Don't Trust Me

So here's the mundane question of the week: "Is the Internet making kids dumb?" Seems a marginally scientific study found that seventh graders, after being asked to research the 'tree octopus' and being directed to the Save The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus site, believed that the tree octopus was real.

Then this group of students (25 of them to be exact) were told that the story of the endangered cephalopods was actually a decade's old hoax. Har har. What a way to kid a kid. However, even after being let in on the joke, about half the students continued to believe the species was real.

The researcher, Dr. Donald Leu, concluded that "anyone can publish anything on the Internet and today's students are not prepared to critically evaluate the information they find there." I must agree.

In fact, his statement reminds me of an incident a few months ago with a friend and her nine-year-old niece. The niece said that her teacher told her to never trust Wikipedia because anybody can edit it. Well, I think my response was something like "you should be skeptical of everything on the Internet."

But a better answer would have been more like "the world is a stream of unfiltered data, and you need to be skeptical of everything, even your teachers and your schoolbooks. But at least on Wikipedia you can click the 'discussion' tab and find out the who, what, and why behind edits. Also, every article has a thorough reference section that lists sources independent of Wikipedia. I'm shocked your teacher would blacklist such a useful resource."

Ironically, if any of the kids in the aforementioned study had looked up Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus on Wikipedia, they would have learned it was a hoax.

Wikipedia is one awesome and important piece of the Internet, and kids shouldn't be scared away from it. The trick we need to teach kids is to not passively read it, but to purposefully edit it. By taking part in a project that is both cooperative and complex, I think kids will become better thinkers.

And I believe this was actually the point of Dr. Leu's research: A new type of literacy is required for this generation of students. This isn't about the Internet making them dumb. It's about the presumption that kids are innate Internet experts when in reality they must be taught a whole new set of comprehension skills.

Don't trust my conclusion though. Check out Dr. Leu's PowerPoint presentation yourself.

Clicking Aimlessly

The Internet is supposed to make us smarter. Where have I heard that before? Oh, it's the tagline of this blog which, by the way, is a quip I borrowed from comedian Lewis Black.

The truthiness of that supposition, though, seems to be a hot topic this week.

Clay Shirky, who teaches New Media as an associate professor at NYU, talks about the media revolution in his article Does the Internet Make You Smarter:

Every increase in freedom to create or consume media, from paperback books to YouTube, alarms people accustomed to the restrictions of the old system, convincing them that the new media will make young people stupid. This fear dates back to at least the invention of movable type.

He makes a good case that increased freedom to create gives us all kinds of silly, time-wasting distractions. For example cute cat videos, Farmville and the House Republicans' web site. But we also get revolutionary tools like Wikipedia which, according to Shirky, is becoming the most important English reference work since its creation in 2001.

But even the "good stuff" can distract me as I demonstrated in my Six Degrees of Wikipedia post last year.

Obviously there's a massive amount of informative, interesting stuff out there. I load a program called Trillian, which manages all my chat accounts, plus my Facebook and Twitter streams, and I'm instantly inundated with all kinds of witty comments and links to interesting news articles. I want to click each and every one because now I'm aware that there is something I don't know! Now I'm aware that there's new information I'm not aware of!

And knowing that there's something I don't know doesn't make me feel smart. It gives me an urgent feeling that I'm falling behind all those other smart people out there. So I read as much as I can, yet I can't commit it all to my long-term memory. Damn it.

I know I'm a total multitasker because the New York Times told me so. I scored 100% on both their Test How Fast You Juggle Tasks quiz and their Test Your Focus quiz.

But I'm not sure what those results really mean. In fact, asking whether the Internet makes us smart or dumb might be the wrong question. A better question is "What kind of brain is the web giving us?"

I think the most alarming part of this NYT story about a guy hooked on gadgets was the theory that heavy technology use diminishes empathy by limiting how much people engage with one another.

There's further evidence that the web is turning us into shallower thinkers with weak reading comprehension:

Navigating linked documents, it turned out, entails a lot of mental calisthenics—evaluating hyperlinks, deciding whether to click, adjusting to different formats—that are extraneous to the process of reading. Because it disrupts concentration, such activity weakens comprehension. A 1989 study showed that readers tended just to click around aimlessly when reading something that included hypertext links to other selected pieces of information. A 1990 experiment revealed that some “could not remember what they had and had not read.”

Even though the World Wide Web has made hypertext ubiquitous and presumably less startling and unfamiliar, the cognitive problems remain. Research continues to show that people who read linear text comprehend more, remember more, and learn more than those who read text peppered with links.

Well, that's discouraging. Here I am trying to inform and entertain, and yet, hyperlink by hyperlink, I'm slowly turning my audience into uncaring, scatter-brained introverts. That should be my new tagline.

Is Our Children Learning?

