Here are three more quotes from the article that got me thinking...
"In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, 'cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.'...Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom)."
"The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men 'less studious' and weakening their minds...'Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient.' But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver."
"Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom."
Maybe...but I don't know. For some reason this section of the article made me think of my first semester back in college after several years of being away. I attended college, the first time, between 1993 and 1998. We barely even had email, the World Wide Web was just getting started, only well-to-do business types had cell phones (I knew exactly 1 person who had one!) and laptops were like $3,000 and therefore not at all common among the student population. So when we went to large lecture-like classes we had little other choice than to actually listen to the lecturer. Now I'm sure there were people who only looked like they were listening and were really thinking about something else, but it was decidedly less difficult to keep your mind from wandering than the situation I encountered in 2005 when I stepped foot in my first lecture hall of the 21st century. Laptops were everywhere, and I couldn't find a single student using theirs to take notes on the lecture. What I could find were countless Facebook screens, students playing online poker, students reading and typing emails, and students shopping online. And many of them were doing this one-handed while texting under the table with the other. Only about half the students even pretended to be paying attention to the lecture while doing these things. I can only imagine they did the same "multi-tasking" while working on their homework and studying for exams. So if they are not engaging in the lecture, not engaging in their homework, skimming and hopping across texts, and multi-tasking all the while, when does the deep learning happen?
I know that there are wonderful things technology can bring to education...but wow..it's going to be hard for many students to ever pull themselves out of the time-wasting, attention draining, cyber-mire to even notice them.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
The Crazy Quilt of Internet Media
"The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV."
"When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed."
"As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets."
These ideas resonated for me and brought up some conflicting feelings. On the one hand, I love having a calendar, calculator, dictionary, access to driving directions, and the ability to remember the name of the actor who played in that one movie at my fingertips whenever I have a computer available (haven't made the leap to having my phone be my computer just yet.) On the other hand I HATE the way many of the traditional media have adapted to the ADHD environment of the web. It drives me nuts when I'm watching a TV program and little graphics pop up in the corners of the screen telling me what show I should watch next, or when television shows return from a commercial break only to recap everything I just watched and then show 2 minutes of new information before repeating the process all over again, or when I pick up a magazine and have to page and page and page to find something long enough to feel worth reading. Am I teaching my fourth graders to summarize so that summaries are all they will ever need read in the future? And is the reason they have so much trouble doing it because they never have to read anything longer than a paragraph unless I assign it? Makes me sad to think about the printed word becoming so "efficient."
"When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed."
"As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets."
These ideas resonated for me and brought up some conflicting feelings. On the one hand, I love having a calendar, calculator, dictionary, access to driving directions, and the ability to remember the name of the actor who played in that one movie at my fingertips whenever I have a computer available (haven't made the leap to having my phone be my computer just yet.) On the other hand I HATE the way many of the traditional media have adapted to the ADHD environment of the web. It drives me nuts when I'm watching a TV program and little graphics pop up in the corners of the screen telling me what show I should watch next, or when television shows return from a commercial break only to recap everything I just watched and then show 2 minutes of new information before repeating the process all over again, or when I pick up a magazine and have to page and page and page to find something long enough to feel worth reading. Am I teaching my fourth graders to summarize so that summaries are all they will ever need read in the future? And is the reason they have so much trouble doing it because they never have to read anything longer than a paragraph unless I assign it? Makes me sad to think about the printed word becoming so "efficient."
Is Blogger (Re)Forming My Thoughts?
“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”
As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies.
When I was reading "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" these two quotes stood out to me. I think the idea that our thoughts and words are in some respects influenced by the tools we use to convey them is an interesting one. In the article, the author explains how writing on a typwriter supposedly made Nietzche's prose tighter. I remember making the move (way back in the eighth grade) from composing my stories in a spiral notebook to typing them on a computer. While I enjoyed many aspects of word processing (spell check being chief among them) I remember being bothered by the fact that when I edited my work on the computer, the older way I had written it just dissappeared. For a while I became somewhat obsessed with the "save as" button, renaming my files after every major change just in case I wanted to go back to an older version of my prose. I eventually stopped doing this and just learned to let the old versions go. Was that an example of me changing the way I wrote? Did it make me a more "decisive" editor? Was I starting to "take on the qualitites" of a word processor as Daniel Bell suggests? And now that I'm typing in a text box that I know will be posted to the web, how does this change the way I write. Certainly the idea of audience looms much larger in my head than it does when I am writing a story on my computer which I may or may not choose to send to an editor in hopes of publication. I find it a little intimidating to know that others can be reading this post moments after I click "publish." What if I decide later that I don't like what I've written? I can't go back and have people "unview" it. I think it makes me a little more timid and a little less likely to say something I'm not sure of. Perhaps, though, this is becuase I grew up in a generation much more private than the one that has grown-up with Facebook, blogs, Twitter, and all manner of public displays of information. Perhaps those younger than me don't have the same reluctance to take risks with writing that will become immediately public.
As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies.
When I was reading "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" these two quotes stood out to me. I think the idea that our thoughts and words are in some respects influenced by the tools we use to convey them is an interesting one. In the article, the author explains how writing on a typwriter supposedly made Nietzche's prose tighter. I remember making the move (way back in the eighth grade) from composing my stories in a spiral notebook to typing them on a computer. While I enjoyed many aspects of word processing (spell check being chief among them) I remember being bothered by the fact that when I edited my work on the computer, the older way I had written it just dissappeared. For a while I became somewhat obsessed with the "save as" button, renaming my files after every major change just in case I wanted to go back to an older version of my prose. I eventually stopped doing this and just learned to let the old versions go. Was that an example of me changing the way I wrote? Did it make me a more "decisive" editor? Was I starting to "take on the qualitites" of a word processor as Daniel Bell suggests? And now that I'm typing in a text box that I know will be posted to the web, how does this change the way I write. Certainly the idea of audience looms much larger in my head than it does when I am writing a story on my computer which I may or may not choose to send to an editor in hopes of publication. I find it a little intimidating to know that others can be reading this post moments after I click "publish." What if I decide later that I don't like what I've written? I can't go back and have people "unview" it. I think it makes me a little more timid and a little less likely to say something I'm not sure of. Perhaps, though, this is becuase I grew up in a generation much more private than the one that has grown-up with Facebook, blogs, Twitter, and all manner of public displays of information. Perhaps those younger than me don't have the same reluctance to take risks with writing that will become immediately public.
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