Bill MacKenty

Technology strengthens, deepens, and broadens our learning...

The internet rots your brain

Great article (pdf) in Salon entitled “What’s the matter with kids today?” - the byline, Nothing, actually. Aside from our panic that the Internet is melting their brains.

Some choice quotes:

“Teenagers today read and write for fun; it’s part of their social lives. We need to start celebrating this unprecedented surge, incorporating it as an educational tool instead of meeting it with punishing pop quizzes and suspicion.”

“We need to start trusting our kids to communicate as they will online—even when that comes with the risk that they’ll spill the family secrets or campaign for a candidate who’s not ours.”

“Once we stop regarding the Internet as a villain, stop presenting it as the enemy of history and literature and worldly knowledge, then our teenagers have the potential to become the next great voices of America. One of them, 70 years from now, might even get up there to accept the very award Lessing did—and thank the Internet for making him or her a writer and a thinker.”

I’m reminded of course, that technology in education is a tool. It is a means to an end.  Technology extends learning, it doesn’t stifle it. This is the central argument I make on a daily basis - technology strengthens, deepens and broadens our learning. Of course at the end of the day, good education is about good teaching. 

On 27 March 2008, Dave inscribed the following thoughts about this post:

At the Adam Smith Academy (http://www.adamsmithacademy.org ) we firmly believe that the use of the internet and other media tools help student interest and retention. We have noticed a 3-fold increase in our site traffic from students over the last couple months looking for ways to watch classic literature through our online streaming videos - that are both animated and narrated. You can see some of our titles here:
http://www.adamsmithacademy.org/titles.html