The article provides brief history of information overload and its effects. The author provides 10 activities that help to cope with information overload, each of them is consists of several activities.
The article includes also a paragraph on the role of librarians and other information professionals in dealing with information overload. The article pays special attention to filtering the received information, RSS overload techniques, phone overload, e-mail overload, multimedia overload etc.
"We live in an age of information overload. While many of us find ourselves inundated with vast amounts of data daily, our fast-paced society also requires us to make more rapid decisions."
A very short blog post that reminds us to slow down and focus. It doesn't add much new to the conversation but the reminders are helpful, especially the one about multitasking. It truly is a myth.
Excellent article. I also really enjoyed the part about multi-tasking! Very interesting and informative!
"What we're actually doing is rapidly shifting our attention from one thing to another," he says. This fast-paced attention seesaw depletes the brain's glucose supply. Glucose is the fuel that the brain's neurons need to communicate with one another.
Using up the brain's glucose supply by task switching means the brain will reach a level of fatigue much sooner in the day than if we concentrate on one item at a time with sustained attention."
Description: I found this is a great source for understanding the concept of information overload, its historical and technological contexts, its causes, and solutions.
Description: "For all the benefits of the information technology and communications revolution, it has a well-known dark side: information overload and its close cousin, attention fragmentation. These scourges hit CEOs and their colleagues in the C-suite particularly hard because senior executives so badly need uninterrupted time to synthesize information from many different sources, reflect on its implications for the organization, apply judgment, make trade-offs, and arrive at good decisions."
This is a project is a production that has come out of a graduate course at the iSchool at the University of Toronto that touches on information overload, literacy and their definition of "post literacy". It is touches on thee multiliteracy that was mentioned in the reading by Kapitzke, and goes beyond into headier stuff. Check out their Pinterest bibliography, and their new recent endeavor with a Beyond Literacy podcast.
Great resource!
I think this conceptualization meshes really nicely with the "IT'S NOT INFORMATION OVERLOAD. IT'S FILTER FAILURE" video, where Shirky discusses how we need to move beyond the idea of "information OVERLOAD". I find that I, and many of the people around me, often set up deliberate practices to try and mediate the amount of information that we receive. The word "infotention" is new to me, and captures this practice nicely.
For example, some of the practices that I use in my day to day life include:
-- I always keep my phone on silent. *Always*.
-- I use an RSS reader to stay on top of blogs and other information, including mailing lists which I have rerouted from my email inbox to my RSS reader (I use feedly).
-- I use an email filter called "unrollme" which sends me a daily digest of email that isn't important but that I might want to see.
Do you find that there are "infotention" practices you use in your day to day life? What about "mindful infotention", as the author describes?
"The editing process is more important today than it has ever been in the history of the world" (Ted Koppel).
This short video is part of a (1990) documentary on Memory and Imagination by Michael Lawrence. Ted Koppel's critique of available information is incisive and especially striking because it makes a clarion call that hasn't been heeded at all.
"It turns out that students are poorly trained in college to effectively navigate the Internet's indiscriminate glut of information.
Another Project Information Literacy study, involving more than 8,300 undergraduates at 25 American colleges, found that most make do with a very small compass. They rely on tried and true resources such as course readings, library databases, Google, and Wikipedia....The skills that students cultivate through traditional assignments-writing essays based on library research-are far different from those required to perform efficient, high-level, accurate research in the digital world. All of those types of research skills take practice under the eye of experts."
This commentary emphasises the need for students to be taught within the curricula on how to be discerning when navigating the surfeit of information on the internet.
Do you own too many devices?
Posted: How many tech gadgets do you own? Chances are, you have a PC, Mac or Windows, desktop or laptop and a smartphone. Maybe you both kinds of PCs, a desktop workstation and a portable laptop. Maybe you have a tablet -- large or small? You might also have a Kindle e-reader.
If I had to pick just one gadget to keep and turf all the rest, I'd pick my iphone. I'd move all the files on my desktop/laptop into the cloud and use my iphone as the means to connect to everything. A project I'd like to undertake in the future is to do a complete MOOC on my phone. Right now I migrate between an ipad, laptop and my iphone but I think I could do it all on the phone. It would be frustrating but doable.
