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August 26, 2011

Collaborative Learning for the Digital Age By Cathy N. Davidson

Five or six years ago, I attended a lecture on the science of attention. A philosopher who conducts research over in the medical school was talking about attention blindness, the basic feature of the human brain that, when we concentrate intensely on one task, causes us to miss just about everything else. Because we can't see what we can't see, our lecturer was determined to catch us in the act. He had us watch a video of six people tossing basketballs back and forth, three in white shirts and three in black, and our task was to keep track only of the tosses among the people in white. I hadn't seen the video back then, although it's now a classic, featured on punk-style TV shows or YouTube versions enacted at frat houses under less than lucid conditions. The tape rolled, and everyone began counting. Everyone except me. I'm dyslexic, and the moment I saw that grainy tape with the confusing basketball tossers, I knew I wouldn't be able to keep track of their movements, so I let my mind wander. My curiosity was piqued, though, when about 30 seconds into the tape, a gorilla sauntered in among the players. She (we later learned a female student was in the gorilla suit) stared at the camera, thumped her chest, and then strode away while they continued passing the balls. When the tape stopped, the philosopher asked how many people had counted at least a dozen basketball tosses. Hands went up all over. He then asked who had counted 13, 14, and congratulated those who'd scored the perfect 15. Then he asked, "And who saw the gorilla?" I raised my hand and was surprised to discover I was the only person at my table and one of only three or four in the large room to do so. He'd set us up, trapping us in our own attention blindness. Yes, there had been a trick, but he wasn't the one who had played it on us. By concentrating so hard on counting, we had managed to miss the gorilla in the midst.

Attention blindness is the fundamental structuring principle of the brain, and I believe that it presents us with a tremendous opportunity. My take is different from that of many neuroscientists: Where they perceive the shortcomings of the individual, I sense an opportunity for collaboration. Fortunately, given the interactive nature of most of our lives in the digital age, we have the tools to harness our different forms of attention and take advantage of them. It's not easy to acknowledge that everything we've learned about how to pay attention means that we've been missing everything else. It's not easy for us rational, competent, confident types to admit that the very key to our successour ability to pinpoint a problem and solve it, an achievement honed in all those years in school and beyondmay be exactly what limits us. For more than a hundred years, we've been training people to see in a particularly individual, deliberative way. No one ever told us that our way of seeing excluded everything else. I want to suggest a different way of seeing, one that's based on multitasking our attentionnot by seeing it all alone but by distributing various parts of the task among others dedicated to the same end. For most of us, this is a new pattern of attention. Multitasking is the ideal mode of the 21st century, not just because of information overload but also because our digital age was structured without anything like a central node broadcasting one stream of information that we pay attention to at a given moment. On the Internet, everything links to everything, and all of it is available all the time. Unfortunately, current practices of our educational institutions and workplacesare a mismatch between the age we live in and the institutions we have built over the last 100-plus years. The 20th century taught us that completing one task before starting another one was the route to success. Everything about 20th-century education, like the 20th-century workplace, has been designed to reinforce our attention to regular, systematic tasks that we take to completion. Attention to task is at the heart of industrial labor management, from the assembly line to the modern office, and of educational philosophy, from grade school to graduate school. The Newsweek cover story proclaimed, "iPod, Therefore I Am." On MTV News, it was "Dude, I just got a free iPod!" Peter Jennings smirked at the ABC-TV news audience, "Shakespeare on the iPod? Calculus on the iPod?"

And the staff of the Duke Chronicle was apoplectic: "The University seems intent on transforming the iPod into an academic device, when the simple fact of the matter is that iPods are made to listen to music. It is an unnecessarily expensive toy that does not become an academic tool simply because it is thrown into a classroom." What had those pundits so riled up? In 2003, we at Duke were approached by Apple about becoming one of six Apple Digital Campuses. Each college would choose a technology that Apple was developing and propose a campus use for it. It would be a partnership of business and education, exploratory in all ways. We chose a flashy new music-listening gadget that young people loved but that baffled most adults. When we gave a free iPod to every member of the entering firstyear class, there were no conditions. We simply asked students to dream up learning applications for this cool little white device with the adorable earbuds, and we invited them to pitch their ideas to the faculty. If one of their professors decided to use iPods in a course, the professor, too, would receive a free Duke-branded iPod, and so would all the students in the class (whether they were firstyears or not). This was an educational experiment without a syllabus. No lesson plan. No assessment matrix rigged to show that our investment had been a wise one. No assignment to count the basketballs. After all, as we knew from the science of attention, to direct attention in one way precluded all the other ways. If it were a reality show, we might have called it Project Classroom Makeover. At the time, I was vice provost for interdisciplinary studies at Duke, a position equivalent to what in industry would be the R&D person, and I was among those responsible for cooking up the iPod experiment. In the world of technology, "crowdsourcing" means inviting a group to collaborate on a solution to a problem, but that term didn't yet exist in 2003. It was coined by Jeff Howe of Wired magazine in 2006 to refer to the widespread Internet practice of posting an open call requesting help in completing some task, whether writing code (that's how much of the open-source code that powers the Mozilla browser was written) or creating a winning logo (like the "Birdie" design of Twitter, which cost a total of six bucks). In the iPod experiment, we were crowdsourcing educational innovation for a digital age. Crowdsourced thinking is very different from "credentialing," or relying on top-down expertise. If

