Dave’s Whiteboard

Yesterday, I worked with a group of people at a nonprofit; the goal was to help them manage the content on the organization’s web site — a new task for most, a new interface for all of them.  Certain, um, distinctive characteristics of their system reminded me (again) of how often “training” serves as the Clearasil on the zits of some software application.

All of these folks are busy at work, and until now none of that busy-ness has meant wrestling with the finer points of Drupal.  They’re not much into multitasking, a topic Jane Hart touched on recently.  She points out that today’s new learners are multi-taskers, and links to a Learning Circuits article by Tom Brigham, How to Train Multitaskers.

I’m looking forward to Jane’s promised piece on the needs of those new learners.  I thought Tom’s ideas made sense, though none of them is unique to “e-Learning 2.0″ (possibly since distractions and competition for attention existed long before even Whatever 1.0).  And at their cores, each of Tom’s suggestions is aimed at having people choose not to multitask for a while.

I’m skeptical about multitasking.  Sure, I’ve seen people listening to music, skimming their BlackBerry, hopping onto a call, updating mankind via Twitter, all while drinking coffee and, I suppose, mashing up the new strategic plan for presentation via YouTube.

But there’s a big difference between doing several things and getting several things done.  Our brains aren’t really good at doing two things at once if they both involve focused attention. John Medina describes the process in chapter four of Brain Rules:

• Shift alert: when your brain detects a signal to shift attention (you decide to start the report, you hear the phone, you see a email arrive), blood rushes to the anterior prefrontal cortex.  “Brace yourself, brain!”
• Rule activation: the brain seeks to locate the neurons required for the new task –  those involved in writing, or in phone conversation, or in reading emails).  Having found them, the brain then gets them started (hence, activation).
• Disengagement: as you work on your report (task A), your brain picks up a signal from outside the task realm (e.g., the chime of an arriving email).  The executive function of the brain must disengage at least partially from task A.  You may still be physically holding the pen or touching the keyboard, but your brain has paused.
• Rule activation for task B: At a cost of a few tenths of a second, once again the brain locates and then activates a set of neurons appropriate to the new task.

That’s for every switch that requires attention. (Thank heavens for the autonomous nervous sytem.)

Clearly, some people do this better than others — younger people more so than older ones (in general); people working on familiar tasks rather than novel ones.  But any superior performance is likely to to greater working memory that’s capable of shuttling faster to handle new inputs one at a time.

I think this has implications for work literacy — a recognition that at least some of the time, trying to do things at once, or as they arrive, is counterproductive.  I absolutely believe that the individual is in charge of his own learning.  As with the individual’s own health, though, people don’t always make the best choices — something Rob Wilkins also muses about in Lots to Learn from the Past.

MultitaskMobile photo by Or Hiltch. It’s his car.
On the top of the dash: yogurt drink, hairbrush, electric shaver, Polo cologne, two bananas (in case of a guest?).
Lower down: CD playing, cell phone at the ready.

One advantage of living near Washington DC is the Smithsonian Resident Associate Program. I’ve gotten to hear people like novelist John Mortimer, historian John Keegan, DNA co-discovered James Watson, and nanotube expert Richard Smalley.  Some weeks ago it was Jan Moynihan on “Making Connections: the Endocrine and Immune Systems and the Brain.”

I don’t have any formal background in science, so a good deal of the time I was swimming (or dog-paddling) in water over my head. (And mighty polysyllabic water at times: “a chronic increase in proinflammatory cytokines can induce a state of resistance to anti-inflammatory glucocorticoids.”)

Moynihan’s main topic was the link between the immune system and the brain. Each influences the other. This sounds straightforward — but for centuries “common sense” told people the earth was flat. Moynihan provided evidence for the connnection… and some possible implications as well.

For example, one study showed that exposure to acute stress prior to a flu vaccination enhanced the body’s ability to create antibodies — but only in women. ( “Acute stress” here means a brief, one-time experience, such has having to subtract backwards from 1,000 by 17.)

