Internet is Good for Study - Term Paper Example

Internet is good for Study Today, the internet recognized as an ordinary aspect of daily life and most people depends on the internet in some capacity or other wheatear professionally or socially. Over the last decade, there has been a phenomenal increase in internet usage globally; as of 2012, China and US topped the records for having the most internet users globally (“Top 20 Countries with the Highest Number of Internet Users”). The increase in these figures is especially notable among the young generation who have come to depend on it for a diverse multiply of uses ranging from data gathering, socialization and entertainment. Contemporary youths have tended to show a higher dependency of social network than the elder generation and as a result the popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Weibo and MySpace just to mention a few, has significantly driven up the demand for internet services and infrastructure. Notwithstanding, the internet is not exclusive to the young and with time the older generation is gradually acclimatizing to technology and becoming heavy users as well. Primarily, the internet is used for carrying out research, accessing social networking, downloading and storage of music and videos paying pills banking carrying out online business and other related services. . Research has revealed that most people with access to the internet have abandoned traditional sources of information such as books and tend to rely on the internet for news academic information entertainment and even news. Despite the obvious and significant benefits the internet avails for students, critics argues that it is unsuitable as a study tool citing among other factors proliferation of unauthentic information and numerous distractors;. This paper contends that the internet is nevertheless a critical study tool by examining both sides of the argument and refuting the claims of the opposition. One of the major advantage of internet as a means through which one can study is the fact that it encompassed numerous demographical and geopolitical profiles, and this easily makes it the preferred study method for research by most scholars. By studying online, they can interact with information from a multiplicity of social culturally and politically diverse sources which significantly broadens their scope of knowledge. According to Internet Stats, internet content is distributed; thus, Asia comprises 44%, the Europe 21.5 North America 11.4% Latin America 10.4% Africa 7% the Middle East and Australia the rest (“Top 20 Countries …”). These serve to underpin the remarkableness of the diversity that the internet allows its users, a student studying a certain concept in the USA for example will get information about the same from several contexts since the internet transcends geopolitical boarders and this will serve to improve their scope of knowledge and critical thinking. The internet therefore acts as a conduit for information from diverse sources across the globe, and these provide a wealth of information for researchers as they interact with many different perspectives from scholars in other parts of the world who are exposed to different experiences and viewpoints. Therefore, when one used the internet to study they are also exposed to multiple ideas and this ultimately increase the quality of their work. One of the main challenges attributed to the internet is its addictive nature, social networking for one has been found to be highly addictive and as a result students waste a lot of time that should be used for studies surfing on the net (Andreassen 513). Besides, the internet is a source of often unrestricted and free pornography, which has been proven a major distractor for leaners since it is also very addictive. Students are notorious for accessing such content when they should be learning and even when there are filters and restrictions some still come up with ways though which to override them. The ultimate argument by detractors is that while the internet itself is quintessentially amoral and cannot be said to be either negative or positive since the benefit or harm is determined by the uses to which it is put, it usefulness in academia is spurious at best. This is grounded on the assumption that many webpages upon which students stumble are characterized with inaccuracies misinformation and distractions that ultimately are more likely to negate rather than enhance academic effort. Social networks , porn cites and other similar content will greatly hinder concentration and attention and at the end of the day, the student will have had access to millions of useful sources by may end up either being sidetracked or failing to locate the relevant and accurate ones. While conceding that a few students will manage to avoid the distraction or have the acumen to separate authentic content the majority may gain a lot from using the internet for their studies. It is certain that the quality of information available on the internet is much more reliable than what one gets from traditional sources, and this is because with diversity, there is a great deal of objectivity owing to the meeting of multiple perspectives. This may be opposed on the basis that online data cannot be controlled or regulated and indeed the internet is full of false or unverified information (Vedder and Robert 211); however, in the context of studying, there is a tendency for various internet sources to classify their information based on reliability and if it has been peer reviewed. For example, when a student is using a site such as Google Scholar to carry out research, they are guaranteed that all the works they find in the database are academic and authentic as the company ensures the validity of data before they post it online. Additionally most professional databases categorize their content based on authenticity and a student can choose between peer reviewed, academic and others (Gábris and Ladislav 7). This ability to classify data based on reliability is unique to the internet since in the physical library one would have a hard time telling what was authoritative since such discriminations are difficult to make given the huge volume of physical books. Therefore a student working on a project online may for instance limit their search only to peer reviewed journals, this way they will not waste time going through individual texts to find out if they are peer reviewed on not making research much more efficient and timely. Conversely, one of the factors that has seen to the internet being touted as detrimental to academic performance is the unrestrained liberalization of information that comes about because of it. Today, anyone can set up a website or blog post and upload any information they wish on a subject irrespective of wheatear it is correct or authentic. One does not need for example to be a doctor to set up a self-help medical page, and therefore a lot of the data available online cannot be considered authentic or even valid. There is no way to determine the intellectual capacity of anyone posting in most websites and consequently, the internet is rife with material that people pass off as