anything, crowdsourcing is suspicious of expertise, because the more expert we are, the more likely we are to be limited in what we conceive to be the problem, let alone the answer. Once the pieces were in place, we decided to take our educational experiment one step further. By giving the iPods to first-year students, we ended up with a lot of angry sophomores, juniors, and seniors. They'd paid hefty private-university tuition, too! So we relented and said any student could have a free iPodjust so long as she persuaded a professor to require one for a course and came up with a learning app in that course. Does that sound sneaky? Far be it from me to say that we planned it. The real treasure trove was to be found in the students' innovations. Working together, and often alongside their professors, they came up with far more learning apps for their iPods than anyoneeven at Applehad dreamed possible. Most predictable were uses whereby students downloaded audio archives relevant to their coursesNobel Prize acceptance speeches by physicists and poets, the McCarthy hearings, famous trials. Almost instantly, students figured out that they could record lectures on their iPods and listen at their leisure. Interconnection was the part the students grasped before any of us did. Students who had grown up connected digitally gravitated to ways that the iPod could be used for collective learning. They turned iPods into social media and networked their learning in ways we did not anticipate. In the School of the Environment, one class interviewed families in a North Carolina community concerned with lead paint in their homes and schools, commented on one another's interviews, and together created an audio documentary that aired on local and regional radio stations and all over the Web. In the music department, students uploaded their own compositions to their iPods so their fellow students could listen and critique. After eight years in Duke's central administration, I was excited to take the methods we had gleaned from the iPod experiment back into the classroom. I decided to offer a new course called "This Is Your Brain on the Internet," a title that pays homage to Daniel J. Levitin's inspiring book This Is Your Brain on Music (Dutton, 2006), a kind of music-lover's guide to the brain. Levitin argues that music makes complex circuits throughout the brain, requiring different kinds of brain function for listening, processing, and producing, and thus makes us think differently. Substitute the word "Internet" for "music," and you've got the gist of my course.

I advertised the class widely, and I was delighted to look over the roster of the 18 students in the seminar and find more than 18 majors, minors, and certificates represented. I created a bare-bones suggested reading list that included, for example, articles in specialized journals like Cognition and Developmental Neuropsychology, pieces in popular magazines like Wired and Science, novels, and memoirs. There were lots of Web sites, too, of course, but I left the rest loose. This class was structured to be peer-led, with student interest and student research driving the design. "Participatory learning" is one term used to describe how we can learn together from one another's skills. "Cognitive surplus" is another used in the digital world for that "more than the sum of the parts" form of collaborative thinking that happens when groups think together online. We used a method that I call "collaboration by difference." Collaboration by difference is an antidote to attention blindness. It signifies that the complex and interconnected problems of our time cannot be solved by anyone alone, and that those who think they can act in an entirely focused, solitary fashion are undoubtedly missing the main point that is right there in front of them, thumping its chest and staring them in the face. Collaboration by difference respects and rewards different forms and levels of expertise, perspective, culture, age, ability, and insight, treating difference not as a deficit but as a point of distinction. It always seems more cumbersome in the short run to seek out divergent and even quirky opinions, but it turns out to be efficient in the end and necessary for success if one seeks an outcome that is unexpected and sustainable. That's what I was aiming for. I had the students each contribute a new entry or amend an existing entry on Wikipedia, or find another public forum where they could contribute to public discourse. There was still a lot of criticism about the lack of peer review in Wikipedia entries, and some professors were banning Wikipedia use in the classroom. I didn't understand that. Wikipedia is an educator's fantasy, all the world's knowledge shared voluntarily and free in a format theoretically available to all, and which anyone can edit. Instead of banning it, I challenged my students to use their knowledge to make Wikipedia better. All conceded that it had turned out to be much harder to get their work to "stick" on Wikipedia than it was to write a traditional term paper. Given that I was teaching a class based on learning and the Internet, having my students blog was a no-brainer. I

