In 1975, Neurologist Oliver Sacks saw a hospitalized patient by the name of Jimmy R. (see “Lost Mariner” in wife-hat-2)
“Jimmie was a fine-looking man, with a curly bush of grey hair, a healthy and handsome forty-nine year-old. He was cheerful, friendly, and warm.
‘Hiya, Doc!’ he said. ‘Nice morning! Do I take this chair here?’ He was a genial soul, very ready to talk and to answer any questions I asked him. He told me his name and birth date, and the name of the little town in Connecticut where he was born…. He spoke of the houses where his family had lived—he remembered their phone numbers still. He spoke of school and school days, the friends he’d had, and his special fondness for mathematics and science. He talked with enthusiasm of his days in the navy—he was seventeen, had just graduated from high school when he was drafted in 1943.
With his good engineering mind he was a ‘natural’ for radio and electronics, and after a crash course in Texas found himself assistant radio operator on a submarine. He remembered the names of various submarines on which he had served, their missions, where they were stationed, the names of his shipmates….
With recalling, reliving, Jimmie was full of animation; he did not seem to be speaking of the past but of the present, and I was very struck by the change of tense in his recollections as he passed from his school days to his days in the navy. He had been using the past tense, but now used the …the actual present tense of immediate experience.
A sudden, improbable suspicion seized me.
‘What year is this?’ I asked, concealing my perplexity under a casual manner.
‘Forty-five, man. What do you mean?’ He went on, ‘We’ve won the war, FDR’s dead, Truman’s at the helm. There are great times ahead.’
‘And you, Jimmie, how old would you be?’ Oddly, uncertainly, he hesitated a moment, as if engaged in calculation. ‘Why, I guess I’m nineteen, Doc. I’ll be twenty next birthday.’
Looking at the grey-haired man before me, I had an impulse for which I have never forgiven myself ….
‘Here,’ I said, and thrust a mirror toward him. ‘Look in the mirror and tell me what you see. Is that a nineteen-year-old looking out from the mirror?’
He suddenly turned ashen and gripped the sides of the chair. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he whispered…. What’s happened to me? Is this a nightmare? Am I crazy? Is this a joke?’— and he became frantic, panicked.
‘It’s okay, Jimmie,’ I said soothingly. ‘It’s just a mistake. Nothing to worry about. Hey!’ I took him to the window. ‘Isn’t this a lovely spring day. See the kids there playing baseball?’ He regained his color and started to smile, and I stole away, taking the hateful mirror with me.
Two minutes later I re-en...
I know I’m not. A good multitasker, that is. I know I do my best work when I’m singlemindedly focused on a certain thing. But if I don’t turn off my email when I’m working, I switch over to look at it. I fiddle with the stereo while driving and realize that I don’t remember the last stretch of road. I have my twitter stream open during a conference, and realize that I only absorbed the very lightest layer of what the speaker was actually saying, while I was busy reading the twitter stream of what people were talking about what he was saying. And I just can’t listen to music with words (at least english words) while reading or doing some other task that uses my verbal centers.
But there are people out there who claim to be great at multitasking. Are there people who have trained their brains to be better at this sort of thing? Turns out that a study came out of Stanford a few years back (Media Multitaskers Pay Mental Price) suggesting that no, they don’t. They asked students if they were heavy multitaskers, and found out that those students were just really highly distractible:
“They’re suckers for irrelevancy,” said communication Professor Clifford Nass, one of the researchers whose findings are published in the Aug. 24 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Everything distracts them.”
When given a task of sorting red rectangles, they were much more distracted by irrelevant blue triangles than non-multitaskers. Do they have better memories? It doesn’t seem so, they weren’t any better at remembering when alphabetical letters were shown to them more than once — in fact, they did worse as the study went on:
“The low multitaskers did great,” Ophir said. “The high multitaskers were doing worse and worse the further they went along because they kept seeing more letters and had difficulty keeping them sorted in their brains.”
And they also weren’t any better at switching between tasks than low multitaskers. Because, surprise, they couldn’t focus on the task they were doing.
“They couldn’t help thinking about the task they weren’t doing,” Ophir said. “The high multitaskers are always drawing from all the information in front of them. They can’t keep things separate in their minds.”
Dear lord, that sounds like me. I know I don’t filter as well as I used to now that I’m trying to juggle email during meetings, or update my calendar while I’m working on a paper. Things come up in my mind and I can’t filter it out, I attend to it right then.
Here’s a YouTube video about the study. ...
