Well, a little reading and viewing that I've been doing today that you might like to check out and think about over your weekend!
In the first of two articles I found in today's The Age newspaper, How the Internet makes us dumb is an interesting read about what some experts believe to be dangers to our brains and the way we think based on increasing use of (and dependence on) the Internet. While I generally don't subscribe to alarmist-style 'research' that paints Internet use as a straight path to hell (for our brains and capacity to communicate with fellow human beings), there were some points made in this article that got me thinking a bit - especially in terms of the 'depth' issue.
After I posted a link to this article on Twitter, someone in my PLN posted a link to this article in the New York Times from Steven Pinker: Mind over mass media, and I think it makes for a very interesting alternative perspective to the "Internet makes us dumb" argument.
Another Twitter colleague, Dayle Major, also pointed me towards fascinating article about the effects of e-readers on our brains: The Future of Reading and why printed books may actually be more helpful on this front.
Also in The Age today, I found this article called Talkin' 'bout the (digital) generation, which explores some of the assumptions being made about the so-called 'digital natives' generation and what it means for them in terms of shopping, work and basic socialising. I like the writer's eventual point that "Technology magnifies existing human behaviours and tendencies" (rather than automatically creating new and until now never seen before behaviours) and his recommendation that we "wait to see whether this generation grows out of some of its in-built proclivities before pronouncing it a separate species, warped by technology."
And last but certainly not least, if you haven't watched it yet then I highly recommend you check out the fascinating TED Talk from Sugata Mitra, where he talks about The child-driven education and his real-life experiments with giving children self-supervised access to the web. This is a brilliant demonstration of Mitra's final conclusion that "education is a self organising system where learning is an emergent phenomenon." Also, his use (and naming) of the "granny cloud" is amazing!
Hope that gives you something education and technology related to chew on a bit over the weekend!
:-)
