“I think we should teach people wonders and that the purpose of knowledge is to appreciate wonders even more.” – Richard P. Feynman
Nature is bewitching. The beauty is immensely breathtaking. The more you know nature and its whereabouts, the more you adore the wonders. This is what the revolutionary physicist Richard Feynman meant by the statement above. I entirely second this thought. I mean, can a politician understand the beauty of a spaceship with a streamlined body to reduce air friction? No! Knowledge gives you the senses to experience the realism of everything.
Talking about knowledge and realism, I often ponder about today’s generation’s mode of absorption towards knowledge. Back in the days of chalk dust, things were very conventional. Regular long days with little or no comfort kept in mind and many more hard to go with things. So let’s understand the ups and downs of technology and education.
Pros:
Better Understanding
Yes, with modern technological advancements it’s really easy to conceptualize things into our minds and later on customizing to get the own version of understanding.
Interesting to learn
Absolutely, you may fall asleep during a lecture, but when your favourite movie is turned on you won’t. We have tons of tools to make modern concepts interesting.
Learn more in less time
You can learn more in a single 2-minute video than reading a page with 1000 words. That’s time-saving!
Visuals help in quick learning
Visual understanding is the most powerful way to retain things. You can capture the image of things into your head and keep them forever into your subconscious zones.
Accessible
The most vital role the technology is that now, no one is kept untouched. Be it the shelter on the mountains of Tibet or the small crowd of Alaska. With technology, knowledge is accessible everywhere. There are various online schools run by some websites to help those in remote places. So in the coming future, the school problem will be nearly non-existent. Good thing!
Collaborative
Devices lead to easy collaboration. The days when students used to go and visit teachers and their friends to ask and clear up doubts. That hassle now is no more. You can have live discussions with your mate and help each other.
No books
Technology is avoiding books and now the devices can save the whole library over the cloud. All you need is the internet and determination to learn.
No heavy bags
No books, no more heavy bags to carry up to the school. The shoulders can breathe. Phew! There is also an environmental side to this. No books, no papers and hence less cutting down of forests to manufacture paper.
Systematic Organization
The technology helps you keep track of even the minutest changes and you can have your work schedules aligned as per the time table.
Usage of simulations.
3D rendering and all other skeletal animations are enabling students to understand things in-depth and look past the horizon.
Cons:
Reduced importance to classroom aura
The classroom experience of the students will surely get affected by this. Because where everything is quick and instantly accessible via their device, it’s going to be hard upon the kid to sit and learn the stuff for hours. While he can get this done in minutes.
Low attention span
They surely will pay less attention and think that there’s his/her home to learn all of the stuff from their device anytime and much faster.
Teacher-student relationship
There will be no respect and honour left for the teacher. Because the teacher is in their pocket right now. So the significance of teaching staff will get affected.
Loneliness
Technology will take away the fun of ‘realness’ from the students. As the more they learn and accept things from an application, the less they find the outer world incapable of getting answers and learn. This will lead to isolation and things will go worst when they’ll be alone, and no one to talk to and just the app.
Losing problem-solving skill
Most scaring thing is the child will stop using his brain and start finding solutions instantly rather than thinking over it for a minute or two and finding it on his own.
Health issues
Health will surely be affected because of the prolonged use of screens for everything, every day and every hour. Visual impairment and guaranteed health issues.
Less fieldwork
Surely everything will affect the body if the whole time is spent over the device. The less the movement the more prone one will be towards evil diseases.
Mental health
The perspective of things is now entirely based upon how things are looking in a few inches of a screen. Limited and preferential learning. The student will start learning things which he/she wants, not what’s important.
He starts thinking with computer-generated images and no self-experience with natural learning. Above all, there’s a perfect chance of him/her to get in touch with adult and explicit content. This is sad. Things are about to get worse.
So here we stand with one side technology helping the commons and on the other side deteriorating the things to the point of no return. I do think that the possibilities are endless and the implications are in millions. But I’d like to leave out all the rest upon the reader to judge and weigh things as per the best of his knowledge and experience.
