When I began teaching an honors American history class to a group of 25 seniors, the last thing I expected was to need to hand-hold them through the process of doing research for a simple 5 page paper . These were the brightest of the bright! These students attended a wealthy, well funded public high school in Colorado. I will never forget the first time I walked them down the hall to their incredible library for time to complete research for their paper.
The students walked straight to the computers, ignoring the online catalog which organized multiple rows of fabulous books and resources and also ignoring the online databases the school paid for. Straight to Wikipedia they went, straight to the Google
search engine, choosing the first site it brought up. They had no discernment. They could not tell "good" sources of
information from "poor" ones. The students didn't even know to ask the
question. They had too much information. I realized they had completely grown up when information is constatnly bombarded into your personal space, when you want it, but mostly when you don't.
Ten minutes after bringing them into the library, I watched one student copy and and paste an entire passage straight into his own paper. I knew we had to call a time out. This student, a bright, engaged learner was not quite sure why I told him he could not do that. I brought the class away from the "computer corner" and back to the tables nearer the rows of books. I told them (amidst protesting groans of disbelief) that they were going to have to do their entire research project and give their presentation using only hard copy books and resources in their own school library.
Now, I know that their future is not filled with doing research soley with books and hard copy journals. I didn't want them to only use books because I thought it would be better than the internet. I am fully aware of how much fabulous information and resources exist online. I wanted them to be confined to their one library with its books because I simply wanted them to SLOW DOWN. I wanted these students to think about where their information was coming from, search for it, consider it, compare it. I wanted them to learn how to use a library catalog and how to use the index and table contents of a book. One young woman, with a straight face, complained she would have to go through a 400 page history book page by page to find anything on MLK. At first, I thought she was joking, but no, they had no clue how to use an index or table of contents.
In Communication Flows and Flomations, Paul Adams quotes Daniel Sui who argues that "Many studies have indicated that having access to unlimited amounts of information is not necessarily beneficial to an individual or an organization." (2000) In the case of my class, this was defiantly true. They had the brains, the drive, the curiosity and the access to information. What they needed was to be taught discernment, critical thinking, to consider the speaker, the motive, the culture, the time period from which this information was created. The question for the next generation is not where and how to get information, but how to critically consider where their information and where it is coming from. Our children need to be taught the tremendous skill of critical thinking and given the tools to sift through the mass of information that bombards their lives in multiple mediums.
As for the research projects, the presentations on MLK, WWII, the Gilded Age and the role of women in the Revolutionary War were fabulous.
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I think this is one of the many things the schools are falling short on. There is too much reliance on the new technologies with little regard to training students on proper research skills. Unfortunately, with budget cuts, fewer librarians are being hired than in the past and many are getting laid off. I'm sure school districts see that it's cheaper to buy a few computers than employ a librarian.
I read this morning in the Washington Post about SAT scores dropping to the lowest scores in decades http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/sat-reading-scores-drop-to-lowest-point-in-decades/2011/09/14/gIQAdpoDTK_story.html. The students who are taking the SATs now started school in 2000 or so, shortly after the release of Windows 98 and the proliferation of the internet into peoples homes skyrocketed. I know that the internet is not the only cause of low SAT scores, but I can't help but think that the two are related somehow.
It reminds me of a commercial I saw the other day: http://www.youtube.com/user/ToyotaUSA/?x=venza. There is so much truth in what the girl says at the beginning of the commercial, and I think this speaks volumes to the culture that's been created with the fast-paced information network. Sadly, this has to have results on young people. Are they able to "connect the dots" so to speak or critically assess an idea if they can't finish a one-page article (that isn't a reliable new source in the first place)?
-lbruce
Just the other day I was listening to a talk by Nicholas Carr, a technology writer, about the influence of technology on the way the human brain processes information. First of all, he reminds us that the kind of solitary, contemplative reading and thinking we know now came about only after words in books were actually being separated from each other (around the 8th or 9th Century AD). Supposedly before that books were written in one continuous stream without separation into sentences. That was because of the way we hear and perceive human speech and, as we know, before writing was invented, people mostly exchanged information orally. So our brain first adapted to the “oral” way of communication, strengthening its listening capabilities, but with the arrival of writing it began to build up new paths and adjust to the written word.
One interesting thing Carr also mentions is that our brain is “qualitatively neutral,” meaning it does not care what it adjusts to; it simply adjusts as technology progresses. At the same time, to be effective, our brain loses its former capabilities when they are not exercised relatively often. So in a way, the shortening of the attention span, as well as the loss of certain capabilities (like listening, as Marc Rambeau points out in his post, “Losing Our Listening”) are literally unavoidable, and the only reason we assign negative meaning to this loss is that we have been trained differently. Even though the “attentive solitary reading” of longer texts seems to be the best way for people to improve their minds, this method of information consumption is slowly but surely becoming obsolete. In this respect, it would be interesting to do a thought experiment and imagine a classroom in which even the teacher himself does not remember the time when you had to read a hard copy of an entire book. Their brains would probably be very different from ours. And so would be their ways of exchanging information.
Here is the link to the talk:
http://bigthink.com/nicholascarr#!video_idea_id=26566
Julia D