reflection on Rowe

ON: Personal Computing: A Source of Powerful Cognitive Tools Helga A.H. Rowe

Computers are tools that can be tailored to individual requirements. Just like a “pencil”, a computer can be used to communicate ideas, create art, or design and invent. The difference is in the ease, complexity and multi-sensorial way these tasks can be accomplished on a computer.

Computers allow people to free their thought processes from basic functions, like memory storage and retrieval and allow us to move onto the complex tasks of sifting, integrating, analysing available information so that we can develop and inventing new, more complex ideas, strategies and solutions.

An added bonus of this is that those who have less efficient memory storage are not hindered in the development of “metacognitive strategies”: “They enable individuals to engage in higher order thinking that helps them to muster cognitive processes that would normally not be available to them without that cognitive tool (Rowe, 1993).”