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Is Google making us stupid? Atlantic contributor Nicholas Carr thinks maybe so. You can read the full article here, but the basic idea is that the way we interact with information on the web is re-wiring our brains, “chipping away” our “capacity for concentration and contemplation.” A few days ago, Trent Batson wrote a wonderful response to Mr. Carr’s article. It made me think about our conversation with students at North Park University this past weekend.

On Saturday, Mark talked about how the internet has changed the way students learn. It’s not an issue of whether this change has taken place, but how we respond to that change. The North Park students seemed to agree. But a few raised concerns that echoed the Atlantic article. Is it possible, they wondered, that students are getting worse at hanging with longer, more complex written material such as … oh, say the Bible?

Reading Mr. Carr’s article, it seems possible we all may be losing some of our ability to concentrate on large portions of any written text. But Mr. Batson’s response suggests that what the web is doing is actually making us better at listening to multiple voices in the learning process:

Our reading on the Web is like listening to a bunch of people talking. What Google and the Web are doing is helping us re-claim our human legacy of learning through a rapid exchange of ideas in a social setting. Google is, indeed, making us smarter as we re-discover new ways to learn.

This is exciting to me because while the Bible is a book, we’ve never relied solely on reading it. We’ve relied on talking about it, and listening to others talk about it. And maybe the new way students are learning is creating an expectation that there should be a variety of voices to learn from, and is also helping them sort through and make those voices useful.

What do you think? How do you see the web affecting the way students learn? Do you see it as a good thing or a bad thing?