13xx - Chris Andrews on Diigo

12 Oct 09

Last year the Librarian of Congress warned that texting was responsible for a drastic decline in American sentences, but that opinion wasn't backed up by any scientific evidence. Now, a team of Australian psychologists has come a step closer to proving that mobile phones are destroying our ability to think. The researchers show that children who use mobile phones respond to higher-level cognitive tasks faster, but less accurately, than those who don't.
Australians
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- Specifically, the psychologists found that as mobile phone use increased, children learned to perform tasks more quickly, but their ability to remember things declined:
- mobile phone use also correlates with impulsivity
- (For other research on texting, click here and here; for the impact of texting on literature, click here; for its impact on politics, click here; for its impact on language development, click here).
- But reports that cell phones are destroying our brains are premature
- All too often, we blame our technologies for whatever ails us. According to Carolyn Marvin (1988), the telephone that Alexander Graham Bell invented -- the one with wires -- was blamed for everything from ear irritations and dizziness to nervous conditions, neuralgia, and even insanity. Wired telephones don't cause these things, any more than wireless phones cause hyperactivity, lowered IQ's, or declining grammar.
- our modern preference for speed doesn't mean that the internet is making us stupid, either. Who's to say that in Gutenberg's day, John and Jane Q. Public (Gutenberg knew them as Johannes and Johanna von Volk) preferred the quick and often inaccurate printed word to the slower, more costly, but more-carefully-prepared handwritten manuscripts that the printing press was replacing
- We've always been attracted to shortcuts, because time has always been of the essence.

06 Oct 09

Clive Thompson on the New Literacy

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13xx literacy technology students writing socialnetworking

how kids today can't write—and technology is to blame
age of illiteracy
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- add up.
- virtually never construct a paragraph again.

Get Smarter - The Atlantic (July/August 2009)

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13xx technology future education brain google

neurophysiologist William Calvin argues persuasively that modern human cognition—including sophisticated language and the capacity to plan ahead—evolved in response to the demands of this long age of turbulence
Our present century may not be quite as perilous for the human race as an ice age in the aftermath of a super-volcano eruption, but the next few decades will pose enormous hurdles that go beyond the climate crisis.
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- The nascent jargon of the field describes this as “
  intelligence augmentation.” I prefer to think of it as “You+.”
- we may soon have to start thinking of ourselves as living in an entirely new era. The focus of our technological evolution would be less on how we manage and adapt to our physical world, and more on how we manage and adapt to the immense amount of knowledge we’ve created
- for millennia
- With every technological step forward, though, has come anxiety about the possibility that technology harms our natural ability to think
- induced form of ADD—a “continuous partial attention-deficit disorder,”
- In reality, though, the proliferation of diverse voices may actually improve our overall ability to think
- cognitive calisthenics
- reward the capacity to make connections and to see patterns—precisely the kinds of skills we need for managing an information glut.
- Scientists
- “fluid intelligence”
- information overload”

05 Oct 09

Is Google Making Us Stupid? - The Atlantic (July/August 2008)

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technology reading web2.0 education culture 13xx google

My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think
Web has been a godsend to me as a writer
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- universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind
- media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought
- Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
- not the only one
- a recently
  published study
- They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another sit
- Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self
- Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged
- And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains
- The human brain is almost infinitely malleable
- intellectual technologies
- impoverished
- becoming
- When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image
- reprogramming
- The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”
- It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.”
- a HAL-like machine
- or even replaced
- The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
- human knowledge (if not wisdom)
- Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom.
- The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds
- content
- under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available

04 Oct 09

Why Generation-Y Can’t Read Nonverbal Cues - WSJ.com

online.wsj.com/...3863204574348493483201758.html - Preview

13xx socialnetworking reading writing students digitalnatives

Unfortunately, nearly all of their communication tools involve the exchange of written words alone.
The digital natives improve their adroitness at the keyboard, but when it comes to their capacity to "read" the behavior of others, they are all thumbs

