Degrees of meaning
New forms of literacy came up a number of times at the OpenLearn conference and in particular how do we navigate through and make sense of this ever increasingly complex world of digital information and communication? Some of Marc Eisenstadt’s comments in his blog on ‘attention deficient’ resonate with this for me. Marc talks about shifting levels of granularity of things that we focus on which is dependent on the context of what we are interested in at a particular moment in time. For example I might quickly scan through 20 or 30 web sites or spend half an hour reading an online research paper. Or as Marc says:
… one finds when leapfrogging around the blogosphere that there are items that suddenly grab one’s attention. From that moment onwards, it is possible to ‘drill down’ into the minutiae of [pick any topic], and get drawn into a whole new world. If it gets that absorbing, one’s entire focus shifts… a life-long interest in, say, cognitive models of human perception becomes superseded by, say, the reliability of assumptions of variable-independence in certain statistical tests. New authorities are discovered, new literature, new subtleties, new paradigms, new disciplines, and one can drill down deeply into what had previously been just a side problem (like Marlowe getting dressed) yet is now the Top Goal.
And he goes on to say
You could argue that the ability to maintain steady focus is what separates deep thinkers from mere dilettantes. The counter-argument is that serendipitous pathways and disruptive states are only discovered by those who relax such a fixed ‘tunnel vision’ of focus. There’s no need for an ‘either-or’ distinction: one can actually have it both ways.
Which raises two questions in my mind:
Reference
Salomon, G. (1996), ‘Distributed cognitions – psychological and educational considerations’, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
November 13th, 2007 at 8:44 pm
[…] make sense of it all. I’ve posted on aspects of this before ‘New forms of sensemaking’ and ‘Degrees of meaning’. New tools and services are emerging all the time, offering new possibilities for changing how we […]