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Book review: Now You See It

Jay Cross — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 05:43:21 +0000

Among the prizes I’ll be passing out at my webinar on Making Learning Stick on April 30: Cathy Davidson’s profound book on attention, Now You See It

The Divided Mind on RSA

Jay Cross — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 19:55:49 +0000

The last three minutes of this RSA Animate on using your whole brain rather than favoring one hemisphere is sheer poetry. One inspiration after another, staccato, overloaded by circuits. My mental movie was nodding in agreement. Yes, yes, yes, right, right on, of course, yes, yes, right, yes.

Start here and then go back to the beginning.

I’d been trying to reconcile Dan Pink’s bi-cameralism and other’s put-downs. The Divided Mind clarifies it.

What it’s like to endure 7 weeks of amnesia

Jay Cross — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 09:39:58 +0000

This is a funeral for a life snuffed out before its time. I have to have closure. I must start anew.

My online jounral goes back to ’82. Some annual files contain hundreds of pages of ideas, observations, confessions, and diary stuff. The notebooks contain drawings and to-do lists and diagrams and scribbles and anything that comes to mind. I weed them out every five years.

For the last year, I’d gotten into pouring stream-of-consciousness words into the 2012 Pages file. Business ideas, project reminders, reflections, all the stuff that would disappear from my memory banks, to be retrieved with an assist from my outboard brain’s 2012 file.

A little before Christmas 2012 I was so excited about turning the page to a fresh year that I started jotting things down in a new 2013 file. Feeling hip, I put the file in Apple’s cloud. I wrote and drew page after page. Business plans, calls to make, sketches. I added material daily and reflected on what I wrote. Six weeks into this, I opened 2013 on my iPad. The next day, my Macs could not open 2013. It was missing an index file. I examined a copy and was horrified to find it contained no data.

Apple tells me if I don’t save a iCloud resident file on my iPad, when I try to open it on my Mac, it may give this error. And all I need to do is reboot the iPad and let it finish uploading the file to iCloud. That sounded great. What Genius! But when I opened my iPad, there was no 2013 file there.

I went to my backup. Time Machine doesn’t back up iCloud. Seven weeks of plans, ruminations, New Year’s Resolutions!, research findings, general writing… all gone, never to return.

This is not a solemn funeral. I lost more than a month of memories but I am free to think an even grander future.

Did I mention I am easily distracted? I will not go out of my house without a notebook in hand. A “hip pocket PDA” (3 x 5 cards and a paper clip) is enough although I’m partial to small French and German sketchpads and notebooks. I cope…no, make that overachieve… by not losing ideas without giving them a second hearing. I jot concepts down on first meeting them and puzzle out why they seemed so cool in the second step of the process. If I’m going to work them over, they go into my automated systems. These hadn’t made it yet.

Raise a glass to disappeared January! I’ll live my life without it.

Don’t you see it?

Jay Cross — Sun, 30 Dec 2012 17:38:36 +0000

Now You See It: How Technology and Brain Science Will Transform Schools and Business for the 21st Century by Cathy N. Davison, a polymath professor at Duke. 2011. 292 pages. $11.68 (paperback) on Amazon.

Her blog.

I finished reading Cathy Davidson’s Now You See It yesterday afternoon. It is brilliant. Extremely well-written. Nearly impossible to put down. I love the way this woman thinks. This is a beautiful book.

Have you ever watched the television series Eureka? The characters get trapped in a virtual reality environment and when the force field gets hosed, the picture jiggles and sometimes what you thought was the real world begins to pixelate and morph into little cubes. Your eyes are pried open by the reality shift. That’s what I experienced reading Now You See It. The world’s not quite what I thought.

We all suffer inattention blindness. Humans have low bandwidth. When we pay attention to one thing, we don’t register lots of concurrent alternatives.

Our culture is leaving the industrial era. It’s not accidental that we began to imagine our brains were linear, machine-like, inflexible, and subject to decay a hundred years ago; we came up with the assembly line and time clock at the same time. We’ve got to see that for what it is and then cultivate the distraction to take another perspective. Oh yeah, those aren’t chickens; they’re ducks. Classrooms discourage learning. Grades and multiple choice and standardization are obsolete.

“We need to be thinking of interconnected, not discrete, twenty-first-century skills. Instead of testing for the best answer to discrete questions, we need to measure the ability to make connections, to synthesize, collaborate, network manage projects, solve problems and respond to constantly changing technologies interfaces and eventually in the workplace, new arrangements of labor and new economies. For schools this means that in addition to the three Rs of reading, writing and arithmetic, kids should be learning critical thinking, innovation, creativity, and problem solving, all of the skills one can build upon and mesh with the skills of others.”

