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Mary Fahey Colbert

The New Atlantis » The Myth of Multitasking - 0 views

    • Mary Fahey Colbert
       
      This whole article is full of names of people who have done studies on the adverse effects of multitasking on learning.  Come back and chase down some of these studies.
  • In one recent study, Russell Poldrack, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that “multitasking adversely affects how you learn. Even if you learn while multitasking, that learning is less flexible and more specialized, so you cannot retrieve the information as easily.”
  • Also, “sensation-seeking” personality types are more likely to multitask, as are those living in “a highly TV-oriented household.” The picture that emerges of these pubescent multitasking mavens is of a generation of great technical facility and intelligence but of extreme impatience, unsatisfied with slowness and uncomfortable with silence: “I get bored if it’s not all going at once, because everything has gaps—waiting for a website to come up, commercials on TV, etc.” one participant said. The report concludes on a very peculiar note, perhaps intended to be optimistic: “In this media-heavy world, it is likely that brains that are more adept at media multitasking will be passed along and these changes will be naturally selected,” the report states. “After all, information is power, and if one can process more information all at once, perhaps one can be more powerful.” This is techno-social Darwinism, nature red in pixel and claw.
Mary Fahey Colbert

Learning & the Brain - Connecting Educators to Neuroscientists and Researchers - 0 views

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    Larry D. Rosen, PhD, Research Psychologist; Professor, Department of Psychology, California State University, Dominguez Hills; Author, REWIRED: Understanding the iGeneration and How They Learn (2010)
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

JSTOR: Export Citations - 0 views

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    Measuring Skills for 21st-Century Learning Elena Silva The Phi Delta Kappan Vol. 90, No. 9 (May, 2009), pp. 630-634 Published by: Phi Delta Kappa International Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27652741
Mary Fahey Colbert

How the New Generation of Well-Wired Multitaskers Is Changing Campus Culture - Technolo... - 0 views

  • Jazzing Up Lectures Question: Are you comfortable with a lecture style that is just a guy speaking to you, or do you think that colleges should add more flair or more pizzazz to lectures through video and PowerPoint, electronic stuff, and so on? Laura: Well, with the professor just lecturing to you it can get boring, so I think they need to. If they do not already have flair, they need to just add a little more instead of just lecturing notes. Deanna: I agree with her 100 percent. When there is a teacher lecturing to you in the front of the room, it is really boring. You do not get involved, and you tend to kind of zone out the whole time. I need more bells and whistles to keep my attention. Anthony: I think what they really should look at is how businesses are doing business because the student could say they want to learn a certain way, but if business is not working like that, they might not be prepared to actually go into the work force. So I think you definitely need to look at what the corporate world is doing and try to match with them in some ways. Going Out Into the Real World Question: How many of you think that when you get out into the work world and you are reaching your sort of earning potential, how many of you think you are going to make more money than your parents did? And do you think you will work as hard as they do? John: I definitely think we are going to be working more than our parents simply because of the integration of technology and the tools that we are required to learn and use in everyday business. ... Technology being there is going to force us to be more productive, so in an eight-hour day we are expected to do four, five, six times as much. Question: But the tool that was supposed to get rid of work makes work.
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

Joanne Cantor: Multitasking exercises - YouTube - 0 views

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    Another clip to watch later that might be helpful for impressing kids with the reason not to multitask while trying to learn.
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

Title:Taking on multitasking: students will continue to media multitask--to their own d... - 0 views

  • Therefore, the impairing effect of multitasking upon learning may be related to reduced brain resources that are available to satisfactorily complete tasks when they're tried together.
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    This looks promising for my research. Come back and read later.
Mary Fahey Colbert

Have Technology and Multitasking Rewired How Students Learn? - 0 views

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    This is a practical look at technology's usefulness in the classroom.  It addresses the idea of multitasking and working memory.
Mary Fahey Colbert

Multitasking Behaviors Mapped to the Prefrontal Cortex: National Institute of Neurologi... - 0 views

