learning consumption

Nicholas Carr has followed up his article ‘Is Google Making us Stupid?’
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-... with a book called ‘The Shallows’ in which he argues: “The internet...plays havoc with our ability to see anything through to the end. This is sad because our brains are malleable, still works in progress, moulded by external stimuli.”

At the same time a UCL report states: “It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense, indeed there are signs that new forms of `reading’ are emerging as users `power browse’ horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.” It also says students are “...hungry for highly digested content.”

What worries me here is that the inference being drawn is that this is a bad thing which will all end in tears. In my view it is too easy to see “different” as “worse.” Yet maybe, from an evolutionary standpoint, this new way of learning better equips us for a world in which everything is speeding up and where change is a constant. Maybe, just maybe, we don’t now have time for traditional, more linear learning and that the old ways will not equip the new generation for future challenges. So rather than make us ‘worse’ the new learning modes just might make us ‘better,’ and certainly more relevant.

When we say ‘this generation’ we make a sweeping statement about a lot of people; but what about your 19 year old daughter, or your 21 year old son? Are they stupid, or even less bright than you are? Of course not! We live in a far more participative-based world, where people want to both take and put-back, (c. f. the revolutionary language learning site www.livemocha.com) and whilst the older generations preferred passive media (books, TV, newspapers) this generation prefer consuming active media, with ‘snacking’ and multi-tasking. So rather than fit the learners around outmoded and less appropriate learning media maybe our industry needs to see the learner as consumer and offer a wider range of options?

Google CEO Eric Schmidt says its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Therefore information is a commodity like other commodities to be mined and processed efficiently. “The more pieces of information we can ‘access’ and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.” And consider the Wikimedia Foundation’s mission: “Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment.”

So rather than hang onto dreams about the good old days when the summers were hotter and the grass greener perhaps we should allow this generation to dip in and out, parallel process, snack, multi-task, skim and power browse; it might just save us all.