JABET

Continuing the theme of ‘learning addiction’ I have been developing (1, 2, 3, 4), it is interesting to see medical science furthering our understanding of why our brains are wired for that (Seeking: How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that’s dangerous). I guess it should be no surprise that it is essentially a survival instinct called ’seeking’. Accidentally discovered in 1954, the seeking stimulus is triggered by learning, and even more so by learning unexpected things (aka discovery?). Interestingly, the seeking stimulus is not a pleasure like sex or eating chocolate, but rather a kind of excitement that triggers the release of dopamine and the desire to do more seeking. It is no wonder then that when the barrier to successful seeking becomes lower (e.g. Google, Twitter, and texting), people can get stuck in an addictive feedback loop.

The original article goes into far more interesting detail (learning addicted beware), but I have also quoted an ‘abridged’ version below from SDR News (because I could not link to it directly):

How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that’s dangerous. Basic drives for food, sex, and sleep have been overridden by a new need for endless nuggets of electronic information. We actually resemble nothing so much as those legendary lab rats that endlessly pressed a lever to give themselves a little electrical jolt to the brain. While we tap, tap away at our search engines, it appears we are stimulating the same system in our brains that scientists accidentally discovered more than 50 years ago when probing rat skulls. They at first thought they had found the pleasure center but this supposed pleasure center didn’t look very much like it was producing pleasure. It is an emotional state Panksepp tried many names for: curiosity, interest, foraging, anticipation, craving, expectancy. He finally settled on seeking. Panksepp has spent decades mapping the emotional systems of the brain he believes are shared by all mammals, and he says, “Seeking is the granddaddy of the systems.” It is the mammalian motivational engine that each day gets us out of the bed, or den, or hole to venture forth into the world. Panksepp says that humans can get just as excited about abstract rewards as tangible ones. He says that when we get thrilled about the world of ideas, about making intellectual connections, about divining meaning, it is the seeking circuits that are firing. The juice that fuels the seeking system is the neurotransmitter dopamine. Our internal sense of time is believed to be controlled by the dopamine system. Actually all our electronic communication devices—e-mail, Facebook feeds, texts, Twitter—are feeding the same drive as our searches. Since we’re restless, easily bored creatures, our gadgets give us in abundance qualities the seeking/wanting system finds particularly exciting. Novelty is one. Panksepp says the dopamine system is activated by finding something unexpected or by the anticipation of something new. If the rewards come unpredictably—as e-mail, texts, updates do—we get even more carried away. No wonder we call it a “CrackBerry.”

Reddit also has some interesting (and some hilarious) comments.

In some ways this makes it even more astonishing that many children can have the love of learning beaten out of them at school. In some cases it is displaced by more stimulating activities (e.g. talking, texting), but in many cases it only leaves boredom and apathy. On a more positive note, at least it helps provide scientific evidence of the benefit of allowing “self directed learning”, as is encouraged in some schools like Discovery 1 (1, 2).

In a recent series of blog posts (1, 2, 3) I talked about the concept of ‘learning addiction’, and that for some people, it can be very tempting to continue acquiring vast quantities of knowlege far and beyond any practical abaility to apply it.

Unfortunately, I guess this hilights a problem with podcasts – there is very little navigational control one you are in a ‘chunk’ of audio. Thus it is much harder (than with a newspaper or internet article) to:

• skip to the next topic,
• read a topic heading and decide if it is relevant to you,
• skim through a topic of minimal interest,
• bookmark a topic to look into further later,
• or jump to the references and read about that item in more depth.

It can even be a pain finding a list of the topics in a particular audio file in order to decide if it is worth listening to. Of course there is no technical reasons that these forms of navigation are not possible, so given time we are likely (hopefully) to see them become more widely available. QuickTime’s ‘enhanced podcasts’ are making some progress in this area, but there is still a lot more work to do.

But in the here and now, this still poses a problem, in that the system generally makes us consume more information than we need to – possibly causing, but at the least, supporting ‘learning addiction’.

It is intersting to see how this differs across different media forms. TV and radio are similar to podcasts and vodcasts, in that you get, e.g. a 1 hour chunk of news with the topics chosen by someone else, and minimal navigational control, although with TV and radio it is arguably slightly easier to change the channel. Newspapers and print media offers a lot more navigational control which, if used with dicipline can make you a lot more efficient, however, it is still a big ‘chunk’ (10’s of pages) of topics chosen by someone else, and because they are so readily available and have such tantalising headlines, people can still be easily tempted to feed their learning addiction. Online news probably has the best navigational control, but the concept of ‘chunking’ gets a little gray. A chunk could be interpreted as what story is on the page, what stories are linked to from this page, all the stories on the site, or all the stories on the internet. Thus the contribution to learning addiction is quite variable. I wonder if artificially increasing the time to load a new page might actually help curb learning addiction by increasing the cost in the cost:benefit ratio, and thus making the decision to read it more consciously “is this information valuable or just entertaining – am I going to apply it?”.

