(England, July 2, 1508) – In the latest edition of the Ye Atlantic Monthly, Nicholas of Carr despairs over the toll that books and reading are taking upon the minds and spirit of man.  A noted jongleur and philosopher, Nicholas attests that he and many members of the jongleur guild are losing their ability to sing epic poems from memory.  He plainly believes books are the cause.  “It is as if these instruments are agents of Lucifer trying to steal away God’s gift of memory”, he laments in the article.  And the danger may be more than the loss of the jongleur gift.  While it seems ludicrous, Nicholas foresees a future in which even peasants have learned to read books.  People from every class would lose the ability to remember even the simplest parable or psalm as they rely on the insidious books to remember it for them.  While admitting that relying on books would provide him more epics and ideas to share with his audience, Nicholas worries that doing so will weaken his mind and spirit.  “To rely on the crutch of a book when I sing a poem cheats my audience and demoralizes me,” declares Nicholas of Carr.

OK, unless you are an Atlantic Monthly reader, you are probably thinking that this is a very strange way to start a post.  If you would like to better understand my lame attempt at parody, please read this:

Is Google Making us Stupid?

Nicholas Carr’s love/hate relationship with technology have given us very interesting food for thought such as Does IT Matter?, The Amorality of Web 2.0, and his recent, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google.  All his works are thought provoking and often challenge ideological extremism and divisiveness that tends to echo rampantly in the blogosphere.

I will leave the critical diatribe to others (see Jay Cross’s petulance).  This is a blog on learning and performance improvement.  So, in that regard, let me share the ideas that struck me as I read the article:

Acquired ADD – Carr laments how he and colleagues can’t read lengthy articles any longer.  They have been conditioned by the Web (so he contends) to do drive-by reading (my term d’art), only gathering the information they need and then moving on.  Yea, so?  Let’s face it, we are moving into an attention economy.  My time is valuable, I need to get what I need to perform and move on quickly if I want to remain competitive.  And when I do compete well enough to win some leisure time, I will still “scuba dive in the sea of words” (Carr’s reference to deeply reading a whole book).  But that book better be engaging (which is rare in non-fiction) or I’ll quickly find another book that is.  Does this mean we are worse readers, or just demanding better quality reading?

It’s the Economy Stupid – Like it or not, we all have to compete in this dynamic economy.  That means using the best tools available to innovate, solve problems, and out produce your competitors.  Carr shares that pathologist Bruce Friedman’s feels his thinking has taken on a “staccato” quality – “scanning short passages of text from many sources online.”  So?  If the only downside is you can’t plod through War and Peace any longer and the upside is you perform more efficiently, I’m OK with that.

The Brain : Mind Barrier – Carr’s most dark and insidious concern throughout the article is that we are flirting with a future where machines have surpassed the human brain.  He even claims that the Google gang stated that “we’d be better off” if are brains were replaced by an artificial intelligence (I’m guessing they stated “supplemented” instead of “replaced”).  Indeed, Carr closes with his fears of a 2001: A Space Odyssey world where “people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine.”  Well, that makes for a nice, spooky movie, but it is fiction.  To make that leap, we would have to agree that the brain and the mind are one.  We would have to have concluded that self-awareness, reasoning, cognizance, and intelligence are all just a by-product of an efficiently wired brain.  I don’t believe that conclusion is already settled and universal.  The Web may become an ancillary brain for us, but it can never replace the human mind.

Maslow on Google – If we drop the economic argument (after all the market may not always know what is best for us) of performance improvement, how does Carr’s claim impact us as individuals?  Will our collective inability to finish lengthy tomes upset our personal success?  If it does turn out that a “staccato intellect” results in me better meeting my needs, it is well worth it.  To contemplate this, let’s revisit Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as influenced by the Web:

• Physiological Needs (Breathing, Drinking, Eating, Excretion) – Other than the fact that the eventual demise of newspapers and magazines will alter my excretion behaviors, I do not believe the Web impacts us at this level.
• Safety Needs (Personal Security, Financial Security, Health and Well-Being) – Even if the Web has given me ADD, it has provided me with a host of tools and information to find a better home, clothing, invest more wisely, and learn how to take better care of my health.
• Social Needs (Friendship, Family, Sex) – Others could argue finer points, but overall I would say the Web has proven to be a wonderful platform to help meet these needs.  It helps us find and stay in touch with friends, find spouses and communicate with the families we create with them, and find opportunities to have sex (with others or alone .
• Esteem Needs (Self-Esteem, Confidence, Achievement, Respect for/of Others) – Now on this need, the Web’s influence becomes arguable.  The Web, like any tool or communication platform, can be used for good and bad.  Via the Web I can build great esteem, or have my esteem destroyed by others.  I’m going to call this one a draw now, but as we grow into the new mores of radical transparency and attention trust, the good will soon outweigh the bad.
• Self-Actualization Needs (Morality, Creativity, Spontaneity, Problem Solving) – And finally, we reach the level most directly addressed by Carr’s concerns.  This is our need to become the best we are capable of becoming.  Learning, creating, reading, curiosity are all the traits that Carr worries the Web might be undermining.  Again, I will argue that the good outweighs the bad.  Through “drive-by learning” I can still gather more ideas that feed my morality, creativity, and problem solving abilities.  Inevitably, I will still be forced to more deeply contemplate those ideas as I weave them into my world view.  And often the Web (or people on the Web) will be what challenges me to contemplate them more deeply.

