You can't go for more than 30 mins at an educational conference without hearing the phrase 'learning styles'. It's one of those fixed narratives trotted out by every teacher and educational academic in the land, without the slightest concern about whether there's any evidence that they're useful or whether they even exist. I've posted Coffield's research in the past, which I thought would finally put paid to this madness, but no, almost every school in the land trots through this stuff in useless INSET days.
So thanks to Wil Thalheimer for this blog post. The Association of Psychological Science commissioned a review of the evidence for the benefits of using learning styles, and the report is clear.
"We conclude therefore, that at present, there is no adequate evidence base to justify incorporating learning-styles assessments into general educational practice. Thus, limited education resources would better be devoted to adopting other educational practices that have a strong evidence base, of which there are an increasing number. However, given the lack of methodologically sound studies of learning styles, it would be an error to conclude that all possible versions of learning styles have been tested and found wanting; many have simply not been tested at all. (p. 105)
Research Citation:
Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., & Bjork, R. (2008). Learning styles: Concepts and evidence.Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 9, 105-119.
Surely, someone in charge of teacher training will finally kill this stuff off, before we stereotype learners into pigeon-holes which limit, rather than enhance, their educational aspirations.
Up In The Air is every baby-boomer’s wet-dream. It’s narrative crack for the sentimental, story loving middle classes. A nasty, chemical concoction of conceits.
Ingredient 1 – Implausibly good-looking ageing actors (Clooney & Farmiga).Designed to pull in star-struck boomer romantics. Two good looking executives have raunchy sex in hotel rooms and discuss joining the mile-high club (the scene where they compare airmiles’ cards and discuss sex on planes is just plain, bad writing). The film’s one saving grace is Clooney’s lack of redemption.
Ingredient 2 – Sentimental (but patronising) view of marriage among poor people. The wedding scenes are so clichéd, cloying and inauthentic that it’s an insult to the people bearing the brunt of job losses, largely caused by assholes talking down to them. The groom is a cartoon character with unreal dialogue and played as a buffoon; the bride as a bubbling child. The older sister character is much more interesting but she’s subsumed under this pathetic sub-plot.
Ingredient 3 – Young person introduces then turns her back on technology. Baby Boomers just love this. Bright young thing just doesn’t get it (technology bad – face-to-face good) – then she does. It’s us Baby Boomers teaching them young ‘uns a lesson. And what’s the lesson? When it comes to sacking people, do it face-to-face, with a smile. Wow.
Ingredient 4 – Use real people to get emotional response then ignore issue. This is criminal. Real people are used for the interview scenes and finale, and their plight is in no way helped by appearing in a sentimental rom-com, where they’re mere fodder for a feel-good plot. The fact that they’re real people, being exploited again, makes me want to tear the Director’s throat out.
Ingredient 4 – Barely disguised advert for Hilton and American Airlines. Does the Director have no sense of irony? Having paid for huge dollops of crude product placement, one could reflect on the fact that both organisations have been sacking staff like crazy. Take the 7000 jobs from American Airlines and the 1000 and more from Hilton. There’s something creepy about naked capitalism when it’s worming its way into your consciousness through indirect advertising in a movie that decries the very behaviour you exhibit.
Oscar?
In the end this is a thinly disguised rom-com for cosy people who have jobs and don’t care much for those who don’t. By avoiding the main issue, job losses and redundancy, it redirects the audience towards an anti-technology message. This is bullshit. The 'sack people using videoconferencing' idea is fantasy, job losses and the pain of redundancy is not. If Clooney gets an Oscar for this, it will rival Obama’s Nobel Prize as most misplaced award of the century.
The iPAD puzzles me. What is it useful for? In the Steve Jobs launch we saw entire newspaper pages on the screen – but people don’t read entire newspapers online. I prefer online stuff because I don’t have to have contact with the fashion, style, food, sudoko, court circulars, minor sports and supplements that are of no interest to me. I want good articles, not entire newspapers.
Similarly with magazines; I don’t want the full page ads, problems pages and topics I’m not interested in. The web allows me to click to the quick and not be a slave to the editor’s narrative arc. The iPad is the dying device of the narrative nimbies who can’t face up to the fact that the limitations of pressed and printed paper needn’t carry over to the web.
Newspaper and magazine types aren’t salivating over the iPAD, they’re scared, because they’re no longer in control of the product and its distribution. In any case, they're followers, not leaders. The blood is being drained from them minute by minute, by the sharper, vampire medium that is the web. We no longer need the editorial narrative of a newspaper or magazine. That was just a function of content that had to be bundled and bulked out to make it commercially viable to distribute. One page newspapers and magazines make no sense.
Never ending story – why boomers don’t get social media
The iPads is big on sit back and watch media; weak on lean forward, user-created content. It’s a narrative media device, not a communication or create content device, a TV screen with web access.
My generation have been fed on a diet of fixed narratives. They’ve lapped up TV, movies and books for so long that they can’t see beyond its limitations. It’s their end-game, amusing themselves to death on stories. There’s nothing wrong with narrative-driven media – movies, novels, TV programmes, theatre – but to the exclusion of everything else? Bounded in the nutshell of packaged programmes and print, they can’t imagine the infinite space of created content and collaboration.
