there is no actual evidence to support the view that this generation is distracted, performing poorly or otherwise less capable than previous generations. In fact the evidence suggests that on the whole, this is the smartest generation ever. IQ is up year over year for many years, university entrance exam scores are at an all time high and it has never been tougher to get into the best universities. This is a generation about which we can be enormously hopeful.
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DocsTeach - 0 views
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The National Archives has created a new web site to help educators teach with primary-source documents. The site, called DocsTeach, not only lets teachers explore thousands of documents in a variety of media from the National Archives holdings, but it also includes online tools to help teachers combine these materials and create engaging history activities that students can access over the internet.
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Media Cloud - 0 views
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Media Cloud is a system that lets you see the flow of the media. The Internet is fundamentally altering the way that news is produced and distributed, but there are few comprehensive approaches to understanding the nature of these changes. Media Cloud automatically builds an archive of news stories and blog posts from the web, applies language processing, and gives you ways to analyze and visualize the data.
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Edmodo: Microblogging in the Classroom-Special Guest: Jeff O'Hara - Classroom 2.0 LIVE! - 1 views
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Add Gadget to Your Webpage - 0 views
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Embed this Google Earth player on your webpage. Point it to a kmz tour file. This is great! http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2009/07/best_google_earth_tour_to_date_apol.html
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Using Google Earth in the classroom | Google Earth Blog - 0 views
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Today we're looking at GEteach [Google Earth PLUGIN required.] , a site developed by 9th-grade Geography teacher Josh Williams. The site uses the Google Earth Plug-in to give you quick access to a wide variety of information such as the CIA Factbook, population densities, and various other human and physical geographic overlays.
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Magazine - Is Google Making Us Stupid? - The Atlantic - 10 views
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By Nicholas Carr
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Nicholas Carr also wrote The Shallows an entire book about the effect the Internet is having on our brains - I highly recommend it. http://www.theshallowsbook.com/
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I can relate. I have the Google application on my phone which I use almost daily to check something such as a bus schedule, movie time, game score, etc.
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I am the same way on my phone. On car rides, dinner, you name it with my wife and one of us will say, "I wonder..." and the phones are out and we're finding answers. Sometimes I want to just wonder though...
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I would be interested to see a study done like this in the United States. In my one undergraduate class on politics and media we talked about "info snacking" which is the idea that people look for small bits of information at a time instead of reading the entire article. This is exactly what Carr is talking about here.
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I agree Charles. However I would suggest that I think that people will have to develop a way to info. snack and be able to do conventional reading too. It seems as though there is something lost when all you are able to do is skim and scan.
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The other thing that I wonder quite a bit about this entire article is does "info snacking" stem from the internet or does it stem from being a generation that was raised on frequent tv, video, video games, and the internet altogether. It would seem to me that those other factors would have to have something to do with it as well.
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Let's also not forget the constant stream of data to our mobile device(s) as well when thinking about that. Should this make us better, not worse, at multi-tasking.
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ity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. Th
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that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activ
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As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational co
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This is the point I read until I got distracted. The ads on the side are distracting to me, and I also needed to get going because of the time.
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I am finding the sticky notes to be distracting. I keep skipping from the article to the notes.
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That is a very good point. I personally find it easier to read articles on paper instead of the computer screen because there are less distractions.
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My mind would
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What a good analogy. Before when you swam and simmered in the information and had to take time to digest, now we can just move from one thing to another quickly.
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Do you feel that this style allows for anything further than "In one ear, out the other"? How do you best capture the features of the web?
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It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.
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“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.”
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Nietzsche’s friends, a composer
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Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”
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The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written , “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.
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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.
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Carr's argument is that although we are perhaps reading more than ever...due to text messaging, social media sites, etc we are not taking the time to really delve into what we read and contemplate. Moreover, this premise seems plausible to a degree, as it seems generally that much of what is sent through social media may be trival or meaningless information.
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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.
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Although I didn't read it (how appropriate - LOL = ) ) Carr's book on "The Shallows" alludes to this concept...in that our brains may in fact be coming re-wired, due to the common every day distractions that cause us to lose focus on thought-provoking topics. His argument is that the collective human attention span is becoming reduced, essentially due to our environment of perpetual distraction- spawned by the internet.
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With the approval of Midvale’s owners, he recruited a group of factory hands, set them to work on various metalworking machines, and recorded and timed their every movement as well as the operations of the machines. By breaking down every job into a sequence of small, discrete steps and then testing different ways of performing each one, Taylor created a set of precise instructions—an “algorithm,” we might say today—for how each worker should work. Midvale’s employees grumbled about the strict new regime, claiming that it turned them into little more than automatons, but the factory’s productivity soared.
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The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. 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
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I believe this segment is akin to "data mining" where companies look at human tendancies to advertise and create greater opportunities to feature their products by the locations (physically or virtually) of their prospective customers, clients or buyers. This idea (data mining) is relatively new to me, but there is no doubt that it will be a prevalent part of marketing in the future. During the reading of this article I received 5 text messages (responded to 2), but was disciplined enough not to check my email until I was finished. What portion of today's younger generation is disciplined enough to stay on task...until an assignment is completed?!?
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r use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.
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I never really thought about this. Our brains are adapting to the net earlier than ever before now thanks to web tools that are being implemented earlier in the classroom. I do not remember using computers on an active basis to at least fourth grade, and I know they are starting much earlier with them.
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tual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating “like computers.
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al of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectua
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The world would be so different without all of the great technology advances. I think back to when I had my first cell phone and it became easier to stay connected with my friends through phone calls, and now with smart phones we can be connected to the world at all times. Some people may fear change, but I think it is good to embrace it.
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Overall, I do not think Google is making us stupid. I think it is our society as a whole has become so fast paced, and we need information quicker so online resources are the first thing we go to. I think as long educators keep students focused on analyzing and deep thought, we won't let Google or other web tools make our society less intelligent.
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The idea of not being able to sustain attention to a lengthy article or book makes me think about how difficult it is more and more kids to sustain attention to tasks in class. It seems to get worse as the years go by and I feel like more and more kids are being diagnosed with ADD. Perhaps that type of attending "problem" is going to be the norm.
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I find this to be very true in the computer age as well. It is so easy to type something and change it multiple times now. I wonder if we actually give as much thought to what we are typing as we once did when changing a line meant getting a new piece of paper and starting over causing minutes or hours of extra work rather than seconds.
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I would agree with this statement. I feel that as I have gone through my education, I was taught all of the skills to read and analyze appropriately. Now that I have mastered those skills, I am only expected to recall information. If I can gather the information in a quicker/more efficent way, I will use it. But am I really learning?
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Live Blogging 2.0 - ReadWriteWeb - 0 views
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Back to School - Educational Uses with Google Earth - 0 views
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Modeling the Harrisburg Capitol Complex | Google Earth Blog - 1 views
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Learning Is Messy - Blog » Blog Archive » Process The Learning - 1 views
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Having taught first grade, it's not surprising. Retention is not easy for these lil kiddos. It requires loads of revisits. But as the author noted, talking about it helps cement those connections. Taking time for this is difficult with soooooo much to do, but well worth the time. My goal---have students review their learning each day and have a "reporter" podcast this to our school website.
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Information-rich and attention-poor - The Globe and Mail - 0 views
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For example, a recently announced storage technology using carbon nanotubes may allow digital information to be held without degradation for a billion years or more – an innovation that would eliminate the major shortcoming of the digital archive.