Brain Plasticity: Is the Internet Really Changing Us?

Any attempt to make broad statements about the technical abilities of our students is met with a variety of responses. Some folks are quick to embrace the heuristic value of terms like the Net Generation or Digital Natives. Others are equally as quick to attack such broad generalizations as counter productive, claiming that such stereotypes hide differences among students that are more important educationally than broad differences between different “generations”. Others accept the premise that many students’ capacities to use different types of “sensory input” have changed, but reject the corollary that schools and universities need to adapt to those changes.

As Sheryl points out in her post, it’s not just kids who are being changed, it’s all of us who are being constantly exposed to ever increasing amounts and types of media. I’m not sure if this is mainstream science or not, but increasingly I’m seeing references to processes by which human brains can actually reorganize to make better use of the rich information sources available to them through the process of “brain plasticity”.

A field of neuroscience, brain plasticity refers to the ability of the brain to adapt and change physically and functionally throughout life.

This research holds that our brains are being “massively remodeled” by our exposure to the internet, reading, cable and satellite television with hundreds of channels and hundreds of hours of ads, by video games, by modern electronics, by ubiquitous access music, by cell phones, digital photography and by the other gadgets that make up the “tools” of modern life.

Some researchers claim that understanding the concept of brain plasticity and adapting learning experiences can result in dramatic increases in learning. Mike Merzenich, a PhD in neuroscience from Johns Hopkins, claims to be utilizing these methods in older adults:

We have been training 70- to 90-plus-year-olds to be more accurate aural-language receivers and language users. After 40 hours or so of training, the average trainee’s cognitive abilities are rejuvenated by about 10 years, i.e., their performance on a cognitive assessment battery is like those of an average person who is 10 years younger.

Here are a couple of interesting, though non-scholarly, articles on the relationship between technology, learning and intelligence.

Are we getting smarter or dumber? | Newsmakers | CNET News.com

[print version] Intelligence in the Internet age | CNET News.com

The Kaiser Family Foundation did a detailed report that outlines the extent of media exposure by children 8-18 years old.

A Principal Who Blogs (Fearlessly)

Link to: MabryOnline.org

This is an beautifully designed site from a school in Marietta, Georgia that celebrates “Making Learning Irresistable for Over 25 Years.” The site features blogs by most of the teachers and key administrators, including some links to actual lesson plans. The teachers’ blogs all have RSS feeds and incorporate many of the features we talked about in our You be the Dean exercise.

The principal’s blog includes a review and recommendation for Thomas Friedman’s book The World is Flat, along with a link to a podcast of an interview with the author. The book has been made required reading for all subject area coordinators at the school and will eventually be circulated throughout the entire staff. Moreover, he’s recommending that all parents read the book before attending the open house parent’s night’s and even threatens to require the 8th graders to read it. (This book has been mentioned in the keynote at every professional meeting I’ve been to in the last six months. If you haven’t read the book and don’t have time to, at least checkout the podcast or this video at MIT.)

This is a pretty fearless recommendation, since the book offers significant challenges to the status quo, particularly to the educational system. If many of the parents actually take the recommendation and read the book, it could make for some mighty interesting discussions on parents night!

Thanks to David Warlick for the link: 2 Cents Worth » Blog Archive » A Glimmer from Cobb County.

The Internet’s Impact on U.S. College Faculty

Professors online

First Monday has published the results of a survey of 2,316 US college faculty to determine the impact of specific internet technologies on teaching and research, their interactions with students and about their perceptions of students’ internet use. One particularly important research question focused on the degree to which the internet enhances or detracts from the quality of classroom discussion. The conclusions of the authors were that “There is general optimism, though little evidence, about the Internet’s impacts on their professional lives.” (Note: First Monday was launched as an openly accessible, peer–reviewed journal solely devoted to the Internet. )

Summary of some findings.

* 98% of faculty use the internet to communicate with students.
* 55% use course web sites.
* 37% used chat rooms (I found that pretty high).
* 73% said that their communications with students had increased since they started using email.
* 33% communicate with their classes electronically several times a week.
* Both faculty and students use the internet primarily for class adminstration–announcements, checking grades or assignments, or reporting absences.
* However, 76% believed that the internet it has “enabled the expression of ideas that their students may not have expressed in class due to peer pressure, fear of embarrassment, or simply a lack of class time to allow for all students’ ideas to be expressed.”
* One third believed that use of the internet had improved their students writing; only 6% believed that it had hurt it.
* “Nearly half (42 percent) of college faculty felt their students’ work had worsened in quality and another 24 percent were undecided. Just 22 percent felt the Internet had improved students’ work.” (Hardly sounds like an optimistic conclusion to me!)

The article concludes with three implications for the future.

