EdTech

continuous partial attention to describe the modern predicament of being constantly attuned to everything without fully concentrating on anythin

Continuous partial attention is neither good nor bad. We need different attention strategies in different contexts

The important thing for us as humans is to have the capacity to tap the attention strategy that will best serve us in any given momen

Playing video games is not addictive in any meaningful sense. It is normal behavior that, while perhaps in many cases a waste of time, is not damaging or disruptive of lives in the way drug or alcohol use can be

These areas of the brain — those that produce and respond to the neurotransmitter dopamine — are involved in just about any pleasurable activity: having sex, enjoying a nice conversation, eating good food, reading a book, using methamphetamines.

when you realize that lipstick, pickles, and styrofoam are on that list, it puts it into a different perspective.” None of those things are necessarily super high-risk

a dearth of data means that no one would conclude right now that that cellphones cause cancer

no one has yet proven a solid link between cancer and phone use

There’s an idea that’s been gaining ground in the tech community lately: Everyone should learn to code. But here’s the problem with that idea: Coding is not the new literacy.

Selling coding as a ticket to economic salvation for the masses is dishonest

It’s one thing to have to relearn behaviours when you switch machines, it’s another to have to re-learn them every time you plug in a peripheral.

the necessity, or not, of drivers for accessories was a big part of that competitive push by Apple, which made a point of ensuring out-of-the-box support for many of the most commonly used peripherals like printers, cameras and mice. When Steve Jobs said “it just works”, this is the sort of thing he was referring to: the ability to plug in a mouse and have it Just Work. Installing drivers for a mouse to enable a niche behaviour is no great hardship, but it still left me moderately concerned. Microsoft made both the mouse and the laptop, yet the two weren’t able to play nicely together without my intervention. This digging in the nuts and bolts of the machine was not something I had missed.

It’s a fantastic machine. Small and powerful, with a long battery life, it impresses as a laptop, but its real strengths are revealed when you undock the screen from its base. Being able to carry my laptop around the kitchen when doing the weekly shop, before docking it back and typing up some recipes, was genuinely cool.

he hands are the instruments of man’s intelligence

In 2011, the American Academy of Pediatrics updated its policy on very young children and media. In 1999, the group had discouraged television viewing for children younger than 2, citing research on brain development that showed this age group’s critical need for “direct interactions with parents and other significant care givers.” The updated report began by acknowledging that things had changed significantly since then.

To date, no body of research has definitively proved that the iPad will make your preschooler smarter or teach her to speak Chinese, or alternatively that it will rust her neural circuitry—the device has been out for only three years, not much more than the time it takes some academics to find funding and gather research subjects. So what’s a parent to do?

Recently, a coalition of nearly 70 researchers spoke against brain games like Lumosity, signing a letter of consensus posted by the Stanford Longevity Center that lambasted the brain training community for promising a kind of mind power boost that just isn't provable.

Often, however, the cited research is only tangentially related to the scientific claims of the company, and to the games they sell.

In 2009, a consumer group in the UK asked a panel of scientists to look into brain-training games, including Lumosity. These scientists explicitly debunked Lumosity's claims, and they are not alone.

he video game Portal 2 is better at improving cognitive skills than the "brain-trainer" Lumosity—a web based system that has been designed to improve such skills

The researchers found that those who had played Portal 2 showed a "statistical advantage" over those who'd played Lumosity—they note that the reverse was never true with any of the volunteer