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Mary Fahey Colbert

Amazon.com: The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memor... - 0 views

  • As the pace of technological change accelerates, we are increasingly experiencing a state of information overload. Statistics show that we are interrupted every three minutes during the course of the work day. Multitasking between email, cell-phone, text messages, and four or five websites while listening to an iPod forces the brain to process more and more informaton at greater and greater speeds. And yet the human brain has hardly changed in the last 40,000 years. Are all these high-tech advances overtaxing our Stone Age brains or is the constant flood of information good for us, giving our brains the daily exercise they seem to crave? In The Overflowing Brain, cognitive scientist Torkel Klingberg takes us on a journey into the limits and possibilities of the brain. He suggests that we should acknowledge and embrace our desire for information and mental challenges, but try to find a balance between demand and capacity. Klingberg explores the cognitive demands, or "complexity," of everyday life and how the brain tries to meet them. He identifies different types of attention, such as stimulus-driven and controlled attention, but focuses chiefly on "working memory," our capacity to keep information in mind for short periods of time. Dr Klingberg asserts that working memory capacity, long thought to be static and hardwired in the brain, can be improved by training, and that the increasing demands on working memory may actually have a constructive effect: as demands on the human brain increase, so does its capacity. The book ends with a discussion of the future of brain development and how we can best handle information overload in our everyday lives. Klingberg suggests how we might find a balance between demand and capacity and move from feeling overwhelmed to deeply engaged. Show More Show Less
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    As the pace of technological change accelerates, we are increasingly experiencing a state of information overload. Statistics show that we are interrupted every three minutes during the course of the work day. Multitasking between email, cell-phone, text messages, and four or five websites while listening to an iPod forces the brain to process more and more informaton at greater and greater speeds. And yet the human brain has hardly changed in the last 40,000 years. Are all these high-tech advances overtaxing our Stone Age brains or is the constant flood of information good for us, giving our brains the daily exercise they seem to crave? In The Overflowing Brain, cognitive scientist Torkel Klingberg takes us on a journey into the limits and possibilities of the brain. He suggests that we should acknowledge and embrace our desire for information and mental challenges, but try to find a balance between demand and capacity. Klingberg explores the cognitive demands, or "complexity," of everyday life and how the brain tries to meet them. He identifies different types of attention, such as stimulus-driven and controlled attention, but focuses chiefly on "working memory," our capacity to keep information in mind for short periods of time. Dr Klingberg asserts that working memory capacity, long thought to be static and hardwired in the brain, can be improved by training, and that the increasing demands on working memory may actually have a constructive effect: as demands on the human brain increase, so does its capacity. The book ends with a discussion of the future of brain development and how we can best handle information overload in our everyday lives. Klingberg suggests how we might find a balance between demand and capacity and move from feeling overwhelmed to deeply engaged.  
Mary Fahey Colbert

Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes by N. Katherine Ha... - 0 views

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    Networked and programmable media are part of a rapidly developing mediascape transforming how citizens of developed countries do business, conduct their social lives, communicate with each other, and perhaps most significantly, how they think.  This essay explores the hypothesis we are in the midst of a generational shift in cognitive styles that poses significant challenges to education at all levels, including colleges and universities.  The shift is more pronounced the younger the age group; already apparent in present-day college students, its full effects are likely to be realized only when youngsters who are now twelve years old reach our institutions of higher education.   To prepare, we need to become aware of the shift, understand its causes, and think creatively and innovatively about new educational strategies appropriate to the coming changes.
Mary Fahey Colbert

The shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains You are not a gadget: A manifest... - 0 views

  • Carr draws extensively from cognitive neuroscience literature to make his deterministic argument that the Internet is changing who we are. He weaves the findings together well, but on closer inspection, his use of the literature is occasionally questionable and at times outright indefensible. He seems to ignore the scientific literature that has actually found that new digital technologies might be better for how we learn (Gardner, 2006) and how we socialize (Pew, 2010). Furthermore, in his discussion of hypertext and the ways it hurts deep thinking, he draws from a Canadian study (Landow & Delaney, 2001) that, as Rosenberg (2010) argues, does not prove Carr's argument. The study was actually analyzing a specific type of hypertext fiction and was never meant to be extended to all hypertext. This example is a microcosm of Carr's book as a whole, a valid argument that extends itself too far.
  • Both Carr and Lanier provide inflammatory arguments about the Internet that will surely anger some readers. The strengths of these books are their ability to question widely held beliefs of digital evangelism and to make their criticisms accessible to mainstream audiences (though Gadget occasionally may get too technical for some). As we discussed above, the books do have their problems, but they may still prove valuable in an undergraduate course or any introduction to media criticism. Students would be able to read accessible accounts questioning widely accepted orthodoxy, and they would also be able to evaluate areas where each author takes his argument further than evidence allows.
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    This is a good review and refutation of some of Nicholas Carr's assertions/arguments in "The Shallows," and it also has some further resources for me to investigate from the references.
Mary Fahey Colbert

