The double-edged sword of computers and phones – Take my test !

In this Blog, I will throw couple of blunt assumptions about you dear reader, making the bet that the majority of people who will read my article will identify with at least 4 of my hunches:

  • You use your computer every day
  • You use your computer every day for at least 5 hours
  • You check your phone at least every 30 minutes
  • You think your attention span has gotten shorter but you don’t know why
  • You don’t think multitasking is a myth
  • You can hardly focus on one single task for an hour without several interruptions
  • You can hardly imagine a life without a phone or a computer
  • You have more than one email account
  • You have at least 20+ apps in your phone
  • Deep down you know that taking notes on your laptop in classroom is not as effective as taking hand written notes
  • Deep down you know that the use of computers and cellphones during classroom harms your focus and attention span towards what the professor and your classmates are saying
  • You think an International Day without Cellphones and Laptops sounds really cool (comment below if you really think so and why!)
  • Google if your best friend

Now I want you to think of what it means that you have identified with at least 3 of my hunches. What kind of world do we live in ? and how the way we do our work has evolved to affect us ? What does this say about us; humans of the 21st century ?

 


Attention! Can I have your attention please!

Ok, so attention and multitasking…  I am horrible when it comes to multitasking.  You all know by now how I Google big words that I don’t know when I’m in class.  I hardly ever just work on one thing at a time.  I’ve never been diagnosed with ADHD, but it’s probably a pretty fitting diagnosis.  I’m qualified to diagnose others with ADHD, but I don’t think I could do that for myself.  Anyway, (my point exactly) multitasking…  I will start on one assignment and then think about something that needs to be done on another and soon find myself bouncing between 3 or 4 different projects at once.  And the worst part is that I know the inefficiency of multitasking (aka polyphasia for those who also like to google big words).  I know that for each additional task added on to your workload that performance in each significantly decreases.

 

We can see in The Myth of the Disconnected Life the dangers of paying attention too much to the wrong things, such as focusing so much on one’s phone that you trip and fall into a fountain.  It would appear that the obsession with technology is not a new phenomenon.  I appreciated the story of how obsessed people were with the Kaleidascope in 19th century England.  That article talks about how people were mesmerized by it.  If you are interested in the origin of the word “mesmerized,” it has somewhat of a similar origin based on Franz Anton Mesmer.

One of my favorite videos for attention is this one:

So as you can see, sometimes we need to be more aware of how much attention we are paying to the events in front of us.

 

As I’ve been looking at these articles for the week and writing up this blog, I am reminded of where our blogging started out this semester.  We started with networked learning and how technology affects education and then moved on to mindful learning.  We have also covered methods of engaging the imaginations of digital learners.  It would seem to me based on this week’s readings that finding a good balance among these topics is important.  Technology can greatly facilitate learning, but focusing too much on technology (i.e. not being mindful of our surroundings) can lead to someone walking into a fountain!  I’m in favor of taking a digital Sabbath now and then because I greatly appreciate being disconnected now and then.  As much as technology is an integral part of my daily life (especially being a student), I appreciate disconnecting from time to time because I find myself noticing so much more about my surroundings.  The last vacation I was able to take was a cruise, and I was amazed how many people bought the internet package and were on their phones the whole time.  For as much as I multitask, I go on vacation to get away from the rest of the world!

 

I can see how the majority of the topics for this semester are related to attention in one way or another.  Inclusive pedagogy in itself requires quite a bit of attention to detail.  Taking time to recognize and be accepting of diversity does require time and energy, but it can create a learning environment well worth the extra attention.  Critical pedagogy really seemed to be an adjustment to attention on the part of the student.  Instead of having to sit and listen to the professor lecture for hours (hard to pay attention), students are more engaged with each other and thus able to better pay attention.

 

Ok, so true to my own multitasking, I was able to tie in how many of the different topics of this semester are related to attention (and add in a few tangents as well).  I think the main item I’m taking away from this is that technology can be a great tool that helps us accomplish so many tasks at once, but BALANCE is still an important concept to rely on.  We have to be able to take some opportunities to pay attention to ourselves, our own well being, and take a break from all that is out there for us to focus on at once.  As seen in the video, trying to pay attention to too much can cause you to miss out on what may be more important.

Yes, you may turn your final paper in as an interpretive dance

I am a veteran of the internet, having had my first home dial-up connection in 1992. I have seen much and consumed much on the internet, for better or for worse. As any ‘old-timer’ would say, things are cyclical and often times people are versions of archetypes. So are the complaints of the aged it seems. Thomas Sheridan described the youth of his time as experiencing “total neglect of this art (of speaking)”, his time being the late 18th century of course. In Book III of Odes, circa 20 BC, Horace wrote of the youth that they were “a progeny, yet more corrupt”, clearly he had yet to witness any of the abominations to come.

