Skip to main content

Home/ Diigo In Education/ Group items tagged distracted

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Ann Steckel

BBC News - Is multi-tasking a myth? - 36 views

  • What that suggests, the researchers say, is that multi-task are more easily distracted by irrelevant information. The more we multi-task, the less we are able to focus properly on just one thing.
  • A raft of studies has found that, actually, multi-tasking is a good way to do several things badly.
  • We're not really multi-tasking. We're switching between tasks in an unfocused or clumsy way."
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Amazing, but as it turns out, quite logical. "The brain has very specialised modules for different tasks, like language processing and spatial recognition. It stands to reason that two similar tasks are much harder to do simultaneously, because they're using similar bits of tissue."
  • Driving and talking doesn't use the same bits of brain. Answering an e-mail while chatting on the phone does. In effect, we are creating information bottlenecks.
Adam Babcock

Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction - NYTimes.com - 63 views

  • Bypassing Vonnegut, he clicks over to YouTube, meaning that tomorrow he will enter his senior year of high school hoping to see an improvement in his grades, but without having completed his only summer homework. On YouTube, “you can get a whole story in six minutes,” he explains. “A book takes so long. I prefer the immediate gratification.”
  • is that developing brains can become more easily habituated than adult brains to constantly switching tasks — and less able to sustain attention.
  • plays video games 10 hours a week
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • regularly sends Facebook status updates at 2 a.m., even on school nights
  • his best friend calls him a “YouTube bully.”
tom campbell

The Creativity Crisis - 62 views

  • Another is the lack of creativity development in our schools.
  • Researchers say creativity should be taken out of the art room and put into homeroom. The argument that we can’t teach creativity because kids already have too much to learn is a false trade-off. Creativity isn’t about freedom from concrete facts. Rather, fact-finding and deep research are vital stages in the creative process. Scholars argue that current curriculum standards can still be met, if taught in a different way.
  • A fine example of this emerged in January of this year, with release of a study by University of Western Ontario neuroscientist Daniel Ansari and Harvard’s Aaron Berkowitz, who studies music cognition. They put Dartmouth music majors and nonmusicians in an fMRI scanner, giving participants a one-handed fiber-optic keyboard to play melodies on. Sometimes melodies were rehearsed; other times they were creatively improvised. During improvisation, the highly trained music majors used their brains in a way the nonmusicians could not: they deactivated their right-temporoparietal junction. Normally, the r-TPJ reads incoming stimuli, sorting the stream for relevance. By turning that off, the musicians blocked out all distraction. They hit an extra gear of concentration, allowing them to work with the notes and create music spontaneously. Charles Limb of Johns Hopkins has found a similar pattern with jazz musicians, and Austrian researchers observed it with professional dancers visualizing an improvised dance. Ansari and Berkowitz now believe the same is true for orators, comedians, and athletes improvising in games.
  •  
    bring on the improv!
Ed Webb

Innovate: H. Sapiens Digital: From Digital Immigrants and Digital Natives to Digital Wi... - 0 views

  •  
    Important revision of the frankly distracting "digital native/digital immigrant" discourse.
andrew torris

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

  • "As students spend more time with visual media and less time with print, evaluation methods that include visual media will give a better picture of what they actually know
  • reading develops imagination, induction, reflection and critical thinking, as well as vocabulary," Greenfield said. "Reading for pleasure is the key to developing these skills. Students today have more visual literacy and less print literacy. Many students do not read for pleasure and have not for decades."
    • Dana Huff
       
      When was this magical time in the past when the majority of children read for pleasure?
    • Dana Huff
       
      Interesting point about fanfiction. The way we read is definitely changing. We are becoming more participatory
  • ...3 more annotations...
    • Dana Huff
       
      This doesn't mean that technology is to blame. The students were encouraged to use the Internet for what? I'll bet they were given no guidance and used it for whatever they wanted. No wonder they were distracted.
  • Adapted from materials provided by University of California - Los Angeles.
    • andrew torris
       
