Is Google making us dumber?

This is one of my least favorite questions. It comes up fairly frequently in my master's classes, which discuss educational technology. Every time, I give an emphatic NO, because I personally feel I am quite a bit smarter for having Google, and the internet in general. With Google, every time I get curious about something (or my students get curious about something), I can figure it out. Many times it leads to more questions, which I then find more information on. So, not only can I find answers, I contend that it creates more curiosity!! Before Google, I was much less curious because finding out answers to questions required finding an expert or getting a book, and those were significantly slower methods to finding answers to little things than Google's standard 0.752 seconds, or whatever it is. Hence, in my opinion, Google encourages curiosity. 

That curiosity is driven by lots of things, and Google answers most of my questions. However, sometimes there are questions I didn't even know I wanted to know about. These "preemptive answers come from my favorite podcast, which I highly recommend from HowStuffWorks.com .

Sometimes the topic of each free, 10-20 minute podcast doesn't immediately strike me as interesting, but when I start listening, I'm hooked. Some of my favorites have been: 

• Why orange juice tastes bad after you brush your teeth
• How Delta Force works
• How abandoned cities work
• How OCD works
• Does gum really stay in your stomach for seven years?
• How redheads work

The one I'm dying to listen to next is How Deja Vu works. It is the weirdest thing to me. Anyway, even though some of these address random topics that you think you already understand (or don't care about), they have all kinds of interesting background information that I think is fascinating. They don't just say how stuff works, but also why it works. While I was hiking with the dogs today, I listened to one about how Kevlar bullet-resistant vests work, and how they're developing a new liquid bullet-resistant material. Fascinating :-) So if you're a curious sort like me, go to iTunes, and subscribe to the How Stuff Works podcasts. (No they're not paying me to advertise, but maybe they should!!)