    • Mary Fahey Colbert
       
      I wonder if this is the same study referenced in the National Geo article about the teenage brain.  Check this.
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    Tasks performed by the volunteers involved exercises to test working memory, attentional focus, and a combination of the two. All of the subjects, who were healthy, normal volunteers, participated in all of the task groups. The task groups consisted of a control task, a delayed-response task, a dual-task, and a branching conditions task. Dual-task involves changing focus between alternative goals successively. The investigators predicted that subject performance on the individual delayed-response task and dual-task conditions would not activate the FPPC. They did predict that the branching task which involves problem solving and planning would stimulate activity in the FPPC. According to the fMRI data, their predictions were correct. The FPPC was activated only during those tasks that involved an interaction between working memory and attentional focus decisions.
Mary Fahey Colbert

Daily Media Use Among Children and Teens Up Dramatically From Five Years Ago - Kaiser F... - 0 views

    • Mary Fahey Colbert
       
      And here is the crux of the matter for me, is it a cause and effect or not?  Are the kids who are not doing so well sucked into media because they are already prone to this kind of stimulus (meaning they already have attention issues, just not of diagnosable degree) or are all kids being effected in this way?
  • Heavy media users report getting lower grades.  While the study cannot establish a cause and effect relationship between media use and grades, there are differences between heavy and light media users in this regard.  About half (47%) of heavy media users say they usually get fair or poor grades (mostly Cs or lower), compared to about a quarter (23%) of light users.  These differences may or may not be influenced by their media use patterns. (Heavy users are the 21% of young people who consume more than 16 hours of media a day, and light users are the 17% of young people who consume less than 3 hours of media a day.)
Mary Fahey Colbert

Is Technology Producing A Decline In Critical Thinking And Analysis? - 0 views

    • Mary Fahey Colbert
       
      This is so true.  I like the idea of assessing what students know through a visual medium, since that's where their literacy skills lie, but my own experience is that many students don't know how to produce good visuals beyond a PowerPoint.
  • "If you're a pilot, you need to be able to monitor multiple instruments at the same time. If you're a cab driver, you need to pay attention to multiple events at the same time. If you're in the military, you need to multi-task too," she said. "On the other hand, if you're trying to solve a complex problem, you need sustained concentration. If you are doing a task that requires deep and sustained thought, multi-tasking is detrimental."
    • Mary Fahey Colbert
       
      This is common sense.
    • Mary Fahey Colbert
       
      I don't agree with this statement.  It depends on how the teacher decides to deliver the content, and it depends on what the students are doing online.
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    Patricia Greenfield - look up her research at UCLA.  It's from 2009, which was three years ago at this point, so it's not the most current research.  Based on some of the sticky notes others have posted, there are some generalizations made that bare closer scrutiny.
Mary Fahey Colbert

JSTOR: Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, Vol. 52, No. 6 (Mar., 2009), pp. 471-481 - 0 views

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    Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20468390 Good article to sum up an overall picture of the goal of teaching students media literacy.
Mary Fahey Colbert

EBSCOhost: Layering Knowledge: Information Literacy as Critical Thinking in the Litera... - 0 views

Mary Fahey Colbert

School of Education at Johns Hopkins University-Table of Contents - 0 views

    • Mary Fahey Colbert
       
      I read "The Brain-Targeted Teaching Model" and was not impressed.  It's mostly common sense stuff, so I didn't learn any great pearls of wisdom.
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    Some interesting articles, but they are not that useful to my research.
Mary Fahey Colbert

Turning Into Man Machines: Nicholas Carr's "The Shallows" | Strangers on the Shore - 0 views

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    This guy gives a great review of "The Shallows" by Nicholas Carr, and he goes on to talk about how he hopes to see educators come to with appropriate Internet use:           "It's not impossible that educators will come to a consensus about what constitutes healthy Internet usage and we come to think about it in the way we now think about risks to our physical health. Perhaps children in 10 years' time will be taught to do 2 hours' book reading for every hour online." This is the ultimate challenge I see facing me and all of us in the classroom.  We do need to address the reading and empathy piece head on, but how is the question.
Mary Fahey Colbert

Students and the stress of Multitasking - HOME - Edgalaxy: Where Education an... - 0 views

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    Good resource for me for ideas and lesson plans as well as another source for my paper.  The pictorial flow chart about what happens to the brain while multitasking and how information overload occurs is simple and clear.  It will be another good source to share with students.
Mary Fahey Colbert

Nicholas Carr on what the internet is doing to our brains - 0 views

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    I want to download this podcast, so I can play it for students in class, or have them "listen" at home for homework before assigning chapters for homework.
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