Anyone for the internet delivering on moral purpose?

I was inspired by yet another experience on the internet yesterday. I came across an article talking about a remarkable Harvard University political philosopher - Michael Sandel. He has one of the most popular coursed at Harvard called Justice, where he hones students' understanding of moral philosophy. He is also a strong exponent of open learning, and the Justice in moral reasoning web site is has years of his lectures in video and text, for all the world to see. There is another very good example of Sandel in full flight in a TED talk last year, The Lost Art of Democratic Debate  (20 min)


The article that led me to Sandel was one by Tom Friedman in the NY Times which featured the huge following Sandel has in China and Japan, where his lectures are widely translated and viewed. So there is clearly a demand for discussion of moral issues, which is what partly inspired me about this story, but the more important inspiration for me, for this blog, is how the great teaching of this man is so widespread and accessible all around the world at quite modes cost. The internet makes this extraordinary communication reach possible, at a relatively low cost. I think one would need an educational heart of stone not to be moved by this story. Partly because helping young people develop a sense of morality is so important, partly because Professor Sandel involves the a thousand students in a genuine discussion, and partly because I, like anyone else in the world with a computer, could locate and enjoy this experience in a matter of minutes. At the end of the TED talk Professor Sandel was asked what his goal with this technology is, and he said to have American, Chinese and other young people engaging in these discussions simultaneously, no doubt exposing fascinating cultural similarities and differences.

This is at the high end of internet communicating, but it is not different in kind with what we can do with students in school. That's impressive.

Smartphones overtake PC and notebooks

A remarkably detailed presentation Internet Trends by Morgan Stanley, just published, has some very striking things to say about the mobile world taking over the internet. They predict that sales of smartphones will overtake combined computer sales by 2011 (in Nth. On the graph, smartphones is the green bar. Also notice that desktops have leveled off and notebooks have been ahead since 2009. A bit sad to note that some secondary schools are still purchasing large numbers of desktops.

It seems that they have not included iPad type devices in the graph, which are neither a phone nor a notebook. I think they classify more as a mobile device than not, and their amazing take-up will make the changes all the more dramatic.

The move to mobile devices has a message for schools, surely, though the well practiced habit of education in holding itself at least 5 to 10 years behind societal trends will continue, no doubt. But when students can pull out of their pocked or their bag, a small device that is more effective in accessing the internet than what the school has to offer, guess which one they will use?

Godness gracious: the internet changed my brain!

There have recently been some excellent articles about an issue that is fundamental to how schools think about the impact of technology on learning. On one side are the pessimists who see the changes being brought about by new technologies as a threat to the way we should learn and engage with information and ideas. On the other hand there are the optimists who believe that we adapt to make the appropriate use of new technogy and ways of doing things.

Nicholas Carr, in Is the internet making us dumber? in the Wall Street Journal writes about evidence that multi-tasking and the sheer distracting nature of the internet interferes with deep and sustained thinking. He says that people are losing the capacity they used to have to read a sustained argument and follow through complex ideas in an orderly manner. He writes:

"What we seem to be sacrificing in all our surfing and searching is our capacity to engage in the quieter, attentive modes of thought that underpin contemplation, reflection and introspection. The Web never encourages us to slow down. It keeps us in a state of perpetual mental locomotion"

Carr quotes research that suggests that our brains and being modified to adapt to this new dominant form of communication, and we are diminished by the process, and becoming more shallow in our thinking. It is a pretty frightening prospect: technology makes people dumb!

On the other hand, Clay Shirky, also in WSJ asks, Does the internet making you smarter? He takes a closer look at history and points out that we have been here before. The invention of movable type printing famously had a major impact on the refomation, breaking the control of access to scripture away from the established church. And, as Shirky says,

"Vulgar versions of the Bible and distracting secular writings fueled religious unrest and civic confusion, leading to claims that the printing press, if not controlled, would lead to chaos and the dismemberment of European intellectual life."

And it did, and we generally now think of this as a good thing. No doubt Nicholas Carr's of the day were filled with foreboding. Shirkey goes on to say,

"Novels, newspapers, scientific journals, the separation of fiction and non-fiction, all of these innovations were created during the collapse of the scribal system, and all had the effect of increasing, rather than decreasing, the intellectual range and output of society."

We can say this now, but at the time it must have been frightening, with the controlled and well ordered system of distributing and interpreting text being destroyed all of a sudden - over a few decades.

Shirky points out a flaw in the story of the pessimists regarding technology, that they romanticise the past. Carr writes about people in the past ploughing through readings that kept their minds on a sustained argument. Very few people did this. It wasn't ever the experience of most people. He also acknowledges that the path to progress is very crooked. Guttenberg's presses produced erotic novels before scientific journals were invented.

"Reading is an unnatural act; we are no more evolved to read books than we are to use computers. Literate societies become literate by investing extraordinary resources, every year, training children to read. Now it's our turn to figure out what response we need to shape our use of digital tools."

Presumably learning how to read changed our brains. It should be remembered that Socratese complained bitterly about the intoduction of writing to the curriculum in ancient Greece because it would reduce the capacity of young people to memorise, which no doubt it did.

A third player, Steven Pinker in the New York Times in Mind over Mass Media addresses the issue of our brains being changed by new experiences. He says "cognitive neuroscientists roll their eyes at such talk". Every time the brain learns something new it changes, and adapts. He accepts that distraction, for example, as Carr complains, is a problem,

"But distraction is not a new phenomenon. The solution is not to bemoan technology but to develop strategies of self-control, as we do with every other temptation in life."

This is where teachers and common sense come into play. Yes, the internet offers great potential for distraction, so teachers have to work to help students manage it, so they can benefit from its undoubed bounty of information and communication.

The three short articles are much more detailed than my summary. They address a crucial issue for school leaders to be clear about.