      For the source article (which is not much better) is at this link. Go leave a comment or two.
  • "Wiring classrooms for Internet access does not enhance learning," Greenfield said.
    • andrew torris
       
      will agree here. Wiring does not improve learning. What improves learning is teaching educators how to engage students to use the "wiring" to create, collaborate, share and publish. The net and "wires" allows students to delve deep into learning and apply their research rather that sit and "git".
  •  
    Worth thinking!
Tony Baldasaro

Classrooms Go High-Tech to Engage Students - US News and World Report - 0 views

  • destroyed the boundaries of classrooms
  • Some may see this as a distraction, but students are used to multitasking
  •  
    Article about using technology in higher education to keep students engaged in learning.
Mr. Loftus

Texting vs. Teaching: Who Wins? - Class Struggle - Jay Mathews on Education - 0 views

  •  
    The standard adminstrative response is to try a new rule--like texting only during lunch--that might or might not alleviate the problem, when the answer to almost every educational mishap or distraction is not more rules, but more good teaching.
Phil Taylor

4 Tips for Integrating Social Media Into the Classroom - 45 views

  • Instead of dismissing social media as distracting or destructive, schools should embrace it as an essential part of the curriculum. Not only does this limit the potential for students to abuse the technology, but it opens a new set of valuable educational tools.
Leslie Raffelson

Weblogg-ed » Don't, Don't, Don't vs. Do, Do, Do - 57 views

  • “Do use our network to connect to other students and adults who share your passions with whom you can learn.” “Do use our network to help your teachers find experts and other teachers from around the world.” “Do use our network to publish your best work in text and multimedia for a global audience.” “Do use our network to explore your own creativity and passions, to ask questions and seek answers from other teachers online.” “Do use our network to download resources that you can use to remix and republish your own learning online.” “Do use our network to collaborate with others to change the world in meaningful, positive ways.”
    • Leslie Raffelson
       
      We have bandwidth issues and the issue of students just plain being distracted in school. I see that as a challenge to teachers to teach better rather than letting the teachers sit back and teach the same old way. Figure out a better way to engage students. 
  • Do some students watch the Kanye West dissing Taylor Swift video on YouTube when they should be doing their work? Of course they do. But this experience has shown me that THIS IS THE WAY students should be learning…
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • ast year, my high school Current Events students told me that the more rules the school made, the more they, the students, would look for ways around the rules.
  •  
    The Doo's we need to tell our students to do in school instead of the Don'ts. How can we challenge students with these doo's?
Stan Golanka

Reading and the Web - Texts Without Context - NYTimes.com - 49 views

  • It’s also a question, as Mr. Lanier, 49, astutely points out in his new book, “You Are Not a Gadget,” of how online collectivism, social networking and popular software designs are changing the way people think and process information, a question of what becomes of originality and imagination in a world that prizes “metaness” and regards the mash-up as “more important than the sources who were mashed.”
    • Stan Golanka
       
      Core discussion topic? From this, I see a few discussion issues: 1. Do we prize "mash-ups" more than original work? Who is "we" in this? 2. If the answer to #1 is "yes," then the next question is: is this good or bad? 3. Finally, if the answer is "bad" to #2, what place do "mash-ups" have, and how do we help our students see the value in original work?
  • Web 2.0 is creating a “digital forest of mediocrity” and substituting ill-informed speculation for genuine expertise;
    • Stan Golanka
       
      How do teachers help students rise above this "digital forest of mediocrity"?
  • Mr. Johnson added that the book’s migration to the digital realm will turn the solitary act of reading — “a direct exchange between author and reader” — into something far more social and suggested that as online chatter about books grows, “the unity of the book will disperse into a multitude of pages and paragraphs vying for Google’s attention.”
    • Stan Golanka
       
      If Johnson's predictions are true, is this necessarily bad? How much of this concern is "nostalgia"? What would be lost from an academic p.o.v, and what migh be gained?
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Instead of reading an entire news article, watching an entire television show or listening to an entire speech, growing numbers of people are happy to jump to the summary, the video clip, the sound bite — never mind if context and nuance are lost in the process; never mind if it’s our emotions, more than our sense of reason, that are engaged; never mind if statements haven’t been properly vetted and sourced.
    • Stan Golanka
       
