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Mary Fahey Colbert

Being Wired Or Being Tired: 10 Ways to Cope With Information Overload | Ariadne: Web Ma... - 0 views

    • Mary Fahey Colbert
       
      This is the first time I've seen this term used and defined.  It is very much what I see in students in my classroom.  Look further into this while researching.
  • A sustained negative neurological effect of information overload has been identified by psychiatrist E.M. Hallowell. He has called this effect Attention Deficit Trait, or ADT. 'It isn't an illness; it's purely a response to the hyperkinetic environment in which we live....When a manager is desperately trying to deal with more input than he possibly can, the brain and body get locked into a reverberating circuit while the brain's frontal lobes lose their sophistication, as if vinegar were added to wine. The result is black-and-white thinking; perspective and shades of gray disappear. People with ADT have difficulty staying organised, setting priorities, and managing time, and they feel a constant low level of panic and guilt.' [5]
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  • University of London researcher Glenn Wilson showed in a 2005 study that people taking an IQ test while being interrupted by emails and phone calls performed an average of 10 points lower than the baseline group without those interruptions. A frightening footnote to this study is that another test group had been tested after smoking marijuana, and they only performed an average of 4 points lower than the baseline group – from which one might reasonably conclude that persistent interruptions have a two-and-a-half times more detrimental effect on the brain than smoking marijuana [4].
  • The overall idea is to take control of the information instead of letting it control you.
  • There are many books about information overload and dealing with information generally. Here are some of my recommendations: Information Anxiety [8] and Information Anxiety 2 [9] by Richard Saul Wurman, Take Back Your Life!: Using Microsoft Outlook to Get Organised and Stay Organised by Sally McGhee [10], Techno Stress: The Human Cost of the Computer Revolution by Craig Brod [11], and TechnoStress: Coping with Technology @ Work @ Home @ Play [12].
  • Today, the most-used interruptive technologies are instant messaging, text messaging, paging, and most recently the micro-blogging technology of Twitter. Why is the interruptive technology a problem? Interruptions make us less effective. But they can also interfere with our attention spans. A Basex survey showed that over 50% of knowledge workers surveyed write emails or IM messages during conference calls [4]. We are participating in these conversations all the time, regardless of other things competing for our primary attention. Controlling our use of these technologies is one of the keys to dealing with information overload.
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

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

Is Technology Making Your Students Stupid? - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Educa... - 0 views

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    I won't have time to read Nicholas Carr's book, "The Shallows," so this interview with him about his assertions in it is useful for my research.
Mary Fahey Colbert

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

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    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

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

Overview of responses | Pew Internet & American Life Project - 0 views

  • Futurist John Smart, president and founder of the Acceleration Studies Foundation, recalled an insight of economist Simon Kuznets about evolution of technology effects known as the Kuznets curve: “First-generation tech usually causes ‘net negative’ social effects; second-generation ‘net neutral’ effects; by the third generation of tech—once the tech is smart enough, and we've got the interface right, and it begins to reinforce the best behaviors—we finally get to ‘net positive’ effects,” he noted. “We'll be early into conversational interface and agent technologies by 2020, so kids will begin to be seriously intelligently augmented by the internet. There will be many persistent drawbacks however [so the effect at this point will be net neutral]. The biggest problem from a personal-development perspective will be motivating people to work to be more self-actualized, productive, and civic than their parents were. They'll be more willing than ever to relax and remain distracted by entertainments amid accelerating technical productivity. “As machine intelligence advances,” Smart explained, “the first response of humans is to offload their intelligence and motivation to the machines. That's a dehumanizing, first-generation response. Only the later, third-generation educational systems will correct for this.”
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

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

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

Academic Leadership Journal - 0 views

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    This is from an older issue, 2004, so I probaby won't use it in my research paper, but it is background information and confirms my own experience with students in high school who think nothing is wrong with plagiarizing and copying each others homework.
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

CITE Journal - Language Arts - 0 views

    • Mary Fahey Colbert
       
      This publication may be very worth reading for my own edification, but I'm considering submitting my research article to it for publication.
  • Articles are encouraged that explore theory, research, and practice—both practical and innovative technology applications
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