Is the Internet making us stupid?

In the latest issue of the Atlantic, Nicholas Carr writes a thought-provoking piece about how the Internet may be changing the very way we think.

As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And 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. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

As a teacher who incorporates a number of Web 2.0 tools, the article gives me pause. Since I also taught a couple of decades without the Internet in my classroom, however, some of what he writes seems a bit too simplistic. My classes start with 10-15 minutes of sustained reading (of books) or writing (in journals); there is a collective calm that ensues as the students and I engage in what one of Carr's sources might call "rich mental connections" with traditional texts and tools. Sometimes that involves writing on paper what we've been learning from online sources.



To use Carr's own metaphor, isn't it possible to be a person who enjoys both jet skiing and scuba diving? Just because I now jet ski, does that mean I can no longer scuba dive? That's silly. What this all means to me as an educator is that I've got to be more explicit in my teaching about the "rules" that govern reading and writing in traditional vs. digital composition. We don't need to unplug (as he seems to imply), rather we need to become fluent in the various media.

ScribeFire tests

I'm always on the lookout for the easiest way to publish online, especially in my classroom. I've been using Flock because of the web snippet/clipboard capability. Now that Firefox has added the ScribeFire extension, I've been testing it.

I can't get the "Add an image" button to integrate with my Picasa gallery very easily.



I had to drag and drop the embed code into the source editing panel; when I pasted the code of this picture I took into the "Add an Image" popup window, I just got an unattractive little box like this one

It doesn't automatically format text that I pull from a source like Flock does, I had to manually make a block quote:

you can drag and drop formatted text from pages you are browsing, take notes, and post to your blog.

And I could only get out of the block quote formatting by going to the source editing tab, not from the rich editing tab that most users would prefer using. Maybe I'm missing something, but ScribeFire needs a lot of work if I'm going to bring it into my classroom (or into my own online publishing habits).