How to Focus

I’m torn.

Is social media, Web 2.0, and technology good for us? Or can it be so distracting that we (and our students) are unable to focus long enough to think and deliberate on important issues?

Can we use mobile devices and Edmodo and Twitter and all sorts of other tech tools to encourage learning, collaboration and creativity? If we really can’t multitask but switch quickly between tasks instead, is back-channeling and Tweeting and texting and other forms of social media just encouraging less comprehension and more confusion?

Let me be clear . . . I strongly support the use of social networks and technology as learning tools. But I’m beginning to believe that we’re not really sure how to use these tools appropriately as part of instruction. We’re not asking enough questions about the best ways to integrate tech into what we do every day.

Can students and instructors really use technology/media/social networks in ways that engage and keep students focused on the truly important?

I think so. But we should think about, and we need to train our kids to think about, finding a proper balance between indiscriminate use of “shiny” new doodads and quality use of technology tools.

A recent article over at Edudemic seems useful. They’ve put together a handy infographic that provides suggestions and ideas of how to stay focused “in an age of distraction.” The infographic breaks up your day into six categories:

• Managing your space
• How to work
• Create rituals and habits
• Managing email
• Take time to reflect and review
• Help for addicts
• Take a digital technology detox

It seems like the balance I’m looking for – acknowledging the fact that technology is necessary but understanding that we have to be careful how we use it.

Reading this post will make you more stupidier

The common assumption among educators is that technology, especially online sorts of things like Social Media and Web 2.0 tools, is good for kids. By using these tools, we can expand our classrooms, connect with experts, create Personal Learning Networks and generate wonderful products.

We often cite research showing that use of the web increases brain activity and encourages the growth of neural networks. The assumption is that this increased brain wiring is good for kids – that being online makes people smarter.

But we need to be careful with that sort of research. A recent Wired article does a great job of documenting what happens in our brains when we’re online. And it’s not necessarily good news.

Others and I have talked about this issue before.

And now Nicholas Carr discusses a wide range of research that is saying that hyperlinks, especially those that live inside text, cause comprehension problems. Examples?

People who read linear text comprehend more, remember more, and learn more than those who read text peppered with links

It takes hypertext readers longer to read documents and they were seven times more likely to say they found it confusing

Comprehension declines as the number of links increase – whether or not people clicked on them

A 2007 scholarly review of hypertext experiments concluded that jumping between digital documents impedes understanding. And if links are bad for concentration and comprehension, it shouldn’t be surprising that more recent research suggests that links surrounded by images, videos, and advertisements could be even worse

Carr also talks about Cognitive Load, the process of how short-term memory is transferred to long-term storage. In the pre-web world, the brain could better handle the load. But if too much information from too many sources tries to makes it into our long-term memory, we get just bits and pieces in no coherent pattern.

I was especially interested in learning more about what scientists are calling switching costs. Basically, switching costs become the price your brain pays when you decide to jump back and forth between different tasks.

Every time we shift our attention, the brain has to reorient itself, further taxing our mental resources. Many studies have shown that switching between just two tasks can add substantially to our cognitive load, impeding our thinking and increasing the likelihood that we’ll overlook or misinterpret important information.

The problem with online tools and the web is that there are increasingly more ways for those tools to encourage task switching. We begin to believe that we can multi-task, that we can focus on multiple things and still be productive. But a 2009 Stanford study looking at heavy media users suggests otherwise:

the heavy multitaskers were much more easily distracted, had significantly less control over their working memory and were generally much less able to concentrate on a task. Intensive multitaskers are “suckers for irrelevancy,” says Clifford Nass, one professor who did the research. “Everything distracts them.”

As we multitask online, one researcher summarized,

we are training our brains to pay attention to the crap.

Perhaps the most frightening sentence of Carr’s article?

The problem is that skimming is becoming our dominant mode of thought.

Carr cites another 2009 study by developmental psychologist Patricia Greenfield. She concluded that “every medium develops some cognitive skills at the expense of others.” She basically says that any gains that we make by using the web goes

hand in hand with a weakening of our capacity for the kind of “deep processing” that underpins “mindful knowledge acquisition, inductive analysis, critical thinking, imagination, and reflection.”

By focusing on superficial types of online activities such as Wordle or Prezi, by asking kids to read more online articles or encouraging the use of iPod apps, are we actually making our kids dumber instead of smarter? Are our students less able to analyze and think critically because of our well-intentioned but perhaps misguided instruction?

The irony of both the content of this post and its delivery method is not lost on me. I make my living working with teachers to incorporate effective learning strategies. A lot of what I do involves the use of online tools and social media.

