"Is Stupid Making Us Google?" by James Bowman has a fairly self-explanatory title. Are people really so clueless that they have to rely on Google for everything? Bowman argues that, because of a variety of reasons, yes, people's stupidity makes them rely upon Google. Bowman says that children of today never learned the proper deep reading skills, which is why they simply skim articles to look for key points and simply copy them down and site them properly. It's not because they choose not to use their deep reading skills; they lack them. In this article, Bowman quotes an author named Mark Bauerlein who says in his novel, "the model is information retrieval, not knowledge formation, and the material passes from Web to homework paper without lodging in the minds of the students". Teachers, rather than attempting to right this problem, are simply dumbing the work down even further, making it more surface, and prompting the problem rather than stopping it. Modern kids simply rely on Google for all the answers, copy and paste them down, and remember none of them. Most school information given to kids now follows the old saying: in one ear and out the other. Bowman also notes that professors of literature aren't fighting for books or culture to be learned anymore. They're simply letting the past culture slip away rather than truly trying to get their students to learn it for more than ten minutes. The new generation has stopped reading for pleasure and for the sake of learning and is now missing the past from their memory, so it's no wonder they must rely on Google to find the right answers for their homework.
"Is Stupid Making Us Google?" obviously connects to the work it was written in response to, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" by Nicholas Carr. Carr argues that the current generation knows how to read deeply, but chooses to Google instead because it's simpler and therefore because they are unable to read deeply following prolonged advertisement bombardment from the Internet and developing short attention spans. This is the direct opposite of Bowman's work. Like "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", "Is Stupid Making Us Google?" connects with "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants" by Marc Prensky. Prensky's work focuses on the impact of technology on education, specifically that the technological generation is being taught by the previous non-technological generation who cannot seem to teach in a way that grasps the natives' attentions. This is exactly what Bowman is talking about, the disconnect between the current generations' learning and the teaching they're receiving and its inadequacies. However, Prensky argues that the digital immigrants could learn to teach in a way that the digital natives could understand and that this wouldn't harm the students unlike Bowman. Bowman sees that an attempt to please the digital natives' overactive minds while learning would make their education even more surface-skating than it already is.
What is Google's proper place and use in modern education of digital natives?
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