Stop Googling. Let's Talk.

This is a topic that was mentioned in one class and thought I would post about it.  It's about the loss of face-to-face conversation.  For me to even engage with the class (without using Clickers to do so), I have to ask students to close their laptops, and look up.  What a concept!  In the NY Times Sunday Review (last Sept), Sherry Turkle begins:

COLLEGE students tell me they know how to look someone in the eye and type on their phones at the same time, their split attention undetected. They say it’s a skill they mastered in middle school when they wanted to text in class without getting caught. Now they use it when they want to be both with their friends and, as some put it, “elsewhere.”

Sherry Turkle has been studying the psychology of online connectivity for more than 30 years. For the past five, She had a special focus: What has happened to face-to-face conversation in a world where so many people say they would rather text than talk? She goes on:

First of all, there is the magic of the always available elsewhere. You can put your attention wherever you want it to be. You can always be heard. You never have to be bored. When you sense that a lull in the conversation is coming, you can shift your attention from the people in the room to the world you can find on your phone. But the students also described a sense of loss.

 For example, Turkle spoke to one college junior who tried to capture what is wrong about life in his generation. “Our texts are fine,” he said. “It’s what texting does to our conversations when we are together that’s the problem.”

Read the article by Turkle based on her book, “Reclaiming Conversation.”  Here she makes a case for face-to-face talk, and that direct engagement is crucial for the development of empathy, the ability to put ourselves in the place of others.   After you read this article, there is a link to her next article, as she reacts to the comments she received.  I found this related article, "Talk to Each Other, Not Your Phone" to be even more powerful.  We text because regular conversation is so "pedestrian" and boring.  In her book, Turkle asks Randall, 24, a real estate broker,

What happens when there is a lull in the conversation. He looked at me, seeming not to understand. Later he explained that, in his mind, he had just made it clear that there is never a lull in the conversation. Anything like that would be filled by turning to your phone. But I hadn’t understood this yet so I tried again. I said, “Like, if things got quiet among your friends?” Randall said, “Oh, if the conversation was not providing information, I’d check out some YouTube stuff I’m behind on … or take a picture of us and post it.”

After you read the articles (very short), what do you think?  What has been your experience? Are you comfortable with silence in conversation?  Or do you view conversation a transactional; that it has to accomplish something or provide new information?  

OK, Google. Where Did I Put My Thinking Cap?

It's not unusual to hear people talk about "Googling it" to find about anything.   But it is surprising to find that students use Google and Siri to help them answer assignment questions, or whenever they want to know anything.  This recent NPR tech article probes this further by asking,

But with so much information easily available, does it make us smarter? Compared to the generations before who had to adapt to the Internet, how are those who grew up using the Internet — the so-called "Google generation"— different?

Although there is a relative lack of research available examining the effect of search engines on our brains even as the technology is rapidly dominating our lives, the few studies available do not seem to bode well for the Google generation.

• A 2008 study commissioned by the British Library found that young people go through information online very quickly without evaluating it for accuracy.
• A 2011 study in the journal Science showed that when people know they have future access to information, they tend to have a better memory of how and where to find the information — instead of recalling the information itself.   That phenomenon is similar to not remembering your friend's birthday because you know you can find it on Facebook. When we know that we can access this information whenever we want, we are not motivated to remember it.

Consider these positions: 

1. The worry for some educators is that the more you (fill in: students) are on your computer, the less likely it is that you will be able to read the material and understand it for a sustained amount of time.  
2. The Internet holds great potential for education — but curriculum must change accordingly. Since content is so readily available, teachers should not merely dole out information and instead focus on cultivating critical thinking, he says.
3. One recommendation is to make questions "Google-proof."

Design it so that Google is crucial to creating a response rather than finding one," he writes in his company's blog. "If students can Google answers — stumble on (what) you want them to remember in a few clicks — there's a problem with the instructional design.

Are there are other recommendations or comments you want to add about relying on Google and voice-recognition software (aka Siri)?

Read the article at here.