Thinking some more about learning

In reading Nicholas Carr recently, it became clearer to me that we need to look more closely at the relationship between learning and technology, in particular learning and the technology of the Net (hereafter used to refer to both the internet and worldwide web as we find them today).

One of the reasons for introducing technology-enhanced learning into the educational system was to take advantage of whatever it is that the Net has to offer. What is this? Carr maintains that it is not what we think it is. He believes that there is a growing body of evidence that indicates that our ability to understand is being challenged by the Net. What does this mean? Understanding is our ability to give meaning to the world around us, to our lives. It is a matter of establishing a frame of reference against which (hopefully) sound judgments can be made. These judgments may be about which smartphone to buy or about whether we invade a foreign country.

Every judgment we make has, to be sure, a factual component, but I suspect it has a moral component as well. (Which smartphone, or whether a smartphone says something about the buyer's view of the place of such technology in their lives and its potential impacts, say, on the environment. This is much closer to the moral dimension but is certainly not in the forefront of the buying decision. Where is should be is another issue that will have to be discussed elsewhere.) Understanding, hence meaning, is what makes our lives worth living, and so long as we have a why, as Nietzsche noted, we can endure almost any how. It is not a mere intellectual game, a cocktail-party sport, to consider what the world might become should we no longer have a basis for making a why-judgment.

The Net demands that we make many, quick decisions. Hyperlinking demands that we decide, at a minimum to-follow-or-not-to-follow. (That has become the question, but who cares any more about the Prince of Denmark?) This constant decision-making overloads the pre-frontal cortex to such an extent that the brain is more involved in deciding than it is in transferring material from working to long-term memory. If we do not do this, we no longer understand, for the underlying schema upon which, or against which background, long-term, life-relevant decisions are made is undermined. It atrophies. As Carr puts it, we become "mindless consumers of data" (p125). I'm not sure this is what we want going on in the classroom.

Reference
Carr, N. (2010) The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains, New York & London, W.W. Norton and Company.