Groups for them are cosy little, middle-class book groups or film groups, chewing over a narrative that is clean; has a start, middle and end, and is professionally packaged. They can’t comprehend a medium that is simply a flow, with no narrative, no start, no middle and no end. It’s this open-endedness that scares them. They have become so used to consuming fixed narratives that they literally can’t imagine using a medium where it’s absent.
Why do otherwise open-minded people screw their face up when you suggest they use Facebook or Twitter? What do they fear? You can hear it in their responses to Twitter, “But what’s the point of telling people that you’re having a cup of tea….” (I’ve heard this particular line several times). Yet, rather than try it for even a few minutes, they’d rather let their love of narrative media condemn new media as a waste of time.
Email is enough to send them into a frenzy of worry about inboxes that never empty. That’s the whole damn point folks. It’s meant to fill up. There is no closure on email, Twitter or Facebook, because there’s no closure on life. Life goes on and Facebook and Twitter are the visible comet tails of those lives. It’s a never ending story, then you die!
Narrative device
So, for me, the iPAD is a backward, not forward looking device, that attempts to throw the trawl net off the back of the ship and scoop up all of those sinking fast narrative media, like newspapers and magazines, or the more solid bottom dwellers like movies and TV. But how many of us watch movies and TV on the move, some but precious few. And here's the really bad news for the narrative nimbies - iPAD users will have to get used to lots of blanks in the stories, because there's loads of Flash out there.
Forget the functionality and the fact that it doesn’t have a USB or webcam it’s just the wrong shape. No consumer device can withstand ergonomic failure. It's just too awkward to use, hold and store.
1. Pain in the neck. When I’m writing (typing) do I lie it flat on a table and peer at an acute angle at the text? You can’t hold the damn thing and type. Wait for the neck pain and eye strain.
2. No feeling. Most writers prefer the haptic feel of a keyboard.
3. Touchscreens error prone. Research from the University of Glasgow Scotland [Brewster, Chohan, and Brown 2007] demonstrates that sample users reduce input errors (20%), increase input speed (20%), and lower their cognitive load (40%) when touchscreens are combined with haptics or tactile feedback.
4.Thumbs useless. For texting it doesn’t have that two-thumbs convenience.
5. Gamers like control. Most gamers like cognitively ergonomically designed controllers, not touchscreen.
6. Won't stand up. When I watch a movie do I have to hold it up for 2 hours or prop it up on its thin shiny strip of a base? Can’t see me using this on a train or plane. A laptop or netbook has a screen that can be tilted on a hinged base – perfect. Or you carry the iPAD 'dock' around!
7. Armpit? Do I need something this big to listen to music? Do I hold it under my armpit as I walk or run?
8. Awkward e-book. For reading I can hold a book in one hand as it’s a shallow V shape, even drop it. Flat devices are awkward for holding and reading.
9. Condom storage. When I put it away I’ll have to sleeve it to protect the screen. That’s a pain.
10. Forgotten the tablet? We’ve been through this with the PC tablet, which was a dog for all of the above reasons.
Ergonomically, it’s worse than an iPHONE or iTOUCH as it’s too big, literally a designer who wanted to PAD out an iPHONE. Ergonomically, it’s worse than a netbook or laptop because it’s flat. Too big to hold comfortably, too flat for work, too awkward to store. Ergonomically, it’s all wrong.
There’s something odd about relentlessly jolly people, a sort of deep sadness. But this is nothing compared to the people who sell ‘happiness’ as a commodity – behind the smile lies a lie and a hefty daily rate. I have an instinctive distrust of motivational speakers, positive psychologists, life coaches, NLP fanatics and other happy-clappy types. Call me old fashioned, but I’m a sucker, not for pessimism, but for realism.
Smile or Die
That brings me to an astonishing book by Barbara EhrenreichSmile or Die, a welcome shot of realism that shatters the cosy world of the happy, shiny people. The core argument is compelling. The ‘happy’ movement replaces reality with positive illusions. Sure, you can think positive but “at the cost of less realism”. It’s this optimism bias that leads to failed projects, missed sales figures, unrepayable debt and failure.
Ehrenreich starts with her Cancer, the catalyst for the book, and berates the relentless and ill-informed advisors who make false claims about extending your life through positive thinking. There is no such evidence, yet paid counsellors keep the myths flowing. It’s an unthinking world where any dissent is seen as negative and therefore wrong, even if you’re right. Even worse is the psychological side-effect which encourages patients to blame themselves (if they’re realistic) and their attitudes for their disease. This is truly disturbing.
Get a life not a coach
Above all it’s the coaching profession she finds most insidious. At its worst they seem to suggest that reality is wholly subject to change through thoughts and feelings. They cherry pick bits of science; quantum physics, magnetism and a heap of other things they don’t really understand (NLPers are easily the worst at this) to create illusions from bad science. Luckily the science usually bites back.
Pied piper of the positive psychology
Martin Seligman is the pied piper of the positive psychology movement and when she meets him she finds an odd man, keen on exploiting his ‘science’ for money. His book Authentic Happiness is, like him, a “jumble of anecdotes”. His banal formula for happiness is H= S+F+C (Happiness = set range, circumstances and voluntary control) condenses one vague concept from three others. The Journal of Happiness Studies is study after study linking happiness to every conceivable outcome but there’s no room for negative results in this brand of science.
