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The Chronicle Review

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 success—our ability to pinpoint a

problem and solve it, an achievement honed in all those years in

school and beyond—may 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 attention—not 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 workplaces—are 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 tocompletion. 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 first-

year 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 tothe 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 first-

years 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, wemight 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 iPod—just 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 anyone—even at Apple—had dreamed possible. Most

predictable were uses whereby students downloaded audio archivesrelevant to their courses—Nobel 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, oneclass 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 bepeer-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 shotthrough 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 college—the term paper—and 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. Theobjective 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





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 Internet—like 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-presentationand 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 self-

publish—whether it's a photo from their iPhone or a blog—they 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



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I don't agree with quite a few views mentioned rather lamely as those that necessitate a

goodness in this internet era. Specifically, given that more and more people are engaging in

social networking sites-so emroiled in co mmenting 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 invariably engage in these activities not being able to c oncentrate on any thing else...

just a s a man who feels r est less without taking d rugs . How do y ou subst antiate t his?

I would just like to add, rather proudly that I am not a victim of the abov e mentioned

'phenomenon' but I found so many of my peers hav ing succumbed to it.

9 people liked this. Like

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



If I could engage 20 c redits with professors like Cathy N. Davidson, I would c all the award of

that degr ee "Nirva na". Then I wouldn't want to engage a PhD but a NheD - a Doc tora te of

higher education Nirvana. 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 21st Century learning. That does

not mean that old, true and tried tested ways are obsolete, b ut that whenever a system leads

us to behave one way inside the syste m and another outside it, we need to peer in the outerone to see what we may be missing.

It is a cerebral jigsaw that requires all the pieces to fit because once t hing I recognize is that

students do have ex traordinary relationships with their profs and can be in awe of those they

respect as people who have helped them to see, but here I re ad about a learning pool, where

every one is discovering something, and that is something I love seeing - it means I that as I

sit in the present - I know I am watc hing a much more po werful and positive future unfold.

We can still wor ship the pr of as it has o cc urred in t ime immem orial, o r we c an foc us on

observ ing transformational change in the way we individually approach learning, then there

is less worship and more taking part in the activity of making education a way of life rather

than simply a way of graduating.

M.


If you are looking for "possibilities," "emergent engagement," "cerebral jigsaw,"

"discovering," "unfolding," "love," and "transformational change" psychoanalysis is your

cup of tea.

The classroom anyt ime it is structured for accountability for learning over will certainly

bo re y ou t o de ath.


It probably will bore me to death. Then that is my c hallenging of learning. I have t o

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 Davidson's article is that when we are

open to a new appro ach, we suddenly see things we didn't see before - we awaken to

new ty pes of learning (BTW you can add "awaken to ourselv es" to y our list) and

then we can figure out how concre te our learning needs to be and how abstract.

Both are vitally important forms of seeing IMHO. Surely a university e ducation

that does not do that is simply rot e learning?

I have no idea how to take the viciousness 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 choanalysis of merit here is "know thyself".

Education hasn't become less visco us, it still remains largely an industrial age

training ground. In what I see Davidson write above, I see her welcoming in the

21st Century.

I really do n't know who anybody here is, I don't know how best any particular

person learns even if I hav e pedagogical script - if education isn't a way of life for

me, then all I am do ing is graduating into that equally b oring existence of pass/fail,

then education isn't a way of life, and in that resulting failure I will have do ne that

to myself, only my self. I am not here to prov e that I am a lifelong learner. I am.

Beyond the imaginative wo rds I utilized there is the pragmatic reality that yo u

have o utlined, which is that learning without rigor is simply sho rtchanging our

given selves.

I have c ome here to learn and that learning includes burning some of my o wn ego,

I added a like to y our response, because y ou offered something that I can certainly

appreciate, build upon simply because I c an be adaptive - and so, if I can do that

the thoughtspaces 1 year ago

5768 1 year ago

the thoughtspaces 1 year ago



here, imagine what I might have learned when once, many dec ades ago, when I too

used to be in a classroom.

Y es, v icio us ed ucatio n bores me to de ath - and y es, I wou ld like t hat a lso t o be

engraved on my tombstone or at least written into the epitaph of factory

education.

M.

1 person liked this. Like

"Make Wikipedia better" is a fantastic assignment for almost any course. Perhaps a similar

challenge would be o f even greater interest to some students. As a PhD student in Computer

Science, I've pic ked "Make something better than Wikipedia" as my thesis topic. Two years

into my researc h, the open source Wiki-to-Speech project has reac hed a stage where

students and teachers can begin using the (free) tools to create content which prov ides

pathways for learning rather than merely points of reference. For ex ample, here is a Wiki-to-

Speech presentation on the foundational concept behind the project, stigmergy:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/128384...


