The Internet, Memory, and Pedagogy
Posted August 16th, 2008 by jose marichal, california lutheran university
1 Comments | 606 Page Views
Evan Ratliff at Salon's Machinist blog asks if the Internet is making us lose our memory. Building off of Nicholas Carr's provocative Atlantic article entitled "Is Google Making us Stupid?" and the discussions that have resulted, Ratliff wonders what happens to our brains when we never develop the need to remember certain items, like remembering phone numbers, a task that online personal databases has rendered obsolete.
My interest is in whether memorization is a skill we should be teaching our undergraduates. If facts are readily available, should our student assessment consist of testing the retention skills of our students? Should our role be to help students develop the memorization skills they might not have learned beforehand?
Anthropologist Michael Wesch has an interesting take on this question. In this wonderful lecture from the University of Manitoba (http://umanitoba.ca/ist/production/streaming/podcast_wesch.html), Wesch makes the claim that most university classrooms are designed with the assumption that knowledge is limited and the expert at the front of the room is its main disseminator. The result is that the professor is competing directly with the web as a disseminator of knowledge. Speaking for myself, that's a battle I can't win. I agree with Wesch that our job is not solely to disseminate information, but to help students use the tools of knowledge aggregation to address problems. In Wesch's lecture, he talks about how he poses a "grand narrative" question at the start of his course and the students structure the types of materials they need to address the question they are addressing.
The problem is that many of us in academia treat the web as the enemy. I've had countless conversations about the evils of Wikipedia. Much of this is a natural reaction on the part of "experts" whose authority is being challenged by "the crowd." Unfortunately for us, the information produced by "the crowd" is more accessible, and therefore potentially more influential than that produced within the ivory tower. Since the majority of our students will not live in the ivory tower, I'd rather they learn to marshal "the crowd" rather than ignore it.
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jose marichal. "The Internet, Memory, and Pedagogy." Academic Commons Issue Name (Spring 2008): 21 November 2008. <http://www.academiccommons.org/>.Bookmark/Search this post with:
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Knowledge, content aquisition and critical thinking skills....
On August 21st, 2008 Peter D. Naegele, Oberlin College Department of Psychology said:
Jose, you have hit it on the head! I believe, as Wesch does, that there is a drastic difference between memorizing something and understanding it [what one might call learning]. There are topics that may only require simple memorization to pass a course, yet require deeper, critical understanding to apply what is learned outside of the classroom.
There is some exciting work at Middlebury examining the manner in which high-school students go about knowledge acquisition and learning on the web. They are focusing on the use of Wikipedia as one example of thinking critically about, and the evaluation of, material available online.Their results should provide the insight we need as to how we might approach the use of web-based content in higher-ed.
As an outsider, I find it interesting that from one perspective, it is as if we should think critically about most everything EXCEPT Wikipedia [or the web], yet from the other, it is as if we should think critically about ONLY Wikipedia [or the web]. I was formerly in the latter category, before attending the Church of The Good Reverend.
What may be happening is that we are seeing the very beginnings of a great collapse, not unlike the unexpected wars described by Wesch. As Wikipedia becomes more and more like Conservapedia in terms of pan-optical content control (because editors continue to resign), and as the rift between the "believers" and "non-believers" grows, the control over the usage of online information, and the editing of it, will become tighter and tighter.
In the end, it's best to return to what Jimbo has said in the past as a simple guide to evaluating content on Wikipedia: "[Wikipedia] is not a place where people have the inherent right to edit" - October 29, 2007. Taken both in and out of context, it provides decent fodder for the need for critical thought.
There is some exciting work at Middlebury examining the manner in which high-school students go about knowledge acquisition and learning on the web. They are focusing on the use of Wikipedia as one example of thinking critically about, and the evaluation of, material available online.Their results should provide the insight we need as to how we might approach the use of web-based content in higher-ed.
As an outsider, I find it interesting that from one perspective, it is as if we should think critically about most everything EXCEPT Wikipedia [or the web], yet from the other, it is as if we should think critically about ONLY Wikipedia [or the web]. I was formerly in the latter category, before attending the Church of The Good Reverend.
What may be happening is that we are seeing the very beginnings of a great collapse, not unlike the unexpected wars described by Wesch. As Wikipedia becomes more and more like Conservapedia in terms of pan-optical content control (because editors continue to resign), and as the rift between the "believers" and "non-believers" grows, the control over the usage of online information, and the editing of it, will become tighter and tighter.
In the end, it's best to return to what Jimbo has said in the past as a simple guide to evaluating content on Wikipedia: "[Wikipedia] is not a place where people have the inherent right to edit" - October 29, 2007. Taken both in and out of context, it provides decent fodder for the need for critical thought.