Ponzi positivism
The whole Ponzi scheme that was the recent financial bubble was built on the false optimism of being positive about everything. At the heart of the economic crisis was an epidemic of self-delusion. A group of bankers coked up on a heady mixture of motivational speakers, motivational literature and coaches. Ehrenreich slates Tim Robbins, Chris Gardner and Chuck Mills for creating a ‘woo’ culture of high fives and leaders who became “megalomaniac, narcissistic solipsists”. Bankers and other financial types built bubbles around themselves, all within a mega-bubble of debt. As Paul Krugman said “nobody likes to be a party pooper”. To be positive is to be forever blowing bubbles.
Cheese, soup…….
Ehrenreich refuses to “fake sincerity” and “retreat from the real drama and tragedy of human events” and slams infantile books like; Who moved my cheese? Chicken Soup for the Soul, The Secret etc. for selling snakeoil solutions to vulnerable people. It’s always happy hour for the ‘professionals who peddle positivity, make huge sums of money from the selling these illusions.
Get real
In the final chapter, she despairs at Human Resources who can’t possibly see past this simple narrative and swallow it whole, using ‘positive’ and ‘good’ interchangeably. On the whole, HR and the training world, hungrily lap up this stuff, and are the enablers for this epidemic of anti-realism. It’s not a matter of optimism versus pessimism, but realism versus illusions.
I’ve worked with technology all of my adult life, built a business based on technology, written extensively about technology and evangelised technology, BUT I don’t own a mobile phone. How come?
When I worked full time I had one but in August 2005, I threw it to one side and haven’t bought one since(sorry I’ve bought several for my teenage sons). Don’t get me wrong, my use of technology increased dramatically at this point as I had the time to blog, email, research, Facebook and eventually Tweet away and I did, with a vengeance. I was just fed up with random calls that led to random behaviour and gave me no time to think.
Mobilus interruptus
A mobile stops and interrupts your life. You subject yourself to the tyranny of incoming calls and texts. This disturbs me a lot, as I like to stay in the flow, when I’m doing things. I don’t like being interrupted. I don’t want the tail wagging the dog. When I’m reading the newspaper, watching the news, watching a movie, reading a book or writing, I don’t want to hear the shrill sound of a ringtone. It throws me. It also leads to demands and promises (not saying NO enough) that nag away at your mind until they’re fulfilled.
Ringtones
I hate ringtones, every last one of them. From the familiar simple, standards to the full polyphonic cacophonies that assault my ears and mind on trains and buses, I hate them all. When their phone rings, it’s not for my attention or the attention of the train carriage or busload of passengers, it’s for the owner. It’s sometime absurdly loud.
Private-public collapse
It’s this collapse of the public-private distinction that disturbs me the most. It's so undignified. I yearn for the days when telephony was confined to the privacy of your own home or in a large, red, metal box. Private conversations should be private, not public. What’s more, I‘m often forced to listen to one side of a banal conversation as it is being SHOUTED DOWN THE PHONE. Since when did people believe that they have the right to inflict public shouting on large numbers of their fellow human beings for long periods in enclosed places? I’ve even experienced teenagers place the phone on a table between them on a train to use it as a mini-ghetto blaster. How rude is that?
Slow movers
There’s a Facebook group set up for people like me who want a law to make it legal to club someone with a baseball bat if they stop or slow down in front of you due to mobile use. I’m a member. What makes someone think that when walking along a crowded street they can just stop or slow down causing small ripple traffic jams among the pedestrians, just because they’ve got a call. Move to one side. Have some respect. Some of us have things to do and places to get to. We’re not all itching for intimate phone chat.
Mobiles during movies
Another social convention that seems to have suffered is the expectation that one can watch a movie or live performance, without some idiot checking their texts or sending them, illuminating the three rows behind them. This is behaviour of such selfishness that I rarely respond with polite request. I prefer to prod them on the back of the head with one finger, then tell them to switch it off. This, I’ve found is not an age or class thing. Some of the worst offenders are older middle-class folk who seem to think the world revolves around them and their family, “Sorry darling, I’ll have to call you back later….(silent thought - there’s a mad Scotsman about to ram my mobile up my rectum)……love you”.
Queue clogger
You’re in a queue at the bank, in a supermarket, at the ticket booth in the station, and there’s some prat on his/her phone who’s having a conversation during the transaction. Of course, they can’t and slow the whole process down. The teller, check-out person and ticket seller shake their head with disbelief and the rest of us want to shove the mobile into their open mouth (sideways).
Plane stupid
Then there’s the nutters in airports and planes who feel the desperate need to call as the plane is landing or just after the pilot has announced that it’s illegal. Even a solid stare from a member of the cabin crew doesn’t put them off – they’ll continue with that call to the death, literally of us all.
Burnt alive
Similarly in petrol stations, where the danger of sparks demand that you switch them off to prevent you and everyone else being emolliated. If you don’t think this is possible, watch this horrific video.
Mobile murderers
Lastly, there’s the murderers and suicide drivers who use them while driving. To be fair this is often guys in vans (sort of understandable) or wankers in BMWs (unforgivable). Using a mobile increases your chance of killing yourself and others. No you can’t multi-task Mr BMW, ask your wife – she’ll tell you that you can barely use a knife and fork at the same time.
