The
societies’ necessity of information nowadays make them cannot live without
media. The media has been changed into their primary needs. There are many
kinds of media, but the most popular one now is electronic media. Electronic
media is a kind of media that using electricity to access the content. It is in
contrast to static media (printed media) that generally created electronically
but don’t require electronic energy to be accessed by the user (reader) in the
printed form. There are several kinds of electronic media. They are television,
radio, telephone, computer, and the famous one is the Internet network. In this
essay we are going to talk about the popular one which is the internet. The Internet is a global system of
interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) to serve
billions of users worldwide (Oxford English Dictionary, Wikipedia). In societies,
students were the most affected user by this kind of media. The internet is
available around students. It can be find everywhere even in mobile phone. In
this writing I would like to describe contents of the internet and their effect
in student’s learning activity. There are two kinds of the Internet contents
which are the positive and the negative and the advantages of the Internet for
students.
The
internet as we know has many contents, not all of which are positive for most
of people, especially children or students. The positive contents means the
contents that are useful for students generally contain information which is needed
by the students for their school activity or their life in society, and surely educate
them. In the internet, students can search everything they need; there are unlimited
sources that provide references and exercises which is relevance to school activity
for free. For example, if students need to practice their listening skill in English,
they can go to http://www.englishlistening.com/index.jsp
or http://legacy.lclark.edu/~krauss/toppicks/listening.html which has a lot of
listening comprehension exercises with various levels from beginner to advance.
Open http://www.ego4u.com/en/cram-up/grammar/exercises to improve student’s skill
in grammar, or http://www.ego4u.com/en/cram-up/vocabulary to increase
vocabularies with useful exercise. Not only exercises, but we also can find any
learning reference or something related to their activity.
The
negative content is everything in internet that generates something negative
for students itself. The negative contents are diverse or have a variety of form.
It can be a video, picture, or article (writing) which contains racism, violence,
porn, criminal and other harmful contents. There are large numbers of website
that contain harmful contents. Beside the negative contents which I mention
before, there are also some people who use internet as cheating place by
offering services to do student’s assignment with certain amount of money for
return. It is http://essaysreasy.com/ and http://www.assignmentexpert.com/do-my-assignment.html
for example. Those two websites are offers to assistance and undertake student’s
homework, assignment or writing such as essay, dissertation, thesis, term
paper, research paper and other assignment so the student is only required to order,
send some money and then wait for the paper or assignment finish, and the
student doesn’t need to do his/her task by self. The “instant” way which was
mentioned above must be detrimental to students’ mentality because it will
become a bad habit for them.
Those
contents are packaged which included in the Internet and cannot be separated
each other. Each the positive or negative contents must affect the students. The
positive side of the Internet is its benefits for the students in study. Students
who know about how to use the Internet in the right way can get the advantages
of using the Internet, such as makes learning more fun, makes students more
interactive, and improves students’ ability in doing research.
The
first advantage of the Internet for students is making learning great fun. The
use of the Internet network can be a great
motivator for students. In the Internet, students can easily find what they are
looking for because there are huge numbers of websites which provide various
learning sources and references that needed in study. The Internet has
made the lives of students very easy. Now students do not have to rush to
libraries to gather information from thousands of books. So they are motivated to do their task or assignment as
well as possible. On Net, there are lots of reading materials with impressive
graphics and sound. They can catch children’s attention at first glimpse and
keep children's concentration. In this way, reading become great fun. Children
can also learn drawing, pay a visit to some galleries, or make some field trips
on the Internet. Participation in these activities keep kids busy and arouse
their great interest in learning.
The second advantage is making the
students more interactive. The Internet ability to connect computer in
worldwide are making their user be able to send data easier to other user.
The Internet also offers students opportunities to send and receive E-mails
from any friends in the world. Electronic
mail, commonly called email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages
across the Internet or
other computer networks (Wikipedia). There are a lot
of websites which offer web based email services for free, for example, www.hotmail.com/
and mail.yahoo.com/ that only requires registering to get a free email account.
Using electronic-mail, students are able to express their ideas, exchange
opinions with others quickly. These activities are magnetic because of their
interactivity. They can help students improve their skills in communication, in
understanding and making themselves understood. E-mail makes writing
fascinating instead of painful. It is more important that E-mail brings kids a
sense of globalization.
The
third benefit of the Internet is Improve
students' ability in doing research. A study by
the CAST (Center for Applied Special Technology) summarized that
access to online services in the classroom can increase learning. The study
showed that students who had access to online services performed better than
their counterparts who did not have access. The study compared the work of 500
students in fourth-and sixth-grade classes in seven urban school districts.
Half the students had access to online services and half did not. "There
was a significant difference in the quality of understanding and ability to
gather resources in support of an argument," Skip Stahl, director of
training at CAST, said. "Students who had access to online use not only
were able to identify and articulate a problem more clearly, but also were more
informed and had projects that were more compelling."
In
concluding the Internet actually cannot be separated with our society,
especially for students. The unlimited features and contents of the Internet
can be useful or even can be awful for its users. It all depends on how the
user “exploits” the contents of the advanced worldwide network. Students should
use this source of knowledge wisely, to get the benefits and useful features
and also avoid all of its dangerous contents. Control from parents and teachers
are indispensable to prevent students from negative things of the Internet.
Biyantiko Galih
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