I find myself constantly needing more devices, even though I know one is enough. We do live in this gadget-centric world, and with every year that Apple introduces something that blows away their last invention, I feel the need to acquire it. Though, what's actually stopped me from acquiring anything, is that I know year after year, there will be another 'revolutionary product' that will 'enhance' my life. So for now, it's just a laptop and a phone! Though a tablet does sound tempting...
In my household we have two adults, two children, one Mac desktop, two smartphones, a nexus and an iPad. It seems to work out that we have enough for my husband to be learning and practicing coding on the mac, my son learning Italian on an app, my daughter watching animal videos all while I'm looking up a recipe online. So far so good. I wouldn't add any to it. And sometimes I want to subtract, but we're in a new era and I'm done fighting it. I'm trying to embrace all the wonderful qualities the device era has to offer.
We often talk about how our customers (a.k.a. users, researchers, authors, readers, etc.) are being overwhelmed by the flood of information available today. Let's not forget that we are consumers of information as well. How are we handling information overload? How are we finding the "must-reads" in our profession?
Very interesting. The answers from this blog actually correspond with a conversation I recently had with a customer (I am a librarian). He said his first source of keeping up in his field (computer-human interface) is via Twitter, the same as several people said here.
Rheingold puts his thoughts, videos,course syllabi on the skills to be network smart on this site. Here is his introduction:
The future of digital culture-yours, mine, and ours-depends on how well we learn to use the media that have infiltrated, amplified, distracted, enriched, and complicated our lives. How you employ a search engine, stream video from your phonecam, or update your Facebook status matters to you and everyone, because the ways people use new media in the first years of an emerging communication regime can influence the way those media end up being used and misused for decades to come. Instead of confining my exploration to whether or not Google is making us stupid, Facebook is commoditizing our privacy, or Twitter is chopping our attention into microslices (all good questions), I've been asking myself and others how to use social media intelligently, humanely, and above all mindfully. This book is about what I've learned.
This study conducted by the International Center for Media & the Public Agenda (ICMPA), documented the experiences of 200 students at the University of Maryland as they "unplugged" from all media for 24 hours. The results were simultaneously astounding and totally predictable.
Their top five findings were:
1. Students use literal terms of addiction to characterize their dependence on media.
2. Students hate going without media. In their world, going without media, means going without their friends and family.
3. Students show no significant loyalty to a news program, news personality or even news platform. Students have only a casual relationship to the originators of news, and in fact don't make fine distinctions between news and more personal information. They get news in a disaggregated way, often via friends.
4. 18-21 year old college students are constantly texting and on Facebook-with calling and email distant seconds as ways of staying in touch, especially with friends.
5. Students could live without their TVs and the newspaper, but they can't survive without their iPods.
I love this lecture by David Levy at GoogleTechTalks from 2008. I found the required video by Levy to be a bit too short for my taste, so for anyone who is interested in hearing more, I would recommend this lecture.
I'm reading "Men Like Gods" by H.G. Wells, and there are quite a few things that seem prophetic. The book was published in 1923 and the setting includes things like connecting by voice and visuallly when talking to others at different locations. (Skype, Facetime) A screen where the words move instead of your eyes. (SPREED.com)
Concentrix Management (CM) is a model for distributing and managing information with the intent to cross pollinate ideas and concepts across sub-groups so that each part of the system knows about the 'whole' (of which all working groups within it reside) without overloading any one person.
"When you're reading for information, you should ALWAYS jump ahead, skip around, and use every available strategy to discover, then to understand, and finally to remember what the writer has to say. This is how you'll get the most out of a book in the smallest amount of time."
This has been a very useful article for me. After reading this the first time I found that every thing that I did when I was reading was the opposite of what I "should" be doing according to this article. I treated all the definitions, table, and sections that were highlighted as if they were advertisements and just ignored them. This was a very useful article in helping me get back on track when it came to learning how to study in an academic environment, and I was very happy to get new and better skills from it as well.
This reading was suggested in a previous class, and it was foundational knowledge that some learners already have, but just reading and validating certain strategies while offering new strategies for thorough reading is so essential in the overload of content we are constantly sifting through.
ibudule on 04 Nov 14The article provides brief history of information overload and its effects. The author provides 10 activities that help to cope with information overload, each of them is consists of several activities. The article includes also a paragraph on the role of librarians and other information professionals in dealing with information overload. The article pays special attention to filtering the received information, RSS overload techniques, phone overload, e-mail overload, multimedia overload etc.
