Wednesday, July 15, 2015

Are we weakening our capacity for deep processing?

Are we weakening our capacity for deep processing? (Core-Ed.org)

With the amount of data we can access increasing and coming at us at an ever increasing speed it seems that we are increasingly consuming in bite size chunks. The apps and sites we use are breaking up the data to aid speed of consumption.
But is this trend having an affect on our ability for deep processing? The blog post by Jedd Bartlett examines this issue.

Quotes from the blog

"Does the consumption of ephemeral content — those bite-sized, self-destructing user interactions — go hand in hand with a weakening of our capacity for the kind of deep processing that underpins mindful knowledge acquisition, inductive analysis, critical thinking, imagination, and reflection?"


"What does this mean for learning?
We have always skimmed newspapers and magazines to get the essence of a piece of writing. We teach the skills of effective skimming and scanning because these abilities are as important as the ability to read deeply. Carr believes that the problem is that skimming is “becoming our dominant mode of thought. Once a means to an end, a way to identify information for further study, it’s becoming an end in itself—our preferred method of both learning and analysis”."

"Do your classroom observations of children's learning habits substantiate the claims of short attention span, skimming, and (more particularly) resistance to deeper engagement?  If so, what can we do to help students as they navigate these new waters? How can we adapt pedagogies to support learners as they explore different ways of approaching different forms of content, and for different reasons?  What new strategies or new literacies will children need, and what are the implications for the dispositions and media consumption habits that learners will bring into the classroom in the future?"

Are we weakening our capacity for deep processing?


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