Comments "Brain Drained By Google" By Edward Tenner (Straits Times, Review, 28-Mar-06)

Are we really losing critical ability?

Edward Tenner, as I read from Google’s search engines, is an independent writer. While his page turns up first on Google, he complains in his book “Our Own Devices”, that students are less teachable and less critical due to search engines. Now, being an interested search engine user and teacher of optimization techniques, I looked at is with a bit of surprise. The argument was really a bit of a slippery slope to me. How can you equate the existence of search engines with unteachable students?

Ok, granted I haven’t read the whole book yet, but from what I see, it’s not really all that ‘critical’ an argument… ironic coming from someone claiming that critical thinking has been thrown out the window due to search engines among other things.

I have seen and taught unteachable students, and the problem is certainly not technology. Heck, these are the people who usually can’t even afford it. Even if they did in England (where the survey was done in 1992) the decline of critical ability can’t just be attributed to the existence of search engines and whether or not search engines have problems listing relevant and accurate content.

I’d rather think of the search engine as a very big mind. Inside the mind, there are lots and lots of irrelevant thoughts that appear and disappear, then reappear. In the mind, we have literally trillions of bits of information being generated, and few are meaningful. Dreams, for instance, are like that. Do we always have relevant and meaningful dreams? Heck, I just woke up thinking I was drinking a glass of orange juice. Instead of arguing that my psychoanalytical mind is arranging it for some kind of desire I have of orange juice, let’s admit it – sometimes, some dreams just are not meant to be directly relevant, interpreted or not.

However, in the Googlesphere, I believe that the consciousness of searching is intertwined with the human consciousness. That is, you plough through the focal points of your search, and even if you have items that are poorly organized, the combination of our ability to see and perceive relevance is heightened. So, the machine with out the man, is useless.

Let’s go back to “unteachable” students. I suppose Tenner is referring to research students more than the students I have faced, but I do believe that there are similarities. I actually did a simple podcast of this here and unfortunately, some people believe that there are unteachable students out there. In my opinion, there are critical elements that allow someone to teach, and someone to be teachable.

1. Rapport. Without a positive relationship between teacher and student, both parties will have difficulty even communicating with each other let alone find each other partners in the learning process.
2. Teaching-Learning Style Compatibility . Again, teaching style is important because when you teach, you display a part of your personality. If it doesn’t fit the learning style, your lesson won’t be learnt very well.
3. Classroom Dynamics. I’ve discovered that the simplest change to the environment could set off a change in the behavior of students. Experimenting with seating styles and teaching venues could be useful. There are so many reasons for this including noise and distraction, temperature, lighting, etc that affect the quality of learning.
4. Engagement. Teachers need to learn to engage students better. The critical thinking abilities do not fall apart if teachers encourage thinking without the fear of making a mistake. Also, if engagement is part and parcel of the teaching process, it becomes natural for students to engage in thinking. The main reason why some teachers find that engagement (especially in Asian countries) is difficult is because the relationship is not yet set up. If I asked a question, Asian students will not be primed to answer unless there is a teaching frame that allows them to do so. Most do not have permission to speak in class, and that is the dominant frame – discipline. So teachers need more versatility to draw out the critical thinking abilities in their students.

Where the critical thinking ability of research students is concerned, the first question I would ask is, have they learnt different models for critical thinking? Since the infusion of technology in the education system, my bet is that they have never been given the skills to use and maximize the power of the internet to do their research, and to distinguish fact from fiction. To be able to do this still requires a huge amount of effort. Leveraging the internet has never been easier. In fact, it is still a great source of information, but most people only rely on major search engines rather than those that are relevant to their niche area of research. Who would have known that Amazon.com could provide relevant statistics about the books that have been written? Unless we see it as a useful statistic, it will just simply be irrelevant information floating in cyberspace.

We model the thinking processes in a linear fashion, but need to execute it in a non-linear way. Let me just suppose we were researching on the ethics of cloning. Not only is there a knowledge domain called ‘cloning’ and ‘ethics’, there are interactions between the two. Moreover, there are greater systems that are affected by those thoughts, including the political arena. There is an economic impact. There is a technological impact. There is an educational impact. There is even the impact of this form of research in understanding one’s existence. Now, from statistical evidence, we can draw out lessons and learn from our experimental tests.

However, these tests are devised on a system that is still faulty. After all, when someone says that something is not scientific, they basically shoot themselves in the foot, because there are just some things that is not in the realm of science to explain. One of it is the existence of love. Has it been scientifically proven that love exists? Well, for one I don’t think we really need to prove it to ensure it exists, right? How about this – have we got research to show that if you care for someone else, that person will be more willing to help you? Sure, you can do research on it, but it’s quite a bit of common sense that you don’t really need to prove.

Critical thinking abilities are not formed out of talent. I believe they are formed from constantly engaging the mind in learning cause-effect continuum (what causes what that causes something else), and learning the mechanisms for supporting a point that has been argued, while diffusing rebuttals of the original argument.

Bloggers have a role to play here – if we are to help to build the environment for effective thinking, then please… stop reading those blogs that do nothing but rant. I mean, there are blogs that talk about personal development, struggles and victories, technological advances… and they provide many good ideas. Let’s encourage critical thinking in our own lives and continue to build our thinking competencies in order to come up with better ideas and help to build a better future with those ideas.