Teachers Mobile Technology

noreply@blogger.com (By Med Kharbach, PhD) — Fri, 14 Feb 2014 07:57:00 +0000

A decade later, I picked up on the idea and founded the Reality Club, which in 1997 went online, rebranded as Edge. The ideas presented on Edge are speculative; they represent the frontiers in such areas as evolutionary biology, genetics, computer science, neurophysiology, psychology, and physics. Emerging out of these contributions is a new natural philosophy, new ways of understanding physical systems, new ways of thinking that call into question many of our basic assumptions. For each of the anniversary editions of Edge, I have used the interrogative myself and asked contributors for their responses to a question that comes to me, or to one of my correspondents, in the middle of the night. It’s not easy coming up with a question. As Byars used to say: “I can answer the question, but am I bright enough to ask it?” I’m looking for questions that inspire answers we can’t possibly predict. My goal is to provoke people into thinking thoughts they normally might not have. The 2010 Edge Question This year’s question is “How is the Internet changing the way you think?” (Not “How is the Internet changing the way we think?

A new invention has emerged, a code for the collective consciousness that requires a new way of thinking. The collective externalized mind is the mind we all share. The Internet is the infinite oscillation of our collective consciouness interacting with itself. It’s not about computers. It’s not about what it means to be human—in fact, it challenges, renders trite, our cherished assumptions on that score. It’s about thinking. Here, more than 150 Edge contributors—scientists, artists, creative thinkers—explore what it means to think in the new age of the Internet.

Introduction: The Dawn of Entanglement W. Daniel Hillis Physicist, computer scientist; chairman, Applied Minds, Inc.; author, The Pattern on the Stone nineteenth-century curmudgeon attempting to dampen their enthusiasm:

By the Internet, I mean the global network of interconnected computers that enables, among other things, the Web.Today, most people recognize that they are using the Internet only when they are interacting with a computer screen. They are less likely to appreciate that they are using the Internet while talking on the telephone, watching television, or flying on an airplane. Some air travelers may have recently gotten a glimpse of the truth, for example, upon learning that their flights were grounded due to a router failure in Salt Lake City, but for most of them this was just another inscrutable annoyance. Most people long ago gave up trying to understand how technical systems work. This is a part of how the Internet is changing the way we think.If the theme of the Enlightenment was independence, ours is interdependence. We are now all connected, humans and machines. Welcome to the dawn of the Entanglement

The Bookless Library Nicholas Carr :Author, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains .

As the school year began last September, Cushing Academy, an elite Massachusetts prep school that has been around since Civil War days, announced that it was emptying its library of books. In place of the thousands of volumes that had once crowded the building’s shelves, the school was installing, it said, “state-of-the-art computers with high-definition screens for research and reading,” as well as “monitors that provide students with real-time interactive data and news feeds from around the world.” Cushing’s bookless library would become, boasted headmaster James Tracy, What makes it easy for an educational institution like Cushing to jettison its books is the assumption that the words in books are the same whether they’re printed on paper or formed of pixels on a screen “it is utterly immaterial to me whether they’re doing so by way of a Kindle or by way of a paperback.” The medium, in other words, doesn’t matter. But Tracy is wrong. The medium does matter. It matters greatly. The experience of reading words on a networked computer, whether it’s a PC, an iPhone, or a Kindle, is very different from the experience of reading those same words in a book. As a technology, a book focuses our attention, isolates us from the myriad distractions that fill our everyday lives. A networked computer does precisely the opposite. It is designed to scatter our attention. It doesn’t shield us from environmental distractions; it adds to them. The words on a computer screen exist in a welter of contending stimuli.

My own reading and thinking habits have shifted dramatically since I first logged on to the Web fifteen years ago or so. I now do the bulk of my reading and researching online. And my brain has changed as a result. Even as I’ve become more adept at navigating the rapids of the Net, I have experienced a steady decay in my ability to sustain my attention. As I explained in the Atlantic in 2008, “What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.”* Knowing that the depth of our thought is tied directly to the intensity of our attentiveness, it’s hard not to conclude that as we adapt to the intellectual environment of the Net our thinking becomes shallower.

