(3) Tue Sep 27
Is technology making us smarter?
BEFORE CLASS:
1. Write
2. Read
1
New technologies induce new aptitudes, and bundled together in the bedroom they push consciousness to diversify its attention and multiply its communications., Young Americans join virtual communities, cultivating interests and voicing opinions. Video games quicken their spatial intelligence. Group endeavors such as Wikipedia and reality gaming nurture collaborative problem-solving skills. Individuals who’ve grown up surrounded by technology develop different hard-wiring, their minds adapted to information and entertainment practices and speeds that minds maturing in pre-digital habitats can barely comprehend, much less assimilate. Screen time is cerebral, and it generates a breakthrough intelligence. E-literacy isn’t just knowing how to download music, program an iPod, create a virtual profile, and comment on a blog. It’s a general deployment capacity, a particular mental flexibility. E-literacy accommodates hypermedia because e-literates possess hyperalertness. Multitasking entails a special cognitive attitude toward the world, not the orientation that enables slow concentration on one thing — a sonnet, a theorem — but a lightsome, itinerant awareness of numerous and dissimilar inputs. Source: Mark Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation (2008)
2
Reading on the web:
- permits nonlinear strategies of thinking
- allows nonhierarchical strategies
- offers nonsequential strategies
- requires visual literacy skills to understand multimedia components
- is interactive, with the reader able to add, change, or move text
- enables a blurring of the relationship between reader and writer Source: Mark Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation (2008)
3
In a white paper entitled “Education for the 21st Century,” MIT professor Henry Jenkins sketches the new media literacies in precisely such big, brainy terms: distributed cognition — the “ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities” (search engines, etc.); collective intelligence — the “ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal”; transmedia navigation — the “ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities”. Source: Mark Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation (2008)
4
What are the central biases of today’s digital tools? There are many, but I see three big ones that have a huge impact on our cognition.
- First, they allow for prodigious external memory: smartphones, hard drives, cameras, and sensors routinely record more information than any tool before them. We’re shifting from a stance of rarely recording our ideas and the events of our lives to doing it habitually.
- Second, today’s tools make it easier for us to find connections — between ideas, pictures, people, bits of news — that were previously invisible.
- Third, they encourage a superfluity of communication and publishing. Any economist can tell you that when you suddenly increase the availability of a resource, people do more things with it, which also means they do increasingly unpredictable things. As electricity became cheap and ubiquitous in the West, its role expanded from things you’d expect — like nighttime lighting — to the unexpected and seemingly trivial: battery driven toy trains, electric blenders, vibrators. The superfluity of communication today has produced everything from a rise in crowd-organized projects like Wikipedia to curious new forms of expression: television-show recaps, map-based storytelling, discussion threads that spin out of a photo posted to a smartphone app, Amazon product-review threads wittily hijacked for political satire.
Source: Clive Thompson, “Smarter Than You Think”
5
Shifts that are supporting connection and network building:
- Analog to digital
- Tethered to mobile
- Isolated to connected
- Generic to personal
- Consumption to creation
- Closed systems to open systems
Source: Will Richardson, Personal Learning Comprehension (2011)
6
Learning today is not about memorizing facts. An integral part of the learning process is to be able to find and synthesize the most current information and recognize connections between ideas that may be found in many different places from many different people. Since learning is an ongoing process and no longer an event, our ability to expand our knowledge is more important than we currently realize. (Siemens, 2007). Young people today use the web to connect in interest-based ways, which, as the name suggests, is all about their passions to learn; whether it’s fixing up that ’78 Camaro, finding ways to clean up the environment, or learning how to build an awesome new skateboard, kids are beginning to engage in these networked online spaces on their own. As the lead author of the study, Mimi Ito writes, “Kids learn on the Internet in a self-directed way, by looking around for information they are interested in, or connecting with others who can help them. This is a big departure from how they are asked to learn in most schools” (Ito et Al., 2008). Source: Will Richardson, Personal Learning Comprehension (2011)
7
Learning in the new world is all about creation, not consumption. Certainly, we continue to spend a large amount of our learning time reading, thinking, and synthesizing ideas. Now, however, we don’t just consume those ideas: we share them. As Clay Shirky suggests in Cognitive Surplus (2010), we are in the process of taking the roughly two hundred billion collective hours per year we spend in front of the television set (in the U.S. alone) and turning them into creative acts, some more foolish and inane than others, but creative nonetheless. Source: Will Richardson, Personal Learning Comprehension (2011)