17 Aug 09

OMG! Expert Says Today's Kids Are Stupid : NPR

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13xx digitalnatives learning book

the digital generation is pretty much filled with idiots.
adult information
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- an teachers and parents in the home as well, start steering all of that online activity toward productive, knowledge-inducing activity? And I'm pessimistic.
- But I actually think that that's a healthy thing to happen in any society. It's good for old people to rebuke adolescents precisely for their adolescence, and it's good for adolescents to resent the elders for, perhaps, their rigidity about things, or their authoritarian attitudes. I think we actually need a lot more statements about young people not knowing enough history, not reading as many books, work harder, come on, grow up.
- it doesn't seem that adults are really that much brighter when it comes to civics or general world knowledge than students are

Clay Shirky: How cellphones, Twitter, Facebook can make history | Video on TED.com

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twitter facebook socialnetworking video information politics news 13xx

13 Aug 09

BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | Giving up my iPod for a Walkman

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13xx digitalnatives technology music

the iPod of its day
Perhaps that kind of anticipation and excitement has been somewhat lost in the flood of new products which now hit our shelves on a regular basis.

Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants - Some Thoughts from the Generation Gap

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13xx digitalnatives students

What Companies Should Know About Digital Natives « Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang | Social Media, Web Marketing

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13xx students socialnetworking digitalnatives

live blogging
age doesn’t always matter as the generation is defined on: access to digital technologies since birth, age, and have the skills to use the digital technologies.
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- Online representation is the same as physical representation
- Opportunity for HR departments to learn more about their employees, but guess what? They Google you too.
- not only do they have the right to speak, but to be heard
- Creators
- rip, mix, burn content to encourage interaction
- online activism
- qualified and expert sources

Are Students Really Studying More than Social Networking?

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13xx students socialnetworking

23 Jul 09

Tweeting Your Way to Better Grades - US News and World Report

Burlingame High School in Burlingame, Calif., is a devoted user of Twitter. She's used the website with her classmates for online book discussions for her AP English class, in which they post and share feedback, analysis, and questions about novels such a

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twitter socialnetworking education technology 13xx

07 Jul 09

Twitter Frenzy | The Daily Show | Comedy Central

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humor video twitter politics media 13xx

29 Jun 09

The Future of Work

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future trends work 13xx

22 Jun 09

Study shows Americans' devotion to the Internet - CNN.com

h-speed Internet. The survey found that home Internet users were paying about $4.50 more in monthly bills this year -- from an average of $34.50 last April to $39.00 this year.

The added price and the recessi

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internet tv 13xx

Do you suffer from Internet fatigue? - CNN.com

for people going forward is to see these tools as tools, meaning you can use them to identify yourself as being offline at a particular moment, and not see them as perpetual obligations to be available at all times t

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web2.0 twitter socialnetworking technology filter internet 13xx

Chris Andrews's Library tagged 13xx → View Popular

Cell phones make kids faster, dumber, The Web of Language

Clive Thompson on the New Literacy

Get Smarter - The Atlantic (July/August 2009)

Is Google Making Us Stupid? - The Atlantic (July/August 2008)

Why Generation-Y Can’t Read Nonverbal Cues - WSJ.com

OMG! Expert Says Today's Kids Are Stupid : NPR

Clay Shirky: How cellphones, Twitter, Facebook can make history | Video on TED.com

BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | Giving up my iPod for a Walkman

Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants - Some Thoughts from the Generation Gap

What Companies Should Know About Digital Natives « Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang | Social Media, Web Marketing

Are Students Really Studying More than Social Networking?

Tweeting Your Way to Better Grades - US News and World Report

Twitter Frenzy | The Daily Show | Comedy Central

The Future of Work

Study shows Americans' devotion to the Internet - CNN.com

Do you suffer from Internet fatigue? - CNN.com

Twitter on the Barricades - Six Lessons Learned - NYTimes.com

YouTube - Video: RSS in Plain English

YouTube - Blogs in Plain English

YouTube - Social Bookmarking in Plain English

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