“I’m writing a report on Napoleon; you wouldn’t happen to have a book with few pages and lots of pictures?”

Clifford Stoll, Confessioni di un eretico high-tech

The Google Generation, the generation of the so-called “digital natives”, has for quite some time now been the object of attention from numerous scholars, psychologists and psychiatrists, philosophers and media theorists, educationalists and sociologists. The young people born from the early 1990s onward, those of blogs and social networks, the New Millennium Learners, as the OECD defined them in a study published in 2006, are the ones who have never known a world without the Internet, mobile phones, video games, computers and iPods; who download research from Wikipedia, do their Latin and Greek translations online, and cannot do without a mouse and a calculator, without blogs, chats and text messages. Today’s children and teenagers, growing up with electronics and information technology, are said to be positively multitasking, able to use several technological devices at once, with all information a single click away; it is hypothesized that these young people, compared with previous generations, have a downright different brain, able to rely on learning mechanisms that are more perceptual and less symbolic, new, different, more tied to the image than to the word, and that they are throwing schools into crisis all over the world, prompting parents, teachers and specialists to wonder about the possibility of coexistence between old and new methods of study. The “net”, as is well known, has made its way everywhere: into homes, schools and institutions, precisely because of its nature as a dispenser of information updated to the very last instant, sidelining even the most famous and prestigious printed encyclopedias.
It should be noted that, from the birth of the Internet to the present day, alongside the countless enthusiasts of the “wonders” offered by the new technologies, every so often a rather critical voice is raised against the illusions and the possibilities offered by the network and by the computing revolution. Many fear that computers and information and communication technologies are part of a marketing drive that plays on their merely potential usefulness, but that in reality they are used above all for entertainment. The computing revolution would essentially be an immense commercial operation promoted by the great electronics multinationals, but no revolution in the way of learning and studying could be linked to it; that, on the contrary, must be preserved in its traditional form, consolidated over time. The participants in the debate on the use of computers and the Internet at school are always in opposing camps and could be divided between those who hold that school is the essential place for the construction and reproduction of knowledge and those who maintain that, with the birth of the network, there exist virtual places where what is built is no longer an individual intelligence but a collective intelligence, a new kind of distributed intelligence that relies on collaboration and sharing, and that strips school of its hegemonic role as the principal place for building knowledge, handing it over to the network and to social networks. Before trying to understand what is happening, I would like to make a few small observations, simply to note that in Italy and the United States, two countries that have invested heavily in the technological future of their schools, a surprising and paradoxical backpedaling in the use of computers and new technologies at school is taking place. In Italy, after more than twenty years of national computing plans, of training and refresher courses for teachers, of incentives for the purchase of computers and of the insistent pervasiveness of computing in the school world, with substantial funding and multi-year programmes for spreading the new technologies, the Ministry of Public Education recently let it be known that, for the time being, computing no longer falls among the educational objectives of the Italian school (A scuola Internet non è una priorità, in “La Repubblica”, 23 February 2009). Faced with a Minister for Public Administration and Innovation who recently declared that he wanted to equip Italy’s primary schools with a million netbooks (lightweight laptops intended for children aged 6 to 10) and with interactive multimedia whiteboards (IWBs) to promote modern educational technologies, computing, from next school year, seems destined to disappear, or at least to be scaled back, at first sight because of the government’s cuts and the introduction of the single teacher, but perhaps, ultimately, because the wave of the computing revolution is slowly grinding to a halt. All this is cause for perplexity, since setting aside the I for Information Technology in the government programme of some time ago would risk nullifying, among other things, the 700 million euros the State spent to train teachers in the use of computers and new technologies. The perplexity grows even greater if we consider that the OECD itself, in the study cited above, states that rethinking school for the new generations means integrating digital technologies ever more fully into the learning environment, precisely because of the new cognitive capacities of the millennials.