8
Digital Natives are able to switch between attentional targets in a way that’s been considered impossible. As we become more skilled at the 21st-century task Meyer calls “flitting,” the wiring of the brain will inevitably change to deal more efficiently with more information. The neuroscientist Gary Small speculates that the human brain might be changing faster today than it has since the prehistoric discovery of tools. Research suggests we’re already picking up new skills: better peripheral vision, the ability to sift information rapidly. Kids growing up now might have an associative genius we don’t — a sense of the way ten projects all dovetail into something totally new. They might be able to engage in seeming contradictions: mindful web-surfing, mindful Twittering. Source: Sam Anderson, New York Magazine (2009)
9
The new brain science helps us to re-ask the old questions about attention in a new ways. What are we learning by being open to multitasking? What new muscles are we exercising? What new neural pathways are we shaping, what old ones are we shearing, what new unexpected patterns are we creating? And how can we help one another out by collaborative multitasking? We know that in dreams, as in virtual worlds and digital spaces, physical and even traditional linear narrative rules do not apply. It is possible that, during boundless wandering thinking, we open ourselves to possibilities for innovative solutions that, in more focused thinking, we might prematurely preclude as unrealistic. The Latin word for “inspiration” is inspirare, to inflame or breathe into. What if we thought of new digital ways of thinking not as multitasking but multi-inspiring, as potentially creative disruption of usual thought patterns. Look at the account of just about any enormous intellectual breakthrough and you’ll find that some seemingly random connection, some associational side thought, some distraction preceded the revelation. Distraction, we may discover, is as central to innovation as, say, an apple falling on Newton’s head. Source: Cathy Davidson, Now You See It (2011)
10
In his fascinating book, The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki makes a strong case for the benefits of access to a large decision-informing audience. Surowiecki argues that individuals tend to make better decisions when informed by a crowd than when they make decisions in isolations, even when they are experts on the matter. Source: Jesse Rice, The Church of Facebook: How the Hyperconnected are Redefining Reality (2009)
11
For me, floating behind all the talk of our frazzled attention is a veil of guilt and blame: It’s your fault! You could sit down and do this if you wanted to. You could savor stuff on a screen — didn’t you just binge watch the entirety of High Maintenance last night? Yet the profusion of the Internet also changes the calculus of how long I’m willing to spend on a given story. I’m not alone: People report more impatience when they read from their computers. In reading as with everything else, we’re haunted by FOMO and the search for novelty: “We are sponges and we live in a world where the fire hose is always on,” wrote David Carr in the New York Times. Jakob Nielsen, who studies the mechanics of Internet perusal, put it more bluntly: “ Users are selfish, lazy, and ruthless.” Source: Reading Insecurity Katy Waldman, slate.com (2014)
12
Still, the dissatisfaction lingers. In his 1988 study of ludic (or pleasure) reading, Victor Nell found that we read slower when we like a text. Our brains enter a state of arousal that resembles hypnosis. There is trance and transportation — which might explain why, 30 years later, adults prefer to encounter Darcy and Dracula offline, where they are less conditioned to skim, jump around, and be generally restless. In a recent survey of several hundred men and women over the age of 18, most respondents said they enjoyed print books more than e-books, though they were content to gather information from either format. The researchers suggested that pleasure reading requires a deeper engagement with the text, one facilitated by the kind of sustained, linear attention (and ability to annotate) that print books promote. In other words, when we bemoan that we don’t reeeeeaaad any more, we are mourning a specific kind of reading — and it is precisely this kind that seems to shimmer beyond our reach online. Source: Reading Insecurity Katy Waldman, slate.com (2014)
13
When do technologies free students to think about more interesting and complex questions, and when do they erode the very cognitive capacities they are meant to enhance? The effect of ubiquitous spell check and AutoCorrect software is a revealing example. Psychologists studying the formation of memories have found that the act of generating a word in your mind strengthens your capacity to remember it. When a computer automatically corrects a spelling mistake or offers a drop-down menu of options, we’re no longer forced to generate the correct spelling in our minds. The solution might seem to be improving battery life and making spelling assistance even more omnipresent, but this creates a vicious cycle: The more we use the technology, the more we need to use it in all circumstances. Suddenly, our position as masters of technology starts to seem more precarious. This concern appears in Plato’s Phaedrus, where a character in the dialogue worries about the effects of the phonetic alphabet: “This discovery … will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.” Source: Is Google Making Students Stupid? Nick Romeo, theatlantic.com (2014)
14