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 over the y ears, I hav e found

student assignments involv ing individual or group b logs to wo rk best.

Eons ago, in 2003, a go od portion o f the grade in our online class was based on student

participation in discussion boards. It worked well, exc ept 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 substantive

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 stud ents wer e not affec ted by the MS-Word "I am wri ting a p aper" mental ity . 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 enonce c hanged 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 environment within a set

and very familiar blogging framework. Our students, anyo ne really, do n't have to futz with

wiki nav igation, co ntent seque ncin g, aggregation, and pe riphera l pre sent atio n. Students can

conce ntrate on their writing, easily mark it up, add links, multimedia and anything else they

may deem appropriate.

Instructors c an easily set individual 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 cr itique and discuss their classmates' writing assignments via blog c omments.

Blog assignments have worked v ery well for us. Students get into substantive discussions.

Like the article says, o ur learners like to show off what they know, expres the ir opinions and

Web 2.0 too ls, like blo gs fac ilitates that rather wel l. Bett er y et, the ir c ollobor ativ e learnin g

skills, writing skills and quality of discussion continues to get bette r and better.

Life is still good.


Maybe it depends on the student's academic interest/inclination (major): I have

students who are quite annoyed if they hav e to blog o r read someone's blog or keep up

with my tea cherly blo gging. They are n ot in curio us; ac tually , they are inte llige nt, well-

spoken, well-read and "good students." Hitting them with the stick of Required for Y our

Grade, or even tempting them with the carrot o f Improving Y our Grade ... well, it seems

counterpro ductive. Is it ok to study, read, write and also be unplugged?

John Graves 1 year ago

garay 1 year ago

lamoglie 1 year ago





multitasking our attention—not 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."

As an indiv idual , I c an't split my attention an d att end to mu ltipl e things at onc e. But a

group of individuals can do so, and I think that's what Davidson means here. I t's

consistent with her use of "crowdsourcing" in this essay, that a group o f individuals can

acco mplish more than what any one individual (even an ex pert) can do bec ause of the

diversity of perspectives they collectively 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 gro up c an mitigate this.


I agree with yo ur interpretation. In a way, I think Davidson is identifying in the

digital world something similar to what i understand happens when flying a

commerc ial airliner or the space shuttle - lots of distributed attention to getting a

particular task accomplished.

1 person liked this. Like

Exactly .I buy yo ur point. Multi-tasking is an insidious practice in this modern day. .so

dangerous that never can a student devote his full concentration to the task at hand.

What's the point o f doing a ny thing if u r not 100 % intere sted, if no t comm itte d.


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 symptom that supposedly reve als the

mysterious et iology and manifestations of an ailment called dyslexia, for which there is nodefinitive diagnosis, only a diverse menu of illustrative sympto ms from which to choo se (37

at one site that po ps up on Google with the co mforting message that "usually" dyslex ics

exhibit at least 10 ). Was the author's decision not to attend to tracking the basketballs

bec ause she is dy slexic or bec ause she b elie ve s she is dy slex ic?

I once had a conv ersation along these lines with a student who indicated that he was A DD

(because he had been told that he was). When in the course of our c onversation I asked him

some of his favorite free time ac tivities, he responded "playing chess." When I pointed out

how remarkable it was that, given his condition, he would enjoy a pastime that required such

conce ntration and focus, he looked genuinely surprised and said that this inconsistency had

never occurred to him.

The larger point is that attention is not something innate to an individual, let alone to a

generation, although propensities might be. Attention is task specific, shaped by culture,

and applied in relation to o ur beliefs, values, and personal preferences which I think the

author is really saying and which makes the introductor y anecdote co ntradictory . Any one

who thinks c hildr en have sho rt a tte ntio n spans is impo sing their adult v alue s on c hildr en

who unde r cert ain c irc umst anc es relev ant to th eir wor ld perse v erate fo r ho urs o n activ ities

that adults would abandon in minutes.


I think the introductory anecdote works well here. It shows that if every 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 whatever reason), which meant that the gro up, as a group, was mor e

observant.

rick1952 1 year ago

akhileshankala 1 year ago

reinking 1 year ago

Derek Bruff 1 year ago



I think you're letting the comment about dy slexia distract yo u, so to speak, from

Davidson's point.


With all du e re spect , and a heal thy admir atio n for t he au tho r's energy and industr ious

exploration of new tec hniques, not every 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 non-

selective public university ? I for one am not brave enough to find out.


Y es, and I a m wonder ing ho w the se exper imen ts at Duke wou ld compare again st

traditional educational methods and their outco mes at Duke. Innovation for

innovation's sake that fails to norm itself against past practice s and outcome s is yet too

y oun g an ex per iment for us to judge .