These comparisons can’t be limited just to different media forms – within a single media (e.g. podcasts) there can be different uses of the media (a news show, a panel discussion, a seminar or interview, or a novel etc). Interestingly, the same Audible interview with Ben Bova and Orson Scott Card as referred to in a recent post talked about the advantages of audio books (some audio books are also released as podcasts, or at the least downloaded in segments, so the distinction is blurred) because they had limited navigational control. They liked that story is delivered at the pace and in the detail the author had envisaged – it is very hard to skip ahead or skim over certain parts. In one anecdote, Orson (I think) had started listening to a long book which started quite slow – if he had been reading it he would have skimmed throught the start, but as he was listening he didn’t, and his opinion was that this resulted in a much more pleasurable and fulfilling experience. In this case, I don’t think it contributes to learning addiction, as the entire novel is on a single topic that the listener chose ahead of time, and it is more a form of entertainment and relaxation, which may not need to be ‘applied’ to anything more than that.

In my last post, I mentioned the idea of ‘learning addiction’:

…with the continual increase in knowledge (and technology) production, and such ready access to it (via the internet etc), I am seeing a form of ‘learning addiction’ arise, for example, in people that are subscribed to 600 blogs, or in my case, a ‘healthy’ number of podcasts. 

This reminds me of the ancient Greek concepts of knowledge. They had three different terms to describe different aspects of knowledge:

1. The aquisition of knowledge. Learning, and applying rules.
2. The application of knowledge. Trades and crafts.
3. The ‘being’ of knowledge. Experts that are so familiar with a topic they do not have to think about it.

Understandably, thhis is also a progression from the most basic form of knowledge to the most complex and revered form. (As an aside, this inability to describe knowledge fully in English has been blamed for not being able to fully comprehend and therefore deal with knowledge, and has thus been blamed for failures of large knowledge management systems).

This is all very interesting, but what has it got to do with ‘learning addiction’? It seems to me that ‘learning addiction’ is solely based in the ‘aquisition of knowledge’. I find it helpful to regularly ask myself if my dealings with knowledge are purely aqusition, or if they are moving towards application and being. Sure, some will always be for entertainment and I don’t think that is a bad thing (in moderation), but if you read the morning newspaper etc, how much of that do you think you will be able to apply to your life or your work?

I just listened to a free Audible interview with Ben Bova and Orson Scott Card, in which something interesting bubbled up that seemed relevant to my last post.

A third party had made the comment that Science Fiction is “a fringe genre read only be teens and techo-nerds”, which prompted the question “do you think the (SciFi) art form is becoming acceptable to more mainstream book lovers?”, to which Orson Scott Card replied (amongst other replies):

The demographics have been done on who reads science fiction: our readers are smarter than the readers of any other genre (on average). They are also people who embrace the idea of taking themselves out of the present reality, and going through the process that every two year old can do (but then we stop doing it), which is learning the world through finding, discovering, noticing new things and making rules out of them. And our readers do that routinely – that is what they read for – to have that same excitement of being in a new world, that most human beings only get between the ages of birth and three or four. So we are writing something that duplicates the experience of children, but it is the most intellectually productive time in a human life.

I personally prefer the term (or is it a genre) ’Speculative Fiction’ rather than ‘Science Fiction’. I often feel that making sense of foreign systems, and considering different ways of doing things (both strong components of Spec Fic) have made me more perceptive and creative. However it is a ‘Chicken and Egg’ situation – alternatively I could have already been strong in those skills and appreciated opportunities to exert them. Either way, I can certainly relate to the excitement of such challenges. In fact, with the continual increase in knowledge (and technology) production, and such ready access to it (via the internet etc), I am seeing a form of ‘learning addiction’ arise, for example, in people that are subscribed to 600 blogs, or in my case, a ‘healthy’ number of podcasts.

Though I stubled upon it completely independently, this Quotation Search tool is of a similar theme, and could have similar application to my previous post.

Wow. That has to be my shortest post ever.

I stumbled upon an interesting Acronym Search tool today that I thought had interesting potential uses in the classroom. I guess I am just one of those (annoying?) guys who likes making acronyms, so seeing what is already out there also has some appeal. But I know that I am not alone and suspect that this could also engage some students in some interesting activities.

