Some good quotes from Clifford Nass:

“It seemed as though they could actually do two things at once. What do these kids know that I don’t? It drove me crazy. That’s what inspired my research.”

But he found that “they’re not amazing. They can’t really do it.” His research shows that the students’ memories were disorganised; they fixated on irrelevant data, could not follow specific directions that required paying attention and wrote poorly.

… “We’ve reached a period where attention is no longer valued. There’s been a cultural change where we’ve forgotten about the idea of paying attention,” he says. “And people have started to resent that.”

I haven’t banned laptops from my own lectures – indeed, only small numbers of students bring laptops to lectures at UWS, so it hasn’t really been a major issue. In some classes I’ve given out laptops – but that has been to allow students to do practical work at set points in a class (its hard to teach programming in a lecture). I have this year used mobile phone based response/poll systems in class and that did work well – using the technology to concentrate attention on the task, without allowing it to become a distraction seems to be key.

Sherry Turkle makes a very worthwhile point:

But what professors are learning to say is: ‘You know what? In this class we’re here to be with each other. We’re here to be a community. Let’s make the most of it.’

There are of course two sides to this – lecturers need to do their part to engage students and to try to promote learning – and students need to learn how best to help themselves and understand the negative impacts of partial attention.

(See some of the other posts here on multi-tasking for links to other studies)

The ____ Generation. Insert one of:

Google, iPod, Gamer, MySpace, Nintendo, Now, N, Net, Multi-tasking, Benefits, Facebook.

To help you choose I undertook a *highly* scientific survey of popularity of each. I googled each term, and have ranked them below. Try and order them before you see the results – how many did you get right?

• iPod Generation. Hits: 333,000 for “ipod generation”. Confusingly, as well as “iPod Generation”, this also includes hits for the “IPOD Generation”, where IPOD means Insecure, Pressurized, Over-taxed and Debt-ridden. Plus some hits referring to different generations of iPods themselves. Mostly the first though.
• Net Generation. Hits: 203,000 for “net generation”. “Net Generation” on this blog!
• MySpace Generation. Hits: 85,700 for “myspace generation”.
• Google Generation. Hits on Google: 81,500 for “google generation”. “Google Generation” on this blog!
• Now Generation. Hits: 81,500 for “now generation”.
• N Generation. Hits: 80,900 for “n generation”. (Note: compared to other searches, a large proportion of these hits appear to be out of context. E.g. the ‘n’ generation of Nokia phones – a set of models of mobile phone, rather than a generation of youth.)
• Nintendo Generation. Hits: 27,200 for “nintendo generation”. On this blog!
• Gamer Generation. Hits: 23,400 for “gamer generation”. On this blog!
• Facebook Generation. Hits: 22,900 for “facebook generation”.
• Multi-tasking Generation. Hits: 3,430 for “multitasking generation”.
• Benefits Generation. Hits: 2,030 for “benefits generation”. OK, a British one this – as seen on the cover of the Daily Mail the other day. By the same journo who coined the term ‘Sick Note Generation’ a few days earlier.

To quote the article:

“…people who think they are multitasking are probably just underperforming in all – or at best, all but one – of their parallel pursuits. Practice might improve your performance, but you will never be as good as when focussing on one task at a time.”

The are quotes from a number of researchers in this area, showing that with practice performance at multi-tasking does improve – for people of all ages – but even researchers who are more ‘optimistic’ about multi-tasking believe that attempting to multitask writing with instant messaging will result in underperformance.

Natural multitasking is often seen as indicative of ‘digital natives’, but this lends support to arguments that students might simply not be doing as well by failing to concentrate on individual activities. While acknowledging that performance at multitasking drops with age, the fact that people of all ages can be trained to significantly improve their multitasking performance chips away at the idea of multitasking being a meaningful difference between ‘digital natives’ and ‘digital immigrants’.

In short, as more lecture halls and class rooms are set up for wireless, more and more students are using their laptops in the lecture hall. But they aren’t necessarily using them for taking notes, following up class related links or similar. No, they are more likely to be checking out MySpace pages, IM’ing friends or playing The Sims. Or buying shoes on eBay. And anecdotal evidence supports the common-sense assumption that this leads to poorer learning outcomes…

Cynthia M. Frisby, associate professor of strategic communication at the University of Missouri, has noticed students on MySpace and eBay during her lectures. She has also noticed more failing grades. The final straw, she says, came in an e-mail from a student “complimenting my outfit, failing to realize that the time stamp was on the e-mail, further suggesting that he was not paying attention to my lecture.”