facts although it could easily be fictitious. People put up false research studies cite “manufactured” statistics and amateurs in any subject can pass themselves off as experts. This is made worse by the fact that on an ordinary website, it is difficult to tell was has been peer reviewed or not since the publisher have been known to present fabricated credentials. Consequently, when students go online to look for content, they may end up coming up with unverified and misleading data, which ends up undermining their entire academic efforts as they are based on false or unreliable data. The internet also provides the possibility of online studies, which is inconceivable in offline education. Studying in the literal sense of going to school can be carried out in real time on the internet easily transcending geopolitical boarders and allowing students to remotely access online resources. This has allowed millions of people to further their education and acquire online undergraduate and master’s degrees through distant programs (Cheawjindakarn Praweenya and Anuchai 61). In addition, such programs allow learners form different demographic and social cultural backgrounds to access education by enrolling in the courses offered online. One of the main benefits of this is that students from developing countries more so in Africa and Asia are able to access western education almost as good as what their contemporaries in the west get. Furthermore, the online platform makes it easy for people to study one a part-time basis from the comfort of their own houses or advance their education even as they work without attending classes physically. Furthermore, students can interact with each other and share ideas and knowledge with contemporaries both locally and abroad they can engage with their contemporaries from all occupations in intellectual discourse or take online tutorial consult lecturers and even seat joint exams. CISCO Inc. provides a perfect example of training and certification body that offers online courses than anyone can take as long as they have internet access irrespective of their geo-location. After one has studies the content they then sit a standard online exam and even get a certificate all through the internet, ultimately, these contribute to making online education highly fulfilling and exiting but most importantly all inclusive. The most damaging effect the internet has been accused of having on academia is arguably the fact that learners jeopardized their cognitive skills because the internet spoon-feeds them with information on literary everything. The concept of research in the traditional sense where learners would go through multiple sources of data and critically analyses them to determine the most relevant to them was very useful in developing their cognitive skills (Nagisa 44-46). The internet has radically changed that since students are filtered out results and they almost never have to sort through data since it is often provided in the very context and form in which they want to access it. For example, when students are asked for instance to carry out a comparative study between the ideas of Jean Piaget and Vygotstky, instead of separately studying each and then trying to syntheses the comparisons all they need to do is look up comparative analysis done on them by others which are available online. They then simply copy paste or paraphrase the work often without proper citations that brings up the issue of plagiarism. This can be generally described as the act of reproducing someone else’s work without acknowledging the original source and trying to pass it off as one’s own (Tang 616). The wealth on information makes it this especially tempting prospect since and consequently a large number of students do not actually do any research but simply reorganize the data they find on the internet (McLafferty and Karen 186). Some schools have come up with ways of detecting plagiarism by using software such as “turnitin” but students have also found ways of bypassing such using online paraphrasing sites. While a lot of this information used is correct, the fact that students do not carry out their own independent work brings about intellectual laziness and jeopardizes the future of information since so many contemporary learners are simply regurgitating what was done in the past. Therefore, in posterity, the amount of original information will have diminished considerably as will have the number of people with skills and creativity to come up with original ideas. Conclusion All things considered there is no doubt that the argument against the internet as a learning tool has a degree of merit, evidently there are many distractors any it is true that the internet can be addictive and in a sense defeat the very purposes for which it is being employed. That said, it is nevertheless unrealistic and defeatist to claim that the internet should as result not be used for intellectual pursuits. The fact that there is more refined information has also been cited as justification to discredit online studies, while agreeing that plagiarism is one of the main challenges of online studying and it devalue education, the fact that the information available online leaves little for students to do cannot reasonably be seen as negative. The reason people carry out research and publish it online or otherwise is for the sake of those who will be interested in the same subject area in posterity, for this reason claiming that students must start from a scratch while there are others who have carried out studies on the same content is tantamount to encouraging duplication of work. If learners have to do “original” research for themselves every time they are investigating a concept, they will make very little progress since they will be unable to effectively build on the work of their predecessors as they will be busy repeating it. Even if one was to eliminate the unauthentic data from the internet the reminder would still be too great to handle offline. Suggesting that the internet is not good for education is tantamount to suggesting that studies should not enjoy the benefits of globalization and that students should only focus on the writing and works of scholar and thinkers in their immediate geopolitical environment. By precluding the internet from studies, one would also eliminate the interconnectedness and diversity students enjoy today. All factors considered even with the downsides, the internet is inextricable from studies since a huge percentage of educational content is only found online and the mere idea of separating the two is inconceivable in the modern context. Works Cited "Top 20 Countries with the Highest Number of Internet Users." Internet World Stats. 11 March 2014. Web. 09 May 2014 Andreassen, Cecilie Schou, et al. "Development of a Facebook addiction scale 1, 2." Psychological reports 110.2 (2012): 501-517. Cheawjindakarn, Bussakorn, Praweenya Suwannatthachote, and Anuchai Theeraroungchaisri. "Critical Success Factors for Online Distance Learning in Higher Education: A Review of the Literature." Creative Education 3 (2012): 61-6.  Gábris, Tomás, and Ladislav Kovár. 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