Scholars Turn Their Attention to Attention - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Hi... - 0 views

    • Mary Fahey Colbert
       
      Here it is, again, the rub.  If someone believes they are performing well while engaged in several things (i.e. my students), how can you combat that as a teacher?  We see with our beliefs not our eyes.
  • That illusion of competence is one of the things that worry scholars who study attention, cognition, and the classroom. Students' minds have been wandering since the dawn of education. But until recently—so the worry goes—students at least knew when they had checked out. A student today who moves his attention rapid-fire from text-messaging to the lecture to Facebook to note-taking and back again may walk away from the class feeling buzzed and alert, with a sense that he has absorbed much more of the lesson than he actually has.
    • Mary Fahey Colbert
       
      Again, in the classroom, there are so many stimulus driven distractions that the controlled attention function of a number of students is drowned.  The "stimulant" addiction if you will, further undermines focus on content because it doesn't provide "stimulant"!!  It's all so, "Boring!"  
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  • The consensus today is that there are overlapping but neurologically distinct systems: one of controlled attention, which you use to push yourself to read another page of Faulkner, and one of stimulus-driven attention, which kicks in when someone shatters a glass behind you.
  • In other words—to borrow a metaphor from other scholars—people with strong working-memory capacities don't have a larger nightclub in their brains. They just have better bouncers working the velvet rope outside. Strong attentional abilities produce stronger fluid intelligence, Kane and others believe.
    • Mary Fahey Colbert
       
      This is common sense to me, but will working memory improve with practice on focused tasks or not?  As an educator, I believe it will and does, at least to a certain degree.
  • Foerde and her colleagues argue that when the subjects were distracted, they learned the weather rules through a half-conscious system of "habit memory," and that when they were undistracted, they encoded the weather rules through what is known as the declarative-memory system. (Indeed, brain imaging suggested that different areas of the subjects' brains were activated during the two conditions.) That distinction is an important one for educators, Foerde says, because information that is encoded in declarative memory is more flexible—that is, people are more likely to be able to draw analogies and extrapolate from it.
    • Mary Fahey Colbert
       
      This happens in my classroom all of the time!  A student like Cenzo can tell me what was just discussed right after the moment it happened, but he cannot hold onto it for a quiz the next day.
    • Mary Fahey Colbert
       
      I love this!  I am going to try this with my students to illustrate the point.  They cannot be talking or texting secretly in their laps and still get what's going on in class.
  • He might, for example, ask students to recite the letters A through J as fast as possible, and then the numbers 1 through 10. Each of those tasks typically takes around two seconds. Then he asks them to interweave the two recitations as fast as they can: "A, 1, B, 2," and so on. Does that take four seconds? No, it typically requires 15 to 20 seconds, and even then many students make mistakes.
    • Mary Fahey Colbert
       
      Try to find Dr. Hayles' articles on this for a different perspective.
    • Mary Fahey Colbert
       
      Good point.  We are not going to change the tide, so this will be our challenge.
  • And our pedagogical challenge will be to combine hyper attention with deep attention and to cultivate both. And we can't do that if we start by stigmatizing hyper attention as inferior thinking."
    • Mary Fahey Colbert
       
      Good question.
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    Great article, and I think I will look into publishing requirements for this journal.
Mary Fahey Colbert

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains - Nicholas Carr - Google Books - 0 views

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    Find out if Marlboro College Library has a copy of this for loan, and if not buy it on Google books.  It will be an excellent source for one side of this issue of the effects of hypermedia immersion on student learning.  This is the same author of "Is Google making us stupider?"
Mary Fahey Colbert

Ed/ITLib Digital Library → No Access - 0 views

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    Coghlan, M. (2011). Thinking Deeply About the Shallows. In T. Bastiaens & M. Ebner (Eds.), Proceedings of World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications 2011 (pp. 1038-1043). Chesapeake, VA: AACE. Retrieved from http://www.editlib.org/p/37999.   I need to see if Marlboro College Library has access to this paper.
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