Now she bans laptops in her large lecture courses and has a clause in her syllabus about the inappropriate use of technology. The result? “Huge increases in attention and better performance on exams,” she says. “Students have even mentioned that they feel like they are doing better without the laptop.”

This is not too different from my own experience. About 6 years ago I found someone playing ‘Snake’ on his mobile phone in my classroom. I have to admit that I was completely taken aback with that. When one student is using a laptop, and other students around are drawn to the screen, I know it isn’t being used for notes…

The article also include quotes with a very familiar feel to anyone who has read Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death” – or any of the numerous posts on this blog where I refer to it:

Adams cites a 1972 work by Eda LeShan on “The Sesame Street Syndrome.” She argued that, by overemphasizing the idea of right and wrong answers, the show taught children that thinking and questions are irrelevant because adults do the asking and answering. Nowadays, the syndrome “has come to describe students who expect to be entertained as they learn,” Adams wrote, adding: “If the entertainment doesn’t come from the front of the wireless classroom, it comes from the Internet.”

The article also includes some coping methods – such as allowing laptops but asking students to close them when there is a point needing emphasis. Somewhat deeper are comments on the philosophy of a technology led education system… e.g.:

“We should be teaching our students to think creatively or to become innovators, not just test takers,” he says.

That goal is increasingly difficult to attain. We deal with legislatures holding school districts “accountable” through multiple-choice testing as they cut budgets to higher education, resulting in ever-larger classes where digital distractions are most common and where we rely again on computer-graded bubble tests emphasizing right answers rather than process.

I could easily pick three or four more quotable paragraphs, but I’ll leave it there.

It is extremely unlikely that banning technologies from the classroom is going to be a viable long-term solution for the problems of distraction – so we need to develop more strategies for coping, and to better educate our students on how to use technology productively.

The sections I’ll look at this time are Parallel vs. Linear Processing and Random Access vs. Linear Thinking. At first it seems obvious – parallel processing has to be better than linear: being able to deal with multiple strands at once. And old fashioned liner thinking! Who could possibly want that!

I think Prensky made a clever choice of terms here, so I’m going to change the labels for a start. So question: What do you call linear processing combined with linear thinking?

Reasoning.

Collecting thoughts to build a structured argument, focussed thinking on a topic. Critical thinking. Even Prensky admits that this may be a problem to some extent:

A difficult challenge is how to create experiences that allow people to link anywhere and experience things in any order yet still communicate sequential ideas and logical thinking.

Actually, I’d say the challenge is how to help them learn and develop their critical thinking skills. Elsewhere (part two of ‘Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants’) Prensky has made a big issue out of how adaptable the human brain is. So there is every hope that we can find ways to help today’s twitchy youth become less reliant on constant stimulation and novelty.

Actually, its a lot less simple than this. Many great thinkers have been distinguished by their ability to pull on different strands of thought, and bring together different ideas in valuable ways. But establishing an argument still requires a certain degree of linearity: understanding that consequences follow on from other factors.

As well as disagreeing with this overview, I also disagree with many of the details in these two sections. So time to give them the paragraph by painful paragraph treatment. Starting with Parallel Processing vs. Linear Processing.

First, are the over 30′s uncomfortable with multi-tasking? I recall from my youth that my mother would do household chores while watching television and holding conversations. Not too different from some of the multi-tasking examples of todays youth that Prensky gives. My mother also told me about an aunt of hers who was able to hold three different conversations on different topics and in three languages at the one time. How’s that for multi-tasking! And I suspect that any study of “young computer artists” would discover that the amount of attention they pay to their music, and involvement in chatter, drops when they are fully involved in a task. (Dare I mention flow here – see the previous post for the discussion on that!)

Paragraph 2. Does a viewer of a modern news programme, where the screen is covered in different pieces of information receive more news in the same amount of time? Certainly. Do they get the same depth of information? Certainly not. Facts without hope of much real understanding. Facts presented in such a way as to explicitly discourage understanding – almost saying that it doesn’t matter if you know the causes or consequences of any of these events, its the number of events you know about that counts. Again, time to invoke Neil Postman’s excellent and his ironically entertaining “Amusing ourselves to death”.