In the United States, cradle of the computing revolution, the project launched by Nicholas Negroponte under the name One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) has begun to creak (Massimo Piattelli Palmarini, Contrordine: il pc non aiuta a studiare, in “Corriere della Sera”, 15 May 2007). The American Department of Education, in fact, carried out a comparative study which found that there are no differences in average achievement between students who attend school each equipped with a laptop and their peers who, by contrast, are enrolled in schools without such computer equipment. What has come under fire is above all the easy plagiarism fostered by the network and that temptation, inherent in web browsing, to download texts and set them aside, postponing their reading to a later time, with students drawn to images that are not always appropriate.
So, are computers and the Internet of use for studying, for learning? Some years ago Clifford Stoll, an astronomer very well versed in the network, published a book that sought to brutally demolish every attempt to introduce the computer into students’ school lives (Confessioni di un eretico high-tech, Garzanti, Milan 2001). The subtitle of his volume, Perché i computer nelle scuole non servono e altre considerazioni sulle nuove tecnologie, gives advance notice that the scholar’s negative considerations are aimed not only at the network but at the whole school system, which from the advent of computers to today has suffered and still suffers from a sort of dependence on computing technology, the fruit of an exaggerated enthusiasm that borders on technological dazzlement.
Concerned about the “naive credulity in the empty promises of the priests of computing”, Stoll is not at all convinced that the new technologies can solve the school’s dramatic problems; on the contrary, they would probably help to create new ones, since our “pernicious love of electronic gadgets” risks creating a rift between teacher and pupil, between whom a productive dialogue must endure. “A computer – Stoll says – cannot replace a good teacher. Fifty minutes cannot be freeze-dried into fifteen multimedia minutes.” Raised on educational games and edutainment (a blend of education and entertainment), on hypertexts and multimedia encyclopedias, young people, the American scholar maintains, find themselves, among other things, in clear difficulty when they are forced to read books, by now convinced that the computer makes learning fun. The educationalist Frabboni reports: “more and more often I come across degree theses made solely of slides and PowerPoint, as though, once they step outside the visual mode, students were no longer able to recount the content of their research”. On the Internet, in fact, texts are by now merely a support for images, for graphics. Stoll has been echoed by the Italianist Raffaele Simone – who wrote the afterword to the Italian edition of Stoll’s book – forcefully maintaining that there is still no better repository of knowledge than a book (R. Simone, La terza fase. Forme di sapere che stiamo perdendo, Laterza, Bari 2000).
Recently, even among philosophers, often remote from these issues, some have intervened in the debate. Hubert Dreyfus, for example, published a slim volume (On the Internet, Routledge, New York 2002) in which he severely criticized certain aspects of the network. Although he himself had been reproached for having taken advantage, in his philosophy lectures at Berkeley, of podcasting and of various tools for distributing material remotely, the American philosopher, one of the perennial foremost opponents of the “omnipotence of the computer”, initially launched into a severe critique of one of the main cornerstones of today’s computer culture and of the network in general: hypertextuality, that is, the interconnection of the digital texts on the web, which lies at the basis of the structure of the information conveyed by the network. Dreyfus argues that the links between documents are often a cause of cultural debasement, since documents are connected to one another in an unjustified and often muddled way: when everything is connected to everything, some important points of reference are lost. The network, according to Dreyfus, has certainly improved over time, but it should be noted that it conditions people differently from the traditional instruments of information and communication, risking, among other things, becoming the only way an individual has to relate to the rest of the world, producing flattening and dependence. Moreover, search engines are almost never of help in pinpointing the desired information: for this, an intelligent information retrieval is needed.
It is true, as Frabboni states, that “doing research on the web saves time and multiplies sources, but it cannot replace the creative, and perhaps even conflictual, relationship with the teacher. The new technologies are phenomenal aids, provided that the student has, however, learned to find their way among the pitfalls of this avalanche of raw information that the computer offers at a single click” (Se Internet studia per te, “La Repubblica”, 29 April 2009). It is equally true that learning requires effort, concentration, and that digital technologies and the Web are not shortcuts; so perhaps the goal to be attained is that of acquiring new skills, dictated precisely by the entry of the new technologies into our school and, why not, professional life. In a very recent volume (Metitieri F., Il grande inganno del Web 2.0, Laterza, Bari 2009), the difficulties for network users have in fact been highlighted, both in retrieving information and in assessing its reliability, given the disappearance of the so-called information mediators. The critical observations are aimed fundamentally at the ideology of Web 2.0, in which, as Metitieri says, “no one is obliged to identify themselves and anyone can spread news without taking responsibility for it”.
Rightly, digital natives see the computer not as a tool on a par with any other household appliance, but as an environment in which they feel immersed. By now, the literacy that is useful is no longer computer literacy but the literacy that makes it possible to retrieve information; it is no longer necessary to hold the European Computer Driving Licence, but rather to have the competence to identify, quickly and precisely, the road that leads to the information we are looking for. As Stoll states, there is a difference between having access to information and possessing the common sense, the wisdom needed to interpret it. As is well known, the need to assess the reliability of a source on the web almost never arises, whereas the authors of online pages insistently claim the right to be judged not on the basis of the academic or professional qualifications they hold, but solely on the basis of what they write and publish on the network. To underline the importance of search engines, Metitieri recalls how, on the Internet, most of the time is devoted to searching for documents rather than to examining and reading them, with a “squirrel”-like attitude that saves everything it finds on the hard drive.
In short, the importance of Information Literacy seems not yet to have been sufficiently emphasized. This discipline, still in some respects unknown to most users, denotes the ability to retrieve documents and sources offline and online, and to know how to assess and use them. According to a 1989 definition by the Association of College & Research Libraries, reported by Metitieri, “information literate people are those who have learned how to learn. They know how to learn because they know how knowledge is organized, how to find information, and how to use information in such a way that others can learn from them”. It is clear that there will always be those who take pleasure in studying and those who detest books and teachers, those who can grow passionate about a subject and those who cannot, those who manage to rework documents downloaded from the web and those who stop at copy-and-paste. For school and teachers, however, the goal is by now not so much to teach computing as to educate people to manage the computer and information, to shape in the new generations styles of learning suited to the new kind of communication introduced by the new technologies.

Massimo Capponi is a tenured university researcher at the University of Perugia; he teaches Applied Computer Science in Education in the degree programme in Educational Sciences.