BASIC COURSE INFORMATION
As an online course, the writing that we do in English 305 is substantially
different from a face to face course. As such, it is imperative that you
understand the course style from the start. Nearly all of your work in this
course will be posted on the course blog. EACH WEEK YOU WILL HAVE THREE BLOG
ASSIGNMENTS:
1. A BLOG ENTRY,
2. A READING, AND
3. A WRITING ABOUT
THE READING.
Your reading and writing on the blog must be completed by
the Friday (by midnight) of the week in which the reading falls. You have all week each week to complete the reading and writing for that week, but there are no late assignments accepted, so be sure to be disciplined about the
work from the start.
Let me re-state that point; if you do the assigned
work before or during the week it is due, you will receive full credit. If you do the work after the Friday of the week it is assigned, you will get zero credit for that week.
I believe Google is making us stupid, why? Before Google everything was found manually, by hand, sometimes by first person, and or through books; now in days everything is on Google. Google has everything so we just type in what we are looking for and boom it’s there. I hardly use a library because every book, and or information is on the internet. Some may think that is a good thing, but I no longer know how to use a library because I have forgotten since I don’t use it. According to Maryanne Wolf, a developmental Psychologist; the new style of reading is weakening our capacity for deep reading. We are now used to reading short sentences sometimes short paragraphs only; for example, when you search for something on Google it will summarize the information from the link. You no longer have to open each link to read to find the information you need. I have to say we are just getting lazy at reading. Our minds are no longer working like they used to, we are making our brains lazy.
ReplyDeleteI believe Google is making us stupid and lazy! According to James Olds, a professor of neuroscience, “the brain has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.” We are altering our brain each and every day to think and act differently. Therefore we are making our brain lazy, with all these information given to us very easily.
Agreed
DeleteI disagree with you that Google, or the internet, is making us stupid. It just provides the information, which we may get by reading books, in a different format. It actually helps us to think more critically and out of the box by exposing our minds to different opinions and reviews around the same point of interest we are targeting.
DeleteIn my opinion, the internet has mainly made individuals more impatient because of how quick it is for obtaining information. Also, I do not feel as if the internet has made individuals “stupid” through its use. Although the internet makes it much easier to access information, we still need to analyze and compare the information for consistency.
DeleteAs I read that very long article, I realized that it was not as long as it seemed. I too wanted to just scan the several articles. I believe that being able to do a quick Google search has shortened our attention spans. Reading blogs and articles on the internet is much more distracting than having alone time with a long book, or any book for that matter. We no longer have to seek information out, it is at our finger tips. It goes with us on our phones. I get really tired when I read over a certain amount. When I am not dozing off, my mind is preoccupied with other things I need to be doing. Often, if I am reading or writing on the computer, I will also have my Facebook and email open in other windows. Write or read a paragraph then check my stuff is usually the it works on my computer. I prefer actual books to electronic copies; however, I have a harder time finishing than I used to. I don't know if Google can take all of the blame, but I have no doubt that the internet is a double edge sword. Laziness and stupidity may very well be one of those edges.
ReplyDeleteI felt myself skimming the article as well, until I came across the part about skimming books. Then I actually stopped and my guilty conscience redirected me to read every word!!
DeleteI felt the exact same way when I read this article. As I began to read, I read the first few sentences and then began to quickly scan the rest of the text. I went back and carefully read the whole article when I got to the section that explained how weakened our capacity is for reading. The internet has definitely made us lazy readers.
DeleteI agree with you, Google has decrease our attention span and it has made it much more harder to focus. While I first read this article I had to skim through it. I had to go back and re-read it because I had a hard time remembering what I had read. This happen because I didn't take the time to read carefully. I could relate to you having different windows open as you try to do your work because I exactly do the same thing. I do agree that the interenet has made us lazy.
DeleteNo. Google is not making us stupid. Google is making us lazy. We are no longer going to libraries and actually researching. I feel that reading an actual book is becoming a lost art form. We are still using our brains, but in a different way. The way we process information is changing but the ultimate impact remains to be seen. To be fair, Google has allowed for alot of information to readily available and accessible. It has facilitated the curiousity in all of us. I think we should use it as a tool, but continue to do the footwork in educating ourselves.
ReplyDeleteIt is not actually making us lazy. It is helping us utilizing our time more efficiently especially for those who have very limited time due to working, playing sport, travelling etc. so it just makes reading easier and more convenient.
DeleteI am on the fence on whether I agree or disagree with the fact that google is making us stupider. I myself love reading books, it's always been a passion of mine and I don't see myself giving that up. As for information gathering, I definitely utilize google and other online sources to seek information, it is readily accessible and gives you what you are looking for. I agree with Kassandra that google is making us much lazier. In the past we would have to actually get off the couch and go to a library or look through an encyclopedia for information. I find google to be a tool adding to our intelligence, the fact that we can answer any question we have by the click of a button is phenomenal, and only allows us to expand our knowledge. On the down side, it is giving us an easy way out of obtaining information through time and effort, contributing to the laziness of our younger generation.
