News

Cosmic masses of information are changing our students. The vast quantities of information students experience transform them into a new species of learner. The amount of information they encounter is unprecedented and alters the complexion of education.

Information is proliferating at a rate that would make a rabbit blush. A University of California at Berkley study estimates the total volume of information generated annually as being 2 exabytes (2 X 1018) of unique information every year – 250 megabytes for every person on earth.

Students are exposed to vast amounts of information in their leisure time. A 2001 Media Awareness Network study reports that after school, 9 to 17 year old Canadians like to listen to music, watch TV, visit with friends, and surf the Internet. Television, the Internet, and music expose them to more information than ever before.

Teens watch TV 12.9 hours a week. In 1952, there were only 146,000 televisions in Canada, and only a single channel. By 1972, 97 per cent of Canadian homes had at least one TV. Statistics Canada reports that by 2005, Eighty-eight per cent of the country received at least 36 channels.

Massive amounts of information flow through the TV.

The Internet is a close second behind TV. A 2005 Media Awareness Network study reports that 94 per cent of youth report Internet access from home. Ipsos Reid revealed that users spent an average of 12.7 hours a week online in 2005. Cyveillance estimates that the Internet contains 2.1 billion pages, and grows by 7 million pages a day. Five hundred million screens of information, says the Pennsylvania Department of Education, travel the Internet weekly “making more information available…than at any other period in the history of the world.” The student's biggest exposure to information comes through the Internet.

Canadian students carry vast amounts of music in their pockets. Smaller MP3 players store around 240 songs. If the average vinyl album holds an approximate average of 12 songs per release, smaller MP3s hold around 120 albums worth of information. Big MP3s can hold 25,000 songs – the equivalent of 2083 LPs.

TV, Internet, Music. All three expose the new student to a mammoth universe of information.

This exposure is not leaving youth unscathed. There are at least seven educational trends that can be traced to the new student adapting to large quantities of information.

The first trend is a negative impact on reading. A growing group of people, for instance, know how to read, but choose not to, a phenomenon termed “aliteracy.” The National Endowment for the Arts discovered that the reading of literature dropped 28 per cent for young adults between 1982 and 2002. Like most people, students read because they must, which means most choose not to read in their spare time. The way we read is changing too. Linton Weeks noted in the Washington Post that readers increasingly skim texts and don't really read in a traditional sense at all. People scan text without fully understanding it.

The second trend is information recycling. In a world littered with information, information reuse seems almost natural. Information is “re-purposed” from its original context and be redeployed.

It's a huge trend in information management circles. The new student discovered a similar value. Librarian Joyce Roby says “We are faced with the “cut and paste” generation who go online and cut and paste from various articles, piecing the bits together to call their own.” Of course, plagiarism is one form of the cut and paste trend. Is it any wonder that it's escalating?

The third trend is the growing importance of the search. As one might expect, the new student is not interested in how to originate information, but, rather, how to find it. Author Paul Horowitz claims that “students need to learn how to Google.” He adds that “Google is making such “librarian skills” obsolete while simultaneously raising concerns about what new knowledge students will need if they are to manage their new-found powers wisely.”

The fourth trend is the decline of the book and library. A 2001 Pew Internet & American Life Project survey reports 71 per cent of teens online rely mostly on Internet sources for research. 24 per cent relied mostly on the library. The two main reasons students preferred Internet research were speed and the ease of use. The Nova Scotia Department of Education reports that “in 1990, there were 103 teacher-librarians in Nova Scotia; in 2002, there were 9.” The Internet has hit books and libraries hard.

The fifth trend is the emphasis on speed. Speed is a part of the information volume itself and is addictive. Matt Richtel, in The New York Times, reports that high information volumes can produce symptoms similar to Attention Deficit Disorder. Those affected tend to become “frustrated with long-term projects, thrive on the stress of constant fixes of information.”

Information produces a dopamine-induced, narcotic-like high that uses the same “pathway as our drugs of abuse and pleasure.” A Reuters study reported that the “PC generation is the generation of information addiction. Almost half of respondents said if data was a drug, they knew addicts, and the Internet is pinpointed as a key driver.” The classroom is quiet when compared to the Internet. It isn't surprising, then, that students are often bored in the classroom. A study done on Indiana high school students revealed that two out of three students report being bored in class every day.

The sixth trend is weakening thinking skills. A CREPUQ-sponsored survey conducted in 2003 shows that Québec university students experience major difficulties conducting research as many “have limited knowledge, or no knowledge, of basic elements characterizing the information research process.” Laura Sessions Stepp, in the Washington Post, reports that students “value information-gathering over deliberation, breadth over depth, and other people's arguments over their own.” The new student can cut and paste, but is having trouble thinking.

Parker Palmer calls thinking a process that allows “one idea to generate another in us.” The resistance to thought comes from at least two sources. First, thinking produces more information.

Second, thought requires time and sustained effort, an extravagance in a speed-oriented world.

The seventh trend is a growing tolerance of error. Students simply don't have the time to assess each bit of information with any thought whatsoever. If one “Googles” Pierre Trudeau, he or she is returned 396,000 hits. “Stephen Harper, Prime Minister” brings 1,170,000 hits. “Riel Rebellion” brings a modest 43,000 hits. The new student learns to make snap judgments usually based on intuition. “Close” now counts in horseshoes, hand-grenades, atom bombs and knowledge.

Parker Palmer defines a good education as one that “teaches students to become both producers of knowledge and discerning consumers of what other people claim to know.” But these seven trends suggest that the new student is a species more resistant to traditional educational endeavours than ever before. Though the new student represents what our world is coming to, the traditional education has never been more important.

As the gap between the new student and the traditional teacher grows, the new education must find ways to bridge the two.

Bill Bunn is an English Instructor at Mount Royal College in Calgary. He is currently researching the impacts of technology and information on students