Chronic (long-term) stress produces what’s called allostatic load. “Allostatic” refers to the body’s complex balancing act. If you’re walking in the desert, you’re stressed by the head. The body could sweat, but eventually you’d dehydrate. So rather than that simple, homeostatic adjustment, the body will reduce urine output, dry out mucous membranes, decrease sweat output, constrict the circulatory system in order to maintain blood pressure with a lower volume…

An increased allostatic load can have negative consequences:

• Impaired cognitive function
• Suppressed thyroid function
• Decreased bone density
• Decreased muscle mass
• Higher blood pressure
• Decreased adaptive-immune function

That last point reference to the adaptive immunity you’ve acquired — e.g., through vaccinations.

In other words, chronic stress can reduce your body’s ability to protect itself.

This was a summary of a complex field, but at least for me, one worth tracking.

Stressful work photo by alexanderljung / Alexander Ljung.

Toward the end of a slow week, a cluster of things I haven’t figured out.
(Plenty where those came from.)

Tagging (on a blog)

Alan Levine at CogDogBlog muses about tags versus dog-egories. I haven’t used tags on the Whiteboard — not sure why. Maybe I’ve thought of them as too ad-hoc, though I realize the Taxonomy Police rarely conduct raids.

I may also be a bit analytical. When I started using Quicken, for example, I went back five months with my checking account and credit cards so I could have a full-year record. Even on the blog I write just for my parents, I’ve occasionally gone back and moved posts out of the default “uncategorized” category.

D’Arcy Norman, commenting on Alan’s post, says “I use tags to describe the content, and categories to indicate the ‘type’ of post.” That makes sense, as does his remark that usually he uses the search feature on his blog to find stuff.

Registering to comment

Two or three times a month, I wander to a blog I haven’t read before and find myself wanting to comment. Sometimes I give in to that urge, only to discover — sometimes after writing the comment — that this particular blog requires registration. I don’t mean “enter your name and your email,” which to me isn’t registration. That’s just asking, “who are you?”

What I don’t get is, “if you want to comment on this statement I’ve thrown out to the world, sign up for this site, this group, this portal.” I understand that each person defines ‘blog’ in his own way. It’s your blog; you can do whatever you want.

I myself “belong” to more sites than makes sense. It’s like those paternalistic grocery-store programs where you have to sign up or you’re not allowed to buy stuff at the sale price.

I’m not going to sign up for yet another goofy-named social site or blogger cartel.

(Added twelve hours after the original post)

Ahhh. I just read a post that had elicited several good comments. I liked one of them so much I followed it to the commenter’s blog. Uh-oh, another online community that invites me to join. But the EduGeek Journal, while inviting me in, will let me comment on posts even if I don’t join. (To comment on comments, I have to register. I don’t quite get that, except maybe as an incentive to join, but at least I can take part. ) Good going.

I’ve tried — five months now — but I often feel like I’ve wandering into a presentation at someone else’s convention. Wherever the happy medium is, I haven’t found it. People with lots of followers tweet about wondering why they’re there. People who follow hundreds — are they like the folks who always have the TV on in the background?

They have their own problems; I just wonder about myself. Poor choices in picking whom to follow? Lack of connectedness? Just plain uninterested in what someone bought at the drugstore? Dearth of social skills? I’ve sent 21 updates since March. Over half were sent to individuals, which hints I’m more reactive than proactive. No surprise there, I guess.

Dysfunctional interfaces

My wife and I want to go to the beach again. We usually rent an oceanfront house, and we’ve gone to the same town five or six times. What confuses me now, as it has before: how come, in a field where you’ve got lots of competitors (like vacation rentals), no site gets inspired by good features on competing sites?

For example: the overall best-organized site we check doesn’t let you specify a period long than a week (we’re trying for two). That means having to dig deeper into each property available during week 1. Competing Site 2 does allow multi-week searches, but doesn’t filter for peculiar features that no one in their right mind would look for — like internet access. Competing Site 3, now, has photos of each property — but they’re about 100 pixels wide, with (apparently) no way to enlarge them.

Why make things so difficult for people who are waving credit cards and saying, “Gee, I’d sure like to rent a place. I wonder where I can find one that suits me?”

Tag cloud photo by broken thoughts / Mark Lindner.
Registration desk photo by Toni Malin.
Photo of traffic sign in San Jose, California by Richard Masoner.