supplemented that with more traditionally structured academic writing, a term paper. When I had both samples in front of me, I discovered something curious. Their writing online, at least in their blogs, was incomparably better than in the traditional papers. In fact, given all the tripe one hears from pundits about how the Internet dumbs our kids down, I was shocked that elegant bloggers often turned out to be the clunkiest and most pretentious of research-paper writers. Term papers rolled in that were shot through with jargon, stilted diction, poor word choice, rambling thoughts, and even pretentious grammatical errors (such as the ungrammatical but proper-sounding use of "I" instead of "me" as an object of a preposition). But it got me thinking: What if bad writing is a product of the form of writing required in collegethe term paperand not necessarily intrinsic to a student's natural writing style or thought process? I hadn't thought of that until I read my students' lengthy, weekly blogs and saw the difference in quality. If students are trying to figure out what kind of writing we want in order to get a good grade, communication is secondary. What if "research paper" is a category that invites, even requires, linguistic and syntactic gobbledygook? Research indicates that, at every age level, people take their writing more seriously when it will be evaluated by peers than when it is to be judged by teachers. Online blogs directed at peers exhibit fewer typographical and factual errors, less plagiarism, and generally better, more elegant and persuasive prose than classroom assignments by the same writers. Longitudinal studies of student writers conducted by Stanford University's Andrea Lunsford, a professor of English, assessed student writing at Stanford year after year. Lunsford surprised everyone with her findings that students were becoming more literate, rhetorically dexterous, and fluent not less, as many feared. The Internet, she discovered, had allowed them to develop their writing. The semester flew by, and we went wherever it took us. The objective was to get rid of a lot of the truisms about "the dumbest generation" and actually look at how new theories of the brain and of attention might help us understand how forms of thinking and collaborating online maximize brain activity. We spent a good deal of time thinking about how accident, disruption, distraction, and difference increase the motivation to learn and to solve problems, both individually and collectively. To find examples, we spent time with a dance ensemble rehearsing a new piece, a jazz band

improvising together, and teams of surgeons and computer programmers performing robotic surgery. We walked inside a monkey's brain in a virtual-reality cave. In another virtual-reality environment, we found ourselves trembling, unable to step off what we knew was a two-inch drop, because it looked as if we were on a ledge over a deep canyon. One of our readings was On Intelligence (Times Books, 2004), a unified theory of the brain written by Jeff Hawkins (the neuroscientist who invented the Palm Pilot) with Sandra Blakeslee. I agree with many of Hawkins's ideas about the brain's "memoryprediction framework." My own interest is in how memories reinforced behaviors from the pastpredict future learning, and in how we can intentionally disrupt that pattern to spark innovation and creativity. Hawkins is interested in how we can use the pattern to create next-generation artificial intelligence that will enhance the performance, and profitability, of computerized gadgets like the Palm Pilot. The students and I had been having a heated debate about his theories when a student discovered that Hawkins happened to be in our area to give a lecture. I was away at a meeting, when suddenly my BlackBerry was vibrating with e-mails and IM's from my students, who had convened the class without me to present a special guest on a special topic: Jeff Hawkins debating the ideas of Jeff Hawkins. It felt a bit like the gag in the classic Woody Allen movie Annie Hall, when someone in the line to purchase movie tickets is expounding pompously on the ideas of Marshall McLuhan and then McLuhan himself steps into the conversation. It was that kind of class. "Jeff Hawkins thought it was odd that we decided to hold class when you weren't there," one student texted me. "Why wouldn't we? That's how it works in 'This Is Your Brain on the Internet.'" Project Classroom Makeover. I heard the pride. "Step aside, Prof Davidson: This is a university!" "Nonsense!" "Absurd!" "A wacko holding forth on a soapbox. If Prof Davidson just wants to yammer and lead discussions, she should resign her position and head for a park or subway platform, and pass a hat for donations." Some days, it's not easy being Prof Davidson.

What caused the ruckus in the blogosphere this time was a blog I posted on the Hastac, an online network, which I co-founded in 2002, dedicated to new forms of learning for a digital age. The post, "How to Crowdsource Grading," proposed a form of assessment that I planned to use the next time I taught "This Is Your Brain on the Internet." It was my students' fault, really. By the end of the course, I felt confident. I settled in with their evaluations, waiting for the accolades to flow, a pedagogical shower of appreciation. And mostly that's what I read, thankfully. But there was one group of students who had some candid feedback, and it took me by surprise. They said everything about the course had been bold, new, and exciting. Everything, that is, except the grading. They pointed out that I had used entirely conventional methods for testing and evaluating their work. We had talked as a class about the new modes of assessment on the Internetlike public commenting on products and services and leaderboards (peer evaluations adapted from sports sites)where the consumer of content could also evaluate that content. These students said they loved the class but were perplexed that my assessment method had been so 20th century: Midterm. Final. Research paper. Graded A, B, C, D. The students were right. You couldn't get more 20th century than that. The students signed their names to the course evaluations. It turned out the critics were A+ students. That stopped me in my tracks. If you're a teacher worth your salt, you pay attention when the A+ students say something is wrong. I was embarrassed that I had overlooked such a crucial part of our brain on the Internet. I contacted my students and said they'd made me rethink some very old habits. Unlearning. I promised I would rectify my mistake the next time I taught the course. I thought about my promise, came up with what seemed like a good system, then wrote about it in my blog. My new grading method, which set off such waves of vitriol, combined old-fashioned contract grading with peer review. Contract grading goes back at least to the 1960s. In it, the requirements of a course are laid out in advance, and students contract to do all of the assignments or only some of them. A student with a heavy course or workload who doesn't need an A, for example, might contract to do everything but the final project and then, according to the contract, she might earn a B. It's all very

