=========================================== Assignment #01 - Multi-tasking and Homework =========================================== - Ian! D. Allen - idallen@idallen.ca - www.idallen.com Available online: Wednesday January 12, 2011 Upload due date: Upload before 12:00 (noon) on Tuesday January 18, 2011 Late assignments may or may not be marked. Submission method: Create a plain text file named "assignment01.txt" Upload the file via the Assignment01 "Upload File" facility in Blackboard. Use "Attach File" and "Submit" to upload your plain text file. No wordprocessor documents. Do not send email. Use only "Attach File". Use the file name given above. Upload only one single file of plain text, not HTML, not MSWord. No fonts, no word-processing. Plain text only. Did I mention that the format is plain text (VIM/Nano/Pico/Gedit or Notepad)? NO WORD PROCESSOR DOCUMENTS ACCEPTED. No marks are awarded for submitting under the wrong assignment number. ============================================================================== Assignment: Read these essay excerpts (or the original essays from which they are taken), answer the questions at the bottom, and upload your answer. Do not upload these essays as part of your answer. Only upload your answer itself. Did I mention that the upload format is plain text (Notepad)? NO WORD PROCESSOR DOCUMENTS ACCEPTED. -------- Essays on how multi-tasking changes our attention: "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" [excerpts] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/ "Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn't going-so far as I can tell-but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. I think I know what's going on. For more than a decade now, I've been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. [...] The faster we surf across the Web-the more links we click and pages we view-the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link-the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It's in their economic interest to drive us to distraction. [...] I'm haunted by that scene in 2001. What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer's emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut-"I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm afraid"-and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence. HAL's outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they're following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That's the essence of Kubrick's dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence." "The Autumn of the Multitaskers" "Neuroscience is confirming what we all suspect: Multitasking is dumbing us down and driving us crazy." http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/11/the-autumn-of-the-multitaskers/6342/ "Multitasking messes with the brain in several ways. At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that it requires-the constant switching and pivoting-energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning. We concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever it is that we're supposed to be concentrating on. What does this mean in practice? Consider a recent experiment at UCLA, where researchers asked a group of 20-somethings to sort index cards in two trials, once in silence and once while simultaneously listening for specific tones in a series of randomly presented sounds. The subjects' brains coped with the additional task by shifting responsibility from the hippocampus-which stores and recalls information-to the striatum, which takes care of rote, repetitive activities. Thanks to this switch, the subjects managed to sort the cards just as well with the musical distraction-but they had a much harder time remembering what, exactly, they'd been sorting once the experiment was over. Even worse [...]" This essay is a real gem, with many examples related to student learning. "The next generation, presumably, is the hardest-hit. They're the ones way out there on the cutting edge of the multitasking revolution, texting and instant messaging each other while they download music to their iPod and update their Facebook page and complete a homework assignment and keep an eye on the episode of The Hills flickering on a nearby television. (A recent study from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 53 percent of students in grades seven through 12 report consuming some other form of media while watching television; 58 percent multitask while reading; 62 percent while using the computer; and 63 percent while listening to music. "I get bored if it's not all going at once," said a 17-year-old quoted in the study.) They're the ones whose still-maturing brains are being shaped to process information rather than understand or even remember it. [...] It begins by giving us more tasks to do, making each task harder to do, and dimming the mental powers required to do them. It finishes by making us forget exactly how on earth we did them (assuming we didn't give up, or "multi-quit"), which makes them harder to do again." Below are a few excerpts from a wonderful article summarizing how all the distraction of the Internet disrupts the basic process of learning: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/05/ff_nicholas_carr/all/1 "The depth of our intelligence hinges on our ability to transfer information from working memory, the scratch pad of consciousness, to long-term memory, the mind's filing system. When facts and experiences enter our long-term memory, we are able to weave them into the complex ideas that give richness to our thought. But the passage from working memory to long-term memory also forms a bottleneck in our brain. Whereas long-term memory has an almost unlimited capacity, working memory can hold only a relatively small amount of information at a time. And that short-term storage is fragile: A break in our attention can sweep its contents from our mind. [...] Psychologists refer to the information flowing into our working memory as our cognitive load. When the load exceeds our mind's ability to process and store it, we're unable to retain the information or to draw connections with other memories. We can't translate the new material into conceptual knowledge. Our ability to learn suffers, and our understanding remains weak. That's why the extensive brain activity that Small discovered in Web searchers may be more a cause for concern than for celebration. It points to cognitive overload. The Internet is an interruption system. It seizes our attention only to scramble it. There's the problem of hypertext and the many different kinds of media coming at us simultaneously. There's also the fact that numerous studies—including one that tracked eye movement, one that surveyed people, and even one that examined the habits displayed by users of two academic databases—show that we start to read faster and less thoroughly as soon as we go online. Plus, the Internet has a hundred ways of distracting us from our onscreen reading. Most email applications check automatically for new messages every five or 10 minutes, and people routinely click the Check for New Mail button even more frequently. Office workers often glance at their inbox 30 to 40 times an hour. Since each glance breaks our concentration and burdens our working memory, the cognitive penalty can be severe. [...] But it would be a serious mistake to look narrowly at such benefits and conclude that the Web is making us smarter. In a Science article published in early 2009, prominent developmental psychologist Patricia Greenfield reviewed more than 40 studies of the effects of various types of media on intelligence and learning ability. She concluded that "every medium develops some cognitive skills at the expense of others." Our growing use of the Net and other screen-based technologies, she wrote, has led to the "widespread and sophisticated development of visual-spatial skills." But those gains go 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." [...] Last year, researchers at Stanford found signs that this shift may already be well under way. They gave a battery of cognitive tests to a group of heavy media multitaskers as well as a group of relatively light ones. They discovered that 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." Merzenich offers an even bleaker assessment: As we multitask online, we are "training our brains to pay attention to the crap." See any of the other links in the course Notes file "this_is_your_brain.txt". --------------------------------------- Questions: 1. Given that studies show that multi-tasking makes it harder for your brain to remember what you have been doing (see above), in what ways does your method of doing school homework suffer from multi-tasking? 2. How would it be possible for you to single-task your schoolwork, to remember it better come exam time (and job interview time)? 3. Do you find that your brain has been trained to "process information rather than understand or even remember it"? (As an example: When given an assignment question, do you Google for the answer, or do you remember the answer and write down what you remember?) Give your own answers to the above three questions. There are no "right" answers here. You decide your own answers. Minimum length: one feeble, insubstantial, wimpy paragraph. Maximum length: five single-spaced pages (plus optional bibliography and/or references). Do not upload these essays as part of your answer. Only upload your answer itself. Did I mention that the uploaded format must be plain text (Notepad)? Did I mention that you should *not* upload this file with your answer? NO WORD PROCESSOR DOCUMENTS ACCEPTED. -- | Ian! D. Allen - idallen@idallen.ca - Ottawa, Ontario, Canada | Home Page: http://idallen.com/ Contact Improv: http://contactimprov.ca/ | College professor (Free/Libre GNU+Linux) at: http://teaching.idallen.com/ | Defend digital freedom: http://eff.org/ and have fun: http://fools.ca/