Continue reading “The Internet’s Impact on U.S. College Faculty”

Learning, Technology and Communities of Practice

Learning, Technology and Community: A Journey of the Self

Stephen Downes has posted summary notes and the PowerPoint slides from a talk by Etienne Wenger at the ALT-C elearning conference in Manchester. Wenger’s ideas on communities of practice were shaped by intensive conversations and interactions with John Seeley Brown, one of the authors of The Social Life of Information. The role of educational technology in the formation of communities of practice is an important concept for our course. Some key ideas from the talk:

A community of practice is a group of practitioners who:

  • share similar challenges
  • interact regularly
  • learn from and with each other
  • improve their ability to address their challenges

Practitioners need a community to:

  • To help each solve problems,
  • To hear each other’s stories.
  • To keep up with change,
  • To avoid local blindness,
  • To reflect on their practice and improve it,
  • To push the boundaries of their field,
  • To think of new ways to leverage their knowledge.

A community of practice is a putting of language on what everybody knows.

This notion of community of practice is a very natural thing, it’s a putting of language on what everybody knows. Practitioners need a community to hear each other’s stories, to keep up with change, to avoid local blindness, to reflect on practice and improve it, to push the boundaries of their field, or to think of new ways to leverage what they know. (From S. Downes notes on E. Wenger’s talk, Learning, Technology and Community: A Journey of the Self.)

Another way of looking at instructional design

Internet Time Blog: Another way of looking at instructional design

This link, from the Internet Time blog by way of Sephen’s Web, offers some interesting context on instructional design theory. At the same time it raises some interesting questions about curriculum development techniques and about how we approach the broad issues of technology planning in this class.

In adult and continuing education programs, the term program planning is often used to describe the same set of activities that are defined as curriculum development in K-12 and Higher Education. When I taught program planning courses at Syracuse, I had a deck of about 50 overheads showing various planning models lovingly collected over the years from text books, journal articles and conference presentations. (The class where I went through them one by one was one exciting piece of education, believe you me!) Nearly all of them were variations of the ADDIE model identified in this post–neatly drawn flow charts or checklists that everyone knew bore almost no resemblance to the way programs were plans, classes were designed or adults learned. Cross says it this way.

Dipping into the rapid flow of knowledge streaming by, workers pull up a ladle of knowledge never seen before, but knowledge of a world now downstream. The ADDIE model breaks down in times of change or when we no longer buy the concept that an expert needs analyst can somehow suck the important knowledge out of a subject matter expect and encapsulate it into a training intervention. Furthermore, it is folly to imagine that anyone can “control” other human beings. We can give them a little shove here and there but that’s about it.

Some of the thoughts in this post are very applicable to our experience together in this class:

  • Our goal is to create a learning environment that improves all of our abilities to make use technology in learning more effectively.
  • We all have a responsibility to maintain the environment, “but then we have to let the plants (or the people) grow as they will.”
  • “Neither nature nor the workplace will cooperate by going into suspended animation so we can tweak the details without things changing all the time. Everything flows.” Technology changes.
  • “Organizations and their members are living things, and the landscape/learnscape analogy invites us to consider nature, symbiosis, interconnections, genetic make-up, adaptation, the change of seasons, and life cycles. ” This is in stark contrast to much of the thinking by technologists and those who would seek to reduce education to a set of measurable objectives.

Something in preparing for this class has triggered me to think more seriously again about my philosophical roots (educationally speaking). As Jay Cross says, “In the mechanical world, I’d wrap this up with a conclusion. In a natural world, I know that this is but one step on a long journey.” It’s nice to have permission to just end a post without bringing it to a logical conclusion.

Adventures in Technology Planning Class Launched

This year’s adventure in technology planning–also know as EPPL 639 has officially launched, and seven brave souls (graduate students) have agreed to join me in exploring how a better understanding of technology might help them make better decisions in their future careers as K-12 or Higher Education administrators. (The second class met last night, but I always wait to see who comes back before I declare the class officially launched.) Over the coming weeks, I’ll use this blog as a reflective tool to share some thoughts and ideas about teaching this kind of class with the students, and with anyone else who might be interested.

This is the second time I’ve taught this class at William and Mary, and, just as last time, the students bring a very impressive range of backgrounds and experiences to the group. We’re about evenly split among those in Higher Education and K-12 programs, and we have a pretty wide range of technical abilities. I’ve been very impressed with the energy of the folks in the group, and most especially by their willingness to jump into new areas of learning for them.

The syllabus for the course is extraordinary fluid–so fluid that it resides on a wiki rather than a word document to allow constant tweaking and adjustment. The structure of the course is provided by 4 loosely-structured assignments:

  1. Everyone will keep a reflective journal–preferably in blog format–that reflects his/her personal interests in educational technology.
  2. We’ll work together on a major technical review of a piece of open-source software to configure it and test its applicability for a specific educational purpose involving K-12 teachers, college faculty, and librarians.
  3. We explore decision making styles through a series of critical incident discussions affectionately known as You Be The Dean.
  4. A series of short presentations on technical topics, with each student giving 2-3 over the course of the semester. We started with RSS and News Aggregators as a gentle introduction to how relatively simple technologies like the lowly text file can have such a huge impact on the communications patterns of hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of users.

I’m looking forward in watching how the interaction of these four assignments shapes our time together.

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