Helloooooooo, friends.
Sorry about my hiatus, but I’ve been busy not doing my readings, among other things. Yep. Allow me to introduce Topicmarks, an online text document summary service. All you have to do is to upload a text document or paste the url to the document that you want summarized, then kick back, relax, and let Topicmarks do the reading for you. It then spits out a condensed version of the document that you can read within minutes, including key words and facts that it has determined to be important. Isn’t it awesome? With Topicmarks, you can catch up on your readings without ever reading anything yourself!
Topicmarks is an example of digital technology designed to make the lives of digital natives easier. We think and process information differently than the old folks. We want things fast and now. We want to be able to do multiple things at once. Reading long essays for class just doesn’t cut it. Topicmarks seems to be the perfect solution.
After stumbling upon Topicmarks this morning, I gave it a test run. I uploaded my document - Marc Prensky’s H. Sapiens Digital: From Digital Immigrants and Digital Natives to Digital Wisdom - and waited for it to spit something out at me. Unfortunately, it didn’t come back immediately, as I expected and hoped. Instead, it took 20 minutes to process the 9-page document and prepare the summary. WHAT THE HECK!? This is an outrage! As a software designed in the digital age for busy bodies who don’t have the time to read a huge document, it made me wait the same amount of time that it would have took me to read the whole document myself.
Yes, I could’ve taken that time to do something else productive - perhaps start another reading or study for another class while I waited - but truthfully, I just sat there and browsed through my meaningless connections on Facebook. So ironically, a website that was supposed to make me more productive, made me waste more time. Epic fail.
Is this the future of digital technology? If so, I weep for humanity. I predict that as sites such as Topicmarks gain popularity, more people will lose the ability to read critically and will only be able to take in information in small, fractured bits. Furthermore, students will be unable to write academically because they are so used to taking information in small bits, that they don’t develop the skills to compose an argument effectively.
Is Prensky correct in stating that “the brains of wisdom seekers of the future will be fundamentally different, in organization and in structure, than our brains are today’? If so, then we will need to develop technologies that will write our essays for us. There will be no need to teach how to read or write in classrooms. Grammar and spelling lessons will be obsolete.
What brings about this change in the brains of digital extension users? Are digital technologies making us less efficient? We want everything to be fast paced and easy to understand. We want to be able to multitask and have multiple conversations and interactions at once.
But who said that all digital natives are made to multi-task? For those of you who know be beyond the classroom, you will know that I am unable to walk, text, talk, and chew gum at the same time. I am unable to walk in a straight line, and I bump into everything and everyone in sight while mumbling incoherent sentences. I’m just that classy. It’s really quite a show.
Even when I’m focused on one task, I get distracted too easily. As I’m writing this, I stop after every sentence to re-read what I wrote. Sometimes, I even stop mid-sentence to check my Facebook or Twitter.
Although technology is extending our digital wisdom and engages our ability to take in information, one must question its tradeoffs. Are we giving up our ability to think critically and absorb information from written documents? Are we controlling the amount of information that we want to take in, or is the machine conditioning us to be only able to take in small bits of information? For myself, I think I’ll stick to reading my own readings for now.
Love,
Bonnie and Clyde, reading academic articles.
PS:
For more information on Topicmarks, visit http://topicmarks.com/
Here are a few screen captures of the article I ran through Topicmarks, in case you're interested:
PPS:
For clarification purposes, this post is intended to be a response to blog assignment #2.
How terrifying. But how accurate was the summary you received? Your post seems to assume that the problem is the fragmentation of information, but how do you even know the "fragments" you get accurately reflect the article?
ReplyDelete