The print media is making us stupid.
Okay, not quite. But hear me out.
I was annoyed by that silly professor (so I judged) who banned her students from using Wikipedia and Google (Reference books? Give me Wikipedia). I mean, ban them from using them as citations, sure, but don't ban their use. But once I read past the sensationalism of the media, she was actually being very intelligent about it, saying that:
...media platforms such as Google made perfect sense. The trick was to learn how to use them properly.
and
"Students must be trained to be dynamic and critical thinkers rather than drifting to the first site returned through Google.”
Much better than Gideon Haigh's hatchet job, Information Idol: How Google is making us stupid, in The Monthly magazine 2 years ago which, I was appalled to discover the other day, won the John Curtin Prize for Journalism in the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards in 2006. I planned a letter to the editor after the article was published, headed "Gideon Haigh is making us stupid"... then found that The Monthly didn't have a "letters to the editor" page. I can't think of any philosophy further from, or more inferior to, a wiki's philosophy of openness and its ability to be corrected.
(Actually there are lots of worse philosophies, notably one-eyed political and religious publications. But as journalists know, hyperbole is much more eye-catching than truth.)
I was annoyed by that silly professor (so I judged) who banned her students from using Wikipedia and Google (Reference books? Give me Wikipedia). I mean, ban them from using them as citations, sure, but don't ban their use. But once I read past the sensationalism of the media, she was actually being very intelligent about it, saying that:
...media platforms such as Google made perfect sense. The trick was to learn how to use them properly.
and
"Students must be trained to be dynamic and critical thinkers rather than drifting to the first site returned through Google.”
Much better than Gideon Haigh's hatchet job, Information Idol: How Google is making us stupid, in The Monthly magazine 2 years ago which, I was appalled to discover the other day, won the John Curtin Prize for Journalism in the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards in 2006. I planned a letter to the editor after the article was published, headed "Gideon Haigh is making us stupid"... then found that The Monthly didn't have a "letters to the editor" page. I can't think of any philosophy further from, or more inferior to, a wiki's philosophy of openness and its ability to be corrected.
(Actually there are lots of worse philosophies, notably one-eyed political and religious publications. But as journalists know, hyperbole is much more eye-catching than truth.)