One concept that continuously emerges is the idea that this generation is particularly distracted and socially inept due to technology and that in the glorious old days, this wasn’t the case. However, this doesn’t keep the youth from firing back, drawing parallels between news papers and smartphones.

As you can imagine my delight when the Thompson reading makes the claim that the technology we are using is a new form of content delivery, but it’s much more than that. Yes, Carr, it is re-wiring our brains (or in some cases, wiring them differently from the get-go, because some of these kids have never learned to read like you have) but is that really an problem? Along the same vein as the first week’s blog prompt I pose the challenge that if technology is changing, is the student’s problem or educators?  The first people to use pen and paper over inkwell and parchment were also disparaging tradition, but were they wrong?

Technology has been used in every other facet of our lives to make things easier, safer, more efficient, and more accessible, why then should we be resistant to that change in the places where it can be most effectively applied? Of course a map’s battery is never going to die unlike your cell phone’s GPS, you can’t accidentally reply-all on a letter from grandma, and you’d be hard pressed to die in a DUI in a horse-drawn carriage, but using that logic would mean taking a stance against innovation simply because the current solutions have merit, on which they were used to begin with.

Why is it then that we allow this to be the argument against technology in education? If students for 15 hours of their day are surrounded by immersive and interactive technologies, why should they be forced to uninterestedly pen and paper their way through the 9 most important hours of it?  The most impressive educational experiences I remember having were ones where we were allowed to choose the medium in which we demonstrated our understanding. I chose to make an indie film about Jason and Argonauts set in modern day Blacksburg, Virginia. Some designed board games, while others used flash and dreamweaver to design online games paralleling ancient mythological quests. Both effort and accuracy were rewarded.

This can pose a challenge in math and science, but not a significant one. Reading the Carr article again triggers memories of Wikipedia “article-hopping” where one is reading about a concept, and ctrl-clicks on a link to look at later. This can be done in a classroom where it is acknowledged that attention spans are limited. Therefore, an example of the “ctrl-clicks” can be where a concept is explained briefly on the chalk-board, then an example of said concept is shown in a video, then an in-class demonstration is held, then a continuation of the chalk-board explanation that is referential to the “ctrl-clicks”, giving both a distraction/mental break and context to the lesson. Small micro-assignments can then be given out as a demonstration of understanding. This model is closer to how the student consumes and interacts with their information in the rest of their day to day lives.

This is different than how I had information given to me, which was a barrage of lessons, followed by a lab or a demonstration at a later day or in a different period after the relevance was lost on me, then an assignment that was done at home after I had forgotten completely what we had talked about, finally an assessment after a month or so, requiring review, memorization, and regurgitation.

Recently, I saw an undergraduate researcher’s year long project result in a dance routine presented at a research symposium. Earlier this year, for the first time ever, a doctoral student defended his dissertation thesis in the form of a hip-hop album.


I am always reminded of the frequently mis-attributed quote from Dolbear from 1898 about judging fish on their ability to fly, but as a comparative bio-mechanist specializing in animal physiology, I know better. Though he may have been talking about children in the same classroom, I like to think he is talking about students across generations.

Current Education System Creates Short Attention Span

“It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/

 

I absolutely agree with the statement above, regarding how we read content online. I am guilty of this when I am trying to get an assignment or an answer for research. I think that the problem is not necessary Google or the internet, but our current educational system. I know particularly when I was preparing for the SAT’s or other reading comprehension tests before college, I was taught to look for only the most important information. I was told to read the questions first and look for the answers in the passage. If I spent too much time trying to completely understand the content, I run out of time on the examination. I typically had trouble with reading comprehension exam because of this. Eventually, I learned how to skim read and only get the information that I need for the examination. I think the root cause of this problem starts in grade school with the standards of learning assessments, where the students are trained to look for the answers rather than formulating their own.

My ability to read long passages starts to demise when Google searches became extremely efficient. I started to notice that when I do a Google search, I would quickly skim the passage for what I need. If the page looks like it has too much text and the “find” function does not produce the answers I want, I would just click onto another link. I guess I am able to determine what formats of the pages will give me the quickest answer. I move on quickly if I do not like the format of the webpage. I feel like “power browse” technique does not allow the reader to fully comprehend the content that the author tries communicate to the user. This is problematic because I selectively pick out the information that I want to retain. In a sense, it is limiting my perspective because I have a pre-filter to disregard content that would take too much time to understand.

