A Little Learning

A friend told me about this article in the Atlantic, by “net critic” Nicholas Carr: Is Google making us stupid?

That’s an intriguing thought. Check out the excerpt below. Does it sound familiar? I read with enthusiasm for the first few paragraphs, forced my way through another handful on principle, and then finally gave up after scrolling down and seeing how long it was. I mean, that was a LONG article (she said ironically). What I realized is that while I read this article, other things came to mind - something to Google, a note to make on my calendar - that I had to fight in order to keep reading.

“Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial brain.

“Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”
I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. …

Denise

test post

Jane Hart, founder of the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies, lists the Top 100 Tools for Learning (methodology listed on her site). I am happy to say I am familiar with many of them. Next step is to think about their implications for learning.

Link.

>>Sherry 

is “Let’s Give Teaching and Learning a Chance” with Stan Katz in CHE “Review” almost two months ago: “The new generation of centers[’] … message is that teaching ought to be a self-conscious act.”  Also many interesting comments on the piece, e.g. “understanding the learner is as important as understanding the discipline” or reference to “a long-standing expectation that the people who opt for [optional ‘Grades 13-16′] should supply ample self-motivation to compensate for the lack of flash and dash encouraged by teaching and learning centers.”

Nelson

McCain on the internet:

“I am learning to get online myself, and I will have that down fairly soon, getting on myself.”