NY Times: Does the Digital Classroom Enfeeble the Mind?

Yesterday's paper had an interesting article discussing the 'digital classroom' of today and how it can destroy creativity and self-thinking in the classroom.

Given my undergraduate degrees in Economics and Computer Science, I spent the past 9 years working in the financial technology sector. At a high level, this means that I implemented large-scale technology solutions for many of the major trading desks and banks on Wall Street. These technology platforms were responsible for creating million-dollar trades in a millisecond, and tracking P&L for the trader, the desk, the bank. Working with such technology forces you to see a dollar value in the system and treat it like any abstract number without fully realizing the value or the power behind it.

Conceptually, this is similar to what Lanier from the New York Times is telling us. A digitized means of teaching, if not carefully harnessed by a teacher who cares, can suck out the meaning and the life in what is being communicated. While we feel constant pressure to keep up with the times and learn to effectively communicate in a digital form, it goes beyond just mastering the latest program. We as designers have a responsibility to keep the human aspect alive in our work and the ability to include this in our designs will propagate a digital world where interacting, feeling, and learning is not just a simulation.