Has Google helped/hurt society?
This article caught my eye a few weeks ago. I am sure it has been talked out already, but I I wanted to make sure it was included here.
For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” 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 thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my 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 the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
I thought the irony in the article showed when he talked about how reading anything more than 3 or 4 paragraphs was extremely difficult for him, yet he wrote a rather long article about it. And honestly, I didn’t even get to the end of it. I might later on, I have it in my bookmarks for later.
As a teacher, I don’t ask myself why kids don’t read the whole document anymore. I know why. It is longer than 2 paragraphs and they don’t care if they haven’t found the info. by then.
July 1st, 2008 at 9:14 am
I think we have to build in some time to get the kids off the computer and reading. Perhaps give them 12-30 minutes to gather and print information, and then the rest of the period to read what they have printed and highlight, take notes and do some THINKING before getting back on the computer again…. I’d love to try that out and see how it works.
If you run into anything that talks about different techniques needed to read and assimilate information from the net as opposed to print – please share. I think we are trying to teach kids how to deal with a new medium using old skills. Many (most) of those skills still apply – but surely there are new ones that we need to develop?
The article on google is one of several things I have read on this theme lately. All seem to raise questions. I have seen no answers so far.
Did I loan you my book “The Dumbest Generation?” A pretty much universally hated book….but I think most folks are reacting to the title like a bull to a red cape. The author is not saying that the kids are dumb – just that the constant interaction with things net are blocking learning opportunities. I loaned the book to someone – and I can’t remember who. I can keep our library’s books straight – but lose track of my personal library.
Anyway – you’ve probably read them already – but my “ruminations” on the topic can be found at:
http://wanderings.edublogs.org/category/books-reading/