      Should teachers "fight" this, or embrace it? Can summaries/sound bites ever be appropriate for academic discussions?
  • And online research enables scholars to power-search for nuggets of information that might support their theses, saving them the time of wading through stacks of material that might prove marginal but that might have also prompted them to reconsider or refine their original thinking.
  • Digital insiders like Mr. Lanier and Paulina Borsook, the author of the book “Cyberselfish,” have noted the easily distracted, adolescent quality of much of cyberculture. Ms. Borsook describes tech-heads as having “an angry adolescent view of all authority as the Pig Parent,” writing that even older digerati want to think of themselves as “having an Inner Bike Messenger.”
    • Stan Golanka
       
      Can teachers moderate this attitude? Does our (adults) use/non-use of technology help breed this attitude?
  • authors “will increasingly tailor their work to a milieu that the writer Caleb Crain describes as ‘groupiness,’ where people read mainly ‘for the sake of a feeling of belonging’ rather than for personal enlightenment or amusement. As social concerns override literary ones, writers seem fated to eschew virtuosity and experimentation in favor of a bland but immediately accessible style.
    • Stan Golanka
       
      Does this ring true to educators? Are social concerns and literary conerns opposites? How does web publishing affect "literary" publishing, as opposed to "non-literary" publishing?
  • However impossible it is to think of “Jon & Kate Plus Eight” or “Jersey Shore” as art, reality shows have taken over wide swaths of television,
Jac Londe

Keys to long life: Longevity study unearths surprising answers - 41 views

  • Keys to long life
  • Friedman and Leslie R. Martin , a 1996 UCR alumna (Ph.D.) and staff researchers, have published those findings in "The Longevity Project: Surprising Discoveries for Health and Long Life from the Landmark Eight-Decade Study" (Hudson Street Press, March 2011).
  • It's never too late to choose a healthier path, Friedman and Martin said. The first step is to throw away the lists and stop worrying about worrying. "Some of the minutiae of what people think will help us lead long, healthy lives, such as worrying about the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids in the foods we eat, actually are red herrings, distracting us from the major pathways," Friedman said. "When we recognize the long-term healthy and unhealthy patterns in ourselves, we can begin to maximize the healthy patterns." "Thinking of making changes as taking 'steps' is a great strategy," Martin advised. "You can't change major things about yourself overnight. But making small changes, and repeating those steps, can eventually create that path to longer life."
Keith Rowley

Brief meditative exercise helps cognition - 5 views

  • "Simply stated, the profound improvements that we found after just 4 days of meditation training- are really surprising," Zeidan noted. "It goes to show that the mind is, in fact, easily changeable and highly influenced, especially by meditation."
  • The meditation training involved in the study was an abbreviated "mindfulness" training regime modeled on basic "Shamatha skills" from a Buddhist meditation tradition
  • "Findings like these suggest that meditation's benefits may not require extensive training to be realized, and that meditation's first benefits may be associated with increasing the ability to sustain attention,"
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • seems to be strong evidence for the idea that we may be able to modify our own minds to improve our cognitive processing -- most importantly in the ability to sustain attention and vigilance -- within a week's time."
  • Both groups also improved following the meditation and reading experiences in measures of mood, but only the group that received the meditation training improved significantly in the cognitive measures. The meditation group scored consistently higher averages than the reading/listening group on all the cognitive tests and as much as ten times better on one challenging test that involved sustaining the ability to focus, while holding other information in mind. "The meditation group did especially better on all the cognitive tests that were timed," Zeidan noted. "In tasks where participants had to process information under time constraints causing stress, the group briefly trained in mindfulness performed significantly better."
  • participants were instructed to relax, with their eyes closed, and to simply focus on the flow of their breath occurring at the tip of their nose. If a random thought arose, they were told to passively notice and acknowledge the thought and to simply let 'it' go, by bringing the attention back to the sensations of the breath."
  • "The simple process of focusing on the breath in a relaxed manner, in a way that teaches you to regulate your emotions by raising one's awareness of mental processes as they're happening is like working out a bicep, but you are doing it to your brain. Mindfulness meditation teaches you to release sensory events that would easily distract, whether it is your own thoughts or an external noise, in an emotion-regulating fashion.
  • "This kind of training seems to prepare the mind for activity, but it's not necessarily permanent," Zeidan cautions. "This doesn't mean that you meditate for four days and you're done -- you need to keep practicing."
Taylor Rankin

