Reading comments
Week #4
Title: This post will be commenting on the article found on http://www.nytimes.com called “Achieving Techno-Literacy” by Kevin Kelly.
Comments: This article was really fascinating. I had quite a few homeschooling friends when I was growing up, and I was always jealous of them because of the lack of homework that they had to deal with on a daily basis. I also envied their self-motivated learning style they had to adapt if they wanted to keep up with the school’s equivalent curriculum. It is much harder to achieve that desire to learn as these students do in their own homes because of the way the education system teaches students now.
What I saw throughout my middle school and high school career was the firing of fact after fact from the teacher’s mouth into our brains, and then the regurgitation of that information in the form of quizzes and tests. After those tests, we were then forced to forget the information we had scrambled together in order to ingest the next wave of facts that were thrown at us. Homeschooling seemed to me at the opposite end of the spectrum, and is illustrated very nicely in this article.
I’ve found a lot of similarities in what was in the article and our curriculum here at the University of Maine’s new media program. We are encouraged to work on outside projects and improve our portfolios, and use the technology that we’ve been learning about in class to our advantage in the outside world. We aren’t given daily assignments. Instead, we’re given projects that force us to look outside of the classroom for our learning experience, and also to think on what we know and believe. A really excellent article.
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What is Technology’s Effect on How We Learn?
Reading comments
Week #4
Title: This post comments on an article found on http://www.nytimes.com called “Does the Digital Classroom Enfeeble the Mind?” by Jaron Lanier
Comments: This article, while sounding very whiny at times, does bring up some very good points as to how we use technology can effect our ability to properly think in both a technical and non-technical setting. While this seems pretty obvious, it is a very valid point. If we as humans rely too heavily on the technology we create to do the thinking for us, we’ve lost an aspect that makes us different from the machines themselves. I find this scary, and agree that we should be careful with how we use the technology we create.
I don’t agree though with the severity that the author gives this topic though. He makes it sound like we’ve already lost some cosmic battle with the machine, which I do not agree with. I agree that we are leaning towards that conclusion, but I still think we’re a long way from total mental disintegration as a species.
This is an issue that should be kept in mind as we continue our study of new media. It may not be the end of the world quite yet, but there are indicators that we’re headed in that direction. We should make the changes now while it’s still relatively easy to do, and before we can’t tell the difference any longer between man and machine.
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