An active discussion regarding the cognitive and socioeconomic impact of today’s heavy information age, with an observation on preserving the growth of epistemic curiosity in high enrollment college environments.
We live in a data overload information age, wherein search engines are ever-closer to our neural circuitry and the average notification-fragmented attention span of the American college student has digressed to 8 seconds. Concurrently, budget-tight Universities are faced with the challenge of translating the traditional educational classroom value into increasingly large lecture halls and online courses. Through it all, epistemic curiosity, the force that catapulted both literary and scientific advancements of the Renaissance Era, is under attack. The cognitive muscle of question asking is being atrophied by the impulsive urge for answer downloading. Technologically scaling the Socratic Method, en route to the heightened levels of cognition characteristic of epistemic curiosity, is both the challenge and the opportunity in today’s high enrollment online educational landscape. Let’s talk about it.
Having attended this session, participants will be able to:
1. Explain the cognitive degradation risks of the information age
2. Explore the societal impact of today’s “Curiosity Divide”.
3. Conceptualize methods of scaling the Socratic Method in high enrollment & online teaching scenarios.
Audience Engagement:
In this session, an audience member will be asked to describe a time when they were most passionately and enduringly curious about something. That audience member will describe the trigger (“awakening") point of the curiosity, the proceeding learning path it led them to, and the resulting life impact made on the individual.
As the audience member's story is unfolding, the lead presenter will ask other audience members for affirmation to ensure that follow-on audience participation occurs. Various aspects of the curiosity lifecycle will be explained by the lead presenter as the audience member’s story unfolds. Once the audience member's story is completed, the narrator will display several visuals+statistics demonstrating today's “avalanche” of information inherent to the search engine culture. Request for complementary examples along with audience affirmations will be occur throughout the session.
The conclusion of the session will ultimately be lead by co-presenter Brandon Chicotsky, a highly acclaimed faculty member at Johns Hopkins University, describing various tactics for scaling the Socratic Method towards curiosity-based learning in today’s high education environment.