Travel without a mobile
I travel to escape the greyness of the UK, to let time expand and immerse myself in another place or culture. I don’t want a dose of the UK in my ear every few hours. I spent years travelling without one and don’t see the need for one now. There’s nothing sadder than some middle manager responding to some middle-management task in a place of great beauty or interest. It’s just wrong.
Asynch or synch
I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m basically an asynch sort of guy. I’m fairly gregarious and social but I prefer incoming fire to be deflected and stored for later perusal. I don’t like all of this ‘out of the blue’ stuff, where you’re showered by requests in realtime, even strangers selling you things. It’s not that I’m a communications curmudgeon. Indeed, I’m an almost obsessive emailer, blogger, Facebook addict and Tweeter. But with this lot I’m in control and can respond in my own good time, or not at all.
I’m not saying abandon mobiles. If you work, they’re often necessary and if you just love to chat on the phone for hours, that’s fine with me. I’m even cool with people who want to have an electronic umbilical chord to their teenage offspring. Just don’t expect me to subject myself to that regime.
I shuffled around BETT for a short while, but I always find it a rather unreal spectacle – a huge shanty town of stalls, selling to largely suspicious customers. There’s several contradictions in ‘education and technology’ that are all too obvious here.
Paradox 1: Technology and classrooms
Education is obsessed by classroom delivery. That means it has to constantly try to force technology into this one box. Classrooms are designed for teachers to talk to groups of students, who then troop off every hour or so to another classroom. To shove technology into this context is like punching holes in the walls. The boxed-in learners are always trying to get out and the technology allows them to do so. So you get this emphasis on iPads, expensive whiteboards and table-top computers and all sorts of other nonsense that has been shoe-horned into the classroom, leaving poor teachers to manage the fact that learners, especially onine want to be free.
Paradox 2: Technology and teachers
The second assumption is that technology should always be teacher-mediated. That’s because the current educational model assumes that teaching is always a necessary condition for learning – it’s not. Teacgers in schools are wonderful, that's their habitat. But the more successful attempts at content creation, distribution and use have been largely teacher-free, allowing students to get on with their learning in the quiet of their own homes or bedrooms - Google, Wikipedia, Khan, BBC Bitesize etc etc.
Paradox 3: Anti-corporate attitude
On the whole, schools, and the teaching profession, have more than a whiff of anti-corporate attitude. Teaching is often explicitly (not always) anti-private sector. You see this on Twitter where many of the tweets are moaning about technology and evil vendors. This makes the market rather awkward, as there’s a lack of trust between sellers and buyers. Hence the crowds of attendees who end up trawling the exhibition for pencils, plastic things, stress balls and other goodies.
Paradox 4: Anti-technology
Although most of the people at BETT are not like this, many of their colleagues are explicitly anti-technology. I’ve experienced this many times in schools and colleges when I’ve given talks on technology.
Paradox 5: Technology brings visibility
Teachers instinctively know that a VLE and other pieces of learning management software, expose them to scrutiny, either by managers or parents, and fear this exposure. This is understandable, but teaching has long been an occupation that lacked scrutiny.
Paradox 6: Small is expensive
Technology in schools has suffered from poor procurement and poor implementation because it is bought by individual schools when the real model should be higher up the value chain, above individual institutions. Schools often make bad, expensive choices and struggle to support the things they buy, leading to further suspicion.
Paradox 7: Technology wants to be free
Technology has a place in schools and a huge role in education. But that role is largely to do with learning out of the box that is the classroom. It needs to target and promote autonomous learning, free from the distractions of groups within a classroom. Most people use technology on a one-to-one basis, not in large groups. If we freed up students to get on with self-driven learning, delivered all learning at home via technology, we’d get better value for our money.
Hedging your bets?
There's some fantastic people working in education and technology, who really care about improving the lot of students, but context crushes much of this effort. I’d like to see technology free us from some of the hideous aspects of the existing model – by delivering strong, inspiring content, allowing home learning to be delivered, marked and communicated back to teachers, giving parents more information and control. But I wouldn’t BETT on it!
Picture the scene; on Friday I walked past a cluster of three schools, all within a few hundred yards of each other. The roads were open and traffic flowing, every shop, pub and restaurant in the area was open. The buses were running and the trains operating. Hundreds their students were throwing snowballs and sledging in the snow on their extensive fields. Something odd, however; the schools were all shut, and as most parents now know, there wasn’t a snowball chance in hell of them being open. Why?
At the first drop of snow Education is the first to bring down the shutters on their students and their parents. Fair enough in those cases where it is physically impossible for teachers and students to get in, but in the majority of cases, this is is simply not true. What is maddening is the excuses trotted out by headteachers and teachers alike.
Blame the parents!
Hard to believe, but almost every teacher I’ve met will recite the myth and mantra of the ‘litigious parent’. Parents will sue at the drop of a glove, they claim, if their children slip in the snow and hurt themselves. No they won’t. There have been no cases of parents suing a school because of snow and ice. This anti-parent attitude is deeply embedded in the educational establishment. My school grounds are full of students playing about in the so-called ‘treacherous’ conditions. Keeping them out of school surely increase the general risk to children of accidents due to snow and ice. The word ‘treacherous’ is a dead giveaway. It’s not snowing in the classrooms.