"Hey everybody! It's Leif Erikson Day!" That's how my nephew suddenly interrupted the dinner conversation the other night. Well, the outburst got our attention. It wasn't Leif Erikson Day though, but apparently my nephew had been informed by this Spongebob episode:


(YouTube video)

Now that the six-year-old had everybody's attention, his grandpa asked him if he knew who Leif Erikson was.

"A viking!" my nephew exclaimed!

"And how long ago did he live," grandpa asked.

"Oh, about 100 years ago," the kid said with a thoughtful expression.

"Try about 1000 years ago," cranky grandpa said.

"And his real name was CHARLIE!" my nephew added with quite a bit of confidence.

"That's not even a Nordic name!" Grandpa was now officially arguing with a six-year-old.

I leaned over to my nephew (he is my favorite nephew), and I said, "We can fix that. I'll teach you how to edit Wikipedia."

That's a joke, of course. But I think in Texas, they actually get their history curriculum from Conservapedia. Much like Conservapedia's ill-conceived project to correct the Bible, the Texas Board of Education wants to put a conservative spin on history, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government, justifying McCarthyism, and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.

This radical right-wing rewrite is insane, but what I find most frightening is throwing Thomas Jefferson down the memory hole. As you should know, Jefferson was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, and he is generally attributed with the phrase "separation of church and state."

Conservatives are so irked by that phrase that the Texas BOE refused to require that students learn that the Constitution prevents the U.S. government from promoting one religion over all others! The "party of God" is probably still upset over some landmark rulings regarding public schools and religion.

But that metaphorical "wall of separation" protects both the church and the government. The founding fathers were a mixture of deists, Christians, and possibly one atheist, but they were all too familiar with the problems of state sponsored religion in Europe.

But the Texas BOE needs an education... and don't even get me started on their views on evolution. Modern science and the principals of democracy are both too complicated for the clowns in charge.

Usually here is where I'd conclude with some witty comparison between the Texas BOE and Spongebob, but I don't want to insult Spongebob.

Six Degrees of Wikipedia

Everybody is still talking about the Swine Flu. Authorities in Mexico say they have identified a latter-day "Typhoid Mary." Of course, I'm aware of the term "Typhoid Mary" to describe a carrier of a contagious disease, but I wanted to know the full scoop. I wanted to know the real story of Mary. Wikipedia to the rescue:

Typhoid Mary was Mary Mallon. She was the first person in the United States to be identified as a healthy carrier of Typhoid Fever. The concept that a person could spread disease and remain healthy was not well known at the time. She was eventually taken into custody and held in isolation for three years at a hospital located on North Brother Island. Eventually a new health inspector freed Mallon under the condition she agreed to no longer work as a cook. However, she did return to her previous occupation, and in 1915 infected 25 more people. She was quarantined on the island again where she lived out the rest of her life. She died in 1938.

I've never heard of this North Brother Island. I guess I've seen too many horror and sci-fi movies, and the idea of an island hospital to quarantine sick people sounds creepy. I clicked the Wikipedia link and was not disappointed. North Brother Island is in New York City's East River. Years after the hospital closed, the island housed a center to treat adolescent drug users, but widespread staff corruption and patient recidivism forced the facility to close. However, the island is more famous for the wreck of the SS General Slocum which burned on June 15, 1904.

Ah, my itchy clicky finger twitches! The SS General Slocum was a steamship launched in 1891. The passenger ship suffered a series of unfortunate mishaps including the time it was carrying 900 intoxicated Paterson Anarchists who decided to riot! Imagine that? But the final disaster likely started with a discarded cigarette or match. Fire! The passengers' rescue was complicated by the fact that the dryrotted hoses fell apart, the lifeboats were tied up and inaccessible (How could they know? Titanic wouldn't be released for another 93 years!), and the life preservers had iron bars inside them! More than 1,000 people died in the accident.

Who would want this clusterfuck of a ship named after them? And is Slocum really pronounced the way I think it's pronounced? Clicky clicky. Henry Warner Slocum was a Union general during the American Civil War and later served in the United States House of Representatives from New York. He earned the derogatory nickname "Slow Come" because he was indecisive on the battlefield.

And that is a Six Degrees of Wikipedia dead end. Nothing about Henry Warner Slocum inspires me to click ahead. But didn't we learn something today? And more importantly, isn't Swine Flu fun?

Our See-Through Government

Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for us about what our Government is doing. As if our Government knows what they themselves are doing.

I certainly don't think Congress knows what they're doing. Do you? Yesterday we learned that nobody knows who killed a provision in the stimulus package that would have curtailed bonuses at bailed out companies like AIG:

Building on public outrage and presidential denunciations of executives at bailed out companies getting bonuses, Wyden and his Republican colleague, Sen. Olympia Snowe, crafted a provision in the stimulus bill that would have forced bailout recipients to cap their bonuses at $100,000 (any amount above that would be taxed at 35 percent).

