May 21, 2012

My reflections from Learning and the Brain conference May 4-6, 2012

Overall quality and content

The talks varied tremendously in quality and content: a few were excellent, some were ok, and some were content-free and/or erroneous. I'm not sure how they vet, but clearly it is not a rigorous process.

The best talks
  • Cathy Davidson, "How the Brain Science of Attention will transform Schools and How Students Learn and Live"
  • David Daniel, "The Dark Side of Teaching with Technology"
  • Jay Giedd, "Developing Teen Brains and Multitasking"
  • Paul Howard-Jones, "What is the Internet Doing to Our Brains?: The Impact of Digital Technologies on Student Learning and Well-Being"
OK talks
  • Larry Rosen, "How Technology Rewires Brains and Teaching Strategies"
  • Steven Yantis, "Attention, Engagement and the Multitasking Brain"
  • Martha Densckla, "ADHD and Multitasking"
  • John Ratey, "Co-opting the Gaming Environment to Improve Learning"
Interesting (to me) topics/thoughts/studies/statistics mentioned


"Learning is the disruption of existing habits" 
(I think it's from Davidson's talk, but I'm not sure)

History lesson (Davidson) -- why and how our current educational system evolved and how it fails for today's requirements:

industrial agedigital age
characterized by ...compulsory standardized public education to prepare populace
... from farm to factory
... from shop to firm 		change at warp speed; we do not know what will be tomorrow's wikipedia, google, youtube, etc
... from factory to call center
... from firm to start-up
key features and requirements of the age> focus on a single task
filter out distractions (world of cubicles)
> specialize
> work alone
> timeliness (9 to 5)
> hierarchical
> standardization (start school at age 6, ready or not)
> credentials (diplomas, degrees)
> stick to "the script"		> multitasking attention (email, texts, webinar, chat, etc)
> collaboration
> cross-cultural, cross-temporal
> centered on workflow, not task
> skills, not diplomas
> DIY (do it yourself) -- remix, customize, mashup
> thinking outside the box, not "by the script"
education for the age > grades
> multiple choice
> standardized tests		we need to figure this out; the existing system is broken

how can multiple choice testing apply to evaluating 12 million Google hits?

we need to teach for "you count, I'll watch for the gorilla"  
  • some interesting projects in education  mentioned by Davidson :


Modern multitasking, interruptions, and cognitive performance 
  • Multitasking
    • we multitask all the time -- e.g. fluent reading requires multitasking of decoding and comprehending
    • multitasking is actually just rapid task switching and it incurs a multitasking "tax" -- delay in overall performance due to the time required to do the "context switch" between tasks
    • for highly predictable tasks, practice can make multitasking tax negligible; if any task is unpredictable (e.g. driving in traffic), practice can decrease, but not eliminate, the tax
    • people who often use multiple media sources simultaneously are measurably worse in experiments that challenge working memory capacity
  • Biology and evolution
    • characteristics of adolescents among all social animals: (1) increased risk taking, (2) increased sensation seeking, (3) greater peer affiliation
    • brain volume increase is driven by change in environment, and not by the harshness of environment
    • dual edge of vulnerability and plasticity: humans remain vulnerable and with family for a long time, but the upside is we do not have to narrow our choices and our brain exhibit plasticity much longer -- to ~25 (executive functions plasticity even later: ~32)
    • vulnerability: most psych illnesses emerge in teenage years
    • brain matures by becoming more connected (white matter) and more specialized (gray matter)
    • brain continues to change dynamically well into the third decade of life as it adapts to the world around it
    • reading is no more "natural" than any other technology viewed over the time span of our evolution 
  • 185 teen subjects, 3 cohorts, all shown a video on which they were later tested.
    cohortsetuptest result
    Ano texts sentdid well
    Btold to answer the texts they received immediatelydid best !
    Ctold they can reply or not to texts (which were synchronized with texts sent to cohort B) whenever they wanteddid worst
    When Cohorts B was questioned on when and why they chose not to answer, they replied that it seemed a critical point in the video. So, being slightly distracted by the incoming text beep, which forces a judgement call on the importance of the current spot in the video, was better than not being distracted at all.

