2011-8-2 Independent Writing

　　Does modern technology help students learn more information and learn it more quickly?

　　Marvelous as it looks at first sight, modern technology does not help students learn information at a greater speed and with higher efficiency in most cases; or it could work towards the opposite direction which led students to lose their initiative to learn and explore.

　　First of all, one property of modern technology is latently harmful to any learning mind – it distracts. One thing we feel about when we are searching for information online is that the internet, as an outstanding example of modern technology and even regarded as the innovator of education, provides us with not only relevant results to make use of, but also external links to click. More than once I turned on my computer to check school library for resources, but ended up watching Youtube videos. In this case, computer as a representative of modern technology plays a negative role in learning information. We do acquire more information with the convenient tool, yet most of them are irrelevant and in the end procrastinating would lower our learning.

　　Also, students would easily become disoriented in the huge sea of information. Although modern technology could equip us with easy access to information, the huge amount of resources would actually leave us discombobulated. Therefore, it is only we possess information more quickly rather than we learn it more quickly. An illustrating example is my experience with a HK digital library which stores almost all the books I desire. At first I enjoyed downloading them from the database, however, one month later I ended up with hundreds of books stored in my hardware yet none of them finished or ever clicked.

　　Furthermore, modern technology gives students an illusion that information and real knowledge is easy to learn – just by clicking mouse or watching videos. But in fact this forms only the first step towards useful information and effective learning, as learning of any kind requires full concentration and interactive thinking, which are almost absent in the pocess of popular e-learning experience.

　　To summarize, modern technology does not help students learn more information and learn it more quickly, though it does make access to information and resources much more easily. The popular e-learning still lacks the concentration, depth, and interaction that are the hallmark of traditional ways of educating and learning.