There are as many human brains as there are human beings. I expect, therefore, that reactions to the Net’s influence, and hence to this year’s Edge question, will span many points of view. Some people will find in the busy interactivity of the networked screen an intellectual environment ideally suited to their mental proclivities. Others will see a catastrophic erosion in the ability of human beings to engage in calmer, more meditative modes of thought. A great many likely will be somewhere between the extremes, thankful for the Net’s riches but worried about its long-term effects on the depth of individual intellect and collective culture. My own experience leads me to believe that what we stand to lose will be at least as great as what we stand to gain. I feel sorry for the kids at Cushing Academy.

The Invisible College Clay Shirky : Social and technology network topology researcher; adjunct professor, New York University Graduate School of Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP); author, Cognitive Surplus .
It is our misfortune to live through the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race—a misfortune because surplus is always more dangerous than scarcity. Scarcity means that valuable things become more valuable, a conceptually easy change to integrate. Surplus means that previously valuable things stop being valuable, which freaks people out. The mere fact of being able to publish to a global audience is the new literacy—formerly valuable, now so widely available that you can’t make any money with the basic capability anymore. This shock of inclusion, where professional media give way to participation by 2 billion amateurs (a threshold we will cross this year), means that the average quality of public thought has collapsed; when anyone can say anything anytime, how could it not? If the only consequence of this influx of amateurs is the destruction of existing models for producing high-quality material, we would be at the beginning of another Dark Ages.

To return to the press analogy, printing was a necessary but not sufficient input to the scientific revolution. The Invisible College, the group of natural philosophers who drove the original revolution in chemistry in the mid-1600s, were strongly critical of the alchemists, their intellectual forebears, who for centuries had made only fitful progress. By contrast, the Invisible College put chemistry on a sound scientific footing in a matter of a couple of decades, one of the most important intellectual transitions in the history of science. In the 1600s, though, a chemist and an alchemist used the same tools and had access to the same background. What did the Invisible College have that the alchemists didn’t? They had a culture of sharing. The problem with the alchemists wasn’t that they failed to turn lead into gold; the problem was that they failed uninformatively. Alchemists were obscurantists, recording their work by hand and rarely showing it to anyone but disciples. In contrast, members of the Invisible College shared their work, describing and disputing their methods and conclusions so that they all might benefit from both successes and failures and build on one another’s work.

As we know from open-source efforts such as Linux, collaboration between loosely joined parties can work at scales and over time frames previously unimagined. As we know from NASA clickworkers, groups of amateurs can sometimes replace single experts. As we know from www.patientslikeme.com, patient involvement accelerates medical research. And so on. The Internet’s primary effect on how we think will reveal itself only when it affects the cultural milieu of thought, not just the behavior of individual users.

be seen as the Invisible High School, with a modicum of educational material in an ocean of narcissism and social obsessions. We could, however, also use it as an Invisible College, the communicative backbone of real intellectual and civic change. To do this will require more than technology. It will require us to adopt norms of open sharing and participation, fitted to a world in which publishing has become the new literacy.

Net Gain : Richard Dawkins : Evolutionary biologist; emeritus Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, Oxford; author, The Greatest Show on Earth

it is the pearls of hardware and software that inspire me: the Internet itself and the World Wide Web, succinctly defined by Wikipedia as “a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet.” The Web is a work of genius, one of the highest achievements of the human species, whose most remarkable quality is that it was constructed not by one individual genius such as Tim Berners-Lee or Steve Wozniak or Alan Kay, nor by a top-down company such as Sony or IBM, but by an anarchistic confederation of largely anonymous units located (irrelevantly) all over the world.

I calibrate Wikipedia by looking up the few things I really do know about (and may indeed have written the entry for in traditional encyclopedias)—say, evolution or natural selection. I am so impressed by these calibratory forays that I go with some confidence to entries where I lack firsthand knowledge (which was why I felt able to quote Wikipedia’s definition of the Web, above). No doubt mistakes creep in or are even maliciously inserted, but the half-life of a mistake, before the natural correction mechanism kills it, is encouragingly short.

But the speed and ubiquity of the Internet actually help us to be on our critical guard. If a report on one site sounds implausible (or too plausible to be true), you can quickly check it on several more.Perhaps the main downside of the Internet is that surfing can be addictive and a prodigious time waster, encouraging a habit of butterflying from topic to topic rather than attending to one thing at a time.