ReplyDeleteWhen first reading this question, I would have said that Google is not only making us stupid, but it is making people lazy. However, after reading the article I changed my mind and decided no. This quote about the invention of the ticking clock stood out to me “in deciding when to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock”. This is so true, I know personally if it is say 7:00 P.M. and my body is tired, I will not listen to it and go to bed, but will go to bed when the clock says it is late enough. So with that said, the real question should be Is Google changing the way we think? This day an age, everything is about spreading ourselves thin and with efficiency, taking on more than we can chew. So with Google, it has information out there and easy for us to access, saving time. Having us work faster and find information at a faster pace, I think it is a convenience factor and now spreading ourselves thin is becoming easier and doable with the quick access to information. This quote also stood out to me “The last things these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.” Google is purposely distracting us so they can track our information and sell it to advertisers. It is for financial gain, so it is not necessarily that Google is making us stupid, as it is distracting us from thinking on a deeper level and reading information more thoroughly. On a personal level, I love to read and Google or the internet has not changed this. I know it is harder on my eyes to read the computer screen and less enjoyable than curling up in a chair with a good book without the glaring lights. So for me, I would love to believe that Google has not made me stupid. It has made information easily accessible, convenient, but distracting.
ReplyDeleteWhen I first read the question I said not stupid but lazy, after reading your input I have to agree with you. It’s convenient. I really didn’t think about it that way but yeah our day to day life is controlled by time. Google fits in our busy schedule because it’s with us everywhere.
DeleteIn a sense, google does take away some of our mental acuity. I would not say it makes people “stupid,” as that implies that a person cannot change once they’re made that way. If anything, the internet and new technological advances make people lazy. Instead of going to a library and researching materials, and spending countless hours reading books, we now can get an answer to any question in a few seconds. Unfortunately, sometimes the validity of the answers we get is questionable. Even someone who is a discriminate researcher can be fooled by what is written online. However, it is true that getting answers so quickly diminishes a person’s attention span. Instead of reading an entire book, people can now get a summary from Wikipedia, or sparknotes. While this is convenient, it offers much less of a rewarding experience. I am an English major, and I used to go through multiple books a week. I do find it difficult and daunting to read more than a few paragraphs when I’m searching the web. Not only did the internet do this, but television depleted my attention span as well. I shut off my cable a couple years ago and became much more productive, and was reading constantly. I recently had it turned back on, and now sometimes I feel like a mindless zombie sitting on the couch wasting away, watching programming that does nothing to enrich my life. So, in a way, technology has made people less aware of the real world around them, but has not necessarily made them stupid.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you. It has made us lazy more than stupid. It's not that it's taking away our intelligence but keeping us from attaining the full experience. Now, it's just random pieces of information that may or may not stick. I find that when I research a topic fully, I retain the information and understand its full concept more.
DeleteReading is not just restricted to reading narrative literature because many people may enjoy read long news articles, scientific journals, etc. It really differs from person to person depending on what an individual goes after. Internet gives us the benefit of using what other researchers have accomplished and then we may add to it. It does not make us lazy or stupid but it rather helps us in using our limited time wisely and smartly. With swiftly life style and the gigantic amount of data, readers are in need of the internet so they can sort and pursue the targeted point out of the midst of the knowledge sea. Since most people, including me, work and have dependents to take care of, internet provides us the opportunity to successfully use the limited time we may have. It does not drop down our concentration level but it rather prevents us from wasting time digging in huge number of books stacked in libraries. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan “media are not just passive channels of information”, they supply the required information to think about and they also help us to think out of the box by surfing the internet and investigating a particular point and look at from different angles. If someone loves to read, like I do, will read as much as possible with high concentration level regardless the form in which the data presented, on line or a book. We can even read more online than we do using traditional ways, and reading will be more intense and well focused in the point of interest. To conclude, we are basically shifting from using traditional forms of reading to a more suitable forms which will not make us stupid if not otherwise make us smarter.
ReplyDeleteThe internet overall, not just google, has changed the way I process information. I used to love reading. Even this article was hard to keep focused on. I'm so used to being able to access information in a matter of seconds. I started to using the internet to find sources and would read entire articles. That turned into skimming of websites. That turned into skimming the results page on google and summarizing the information. We all depend on the internet for quick information. Someone doesn't need to be educated to seem smart anymore. With all the devices that can access information anywhere, people can pull up information whenever they need in a second. I was in class and the professor asked a question that no one knew the answer to. As I look around, I see two people on their phones looking for the answer online. They both raised their hands and got credit for doing the assigned readings. The internet is useful and has good uses for it. We tend to overuse it and become almost addicted to it. That's the reason for the change in the way we process information. Like the writer mentions, there were many skeptics for each invention. All we can do is wait it out, and try to hold on to the things that make us who we are. We can only try to keep technology out of the places it doesnt belong to keep us from becoming robotic in every sense.