The tireless Don Clark links to a Scientific American interview with Marco Iacoboni, who studies mirror neurons. Iacoboni says, “Mirror neurons are the only brain cells we know of that seem specialized to code the actions of other people and also our own actions.”

He also says:

…the hype can backfire and mirror neurons may lose their specificity.

I think there are two key points to keep in mind. The first one is the one we started with: mirror neurons are brain cells specialized for actions. They are obviously critical cells for social interactions but they can’t explain non-social cognition.

The second point to keep in mind is that every brain cell and every neural system does not operate in a vacuum. Everything in the brain is interconnected, so that the activity of each cell reflects the dynamic interactions with other brain cells and other neural systems.

More on mirror neurons in a Brain Connection column by Robert Sylwester. Nice clear examples. For instance, if you stick your tongue out at a baby, even one who’s a day old, the baby will stick hers out. This isn’t a coincidence. “The infant’s observation of her parent’s projecting tongue fires the premotor neurons that represent her tongue and this priming activates the related motor cortex neurons that project her tongue out in mimicry.”

Faking, in sports, also depends on motor neurons. Here the idea is that you move in such a way that your opponent’s mirror neurons (which assess the movements of others) decide you’re going to go here. Of course, you try to go there.

…and then you think, well, he’s expecting a fake, so I’ll make a fake fake…

So why does so much formal training and formal learning seem to leave out modeling?  Blah blah, facts, key points, nobody actually doing the work.

Series: The brain rules!

For this final post based on John Medina’s Brain Rules, I’m looking at Rule 12. That says, “We are powerful and natural explorers.” What Medina highlights is the way in which we learn about the world. From infancy, we’re busy figuring out what things are and how they related to each other.

When my oldest child was turning two, I came across a phrase I’ve always used in place of “the terrible twos” — “first adolescence.” The idea was that two-year-olds, like their teenage counterparts, have just acquired a clutch of physical and mental skills. They can walk, they can talk, they can form ideas and set out to put them to work. But they’re constantly running into limitations and setbacks.

Here’s how Medina sees the world to the two-year-old:

You push the boundaries of people’s preferences, then stand back and see how they react. Then you repeat the experiment, pushing them to their limits over and over again to see how stable findings are, as if he were playing peekaboo. Slowly you begin to perceive the length and height and breadth of people’s desires, and how they differ from yours. Then, just to be sure the boundaries are still in place, you occasionally do the whole experiment over again.

One tool for the miniature experimenter: the mirror neuron. This class of brain cells, discovered within the last 15 years, apparently helps us monitor activities around us and helps us plan our own activity.

It seems clear these mirror neurons played a major role in our evolution. When we came down from the trees, says Medina, we didn’t say, “Give me a book in a lecture and a board of directors so I can spend 10 years learning how to survive in this place.”

Turning to education, Medina argues for expanding the medical school model. Med school, he says, has three components: a teaching hospital, faculty who work as well as teach, and research labs. What does this mean for the student?

• Consistent exposure to the real world — med students constantly move through the teaching hospital, encountering real-life medical problems.
• Consistent exposure to people working in the real world — students learn from not only the medical faculty but also dozens if not hundreds of working professionals.
• Consistent exposure to practical research programs — students discover that the best research is an ongoing activity, that by nature it’s tentative, and that it connects to problems worth solving.

Consider the implications of this model both for how adults learn to teach and how children learn to learn better.

Years ago, I served as a Teacher Corps intern in a rural high school. Corena, he master teacher who led our intern team was also the office education instructor at the school. One of her most successful programs placed office ed students in jobs with businesses in the three small towns that comprised our school district.

So Cindy, Carolyn, and their classmates at 16 or 17 were already learning what really happens in a workplace. Some had more positive experiences than others; as their teacher, Corena would work at trying to improve the experience, or at trying to turn it into an occasion for learning.

That was a small program with the limited but very practical goal. How many other school experiences could profit from a combination of real-life experiences, guidance from trained adults, and exposure to continuing attempts to learn more?

Baby investigator photo by coreyt / Corey Thompson.