Subject: (no subject)
From: Leslie Henrickson (lhenrick@ucla.edu)
Date: Tue 09 May 2000 - 08:34:08 MEST
Date: Mon, 08 May 2000 23:34:08 -0700 From: Leslie Henrickson <lhenrick@ucla.edu>
List address to send message to everyone: ifets-discuss@LISTSERV.READADP.COM
Details of current discussion: http://ifets.ieee.org/discussions/discuss.html
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Alan Cooper wrote:
<< But I suppose the real thrust of Muhammad's posting was to raise the
question of whether any of these enhancements, whether remedial or
expansive, actually do anything to improve the intellect or affect our
educational activities.
I think they do.
My thesis tonight is that it was real, and this brings us to the issue of
intellectual enhancement.
My own experience in handling a small amount of knowledge is that when we
learn stuff we don't immediately "remember" all of it. Sometimes we have to
think to "bring it back", and even with older technologies it was often
more important to know the existence and location of a lot of information
than to recall a smaller part of it in complete detail. We do this
"bringing back" by means of mental links - either crude and artificial
mnemonics or genuine mental maps of the intellectual landscape. And while
technology may not change the quality of our map or the effeciency of our
retrieval process, it may well allow us to devote more of our brain to a
kind of biological FAT and less to the actual data items. Thus my friend
and I might take some credit for the success of our search by thinking that
our ability to generate appropriate starting points even when we lacked the
actual information in our own local memories. And with our brains plugged
in to the net, we really were "superminds".
Wow! Hey, if it makes you feel good, believe it!
<<
I hope you don't mind the personal interpretation I'll give
your quotes. I do so in reference to my previous post/response of
Kort/Henrickson on the role of narrative in developing personal identity.
1. the mental links can be linked to the stories we tell ourselves about
the important things in our lives that need to be remembered.
2. I'd say that Cooper's description has just illustrated a narrative
story about developing a "mental link" to personal identity that was
directly related to interacting with communications technology.
Leslie
---------------------------------------------------------
Forum website: http://ifets.ieee.org/
Forum's contact person: kinshuk@massey.ac.nz
Info on Join/Leave List: http://ifets.ieee.org/maillist.html
---------------------------------------------------------
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a24 : Wed 10 May 2000 - 00:55:26 MEST