ReplyDeleteDo I agree that Google is making us stupid? I’m undecided when it comes to this question because I see Google as a helpful tool but also something that has made us lazier. Google has made us lazier simply because we have relied on it for so much. It has made us lazier in our intelligence, we now prefer to Google an answer to something instead of trying to read it from a book and learn from it. Before we would have to study a book and read deeply into the words, now we just simply type what we are looking for and it will pop up and you don’t even have to read it, you can just skimming through till you find your answer. Everything now and days is in Google; it has an answer to every question. Google has made us rely on it more, now we don’t really challenge ourselves as much as we did before Google even existed. Even reading this article I had a hard time, I would pause my reading and go do something else on the computer. It wasn’t till I went back and actually took my time to read it carefully that I realized the internet has made me a lazy reader. Maybe it’s the fact that now thanks to social networking, I’ve become used to reading words that have been shorten. Our mental capacity to progress these long words and deep readings has weakened because of such things like acronyms. Maybe it’s not that Google made us stupid, it’s just causing a wall for us to understand information in a deeper sense.
ReplyDeleteI had a hard time as well. I hadn't thought about it, but I do have a much harder time focusing on what I read now than what I did when I was younger.
DeleteAfter reading the article “Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains” I agree that Google and technology in general is having an effect on the way we learn and process information, but I don’t think Google is making people stupid. The vast amount of information so easily available has shifted the way people process information. Ideas move faster than they once did, but they are still being produced by people. Furthermore, I think what can be seen is a shift of emphasis into the hard sciences. Technology is changing and evolving so quickly that it seems impossible to keep up with. People are not static and they will change along with technology. Although our brains may be changing, eventually human learning processes will adapt. Having access to so much information on a global scale is opening people up to new cultures and new ideas. While it will take time to adjust to the new mediums I believe there will be advancement in the creation and flow of ideas on a much wider scale. Some ways of learning will become no longer relevant and will fade, but new ways will take the place of the old. I don’t necessarily see technological advancement as detrimental to the intelligence of society. I do however see it as a shift in the way people gather, process, and retain information.
ReplyDeleteThe internet can have both advantages and disadvantages when it comes to resourcefulness. When using the proper resources and references, information from search engines can be beneficial. For instance, the internet is less time consuming by allowing information to be accessed without the need of buying or checking out various sources. Today less time is needed to find information on a certain topic and there are multiple resources available. The draw-back to the internet is the fact that some resources are not reliable and are inaccurate. As the internet facilitates our methods for finding information, having multiple sources for one topic can be overwhelming. Although it is much easier to access information, it still requires that we analyze and compare the information for consistency.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure I agree that google is making us stupid because it is up to us to use our brains. Sure, Google makes finding things easier and faster but it is up to us to look for the things that we want to know. Just because we do not go to a library as much are read as many books, it doesn not mean we are stupid. Do not get me wrong, I love to read and try to do so as much as possible but I do find using google makes some things go a lot faster and easier. Things such as papers to write are faster going with google, easpecially ahving four children at home and not so much time to spare so anything that saves time is good for me.
ReplyDeleteGoogle is not making us stupid, if anything it’s making us lazy. Google is a great technology that we take advantage of, there is no need to go to the library to do research; everything is in our home on our computers, phones, and anything that connects to the internet. Google or the internet in general is changing the way we do things, but all technology does that. I think that it affects people in different ways depending on a person’s characteristic. For example, a person that would never pick up a newspaper or read a book could suddenly be interested in news around the world, just because he read a headline that caught his attention while he was doing something else. Now on the other hand, a person that likes to read might stop reading full articles because he could get what he needs in a shorter article and with less research. The internet gives you so much information in a short amount of time that you get used to just browsing to find the information that you’re seeking. This article has many valid arguments, the one that caught my attention is when Nicholas Carr quotes Plato’s Phaedrus, “They would be able to receive a quantity of information without proper instruction they would be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” I could see how this argument might be valid because when you only get some information without knowing the full story it might make you ignorant, but you are receiving information. For the most part people learn new things and keep themselves informed with Google. And even though Google is making us lazy and changing the way we research, it is giving us information; therefore it is not making us stupid.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your statement, I don't know if I agree to Google making us lazy. I do know that the individuals who have worked extremely hard to make Google and all the other search websites are smart individuals. I am sure they took their share on completing the research that was necessary to attain their goal. I also believe that it comes down to every individual to make the proper decision on the amount of web time they spend. I think Google is doing what their focus is and we are only doing what we think we are suppose to be doing with it. New generations develop and changes are made, it is up to all of us to decide how we want those changes to affect us.