But the research is making me uncomfortable. Where is the balance between the use of the web / social media and appropriate / effective teaching?

If nothing else, the research cited by Carr has made me stop and think a bit more about the kinds of things that I’ll be sharing with teachers from now on. I need to be more purposeful about finding and sharing strategies that address high level brain function rather than just those that seem “shiny” and new.

An example of this is something called Readability, a tool that strips all of the ads, pics and multimedia from online text lessening some of the effects cited in the research. It can even strip hyperlinks from text, creating a set of footnotes instead. I’m starting to use it and I’m pushing teachers to use it with kids.

Applied to this post, it looks like this:

It’s a small step but one I hope that’s in the right direction.

Don’t call your kids multitaskers

We’ve gotten in the habit of calling our students multitaskers.

And we need to stop.

As part of the 21st century skills push, we’ve worked to show how this generation of kids is different. How they think differently and how their brains have been wired differently by the vast amount of data that they’ve messed with since birth.

The implication is that we need to deliver information differently, that we need to do school differently. And I don’t disagree with that.

But one way that we’ve pushed this agenda is to suggest that kids are better multitaskers than we are. And I think this idea is coming back to bite us in the butt.

During a recent conversation with my 16 year-old (which started when I asked him to close his laptop lid while talking with his grandfather), he said something along the lines of:

Come on, dad. I’m a kid. I can multitask!

(I’m hearing this more and more among educators, by the way. But encouraging back-channels and twitter fests during presentations / conferences / staff development is a conversation for another day.)

Brain Rules author John Medina says it best:

To put it bluntly, research shows that we can’t multitask.

Multitasking, when it comes to paying attention, is a myth. The brain naturally focuses on concepts sequentially, one at a time.

Studies show that a person who is interrupted takes 50 percent longer to accomplish a task. Not only that, he or she makes up to 50 percent more errors.

He goes on:

Businesses and schools praise multitasking, but research clearly shows that it reduces productivity and increases mistakes.

I understand why we praise it – we believe suggesting that kids are multitaskers will help make believers out of the anti-21st century skills people. But doing so encourages poor instructional design on our part and decreases the ability of learners’ brains to effectively focus on the truly important.

A recent article, Multitaskers May Be Falling Behind, supports what Medina and others are saying – especially in terms of using multiple forms of media:

. . . studies show that media multitasking in particular takes a toll on the brain. You might think you’re accomplishing a lot but a 2009 Stanford University study shows otherwise.

Eyal Ophir, a cognitive scientist and one of the researchers on the study states that:

People who juggle multiple forms of electronic media have trouble controlling their memory, paying attention or switching from one task to another as effectively as those who complete one task at a time.

Another Stanford researcher, Clifford Nass:

At the end of the day, it seems like it’s affecting things like ability to remember long term, ability to handle analytic reasoning, ability to switch properly . . .

Another researcher, Maggie Johnson, wrote a recent book called Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. Her research seems especially appropriate for social studies teachers:

If we forget how to use our powers of deep focus, we’ll depend more on black-and-white thinking, on surface ideas, on surface relationships. That breeds a tremendous potential for tyranny and misunderstanding.

Let’s be clear . . . I strongly support the use of social networks and technology as learning tools. But I’m beginning to believe that we’re not really sure how to use these tools appropriately as part of instruction.

Several weeks ago I wrote a rant against educators who are attempting to ban laptops from the classroom, urging teachers to develop engaging alternatives to traditional instruction.

So what do engaging alternatives that encourage “brain attention” look like? Can students and instructors really use technology/media/social networks in ways that engage and keep students focused on the truly important?

I think so.

• Stop suggesting that kids are great multitaskers, stop giving students “permission” to divide their attention.
• Share the research with your kids
• Help students understand that technology is a tool that supports original thinking and to get away from the idea that cut and paste is okay.
• Don’t encourage kids to do multiple things at once as part of your instruction and be very clear about the steps that students should take in their learning.
• It’s okay to ask kids to close laptop lids or stow cell phones during short periods of direct instruction, small group discussions, debates and other forms of data transfer.
• Purposefully create periods of reflection and meta-cognition into your instruction.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around what this looks like. But I am convinced that multi-tasking students will develop into citizens that will “depend more on black-and-white thinking and on surface ideas.”

And that can’t be good.

Update April 1- Article detailing the Stanford research discussing the problems caused by “multi-tasking:”

. . . we all bet high multitaskers were going to be stars at something.

We were absolutely shocked. We all lost our bets. It turns out multitaskers are terrible at every aspect of multitasking. They’re terrible at ignoring irrelevant information; they’re terrible at keeping information in their head nicely and neatly organized; and they’re terrible at switching from one task to another.