There's no doubt that the internet has changed our lives in so many ways. As shown in the infographic below, education has not been immune.
The question is how do educators and parents decide on how much technology to use in education and which applications. There is a huge problem when kids are constantly on digital devices outside of school then come to the classroom and deal with a teacher at a chalkboard talking. Their brains are geared to switch tasks quickly, instantly Google a subject they need more information on, and communicate with their peers information, opinion, and even seek help. This causes problems as their digital activities are good for short term memory and problem solving, but it does not do well for long term memory. It's the same argument they used when I was in school for book reports. I must admit I sometimes used Cliff Notes as a source for book reports in college. For those books I couldn't tell you much of anything today. But even for the ones I did read likewise I cannot tell you much. Since then, I have discovered that I am an audio dominant learner. In fact there was a time when I subscribed to Books on CD for my daily commute and remember much more from those than the ones I read. And of the types of learning the dominant type is kinetic, that is movement or activity. This is why we did homework. It can be argued that digital learning is kinetics but lecturing using a blackboard is not. Finally one last comment about the internet in education. Many of the people who make curriculum and process decisions in education are non internet literate (note in the infographic that 1 out of 3 academic leaders consider online learning inferior). This is not a good decision model in any arena but for education I think this is very critical. So the beat goes on. If there was competition in education we might be able to determine empirically the optimum combination but alas here's another problem facing students going forward. So while the infographic above is encouraging, I am frankly pessimistic regarding education's leadership ability to adequately decide the best application of technology to further learning.
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