NY Times:
Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading? I come down on the side of traditional reading. Aren’t there studies that show, if you give a child a doll that has no facial features, it allows the imagination to grow? Whereas if you give a child a doll with facial features, the child has no reason to exercise creativity?
Scanning internet articles, videos, podcasts, etc. is more about feeding an audience predetermined conclusions, fulfilling fantasy, relieving the viewer of the ‘effort’ to think. Look around, you see more people posting conclusions than questions - and posting conclusions from unvetted sources. Personal opinion. How does a kid learn to value a particular site? How do you research, say, the Kennedy assassination, 9/11, the search for the Holy Grail, without having other external authoritative sources to give you a reasonable mental bullsh-t detection kit? Kids are looking for online avatar-mentors, digital deities who can show them the way. God knows what they’re finding these days. I picture the digital image of Dennis Nedry ("Jurassic Park") flipping them off as soon as they walk away.
Ask a college professor about her/his students’ Google search skills. I was surprised to hear from a couple of instructors that their classes are incapable of assembling search terms to find even the simplest information. If students don’t get the information they seek from a one or two word search, then “there wasn’t anything about it online.” With hypertext, kids are expecting answers for all permutations of a single question to reside under a single simple search term.
The internet’s not there yet, but it may be soon. A search engine that learns your contexts and paradigms, and searches from that point. There’s the next step. Ideological search engines. One wonders - could the next generation make the real world work that way, or just seem to? Welcome to the Matrix.
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