I admit, I’m a little old school. I still like going outside to be with nature. I like cycling, skiing, sailing and hiking. I like listening to the sounds around me and to nature. In essence I like to be disconnect.

Even when teaching for an adaptive ski program I tried to stay disconnected technologically. Although in later years we did carry our cellphones, however these simply replaced the two-way radios we use to have in case of emergencies and there was a strict policy that we could only use them for emergencies when we were teaching.

Being one that likes to disconnect I have been pondering the idea of one being intellectually lazy in today’s world of constant connectivity and just in time or on-demand access to information. Today we are drowning in data and information, but we remain starving for knowledge. Today’s technologies give us rapid access to information that seems to be changing by the second. We live in a world of tweets, radio and TV sound bites, and news feeds with limited information in the headline/abstract and the associated article. We are drowning in stuff but starving for knowledge.

Further, it is becoming harder to discern authoritative information on which to build knowledge. Unless we take the time to dig into the information we have nothing but sensational sound bites meant to lead us in one direction or the other. A case in point is a current protest taking place locally about the impact on water supplies. If you google it you get lots of sound bites, but it is hard to find the meat of the story. Not until I came across an article in a newspaper where we had some good old investigative reporting could I start to get an idea of the issues. However, even this article was too short. To learn more I’d have to dig deeper and it would not be easy.

Thus, in our world of Google, tweets, on-demand, and news feeds have we become intellectually lazy. It is all too easy today to take the sound bites at face value and not learn the real story or the real knowledge. Even when using Google Scholar I wonder what I’m missing. It is all filtered based on key words and I have to assume it has pulled up the most relevant information. However, for those us use who remember exploring books in the library stacks often we would see books next to the one we were looking for and saying to ourselves that may have something of interest in that book that could lead me in a new direction in my thinking. We were intellectually curious. This is not to say that I do not appreciate Google Scholar, but I still find myself looking at the references to the articles and that is what leads me in new and interesting directions.

Also, we all can probably admit that we do not remember phone numbers for addresses anymore the way we use to. First phone numbers and email addresses are fleeting and change frequently so to memorize them may be a waste of time. However, our cognitive capacity that this freed up in our hippocampus/long term memory likely is not being used to expand our knowledge as it may get eaten up in the constant barrage of data and information and dare I say cat YouTube videos.

So are we getting intellectually lazy, or is something else going on. It is an interesting study waiting to be explored, but one would need to be intellectually curious to dig into this topic.

On that note I will sign off and go back to enjoying nature and thinking deeply about the ideas our research group is exploring around cognitive load and working memory, and cooperation vs collaboration in online learning environments.