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Mary Fahey Colbert

On Stupidity - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

  • The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (2008), by Mark Bauerlein, provides alarming statistical support for the suspicion — widespread among professors (including me) — that young Americans are arriving at college with diminished verbal skills, an impaired work ethic, an inability to concentrate, and a lack of knowledge even as more and more money is spent on education.
  • t seems that our students are dumb and ignorant, but their self-esteem is high so they are impervious or hostile to criticism. Approaching his subject from the right, Bauerlein mentions the usual suspects — popular culture, pandering by educators, the culture war, etc. — but also reserves special attention for the digital technologies, which, for all their promise, have only more deeply immersed students in the peer obsessions of entertainment and fashion rather than encouraging more mature and sustained thought about politics, history, science, and the arts.
  • Uncertain about academic honesty and what constitutes plagiarism. (I recently had a student defend herself by claiming that her paper was more than 50 percent original, so she should receive that much credit, at least.)
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  • Uncertain about spelling and punctuation (and skeptical that such skills matter).
  • We need to reverse the customer-service mentality that goes hand-in-hand with the transformation of most college teaching into a part-time, transient occupation and the absence of any reliable assessment of course outcomes besides student evaluations.
  • Of course, we lament that the skills we have acquired at great pains can become lost to the next generation, but we can hardly reverse all of it. And it may be that the young are better adapted to what is coming than we are.
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    The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (2008), by Mark Bauerlein, provides alarming statistical support for the suspicion - widespread among professors (including me) - that young Americans are arriving at college with diminished verbal skills, an impaired work ethic, an inability to concentrate, and a lack of knowledge even as more and more money is spent on education.
Mary Fahey Colbert

EBSCOhost: Layering Knowledge: Information Literacy as Critical Thinking in the Litera... - 0 views

Mary Fahey Colbert

Being Wired Or Being Tired: 10 Ways to Cope With Information Overload | Ariadne: Web Ma... - 0 views

    • Mary Fahey Colbert
       
      This is the first time I've seen this term used and defined.  It is very much what I see in students in my classroom.  Look further into this while researching.
  • A sustained negative neurological effect of information overload has been identified by psychiatrist E.M. Hallowell. He has called this effect Attention Deficit Trait, or ADT. 'It isn't an illness; it's purely a response to the hyperkinetic environment in which we live....When a manager is desperately trying to deal with more input than he possibly can, the brain and body get locked into a reverberating circuit while the brain's frontal lobes lose their sophistication, as if vinegar were added to wine. The result is black-and-white thinking; perspective and shades of gray disappear. People with ADT have difficulty staying organised, setting priorities, and managing time, and they feel a constant low level of panic and guilt.' [5]
  • s, having difficulty relating the details to the overall issue, was
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  • ng mistak
  • ting time, and needing more time to reach decisions [3]
  • University of London researcher Glenn Wilson showed in a 2005 study that people taking an IQ test while being interrupted by emails and phone calls performed an average of 10 points lower than the baseline group without those interruptions. A frightening footnote to this study is that another test group had been tested after smoking marijuana, and they only performed an average of 4 points lower than the baseline group – from which one might reasonably conclude that persistent interruptions have a two-and-a-half times more detrimental effect on the brain than smoking marijuana [4].
  • The overall idea is to take control of the information instead of letting it control you.
  • There are many books about information overload and dealing with information generally. Here are some of my recommendations: Information Anxiety [8] and Information Anxiety 2 [9] by Richard Saul Wurman, Take Back Your Life!: Using Microsoft Outlook to Get Organised and Stay Organised by Sally McGhee [10], Techno Stress: The Human Cost of the Computer Revolution by Craig Brod [11], and TechnoStress: Coping with Technology @ Work @ Home @ Play [12].
  • Today, the most-used interruptive technologies are instant messaging, text messaging, paging, and most recently the micro-blogging technology of Twitter. Why is the interruptive technology a problem? Interruptions make us less effective. But they can also interfere with our attention spans. A Basex survey showed that over 50% of knowledge workers surveyed write emails or IM messages during conference calls [4]. We are participating in these conversations all the time, regardless of other things competing for our primary attention. Controlling our use of these technologies is one of the keys to dealing with information overload.
Mary Fahey Colbert

Magazine - Is Google Making Us Stupid? - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.
  • We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.
  • James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”
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  • It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.
  • The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.
  • Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.
  • The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. 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.
  • 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. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.
  • As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”
  • That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.
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    And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
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