Blame the Local Authorities
They have a point here, as the ‘risk analysis’ documents push schools into odd action. However, in the end, it’s the Headteacher and senior staff that make the decision. This leads to subjective judgements fuelled by Headteachers who instinctively side with their staff. They don’t take into account the consequences of their actions for the rest of us. You have the fascinating phenomena in my town of the private schools staying open and the state schools closing down. Can I suggest that this is because the private schools are run for the benefit of their students and parents, not the teaching staff?
If parents can, teachers can
In my town almost every business is open and working parents have made it to work. The roads past my local schools are open – I’ve walked and driven along them – and transport to and from the town is adequate. I’ve made it across town with ease and been to London on back on time. Sure, a few teachers and pupils may not have been able to get to school, but most students live in the catchment area and would have had no problem at all. If staff in other businesses can get to work, so can teachers.
1 teacher 60 parents
Parents, especially single parents, but also other working couples, have a tough time here, having to arrange childcare, often at the last minute, so that they can get to work, while the teachers stay at home. This is costly. For every teacher who’s at home, there may be up to 60 parents at work, many who have find alternative arrangements for their children.
No pay for the poor
Another unintended consequence is the loss of pay, not for the teachers, but for auxiliary staff, who often don’t get paid if they don’t get to work. As usual it’s the poor who suffer here, cleaners and canteen staff. Couldn’t we just pay for them to clear some paths in the snow and get everyone back on track.
Unfair exams
70,000 students have GCSE and A-level exams this week and most have been deprived of adequate support by schools that have been quick of the mark in closing down. The exam boards have been guilty of putting their business interests before that of their pupils. The disruption caused by the snow has put this crop of students at a disadvantage. It is not a fair test because the lead-up conditions are different, depending on where you live or whether you’re in a private of state school.
Many pay for few
Businesses accept that a few people may not be able to get in but don’t close down the whole establishment on the basis of the few. In schools, if just a few can’t make the whole thing closes down.
As parents we’re constantly reminded that absence from school has a deleterious effect on the educational attainment of our children, except when it’s caused by snow, apparently. This fact is conveniently ignored when it comes to making the effort to get schools open in bad weather. Why don’t we do the right thing here and allow teachers holidays when it snows and get them to work extra days when the weather improves?
There’s a lot of angst around how we consume language in the light of new technology. In terms of ‘words’, are we consuming more or less, and from what sources?
How much information? 2009
At last there’s a huge study that attempts to look at the big picture of ‘information consumption’ over time. The How Much Information? 2009 Report on American Consumers by Roger E. Bohn and James E. Short from the University of California, is a fascinating read. It looks at how much information we consume at home (not at work) and has some surprising findings.
First think about the information sources you use at home. There’s stuff from the outside; cable TV, broadcast TV, broadcast radio, telephone, internet, wireless, print, digital storage e.g. DVDs. Then the new kid on the block, the user-created stuff: photographs, videos, web pages, blogs, chat, social networking, email, phone calls, texts, computer games. Our homes are awash with information.
So what did they measure? They use three measures; hours, words and bytes consumedand did not adjust for double counting. If someone is watching TV and using the computer at the same time, the data sources will record this as two hours of total information. This is consistent with most other researchers.
Massive increase in words consumed
I’ll focus more on ’words’, as I think it’s the one that’s gone through most change over time.. When many think of language they think books, newspapers and magazines. If little Josh or Sarah-Jane ain’t reading, or being read to, it’s not really ‘language’. But as any linguist will tell you the spoken word is primary. So how do we consume words, spoken and written?
The top line figure is a 140% increase in total words consumed from 1980 to 2008. Using words as his only metric, Pool estimated that 4,500 trillion words were ‘consumed’ in 1980. This grew to 10,845 trillion words in 2008, which works out to about 100,000 words per American per day.
Breakdown of words consumed
They are consumed in the following ways; TV 45%, computer 27%, radio 10.6%, print 8.6%, phone 5.2%, computer games 2.4%. Taken together, U.S. households in 2008 spent about 5% of their information time reading newspapers, magazines and books, which have declined in readership over the last fifty years. From the perspective of the information measured in words, printed media in total accounts for only 8.6% of all words consumed.
Computers massively increase reading
Conventional print media has fallen from 26% of information by words in 1960 to 9% in 2008. However, this has been more than countered by the rise of the Internet and local computer programs, which now provide 27% of words, with conventional print providing an additional 9%. Thanks to computers, a full third of words are now received interactively. Reading, which was in decline due to the growth of television, has now tripled from 1980 to 2008, because it is the overwhelmingly preferred way to receive words on the Internet. In other words, reading as a percentage of our information consumption has increased in the last 50 years, if we use words themselves as the unit of measurement. Of course, the picture is getting far more complicated as we read and write more on mobile devices and through social networking. My guess is that both reading and writing are dog-legging in growth as mobile devices and social networking have become mainstream.More information consumed In general, we consume more information Hours of information consumption grew at 2.6 percent per year from 1980 to 2008, due to a combination of population growth and increasing hours per capita, from 7.4 to 11.8.