adult. But I also wanted some quality control. So I added the crowdsourcing component based on the way I had already structured the course. I thought that since pairs of students were leading each class session and also responding to their peers' required weekly reading blogs, why not have them determine whether the blogs were good enough to count as fulfilling the terms of the contract? If a blog didn't pass muster, it would be the task of the student leaders that week to tell the blogger and offer feedback on what would be required for it to count. Student leaders for a class period would have to do that carefully, for next week a classmate would be evaluating their work. I also liked the idea of students' each having a turn at being the one giving the grades. That's not a role most students experience, even though every study of learning shows that you learn best by teaching someone else. Besides, if constant public self-presentation and constant public feedback are characteristics of a digital age, why aren't we rethinking how we evaluate, measure, test, assess, and create standards? Isn't that another aspect of our brain on the Internet? There are many ways of crowdsourcing, and mine was simply to extend the concept of peer leadership to grading. The blogosphere was convinced that either I or my students would be pulling a fast one if the grading were crowdsourced and students had a role in it. That says to me that we don't believe people can learn unless they are forced to, unless they know it will "count on the test." As an educator, I find that very depressing. As a student of the Internet, I also find it implausible. If you give people the means to selfpublishwhether it's a photo from their iPhone or a blogthey do so. They seem to love learning and sharing what they know with others. But much of our emphasis on grading is based on the assumption that learning is like cod-liver oil: It is good for you, even though it tastes horrible going down. And much of our educational emphasis is on getting one answer right on one test as if that says something about the quality of what you have learned or the likelihood that you will remember it after the test is over. Grading, in a curious way, exemplifies our deepest convictions about excellence and authority, and specifically about the right of those with authority to define what constitutes excellence. If we crowdsource grading, we are suggesting that young people without credentials are fit to judge quality and value. Welcome to the

Internet, where everyone's a critic and anyone can express a view about the new iPhone, restaurant, or quarterback. That democratizing of who can pass judgment is digital thinking. As I found out, it is quite unsettling to people stuck in top-down models of formal education and authority. Learn. Unlearn. Relearn. In addition to the content of our course which ranged across cognitive psychology, neuroscience, management theory, literature and the arts, and the various fields that compose science-and-technology studies"This Is Your Brain on the Internet" was intended to model a different way of knowing the world, one that encompasses new and different forms of collaboration and attention. More than anything, it courted failure. Unlearning. "I smell a reality TV show," one critic sniffed. That's not such a bad idea, actually. Maybe I'll try that next time I teach "This Is Your Brain on the Internet." They can air it right after Project Classroom Makeover. Cathy N. Davidson is a professor of interdisciplinary studies at Duke University. She served as the first vice provost for interdisciplinary studies at the university from 1998 until 2006, when she helped create the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. This essay is adapted from her book Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn, just published by Viking.
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akhileshankala 1 year ago I don't agree with quite a few v iews mentioned rather lamely as those that necessitate a goodness in this internet era. Specifically , giv en that more and more people are engaging in social networking sites-so emroiled in commenting and so fastidious and so particular about how they are being commented up on,students due to such a, what I call 'delirium' seem to almost inv ariably engage in these activ ities not being able to concentrate on any thing else... just as a man who feels restless without taking drugs. How do y ou substantiate this? I would just like to add, rather proudly that I am not a v ictim of the abov e mentioned 'phenomenon' but I found so many of my peers hav ing succumbed to it.

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the thoughtspaces 1 year ago

If I could engage 20 credits with professors like Cathy N. Dav idson, I would call the award of that degree "Nirv ana". Then I wouldn't want to engage a PhD but a NheD - a Doctorate of higher education Nirv ana. The schism here is between traditional learning and human possibilities. Just reading through the piece made me feel good about the emergent engagement on display . I can only pigeon hole this form of education as 21 st Century learning. That does not mean that old, true and tried tested way s are obsolete, but that whenev er a sy stem leads us to behav e one way inside the sy stem and another outside it, we need to peer in the outer one to see what we may be missing. It is a cerebral jigsaw that requires all the pieces to fit because once thing I recognize is that students do hav e ex traordinary relationships with their profs and can be in awe of those they respect as people who hav e helped them to see, but here I read about a learning pool, where ev ery one is discov ering something, and that is something I lov e seeing - it means I that as I sit in the present - I know I am watching a much more powerful and positiv e future unfold. We can still worship the prof as it has occurred in time immemorial, or we can focus on observ ing transformational change in the way we indiv idually approach learning, then there is less worship and more taking part in the activ ity of making education a way of life rather than simply a way of graduating. M.

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5768 1 year ago in reply to the thoughtspaces If y ou are looking for "possibilities," "emergent engagement," "cerebral jigsaw," "discov ering," "unfolding," "lov e," and "transformational change" psy choanaly sis is y our cup of tea. The classroom any time it is structured for accountability for learning ov er will certainly bore y ou to death.

