All just a click away?

Everything is just one click away. All knowledge, all learning, anything you want to know - can be found online. Have you ever sat down and watched a movie or a TV programme and then Googled the actors or directors to find out more about them? Ever listened to a track and then delved deeper to discover the meaning behind the music? If you have, then you are not alone. People do it all the time, because they can. You can track down resources, people, contacts, tunes, images, videos, quotes. As long as you are able to ask the right question and enter it into an appropriate search engine query box, you will find what you are looking for. That makes it easy. It saves us time. It's very convenient. But does that make it right? If knowledge is now so easy to come by, and we no longer have to strive to find it, do we still understand what we discover? Are we able to contextualise and critically evaluate knowledge if we find it online?

Increasingly, the use of the Internet and other digital tools is coming under the scrutiny of researchers. Some commentators hold the belief that searching for content online is 'dumbing down' education. Tara Brabazon for example argues that internet education is poisoning teaching and learning (see for example her book Digital Hemlock) and builds the case for a return to more traditional values of education. Nicholas Carr is another critic of the Internet and its effect on learning. In his book The Shallows, he argues that Google and other 'short cut' tools are damaging the way we think. Invoking the earlier work of Marshall McLuhan, Carr argues that digital media are dangerous when used regularly, and that they can insidiously alter the structure of the brain.

Others are more positive about the effects and influence of digital technology on learning. The web, they argue is capable not only of informing us of any knowledge or content we need, but can also change the way we learn, enabling us to search wider, perform personal research, and engage with the content in a rich social environment where peer learning occurs. Writers such as Clay Shirky (Here Comes Everybody) and Tapscott and Williams (Wikinomics)  espouse the use of digital media as as offering unprecedented opportunities to connect, crowdsource ideas and collaborate with others across the globe.

This from Tapscott and Williams: 'The knowledge, resources and computing power of billions of people are self-organising into a massive, new collective force. Interconnected and orchestrated via blogs, wikis, chat rooms, peer-to-peer networks, and personal broadcasting, the web is being reinvented to provide the world's first global platform for collaboration.' (sleeve notes, Wikinomics)

This argument relates more to context than it does to the content based arguments proposed by Carr and Brabazon, and tends to be the view adopted by many of the new generation of Internet users. It tends to be a compelling argument, given the global needs of society and the expediency for worldwide communication on issues that will ultimately affect us all. The question is: can we harness the power and potential of the Internet to make a difference, to provide new and previously unavailable education for the world? Some would argue that this is already happening, whilst others argue that this is the wrong way to proceed. What are your views on this important question? Is all knowledge just one click away? And if it is, should we be celebrating it, or cautioning against this easy to come by learning?

Photo from Public Domain Images


All just a click away? by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.