In reply to "reinking": "Was the author's decision not to attend to tracking the basketballs

bec ause she is dy slexic or bec ause she b elie ve s she is dy slex ic?"

Y ou don't th ink it's likely som eone publishing in th e field of br ain sc ienc e, who helpe d put

together a freaking Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, might have taken the time to

investigate the nature of her o wn dyslex ia?(Or perhaps y ou missed those little details in a

blip o f atte ntio n blindness?)


David, I'm not aware that Prof. Davidson has actually published "in the field of brain

science." In any case, cut bac k on the flaming, eh?


There's no surprise that the quality of writing on the student blogs was better than their term

papers. I find myself only skimming most research articles bec ause the writing formula for so

many academic journal articles seems to ensure that the author must bury the few live ideasand 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

bel ief that y ou are writin g in ac adem ic c ode for a s elect gro up of ex per ts who kno w that code

bet ter than you do.


Degrees are granted to individuals, not to groups. Grades are assigned to individuals, not to

groups. The academic enterprise is inherently individual. Any study or grading scheme that

can't account for that fact is inapropriate.

mrmars 1 year ago

5768 1 year ago

David Thomson 1 year ago

tporges 1 year ago

bghansel 1 year ago

Jeff 1 year ago



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 average grades go up. That helps professors on their ev aluations.


Life outside the academic enterprise is heavily group centered. A n education that does

not prepare students to work successfully in a gro up is inappropriate and flawed.

Most of us hav e felt the sting of working with underperforming peers, it suc ks. The

challenge, for professors, and I suppose bosses, is usually figuring out which members

of the group distinguished themselves.


Teamwork is valued outside the university , not "group centered" work. Teams are

va lued bec ause the y can pro duc e wo rk tha t on e perso n can't achiev e. The wor k

assignments given to groups of students can be achiev ed by individuals. This isprecisely why universities cannot prepare students for work in teams. The entire

"group work" training system is artificial and unrealistic.

Outside the university, teams can fail, but group grades are not given by

professors. The c omparison with non-academic teamwork must fail.But this isn't

my main point, anyway . Group work wasn't introduced to teac h teamwork. It was

introduced to transfer teaching load from professors to brighter students.

Invariably , professors do not allow students to select their own teams. Why not?

Because professors intentionally group lower performing students with higher

performing students. This gives a benefit to the pro fessor and to the lower -

performing student at the expense o f the brighter student.


I agree entirely with this point—that group work is appropriate o nly for

projects that are to o big for individuals. There is an optimum group size for

most tasks, and for most sc hool tasks, that optimum size is one. Coming up

with p rojec ts that genuin ely bene fit fro m gro up wo rk is diffic ult, but possible,

at least in upper-division engineering c lasses.

See http://gasstationwithoutpumps....


What do y u thin k?

Like

Loved the positive waves, and the energy.

Like

jimislew 1 year ago

Jeff 1 year ago

gasstationwithoutpumps 1 year ago

Julie Gillis Lanclos 1 year ago

jimislew 1 year ago



Interesting...but how will it change a c ourse on, let's say, classical Greek, or Kant's Critique?

And let 's not fo rge t the followin g wel l-estab lishe d facts:

Facebook is the only place people talk to a wall

"I wrote abo ut it in my blog",... as did 1,00 0,000 ,000 other bloggers who do n'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 wo rk, and I am sure y ou did not plan "let's read the

Chronicla today ".


Having students write for each other, not just their professor, has benefits in just about

any c ourse, including those o n classical Greek or Kant's Critique.

An d don't knoc k the d istractio n pot ential o f the I nter net. Sure, at this mo ment I'm not

working o n a task that I had dec ided to finish this afte rnoon, but I'm engaging in

unexpected conversations that might have unexpected benefits to my professional

work down the ro ad. Y ou ne ve r know when som e lit tle b it o f inter action or lear ning wil l

be useful in the futur e.


I actually do plan to read the chronicle, as well as govloop.com, milbook, webmaster

newsletter, techdirt, nextgov.com newsletter, linkedIn groups, and ac ademic

impressions daily. I plan for at least 1-1.5 ho urs for reading and research online on

what ev er top ics p op in my inbo x t hat int ere st me the mos t that day.

I've made impressive perso nal and professional connections, found answers to work

problems and invaluable resources and reference materials, and discove red 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

appreciative or incredulous of how much reading I get done.

I do find I have to keep it scheduled or it's quite easy for me to go down the rabbit hole

so to speak.


"Almost instantly, students figured out that they c ould recor d lectures on their iPods and

listen at their leisure."

"At their leisure." Talk about non-accountable listening!

