Group items tagged

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.

The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing.

What we are losing in this country and presumably around the world is the sustained, focused, linear attention developed by reading

What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation

Having enrolled my 8 year old in a private, Episcopal school for the last few years, and had the experience of seeing him survive but not thrive in two public schools in two different districts, I have to agree there are savage inequities in play.

Mobile phones, computers everywhere, hypertext, social networking, collaborative cognition (from Wikipedia on up), Google, text-messaging, Twitter, audiobooks, digital texts, text-to-speech, speech recognition, flexible formatting - these are not "add ons" to the world of education, they are the world of education. This is how humans in this century talk, read, communicate, learn. And learning to use these technologies effectively, efficiently, and intelligently must be at the heart of our educational strategies.

Maybe worse than irrelevant. Maybe dangerous. The belief that "your" experience is relevant leads to a nightmare loop. Students who behave, and learn, most like their teachers do the best in classrooms. Teachers see this reflection as proof of their own competence - "The best students are just like me." And thus all who are "different" in any way - race, class, ability, temperament, preferences - are left out of the success story.