"Technological drawbacks"

“How will technological advancement affect students in their studies?”

Technology according to the American Heritage dictionary is the scientific method and material used to achieve a commercial or industrial objective. Technology has now become a part of our lives and is advancing day by day drastically.  Technology has become like a drug since the majority of students can’t seem to live without it. Everyone is someway affected by technology whether it be at home, school or work.

 Technology is used for vast purposes and comes in different forms.  It has changed the lives of many people, however students are the ones that are mostly affected by it, since they are constantly on computers and have become even more knowledgeable about it.  This has caused students to become more and more dependent on it every single day. Hence, technological advancement has led to the fear that students are no longer learning for it has made their lives easy making them lazy by not putting much effort in their studies. 

Thus, before this era when computers and internet did not yet exist, people practiced more critical thinking and used there imagination because they were dependent on themselves and not technological machines.  Students are now memorizing, hence just copying, pasting, and plagiarizing instead of learning the material taught. Amidst this many of us question why so much poor performance?  Technology has blinded us into only seeing its positive effects when it is aiming at destroying the world. Technological advancement has taken over students study time buy leisure activities and a host of entertainment provided by the internet for which its inventions continue to multiply everyday. Some of these forms of entertainment are virtual sites or accounts in which their personal information can be displayed along with their pictures. Also, chatting is nothing unheard of, as this is one of the most common forms of distraction on these sites which could only lead to internet addiction and danger in every student’s lives. These dangers are being subjective to hacking, prostitution, murders and viruses which can destroy a promising future. This also affects students social interactions since more communication is happening through the computer network and is greatly different from face to face contact. For instance, in the United States of America whereby some schools practice e-learning instead of actual teacher and student class method.

Furthermore, working at home with this information technology, we would certainly be concerned with work all the time at home that would affect the family. Although using multimedia interface and emotional communication tools we can build up a better environment for communication that does not suffice the real world. On the whole, it will make the people isolate and decrease social skills to be dependent on computers also affecting the manner in which some students learn at school.  This is due the fact that not everyone can just sit there and listen and not being able to interact or ask questions during an explanation of the given subjects.

Nevertheless technology comes in different forms and television is one of the major technological advancements. Thereby, over the year’s television another form of technological advancement has proven to be very harmful to more than 50% of students.  Therefore, parents should exercise greater control over their children’s television viewing.  The many areas in which television can dangerously affect the student’s lives are in social development, social influence, health problems, and incompetent academic performance. In the first place, social development is a major problem since the majority of student’s watches television or use the computer for more than five hours a day.  Hence, they spend less time studying or doing their assignments.  Thus, the television becomes their best friend or more likely their worst foe.

            Furthermore, television plays a substantial role on social influence since children believe and imitate everything they see.  Many television shows promote drug trafficking, pre- marital sex, violence, and vulgarity as being cool and the norm.  Also, it promotes fame such as having the perfect body and living “la dolce Vita” like celebrities as being everything in this world.  This may cause them to get involved in gangs, drugs, theft, early sexual relationships, or may even lead them to become bulimic.

            However, due to the long hours of viewing television health problems may not only include bulimia as stated before, but may also cause other irregular health problems such as insomnia and obesity.  This is caused by the lack of recreational activities and exercise.  Generally, students spend most of the day lying on a couch eating unhealthy snacks until wee hours in the morning. Moreover, this dilemma has caused students to have poor reading skills once more drastically affecting their education, since there are not able to concentrate properly. 

            In addition, believe or not some students have become addicted to porn, gambling, games, and virtual sites such as Face book, My Space and twitter which are widely and openly displayed on internet sites.  This has only served as a distraction to students from school material which they may find very boring. This type of technological advancement has a negative effect on students writing skills for instead of using appropriate grammatical language they now insist on using “Slang” which seems rather ignorant of one’s knowledge and capability to learn the right things.  This has become common because of the practice of instant messaging one another, e-mailing and texting. Students get use to this form of writing “slang” that they eventually become unconscious of it, and then use it in their everyday school writing and assignments. As stated in the website (http://www.slideshare.net/guest2630606/negative-effects-of-technology-on-children) it is a fact that “50 percent of teens say they sometimes use informal writing styles instead of proper capitalization and punctuation in their school assignments.”

            Technological advancement has also caused problems in classrooms whenever students intend to use their cell in class either as a distraction or cheating and result in failure. Therefore, it is more than clear that technological advancement has more negative effects on student’s studies and will continue to do so as it just keeps on advancing everyday and students have become very dependent on it. Technology has evaded our world everywhere we and effective. Nevertheless, they are forgetting that meeting personally can never replace online cturn and everything we do is affected by it even if we try to avoid it as students. Technology is making us so busy that we can’t even find time to spend with our closed ones or to do our school work. It would be surprising to know that people are in contact through chat and online messaging though they are in same city because they think it is more efficient hatting.

Also, before the invention of television and internet, people had ways of having fun together every day.  Many of these primitive methods of fun have almost disappeared in the modern world. People used to actually talk with each other, they would play games with each other but now they play games with computer giving no reaction at all making people drift away from one other.  It’s the same with students at first they were able to work in groups, read books, research and discuss the topics thence, actually learn the subject.  However, in this era it have become so technological that the computer does everything for the student that they no longer want to share ideas with others because they consider it unimportant and less effective when its actually not.  This is so because there would be fewer distractions while working on the computer such as chat and internet games etc.

Thus, in many ways modern technology had the opposite effect of making us worker harder and faster just to stay in the same place and as to students it has affected them negatively in their education.