As I read the article “Is Google Making Us Stupid” I
couldn’t help but totally agree with the author. I find that reading articles online more than
a few paragraphs my mind starts to drift and wander. I find it difficult to not open up another
tab on the internet search bar. Either
something I read wants me to search for something or my drifting mind causes me
to think about something else that I have “always” wanted to know about. When I first started the program at UNH I
found it difficult to read on the screen for everything and because of that I
print everything out. I will admit it…I
print everything out! The way I
rationalize it to myself is that I print it onto scrap paper and it helps me go
back to see what I read, highlight and make notes on the texts. It also makes it more difficult for my mind
to drift off like it sometimes does when I read online. I did find it interesting that the author
Nicholas Carr said it was difficult for him to read something online more than
a few paragraphs but his article was way more than a few paragraphs. Yet, what I found most interesting is that
Google’s mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it accessible
and useful”, what I think it does is it give endless information that causes
people to lose themselves in “googling”.
What scares me is that the founders of Google want to make it into a
HAL-like machine that connects to our brains.
Yes, having endless bits of information is cool but sometimes half the
fun of learning something new is figuring out how to find it.
The core ideas behind Connected Learning are what make it so
interesting to me! The first,
Interest-Powered is what drives most learning.
If you have an interest in something you want to want to learn more. That interest is what makes you go a step
further and makes you want to find out more.
Second, Peer-Supported is something that also causes people to keep
going. There have been times that we
have all wanted to give up but someone checking in to see how you are doing/
encouraging you to keep going is what drives keep going after many
setbacks. And third, being academically
orientated. This is important because
there is a reason behind what is happening/what is being learned. To me all lessons are at some point
academically orientated and that what keeps the learning going.
The Spires, Wiebe, Young,
Hollebrands, Lee article talks about technology, etc.
But what I found the most important is how education has three foundational
assumptions, that the teacher is the SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT factor in determining
students success, professional development, and support an idea driven and
creative economy. Over the past two
school years my school district has begun to allow teachers to choose their own
professional development on some professional development days. What I have found is that it has given
teachers the chance to explore various ideas that they want to include in their
classrooms. It has also given teachers
the chance to be in charge of their own learning which to me makes everyone a
little happier to be there. I think that
when teachers are seen as being important and are given the chance to better
themselves it betters everyone!
This work by Anne Marie Lanning is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
No comments:
Post a Comment