The question that has to be answered first is - what would we measure to know?
Which may sound trite but isn’t.
Whether it is athletic events or cognitive function we are very task specific. Train for sprinting, distance, running, cycling, swimming, strength … who is then more “fit” depends on what you measure.
Likewise for cognitive tasks. Through the time period of my to my kids’ educations, youngest in her grad program, I saw a transition of skill sets: my generation better at remembering specific facts, my kids’ generation better at knowing where to find them. I think on balance no cognitive decline but different cognitive focus when you can check for the fact at a moment notice any time.
My suspicion is that cognitive skill sets shift as technology changes but doesn’t actually increase or decline much. It redeploys to the current reality.
Which is not a position on the benefits vs harms in the classroom of any specific tool. More broadly just a wonder about how we assess cognitive skill in the broader sense in a rapidly changing world with changing specific skills needed now compared to not so long ago and who knows what cognitive skills most valuable in a decade or so?
There’s a book that deals with neuroplasticity called The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr. He does talk about some studies showing differences in cognitive skills among Internet users, but a large portion of the book is also dealing with the technology of writing, which was historically a big deal for the human brain. And while we can only speculate about how writing (and later, the printing press) altered our cognitive skillsets, it’s probably true that it was a pretty seismic shift in our capacity to remember things. Knowledge was, for a very long time, imparted orally. Writing made it so you don’t have to remember.
My concern with current technology is the degradation of critical thinking. According to the book, which I read many years ago, people who read stuff online have trouble contextualizing what they have learned and integrating it with existing information. People who read articles online, say, are not reading so much as scanning the page for the information they want, again ripping it out of context, often not even perceiving the context. People who read on Kindle (which I do) are worse at recalling what they’ve read.
So it might be that the Internet has just brought us further away from the need to remember things than ever before, but I’m concerned about what else is getting left behind.
Anecdotally the Internet is full of Gen Z kids complaining they can’t pay attention or think clearly anymore. There’s even a counter-culture movement back to analog devices.
Hilariously, when Wuthering Heights hit the movie theaters, what followed were a bunch of horny young women complaining they can’t get through the original book even though they handled it fine when they were in high school. I think it’s hilarious because I hate that book with the heat of a thousand suns and I’m not sure I would re-read it if I were held at gunpoint. But taken at face value, there are a lot of young people pointing out that they feel their own cognitive skills have degraded.
And yeah I think mine have too. Not as much as others because I’m not much on social media and I read regularly, but I read a lot more fiction when I was younger. I can’t read for hours any more like I used to be able to do. My limit is about one hour.
I’ve always scanned, from the time I was able to read. I read reference books, and moving to reference websites or other online resources was seamless. Unless it’s a picture book I’ve probably scanned a good bit of every book I’ve ever read. If I weren’t good at scanning I would have never survived college and grad school. Paying attention for more than a minute or two? Forget it, although I’m able to refocus. Watching baseball works well for me, since there are so many periods where nothing’s really happening.
Can you imagine me on Twitter? I don’t know how anyone could say anything nuanced and thoughtful within that character limit. This is the only social media I’ve got left.
I remember when The Shallows came out. Then, as now, I have a really, really, really gard time swallowing that the human brain processes words displayed as varying contrast in an electrophoretic display differently than words displayed as varying contrast in sheets of wood pulp. Being distracted by tabbing off to different things on a PC or tablet? Sure, that makes sense. But simply reading the same text written on a slightly different looking flat surface? That sounds like horseshit to me. It is much easier to believe that there is some error in the “research” cited in the book.
I’m guessing you don’t print out SDMB threads to read so that you won’t have problems remembering them?
Although, only scanning threads would explain why there is pretty much never a thread here where someone doesn’t almost immediately break the “rules” laid out in the OP.
OP: “Name your favorite animal that isn’t a squirrel.”
I do most of my reading in some electronic format. I also have a shit memory. Whether that is a casual relationship I’ll leave readers to determine. I don’t remember my memory ever being this bad when I was younger, but this may be the effect of aging.
Here’s one article covering one study.
The theory is that something about the tactile experience of navigating a book increases recall of key events.
I try to compensate for my shitty memory by talking to others about what I’ve read and learned. Pretty much daily I talk to my husband about stuff that comes up on these boards, to tell him anything new I learned or rehash a meaty conversation so we can start our own conversation.
2nd, 4th, 5th, 6th, and 8th reply: “Here’s a list of animals that I’ve heard of!”
I really think that most “educational” games should be banned from laptops, and I’m putting Gimkit at the top of that list. I hate walking into classrooms and seeing all the kids purportedly doing a social studies review but really playing a bargain-basement side-scroller game.
But walking into a room where kids are visting PebbleGo or Encyclopedia Britannica, where they’re researching animals in different biomes and using that research to create analog quiz boards about physical and behavioral adaptations? Be still my heart: that’s education at its best, and laptops are better than paper books for that purpose IMO.
Just this week I was in a classroom where students were researching biomes on PebbleGo and it warmed my retired librarian heart. I was subbing for a special Ed teacher and got to help a couple of kids research the Taiga. During the pandemic I had a 5th grade student who I let teach the younger classes how to use PebbleGo. Britannica is a great resource as well. Kids at my old school loved Book Creator; it was not uncommon for one student to try and lift another’s work and be reminded that it was copyrighted and they needed permission to use it.
There are definitely legitimate uses for laptops or similar technology in school. Unfortunately, some simple-minded people take this to mean that technology is good, and more is better, and doing things without such technology is necessarily old-fashioned and inferior and outdated.
You also have a kid. There was a definite correlation for me, with both of my kids, with having the kid and my memory becoming much crappier than before. (My first kid was born before I had a cell phone, so it was clearly not stuff being in electronic format then.) Also I may be starting peri-menopause and my memory is suddenly even worse than after having the kids.
I’m not discounting that there’s also probably issues with my spending more time on electronic media and short-form stuff, etc., but I feel like I see that more with my attention span, which has gotten much shorter – look, a squirrel!
I think perimenopause may also be a factor for me, too.
The biggest difference I’ve seen is in my working memory, which was already impaired to begin with, but in the past my other cognitive skills could compensate a lot better for my cognitive deficits. Simply put, I can’t hold a bunch of things in my head at once, which results in feeling easily overwhelmed when there’s a lot of information coming in. So something like a cluttered desk or a verbal list of instructions can trigger an outsize overwhelm reaction. And what is the Internet if not a bunch of stuff happening at once? As Bo Burnham sang, “A little bit of everything, all of the time.”
I haven’t really looked into the research but my gut feeling and anecdotal feedback from my friends indicates that the Internet takes ADHD, drenches it in gasoline, and lights it on fire. And I suspect it results in a lot of ADHD-looking profiles for people not necessarily meeting the clinical criteria. The only reason I know my my executive function problems are neurodevelopmental and not Internet-related is because I lived before the Internet, and I’ve always been a space cadet. I don’t know how clinicians even know the difference these days.
I just ignore a good percentage of what is either said to me or put in front of me. My wife says that I seem to have the ability to scan what she says to me and pick out the important things. That’s fortunate, since she’s a person who will never turn down the opportunity to use 20 word when 10 will do. In school I tended to just not pay attention most of the time.