As a starter, you can search for acronoms of your name. Who would have thought there were 9 main acronyms of ‘ERIC’ and another 91 less common ones? As these acronyms generally represent organisations or concepts, it is even more astounding to see the huge variety of that these acronyms represent – in my case, from “Educational Research Information Clearinghouse” to “Ervmisbe’s Intelligent Combat-Armour”, although there was a high strangely high proportion of education-related acronyms. Coincidence? Anyway, getting students to do an acronym search for their name, then choosing some of the results to Google and write a summary paragraph on could be an interesting option.

It also told me 14 acronyms had ‘ERIC’ in their meanings. This could provide interesting insight into a project, when the topic has already been set. For example, a search of ‘SHARK’ revealed “White Shark Research Institute (Cape Town, South Africa)” and “Outlaw Shark Digital Interface Unit”.

And for a more creative project, this resource could support students in creating their own acronyms, either on a given topic, or to fit a given word.

In the spirit of the blogosphere philosophy of ‘filtering’ and helping the cream rise to the top, I thought I wanted to mention the podcast discussion on 21st Century Learing #30: Media Literacy. The shownotes describe it as ”A amazing conversation with With Adam Kenner and Sheryl Rivera from Horace Mann School and the Action Coalition for Media Education New York Chapter. This is a must listen for educators and parents in our wired world”.

It covers the following topics (apologies for the formatting – WordPress can’t seem to indent bullet points (without making them blockquotes), so this is the best I can do):

How and why teach Media Literacy to children.
Understanding how you are being manipulated by advertising and marketing.
- Also how this is constantly changing and evolving.
How media changes our view and reactions to world events.
Asking “Who produced this and what benefit do they get from giving it to me?”
- Conflicts of interest. E.g. MSNBC owned by GE – who earns a lot more from Military Defense contracts than their MSNBC news branch.
- None of the media companies are providing news as a public service. They are doing it to make money. Even PBS now.
Research showing excess of ‘mindless media’ results in lack of involvement.
- Results in depressed, anxious, sad, alone.
Bob McCannon (sp?) collecting media literacy research:
- Just teaching media literacy makes children more aware, but does not change attitude or behavoiur.
- Changes behaviour when combined with parental involvement and reduced media diet.
So a three-pronged approach to improving attitudes and behaviour around media:
- Media Literacy Education
- Parental Involvement
- Reduced Media Diet
How to encourage parental involvement.
Reactions of children. They love it. “Why didn’t you tell us about this earlier?”
The hype around online predators.
- 90% of molestations are by people the family personally knows.
- So should be educating people to look out for this.
- So why so much hype / focus on the other 10% (not all of which are online based).
- What does traditional media have to gain by perpetuating this hype?
Implication of larger politcal issues around media.

Of course, the simple answer to this problem is ‘yes’. But when things are not simple, that is, extra time needs to be spent to support Opera, then what should the answer be?

Recently www.yellowpages.co.nz was refurbished, which is all well and good, but on my first visit I spent about 5 minutes (which felt like hours) trying to figure out how to do a simple search. As it turns out, I am not completely inept – I was using Opera and the site did not display properly. Unfortunately, it didn’t even detect that my browser may not be compatible and notify me (as www.rsnewzealand.com does nicely), so I let them know (through an online form that also didn’t support Opera…). I was told that they only make the site compatible with browsers that 1% or more of their users use.

I did some research before replying to this. As it turns out, there are a number of interesting angles to this, and it is actually quite hard to find reliable numbers on this topic, so I thought I would post my reply here:

Thanks for your reply. It occurs to me that there is a bit of a ‘chicken and the egg’ flaw in your logic – how do you expect even 1% of people to use your site with a browser that can’t use your site?! At a very conservative estimate, I tried using your site once with Opera, failed, and then used Firefox for at least another 10 page views. So already you will be innacurately thinking Opera is 10x less popular to me than it is, and this number will just keep getting worse the longer you leave your website broken.

There is something else you should realise. Opera spoofs IE as its ‘user agent’ – when web servers ask it what it is, so your web logs are very likely wrong. Responsible/knowledgeable weblogs state their stats as “MSIE 6.x/AOL & opera = XX%”.

There are 2 very good reasons they spoof. Opera is very dedicated to being very standards compliant, which actually causes them trouble. As IE is not completely standards compliant, many web developers have had to modify their sites to work for IE, which sadly, can cause problems for Opera. Also, there are documented situations where Microsoft-owned websites actively look for the browser type, and if it is Opera, they actively corrupt the page info sent out, so that Opera can’t display it properly. So Opera has to spoof IE in order to give its customers a good experience. See here for more info.

