With every advance that educational technology brings (from “Oregon Trail” back in my day to laptops in every classroom), there are some drawbacks. Today’s roundup includes a few examples of the constant debate between the “technology will change our lives” camp and the “technology is melting our children’s brains” camp.

In the “young whippersnappers” department, the Wired Campus points us to an excellent ongoing debate about students and technology. It focuses primarily on traditional college-age students; perhaps one of our readers would like to weigh in on behalf of nontraditional students?

Meanwhile, the Chronicle Review posts an article claiming that Web reading is very different from regular (e.g., books & newspapers) reading. As an avid participant in both, I’ll definitely agree that he’s on to something there. Weblogg-ed posted a critique of the piece, though the blogger seems to have gotten a bit confused about the identity of the author.

XplanaZine, meanwhile, doesn’t seem to have its knickers in quite such a twist, claiming in its latest post that the hoopla about the Kindle and its role in education (and textbook purchases) is overblown.

I’ll tell you what I think (because this is my blog, so I can). People complained about the telephone, television and even the telegraph when they were invented, claiming that they would forever ruin the bonds of human community. Those inventions, along with the Internet, have certainly changed things–some for the better (long-distance communication), some for the worse (trolls).

But human nature has some fundamentals to it that aren’t going to evolve away anytime soon. We still want to connect, we still want to learn and (frankly) we still want to insult people. We’ll continue to come up with new ways to do it, but I doubt that any one technology, no matter how revolutionary it is, has the chance to fundamentally alter human behavior.