When learning becomes 'information sharing,' knowledge isn't absorbed and interpreted, it's retrieved, passed along and forgotten.
A Survival Skill
Mark Bauerlein is a professor of English at Emory University and the author of "The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future."
Updated January 5, 2011, 1:01 PM
Yes, cheating is rampant, and for teachers the game of catch-up never stops. Part of the problem stems from the high-stakes system, where a bad grade can jeopardize chances for medical school. For the “overachievers,” cheating isn’t a vice. It’s a survival skill.
There is another cause as well. It surfaces in the Times article: “Internet-age students see so many examples of text, music and images copied online without credit that they may not fully understand the idea of plagiarism.” Cutting-and-pasting, hypertext, embedded links, and all the interactive, participatory behaviors of Web 2.0 contribute, too. They blur the line between your text and my text, undercutting the meaning of proprietary words.
So, last year when Benenson Strategy Group surveyed 7th-12th graders, 35 percent admitted to cheating by cell phone during a test. One quarter of them texted answers, and one-fifth searched the Internet. Fully 52 percent admitted to Web-based cheating of one kind or another.
But a fair number also said, “It isn’t cheating.” Only half regarded phone-cheating during a test as a “serious offense,” while one third shrugged off downloading a paper. Forty-two percent regarded copying text from sites as “minor” or entirely okay.
For them, Digital Age learning is about information-sharing. A teacher assigns a paper and they Google keywords, pull paragraphs from sites, add commentary (fudging their words and others’), then submit the result. It’s the product that counts, not the way it was produced.
On that model, though, knowledge isn't absorbed and interpreted. It is retrieved and passed along- -- so speedily that students forget it an hour later. Sad to say, too many college teachers accept the trend. It’s the 21st century, they shrug, and the last thing they want is to appear behind the times.
So they assign more collaborative projects, with more blogs, wikis, and Facebook pages. Meanwhile, the cultivation of solitary thinkers declines. No wonder students “borrow” texts and “share” answers. That’s the Digital Native outlook, and too many digital mores affirm it for an honor code to correct it.