Radio and TV still dominate
The traditional media of radio and TV still dominate our consumption per day, with a total of 60 percent of the hours. The estimated 292 million U.S. viewers average nearly five hours of TV viewing per day.9 Total TV viewing accounts for 41 percent of total hours of information consumption. In total, more than three-quarters of U.S. households’ information time is spent with non-computer sources.
Interestingly, although adults frequently complain about how much time children spend watching TV, the facts show otherwise: American teenagers watch less than four hours per day while the largest amount is watched by older Americans, those 60 to 65, who watched more than seven hours per day. And Video never did “kill the radio star” which is still alive and kicking, especially in the US where more people spend longer in cars.
Telephone
It is quite likely that by 2010, the total number of hours that Americans spend on their cell phones will overtake their use of landline phones in the household. As a factor of total hours of information consumed by U.S. households in 2008, it was already a close race.
Computer access the big change
The five major categories of home computer use are all on the rise:
1. Accessing the Internet such as web browsing, communications (including email) and social networking;
2. Uploading, downloading and watching videos on the Internet;
3. Playing computer games;
4. Mobile devices and applications;
5. Offline computer activities that don’t require Internet access; such as writing a letter in Word, putting together an Excel spreadsheet, or editing home photos.
The average American spends nearly three hours per day on the computer, not including time at work. That is 24% of total information hours. Rise of interaction Interaction is an interesting extra dimension in that most past sources of information were passive, such as movies, radio and TV. The computer is a game-changer as it is highly interactive, with computer games, social networking, email and other functions being intensely interactive.
In an interesting aside, the authors make an interesting point about evolution here. Our evolutionary past did not prepare us for enormous doses of passive information, it was a highly interactive environment full of conversation, so tradition media such as books, newspapers, magazines, TV and radio are far less aligned that the telephone, txting, msn, computer games and social networking.
Future is complicated
There’s the other complication which is multiple streams of information into the home and switching rapidly between laptop, TV and phone. It is not uncommon for one home to have computers, consoles, telephones, iPOD music, TV and radio all flowing into the one home, while people flit between them or get interrupted and switch in and out of these information flows. There’s also the domino effect as something on one medium stimulates the use of another. A news item on TV may stimulate internet browsing, hearing a song on radio may spark off a download to your iPOD.
Three years ago I blogged an idea that seemed a little crazy at the time - scrap teacher staffrooms. You may not like what he has done since but the infamous Michael Wilshaw did precisely that and, along with other measures, produced one of the most successful state schools in the country - Mossbourne Community Academy. He had no central staffroom and teachers have to take tea and coffee in 'learning areas' around the school, "I wanted staff and students in close proximity at all times so that, at vulnerable periods such as breaks when you get bullying and vandalism, pupils don't all head in one direction and staff in another". And this guy is lambasted by the left for being a traditionalist! Just for the record, his school from being one of the worst in the country now gets 85% A-C (including English and Maths), despite its deprived, and non-selective, intake.
Why staffrooms are bad
When Malcolm Gladwell was asked what one thing would most improve education he replied, ’Abolishing teacher staffrooms’. He may have been right – a survey published in 2007 showed that teachers top the worst ‘gossips at work’ poll, with 79% talking about their colleagues behind their back. John Taylor Gatto, a National award winning teacher in the US gave up teaching quoting one of the reasons as he could no longer stand the culture of the staffroom.
Teachers may lose rank among their peer group if they don’t join in the gossip (Nias 1989) and, worse, may be subjected to rumour and gossip if they shun the classroom (Rosenholz 1989). These studies show troubled teachers, in particular, being at risk. Kainan’s 1994 study of staffrooms found that they were largely simple, colourless, monotonous, devoid of clear functionality and were often split into several cliques; veteran, novice, supply and student teachers. It was a clear hierarchy. Worse than this is the Hammersly study in (1984) that found conversation about students and their parents/carers, was largely condemnatory.
Is there a case for scrapping school staffrooms? No other professions have a ‘panic room’ just for managers to chill out, so why have school staff rooms?
The New Year starts with yet another crass, unscientific and misleading rash of stories in the press and on television, worrying parents about children’s speech and development. The usual suspect ‘technology’ is reported as guilty without any supporting evidence. “Children spend too much time in front of the television and computer games…” opens the Guardian piece with a picture of a games’ controller. The Daily Mail headline shouts, “The youngsters who struggle to speak because their parents let them to watch too much TV”.Yet the so-called “research” with “evidence” is a YouGov survey which proves absolutely nothing about causes, and is rather hazy on whether there’s a problem at all.
Jean Gross has been busily back tracking after the press and television picked up on the story, as there is no evidence at all that technology or any other causes are at work here. She readily admits that the proposed cause, being “exposed to screens of all kinds” is no more than “anecdotal evidence”. As she had to admit under questioning today on the BBC, “nobody actually knows whether it is getting worse or not….it’s all anecdotal evidence”. This is not bad science, it’s speculative, personal opinion put out by so-called experts who confuse ‘anecdotes’ with ‘evidence’. It’s appalling behaviour by people in a position of power who should know better. I’d sack her on the spot.