Therefore, estimating the true number of Opera users is quite difficult, and unfortunately Opera does not often release this kind of information. However, http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp is well respected, and lists Opera as over 1% for the last 5 years (and this is still subject to the spoofing problem). In some areas, usage is higher – some German sites said Opera was as high as 15%. Maybe the most relevant stats - http://operawatch.com/news/2006/08/some-opera-statistics-2.html says over 10,000,000 downloads of Opera 9 in less than 3 months, which does not include all the previous versions of Opera (there were 10,000,000 downloads back in 2003 when it was still a paid product), or downloads since then. It also states more than 40 million phones were distributed with the opera Mobile browser. The only other data I could find is comparing the number of downloads at www.download.com – Opera 9.21 has 6,800,000, IE7 has 9,100,000, Firefox 2 has 10,500,000. Obviously this has many areas of uncertainty, but it does strongly suggest that Opera interests more than 1% of users.

I am not an Opera evangelist, but I have to say I find Opera the best browser by far, and it is now free. It is the only browser created by dedicated, paid, professionals and it shows. Firefox has stability issues and is memory hungry, IE is simply behind the times – even version 7 lacks many common features. Opera is fast, efficient and easy to use with a highly customisable interface and has a track record of introducing innovations that others copy (tabbed browsing, sessions, trash bin etc). About the only problem I have with Opera is that it has problems with a few interactive sites that are not standards compliant, which is unfortunate. Hopefully your site will not be one of those for much longer.

Many thanks,

Eric

I think I have stumbled across a parallel that is worthy of note between the idea of rhizomatics and the Discovery 1 school. The idea of rhizomatics is briefly mentioned in a seminar I blogged about, and detailed more in some of Dave Cormier’s blog entries, starting with this introduction. The Discovery 1 school is a local experimental primary school I blogged about.

In a sentence, rhizomatics “describes theory and research that allows for multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points in data representation and interpretation”. And Discovery 1 School focuses on letting children discover the knowledge that they are personally interested in.

So it seems to me that Discovery 1 children are operating in a very rhizomatic way – they are taught from their very first day to seek out information in many and varied ways, and integrate this into their own knowledge. Of course they need some help in the early years, but parents are encouraged to come to school with the child and assist them. They are also taught the associated skills that support this: choosing educatonal goals, planning how to acheive these goals (so essentially creating their own lesson plans), managing their time,  recognising ‘blind spots’ in their knowledge and resolving them, and at the end of the topic, creating an output that will fairly represent the knowledge they have gained (their equivalent of assessment).

So what can we learn from this? The first thing that hits me is that rhizomatics does not have to be a digital process. Sure, it is made easier by using the internet, but it can equally work in a classroom of 10 year olds who enter and exit from knowledge via talking to people, observing or interviewing an expert, reading books, performing experiments or possibly using the internet.

In addition, at the end of the presentation, there was a discussion on how to apply rhizomatics in traditional teaching situations, especially with regard to curriculum and assessment. I beleive there is a lot to be learned from Discovery 1 School (who themselves have had to learn from the ground up over the last 5 years). Bear in mind I am not the expert on this (in fact, I can probably line up someone from Discovery 1 to attend an EdTechTalk – if someone is interested, let me know), but my second-hand knowledge would be as follows.

With regard to assessment, the student has to create one or more outputs by the end of the topic that will fairly represent the knowledge they have gained. These outputs can be in any form that does the job, so can be any or all of text, diagrams, photos, video, audio, multimedia, posters, paper mache or performance etc.

With regard to curriculum, the teacher (or parents) works with the child to ensure that all curriculum objectives are acheived within the topics of the student’s choice. Often, this is simply a suggestion that the student also looks at xyz as a part of their chosen topic (maybe if the topic is dinosaurs, the student is encouraged to calculate the fraction of various species’ life spans compared to a humans). Occassionally, when the student presents their learning goals to the teacher, the teacher may have to suggest that, for example, they have covered enough music topics recently and should think about something involving science, but generally this does not seem to be a problem as the students seem to naturally have diverse interests.

I am sure there is more that can be drawn from this comparison, but for now, real life becons.

The Eight Competencies of Online Interaction: What Should We Be Learning and Doing? was recently presented at the NYSAIS Mohonk 2006 Conference. Its a long (89 minute) mp3 so jammed full of interesting observations that I had to go back and have a second listen. The energy of the presenters also helps keep you interested for its entire length. My only negative comment would be that in the audio version it was not clear what the 8 competencies were, with only some indications when they were moving on to the next topic, but that does not detract from the insights within.
So what is it about? The title really sums it up, and because online interaction pretty much applies to everyone nowadays, I would reccommend that anyone online take a listen (especially if you are eclectic enough to be reading this blog post). Why? I think it can offer valuable insigts into what you are doing online and how you go about it, and quite importantly, better understand your own strength and weaknesses, which in turn will help you play to your strengths and improve or at least anage your weaknesses. Sounds like a good idea to me.