What called my attention the most this week was the article Is Google Making Us Stupid ? by Nicolas Carr. What the internet is making to our brains is something that we often ask ourselves, but we are rarely able to answer.
Our attention span is getting shorter everyday as we live more and more immersed in the new technologies, that is fact. I can see it in myself,and I definitely witness that in my colleagues and students. The idea that we skim through different websites and platforms seems quite right.
What worries me and I agree with the author in this point, is that we are losing the ability of deep reading. We are not able to keep our attention in long heavy texts. The author states that we might be reading more than in the past by updating statuses, twitting, searching for information, texting, etc, but the content of the texts we read are generally light, compared with the classic literature or any literature people used to read before technology was massively available.
Of course, a lot of people want to read books will still read them, either the paper version or the Kindle type.
Take for instance the popularity of the http://knowyourmeme.com/ ,http://icanhas.cheezburger.com/lolcats, http://failblog.cheezburger.com/, http://www.damnyouautocorrect.com/, http://www.engrish.com/, Your Grammar Sucks, just to mention some of the most popular sites online
that show a great variety of spelling mistakes and simple bad English, because that is the way people write on the internet. The amount of acronyms and abbreviations been used online and for sms and chat are far beyond my knowledge !. As these is what my students are using and watching, I use them for educational purposes .
The modification in the cognitive process that the use of new technologies produce, is also seen in the famous Bloom's Taxonomy, known worldwide for educators . This classification had to be updated to meet the new teaching paradigm. According to Bloom , the cognitive based domain consists on six levels. This was reformulated not only by changing the nouns into verbs, but also by changing the arrangement of the categories. In the past it used to go from the simplest to the most difficult or from the lower to the higher level thinking, placing knowledge in the base of pyramid and application on top. Now, it looks as it follows :
What are we educators called to do ? ...
Change ! Change the way we teach, change the way we plan ,and the way we see our students and the teaching learning process.
If we believe that Google IS REALLY making us stupid, then let's do something to change that , or use the technologies to our advantage. Make use of the skimming and scanning reading techniques that our students are already using to navigate online, to read essays, articles, books, so they improve the reading comprehension abilities, etc .
Now, there is no excuse not to read, because we have reading material all over the" walls"( literally ) , what we need to develop is the ability to choose what is worth deep reading and discuss, and what is worth reading and correct !
Some food for the thought ....
No comments:
Post a Comment