Learning 2.0 – And finally onto what this blog is supposed to be considering: How do people learn differently in this new, Web-driven era?  Carr’s article included many examples of how new technologies (such as the mechanical clock) have literally changed the way we think and behave.  Carr’s basic concern is the Web has ruined our ability to read deeply which (he references to the work of Maryanne Wolf) will ruin are ability to think deeply.  (Which begs the question: Can illiterate people think deeply?)  There is certainly no research to support that assertion, yet.  But there is no doubt that the Web is changing the way we work and learn.  So, the important question for us in learning is: How does our pedagogy have to change to support this new way of working and learning?  Even if this new era of acquired ADD does not alter our brain function or our ability for higher-level thought, it is a death knell for lengthy (boring) learning – whether it be in a classroom or online.  We need to move from structured learning programs to flexible, nimble chunks of instruction along the lines of what used to be called “electronic performance support systems” (and is now just called “Google”).  This does not mean the extinction of complex learning programs, but those programs’ design and delivery need to radically change.  They must rely on more self-directed, mentor-monitored learning that is tightly integrated with daily job performance to meet the learning and development objectives.

So ends my Nicholas Carr inspired prattle.  If you made it this far, I congratulate you!  Your Web-induced ADD is not as advanced as Bruce Friedman’s, who is quoted in Carr’s article:

“I can’t read War and Peace anymore.  I’ve lost the ability to do that.  Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb.  I skim it.”

• The Google Way of Science — Kevin Kelly — The Technium – Kevin Kelly with a less bombastic post that continues on Chris Anderson’s theme that the petrabyte age of information is changing the scientific method in that we can move from models to actually data to test hypothesis.
• No, Mr Kelly, I’m afraid the internet is not as clever as a single (human) brain | Technology | guardian.co.uk – A blistering response to Kevin Kelly’s “Infoporn” post at Wired. See the link below to read the Kelly post.
• Infoporn: Tap Into the 12-Million-Teraflop Handheld Megacomputer – An absurd postulate from Kevin Kelly claiming that the Web has already become more powerful than the human brain. Interesting concept (and colorful pictures!) but hardly accurate. He never mentions “mind”…
• The Science of Diversity and the Art of Inclusion | Learn to Adapt – The circular bookmark of my post on the discussion about diversity and inclusion I had with Scott E. Page, the author of “The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies”

• Instruction eLearning 2.0 and Quality : eLearning Technology – Tony Karrer resonds to comments regarding the "quality" of content being shared using Web 2.o tools (wikis, blogs) for learning. He's spot on in his response. I deal with the same resistance to change. The final accounting is "does performance improve?
• Even Poor Kids Are Social Network Savvy: Scientific American Podcast – Closing the "digital divide"? Study from the University of Minnesota says these days even the least privileged kids have profiles on MySpace and Facebook. And they’re on the internet all the time.
• Our Brains on Marketing: Scans Show Why We Like New Things: Scientific American – "We know not to judge a book by its cover—but new research shows that may be exactly what we do. Scientists have discovered that novel objects perk up the reward system of our brains"
• The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete – Chris Anderson postulates: "The new availability of huge amounts of data, along with the statistical tools to crunch these numbers, offers a whole new way of understanding the world." A transformational theory…
• It’s Not What You Know, It’s Who You Know: Work in the Information Age – Ethnographic research on personal social networks in the workplace, arguing that traditional institutional resources are being replaced by resources that workers mine from their own networks.
• SocialLearn: Bridging the Gap Between Web 2.0 and Higher Education at e-Literate – Martin Weller ponders: "when learners have been accustomed to very facilitative, … and adaptive tools both for learning and socialising, why will they accept standardised, unintuitive, clumsy and out of date tools in formal education?

