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Mary Fahey Colbert

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

www.amazon.com/...0195372883

multitasking education research attention brain working memory books

shared by Mary Fahey Colbert on 28 May 12 - No Cached
  • 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
  • Mary Fahey Colbert on 28 May 12
     
    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

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

chronicle.com/...63746

multitasking education Technology research media learning attention

shared by Mary Fahey Colbert on 27 May 12 - No Cached
    • Mary Fahey Colbert
      Mary Fahey Colbert on 27 May 12
       
      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
      Mary Fahey Colbert on 27 May 12
       
      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!"  
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • 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
      Mary Fahey Colbert on 27 May 12
       
      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
      Mary Fahey Colbert on 27 May 12
       
      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
      Mary Fahey Colbert on 27 May 12
       
      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
      Mary Fahey Colbert on 27 May 12
       
      Try to find Dr. Hayles' articles on this for a different perspective.
    • Mary Fahey Colbert
      Mary Fahey Colbert on 27 May 12
       
      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
      Mary Fahey Colbert on 27 May 12
       
      Good question.
  • Mary Fahey Colbert on 27 May 12
     
    Great article, and I think I will look into publishing requirements for this journal.
Mary Fahey Colbert

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

www.ninds.nih.gov/...e_prefrontal_cortex_051299.htm

multitasking criticalthinking brain Technology education learning

shared by Mary Fahey Colbert on 27 May 12 - No Cached
    • Mary Fahey Colbert
      Mary Fahey Colbert on 27 May 12
       
      I wonder if this is the same study referenced in the National Geo article about the teenage brain.  Check this.
  • Mary Fahey Colbert on 27 May 12
     
    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

Your Brain on Computers - Attached to Technology and Paying a Price - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...07brain.html

digital distraction multitasking edtech brain computers information overload attentiondeficittrait

shared by Mary Fahey Colbert on 27 May 12 - No Cached
  • Mary Fahey Colbert on 27 May 12
     
    Interesting in that it talks about the effects on short-term memory, and they cite their son Conner as having issues in school with homework.
Mary Fahey Colbert

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

www.eric.ed.gov/...detailmini.jsp

multitasking distraction digital brain learning technology

shared by Mary Fahey Colbert on 23 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Mary Fahey Colbert on 23 Jun 12
     
    This is a practical look at technology's usefulness in the classroom.  It addresses the idea of multitasking and working memory.
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