Facebook students underachieve in exams

telegraph.co.uk

8 points·rglovejoy··5 comments

What a revelation: students who only study an hour per week are heavy Facebook users.

...and YouTube. ...and CollegeHumor. ...and probably a thousand other sites.

This article is a joke. It's 2009. What do we expect to find kids with poor study habits in dorm rooms with high-speed internet connections and no cable TV doing?

Facebook, or any individual site, is a red herring here, IMO. Facebook just happens to garner a disproportionate amount of the traffic.

The way we are taught is obsolete. Learning would be much more compelling if it operated more like Facebook, with streams of facts appearing on the computer screen. Just a thought.

The longer you spend associating with content, the better you learn. On the web we merely glance, digest, and move on. The way we learn isn't perfect but lessons are not to be learned from Facebook. Face-book's network is another story: utilizing the network towards online 24/7 learning collaboration but teachers don't like underground collaboration.

You are mistaken because facts are elementary. True learning is composed of analytical skills. It's not the facts that matter, it's what you do with it, what you make of it, how you construct it with other facts, etc. Streams are mindless, endless piles of facts are pointless.

More systems to collaborate and sort facts would be good though.

In the context of the article, a "facebook student" means any student who goes on facebook all the time instead of studying.

It's not surprising that they would underachieve.

Nothing about anything in this article implies causation.

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