Picked this up from Will Richardson’s blog. This article from Nicholas Carr needs to be read and contemplated by all Internet educators.
I know exactly what Nicholas Carr means. More and more I find myself engaged in what I call horizontal learning (skimming multiple resources, multitasking), and have to force myself to engage in vertical learning (prolonged focus on a single topic or resource.) There is indeed a change afoot.
Implications? Identify, make explicit, and teach both approaches. See slides 13- 16 of this presentation for more on horizontal v vertical learning.
Addendum to this post
On a related note I just came across this article today - Society Hard-wired for a fall. More on what computer use may be doing to our brains.
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4 comments:
Michael,
Thanks so much for the links to these two articles. Whilst recognising the online tendency to skim described by Nicholas Carr, I eagerly read to the end of each article, savouring every word. I sense deep changes are happening and welcome as much as discussion and reflection as possible.
Thanks for the nice article links. I got a very nice read. Interesting stuffs. :)
Thanks for this Michael.
i like the quote in Nicholas Carr's article, where he says he knows how HAL was feeling as his mind drained away.
i think i too have developed "bad reading habits" on the interweb, and find myself passively browsing for hours. So passively that it can be a stretch to leave a comment on someone's podcast.
Often i'll have a strained brain from trying to soak up all the information .. because i forget to step away and redraw my own mental models, consciously.
(i think this is similar to what you've said about vertical and horizontal).
kind regards, michael
ps: interesting to hear your words read by the odiogo machine ;-]
I know what you mean by the passively browsing syndrome. But I have been consciously trying to drag myself out of that lately. I think it was in Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody that I read that he tries to make 2 new comments on others' work for every new blog post, or photo etc that he posts. Kind of contributing to the dialogue rather than just promoting your own work/ideas.
So far so good!
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