Blogcoven

It is said that in the past, Ancient Greek instructors objected to teaching pupils to read and write too soon because they would lose the cognitive discipline of keeping everything in their heads. The same argument has been repeated over many generations, up until today’s arguments about the use of google and wikipedia.

It’s interesting to read this paper on eye tracking: Measuring the Task-Evoked Pupillary Response with a Remote Eye Tracker. Klinger et al seem to have discovered that mental arithmetic could be vanishing.

There is a common argument that the only area of human endeavour which has had the least benefit of technology is education. I often wonder if that’s because we don’t necessarily want to save time or make education easier; the goal of teaching is as much teaching people how to learn as it is teaching them the content that they are learning.