Moving from the Physical Information World to the Virtual

One of my group members, Chen, recently posted in our discussion area about Carr's article on Google. (Carr, N. (2008). Is Google making us stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains. Atlantic Magazine. Retrieved from http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/). She discussed the difference between electronic and paper versions of information.


This made me think of my own journey from print to electronic format. I used to print everything out, highlight, take notes, spread it out to see connections, etc. However, there is so much material in this class that printing out and looking at it that way becomes an obstacle.  I have had to learn to join the digital natives in note taking and forming ideas. 


I currently have a MacBook on which I do most of my work for this class. I have become more acclimated to keeping tabs open on the internet, leaving PDFs open to my last "place" and taking notes on one side of the screen in Word while reading on the right side. I don't know that I would use the features if the electronic version of text has a good tool for taking notes. To keep it all organized, it's easier if I can grab text and put it into a document, because I never know when I will be able to get back to that particular tool. Because many of the articles that I find or are shared in discussions and on the D2L are in PDF, I stick to the standard of taking notes/screenshots in Word.  I still tend to print those notes out so that I can cut apart and manipulate the information when I want.


All this virtual practice is a good skill to develop, I think. The more I move away from printing, highlighting and writing notes on paper, the more my brain has to work to remember what and where the "virtual" information is. I think this may even be prompting my brain cells to work in different ways that make me create connections in my head rather than on paper. 


At the very least, this kind of activity makes me feel smarter.  This gets back to the point that Carr was making about what kinds of information we seek out and how it can either pull us forward in intelligent thought (reading original sources or scholarly articles) or set us back to the basics (reading snippets of information culled from other sources and "cleaned up" for the masses) .