Finally, I think that discipline is a big factor on how well I can focus on a particular topic. For example, I did not write this entire blog post in a continuous streak. I would think of an idea and started to Google it. I started to skim a couple of paragraphs, and clicked on a couple of links. The next thing I realized was that I was on Amazon. I feel like my attention span for a topic is not very long. I think my minds works like this because of the demanding responsibilities of my positions. When I was taking 7-8 courses, I would constantly switch topics when I am stuck on something. This means I that can switch tasks almost every half hour. Additionally, my curiosity tends to derail my focus. I would be reading about a particular idea, and I found something that I did not understand. I would then keep Googling until I got the answer to the side question or realizing that I am way off track. If I want to be more productive this inefficiency is something that I need to work on.

I do not necessarily believe Google is making people “more stupid.” It just hampers the critical thinking process. I remember in my undergraduate, 90% of the questions that I had can be answered by Google. However, when I started to do my research, Google was not able to provide me with the answers that I needed. Therefore, I was forced to fully read the content and formulate my own answers. Google is a great tool to find basic information, but sole reliant on it will hamper the creative thought process.

 


Pushing My Brain

Recently, I have been feeling like I have been pushing my brain to do everything. I walk in the store and forget the most important thing I went to the store for (even if I write a list I still end up forgetting something). I have to fight even more lately when having to do academic tasks; staying focused while reading, academic writing, and critical thinking. I have to push, pull and drag my brain to do any of these tasks. Nicholas Carr’s, ” Is Google Making Us Stupid?” made me feel a little better about myself, especially when he states, ” The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing”. Has my brain rejected reading and absorbing long articles due to time spend on the Web and media? Or am I just running into an end of the semester brain blockade? Probably both but I am not intrigued in the research of how internet use affects cognition.  “a form of skimming activity” that is what the internet has taught our brains to do is skim. I can admit that even on my leisure time when I am on social media if something is too long for me to skim and get what the writer is telling me I don’t read it.  Carr discusses a study that suggests that there are “new forms of reading emerging”  and the study also states that “It almost seems that they (participants of the study) go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense”.

I mean this all makes sense to me, today we read often throughout the day. This could be a form of me making an excuse for my end of the year laziness but I do have to say before reading Carr’s piece I was a bit concerned about my attention span and cognitive absorption while reading long academic readings and articles, and just long readings in general.

“Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University…“We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace… Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.”

Though this may ease my mind a little about how I have been feeling lately, at the same time I am truly concerned. If I have to be a human being in 2017 and a scholar is there a way to “fight” back, adapt and do both without feeling inadequate, a bit intimated, and feeling like I am pushing and dragging my brain when reading an extensive document?

The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets.

This blog maybe filled with quotes  but I have been internalizing my abilities lately so the topic this week has simultaneously brought me comfort and concern.

Parallel lines

I find Nicholas Carr’s article on whether Google is making us stupid, very interesting. Especially because, I recently had a conversation with my grandmother along parallel lines. Whiles my conversation with my grandmother is not on reading, I can actually draw some similarities with this article. My grandmother recently moved in with one of my aunties who had just had a baby and needed help looking after the baby since she has a 9 to 5 job. My grandmother is not happy at all in her new environment and I was a little perplexed since she loves babies and she has more people to talk to now than she did when she was living in her own home. Everyone is confused about her behavior and I got appointed to ask her about her strange behavior.

After much probing, she finally confessed that she wasn’t happy because the food tasted very differently! I was very surprised since she actually cooks the meals for the household herself. So I asked her if it was because she couldn’t get all the ingredients she needed for the food in that neighborhood, to which she replied that she did indeed get all the ingredients she needed. Frustratingly, I asked her what then was the problem and she replied in an equally frustrating tone that it was because she had to cook the meals on a gas stove!

Back in her home, she always cooked on a coal pot that used charcoal but in the city where my auntie lives, she had to cook on a gas stove. She went on to complain bitterly about how the gas stove heats up the food differently than how the coal pot does, resulting in the different taste of the food. As ridiculous as that sounded, I was reminded of how I thought my food tasted differently here than when I cooked in Ghana. I was using the same ingredients but they tasted differently and I remember telling my roommates how I thought certain foodstuff in the states tasted differently resulting in a slightly different taste of my food.

Looking back, and reflecting on the conversation with my grandmother as well as on the thoughts of Carr in his article, I am tempted to believe that my grandmother must be right. Perhaps, my food tasted differently now because I cooked on an electric stove here when I had always cooked on a gas stove in Ghana. I remember asking myself why my food always tasted different from my grandmother’s although I used the same procedure (mind you, I am a very methodological person). Maybe, it was because my grandmother always cooked on a coal pot and I cooked on a gas stove.

