I liked what Julia had to say about the affordances of online learning for deep reflection - having the time to ponder what we're learning about and then responding creates the potential for deep processing. One of the ironies, of course, is that the technology that allows us the luxury of this slow, measured responding (in contrast to the immediate demands of f2f classroom learning) is also a technology that can encourage monkey brain - a term for the cognitive restlessness that results in your thoughts jumping from place to place like a monkey scrambling around in the forest without staying in one spot for more than a few seconds. One of the goals of meditation is to still the monkey mind.
How does that relate to being online? We are connected to a multitude of places, people, and things simultaneously - how do you stem the flow of all that information that can lead you to monkey mind? Damon Young in today's BBC News Magazine calls ours the distraction society - but he argues that this is not caused by the technology, rather, our digital world aids and abets a natural tendency to seek novelty and reward. He claims that "at distraction's heart aren't silicon chips, but an unwillingness to confront very human issues: pain, boredom, anxiety. Distraction certainly has neurophysiological underpinnings - physical bottlenecks of sense, response and cognition. But these often work because we allow ourselves to be managed by machines' rhythms and logic."
Damon argues that recognizing and then finding strategies like time management to deal with the affordances of the online world is the key to reducing distraction and confusion.
Today's young learners are natives of the distraction society. How does this affect how they learn? How might this change how we teach?
I hope that ISWO participants will consider the question you pose at the end of your post Sally. As the Damon Young's article implies, the technology is not going to go away. How do we make the most of it?
ReplyDeleteTechnology is definitely not going to go away as you say Sally. One thing we may be able to do as instructors/learners is to reframe somewhat the notion of "affordances." Beyond what various technologies can do to enhance learning quantitatively and instrumentally (as if more = better), other affordances open up possibilities for sustained attention, concentration or reflection, as well as for managing the flow of information. Managing technologies and information is becoming a new fundamental skill, but we're still addressing things at the policy level in our institutions of learning.
ReplyDeleteSo are we Irwin. I wonder what the next few years will bring in terms of managing these things.
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