Thought and digital: what relationships?

Last IPad and digital education summit, held in Montreal on April 30 and 1^er Last May, Mr. François Guité gave an interesting conference on the theme “Thinking and digital technology: what relationships? ". See some notes for those who weren't there and a lot to think about ...

As an introduction to his conference, Mr. Francois Guité, education consultant at the Ministry of Education, Higher Education and Research of Quebec (MEESR), affirms that he observes with the hindsight of time that his own relation to technology has not been even for several years. This has important repercussions on his way of thinking, in particular. He also says he no longer learns the same way. “I also realize that I don't take notes in the same way anymore,” he adds. For him, memorizing is no longer important. He prefers to reflect and synthesize information.

This is why when he sees people, like Stephen Hawking, predicting the end of humanity because of machines, he considers that it is necessary to stop, not to panic, and to think about it all.

Mr. Guité recalls that recently in history, inventiveness has gone beyond human adaptability. For example, he mentions that by 2025, the computer is expected to reach the same computational power as the human brain. "Not the same intelligence, he specifies, but the same computational power ". According to him, the rapid evolution of technology is no longer science fiction, but science-friction, that is to say a tension between what we are able to understand and the magnitude of the phenomena that emerge.

He urges pedagogues to review their speech: "the computer is not just a tool, it's more than that, it's something that transforms us ”. He then refers to recent news about a research identifying the sources of sedentary lifestyle and the strong attraction of teenagers for “screens”. “When we talk about screens, we include television, video games and computers. Yet, have you ever heard the media complain that young people read too much? Yet this is also a source of sedentary lifestyle. "

“Our job as a teacher involves transforming the brains of young people,” he says. However, he believes that we should not only consider the cognitive aspect of intelligence, but also the emotional aspect, ethics and the ability to project oneself into the future. It is probably not tomorrow that the machines will catch up with us on these points ...