Is technology changing our brains? -- Willingham
My guest today is cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia and author of “Why Don’t Students Like School?”
By Daniel Willingham
New technologies seem to touch every part of our lives: How we socialize, how we do business, how we elect people to our government and so on.
By Daniel Willingham
New technologies seem to touch every part of our lives: How we socialize, how we do business, how we elect people to our government and so on.
Is it equally obvious that these new technologies affect the way we think? Are the very brains of our students being changed by new technologies? And if so, should teachers contemplate new methods of instruction to teach these changed brains?
There are two rather obvious caveats that ought to be spelled out before we consider an answer. First, the phrase “new technologies” is empty, because everything depends on what students do with new technologies.
Are they reading Shakespeare, playing pong, following a thread on Twitter debating the merits of teacher merit pay, browsing pornography, or executing a meticulously planned raid of a dungeon with 30 others inWorld of Warcraft?
As the question is usually posed, it is assumed that kids use technology to consume and generate content of no intellectual consequence and