Just like Google is making it easier for us to find the information we need and actually reducing the amount of time we spend on researching, electric and gas stoves are making it easier for people to cook. But perhaps, this easy mode has a slightly different effect on our wiring or cognitive thinking and in mine and my grandmother’s case, on our taste buds. It will be very interesting to see how much research reveals in the future about how recent technologies and small changes in lifestyles, affect us….

New Technologies are Scary(?)

Is Google Making Us Stupid? Are rock albums evil? Do comic books lead to truancy? Who knows? Perhaps, who cares? I take seriously the historical point that Jason Farman makes that new technologies, media, etc. have often caused alarm and likely flurries of whatever the historical equivalent to a “think-piece” is. It’s an interesting question whether new forms of communication, research, interaction and so forth facilitated through digital technologies change how we think.

But, it’s also one I’m not too concerned about. Though I have noticed on the rare occasion that I drive I rely heavily on GPS in a way I didn’t before, I find I can’t get too worked up about the dangers of the internet on attention. I do worry about the disconnection of people from each other and whether “slacktivism” and internet petition signing are eroding the emancipatory potential of actual social movements. But, I don’t personally find my attention wavering or my depth of reading changing. Studies purporting to show a rise in people “skimming” and “bouncing” from website to website rather than deeply reading are unconvincing to me. Is it an intrinsic virtue to slog through the dense and antiquated language of Shakespeare, for example, rather than read a summary? I’m not sure.

There are, to be frank, a lot of long and uninteresting things to read both on the internet and in print. And neither length nor difficulty equate, necessarily, with more depth or complexity. Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, for example, is more than 1,000 pages and contains one very silly idea repeated ad nauseam. I mention this very stupid book because people with real power in U.S. government claim it as their intellectual foundation. Additionally, I find some of Jacques Derrida’s ideas engaging, but I mostly hate the complex and obtuse prose in his work.

In any case, I’m not wholly convinced it isn’t simply a matter of rose-colored nostalgia (or perhaps even elitism) that sees shorter, more varied media on the internet as a worrying influence on the brain. And indeed it is now much easier as well to produce and engage with audio and video information than in the past. Are we trading reading for listening? Maybe? Again, if this were true I’m not sure it’s really anything to be concerned about.

All technologies stretching back to settled agriculture and the wheel have changed human life and likely how we think about the world. And I remain unconvinced that the internet has degraded discourse, conversation, or engagement with ideas. Indeed no “golden age” can ever be said to have existed. Novels were once seen as a distraction, and perhaps danger, not the height of bourgeois culture they seem to be now. So, maybe War and Peace is boring? Maybe it’s wonderful? I don’t know, I haven’t read it. I probably never will. That doesn’t worry me.


* As a slight aside and footnote, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how funny it is that Nicholas Carr keeps referring to “the Net” in his piece “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” It’s interesting how fast language changes as I would hazard no one calls the internet “the Net” anymore. And indeed, in my mind this seems anachronistic for an article published in 2008. I think of the Net as a term akin to others like “cyberspace,” “world wide web” and, best of all the, “information superhighway” from the those heady, early digital days of the 1990s.

“Is Google making us stupid?” Living in the age of technophobia

Many articles, such as this one, emphasize the potential perils of technology in our lives. Will we become too dependent on computers? Will the machines rise up? This needless, even counterproductive, fear-mongering is reflected across media.

Image result for evil technology
Watch out.

Technology changes fast however and can seem threatening, even if it improves our lives. The internet as we need know it has only been around for about 20 years, and has only become accessible to most people even more recently. As technology (and it’s marketing) improves, we can only expect it to become more and more integrated into our daily lives. This is a great NPR piece showcasing the potential for greater computer and internet integration to enhance our relationships and work. Having, for example, reminders about upcoming events and details of friends’ personal lives in real time as we interact with them could provide new depth to preexisting relationships that might not normally be possible given our relatively limited ability to remember “random” details. Being able to recall facts and figures in the modern era is not all that important given how easy it is to look things up (even without a fancy interface). Computers and automation will only increase as time progresses, which is not necessarily a bad thing. The human brain is the best tool we currently have for critical thinking, and will likely remain so for some time. I think that technology that provides additional information and resources to us almost instantly will only enhance that. There is a difference between information and intellect. I don’t think that “Google is making us stupid.” Rather, it is setting us up to reach our full potential.

