Internet and Students

Problems associated with internet and students

The Internet has been welcomed by educators as a great tool for use in the classroom or to create virtual classrooms, because it seems to be a virtually perfect instrument of education that offers the utmost convenience to students while offering endless possibilities for innovative teaching (Applebome, 1999). This essay highlights some of the problems i.e. plagiarism, negative content that can affect an individual’s performance, addiction and unanticipated consequences that are encountered as the use of the Internet by students’ increases.

Problems associated with internet addiction

Internet addiction is a real condition that affects students worldwide. What are its causes and symptoms? Many students believe it's merely a way to chat on Facebook and Twitter or losing track of time while playing a game. Internet addiction is not the same and its consequences can be far more devastating (Michael Rao, 2008)
Internet addiction becomes real when it negatively affects the lives of both the addict and all those around them. Internet addiction has taken so many years to become established due to the disbelief many have over its legitimacy. Most internet addicts do have an ulterior motive for being online so much. In some cases using the internet is simply a private way for feeding their addictions such as gambling or pornography.

It's fairly easy to spot internet addiction. The addicted students withdraw from other students and become more focused with friends they know online. They often make excuses to stay home more, but when they are home, they may seem apprehensive or depressed until they can find a good reason to go online (Michael Rao, 2008)

Problems associated with plagiarism

The Internet makes it easier for students to indulge in unethical behaviours like plagiarism. The number of online term paper mills has increased tremendously in recent years. The Internet makes it easy to copy paragraphs of material from various Web sites and put them together for an assignment or a class report, or to modify someone else’s assignment. The Internet can also be handy in tracking down former students of a class for copies of tests, notes, and assignments. This is not to say that all these activities have not always occurred. But, to point out that the technology now makes it easier – and therefore likelier by a larger percentage of the population. (Phillips and Horton 2000)

Problems associated with negative content that can affect an individual’s performance.

Internet has affected many students particularly university and other higher learning students.

Experts say that internet encourages students to dart between pages instead of concentrating on one source such as the school library which is the traditional way of a student research. Dr David Runciman, a political scientist at Cambridge University, said: ''What I notice about students from the first day they arrive at university is that they ask nervously, 'What do we have to read? Managers, as well as students being trained to be future managers, have begun to use the Internet to find information on almost every subject. But the Internet has a huge, often contradictory amount of information on several topics.

This and other many factors lead to addiction to the internet. Thus students drop their performance due to minimal attention to their books, social conflicts like relationship breakages mainly caused by social sites i.e. Facebook and Twitter.