She gets there, in the words of a reviewer for The Times Educational Supplement by

“…taking us on a tour through a welter of psychological theories and principles as she explains how learning happens. Along the way, she considers the Hebbian principle of neuronal pathways (“neurons that fire together, wire together”), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and Asperger’s syndrome, Alzheimer’s disease, Csikszentmihalyi’s flow theory, Stanford-Binet intelligence testing, Freudian psychodynamics and a galaxy of other psychological theories and themes in order to illustrate and hammer home her point that education, as it is currently conducted, is preparing young people for the past, not the future. She critiques many of our tried and tested assessment methods as obsolete and in need of replacement, and argues that formalized learning environments fail to model new modes of working, many of which are ambient and untethered, arriving at the conclusion that we need to “question whether the form of learning and knowledge making we are instilling in our children is useful for their future”.

I recall someone at IBM’s Almaden Lab once lamenting that “We look at the world through industrial-age goggles.”

“Whether applied to life on the assembly line or inside the new skyscrapers, efficiency was a harsh taskmaster. It required that humans be as uniform as possible, despite their individual circumstances, talents, or predispositions. Working regular hours, each person was assigned aplace an a function; doing what one was told an not question the efficacy of the process were both part of the twentieth=century work. But a problem increasingly reports in the modern offericce was self-motivation. With os much control exerted by others, there wasn’t much reason for the office worker to think for himself, to exceed expectation ro to innovate. Regularity and regulation do not inspire self-movitated workers.”

Frederick Taylor

The first time I read Frederick Taylor in the original, I was outraged. How could he think so little of his fellow man? What gumption it must take to tell someone, “You’re not paid to think.” As I reflected on the value created in industrial age and the comforts it showered upon us, I tempered my feelings. Taylor wanted to increase production so there would be more for all to share. However, at the end of the day, whatever you think of Taylor and his one best way, he’s dead and those days are over.

We need a new set of tricks. Davidson asks,

“Given the new options in our digital world, why exactly, would we want to do thing the way we did them before? Why would we choose to measure the new possibilities of the digital age against a standard invented to count productivity in the old industrial regime? Given the newly interconnecte world we all now live, learn, and work in, given the new ways of connecting that our world affords, why would we not want to use our options? They question isn’t which is better, the past or the present. The question is, given the current possibilities, how can we imagine and work toward a better future?”

: Ceci n’est-pas une pipe!

This is a not a picture.

What confuses the brain delights the brain. I love this” “The mind always wanders off task because the mind’s task is to wander.”

“We currently have a national education policy based on a style of learning — the standardized, machine-readable multiple-choice test — that reinforces a type of thinking and form of attention well suited to the industrial worker — a role that increasingly fewer of our kids will ever fill,” she writes. Thanks mainly to the Internet, “their world is different from the one into which we were born, therefore they start shearing and shaping different neural pathways from the outset. We may not even be able to see their unique gifts and efficiencies.”

One thing I don’t get yet is the IBM-in-Second Life thing. The big section on Chuck Hamilton and his avatar pals got me to skipping pages. Maybe I’m an old fuddie duddie. (Or need a corporate sponsor to fund my technology needs.)

The Wall Street Journal Review neatly summarizes that the “….central argument of the book: that since every individual is bound to miss something, by working together people can cover one another’s blind spots and collectively see the big picture.”

In a review for The New York Times Book Review, Christopher Chabris trashes Davidson’s thesis by saying there’s no proof of what she proposes. “No hard evidence.” The reviewer also studies inattention blindness. In fact, he corrects Davidson for calling the phenomenon attention blindness. The “Now You See It” of Davidson’s title gives away the theme of the reviewer’s book, which is about the famous gorilla-sighting video. Sour grapes?

Budges? We don’t need no stinking badges.

“No hard evidence”

The Times reviewer’s putdown reminds me of a run-in I had with an American academic at a conference in India earlier this year. He had opined that 70-20-10 was hogwash — spurious figures somehow derived from a misinterpretation of Archimedes. I flipped out and challenged him to a debate at the conference. He said he wouldn’t dignify this totally make-believe myth because it had never been verified and reported in a peer-reviewed journal. Specifically, he told me six PhD students who combed the past 50 years of peer-reviewed articles couldn’t find any empirical research to back it up. He said the numbers were therefore meaningless and the issue was not debatable.

This is the sort of nonsense Cathy Davidson warned us about” using yesterday’s yardstick (50 years!) in an attempt to measure today’s reality. It’s not apples and oranges. It’s apples and black holes. Nothing to compare.