The high-resolution color rendering of virtual reality will improve to the point where the distinction from the real world becomes unnervingly hard to notice. Large-scale communal games such as Second Life will become disconcertingly addictive to many ordinary people who understand little of what goes on in the engine room. And let’s not be snobbish about that.Theocratic or otherwise malign regimes, such as Iran and Saudi Arabia today, may find it increasingly hard to bamboozle their citizens with their evil nonsense.We can at least hope that the faster, more ubiquitous, and above all cheaper Internet of the future may hasten the long-awaited downfall of ayatollahs, mullahs, popes, televangelists, and all who wield power through the control (whether cynical or sincere) of gullible minds. Perhaps Tim Berners-Lee will one day earn the Nobel Peace Prize.

The Waking Dream Kevin Kelly Editor-at-large, Wired; author, What Technology Wants

We already know that our use of technology changes how our brains work. Reading and writing are cognitive tools that change the way in which the brain processes information. When psychologists use neuroimaging technology such as MRI to compare the brains of literates and illiterates working on a task, they find many differences—and not just when the subjects are reading. Researcher Alexandre Castro-Caldas discovered that the brain’s interhemispheric processing was different for those who could read and those who could not. A key part of the corpus callosum was thicker in literates, and “the occipital lobe processed information more slowly in [individuals who] learned to read as adults compared to those [who] learned at the usual age.”* Psychologists Feggy Ostrosky-Solís, Miguel Arellano García, and Martha Peréz subjected literates and illiterates to a battery of cognitidve tests while measuring their brain waves and concluded that “the acquisition of reading and writing skills has changed the brain organization of cognitive activity in general . . . not only in language but also in visual perception, logical reasoning, remembering strategies, and formal operational thinkin But my knowledge is now more fragile. For every accepted piece of knowledge I find, there is, within easy reach, someone who challenges the fact. Every fact has its antifact. The Internet’s extreme hyperlinking highlights those antifacts as brightly as the facts. Some antifacts are silly, some are borderline, and some are valid.

Uncertainty is a kind of liquidity. I think my thinking has become more liquid. It is less fixed, like text in a book, and more fluid, like, say, text in Wikipedia. My opinions shift more. My interests rise and fall more quickly. I am less interested in Truth with a capital T and more interested in truths, plural. The trancelike state we fall into while following the undirected path of links may be a terrible waste of time—or, like dreams, it might be a productive waste of time. This waking dream we call the Internet also blurs the difference between my serious thoughts and my playful thoughts

I believe that the conflation of play and work, of thinking hard and thinking playfully, is one the greatest things the Internet has done. In fact, the propensity of the Internet to diminish our attention is overrated. I do find that smaller and smaller bits of information can command the full attention of my overeducated mind. And it is not just me; everyone reports succumbing to the lure of fast, tiny interruptions of information. In response to this incessant barrage of bits, the culture of the Internet has been busy unbundling larger works into minor snippets for sale. Music albums are chopped up and sold as songs; movies become trailers, or even smaller video snips. (I find that many trailers are better than their movie.) Newspapers become Twitter posts. Scientific papers are served up in snippets on Google. I happily swim in this rising ocean of fragments.

go looking, searching, asking, questioning, reacting to data, leaping in, constructing notes, bookmarks, a trail, a start of making something mine. I don’t wait. Don’t have to wait. I act on ideas first now, instead of thinking on them. For some folks, this is the worst of the Net—the loss of contemplation. Others feel that all this frothy activity is simply stupid busywork, spinning of wheels, illusory action.

To Dream the Waking Dream in New Ways Richard Saul Wurman: Architect, cartographer; founder, TED Conference; author, 33: Understanding Change and the Change in Understanding.

Frank Gehry dreams in scrawls and crushed paper, and they transform magically into reality. Each modality changes even what you can even think of. The Internet is just one big step along the way to flying through understanding and the invention of patterns. It’s a good one.

