Group items tagged

We are not only what we read

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

Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that’s not the case

Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

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.

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture.

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”

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.”

Who said we need to look at them all?

As for information overload, I consider bookmarking a way to dribble information overload. Why? If you have tons of bookmarks together with tons of people's bookmarks being tagged, you can use those bookmarks to create meaning whenever needed.

If you consider Diigo for that matter, you could easily set up a group and you could have the bookmarks for your students to start with and encourage them to share their bookmarks with the group. Also, I'd consider specific tags

I think the comments feature and the sticky notes have great potential in the classroom!

Working with bookmarks to make a digital portfolio sounds very creative.

I thought the idea of a digital portfolio using tags a very interesting one, even more with the webslides. You can keep track of all the online artifacts you've been creating. Interesting for busy educators!

I think a really big thing is to change one's way of thinking.

First, add tags that are meaningful for you, for your private retrieval, and also tags that have been suggested by the group that will help others browse through the treasures you find online.

Handling more information and sharing it with our colleagues should make us better teachers.

Every online resource we explore is bookmarked and shared with the group. I used to do that in delicious. Now, I'll have to see how to do that here. In delicious I could easily organize my tags in Weeks (bundling tags). Here, I think you can use the "lists" to organize your tags in a meaningful way to the group. I'll check that.