Collaborative learning techniques long ago c onsidered "jigsawing" in which different students

in a group focus on different parts of an assignment then pool their understanding. Having

tried this (and being a current proponent of team learning--until such a day that I c ome to

see the gorilla invariably the re in the ro om) I regard jigsawing similar to "outsourcing" and

"distribution of responsibility." Far from optimal as far as the individual student is conc erned

and a compromise between poor and good pedagogy at best.


technologicaltransfo 1 year ago


brenadine 1 year ago

5768 1 year ago




Having students grapple with material on their own, t hen with peers, and then with an

instructor ac tually works pretty well, whether it's a "think-pair-share" or a "jigsaw"

activity . Doing so gives students a chance to surface their own prior knowledge and

experience s and vet their ideas in a relatively safe environment (the small group). This

means that more o f them are prepared to engage meaningfully in the whole-c lass,

instructor-led discussion that often follows.


At leas t in pr inciple!

Like

Any one who has s tood o n a foo tball (so cc er) t err ace and w atc hed t hat q uinte ssen tial 2 0thC

sport knows:

At ten tion Blindness Is Rare: Y ou c an see the player with the ball, the play ers without the

ball , what's happ ening no w, and what might happ en. Y ou sense what som e play ers w ant tohappen, versus what others want. You ex perience it all at once, as a totality.

Technology I s the Oppressor: Howev er, when you 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 replays), and you must c ontend with generally

stupid commentary throughout.

Crowd-sourcing Is Old Hat: Shouts, comments, disagreements, terr ace c hants, call-ins,

fanzines, internet forums...'Nuff said.

But, now as always, Future Shock sells!

PS. Apple's co llege marketing strategy hardly differs from the tobacc o c ompanies' "free

sample" approach on y esterday's campuses. How very Mid-Century! But Professor

Davidson's "pester-power" twist is a bit more current. ;)


At ten tion blind ness m ight n ot b e as r are in the rea l world as y ou b eliev e. I f yo u read

some of the original reasons for studying attention blindness, they include some v ery

pragmatic situations with dire outco mes. One of the cases involv ed a chase after a

suspect that had shot a police o fficer. 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, c hasing the real suspect ran right by the

bea ting. Late r, wh en aske d to iden tify tho se inv olv ed in mistakenly beating u p the

undercov er officer (the participants all left when they realized their mistake and did not

identify themselv es) this officer claimed to have not even seen the undercov er officer

being att ac ked. He wa s co nv ict ed o f ly ing and spent a few y ear s in jail before rese arc h

on attention blindness and a set o f duplicated studies simulating a similar ev ent finally

conv inced the judicial system that in fact when concentrating on a key ev ent, it ispossible to miss something ev en as dramatic as an individual being beaten by a gro up.

The reason becomes obv ious if yo u reverse y our perspectiv e and ask if the players o n

the field have the same breadth of vision and attention that you hav e watching from the

stands. I suspect they display dramatic attention blindness to anything other than the

bal l and the play ers imme diate ly inv olv ed. I also su spect that ev en y our attention in the

stand during an exc iting moment would miss something quite major happening in the

stands across from yo u that was not related to the game or t he action on the field.


5768 1 year ago

poppysabina 1 year ago

stelleen 1 year ago

jmalmstrom 1 year ago



The very 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 type

of thing happens in the big wide world, but it is not perceiv ed as a v irtue there.

Alway s rem emb er, co mput er means o f deliv ery are b y nature r igid and inflex ible .

Online classes, while often necessary, do not prov ide the flexibility of what can,

and often does, happen in the classroom. I have dissected a frog both virtually and

in reality. The virtual dissection was much less instructive.

Like

My comments are response mainly to these sentences:

"Grading, in a curious way, ex emplifies our deepest c onvictions about e xc ellence and

authority, and specifically abo ut the right of those with authority to define what constitutes

exc ellence. If we crowdsourc e grading, we are suggesting that yo ung people without

credentials are fit to judge quality and v alue. Welcome t o the Internet, where ev ery one's a

critic and anyone c an express 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--have be tter

informed opinions than laypeo ple. That is so obv ious. Why be interested in a nov ice's

opinion about a discipline? To acco rd a nov ice equal time and cr edibility isn't democ racy ; it's

idiocy.

One other point: How do you do serious study or make a serious scholarly c ontribution, like

writ e a bo ok, witho ut being able t o focus and c onc entr ate for lo ng periods o f time? If y ou let

in distraction, work sputters. This is your brain on reality , folks.


Have you do ne any reading on Peer Grading? From what I've 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.


After r eading Virgin ia Heffernan's artic le on y our book, I wro te a b log p ost abo ut wh at I had

gleaned from the article (the book, although it went straight to my wish list, had not yet be en

released in Canada). The post has receiv ed 17 0 very thoughtful comments; yo u can see the

post and the comments here:

http://siobhancurious.wordpres...

Reading this essay has given me a lot mor e to write about; there will be another post soo n!

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