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the thoughtspaces 1 year ago in reply to 5768

It probably will bore me to death. Then that is my challenging of learning. I hav e to fix that because learning is my responsibility - as a student of life at least, if that is education equates with life. The takeaway I gained from reading Cathy Dav idson's article is that when we are open to a new approach, we suddenly see things we didn't see before - we awaken to new ty pes of learning (BTW y ou can add "awaken to ourselv es" to y our list) and then we can figure out how concrete our learning needs to be and how abstract. Both are v itally important forms of seeing IMHO. Surely a univ ersity education that does not do that is simply rote learning? I hav e no idea how to take the v iciousness out of education, intelligence cannot be enforced, it can't be dictated, we either rise to the intelligence we are capable of encompassing or we gain nothing much but another day of same old, same old - the only psy choanaly sis of merit here is "know thy self". Education hasn't become less v iscous, it still remains largely an industrial age training ground. In what I see Dav idson write abov e, I see her welcoming in the 21 st Century . I really don't know who any body here is, I don't know how best any particular person learns ev en if I hav e pedagogical script - if education isn't a way of life for me, then all I am doing is graduating into that equally boring ex istence of pass/fail, then education isn't a way of life, and in that resulting failure I will hav e done that to my self, only my self. I am not here to prov e that I am a lifelong learner. I am. Bey ond the imaginativ e words I utilized there is the pragmatic reality that y ou hav e outlined, which is that learning without rigor is simply shortchanging our giv en selv es. I hav e come here to learn and that learning includes burning some of my own ego, I added a like to y our response, because y ou offered something that I can certainly appreciate, build upon simply because I can be adaptiv e - and so, if I can do that

here, imagine what I might hav e learned when once, many decades ago, when I too used to be in a classroom. Y es, v icious education bores me to death - and y es, I would like that also to be engrav ed on my tombstone or at least written into the epitaph of factory education. M.

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John Graves 1 year ago "Make Wikipedia better" is a fantastic assignment for almost any course. Perhaps a similar challenge would be of ev en greater interest to some students. As a PhD student in Computer Science, I'v e picked "Make something better than Wikipedia" as my thesis topic. Two y ears into my research, the open source Wiki-to-Speech project has reached a stage where students and teachers can begin using the (free) tools to create content which prov ides pathway s for learning rather than merely points of reference. For ex ample, here is a Wiki-toSpeech presentation on the foundational concept behind the project, stigmergy :

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/128384...
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garay 1 year ago I am a big fan of student group assignments, especially , those that keep the students engaged and working together (instead of div 'ing up the work), and ov er the y ears, I hav e found student assignments inv olv ing indiv idual or group blogs to work best. Eons ago, in 2003, a good portion of the grade in our online class was based on student participation in discussion boards. It worked well, ex cept for file attachment submissions. The attachments affected the fluid communication that we wanted to see in our class. So we turned file attachments off. Students had to ty pe in their assignments and substantiv e comments to their classmates' postings directly into the Blackboard discussion forums. Many copy +pasted their posts on the forums, but we did started seeing better digital writing when students were not affected by the MS-Word "I am writing a paper" mentality . Fluid discussion board communication, of course, improv ed significantly :: our students were engaged. Life was good. Eons later, in 2008 (I think), we started using class blogs inside Blackboard. Why , I ev en once changed the course site entry point from Announcements to a Class Blog and confused the heck out of our students and co-instructors. Today , I usually assign blog assignments. Blog assignments work great because they prov ide a rich authoring env ironment within a set and v ery familiar blogging framework. Our students, any one really , don't hav e to futz with wiki nav igation, content sequencing, aggregation, and peripheral presentation. Students can concentrate on their writing, easily mark it up, add links, multimedia and any thing else they may deem appropriate. Instructors can easily set indiv idual and group assignment blogs to be open to all, or priv ate until graded. I like to set mine to be open to the class, in fact, further encouraging fellow students to critique and discuss their classmates' writing assignments v ia blog comments. Blog assignments hav e worked v ery well for us. Students get into substantiv e discussions. Like the article say s, our learners like to show off what they know, ex pres their opinions and Web 2.0 tools, like blogs facilitates that rather well. Better y et, their colloborativ e learning skills, writing skills and quality of discussion continues to get better and better. Life is still good.

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lamoglie 1 year ago in reply to garay May be it depends on the student's academic interest/inclination (major): I hav e students who are quite annoy ed if they hav e to blog or read someone's blog or keep up with my teacherly blogging. They are not incurious; actually , they are intelligent, wellspoken, well-read and "good students." Hitting them with the stick of Required for Y our Grade, or ev en tempting them with the carrot of Improv ing Y our Grade ... well, it seems counterproductiv e. Is it ok to study , read, write and also be unplugged?

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ychumanities 1 year ago in reply to lamoglie Sure, if what y ou are are aiming to learn is similarly disconnected.

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Mike L. Davenport 1 year ago

I can appreciate many of Dr. Dav idson's thoughts and efforts. Especially since a core component of my first y ear class, A world of wisdom from mistakes, centers around a v ery similar Wikipedia project. One of the most grabbing parts of that project was when one of my students approached me with a strange look. When asked what was wrong, she stated, "When I turn in a paper to y ou only y ou see it. With Wikipedia billions of people can see it. I'll really need to work hard on this." Learn comes in many different places. Brav o for y ou searching for some of those.