Jean Gross
So who is Jean Gross? She's the government’s Communication Champion. Jean seems like a sensible sort, but she’s an expert, not in communication in general, but in special needs in primary schools. In other words, she sees the world through a dysfunctional lens. She’s also a Director of the Every Child a Reader organisation, a partnership between charities, business and the Government which funds the controversial Reading Recovery scheme. At a cost of £2000-£2500 a year per child this is a very expensive scheme and had been roundly criticised for being far too expensive, resulting in short-term effects not sustained in the long-term. The scheme has its origins in New Zealand and has been rolled out in Australia, but is now being abandoned there, on the back of evaluative research. Literacy expert Kevin Wheldall from Macquarie University Special Education Centre, has looked at the research from 1992 onwards and said, "The logic of employing Reading Recovery as a solution for pupils who have struggled to learn to read following phonics instruction is almost wilfully perverse – a triumph of hope over experience. These are precisely the children for whom Reading Recovery works least well." Critics point out that this money would be better spent on the wider use of phonics teaching, which is woeful in many primary schools.
Class bias?
There really is a debate and research agenda in this area, but as long as the vacuum is filled with shameless and deceptive commentators like Sue palmer, Aric Sigman and Jean Gross, who jump to speculative conclusions without supporting evidence, the muddier the issues become. They trot out the usual platitudes about TV and technology being bad while reading to your children is good. The problem is that these people make top dollar from book sales to worried parents or as pseudo-professionals in the field.
The ‘elephant’ in the room, of course, is the working parents’ issue. Technology is an easy target for commentators, who don’t want to raise the obvious fact that families in which both parents work are likely to spend considerably less time in face to face communication with their children. This is a sort of class-based bias, as many of these experts have full-time jobs packing their kids off to packed nurseries, rather than doing what they preach, namely spending loads of time ‘talking to their children’.
Every year I buy The Best of American Science Writing, and every year I come across at least one, often more, astounding pieces of work that change my world view. One was a paper on first-cousin marriage in the Middle East which explained why western ideas of government could never succeed in some countries, as they never replace close kinship, family and tribal affiliations in their populations. Another showed meticulous research showing that bullies do not suffer from low self-esteem, but a surfeit of esteem, and that efforts to bolster their esteem backfire, making them worse!
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
This year, 2009, brought a fascinating tale of US soldiers being successfully treated for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PSTD) through video games. Patients don a helmet with goggles, earphones, supplemented by a scent machine and realistic simulations from the video game Full Spectrum Warrior (originally developed as a training programme). They then go back to experience the horrors of war that caused their condition in the first place.
Nearly 20% of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans suffer from PTSD and most therapies don’t seem to work. This new type of therapy is based on Cognitive-Behaviour Therapy and tries neutralisethe cues that trigger PTSD by playing back the traumatic experiences over and over again, leading to ‘habituation’.
The technique was first used in 1997 with some long-term PTSD Vietnam veterans and all showed signs of improvement. This time round the system was way more sophisticated and in all groups that have used the system, four out of five, eight out of ten and eight out of nine, no longer meet the criteria for PTSD. This is an astonishing rate of success.
Crazy - me?
Interestingly, many sufferers had previously avoided treatment or cut out of treatment due to the stigma of being thought of as ‘crazy’. The fact that the treatment was using computer games, was seen as ‘cool and unthreatening’. There are already signs that computer games can be used in healthcare to good effect, with improved performance in surgery, pain management in children, Alzheimers and other conditions.
E-unlearning
Alternative realities (e-unlearning) may be more than just escapism, they may be just the thing to cure minds of faulty imagined realities. Ultimately, depression and many other forms of mental illness may well be relieved by such virtual approaches, where the mind heals itself through created realities.
Fireworks in Berlin at 'The Big Debate', where Aric Sigman and I locked horns on the question:
“The increasing use of technology and social software is damaging students' minds and undermining the benefits of traditional methods of learning”.
I argued that it improved students’ minds and enhanced the benefits of traditional education.
'Facebook causes cancer' was a headline from the Daily Mail this year, sparked off by a paper written by Aric Sigman, in a peer reviewed journal called ‘Biologist’ (Well connected? The biological implications of ‘social networking’). Ben Godacre, Doctor and award winning journalist, author of Bad Science, and a debunker of some renown, took Sigman to task on Newsnight. It’s as good a demolition job as I’ve ever seen on Newsnight and I’ve seen a few. Even Paxman thought he was a nutter! (Also watch out for Susan Greenfield's admission that there is NO EVIDENCE.)
Sigman's Cherry picking
Back to the debate. I followed Goldacre’s line and attacked the original paper on the grounds that the papers Sigman cited did NOT mention social networking and were largely about medical effects in people over the age of fifty, in some cases even older.
Lamkin D M (2008)Positive psychosocial factors and NKT cells in ovarian cancer patients
No mention of ‘social networking’
Study of women over 65
Rutledge T et al (2004) Social networks are associated with lower mortality rates among women with suspected coronary disease
No mention of ‘social networking’
Mean age was 59
Cohen S et al (1997) Social ties and susceptibility to the common cold
No mention of ‘social networking’
1997 – way before social networks!
