Catch the Wave

The online world is absolutely enormous now and I think I tap in to only a very small part of it. Some days I hear about something that’s been around for a while and I wonder how I didn’t know about it when other people did. That’s part of what makes the Internet so much fun. (What will I learn today? How did they do that? How could I use this? How can I find out about …?) The availability and depth of online resources and opportunities are amazing. And we are increasingly expecting other people to have the personal ability and tech capability to access these resources as well. We refer to website, online forms and are using the Internet for communication, collaboration and problem solving.

For some time now I’ve being telling people that using the Internet is making me more intelligent … sometimes they laugh, but I’m serious. So it was interesting to read an article titled ‘The World is getting Smarter’ which mentions ‘The Flynn Effect’. Your IQ is likely to be higher than those of your parents, and your children’s IQs is likely to be higher than yours.
“Our advantage over our ancestors is relatively uniform at all ages from the cradle to the grave,” says Flynn.
Wikipedia gives a possible explanation - ‘The general environment is today much more complex and stimulating. One of the most striking 20th-century change in the human intellectual environment has come from the increase in exposure to many types of visual media. From pictures on the wall to movies to television to video games to computers, each successive generation has been exposed to far richer optical displays than the one before and may have become more adept at visual analysis.’
Flynn’s thesis shows that whole societies can get better at thinking if they’re given the right environment. ‘The mind is supple and the Flynn effect shows that what we value gets stronger.’ This has huge implications for education … and never more so than now.