And guess what? When you’re on the cutting edge, there isn’t any proof yet. Maybe there’s an emerging pattern, but there’s no “hard evidence.” That goes with the territory. Otherwise, you’re not on the edge. Given that the entire world is getting edgier (you can quote me on that), you better get used to it.

The book reviewer finds Davidson overly optimistic. I share her pronoia — the feeling that the world is conspiring to make our lives better. Davidson’s stories will inspire you to think highly of the future of learning and work. You got a problem with that?

I’m an advocate of common sense. Davidson gives us lots of ponder.

#eyeopener

#justsayin

#wakeupcall

#dreamland

#itateam

Simple Brain Map

Jay Cross — Sun, 07 Oct 2012 08:10:53 +0000

Use Your Brain

Jay Cross — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 18:54:18 +0000

At Online Educa, I chaired a session on neuroscience and learning, Here’s a synopsis from Online Educa’s News Portal.

“Use Your Brain!” – Neuroscience and Education

Neuroscientists are progressing rapidly in their research into areas highly relevant to education. Educators are eager to learn about their discoveries. Numerous teachers already use “brain-based” programmes in order to enhance learning. But can neuroscience really help to improve teaching? Experts at OEB 2009 called for caution.

By Andrea Marshall

Hauke Heekeren, Professor of Affective Neuroscience and Psychology of Emotions at the Freie Universität Berlin and Max-Planck-Institute for Human Development, gave a brief summary of the function of the brain and the basic methods of neuroimaging. “We must be very careful interpreting the results of brain imaging,” he warned. “What we are measuring might be far removed from what we are actually looking for.”

To illustrate this point, Heekeren suggested an analogy: “It is like trying to investigate how a car works – but you examine it with a sensor that is mounted on a geo-satellite.”

“Neuromyths” and “Edumyths”

Quite a few myths have spread from misleading interpretations of neuroscientific data, Heekeren explained. A famous one is “the left side of the brain is responsible for language and the right side for abstract thinking”. However, it is far too simplistic to ascribe one specific function to one clearly defined ‘centre’ in the brain, Heekeren pointed out. “It is a popular myth that there are all these ‘centres’ in the brain. There is even supposed to be a shopping centre,” he smiled.

So how does the human brain work? According to Heekeren, different brain regions form dynamic networks. In other words: Several regions “cooperate” when carrying out certain cognitive tasks. The complexity of the system is one of the reasons that makes it difficult to apply neuroscientific results directly in the classroom. “From a neuroscientific point of view, it is not possible to conclude that – for example – online education works better than other forms of education.”

For more information on Hauke Heekeren, please refer to http://www.heekerenlab.org/

Some “Brain Experts” Sell “Snake Oil”

Daniel T. Willingham, Cognitive Scientist and Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, was connected to the ONLINE EDUCA BERLIN audience via the Internet. He holds a slightly different view. In his book Why Don’t Students Like School? he explains the biological and cognitive basis of learning – with clear applications for teachers. However, he also made the point that it is difficult to ‘translate’ neuroscientific data to behavioural analysis. His main argument: There is often a mismatch in the levels of analysis that neuroscientists and education researchers work with (see below).

Willingham gave a “note of caution” to teachers: “So-called brain experts take ordinary findings, throw in a few ‘brain things’ and sell it as revolutionary in education,” he said, likening the ‘experts’ to quack doctors selling “snake oil”.

The suggestions of these ‘experts’ are often banal: “They explain how a low glucose level in the brain metabolism affects learning. But everyone knows anyway that children who are hungry don’t learn well,” Willingham said.

Neuroscience Can Describe – Not Prescribe “What Works”

What can neuroscience do for education then? At OEB, both experts pointed out that neuroimaging studies are descriptive but not prescriptive. For example, they can pinpoint the neural systems responsible for reading, writing or arithmetic. But they do not tell teachers “what works” in the classroom. It is not possible, for example, to advise teachers on certain strategies for so-called visual, auditory or kinesthetic learners. Brain research has not found any evidence that these learning styles exist.

Different Levels of Analysis

“The upper-most level employed by neuroscientists concerns the mapping of brain structure and activity to cognitive functions (e.g., memory, attention) or function interactions (e.g., the impact of emotion on learning).

Neuroscientists study these cognitive functions in isolation for the sake of simplicity. They do not study the entire nervous system (…).

For educators, the mind of a single child is the lowest level of analysis with any payoff. Higher levels include the classroom, school, neighbourhood and country.

The information that education researchers most often try to import from neuroscience concerns a single cognitive process in isolation, but the interactions with other systems will be part of the educational context. For example, we know that repetition beneﬁts memory, but a teacher cannot ask students to repeat work without considering the impact on motivation.

Neuroscientists usually cannot characterise these interactions.”

Daniel T. Willingham (2009)

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