The difference today is the sheer breadth of mental tasks that have been outsourced to machines. Carr describes a 2004 study in which two groups of subjects played a computer game based on the logic puzzle Missionaries and Cannibals. Solving the puzzle required figuring out how to transport five missionaries and five cannibals across a river in a boat that could hold only three passengers. The cannibals, for self-evident reasons, could not outnumber missionaries on either of the riverbanks or in the boat. The more we use the technology, the more we need to use it in all circumstances. The first group of players used a sophisticated software program that offered prompts and guidance on permissible moves in given scenarios. The second group used a simple program that gave no assistance. Initially, those using the helpful software made rapid progress, but over time those using the more basic software made fewer wrong moves and solved the puzzle more efficiently. The psychologist running the study concluded that those who received less assistance were more likely to develop a better understanding of the game’s rules and strategize accordingly. Source: Is Google Making Students Stupid? Nick Romeo, theatlantic.com (2014)
15
Even those who have come to the Web late in life are not so very different, then, from the fifth-graders who, according to an elementary school principal, proceed as follows when they are assigned a research project: “go to Google, type keywords, download three relevant sites, cut and paste passages into a new document, add transitions of their own, print it up, and turn it in.” This model is information retrieval, not knowledge formation, and the material passes from Web to homework paper without lodging in the minds of the students. Source: Is Stupid Making Us Google? James Bowman, New Atlantis (2014)
16
It turns out that digital devices and software are finely tuned to train us to pay attention to them, no matter what else we should be doing. The mechanism, borne out by recent neuroscience studies, is something like this:
· New information creates a rush of dopamine to the brain, a neurotransmitter that makes you feel good.
· The promise of new information compels your brain to seek out that dopamine rush.
· With fMRIs, you can see the brain’s pleasure centres light up with activity when new emails arrive.
So, every new email you get gives you a little flood of dopamine. Every little flood of dopamine reinforces your brain’s memory that checking email gives a flood of dopamine. And our brains are programmed to seek out things that will give us little floods of dopamine. Further, these patterns of behaviour start creating neural pathways, so that they become unconscious habits: Work on something important, brain itch, check email, dopamine, refresh, dopamine, check Twitter, dopamine, back to work. Over and over, and each time the habit becomes more ingrained in the actual structures of our brains.
How can books compete?
Source: Why can’t we read anymore? Hugh McGuire, Medium (2016)
17
Take a look at this question: How do modern novels represent the characteristics of humanity? If you were tasked with answering it, what would your first step be? Would you scribble down your thoughts — or would you Google it? Source: OK, Google, Where did I put my thinking cap? — Zhai Yun Tan, NPR (2016)
18
A 2011 study in the journal Science showed that when people know they have future access to information, they tend to have a better memory of how and where to find the information — instead of recalling the information itself. That phenomenon is similar to not remembering your friend’s birthday because you know you can find it on Facebook. When we know that we can access this information whenever we want, we are not motivated to remember it. Source: OK, Google, Where did I put my thinking cap? — Zhai Yun Tan, NPR (2016)
19
There’s little evidence that attention spans are shrinking. Scientists use “span” to mean two separate things: how much we can keep in mind, and how well we can maintain focus. They measure the former by asking people to repeat increasingly long strings of digits in reverse order. They measure the latter by asking people to monitor visual stimuli for occasional, subtle changes. Performance on these tests today looks a whole lot as it did 50 years ago. Source: Smartphones Don’t Make Us Dumb — Daniel Willingham, NYT Op-Ed (2015)
20
If our attention span is not shrinking, why do we feel it is? Why, in a 2012 Pew survey, did nearly 90 percent of teachers claim that students can’t pay attention the way they could a few years ago? It may be that digital devices have not left us unable to pay attention, but have made us unwilling to do so. The digital world carries the promise of amusement that is constant, immediate and limitless. If a YouTube video isn’t funny in the first 10 seconds, why watch when I can instantly seek something better on BuzzFeed or Spotify? The Internet hasn’t shortened my attention span, but it has fixed a persistent thought in the back of my mind: Isn’t there something better to do than what I’m doing? Are we more easily bored than we were 20 years ago? Researchers don’t know, but recent studies support the suggestion that our antennas are always up. People’s performance on basic laboratory tests of attention gets worse if a cellphone is merely visible nearby. Source: Smartphones Don’t Make Us Dumb — Daniel Willingham, NYT Op-Ed (2015)
21
Building Attention Span
David Brooks, NYT Op-Ed (2015)
If you’re like most of us, you’re wondering what the Internet is doing to your attention span. You toggle over to check your phone during even the smallest pause in real life. You feel those phantom vibrations even when no one is texting you. You have trouble concentrating for long periods.
