Thoughts on iBrain and engaging students

Last summer I was part of a reading group that looked at the book iBrain by Gary Small. I was also part of the selection committee that picked the book. We were looking for something that would prompt teachers to think about changes that young people were undergoing both in terms of how they lived their daily lives and the way they thought about particular things. At a Reaching & Teaching presentation earlier that spring, Ian Jukes seemed to endorse the book (he might also have just as likely been name-dropping it, to give the appearance that he had read it).

After distributing the book to our reading group, and explaining our hope to have conversations around it over the summer via Twitter, we left them to their thoughts. Our efforts to have teachers use Twitter ended up not amounting to much. In retrospect, I think that had we prompted via email teachers more over the summer to use Twitter, we might have had better uptake.

When we returned to discuss the book in face to face meetings in the fall teachers quite upset over some of Gary Small's ideas. Part of the problem lay in a misunderstanding that teachers had regarding our purpose. They thought that we had picked the book in order to discuss how best to implement it, not as a discussion prompt. Many teachers reported breezing through the first few chapters, until they got to one of two parts. For some, Small's use of the word "evolutionary" to describe his idea about how children's use of technology causes the rewiring of a child's neural network, caused them to question many of Small's scientific credentials. For them, "evolutionary" refers solely to a process that occurs on a multi-generational scale - "adaptive" might have been a better word choice for what Small had in mind. For other teachers, it was Small's endorsement of a study that seemed to link TV-watching to autism. Once suspicious of Small, they became far more critical about what they were reading.

My thoughts on the experience run as follows:

1. I was surprised that teachers did not begin reading the book critically from page one. It seemed that the very fact that we suggested the book gave it a critical endorsement. Since teachers accepted our informal expertise (insofar as it went towards the book selection) they accepted that the book had a certain intrinsic merit. The conversation we wanted to have was actually about whether the book had that very same merit, whereas the conversation they expected was about how best to implement the merit of the book. I can't help but assume that this same confusion over purpose happens everytime we ask students to read something.

2. Teachers believed the book had merit, then felt betrayed when their own experiences caused them to question certain aspects of it. I think this is a very important part of the reading process, the bringing to bear of personal experience, and part of the question then becomes, how do you prepare students to read books on subjects that they do not necessarily have any experience in.

3. After falling out with Small, teachers were extremely reluctant to endorse any of his ideas, but curiously, did not link Small's idea that use of digital technologies causes a change in the ordering of dendrites, to those of Marcia Tate, of Worksheets Don't Grow Dendrites fame. If you accept that Tate and Small are both talking about worksheets, ipods, and computers as tools that aid in learning, there is no real difference in their argument. I know a fair number of these teachers are big fans of Tate, so there appears to be a bit of a disconnect there.

On Multi-Tasking

Recently I've been reading iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind, by Gary Smal MD, and Gigi Vorgan. It looks at the how thought patterns and brain development are affected by new technologies. I was intrigued by the idea that reading something from a book might involve a different cognitive process than reading the same thing online.

The most recent chapter dealt with multi-tasking and recycled some of the familiar studies arguing that multi-tasking is not necessarily more efficient that proceeding through tasks in a linear fashion. From there, it is suggested that students who "multi-task" are doing themselves a disservice and as teachers we might want to encourage them to return to a single task methodology. Without doubting that in some cases, multi-tasking might be less efficient, iBrain made me wonder about the experimental design of some of these studies and their fitness for comparison with the ways that students actually multi-task. The one study that Small briefly explains had participants attempt to solve math puzzles while being also being asked to identify shapes. The result of this switching back and forth between tasks required more time.

It made me wonder however, how many students actually attempt to solve their math homework and their art homework at the same time (or say work on science and English simultaneously)? My own (completely anecdotal) observations of students "multi-tasking" involve them working on homework from one particular curricular area, while listening to music, watching TV, chatting to friends, etc. Listening to music or watching TV are rather passive activities, and students talking while working is nothing new. I don't feel that the extent of the disturbances for these activities would be as great as having to switch cognitive domains.

I would like to see more studies that focus on this kind of "parallel-tasking".