

Students not allowed to use Internet to answer questions - SQL2219

My sophomore(H.S.) son is not allowed to use the internet to help answer questions on his science or history homework, we&#x27;re talking about term definitions, not essay questions. He is only allowed to use the govt. supplied and approved text book or his notes. If schools were about learning, would it really matter where in the information comes from? Ignorance gone to sea.
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27182818284
A few things come to mind:

1: The teacher might be doing this out of ignorance 2: The teacher might be
doing this out of insight 3: The teacher might be doing this because not
everyone has high speed Internet.

If it is done out of ignorance, it is because the Internet is this big scary
unknown that someone told them "anyone can edit" so they banned it. That is
awful.

If out of insight, I've seen more and more students at the university-level
think that an article is something they say on Buzzfeed. (Not kidding) By
banning the Internet, it forces students to do more effort (sometimes
literally because they have to physically travel to a library) to prove their
point.

Lastly with high speed Internet, the upper-middle class were the first I knew
to get high speed broadband back in high school. To this day, it isn't cheap
where I live (is it for you? It is better now, but would still be a burden for
many where I live) so banning the Internet puts an even constraint on
students. (Before anyone mentions a computer lab, staying late at the computer
lab is not the same as using wifi while you're bed or desk at home)

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theaccordance
I think the insight point is valid, but I disagree with the approach I've seen
instructors take in the past. I know in college we were always told we
couldn't use Wikipedia, but what they should have taught us instead was to use
Wikipedia similar to how we use Google: as a springboard to find the sources
we should use and cite.

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brudgers
Maybe the teacher believes that learning how to read a textbook is a useful
skill and that in the age of the internet students are not developing it
sufficiently to effectively evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of
alternative approaches. It might be possible that the teacher wants to expose
the students to the higher level concept that History and Science have
literature and are not just dead collections of facts.

Sorry for failing to be outraged. I don't helicopter my teenager... being
challenged by schoolwork is on the list of things I hope for and a great use
of technology would be J for mathematics class. Google and Wikipedia were part
of the elementary school curriculum.

Good luck.

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theaccordance
That sounds like laziness on the part of the instructor. Textbooks are subject
to being outdated the moment they are printed; restricting the scope of
learning to that in an age where information is free and easily accessible
sounds absurd.

If that were my kid, I'd be asking for more context from the instructor/school
on the situation. If the school's response isn't what I deemed acceptable, I'd
demand either a change in the scope, or that my kid was placed in an
environment that reflects how today's learning actually occurs.

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paulhauggis
"If schools were about learning, would it really matter where in the
information comes from? Ignorance gone to sea."

Are there term questions along with essay questions? When I was in HS, the
majority of homework had both.

Allowing everyone to just Google the answers has created a situation where
people can't critically think for themselves.

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informatimago
Books! Nah, let's restrict them to cuneiform tablets. There are more than one
million of them in museums, that should be enough to answer any science or
history question. (Just be sure to learn Sumerian to read them).

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Turing_Machine
Cuneiform? Bah. Writing itself is a crutch. We should force them to memorize
thousands of lines by rote, as in the days of Homer and the Northern European
bards.

There's a famous section in Plato's Phaedrus which gives an argument against
writing on the grounds that it will both damage the memory and lead to
unoriginal thought (since people will just repeat arguments that they've read
in books, rather than coming up with original ones).

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skidoo
Anyone can Google. Not everyone can learn.

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Turing_Machine
Rote memorization of facts (followed, almost inevitably, by a brain cache
flush) is a very poor type of "learning".

Learning to use a search engine effectively is a valuable skill in its own
right, and no, "everyone" doesn't know how to do it. Watch some people thrash
around with Google some time and I think you'll be surprised at just how bad
they are at it.