    low-cognitive-load interruptions are actually good for memory recall


Brain wiring, unplugging, sleep and technology
  • 2 cohorts of kids did 1 hour of homework, followed by 1 hour of TV (cohort A) or 1 hour of intense video games (cohort B). Cohort B had less deep sleep that night and much lower performance the next day on material from the night before.
  • working memory capacity can be improved e.g. with regular "unplugging" or mindfulness training or exercise
  • Is google rewiring our brains? -- Yes, especially if you are an expert user; but so do any other newly learned skills (e.g. study showed structural changes in the brain after only 3 months of learning to juggle)
  • "digital" disruption of sleep interferes both with next day learning, and with retaining today's learning
    • texting is less bad for sleep than playing computer games
    • study dworak 2007: 13-14 yr olds, 6-7pm

Technology and social connectedness 

  • 1990's research -- greater Internet use linked to reduced social-connectedness and well being -- but this is before Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, etc! 
  • 2012 studies
    • grey matter increases with number of social network sites (SNS) friends
    • size of online friendship networks correlates (positively) with size of intimate real-world relationships



Play, exercise and learning
  • play instinct in mammals is more basic than even hunger!
  • in hunter/gatherer time, we walked >10mi on average each day (this seems a very high number that's hard to believe) -- i.e. we've evolved to be good at adapting to a new environment, moving, and learning
  • play and exercise are definitely critical to learning (via increase in dopamine and seratonin)
    • turn on, or activate, the prefrontal cortex (executive area) and prime it for learning
    • improve regulation of emotions
  • if play/exercise has too much novelty and stimulation, it is distracting
  • we do not yet know which mode works best for improved brain activation:
    1. exercise hard for a short time every few hours (e.g. few high-intensity minutes at start of each class); or
    2. exercise at a slow pace but continually (e.g. walking 2mi/hr on a treadmill-cum-desk all day)


Gaming and learning
  • 2-8% of general population have "problematic" Internet use
    • significant risk factors are low self-esteem and anxiety
    • for adults, it's porn and illicit relationships; for young people, it's gaming
  • gaming results in significant dopamine release, comparable to effects of drugs like ritalin
  • maximum dopamine release with games that have 50/50 win/lose odds, greater than in games with guaranteed win
    reward uncertainty is better for motivation and learning
  • reward's dopamine response changes with age -- in males, peaks at 13-14
  • dopamine explains allure of games, chocolate, sex, etc; also predicts learning via increased rate at which synaptic connections change (synaptic plasticity)
  • solid evidence that 
    • action video games improve performance in many visuomotor tasks - and this improvement transfers to other areas
    • violent games teach (and it carries over) aggression
    • prosocial games teach (and it carries over) empathy
       

The Dark Side of Teaching with Technology (Daniel)
  • in education, $ and not data dominate evaluation of technology usefulness in improving learning
  • there is often a big gap between how students use a technology and how it was designed to be used -- the unintended affordances in James J. Gibson's "The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception"
  • ebooks vs. etextbooks differ along many dimensions:
    • goals -- read vs. know
    • outcomes -- enjoyment vs. learning
    • structure -- sequential flow vs. pedagogy that went into textbooks (boldface terms, chapter outlines, chapter summaries, margin notes, examples and exercises, review quizzes, etc) 
  • data on ebooks vs. etextbooks
    • people like ebooks but students do not like etextbooks, even after using them for a while (no idea if the etextbooks in the studies were any good or just scans of paper textbooks)
    • no data that etextbooks are as effective for learning as paper textbooks 
    • results in the lab differ greatly from home -- in the lab, etextbooks readers took 3 minutes longer than paper text readers (don't remember the length of the reading material involved); at home, 17 minutes longer (self-reported)
    • more use of "special features" with paper texts than etextbooks (again -- what was the quality of etextbooks in the studies? how interactive? how "navigatable"?)
  • everyone sites clickers as positive example of technology in education, but is learning improved because of technology or because of how teaching/pedagogy is modified to incorporate the technology?
  • “In ecological research, the principal main effects are likely to be interactions” Uri Bronfenbrenner, 1979 -- same as the Heisenberg principle -- evaluation of the system changes the system
  • teaching/learning is a complex ecology
    • what works in one context may not translate to another -- fMRI scan vs. classroom
    • provocative vs. useful; theoretical vs. demonstrated; hard data vs anecdotes


Resources that were mentioned that looked worthwhile


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