Trent Batson has scratched an itch I have had for years. Ever since I started using computers and a browser in the classroom, I have felt something didn’t fit. I was doing what I was supposed to be doing with technology even going beyond the call by becoming an early adopter of social tools, new hardware, and online learning platforms, but I was missing something. I was assuming that it was me that was the source of the problem. Perhaps if I was better at using these tools better I would enter into the pantheon of those who had mastered them. After reading Batson’s short but transformative post, I realize that it isn’t me (or at least not mostly me). It was the schools I worked within. I knew this on an instinctive level. Hadn’t my wife and I homeschooled our kids. Or rather we unschooled them. Shouldn’t that have been a clue? I felt that I had to render unto other people’s kids what belonged to them and unto mine what they deserved. And ne’er the twain, etc. Classic double bind.
This problem is one that Batson confronts: it isn’t anyone’s fault. There are no villains. The problem is that the world has changed and we need to live in it instead of the other one. The metaphor he implies is involves pouring. We add technology to the mix of education. Batson implies that they are oil and water and that if you add them to the education bottle they will not integrate. Of course, when we speak of technology integration we assume that “education will remain unchanged”. Education is the container. It is a consoling prospect to think that all we need to do to succeed is to make technology fit education. Education will simply use tech to do what it has done for years. This is the definition of reform. This conversation always implies a master. The educational system, status quo post-WWII, is the master and technology serves it.
Batson uses the analogy of the car to pop this bubble. ”A simple analogy: automobiles became popular in the 1910s — 1910 to 1920. But, for many enthusiasts who were among the first in their town to purchase an automobile, their enthusiasm waned quickly when they discovered their automobiles did not work very well on the dirt roads of the time. The brand new automobiles sat in garages or made short trips to the general store, consigned to the role of oddity instead of the “automobility” role they were supposed to fill. A highway system had to be built along with establishing laws, enforcement, street lights, commonly recognized road signs and the entire infrastructure for cars that took us decades to build. The nation had to integrate itself to the needs of the car.” This is a predictable pattern described by many: idea first, product second, system third, and institution fourth. Rinse and repeat.
If you look at college campuses you w...
From Hacked Education:
Khan Academy announced this morning that it has raised $5 million from the O’Sullivan Foundation (a foundation created by Irish engineer and investor Sean O’Sullivan). The money is earmarked for several initiatives: expanding the Khan Academy faculty, creating a content management system so that others can use the program’s learning analytics system, and building an actual brick-and-mortar school, beginning with a summer camp program.
“Teachers don’t scale,” I remember Sal Khan saying to me when I interviewed him last year. What can scale, he argues, is the infrastructure for content delivery. And that means you just need a handful of good lecturers’ record their lessons; the Internet will take care of the rest.
But online instruction clearly isn’t enough, and as “blended learning” becomes the latest buzzword — that is, a blend of offline and computer-mediated/online instruction — Khan Academy is now eyeing building its own school. The money from the O’Sullivan Foundation will go towards developing a “testbed for physical programs and K-12 curricula,” including an actual physical Khan Academy school.
What might Khan’s “school of the future” look like?
In his video interview with GOOD Magazine, Khan said:
As far as the future of learning is concerned, the school is going to be one or two really big classrooms, and because everyone can work at their own pace, we are going to see the best be a higher bar and you’re going to see everyone having access to that and they can move up with the best.
One or two large classrooms where everyone works at their own pace? That sounds a lot like Rick Ogston’s Carpe Diem school:
Carpe Diem is a hybrid model school, rotating kids between self-paced instruction on the computer and classroom instruction. Their building is laid out with one large computer lab, with classroom space in the back. They had 240 students working on computers when I walked in, and you could have heard a pin drop.
Carpe Diem has successfully substituted technology for labor. With seven grade levels...
Assuming that quality science education plays a role in economic growth within a country, it becomes important to understand how education policy might influence science education teaching and learning. This integrative research review draws on Cooper's methodology (Cooper, 1982; Cooper & Hedges, 2009) to synthesize empirical findings on the relationship between science education and test-based accountability policies. Current accountability policy, particularly at the federal level, is intended to influence educators to more fully consider the needs of all students; however, research suggests that, under these policies, many research-based reform efforts in science become sidetracked, teacher practice becomes more fact based, science is taught less, teachers become less satisfied, and many students' needs are not met. Therefore, a clear understanding of educators' perceptions of the impacts of current test-based accountability policies should guide the development and implementation of the next generation of national science standards and subsequent large-scale assessments. By also delineating the limitations of the research into the perceived connections between test-based accountability and science education, this synthesis reveals further research to be done. Finally, this paper details what the reviewed research suggests for improvements to K-12 science education accountability policies. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed 1–26, 2011