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educationnet2007 1 year ago "Gorilla in the midst"? Great line!

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wiser_now 1 year ago in reply to educationnet2007 Many writers agree. See Google search of prev ious users: About 352,000 results (0.1 7 seconds)

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electronicmuse 1 year ago Those who wish to find an antidote for these speculations on the "v alue" of diffuseness need only research "multitasking," and/or "multitasking 201 0" online. If y ou hav en't read this research, y ou might be astonished to learn just how pernicious attempts at "multitasking" really are. On the one hand, the author presents, uh, diffuse musings, and on the other-there is the sy stematic research. May be that's the "point" of this article, but the theory here doesn't stand up to inspection. In my field, y ou just can't cut it without intense personal focus . . . I'll stick to that.

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Derek Bruff 1 year ago in reply to electronicmuse

I was cautious when I saw that Dav idson inv oked the "multi-tasking" idea here since I'm aware that there's good research arguing that idea. But she's using the term in a different way , I think: "I want to suggest a different way of seeing, one that's based on

multitasking our attentionnot by seeing it all alone but by distributing v arious parts of the task among others dedicated to the same end. For most of us, this is a new pattern of attention." As an indiv idual, I can't split my attention and attend to multiple things at once. But a group of indiv iduals can do so, and I think that's what Dav idson means here. It's consistent with her use of "crowdsourcing" in this essay , that a group of indiv iduals can accomplish more than what any one indiv idual (ev en an ex pert) can do because of the div ersity of perspectiv es they collectiv ely hold. I don't think she's arguing that "intense personal focus" isn't useful. Rather, she's pointing out that "intense personal focus" means we'll miss something things, and that working within a group can mitigate this.

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rick1952 1 year ago in reply to Derek Bruff I agree with y our interpretation. In a way , I think Dav idson is identify ing in the digital world something similar to what i understand happens when fly ing a commercial airliner or the space shuttle - lots of distributed attention to getting a particular task accomplished.

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akhileshankala 1 year ago in reply to electronicmuse Ex actly .I buy y our point. Multi-tasking is an insidious practice in this modern day ..so dangerous that nev er can a student dev ote his full concentration to the task at hand. What's the point of doing any thing if u r not 1 00% interested, if not committed.

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reinking 1 year ago To me, there is a frustrating distraction in this piece that rev eals a large point about attention. In her introduction, the authors adds a new sy mptom that supposedly rev eals the my sterious etiology and manifestations of an ailment called dy slex ia, for which there is no definitiv e diagnosis, only a div erse menu of illustrativ e sy mptoms from which to choose (37 at one site that pops up on Google with the comforting message that "usually " dy slex ics ex hibit at least 1 0). Was the author's decision not to attend to tracking the basketballs because she is dy slex ic or because she believ es she is dy slex ic? I once had a conv ersation along these lines with a student who indicated that he was ADD (because he had been told that he was). When in the course of our conv ersation I asked him some of his fav orite free time activ ities, he responded "play ing chess." When I pointed out how remarkable it was that, giv en his condition, he would enjoy a pastime that required such concentration and focus, he looked genuinely surprised and said that this inconsistency had nev er occurred to him. The larger point is that attention is not something innate to an indiv idual, let alone to a generation, although propensities might be. Attention is task specific, shaped by culture, and applied in relation to our beliefs, v alues, and personal preferences which I think the author is really say ing and which makes the introductory anecdote contradictory . Any one who thinks children hav e short attention spans is imposing their adult v alues on children who under certain circumstances relev ant to their world persev erate for hours on activ ities that adults would abandon in minutes.

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Derek Bruff 1 year ago in reply to reinking

I think the introductory anecdote works well here. It shows that if ev ery one in a group is focused on the ex act same thing (counting basketball passes, in this case), the group is likely to miss something. In her anecdote, a handful of people didn't focus on the assigned task (for whatev er reason), which meant that the group, as a group, was more observ ant.

I think y ou're letting the comment about dy slex ia distract y ou, so to speak, from Dav idson's point.

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mrmars 1 year ago With all due respect, and a healthy admiration for the author's energy and industrious ex ploration of new techniques, not ev ery one has the benefit of teaching students of the caliber that are admitted to Duke. How might these ex periments play out in a decidedly nonselectiv e public univ ersity ? I for one am not brav e enough to find out.

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5768 1 year ago in reply to mrmars Y es, and I am wondering how these ex periments at Duke would compare against traditional educational methods and their outcomes at Duke. Innov ation for innov ation's sake that fails to norm itself against past practices and outcomes is y et too y oung an ex periment for us to judge.

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David Thomson 1 year ago

In reply to "reinking": "Was the author's decision not to attend to tracking the basketballs because she is dy slex ic or because she believ es she is dy slex ic?" Y ou don't think it's likely someone publishing in the field of brain science, who helped put together a freaking Center for Cognitiv e Neuroscience, might hav e taken the time to inv estigate the nature of her own dy slex ia?(Or perhaps y ou missed those little details in a blip of attention blindness?)

