Saturday, September 08, 2007

For Parents Navigating Technology...

In her Boston Globe editorial, "Learning to Think in a Digital World," neuroscientist and reading scholar Maryann Wolf asks:

How many children today are becoming Socrates' nightmare, decoders of information who have neither the time nor the motivation to think beneath or beyond their googled universes? Will they become so accustomed to immediate access to escalating on-screen information that they will fail to probe beyond the information given to the deeper layers of insight, imagination, and knowledge that have led us to this stage of human thought? Or, will the new demands of information technologies to multitask, integrate, and prioritize vast amounts of information help to develop equally, if not more valuable, skills that will increase human intellectual capacities, quality of life, and collective wisdom as a species?

She concludes:

Children need to have both time to think and the motivation to think for themselves, to develop an expert reading brain, before the digital mode dominates their reading. The immediacy and volume of information should not be confused with true knowledge.


The entire article is here.

3 comments:

Megan Cobb said...

How's THAT for a little light reading of a Sunday morning? ;) Whew. I think I need to go back to bed now.

At A Hen's Pace said...

Yikes! Sorry about that....

:)

Jeanne

Hen Jen said...

Husband and I were just talking about this subject, in light of the miss teen North Carolina thing...I really thought her non answer was a result of 1) our modern public school system and 2) our techno-age: watching news on television, getting news online, texting..when a region is mentioned, a map is usually provided on screen- taking away the need of any effort of thought..

"Socrates' nightmare"..now there is a picturesque idea...

thanks for sharing