How Google Is Making Us Smarter...

I found this article 'How Google is Making Us Smarter' from the DISCOVER Magazine on Metafilter (a great site by the way), and had a read. It is interesting as in the first two paragraphs it tackles the debate that technology (mobile phones, internet etc) is making us 'more stoopid'. I have always struggled with this argument as I believe our students are much more street smart when it comes to finding and using relevant information, as well as utilising technology and particularly the internet for their needs. In particular, the article looks at the 'extended mind', and the argument that our environment is often an extension of our mind. We need both to be successful, and the internet, and indeed technology is part of our environment.

Rather than arguing that too much technology in the classroom is 'dumbing down' our students, maybe we should be more worried about the school environment as an extension of student minds. Maybe we should also consider that we need to prepare students to utilise this ideal more and more in the future.

To end this post, something quite poignant at the end of the article....

Socrates worried that writing would make people forgetful and unwise. Sure enough, writing did rob us of some gifts, such as the ability to recite epic poems like The Iliad from memory. But it also created a much larger pool of knowledge from which people could draw, a pool that has continued to expand.

Imagine the world without writing... That is definitely something for us to all think about....