Online Brains in the making

To be sure, the net offers numerous seminal advantages for learners, younger and older ones alike. For one, academic research that once entailed long sojourns in a Iibrary can new often be carried out with relative ease in a classroom or on the comfort of one's home by dint of a simple computer with an Internet connection. A few adept searches on Google, and students are armed with reams of pertinent data and detail.

By granting us immediate access to a huge and fast-expanding storehouse of information, the Internet is fast becoming a universal medium for many people. Yet as the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan observed back in the 1960s, when the idea of an internet-like global electronic network was pure science fiction, the media we use not only aid our thoughts but also shape and reshape them. http://cafesk.lnwshop.com/webboard

"And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation," Carr concedes. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

The author quotes Bruce Friedman, a pathologist at the University of Michigan Medical School and medical blogger, who likewise admits: I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print. I can't read War and Peace anymore. I've lost the ability to do that. Even a blog cost of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.

In other words, instead of going for substance, many people, these experts included, have developed a habit for seeking convenience - handy bits of information that can be absorbed with the slightest mental effort. And if highly skilled readers and writers like these are experiencing such fast erosion in their attention spans, younger users, with their far less trained and far more malleable brains, are in even worse trouble. 

หน้าแรก | วิธีการสั่งซื้อสินค้า | แจ้งชำระเงิน | บทความ | เว็บบอร์ด | เกี่ยวกับเรา | ติดต่อเรา | ตะกร้าสินค้า | Site Map As teachers can attest from experience, skimming, rather than properreading, is now a reflexive habit for many students. Ironically, even as more young people may read and write more than ever, thanks to the ubiquity of text-messaging, they often do so with far less skill than their parents did at their age. Theres no contradiction there. Unlike speech, reading and writing are not instinctive activities for children, they are strenuously acquired skills that require long years of practice.

Ultimately, the onus is on both parents and teachers to try and habituate children to reading well and a lot.