 

 

Our dystopian obsession has grown up in our nightmares as a true monster, which can only be countered by something truly beautiful. Simply, we need a hero. Our fears are demons in our fiction placing our utopia at risk, but we must not run from them. We must stand up and defeat them. Artificial intelligence, longevity therapy, biotechnology, nuclear energy — it is in our power to create a brilliant world, but we must tell ourselves a story where our tools empower us to do it.

— Michael Solana, Wired

 

FAST IS NOT ALWAYS A GOOD THING

Compared with most students in our class, my internet life started quiet late. In 2008, I went to college and was so excited to get my first laptop. I haven’t realized that a small thing happened at that time changed my life dramatically until reading and reflecting upon the article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”. One day. I asked my roommate about a problem of my new laptop. she simply told me: “You should Google it. When others ask me a question, I often suggest them to search it online first.” Although I was a little upset because she didn’t offer to help, my subconscious mind adapted to her strategy so quickly. From then on, I seldom asked others a question if its “answer” can be found online. Also, whenever others ask me a question that I don’t know, I tend to suggest them to search on Google like my previous roommate.

Now, I am a third-year PhD student and the nine-year experience of online searching changes my learning habits a lot. I’m so addictive to Google search that whenever I meet a difficult question, the first thing comes to my mind is to search for an answer online. It is admitted that online searching makes our life much more convenient than before. However, information overload and distraction seem to make us stupid. For me, my brain usually prefers to look for an answer rather than solving the problem by itself.

According to the book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel, our brain has dual processing systems. System 1 likes a “mindless” processor, which is fast and operates heuristically with little cognitive resources. System 2 uses a slow, analytical and deliberate process but requires more cognitive resources. Usually individuals will try to conserve cognitive resources by switching more processing from system 2 to system 1. I think this is what happened to me as well as many other students regarding online search. Indeed, it is quite convenient at the first glance. However, this habit may deplete cognitive resources and the ability to operate system 2 in the long run, since our system 1 dominates the brain more.

As a researcher on food and health. I wonder why convenient and effortless lifestyle is often not good for health. For example, why most convenient foods are unhealthy, and unhealthy foods are usually tastier than health foods? Why physical exercise is good for health but drains willpower? I think this may due to the fact that human evolution is too slow to keep path with the rapid changing environment. Physically, our body still adapts to live a heavy physical labor lifestyle with very limited foods, so our preferences of the energy-intense foods are written in genes. Likewise, our brain still adapts to the old time of low literacy levels, when information was so scarce. In this sense, the ability of filtering useful information from distractions has not been well-trained. As educators, it is our responsibility to help students adapt to learning from online searching and avoid its negative effects, such as lack of deep reading and thinking.  I believe this situation can change and we will grow from this process.

 

Reference

Nicholas Carr;? Is Google Making Us Stupid. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/

Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, fast and slow. Macmillan, 2011.

Striking the Right [Tech] Balance

—This week I read three articles that presented a smorgasbord of positions about human-reliance on techno-gadgets.

In the first article, Carr explored the question is Google making us stupid? The author expressed concerned about our reliance on technology. Carr’s general argument is that tech and/or artificial intelligence is gaining strength and humans are experiencing an all time high of dumb. I would place Carr in the sky is falling category.

In The Myth of the Disconnected Life, Farman discussed how technology can be used to heighten our sense of place. He provided a few concrete examples of how tech has been used to enhance our personal experience with place. His argument could comfortably fit in the camp of tech-advocate.

The third piece is an excerpt from Clive Thompson’s book, Smarter Thank You Think. Thompson makes a convincing case for ongoing collaboration between humans and computers. He makes no attempt to promote one entity over the other. I would categorize Thompson’s stance as middle of the road.

I identified more with Thompson’s position. He was equally critical of the abilities of both man and computer. Thompson argued that humans have a unique trait–intuition–which cannot be replicated by computers. For example:

The recent accident between a motorist and one of Uber’s self-driven cars is a demonstration of what can happen if human abilities are absent from reality. A motorist failed to yield to the Uber vehicle, which caused the accident. If we replace the self-driven car with a human driver, we could increase the chances of avoiding the accident. You can read more about this accident by clicking here.

Computers cannot account for the unpredictable behavior that humans express on a daily basis. Yet, I am an advocate for driver assist technology (DAT), which harkens back to Thompson’s description of collaborative chess–humans and computers as chess teammates. I am not comfortable with computers taking full command of automobiles, but a few DAT warnings along the way could enhanced safety.

Much of this was discussed in previous GEDI sessions, so I look forward to rehashing the topic.

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