When Superintendent Thornton gave the School Board a list of newly recommended textbooks, I raised some serious concerns. Why were we recommending a paper textbook for a course in website design? Aren’t digital textbooks and online services becoming cost effective even when we factor in the cost of laptops and tablets? Aren’t digital textbooks continually updated while paper versions for current history and the sciences woefully outdated before the next textbook adoption?
Computers offer great promise for unlimited and current information on any topic. Online instruction can be individualized for each student’s needs.
But author Nicholas Carr in his book, The Shallows, raises some serious concerns about the limits of online computer information and learning. According to Carr, those who are continually connected may have, at their fingertips, a wealth of information, but computers may be making their thinking shallow and cluttered with useless information.
Carr states that people who read online often jump to various links, get distracted by needless information, and have difficulty remembering important information. They are less likely to grasp complex ideas.
Nor does the Internet automatically expand information. Carr points out that the variety of citations has actually decreased in scholarly works since the advent of online searches. Google sends everyone to the same set of sites for each subject, and researchers are less likely to explore beyond Google’s recommendations.
We may have a thousand “friends” on Facebook and know no one deeply. The same thing goes for information.
Technology isn’t just changing the way we think; it is actually changing the very structure of the brain. Carr isn’t the first person to point this out.
Some twenty years ago, I read Merlin Donald’s Origins of the Modern Mind. Donald pointed out that writing and books profoundly changed how people used their brains. No longer did one have to memorize all of Homer the way ancient Greeks once did. They were free to store the words in texts freeing their minds to reflect upon the ideas themselves.
The Internet was just a baby, and Donald saw the computer’s ability to process information rather than to access information from the Internet. How would this rewire the brain?
Our goal in education is not to develop Jeopardy contestants who store tons of unused information or spelling bee champs who know words they will never use in a sentence. Computers are great for those functions.
But computers are not able to tell us what information is truly relevant, nor what word best carries the right emotion and meaning. Understanding the deep meanings of information and words can only come from deeper reading and contemplation.
Nicholas Carr dropped his Twitter and Facebook accounts. He still uses email and data searches online. But he knows he must read, from time to time, books from cover to cover, free from links and eye grabbing graphics.
We have to teach our children that online searches and superficial knowledge cannot be a substitute for a deeper understanding and contemplation. Computers are these great tools, but cannot become the whole of education.
(I still question the need for a textbook on Website design.)
