Modern Technology: The Bridge or the Barrier Between Students and Their Studies

It is no surprise that with the many technological breakthroughs, digital devices are huge part of education all over the world. I have taken time to research how technology affects students and the quality of our education. As a nursing student myself, I have experienced both the benefits as well as negative aspects of technology regarding my education. College students, those in the medical professions especially, are set to an extremely high standard. Technology opens many doors for students, allowing them to access vast amounts of information conveniently. However, it is hindering students’ education more than it is helping because it has formed habits of skim reading, and a lack of comprehension of what students are reading.

As previously mentioned, technology has proven to instill lazy habits in students. In his recent work, Nicholas Carr elaborates on this matter by sharing his own personal experiences. Carr claims that over time he has come to realize that something has been interfering with his brain, changing the way it works, reprograming his  memory. His mind is still intact but it’s changing. He does not think the same way he used to think. It affects him most when he’s reading. Sitting down to read a long book or article used to be easy. His mind would be so engaged with the argument, he would spend hours delving into the reading. That rarely happens anymore. After a few pages his mind begins to drift and wander off. He start to get anxious and look for something else to occupy himself. It feels like he is forcing his brain to focus on what’s in front of him. The in depth reading he used to frequently experience rarely happens anymore (“Is Google Making Us Stupid?”). This is a prime example of what happens to students like me on a regular basis. This tendency to jump around while online has a big impact on the way I study and the amount of time it takes me to complete an assignment. He adds on to his own personal experience a study that has been done showing students study habits on digital devices. “They found that people using the sites exhibited ‘a form of skimming activity,’ hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they would already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would ‘bounce’ out to another site” (Carr). This supports the fact that students have gotten into the mindset of retrieving their information as quickly and easily as possible with no regard to how much they are truly understanding the content.

In addition to Carr’s research, Jabr acknowledges the negative effects that technology has had on students by presenting research. “When taking [a] quiz, volunteers who had read study material on a monitor relied much more on remembering than on knowing, whereas students who read on paper depended equally on remembering and knowing. Garland and her colleagues think that students who read on paper learned the study material more thoroughly” (qtd.in Jabr, The Reading Brain in the Digital Age). Remembering information is very different than knowing the information. The study conducted shows us again how information read online is not as adequately absorbed and understood by students compared to when they read out of a traditional book. This point is not something that should be taken lightly especially when regarding students and their academics. This impacts me personally because as a student it is crucial that I fully understand the material given to me. It does me, and the patients I will be taking care of in the future, no good if I am only able to commit my studies to short term memory.

Despite the evidence proving technology has negative effects on students there is still the argument that it has not had much of an effect on us or that it is more beneficial than it is harmful. In the article “The Deep Space of Digital Reading” by Paul La Farge he mentions how technology is not to blame for our tendencies of “jumping around” from page to page. He argues, “The Internet may cause our minds to wander off, and yet a quick look at the history of books suggests that we have been wandering off all along. When we read, the eye does not progress steadily along the line of text” (“The Deep Space of Digital Reading”). In sum, he defends the idea that people have jumped around the pages of our books and wandered off all along. Regardless of this argument, the fact remains that the advancements in technologies such as a worldwide Internet have vastly amplified the number of distractions present. Although I agree with La Farge to a point, I cannot accept his overall suggestion that the internet has had no effect on the amount of distractions and the quality of our reading. In addition, La Farge brings another point into argument by shedding light on a theory mentioned in her article. Scientists Rakefet Ackerman and Morris Goldsmith suggests that the idea that students may do worse on comprehending text on digital devices, not because of the devices themselves, but the “expectations that readers bring to them” (qtd in “The Deep Space of Digital Reading”). While this applies to the scenario, this logic can be applied to mostly anything. The way you perceive something and the way it can affect you has a huge impact on the way it performs. Hence the term “placebo effect”. With this idea in mind, we can be reminded that perception is reality. The reality is many people view technology as quick and instant. People google search question because its quick and easy, not so they can take the time to thoroughly examine an article. Efficiency and technology go hand in hand, it is unrealistic to expect todays generations and those to come to view that aspect any differently.

An illustration of technology and its effects on a nursing major in college, we can shed some light on my own personal experiences. No doubt that the Internet has been a huge help when needing quick information for an assignment. There have been times where I left my periodic table in my other folder and simply just googled the chart online. Although digital databases have helped to simplify my life, its assistance only reaches to a certain extent. Many times, I find myself working on chemistry homework online and suddenly receiving a text notification pop up on my laptop. Another common example occurs when doing research online for an English paper. You scan through the articles looking for evidence to support your view, next thing you know you have clicked on two hyperlinks and have found yourself in a whole new article discussing something only slightly related. The Internet for me, and like many other students, is a place to find information and to find it quick. College students, Medical profession’s especially, are given such a heavy work load and a lot of the work is online assignments. It’s hard for us to look at the internet and digital databases as anything other than quick and efficient because that is how we are expected to perform. As much as I love to read, I have never once sat on my laptop for leisurely reading. One reason being lack of time, but another reason is simply because I associate my MacBook Pro with my school work. People all around the world do the same; they open their laptops or use their phones because its quick and easy, not because they want to deeply read a Rupi Kaur poem.

As we move forward in the modern world I would like to see technology and education unite better together. I think a huge step towards this requires a change in the way we view the relationship between school and technology. With so many technological advancements college students are required to know more and more information each year. New scientific breakthroughs occur all the time, along with changing statistics and data. The amount of work we are expected to do and the information we are required to know is abundant. Professors and universities can not expect us to take the time to deeply submerge ourselves in a 5-page article online when they expect a full analysis on that article in three days. The world has progressed to a faster pace and students are set at an extremely high standard. Schools want their students to be able to slow down and thoroughly process the information in front of them but on the other hand they want the assignments to be done, and want them done quickly. The education system needs to open their eyes and realize that at some point they can not have both.