jebsblog

I just finished reading an article in the New York Times (on line of course) “Texting, Surfing, Studying” written by a pediatrician about “her” own children and how they “multitask.” BTW, I cannot tell by the name (or anything in the text) as to whether this is a man or a woman writing – my bias is it’s a woman – so apologies given if necessary.

In any case Dr. Klass shares the story of an “experiment” with her son who is currently a medical student and his friends (also medical students). She asked them about study habits and it turned out most of them indicated that when they studied they were also doing something else (watching a movie, texting, or exercising). Apparently, all of these highly educated and competent medical students could manage to successfully study and do the other task.

Dr. Kass notes in the article about the research showing that there is no such thing as multitasking in human behavior. My own personal and professional experience would back that up. But Dr. Kass appears to be supporting the notion that today’s generation of “digital natives” are perhaps different their forefathers. This notion is in dispute among cognitive neuroscientists, but I would venture to guess there are some stylistic differences at work here.

Rather than quoting research, I thought I would tell you about my stepbrother. Chris is eight years younger than I, but still falls within the “baby boomer” generation. We became brothers when he was 11 and I was 19 and so I only got to observe his studying behavior for a few years. The fact that I was a psychology major helped.

Chris’ technique for studying – which, by the way he did very little of – was to have a book open on his lap while he was watching television. I, on the other hand, have to be in a room with almost complete silence for me to study anything. The only exception is listening to classical music and only such music that has no one singing – no opera!

Now I won’t pontificate and talk about the level of academic achievement that my brother and I attained – suffice it to say there was some variance here. But to this day, he is still much better at remembering things that he has learned by listening and can repeat lines from plays and movies seen years ago with ease. I, on the other hand am one of those people who when I got to a meeting or party and am introduced to new people, cannot remember their names to save my life. And, I can only remember lyrics to songs when I am playing an instrument along while singing.

Both my stepbrother and I are fairly adept at using technology and in other ways are very similar. So I have my doubts about the digital immigrant/digital native notion – sorry Marc Prensky. The only geeky behavior that I eschew is video gaming. For the life of me, I just don’t get it.  To be a gamer I think you have to have been born with a GameBoy in you hands.

Check out the NYT article and feel free to comment.

Image from Gideo Burton Creative Commons license.

I have been indulging in some more thoughtful reading of late about the nature of literacy and particularly the skills of our latest generation. I am a member of the TV Generation and when I was in high school, the educational community was all upset because the nation’s SAT scores had started to drop. There were all kinds of theories at the time: television and comic books were the prime culprits, particularly in my household.

When I was doing my masters degree in school psychology we took a field trip down to Princeton, NJ to visit Educational Testing Service the then-purveyors of Scholastic Aptitude Test – the dreaded SATs. We had a conversation about the declining SATs score with some of the big honchos at ETS and they were engaged in real research at the time about the causes of the decline. They had theories, and yes, television viewing was on the list, but not nearly as wicked as my mother contended. It seemed that there were a lot of factors at work, but we were assured that children were not getting stupider…

As I entered the field of education, I continued to harbor some guilt feeling that we, the TV Generation, did not really work as hard as previous generations. At the time, I sensed that we had had it easier and that there was less pressure to succeed. Clearly, we were allowed to goof off more than the kids who sat in our seats 5, 10 years earlier. After all, there were all these “new technologies” to play with and things to explore. Studying Latin, which had been a requirement for all student at my high school up until 1966, the year I entered, was now only offered as an elective. By the time I graduated, there were no Latin classes, the teacher retired and was not replaced. But this was okay, right?

In college, there were similar events where it looked like corners were being cut. Expectations and entrance requirements had been lowered from previous years, and graduation requirements lowered. But I wasn’t about to complain. Hey, it was the 70s and I was too busy playing my guitar, drinking beer and hanging with my friends.

But this sense of complacency has haunted me all these years.

