On a personal level I feel I’m seeing a majority of my students accepting a few key resources as THE authority on the information they seek, and doing so without the necessary critical thinking skills to determine if it is a credible source or not. Even deeper seems to be a belief in cursory review versus deep fact finding. My sense is students either don’t care about authenticity, believe everything they read as fact, or don’t feel many issues in life are worth deep reflection. (This last point I worry about on hearing students feel “ethics” a luxury when compared to getting a passing grade! I recall a past student telling me that if the US Constitution doesn’t work then to just change it – “What’s the big deal?” I remember thinking this a chilling remark coming from someone under 20 years of age!)
So what does immediate access do to the way learners see the world? It gives them what could be a very biased, shallow, one-sided view of the world. Any “shock-jock” in the social media world could get an immediate following based on emotional charging instead of real fact. On the other hand there are some very real socio-political issues coming to the forefront because of the immediacy of information creation by people in the heat of experience (war, natural disaster, etc.).
I would guess it a two-edged sword, still in its infancy enough that we really don’t know which way it will go. I do recall the hope that TV would become the great educational tool of the century, and we all know where that went.
I think of this dilema, as what faced math learning when the calculator was introduced. We all use calculators, however, the need for fundamental math skills is still required to function in the world. I'm not sure a rigorous dialog occurred, as the people teaching math were ones raised without calculators and felt the need for fundamentals was still necessary. What will this be like in 20 years?
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