My brain is getting rewired. I can feel it.
I’ve been testing an iPad—the office bought two for evaluation purposes. As part of my test, I’ve been doing my newspaper reading—the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal—on the iPad. I try to the papers (why do I call them “papers”?) before work, and then catch up on parts I missed when I get home. (And, sometimes I skip the arts section, not to mention sports.)
So how’s it going? It’s changing the way I read the paper. Here’s how:
I go through them more quickly. I scan, looking for what’s interesting. Oddly, I find myself less patient; I’m more likely to read the first few paragraphs of an article and then move on. I’m likely to only read a few articles in a section (for example, arts or technology) before going on to the next section. And I miss the headlines—the digital headlines aren’t as useful to me as the printed version.
Because the iPad retains articles for a few days, tomorrow when I read the paper I will probably encounter something that I read today. That’s frustrating. But it’s also helpful if I didn’t get to my reading today—I get another chance. I don’t know whether on balance this is a plus or a minus. That increases the chances I’ll skip over something—I can always catch it tomorrow (whether or not I do is another story.)
So what does this mean for us as educators? For me, it’s an in-vitro illustration of how the importance of the medium. In his article “Is Google Making us Stupid” (the answer seems to be no) Nicholas Carr observes that online reading and researching changes the way we think about the material. We’re more likely emphasize breadth of coverage, and tend not to go deeply into any one aspect. (My tendency to skip around in the paper illustrates that phenomena.) He continues the conversation in his book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.
We certainly can’t fight the tide, nor do we want to. Just take a look at the breadth of resources available that weren’t a few years ago. Think about the knowledge we, and the children we teach, have at our fingertips. And the evolving nature of reading as a collaborative enterprise. We need to help them access that information, learn how to assemble and synthesize it, and we need to make it part of the educational architecture we create. We need to help them make social media more than a social experience; it needs to become a learning medium as well, and for their Jewish as well as their secular education.
Yet there’s also evidence that too much digital involvement—cellphones, texting, tweeting, facebooking, etc.—encourages a surface thinking that crowds out contemplation. Just as an example, see this story from the New York Times about the beneficial effects of slowing down and turning off our digital inputs. So while we’re letting in the wealth of new digital resources, we also need to make sure that we build into our curriculum opportunities for critical assessment, analysis, and deep thinking. This requires a curriculum, and experiences, that allow for contemplation, and encourage following a single line of inquiry to its conclusion.
And, we need to do all this while our own brains are getting rewired too.
