My response to the “Learning to Change-Changing to Learn” video and readings from June 2nd

The video was made in 2008 – 2 years ago, yet seems very fresh and revolutionary.

We are witnessing “The death of Education, the dawn of Learning” as one guy put it - quite a concept! How do we cease to be “givers of knowledge” or “trainers” and become “facilitators of learning”?

The article by Nicholas Carr: The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains introduces many very disturbing concepts, including that our reading concentration is negatively affected simply by the presence of hyperlinks in a passage of text, whether or not we follow the links.

I find his analogy of using a thimble to fill a bathtub to explain the transfer of information from working memory to long-term memory very clear. It’s the other end of the spectrum from the idea of drinking out of a fire hose. We can take little drops of information into our long-term memory, we don’t get much of value if it’s coming at us all at once in a huge stream.

A Vancouver doctor and lecturer named Gabor Maté wrote a book a few years ago called “Scattered Minds” about his experience with ADHD. I had several long conversations with Dr. Maté after reading his book, and realized what it must be like to have that condition, when everything coming at you demands equal attention, and if you are able to focus your attention on one thing, it is often not the most important piece of information in the stream, and/or you totally ignore everything else. I think this is akin to what Carr is saying in this piece, that the internet tends to be the fire hose, and that our brains are trying to fill the thimble with it. Pretty tough job!

One of Carr's statements relates back to Howard Rheingold’s idea of “crap detection” - As we multitask online, we are “training our brains to pay attention to the crap.” Interesting warning – to detect the crap, we have to pay attention to it!

Recent research into neuroplasticity has shown, for example, that soldiers with brain injuries from battlefield trauma can learn to re-wire their brain, i.e. transfer cognitive and physical abilities from a damaged part of the brain to a new, undamaged part. But I don’t think we want our brains to be so “plastic” that they are constantly shifting centers of attention and not allowing for sustained concentration on one activity.

What I got from Henry Jenkin’s article Why Participatory Culture Is Not Web 2.0 (and I agree with him whole-heartedly) is the notion that “There is a real danger in mapping the Web 2.0 business model onto educational practices, thus seeing students as "consumers" rather than "participants" within the educational process”. Rheingold frequently uses the term ‘consumer’ of the internet - that it is up to the consumer to investigate the credibility of information on websites. I hear myself and my co-citizens referred to often enough as 'consumers', mostly when we buy something. I don’t want to consider myself a ‘consumer’ of information on the internet.

I believe in the past few weeks, including our LTT Summer Institute and my work on these May-June assignments, I have gained a new appreciation of the value of collaborating with other education professionals in attempting to modify my teaching as much as possible, aiming towards the creation of a participatory learning environment, where my students are encouraged to ask questions that they, themselves, can investigate and try to answer. The integration of digital technology tools allowing students to communicate with each other, with me, and with people around the globe, can be a vital aspect of this change in my teaching practice.