Over the past few years researchers have done a lot of work on attention span, and how the brain is being re-sculpted by all those hours a day spent online. One of the conclusions that some of them are coming to is that the online life nurtures fluid intelligence and offline life is better at nurturing crystallizing intelligence.
Being online is like being a part of the greatest cocktail party ever and it is going on all the time. If you email, text, tweet, Facebook, Instagram or just follow Internet links you have access to an ever-changing universe of social touch-points. It’s like you’re circulating within an infinite throng, with instant access to people you’d almost never meet in real life.
Online life is so delicious because it is socializing with almost no friction. You can share bon mots, photographs, videos or random moments of insight, encouragement, solidarity or good will. You live in a state of perpetual anticipation because the next social encounter is just a second way. You can control your badinage and click yourself away when boredom lurks.
This form of social circulation takes the pressure off. I know some people who are relaxed and their best selves only when online. Since they feel more in control of the communication, they are more communicative, vulnerable and carefree.
This mode of interaction nurtures mental agility. The ease of movement on the web encourages you to skim ahead and get the gist. You do well in social media and interactive gaming when you can engage and then disengage with grace. This fast, frictionless world rewards the quick perception, the instant evaluation and the clever performance. As the neuroscientist Susan Greenfield writes in her book “Mind Change,”expert online gamers have a great capacity for short-term memory, to process multiple objects simultaneously, to switch flexibly between tasks and to quickly process rapidly presented information.
Fluid intelligence is a set of skills that exist in the moment. It’s the ability to perceive situations and navigate to solutions in novel situations, independent of long experience.
Offline learning, at its best, is more like being a member of a book club than a cocktail party. When you’re offline you’re not in constant contact with the universe. There are periods of solitary reading and thinking and then more intentional gatherings to talk and compare.
Research at the University of Oslo and elsewhere suggests that people read a printed page differently than they read off a screen. They are more linear, more intentional, less likely to multitask or browse for keywords.
The slowness of solitary reading or thinking means you are not as concerned with each individual piece of data. You’re more concerned with how different pieces of data fit together. How does this relate to that? You’re concerned with the narrative shape, the synthesizing theory or the overall context. You have time to see how one thing layers onto another, producing mixed emotions, ironies and paradoxes. You have time to lose yourself in another’s complex environment.
As Greenfield puts it, “by observing what happens, by following the linear path of a story, we can convert information into knowledge in a way that emphasizing fast response and constant stimulation cannot. As I see it, the key issue is narrative.”
When people in this slower world gather to try to understand connections and context, they gravitate toward a different set of questions. These questions are less about sensation than about meaning. They argue about how events unfold and how context influences behavior. They are more likely to make moral evaluations. They want to know where it is all headed and what are the ultimate ends.
Crystallized intelligence is the ability to use experience, knowledge and the products of lifelong education that have been stored in long-term memory. It is the ability to make analogies and comparisons about things you have studied before. Crystallized intelligence accumulates over the years and leads ultimately to understanding and wisdom.
The online world is brand new, but it feels more fun, effortless and natural than the offline world of reading and discussion. It nurtures agility, but there is clear evidence by now that it encourages a fast mental rhythm that undermines the ability to explore narrative, and place people, ideas and events in wider contexts.
The playwright Richard Foreman once described people with cathedral-like personalities — with complex, inner density, people with distinctive personalities, and capable of strong permanent attachments. These days that requires an act of rebellion, among friends who assign one another reading and set up times to explore narrative and cultivate crystallized intelligence.
4a. Link
Instructions
4b. Link
DURING CLASS:
1. Current events
- Discussion leader: Robert
2. Lesson work
- Assigned reading/video discussion leader: A
- Online discussion leader: B
- Links library discussion leader: C
3. Digerati: Steven Johnson
- Activity leader: D
Steven Johnson has written nine books about the intersection of science, technology and personal experience. He is the co-creator of three influential websites: the pioneering online magazine FEED, the Webby-award community site plastic.com and the hyperlocal media site outside.in. He is on the advisory board of a number of internet-related companies, including Medium, meetup.com and patch.com.
In-class reading (click here for a copy) excerpted from: Steven Johnson, Everything bad is good for you: How today’s popular culture is actually making us smarter (2005) and Future Perfect: The Case For Progress In A Networked Age (2013)
4. Preview
Preview homework for class 4: Thu Sep 29
- Before class homework assignments
- Classroom leadership assignments
