LearnHub

hcraig said:

I recently read a fantastic piece by Nicholas Carr entitled Is Google Making us Stupid? In the article, he argues:

The advantages of having access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they have been widely described and duly applauded….But that boon comes at a price.  As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information.  They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of though.  And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away [our] capacity for concentration and contemplation.  My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.  Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of words.  Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski. Full article here

That is mere section of a fantastic article that was raised many questions in my mind – the most predominate one being; is the internet teaching our minds to function “ as high-speed data-processing machines”, spread wide, but thin as we less often set ourselves to the task of in-depth reading? Remember In-dept reading? The kind of reading that requires us to “make up our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, [and] foster our own ideas”?

So I pose the question to you: is the internet making us stupid, or is changing the way we process information for the better? And considering this change, what ramifications does this have on the traditional school system?

All quotes were taken from the Carr article, which again can be found here

oLahav said:

I’ll confess this- I wasn’t able to finish that article. It’s way too long, and I just don’t care about the subject matter enough to finish it.

Sure, the population’s attention span as a whole is shrinking. But first of all, it doesn’t mean people don’t read books anymore or that our way of thinking changed, it’s just that some people read less. And that’s always true compared with any generation.

Also, there’s nothing to support the internet is to blame. Maybe it’s TV with commercials every 5 minutes that kill our attention span so that we can’t focus on reading anything longer than 2 pages? Maybe it’s the popular rap music that moves a massive amount of words in as short an amount of time as possible that makes people want to read as little as possible as fast as they can?

I don’t think we can say the internet is making us any different than what we are. It’s the whole wide world.

chris8649 said:

It’s not just the internet, it’s convenience in general. I know folks who have become so dependent on their GPS that they literally no longer know how to get to work without a little voice calling out the turns – but they have become experts at making the GPS do marvelous tricks – planning trips, remembering favorite locations, finding food and shelter.

The effect of the internet is similar to the effect of any convenience, whether physical, psychological or informational. The faculties we don’t use quickly become unusable, and those that we use regularly become sharper than we thought possible. I am confident that more people today are better at finding stuff with search engines than in years past.

As learners and teachers, I think the implications are pretty clear. As learners, we need to embrace and offer inconvenience in order to exercise, explore and expand the full range of our capabilities, most of which will otherwise lie dormant instead of being sources of enjoyment and utility. As teachers, we need to structure experiences of inconvenience so our learners have a shot at knowing that they have marvelous capabilities that can be developed and shared, well beyond those required for a life of passive consumption.

hcraig said in response to:

But do you ever worry about sacrificing a well rounded education for convenience? By being presented soundbites, (I think) we diminish our ability to draw our of connections and conclusions about subjects.

What would ever happen if this moved into the classroom? A usually 6 hour lecture on the causes of WWII could be summed up into 2 bullet pages of notes (at least this is what my binder for HS102 shows me), but even if that’s how those crazy kids are learning these days…. is it good enough? Or would we be missing …something (which I can’t even put my finger on at the moment….)

karen said:

I look at it this way. If you read critically you interact with internet ‘print media’ in the same way that you interact with a book, newspaper or report. More and more, you resist clicking the linked text that diverts your focus from the piece you are reading. More and more, you notice how Advertisements on the page are formatted and you begin to assign responsibility to both yourself and the advertisers who seek to divert your focus.

I would like to offer an example of this, from my day of today. You may be familiar with www.digg.com, a web interface that allows it’s users to post internet links. If you use Digg you can repost a News story for others to ‘digg’ or bookmark and add your personal touch: a New Headline and a Description. You begin to be not just a reader, but a News Editor and you feel that. You can track the stats of views of your Advertisement of a New Media internet article. In what is an interesting twist, I was reading www.macleans.ca and noticed that Digg postings of Maclean’s Url’s were republished back to www.macleans.ca in a Digg listing feed that is a static box on almost every page of the maclean’s news portal. Feeling far from internet Stupid, I noted that the Digg feeds of popular Maclean’s articles dugg by third parties unrelated to Macleans or it’s internet publisher, Rogers, get tons of page views. More page views than do the paid advertisers who purchased space on www.macleans.ca. I decided a Digg listing republished back to the legal domain responsible for the source article is in fact an AD: an Ad for the article. But an Ad reaches out in different ways which is why we discuss and legalize advertising practices (both in the Internet and Traditional print media). I noted that the human contraceptive Anya was being ‘addvertised’ on www.macleans.ca by way of it’s publication of a Digg users Ad linking to a Maclean’s article about Anya that had been first published years ago. In Canada the Federal Food and Drug Act regulates as illegal the advertisement of human contraceptives (the conservative government proposes to change this with Bill C-51 which had it’s first reading April 8th). What a dilemma. I wrote to Macleans and I have effected a change to the Internet. Maclean’s immediately pulled the journalism, the orginal article about Anya, from their servers. Yet the Ad, the Digg listing, is what is in fact illegal. I had the word “Anya” burned into my brain after many page views of featured articles on www.macleans.ca. Now the fun begins to insist that the Editors of the online New Media magazine remove the digg feed that advertises their articles. I have power as a reader. I can hold the New Media to task.

So should you. The CRTC is having a hearing about Internet Regulation and you have until July 11th to ask to submit your views on it.

LibraryLana said:

Fascinating article, fascinating premise. I believe that we’ve adapted ourselves to our environment & that includes technology.

Think back, think way back. Sesame Street was a conglomeration of short, snappy, “sound/image bites”. The notion of short burst of information is not new.

We’ve evolved into a culture that expects instant gratification. Time constraints, real or imagined are one factor; however, think about it, when were you taught to read critically? Were you taught to read criticallly? Was reading, critically or not, accorded value? If you could get away with skimming & cribbing for your school reports what would motivate you to do more?

I’m a librarian & yes, I love to read. I do still read books – sometimes in print & sometimes in digital. I’m tasked with trying to explain why information literacy is an essential skill to a post-secondary audience. Once they get it they get it. Do they apply the reflective, critical thinking, evaluation skills? Not consistently. Why? When I ask I hear “No time” “No need”.

We’re probably all “guilty” to some degree. Granted we may utilize more targeted search terms, or cast our search nets wider, but do we review & evaluate each & every hit every time? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe only cursorily because we bring experience & a skillset that allows for some generalizations re: sources for example.

In the final review I come down on the side of it’s a tool and how we use it, (how we’ve been trained or not to use it) determines the outcome.