Is Google Killing Kids Curiosity?

Are search engines making us dumber…or smarter?

When you were a kid and had a burning question you didn’t know the answer to – how long did it take before you found what you were looking for?

You’d maybe start with the encyclopaedias that you had at home or at the library, continue on to a textbook or maybe a magazine, and then after all that you’d end up asking a friend, family member or teacher. This whole, involved, process could take days.

Nowadays, Google can not only provide you with a litany of answers to nearly every question within 0.30 seconds, it can also even suggest to you what question you were wanting to ask before you finish typing it.

So is growing up with this rapid access to information helping or harming our kids?

Technology writer Clive Thompson argues in his book, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better, that search engines are helping us in that they’re reducing our need to store information personally.

This theory is based on the principle of Transactive Memory. Transactive Memory can loosely be translated as ‘shared memory’ where groups of two or more people develop a shared system for remembering things. 

Thompson writes in his book that this rapid access to more information, more quickly is an “upend (to) our mental habits”, that enables amateurs to become experts and is collectively shifting us towards being “conversational thinkers” – in that we share our information and our everyday “public thought” online all the time.

While Thompson concludes that he believes the changes to information gathering and memory processes are, “deeply positive”, others are not so sure.  

Author Ian Leslie says in his recently published book, Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends On It that the speed in which we’re able to access information is actually harmful to human intelligence.

Leslie puts forward the case that the path of ‘least effort’ that is offered to us by Google and others is dampening our enthusiasm for learning. He argues that when we don’t spend enough time in a state of “not knowing” it reduces our motivation to learn.
 

Do you think Google is helping your kids thinking or harming their curiosity?

Source : parents[dot]nickjr[dot]com[dot]au