By MARVA HALTON
Student Reporter
Some may be under the impression that checking out a book from the library is dead, but it most certainly is not. A surprising amount of students at Northwestern Oklahoma State University still check out books and some even prefer them over an electronic device.
Technology has made it easy for students and society as a whole to access literally any given information at any time. Everything is available at our fingertips in an instant. These devices have definitely made life easier for everyone to find things for school and work. Now try to imagine a life without any electronics involved. Would you be able to find everything you needed for class in the Northwestern library?
Yes, you could. Shannon Leaper, a librarian at Northwestern’s Alva campus, says there is an abundance of resources in the library that students could use without ever picking up a smart device to find the answer. In today’s society, people forget about how important a hard copy of information is. With all of this technology around, it does help make life easier, but is it making students lazy?
Northwestern student Lydia Thompson said, “These smart devices help us remember things easier because we have everything at our fingertips; we don’t have to use our memory as much because we have something that will remember for us.”
Although Thompson finds having a smart device is easier for class and information gathering, she feels that it is making our society more lazy and dependent on technology. There is one exception to where Thompson feels more comfortable with a book, and that is in a classroom setting. She said, “It’s just so much easier to flip back and forth in a chapter rather than trying to scroll from page to page on a smart device.”
Leaper has a different take on what technology does for students here at Northwestern. She believes that these smart devices help more than hinder learning in the classroom or on the student’s own time. The learning process is still just as hard because you have to search for that same information whether it is online or through a book. Students still have to determine which websites are legitimate and which ones could be false information; same with a book, so the effort is there either way.
In a period of seven days students on the Alva/Enid campuses clicked on the main library database over 1,000 times to access information, and that is not including the amount of students that actually accessed individual databases within the site. Although it is obvious that using the Internet can cut study time, both ways are just as productive and students still have to think for themselves on what type of research they are targeting. Leaper said, “I love that students have access to both books and electronics; that’s what’s so great about it because they get to choose their resource and how they want to learn.”