Internet Changes Thinking?!?

Point, Click, Think? is an intriguing article from the Washington Post on the way the internet changes how students think and research.

On the good side, Net thinkers are said to generate work quickly and make connections easily. “They are more in control of facts than we were 40 years ago,” says Bernard Cooperman, a history professor at the University of Maryland.

But they also value information-gathering over deliberation, breadth over depth, and other people’s arguments over their own.

The article gives a good, balanced account of the benefits and the dangers of the internet as the primary source of research and knowledge. I know that my habits of research have changed since I graduated from college a decade ago. The internet has helped me most in the discovery of new areas of research. For example, I knew very little about Human Computer Interaction (HCI) studies until last year when a fellow student sent me a link to a conference. From there I went onto search web sites for HCI and attend the conference. Since then I’ve been to the library, joined SigCHI and the ACM and begun to discover the journals that make up the field. The internet is, IMHO, better seen as a gateway than a final destination.

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Todd Suomela
Associate Director for Digital Pedagogy & Scholarship Department

My interests include digital scholarship, citizen science, leadership, and communications.