DeleteI agree with both sides of the story, I know that the web and all the information that is available to us can be overwhelming at times. I do show more of an interest on having actual contact with books, magazines, newspapers, etc. The school I previously attended made the attempt to make things easier for all students by making everything electronic. The readings assigned were through the eBooks available through the electronic library. I remember listening to comments from other students about how they felt in regards to the eBooks. Most of the students reported that they disliked the idea and that they would not complete most than half of the reading assignments. Most of them agreed that there was a higher chance of them reading if they had the actual books and if they can highlight and or make notes as they felt necessary. Now, the web does provide us with a great of imperative and necessary information. Google for example, the purpose of the company to make it as easy as what we mean to help us get exactly what we need is extremely intelligent. The understanding and the accessibility of the web attract all ages, from early childhood to adulthood. From early ages, individuals are exposed to games, social networks, research, school, entertainment, art, news, business, etc., through the web. The web has been providing and will continue to provide tremendous amount of information and business opportunities. I believe that technology will continue to enhance and increase accessibility in the future.
ReplyDeleteI completely understand your comment about how most students feel like they need the actual book in order to highlight and make their own side notes. I am in the nursing program and NONE of our books are offered electronically but most students say they prefer it that way because they like making contact with the book because it helps absorb the material. And I also agree with my fellow classmates but I just wish our books weren't so heavy that way it wouldn't be so difficult to carry. I'm just a 5 foot person and I can only carry so much. Also, I agree with your statement about technology advancing with time and we will most likely depend on it more and more. However, I just think that everyone should also be taught how to look for books in the library because there older books that carry vital information that will not be carried electronically. Thus, I think depending on google and advanced technology is not bad but we should also teach all the basics to find sources ourselves just in case all our sources can't be handed to us by the click of a button.
DeleteI agree with the argument of the author to a certain extent. I do not believe that google is making the individual's in society stupid but I do think it is hindering their skill in truly looking for the resources themselves. Instead, most individual's like the author said would usually skim articles and e-books to try and find what they need or what they are looking for quickly instead of putting effort to thoroughly read the articles themselves to find out. It is sad to know that our society has gone to the point where they do not go to a library to find books that will help them but rather trust the sources they find in the internet. It is true like the author said that it is convenient and that is the most common reason of why people rely on the internet for their resources to everything but does not determine their intelligence. It's like the saying give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day but if you teach a man to fish than he'll never go hungry. In my opinion google is what hands us our information each day and now we will always be dependent on google to find our information. However, as I said before google is not what makes us stupid because I do not think that google can determine an individual's intelligence. Because to me intelligence is when an individual gets access to information or some source of knowledge and applies that information for further purposes in the future. In the end, if google crashed the world will continue on but every one would be struggling to find the books in the library because they never looked for a book before.
ReplyDeleteI also feel that google is hindering our skills to research information. I think that we are not exercising our minds the way we should. It's better for us to research information through books and newspapers because it allows our brains to solve problems easier. It also lets our minds exercise the natural way. This may sound funny I feel that our brains are like our body's they ned exercise.
DeleteI really like this article. I understand what the writer was trying to communicate. The writer is arguing that before google was invented we would go out of our way to research information. For example; when we needed a 12 page paper we would spend hours researching books and newspapers in a library. Now a days when we need to write a 12 paper we may still spend some time in the library but we save a lot more time by just researching vital information on the internet. We have many programs available to us, such as; ebscohost or even wikipedia. We all know that wikipedia isn't the most reliable source, but lets just be honest, a lot of us use wikipedia to get information. The writer was trying to say that the hours that we have lost from not doing research in the library is costing our mind exersice in other words we are not letting our brains evolve naturally. I do want to say that because we save so much time getting the information from google a lot quicker, we can now have more time to accomplish other tasks. So, is google making us stupid? It might be but it's also making us more efficient.
ReplyDeleteWhile I believe the article, “Is Google Making us Stupid?” provokes a lot of thought about the direction of society’s thinking, I don’t think it necessarily supports the assumption that the handy search engine is in fact making us stupid. I found the author’s views, combined with those of Fredrich Nietsche and James Olds - that the medium in which we write not only affects the way our thoughts develop as we write, but also create a style for our brains to mimic as they embrace ideas. I am one who relishes in reading news headlines on a daily basis, and have noticed that my conversations with friends have become similarly choppy and miscellaneous, progressing from one topic to another without much time spent on any individual subject. I think these theories help explain why Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder and ADD are so prevalent, and seem to be increasing in prevalence. While I think the brain of the 21st century has a significantly poorer attention span than the typical brain of the century prior, I believe that the modern day brain has a capacity to hold just as much information as it ever did. Whether or not that information makes us “smarter” or “more stupid” is subject to opinion.
ReplyDelete