well I am sure to some point there is. Some of my students tend to argue that the information is easily available online and therefore it has not be "learned" anymore. They just have to look it up. They prefer these "shortcuts" to get to their goal. However, reflexion of the provided information is not a topic to them. There is a nice statement to this from Ann Blair, a history professor at Harvard University:
“But making and using shortcuts skillfully and responsibly requires judgment, too. I hope that such judicium, a central value in education since the Renaissance, will continue to define intellectual work and to spur demand for high-quality information, contextual understanding, and methods for building on previous reading and experience, so that we are not reduced to searching for everything anew.
It's important to remember that information overload is not unique to our time, lest we fall into doomsaying. At the same time, we need to proceed carefully in the transition to electronic media, lest we lose crucial methods of working that rely on and foster thoughtful decision making. Like generations before us, we need all the tools for gathering and assessing information that we can muster—some inherited from the past, others new to the present. Many of our technologies will no doubt rapidly seem obsolete, but, we can hope, not human attention and judgment, which should continue to be the central components of thoughtful information management.”
(Blair 2008, p.4-5)
well I am sure to some point there is. Some of my students tend to argue that the information is easily available online and therefore it has not be "learned" anymore. They just have to look it up. They prefer these "shortcuts" to get to their goal. However, reflexion of the provided information is not a topic to them. There is a nice statement to this from Ann Blair, a history professor at Harvard University:
“But making and using shortcuts skillfully and responsibly requires judgment, too. I hope that such judicium, a central value in education since the Renaissance, will continue to define intellectual work and to spur demand for high-quality information, contextual understanding, and methods for building on previous reading and experience, so that we are not reduced to searching for everything anew.
It's important to remember that information overload is not unique to our time, lest we fall into doomsaying. At the same time, we need to proceed carefully in the transition to electronic media, lest we lose crucial methods of working that rely on and foster thoughtful decision making. Like generations before us, we need all the tools for gathering and assessing information that we can muster—some inherited from the past, others new to the present. Many of our technologies will no doubt rapidly seem obsolete, but, we can hope, not human attention and judgment, which should continue to be the central components of thoughtful information management.”
(Blair 2008, p.4-5)
I don't think that digital technology is a cause of digital dementia.
Relying on digital media/technology alone for 'all the answers'' in life will cause a number of problems.
People who never learned to apply what they memorized / failed to learn , tend to be poor learners and poor employees.
Relying on digital media instead of learning and applying what has been learned creates people who are dysfunctional but perhaps they feel entitled in some way.
These people will have trouble applying their knowledge to their jobs...as they don't 'own' it if they merely look it up when it is needed. ....or be able to make good judgments on their own. They'll always be waiting to see what the group 'says'.
While extensive use of new media may not leave people with enough time to exercise skills that were needed much more in the past, they learn new skills and train some higher order cognitive functions. There is evidence, for example, that visual intelligence has risen during the 20th century due to the spread of visual media.
How do you measure the statement that visual skills are more in use now than before -and which skills are not needed now that were needed before? Which skills should be abandoned?
Is this not confusing seeing with understanding.
Are you talking about an increase or a decrease in visual literacy?
We look at images but do we really SEE them in a fulsome way.
Maybe be that is digital dementia.
People can see what other places look like but do all people truly understand the detailed contexts of those images? Can they relate in a profound manner to what they see?
How do we explain the fact that many people can not read a road map or an overland map? How many people really understand a graph?
In spite of their dependence on technology - there are many cases of people getting hopelessly lost while driving their cars...
In the not too distant past, in only parts of the world, the majority of the people who regularly depended on the images painted public walls in order to learn the messages of those images - the story content - probably did not read letters as well as they read the images.
Can you be sure that people of today read images as well as their predecessors with such precise attention to context and detail.
There is a great deal of visual illiteracy about.
Designers of new technologies today are exhorted to try to design 'user-friendly' visual interfaces in order to make these technologies more accessible to Users.
Although in some cases this is the case.
However, if people don't know what they are looking at , I suppose that it hardly matters. Or does it?
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