I know everyone is impatient for vacation to be over, so we can get back to school. I thought it might be time for a new post, to get us thinking teachnologically, in the meantime...
NPR ran a story this morning with Nicholas Carr (who wrote "Is Google Making Us Stupid" published in the Atlantic last summer). NPR and Carr examine the ways that writers are adapting to the new digital platforms readers are using - and how their writing styles change when they are writing for cell phones or Twitter or the Kindle. NPR interviews writers who are now creating tweet and cell phone stories, and those writers describe how they have to write more poetically (one writer says "writing for 140 character tweets is like writing haiku") and with more punch and impact. This in itself is worthy of a teachnology discussion.
For background, you can read the original "Is Google Making Us Stupid" and several rebuttals here, at The Edge (a great blog, that by its very existence shows how new media can expand and broaden intellectual discussions on various topics).
Here's a sampling of Carr's thesis: "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..."
Here's a sampling from Clay Shirky's rebuttal to Carr's view of the internet: "...the anxiety at the heart of “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” doesn’t actually seem to be about thinking, or even reading, but culture. Despite the sweep of the title, it’s focused on a very particular kind of reading, literary reading, as a metonym for a whole way of life. You can see this in Carr’s polling of “literary types,” in his quoting of Wolf and the playwright Richard Foreman, and in the reference to War and Peace, the only work mentioned by name. Now War and Peace isn’t just any piece of writing, of course; it is one of the longest novels in the canon, and symbolizes the height of literary ambition and of readerly devotion. But here’s the thing: it’s not just Carr’s friend, and it’s not just because of the web—no one reads War and Peace. It’s too long, and not so interesting."
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My own opinion is that we are at a media inflection point. Folks like Nicholas Carr are looking backward (even as they find Google to make them so much more effective) and bemoaning the world in which books were preeminent. I think that we have to avoid "media nostalgia" for books, and think more deeply about each medium. The book medium has had an academic monopoly, and has been a self-fulfilling platform. "The book is the best cultural medium" is something that was largely true, from 1500 to 1975, simply because the book was the only cultural medium available to the masses during that long time. Like a fish who has a hard time thinking objectively about water because it's been swimming in it so long, we have a hard time separating information from books because it's all we've known. The book is great for many things, but it is far from the best medium for many things.
ReplyDeleteThere are now many media available to us. I think that we have to become McLuhans, and examine each medium for what it requires of us, and what it makes possible. We need the skills to be able to select the best medium for our message (apologies to Marshal Mc. :) ).
Time to channel the Byrds...
To every medium there is a season,
A home for every bit of information.
A time for a book and a time to Tweet;
a time to post and a time to browse that which has been posted;
a time for video and a time for pics;
a time to iPod and a time to Google;
a time to Youtube and a time to Moodle;
a time for Facebook, I swear it's not too late...
I'd like to introduce myself to the Souhegan readers of this blog. I'm John's sister, Christine Ranta and I teach elementary school, specifically special ed., in a school in Georgia. We have tons of technology at our disposal. I for one am trying to learn to use it in a meaningful way. My students with autism (and many learning disbaled students) are visual learners who love computers and who often struggle with reading. My biggest concern is the TEST and how it stifles using technology.
ReplyDeleteFor instance, our state has standards. If I start with a standard to teach and use it as a learning objective, my next step is to design an assessment- what I want kids to learn and how they are going to show me they have learned it. I may allow different formats for them to display what they learned- text based, graphic, or video. My students with disabilities (and also many of those in the inclusive setting that I work in taht do not have learning disabilities)) will not choose a multiple choice answer assessment nor would they be most successful that way. Nor does it prepare them for any kind of occupation outside of a school setting. But, multiple choice is the assessment that the state uses to determine if a standard has been met. And, my continuing in my job this year is dependent on my students passing the test.
Good teachers think of the real world applications of what they are teaching and recognize that our students will be living in a world in which they will need technological skills. It's also important for us teachers to use the best means to teach- sometimes it might be text, sometimes video, or sometimes others means that are tech dependent. They are tools and we should use the best ones we have for the objective.
But what if it costs us our jobs?
Thanks for the post on this! I too heard the story and found the remarks fascinating. In terms of how Time magazine's Lev Grossman now reads books, he stated that his reading of a book is now less focused. Grossman stated that people are quickly loosing the ability to deeply focus and read books! I looked to my own reading tendencies now, and I love to read, but my reading of books has dwindled significantly in the past several years.
ReplyDeleteGrossman says that particular function of the e-book leads to a certain kind of reading and writing: "Very forward moving, very fast narrative ... and likewise you don't tend to linger on the language. When you are seeing a word or a sentence on the screen, you tend to go through it, you extract the data, and you move on."
I'm finding that I need to spend time catching up on the blogs I follow, chase the links offered in all that is available on those blogs, and then I just spiral out into attention deficit land. Kids tend to have shorter attention spans anyway, so following Grossman's hypothesis they will not be trained to have the depth of focus that is required for reading books, novels, academic papers, etc.
Thanks for the post!
One of the reasons that the web is such an ADHD experience is the amount of business (busy-ness) going on on web pages. Popups, animations, videos etc. all vie for our attentoion while we're trying to read an article. But wait, there's help for our attention deficits (besides adderol) - Readability! I read about it in David Pogue's Best of 2009 column, went to the site, configured it for how I'd like it to look, and bookmarked it. It's very cool - turning the cacophony of nytimes.com (or for those of you who prefer a healthy dose of scandal and sex with your news, the Huff Post) into a pristine, peaceful magazine page. Check it out here - http://lab.arc90.com/2009/03/02/readability/. jr
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