Ertel K A et al (2008) Effects of Social Integration on Preserving Memory Function in a Nationally Representative US Elderly Population
No mention of ‘social networking’
US sample of elderly adults
Deception
On top of this, on one citation, he deliberately failed to mention that the authors Kraut R et al (1998) (Internet Paradox: A Social Technology That Reduces Social Involvement and Psychological Well-Being?) who had discoveredsmall negative effects of using Internet on measures of social involvement and psychological well-being among Pittsburgh families in 1995-1996, had in Kraut R et al (2001) (Internet Paradox Revisited) had changed their minds, “In a 3-year follow-up of the original sample, we find that negative effects dissipated over the total period. We also report findings from a longitudinal study in 1998-99 of new computer and television purchasers. This new sample experienced overall positive effects of using the Internet on communication, social involvement, and well-being.” That is more than cherry-picking by Sigman, it’s deception.
In fact the evidence, that Sigman knew about, but deliberately ignored points to the opposite:
“loneliness was not related to the total time spent online, nor to the time spent on e-mail”
Byron review
Tanya Byron was commissioned to look specifically at these issues by the UK government and in a well conducted and level-headed research project, collected a” vast array of evidence…commissioned three literature reviews:
•up to date research evidence on children’s braindevelopment – Prof. Mark Johnson Birkbeck University
•comprehensive review on the vast body of child development research - Professor Usha Goswami Cambridge University
•current media effects literature in relation to video games and the internet – Prof. David Buckingham Institute of Education"
Annexes F, G, and H and at www.dcsf.gov.uk/byronreview
Some of her conclusions, relevant to this debate, were that, “there is no clear evidence of desensitisation in children”, “children actively involved in sport play on consoles for same amount of time as those who are not” and “technology specifically useful; for those with learning difficulties and disabilities”.
US Department of Education Study
In support of my proposition that technology enhanced education I then quoted from the US Department of Education’s study ‘Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning:Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies’ which looked at data from 1996 to 2008, selecting rigorous, measurable effects, random assignment and the existence of controls, “The meta-analysis found that, on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving traditional face-to-face instruction.”and “Instruction combining online and face-to-face elements had a larger advantage relative to purely face-to-face instruction than did purely online instruction.”
Finally I pointed toYouTube EDU, iTUNES U, Open Learn, MITOPENCOURSEWARE, Project Gutenberg and the Hole in the Wall project to show that there are some wonderful examples of enhancement.
Conclusion
Aric Sigman is the academic version of Sue Palmer, cherry-picking luddites who have books to sell, with titles like ‘Toxic Childhood’ and The Spoilt Child’. They’re part of a ‘parenting industry’ that creates and thrives on fear. It’s people like them that are promoting helicopter parenting and risk averse attitudes that lead to kids being locked up indoors, not the technology.
That's was pretty much my case. I only had 10 minutes, so summed up with a quote from Douglas Adams,
“everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really. Apply this list to movies, rock music, TV, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.”
We won the vote. I have to say that it was a great format and really got the juices flowing. Conferences should have more of this.
One last point. Sigman claimed that kids spend on average 7.5 hours a day online. I challenged this but he stuck to his guns. Now I don't know about you, but but mine would have to switch on the minute they got back from school and stay focussed until midnight every night without going to the toilet, eating etc. This figure alone makes him look ridiculous.
Appendix
Here’s some tweets and a blog post on the debate:
Why blame technology for something that depends on the home environment, parents must take responsibility for childrens learning
read his book on 'bad science' and then you'll see through people like aric
by the way, nasty of Aric to slag Ben Goldacre..he's not a journalist but a doctor and specialises in statistical misuse
Good fuel for a hot debate - extremely well selected speakers
Donald Clark : technologies helps inclusion. Very important
The Brits are demonstrating how to run a controversial debate. Fun.
Lectures on YouTubeEdu are improving education. Teachers get a larger audience
Donald Clark: USDE meta study found good support of e-learning
Donald Clark: Aric's studies based on the elderly, not using social networking
Sigman uses sources for his theory that are not about social networking
Sigman does not understand that social software is very social
listening to Aric Sigman I start to think we should call it OFFLINE Educa next year.
Aric Sigman: North Korea as the model for modern education - teachers get respect!
The sessions were rounded off with a 'debate' on the proposal that the internet is destroying our children's minds. A motion led by Aric Sigman who shouted and attempted to scare everyone. His extremely aggressive style offended some, particularly those unfamiliar with him (the vast majority of the 2,000+ international delegates), but for others gradually seemed like a raving madman. He attacked the audience as being pushers of this mind-rotting technology..not a great debating tactic, but he gives the impression of a man who cares about nothing other than his ego which was bloated by the use of the video projection screens, sadly.
He then was robustly challenged by Donald Clark who did a great job and was happy enough to show some passion and contempt for the scaremongering. The next two speakers were less effective. Bruce 'the Brute' (see Private Eye) Anderson, a veritable caricature of a fleet street hack, his tie slung askew muttered along the lines of trying to support the motion but being 'reasonable' (the old good cop/bad cop pairing), then some guy 'from Silicon Valley,' Jerry Michalski gave a fairly anodyne response to that...his analogy of the development of the 'automobile' with the net currently being at Model T wasn't a good one for a European audience, as a bicycling Dutchman commented!
Anyway, what needs to be said to those unfamiliar with Dr. Sigman is that cherry-picking (ie selective use of some reports and wilfully ignoring of other contradictory findings) seems to be his speciality, as pointed out by Ben Goldacre who he seemed to have a pop at during the session. If you want more on this aspect and some examples then visit this link.
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