My children may have had their umbilical cord severed at birth but they immediately attached themselves to a nurturing cable that suckles them, feeds them, entertains, distracts and informs them. Like a million other young men and women of their age, they are physically attached to an information tube: they text each other instead of speaking, tap out messages on their PDAs or mobiles even if the person is right beside them, and seek answers from a screen rather than open a book…

The omnipresent mobile phone, computer screen, Google, Internet Explorer and all the other gateways to the entirety of human knowledge are all wondrous developments and will be of great benefit to us all, but each is diluting this generation’s self-reliance…
Increasingly this generation is losing the joy of studying books, maps, papers or other non-electronic devices: they are missing the framework of reflection and the joys of browsing and inquiry on which our society has been built. One day they will have to learn the new adage that data isn’t information, information isn’t knowledge, and knowledge isn’t wisdom.

Previous generations learned to learn through trial and error, through research, through questions and uncovering the answers. Once, students had to be like Sherlock Holmes, observing and pondering and sifting through the evidence to find the answer; today, students are more selectors than detectors, and download the answers in the absence of clues.

Source: The Australian
http://tinyurl.com/2tk9×9