Paragraph 3. It has been said in discussions in this blog that Prensky sometimes adapts his message to his audience. This paper was published for business leaders. And so, in this paragraph we read that “managers should be thinking of additional ways to enhance parallel processing and take advantage of this increased human capability“. It is clear that the dream of increased productivity is being sold here to the audience that clearly wants to buy. Personally, I don’t see this as any “worker’s Nirvana“, Nintendo generation or otherwise.

You may be happy to know I don’t have much to say on para 4 – the history of business organization is not a strong point of mine. Next.

At last we reach the section on Random Access vs. Linear Thinking. And it only has two paragraphs!

Para 1. Prensky claims that the hypertext information structure of web has increased the awareness and ability of youngsters to make connections. This is a very dubious, and unsupported statement. There is a difference between being able to follow hypertext connections and being able to mentally form meaningful connections between seemingly dis-connected facts. Is being “freed from the constraint of a single path of thought … generally an extremely positive development“? Not when individuals have to struggle when it is useful or necessary to do so! As noted above, even Prensky recognises that there are some problems with this.

Para 2. After some blah about corporate intranets, Prensky brings in big guns, the military. If the military do it, its got to be right, right? Anyway, we are told a little about an information sharing system developed by the US military which makes information gathered available electronically near-instantly – and which allows access, browsing and investigation of the data. Prensky describes it as “the freedom to create and explore random paths that lead to new ideas“. Personally, I’d hope that more time was spent following interesting or meaningful paths rather than random ones, and I can’t shake the feeling that what may be a very useful and capable data-sharing network is being sold here as something much more than it is.

I can’t really argue with the vague statements calling for more use of modern electronic alternatives to traditional business reports and communications media. In many cases tools like wikis really can help teams share, access and update information far easier than to-ing and fro-ing with long written reports and design documents. So, to some extent, I don’t disagree with all of the solutions or systems that Prensky would have business leaders adopt – but I strongly disagree with his analysis of why.

I stated above that linear thinking and processing could perhaps be renamed reasoning. What about parallel processing and random access? Does this lead to disjointed, mixed-up thinking? I think we have to recognise that thinking about too many things at once and replacing focussed attention with a channel-surfing approach to data collection might lead to severe problems with analysis. As Neil Postman argued it is the role of the education systems to adapt to the media society, not to unthinkingly adopt wholesale the media culture – but to recognise how it may impact on students’ styles and ways of thinking, and to try to cure problems that result.

Want an example of parallel processing, random access writing? I’d refer you to the section in the paper on Fantasy vs. Reality. As I argued before this is a good example of disjointed facts being used to support a conclusion despite very limited connection actually existing between the supposed causes and consequences.

In the 21st century the skills of recognising what information is relevant, and understanding why and how will continue to valuable life and work-place skills. Having access to more and more information may be making this more important than before. The internet-age brings a vast increase in access to data, facts and factoids. Critically evaluating and analysing this will require some good old fashioned reasoning.

phew. Made it. And now I realise that I also promised to deal with “Don’t bother me mom…” in the same post. So very quickly, in bullets! Note: I have not read the book in full. I have browsed it only, and read a few chapters. I do not plan to read the book in full, it would upset me too much.

• The title. It’s very patronising. I hate it, but not half as much as my wife does. It’s actually a real life quote (given somewhere in the book) paraphrased to make it real annoying and provocative.
• The book itself is written in a fairly patronising tone. I know that my wife and I aren’t really the target audience, but it really does come across like that to us.
• He appears to write off the value of almost every form of learning that isnt a computer or video game, and is generally wrong to do so.
• He exaggerates the learning value of non-educational games, and fails to critically address any areas of concern.
• He claims that books are not particularly important any more! “…almost everything that has ever been written – with the exception of science fiction and predictions – is about the past. While still important to know about, the past no longer informs the future as it used to.” (p160-161).
  I don’t even want to begin with this one. Funny that this is one of the topics that Neil Postman writes extensively about.

The 2006 article (see online article here) is about technology in development which seeks to help reduce interruptions, but also includes some practical advice such as:

If an interruption is likely to take longer than 2 minutes, add it to your to-do list and go back to what you were already doing.

It certainly seems that the current generation of office workers perform worse when they attempt to multi-task.