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tporges 1 year ago in reply to David Thomson Dav id, I'm not aware that Prof. Dav idson has actually published "in the field of brain science." In any case, cut back on the flaming, eh?

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bghansel 1 year ago There's no surprise that the quality of writing on the student blogs was better than their term papers. I find my self only skimming most research articles because the writing formula for so many academic journal articles seems to ensure that the author must bury the few liv e ideas and findings in so much conv entional dead wood. But rather than blame the formula, I blame our ex pectations, which include fluency in the jargon of our disciplines and the apparent belief that y ou are writing in academic code for a select group of ex perts who know that code better than y ou do.

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Jeff 1 year ago Degrees are granted to indiv iduals, not to groups. Grades are assigned to indiv iduals, not to groups. The academic enterprise is inherently indiv idual. Any study or grading scheme that can't account for that fact is inapropriate.

I think group work is most often assigned because it's more conv enient for professors. Fewer things to grade. By grouping higher performing students with lower performing students, the class av erage grades go up. That helps professors on their ev aluations.

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jimislew 1 year ago in reply to Jeff

Life outside the academic enterprise is heav ily group centered. An education that does not prepare students to work successfully in a group is inappropriate and flawed. Most of us hav e felt the sting of working with underperforming peers, it sucks. The challenge, for professors, and I suppose bosses, is usually figuring out which members of the group distinguished themselv es.

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Jeff 1 year ago in reply to jimislew Teamwork is v alued outside the univ ersity , not "group centered" work. Teams are v alued because they can produce work that one person can't achiev e. The work assignments giv en to groups of students can be achiev ed by indiv iduals. This is precisely why univ ersities cannot prepare students for work in teams. The entire "group work" training sy stem is artificial and unrealistic. Outside the univ ersity , teams can fail, but group grades are not giv en by professors. The comparison with non-academic teamwork must fail.But this isn't my main point, any way . Group work wasn't introduced to teach teamwork. It was introduced to transfer teaching load from professors to brighter students. Inv ariably , professors do not allow students to select their own teams. Why not? Because professors intentionally group lower performing students with higher performing students. This giv es a benefit to the professor and to the lowerperforming student at the ex pense of the brighter student.

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gasstationwithoutpumps 1 year ago in reply to Jeff

I agree entirely with this pointthat group work is appropriate only for projects that are too big for indiv iduals. There is an optimum group size for most tasks, and for most school tasks, that optimum size is one. Coming up with projects that genuinely benefit from group work is difficult, but possible, at least in upper-div ision engineering classes. See http://gasstationwithoutpumps....

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Julie Gillis Lanclos 1 year ago

What do y u think?

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jimislew 1 year ago Lov ed the positiv e wav es, and the energy .

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technologicaltransfo 1 year ago

Interesting...but how will it change a course on, let's say , classical Greek, or Kant's Critique? And let's not forget the following well-established facts: Facebook is the only place people talk to a wall "I wrote about it in my blog",... as did 1 ,000,000,000 other bloggers who don't read the other blogs Internet, though a great tool, also seriously distorts our attention. Proof is that I am writing this while I actually planned to do some work, and I am sure y ou did not plan "let's read the Chronicla today ".

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Derek Bruff 1 year ago in reply to technologicaltransfo

Hav ing students write for each other, not just their professor, has benefits in just about any course, including those on classical Greek or Kant's Critique. And don't knock the distraction potential of the Internet. Sure, at this moment I'm not working on a task that I had decided to finish this afternoon, but I'm engaging in unex pected conv ersations that might hav e unex pected benefits to my professional work down the road. Y ou nev er know when some little bit of interaction or learning will be useful in the future.

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brenadine 1 year ago in reply to technologicaltransfo I actually do plan to read the chronicle, as well as govloop.com, milbook, webmaster newsletter, techdirt, nextgov.com newsletter, linkedIn groups, and academic impressions daily . I plan for at least 1 -1 .5 hours for reading and research online on whatev er topics pop in my inbox that interest me the most that day . I'v e made impressiv e personal and professional connections, found answers to work problems and inv aluable resources and reference materials, and discov ered whole new ideas/products/solutions by scheduling my unstructured research time. I also tend to forward ridiculous amounts of information on to collegues who are alternately appreciativ e or incredulous of how much reading I get done. I do find I hav e to keep it scheduled or it's quite easy for me to go down the rabbit hole so to speak.

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5768 1 year ago "Almost instantly , students figured out that they could record lectures on their iPods and listen at their leisure." "At their leisure." Talk about non-accountable listening! Collaborativ e learning techniques long ago considered "jigsawing" in which different students in a group focus on different parts of an assignment then pool their understanding. Hav ing tried this (and being a current proponent of team learning--until such a day that I come to see the gorilla inv ariably there in the room) I regard jigsawing similar to "outsourcing" and "distribution of responsibility ." Far from optimal as far as the indiv idual student is concerned and a compromise between poor and good pedagogy at best.

