Deeper Understanding via the Internet - Is It Possible?

I'm always thinking about how technology can enhance understanding and learning, but also how it can just as easily diminish those same things. Trying to tell the difference requires a sensitivity to how technology more generally enhances and diminishes our lives. I'm consumed by these thoughts as I put together a lesson on skills needed for the digital age. I'm teaching this class to 11th and 12th graders as part of a digital citizenship unit in a civics class (more on that in future posts). To think about what skills are necessary I'm thinking about the pitfalls that kids and adults alike fall prey to when using the Internet. 

Howard Gardner and Katie Davis' 2013 book The App Generation: How Today's Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy, and Imagination in a Digital World provides some great insight on this topic. Gardner and Davis explore how the Internet and the technologies we use to go online most often lead to only surface level understanding of complex issues. They quote one mid-2000s study that found young people "talk global, but act local" when it came to true awareness of world events (pg. 88). Participants in Gardner and Davis' own study "suggested a distinction between youth's curiosity about different perspectives, experiences, and practices, on the one hand, and the focused, sustained attention that's required for a deeper understanding, on the other" (ibid). A fabulous scene from Joseph O'Neill's satirical novel The Dog comes to mind: the main character is trying to teach his young intern how to use Google to explore what he's curious about, but they end up following link after unrelated link down a rabbit hole, ending up on the other side an hour later none the wiser. Being able to call up any fact or figure you desire may enable you to collect a lot of facts and figures, but it certainly does not lead to deeper understanding of any kind. True learning requires the synthesis of information gathered, and then taking it one step further. That requires deep understanding.

This surface level understanding enabled by the Internet extends to surface-level degrees of intimacy that technology enables. The authors point out that parents often report being very satisfied with how connected they can remain to their children throughout the day, checking in here and there and coordinating activities, but "there seems to be a tipping point. In one survey, parents supported the view that too much technology in the home - too much time online, too many gadgets - has an isolating effect and reduces family time and closeness" (pg. 107). That appearance of closeness without actual intimacy may help explain the "considerable evidence [which] suggests that today's young people are less empathetic than youth of the 1980s and 1990s" (pg. 110). Though the Internet and social media gives young people access to so many different kinds of people and perspectives, more so than was ever possible at earlier times in history, the authors suggest that young people's "acceptance [of different people and perspectives] doesn't seem to be accompanied by a greater understanding of others" (pg. 111). 

I don't often take heed of  kids-these-days arguments. Perhaps kids today are less empathetic than in years past, perhaps not. But I can believe that users - not just kids, adults too - are less empathetic when communicating online than in "real life." And this is certainly connected to the superficial understanding we gain from casual use of the Internet: it's so much easier to believe the person on the other end is truly as abstract as their avatar and screen name suggest.

How can we reverse course and get young people to actually gain deeper understanding and insight from the Internet? Gardner and Davis have one idea. They argue that technology and the exposure that is possible through technology and the Internet should facilitate the "initial romance" that philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote about: "As Whitehead saw it, genuine learning begins when one is excited, moved, inspired, or stimulated by an early encounter with a question, phenomenon, or mystery - this is the time for romance. But one remains stuck at this point, or becomes bored or alienated or anxious, unless one can begin to acquire tools that allow one to gain a firmer understanding of the initially seductive phenomenon" (pg. 186). This  is beautiful, and I think a great way to think about the power and limitations of the Internet on understanding and learning.

So with this in mind, what are the tools that students need to be engaged and active digital citizens, gaining insight via technology and the Internet? I'll share what my students brainstormed in a future post!