According to Wyden, he "spent hours on the Senate floor," working to get the bipartisan amendment passed. He succeeded -- not a single Senator voted against the provision. "But," says Wyden, "it died in conference."

We've seen this monkey business before. In 2007, as news of the purged U.S. attorney scandal spread, the big question was "who changed the Patriot Act to make it easier to replace U.S. attorneys without oversight?"

Before we get all rabble roused again, let's not forget that computer geeks already have an amazing, simple, and well tested tool that enables worldwide collaboration on open-source software. It's called version control software, and you've probably seen it in action if you've ever clicked the history tab on any Wikipedia article. But here's what version control could mean for Congress:

If bills were created under a system where strike-throughs and additions were carefully tracked, the public would know which legislator made which change to a proposed piece of legislation as it made its way through the Capitol.

At last, there would be transparency in the legislative process. Best-case scenario, it would shame legislators from inserting language against the public interest and only meant to reward political contributors; at worst, it would make such insertions public and allow the voters to punish the politicians who made them.

Ah, but will Congress ever agree to this innovation? It would change the whole way they do business... but isn't that what we voted for? Change?

We finally have a tech savvy President who has promised to appoint a Chief Technology Officer in addition to the already appointed Chief Information Officer. I hope they together will push our men and women in Washington -- though they'll be kicking and screaming I presume -- into this millennium. We urgently need a new see-through government.

Now if only we can create software that tracks whether members of Congress actually read these laws that they pass.

In Popular Culture

Who invented the inflatable sex doll? Why would I even wonder about this? I was reading Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk and got to the part where one character claimed that Adolf Hitler invented the blow-up sex doll. Of course I was skeptical. It's not that the author would lie to me, but Snuff is a work of fiction and the character making the claim was a bit deceitful.

So off to Wikipedia I go. I find this entry about sex dolls, and skim the article for info on an inventor, but find nothing... except near the bottom in the "In Popular Culture" section where they mention Snuff. How funny, but also kind of useless. It told me nothing about the veracity of the passage.

And that's the funny thing about Wikipedia, the Internet's Democratic encyclopedia. The "In Popular Culture" section can be interesting. It can provide inspiration. It can gauge what the online public really cares about. It can be useless.


The above web comic summed up the encyclopedia's controversy, and at the same time started its own controversy. (Who would have thought that Internet geeks could take a joke too far?)

However, let's keep in mind that Wikipedia isn't constructed by elitist academics. It's open for the public to edit. Nobody should be surprised that a lot of our knowledge is based on pop culture. Wikipedia gives us a place in a nice little section to write it all down endlessly.

Maybe the Wikipedia webmasters could allow readers to hide the "In Popular Culture" section if so desired.

However, the section doesn't bother me. Mostly I find Wikipedia helpful, but not this time. I still needed an answer about the sex dolls. So off to Google I go. I find this page which thoroughly answers my question.

Talking about Appeasement

Just about everybody has seen this video of Chris Matthews shredding neocon radio personality Kevin James, but it's so funny I must remark on it:



So what happened here? I mean besides Chris Matthews humiliating this Kevin James kid who I had never heard of before. My take on this video is that somebody handed Kevin a 3x5 index card of "key terms," and he arrogantly went up against people who know much, much more than he does. Kevin needs to learn that Google, Wikipedia, and history books are his friends. It would have taken 2 minutes to research why Neville Chamberlain is considered an appeaser. In fact, the Munich Agreement is mentioned in the second paragraph of Neville Chamberlain's Wikipedia entry.

While on Wikipedia, Kevin could have also researched the word "appeasement":

Most commonly, appeasement is used for the policy of accepting the imposed conditions of an aggressor in lieu of armed resistance, usually at the sacrifice of principles. Usually it means giving in to demands of an aggressor in order to avoid war. Since World War II, the term has gained a negative connotation in the British government, in politics and in general, of weakness, cowardice and self-deception.

And then Kevin, if capable, could have pondered a bit... does this describe Barack Obama? Who has Obama appeased? Obama wants to talk to Iran instead of starting another knee-jerk war. Talking does not mean appeasement.

Ronald Reagan, the patron saint of conservatives, was considered by some to be an appeaser. He met with Gorbachev to negotiate a reduction in nuclear weapons... a reduction in both countries' arsenals. And while Reagan was at these summits with Gorbachev, he also convinced him to allow a little more Democracy in the old USSR. I'm not sure what exactly Reagan said, but it must have been one of those "ingenious arguments" that George W. Bush can't fathom.

In the past few years, there has been quite a devolution in diplomacy. I can summarize Bush's idea of negotiations: first, the other country must pre-concede to all our demands. Then, maybe we'll sit down to talk. Upon meeting with the other leaders, we'll tell them exactly which of their demands we will compromise on or ignore. Then, quite possibly, we'll bomb them anyway.

At the heart of this mentality is a craving for war which I will never understand.