Desalination: Option Or Distraction For A Thirsty World? - 58 views

    • Taylor Rankin
       
      Read the Article!!!
  •  
    discusses the positives and negatives of desalination
Lucy De Palma

Straight Hair Is Knottier Than Curly Hair: Scientific American - 78 views

    • Lucy De Palma
       
      How much adverising is used? Is it distracting? What is being advertised?
    • Lucy De Palma
       
      Who is publishing/sponsoring this site? What is their background/reputation
Kurt Schmidt

A Perfect Storm in Undergraduate Education, Part 2 - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher E... - 43 views

  • But, in the past few generations, the imagery and rhetoric of academic marketing have cultivated a belief that college will be, if not decadent, at least primarily recreational: social activities, sporting events, and travel.
  • Increasingly, students are buying an "experience" instead of earning an education, and, in the competition to attract customers, that's what's colleges are selling.
  • a growing percentage of students are arriving at college without ever having written a research paper, read a novel, or taken an essay examination. And those students do not perceive that they have missed something in their education; after all, they have top grades. In that context, the demands of professors for different kinds of work can seem bewildering and unreasonable, and students naturally gravitate to courses with more-familiar expectations.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Students increasingly are pressured to go to college not because they want to learn (much less become prepared for the duties of citizenship), but because they and their parents believe—perhaps rightly—that not going will exclude them from middle-class jobs.
  • At most universities, a student is likely to be unknown to the professor and would expect to feel like a nuisance, a distraction from more important work.
  • As academic expectations have decreased, social programming and extracurricular activities have expanded to fill more than the available time. That is particularly the case for residential students, for whom the possibility of social isolation is a source of great anxiety.
  • College has become unaffordable for most people without substantial loans; essentially they are mortgaging their future in the expectation of greater earnings. In order to reduce borrowing, more and more students leave class early or arrive late or neglect assignments, because they are working to provide money for tuition or living expenses.
  • As students' anxiety about the future increases, no amount of special pleading for general-education courses on history, literature, or philosophy—really anything that is not obviously job-related—will convince most students that they should take those courses seriously.
  • But at the major universities, most professors are too busy to care about individual students, and it is easy to become lost amid a sea of equally disenchanted undergraduates looking for some kind of purpose—and not finding it.
  • we need to make "rigorous and high-quality educational experiences a moral imperative."
  •  
    ". . . we need to make 'rigorous and high-quality educational experiences a moral imperative.'"
Steve Ransom

Electronic Devices Redefine Quality Family Time - NYTimes.com - 31 views

  • “The family was in the same room, but not together,”
  • One family. One room. Four screens. Four realities
  • Never has there been so much to consume, on so many devices.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The transformation of the American living room into a multiscreen communication and entertainment hub” promises to “change our domestic sphere
  • Individual family members might find themselves contently connected to parallel worlds almost all the time.
Sigrid Murphy

Why I'm Asking You Not to Use Laptops - 66 views

  •  
    cites research multitasking distracts, handwriting notes better than typing
anonymous

Using Mobile and Social Technologies in Schools - 51 views

  • n recent years, there has been explosive growth in students creating, manipulating, and sharing content online (National School Boards Association, 2007). Recognizing the educational value of encouraging such behaviors, many school leaders have shifted their energies from limiting the use of these technologies to limiting their abuse. As with any other behavior, when schools teach and set expectations for appropriate technology use, students rise to meet the expectations. Such conditions allow educators to focus on, in the words of social technology guru Howard Rheingold (n.d.), educating “children about the necessity for critical thinking and [encouraging] them to exercise their own knowledge of how to make moral choices." One process for creating the necessary conditions is reported in From Fear to Facebook, the first-person account of one California principal who endured a series of false starts to finally arrive at a place where students in his school were maximizing their use of laptops and participatory technologies without the constant distractions of misuse (Levinson, 2010). Other similar processes and programs are emerging, and they all share a common theme: an education that fails to account for the use of social media tools prepares students well for the past, but not for their future.
« First ‹ Previous 61 - 80 of 92 Next ›
Showing 20 items per page