The FJP — Here’s an excerpt from “Hot for E-Teacher: 4...

Here’s an excerpt from “Hot for E-Teacher: 4 reasons your brain loves to learn online” via The Next Web, written by Dave Goodsmith

1) Memory: This is your brain on-line. We mean, this, right now, what you’re reading. It’s your brain. On-line.

According to Columbia neuroscientist Betsy Sparrow and her team, “We are becoming symbiotic with our computer tools”. When participants in Dr. Sparrow’s studies thought a fact was saved somewhere accessible, they’d forget it. Furthermore, the more difficult a question was, the more likely participants were to think of the Internet, rather than actually try to work out an answer on their own.

Dr. Sparrow discusses memory in the age of Google.

So is offloading our brain making us dumber? Not according to rising edusoftware giant Knewton’s David Kuntz:

“Accessibility [of information] changes the relative importance of certain topics in much the same ways that a calculator changes the relative importance of some things.”

Kuntz, who’s V.P. of research at the fast growing adaptive learning company, explained that fields of knowledge that were off-loaded simply left room for cogitation on other topics.

“Long division, for example, is a process that, in my opinion, is more or less irrelevant, you never have to work through a problem in that way.”

Our dependence on the web for facts might even be making us smarter. UCLA neuroscientist and author Gary Small did an exploratory fmri study and found that the web-surfer’s googling “may actually engage a greater extent of neural circuitry” than paper-based complex reasoning.

So we’re off-loading our memories to the internet, but when we need to learn a challenging technique, like coding, it takes more than data storage to help us – it takes smile.

See the rest of the reasons at The Next Web.

thenextweb.com