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Derek Bruff 1 year ago in reply to 5768

Hav ing students grapple with material on their own, then with peers, and then with an instructor actually works pretty well, whether it's a "think-pair-share" or a "jigsaw" activ ity . Doing so giv es students a chance to surface their own prior knowledge and ex periences and v et their ideas in a relativ ely safe env ironment (the small group). This means that more of them are prepared to engage meaningfully in the whole-class, instructor-led discussion that often follows.

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5768 1 year ago in reply to Derek Bruff At least in principle!

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poppysabina 1 year ago Any one who has stood on a football (soccer) terrace and watched that quintessential 20thC sport knows: Attention Blindness Is Rare: Y ou can see the play er with the ball, the play ers without the ball, what's happening now, and what might happen. Y ou sense what some play ers want to happen, v ersus what others want. Y ou ex perience it all at once, as a totality . Technology Is the Oppressor: Howev er, when y ou watch it on TV , y ou cannot see the whole pitch, y ou cannot watch the game as an unbroken continuum (because they use cinematic techniques and cuts, and show multiple replay s), and y ou must contend with generally stupid commentary throughout. Crowd-sourcing Is Old Hat: Shouts, comments, disagreements, terrace chants, call-ins, fanzines, internet forums...'Nuff said. But, now as alway s, Future Shock sells! PS. Apple's college marketing strategy hardly differs from the tobacco companies' "free sample" approach on y esterday 's campuses. How v ery Mid-Century ! But Professor Dav idson's "pester-power" twist is a bit more current. ;)

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stelleen 1 year ago in reply to poppysabina Attention blindness might not be as rare in the real world as y ou believ e. If y ou read some of the original reasons for study ing attention blindness, they include some v ery pragmatic situations with dire outcomes. One of the cases inv olv ed a chase after a suspect that had shot a police officer. One group of police officers accidentally mistook one of their own undercov er officers for the suspect and brutally beat him up before realizing their mistake. Another officer, chasing the real suspect ran right by the beating. Later, when asked to identify those inv olv ed in mistakenly beating up the undercov er officer (the participants all left when they realized their mistake and did not identify themselv es) this officer claimed to hav e not ev en seen the undercov er officer being attacked. He was conv icted of ly ing and spent a few y ears in jail before research on attention blindness and a set of duplicated studies simulating a similar ev ent finally conv inced the judicial sy stem that in fact when concentrating on a key ev ent, it is possible to miss something ev en as dramatic as an indiv idual being beaten by a group. The reason becomes obv ious if y ou rev erse y our perspectiv e and ask if the play ers on the field hav e the same breadth of v ision and attention that y ou hav e watching from the stands. I suspect they display dramatic attention blindness to any thing other than the ball and the play ers immediately inv olv ed. I also suspect that ev en y our attention in the stand during an ex citing moment would miss something quite major happening in the stands across from y ou that was not related to the game or the action on the field.

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jmalmstrom 1 year ago in reply to stelleen

The v ery nature of modern media (TV and now the internet) is that it is produced in a way that tends to narrow our focus, often leading to misdirection. Y es, this ty pe of thing happens in the big wide world, but it is not perceiv ed as a v irtue there. Alway s remember, computer means of deliv ery are by nature rigid and inflex ible. Online classes, while often necessary , do not prov ide the flex ibility of what can, and often does, happen in the classroom. I hav e dissected a frog both v irtually and in reality . The v irtual dissection was much less instructiv e.

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22081781 1 year ago My comments are response mainly to these sentences: "Grading, in a curious way , ex emplifies our deepest conv ictions about ex cellence and authority , and specifically about the right of those with authority to define what constitutes ex cellence. If we crowdsource grading, we are suggesting that y oung people without credentials are fit to judge quality and v alue. Welcome to the Internet, where ev ery one's a critic and any one can ex press a v iew about the new iPhone, restaurant, or quarterback. That democratizing of who can pass judgment is digital thinking." People who are ex perts--who know more and think more about a topic--hav e better informed opinions than lay people. That is so obv ious. Why be interested in a nov ice's opinion about a discipline? To accord a nov ice equal time and credibility isn't democracy ; it's idiocy . One other point: How do y ou do serious study or make a serious scholarly contribution, like write a book, without being able to focus and concentrate for long periods of time? If y ou let in distraction, work sputters. This is y our brain on reality , folks.

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klwi3329 1 year ago in reply to 22081781 Hav e y ou done any reading on Peer Grading? From what I'v e seen, as along as a rubric is used, peers generally agree with instructor grading to the tune of 90 - 95%. See Sadler & Good, 2006: The impact of self- and peer-grading on student learning.

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siobhancurious 1 year ago After reading V irginia Heffernan's article on y our book, I wrote a blog post about what I had gleaned from the article (the book, although it went straight to my wish list, had not y et been released in Canada). The post has receiv ed 1 7 0 v ery thoughtful comments; y ou can see the post and the comments here:

http://siobhancurious.wordpres...
Reading this essay has giv en me a lot more to write about; there will be another post soon!

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