Tweet Me Nice Ian Gold and Joel Gold Ian Gold: Neuroscientist; Canada Research Chair in Philosophy and Psychiatry, McGill University Joel Gold: Psychiatrist; clinical assistant professor of psychiatry, New York University School of Medicine

It’s hard to doubt that more friends are a good thing, friendship being among life’s greatest boons. As Aristotle put it, “Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.” But of course friends are only as good as they are genuine, and it is hard to know what to think about Facebook friends. With a larger social group, there are more opportunities for cooperation and mutual benefit, but there are also novel threats.

The Internet has turned the human village into a megalopolis and has thus inaugurated what might be the biggest sea change in human evolution since the primeval campfires.In creating much larger social groups for ourselves, ranging from true friends to near strangers, could we be laying the ground for a pathogenic virtual city in which psychosis will be on the rise?

Whatever the effects of the Internet on our inner lives, it seems clear that in changing the structure of our outer lives—the lives intertwined with those of others—the Internet is likely to be a more potent shaper of our minds than we have begun to imagine.

The Dazed State : Richard Foreman Playwright and director; founder, the Ontological-Hysteric Theater

Internet. For me, to think is to withdraw from gathered information into a blankness, within which something arises, pops out, is born. Of course it will be maintained that what pops out may have its roots—may be conditioned—by many factors in my experiential past. Nevertheless, whereas the Internet swamps us in “connectedness” and “facts,” it is only in the withdrawal from those that I claim a space for thinking.

Power Corrupts Daniel C. Dennett Philosopher; University Professor, codirector, Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts University; Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

As Lord Acton famously said (I know—I just did a search to make sure I remembered it correctly—he said it in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887): “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” We are all today in possession of nearly absolute power in several—but not all—dimensions of thinking, and since this hugely distorts the balance between what is hard and what is easy, it may indeed corrupt us all in ways we cannot prevent.

The Rediscovery of Fire Chris Anderson Curator, TED Conferences, TED Talks

Amid the apocalyptic wailing over the Internet-inflicted demise of print, one countertrend deserves a hearing. The Web has allowed the reinvention of the spoken word. Thanks to an enormous expansion of low-cost bandwidth, the cost of online video distribution has fallen almost to zero. As a result, recorded talks and lectures are spreading across the Web like wildfire. They are tapping into something primal and powerful.

The Rise of Social Media Is Really a Reprise June Cohen Director of media, TED Conference; TED Talk
But lately I’ve been thinking more about the old—about those aspects of human character and cognition that remain unchanged by time and technology. Over the past two decades, I’ve watched as the Internet changed the way we think and changed the way we live. But it hasn’t changed us fundamentally. In fact, it may be returning us to the intensely social animals we evolved to be.

When you take the long view—when you look at the Internet on an evolutionary timeline—everything we consider “old media” is actually very new. Books and newspapers became common only in the last two hundred years, radio and film in the last hundred, TV in the last fifty. If all of human history were compressed into a single twenty-four-hour day, media as we now know them emerged in the last two minutes before midnight. Before that, for the vast majority of human history, all media were social media. Media were what happened between people. Whether you think of the proverbial campfire, around which group rituals were performed and mythologies passed on, or of simple everyday interactions (teaching, gossiping, making music, making each other laugh), media were participatory. Media were social.

So what we’re seeing today isn’t new. It’s neither the unprecedented flowering of human potential nor the death of intelligent discourse but, rather, the correction of a historical anomaly. There was a brief period of time in the twentieth century when “media” were understood as things professionals created for others to passively consume. Collectively, we have rejected this idea. When we were handed decentralized media tools of unprecedented power, we built a digital world strikingly similar to the tribal societies and oral cultures we evolved with.

The Greatest Detractor to Serious Thinking Since Television Leo Chalupa Ophthalmologist and neurobiologist, University of California, Davis

The Internet is the greatest detractor to serious thinking since the invention of television. It can devour time in all sorts of frivolous ways, from chat rooms to video games. And what better way to interrupt one’s thought processes than by an intermittent stream of incoming e-mail messages? Moreover, the Internet has made interpersonal communication much more circumscribed than in the pre-Internet era. What you write today may come back to haunt you tomorrow. So while the Internet provides a means for rapidly communicating with colleagues globally, the sophisticated user will rarely reveal true thoughts and feelings in such messages. Serious thinking requires honest and open communication, and that is simply untenable on the Internet by those who value their professional reputation.Read more at location 899

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