Hyperlink Heroin - Jim Scrivener 18th April 2011

Do you manage to focus when you start a search on the Internet? or do you end up miles away from your original destination in a matter of minutes because you were lured by a wealth of pictures, hyperlinks or routes to go elsewhere? Well, join the team! Jim Scrivener talked about the difficulty we are faced with nowadays to actually do only one single thng on the net, and it all boils down to reading and how we read, especially on the net.

A very down-to-earth observation was to say we don't need to teach Internet reading skills to our students - they're already doing that pretty well, thank you. What we can do is maybe encourage them to read with more depth, read for a longer time, reinforce the need to concentrate at times. When on the Internet, we're more 'Staccato readers', going back and forth from page to page, our readng is non-linear and keyword-spotting and we are basically hunter-gatherers.

Jim suggested 2 books for our reference which he used to prepare his talk:

- READING IN THE BRAIN - by Stanislas Dehaene
- THE SHALLOWS - Nicholas Carr