• Five Ways to Mark Up the Web – Nick Gonzalez from a while back reviews five website annotations tools. These (and others) can be very valuable for new social research approaches to learning. Students can mark up articles "together" as they read them.
• Modeling The Real Market Value Of Social Networks – Michael Arrington does some very interesting number crunching to try to assess the real business (dollar) value of the major social networks.
• Multi-tasking, task-switching, and humans — or why I didn’t finish writing this post three hours ago – Dave Munger ponders a bit of research regarding the human tendency to task switch. As the millenials enter the workforce this behavior will greatly impact productivity and work behaviors. (personal note: multi-tasking kills! ;o)

• Disney.com Breaks New Ground Streaming Full-Length Movies Online for the First Time Ever – Distribution models for media continue to evolve: "The full-length films will then be available for free streaming on Disney.com (www.Disney.com/WonderfulWorld) for the week following the network presentation."
• Is Google Making Us Stupid? – Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic makes an interesting assessment of "What the Internet is doing to our brains".
• LearnHub Relaunches Its Social Learning Network – Jason Kincaid gives an update on LearnHub and other sites trying to leverage Web 2.0 social concepts for learning.

• Preparing Students to Succeed in the 21st Century – Liz Davis reiterates the importance that teachers get with the program if the US wants to compete effectively in the 21st century.
• How to Unleash Your Creativity: Scientific American – In a discussion with Scientific American Mind executive editor Mariette DiChristina, three noted experts on creativity, each with a very different perspective and background, reveal powerful ways to unleash your creat­ive self.

• The Value of Believing in Free Will – I've never been a fan of predetermination theories/beliefs becuase I believe it undermines individual potential. It turns out it is not good for our society either…
• Corporate Policies on Web 2.0 (Enterprise 2.0) – Tony pulled together some policies from companies re: using Web 2.0 tools at work. As we cover in our Web 2.0 University courses, the processes and culture aspects of Enterprise 2.0 implementations is usually a bigger challenge than the tech.

Here is a very interesting research paper:

The Value of Believing in Free Will: Encouraging a Belief in Determinism Increases Cheating

I added this to today’s links list, but wanted to highlight it. If you want the short version, here is the abstract from the article:

Does moral behavior draw on a belief in free will? Two experiments examined whether
inducing participants to believe that human behavior is predetermined would encourage cheating. In Experiment 1, participants read excerpts that encouraged a belief in determinism (i.e., behavior as the consequence of environmental and genetic factors) or neutral text. Exposure to the deterministic message increased immoral behavior on a passive cheating task that involved allowing a flawed computer program to reveal answers to mathematical problems that participants should have been solving themselves. Moreover, increased cheating behavior was mediated by decreased belief in free will. In Experiment 2, exposure to deterministic statements led participants to overpay themselves on a cognitive test relative to participants who were exposed to statements endorsing free will as well as participants in numerous control conditions. These findings suggest that the debate over free will has societal, as well as scientific and theoretical, implications.

Now, I have long been a proponent of free will theory and opposed to any concept of predetermination. I believe that it undermines individual potential. Predeterminism recuses you from personal accountability. Even those who believe in predetermination but profess “many paths to the predetermined result” makes them accountable are fooling only themselves. If you know in your heart of hearts that the outcome is already determined, you divest responsibility.

What I had never stopped to consider (because I’m not terribly bright) is the impact beyond the individual. This research discussed in the article illustrates the toll predeterminism can take on our society. Frankly stated, the research shows that predetermination is immoral. To strengthen our society, all institutions should be teaching the importance of free will. Now, this could become a discussion of whether free will exists or not, but instead I want to consider what we should be teaching people to strengthen our society. Whether you believe in free will or not, I leave you with a quote from the article:

It is also crucial to emphasize that the present findings do not speak to the larger issue of whether free will actually exists. It is possible that free will is an illusion that nevertheless offers some functionality. It may be that a necessary cost of public awareness regarding the science of human behavior will be the dampening of certain beliefs about personal agency (Wegner, 2002). Conversely, it may prove possible to integrate a genuine sense of free will into scientific accounts of human behavior (see Baumeister, in press; Dennett, 2004; Kane, 1996; Shariff et al., in press). Although the concept of free will remains scientifically in question, the present results point to a significant value in believing that free will exists.

• The Growth of Open APIs: More Evidence That Web Services Drive Network Effects [Dion Hinchcliffe's Web 2.0 Blog] – Dion extrapolates the growth of Amazon Web Services to the Web as a whole. The question remains how to monetize this usage. Without the scale or intrinsic financial incentive of Amazon, how do other companies leverage APIs successfully?
• The Science of Irrationality: Why We Humans Behave So Strangely: Scientific American – MIT's Dan Ariely discusses his research in behavioral economics and explains how to deal with our brain's flawed decision-making process.