In 1990, the brilliant film maker Ken Burns released his 11-hour epic “The Civil War” on PBS. I can still remember the episode where the letter from Sullivan Ballou was read. A letter written by a man on a battlefield to his wife telling her how he was “impelled to write a few lines that may fall under your eye when I am no more.” With Jay Unger and Molly Mason’s beautiful and haunting rendition of Ashokan Farewell filling the background, I was moved the first time, and the every time I’ve heard the elegant prose. A graduate of Brown University, a lawyer in civilian life and a man who rose to the rank of Major in the Union Army, Ballou clearly had achieved a level of literacy that far exceeds what most college graduates have today. Could a student today, write a Facebook entry as elegant?

Two articles that I just read talk about “the new literacy” and appear to take the position that things are not so bad. Clive Thompson published The New Literacy in last month’s Wired magazine which described a recent study by Stanford University professor Andrea Lunsford called Stanford Study of Writing. It seems Professor Lunsford thinks thing are not all that bad. Thompson poses this:

But is this explosion of prose good, on a technical level? Yes. Lunsford’s team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.

You should read Thomson’s whole piece. Good stuff.

The other is from Paul Barnwell and appears in today’s issue of Education Week. Entitled Literary Accountability in a New-Media Age, Barnwell, a middle school language arts teacher from Kentucky, suggests that the perceived decline in the literacy of today’s children is a function of the type of metric we are using to measure literacy. He states, “If we judged these students’ ability to interpret and gather information solely based on their mastery of print media, we’d be doing ourselves—and society—a huge disservice.”

I just don’t know. I can’t find the reference right now, but I recall a few weeks ago there was a report (I think it was in the Washington Post) complaining about students not being prepared for college and the costs of remediation for these students once they get to college is growing.

So, if you have thoughts on the topic, feel free to drop a comment. Me, I’m gonna go watch TV.

~j

The Maine Learning Technology Initiative – affectionately known in these parts as MLTI (pronounced “Milty”) – has unveiled their new professional development blog called Maine121.org.

Apart from the fact that it is built in WordPress and just happens to use the same template as this jebswebs’ blog, it should be a welcome addition to the program and to Maine educators.

Most noticeably the blog will feature a section discussing “accessibility and Universal Design for Learning (UDL).” We are pleased that this “theme” is important to the MLTI program and look forward to the potential for collaboration.

BTW, a little background. The MLTI program is Maine’s “laptop program;” designed to get laptop computers into the hands of students and teachers. The program started in fall of 2002 with Apple iBook G4s deployed to every student and teacher in Maine’s middle schools. Eventually the program was expanded to include administrators and support staff and most recently, it was expanded into Maine’s high schools. About 64,000 Apple MacBooks were sent out this summer making it one of the largest 1-to-1 educational technology programs, of its kind, in the country. Read the MLTI history

~j

I read this brief article from yesterday’s New York Times with great interest. Entitled, “Study Finds That Online Education Beats the Classroom,” it grabbed my attention immediately.

Having spent a fair amount of my career dealing with distance education, I always found myself defending this style of pedagogy with my traditionally inclined colleagues. When logic and research failed, the comeback was always, “…well I just could not learn without there being a teacher in the room…”

Personal learning styles and technologically-literate students aside, there had been no definitive study to prove either way if distance education was as “effective” as traditional methods. The NYT’s article describes a new research study from SRI that may have done just this. I will now be endeavoring to pore through that study. In the meantime, I thought I should share some of the comments made about the study so far:

Over the 12-year span, the report found 99 studies in which there were quantitative comparisons of online and classroom performance for the same courses. The analysis for the Department of Education found that, on average, students doing some or all of the course online would rank in the 59th percentile in tested performance, compared with the average classroom student scoring in the 50th percentile. That is a modest but statistically meaningful difference.

Hey, not shabby…

…and where have you heard this before (Hint: Me!)

The real promise of online education, experts say, is providing learning experiences that are more tailored to individual students than is possible in classrooms. That enables more “learning by doing,” which many students find more engaging and useful.

Again, surprise, surprise, surprise! (deference to Gomer Pyle)

Mr. Regier sees things evolving fairly rapidly, accelerated by the increasing use of social networking technology. More and more, students will help and teach each other, he said.

~jeb