The Auricle

by Derek Morrison, 25 September 2009

There! … Even in the title of this posting I’ve added my six pence (cents) worth to the concerns of those becoming exercised by the unchallenged assumption that “technologies + learning = good thing”

In my posting J.G.Ballard on the dangers of “inner space” (Auricle, 27 September 2009) I suggested that Ballard’s perspective of “inner space” and the brain as a “virtual reality machine” that may find interacting with other virtual reality machines more attractive than “reality” (my brain is hurting as well) may feed the anxieties of those who are already, or are becoming, exercised by technological negatives or dysfunctions. Personally, I think that that the value of those working in the learning technology arena is enhanced when they consciously avoid becoming techno-evangelists and instead seek to become as aware of the potential constraints and dysfunctions of technology as they are of the claimed affordances. As we know only too well from various debacles the digital world can easily be one of unsubstantiated claim, cost overruns, failure to deliver on early promises, and hubris.

Consequently, in this posting, the Ballard quotation from my earlier posting offers a useful starting point for a consideration of a few of these anxieties and dysfunctions.

I like using media items to initiate my little Auricle journeys because they represent what informs the majority of the public; albeit sometimes partial, inaccurate, or partisan information.

For example, Chris Woodhead one of the UK’s most controversial, and certainly best known, former Chief Inspector of Schools writes an advisory colum in the UK’s Sunday Times. In the 20 September 2009 edition the lead question to which he responded was title Technology is the enemy of teenage education. Woodhead has some pretty “traditional” views on how education should be “delivered” and while I don’t always agree with him (not that I matter) I do welcome his ability to stimulate debate. What I didn’t like about this response, however, is that he gave no clue to readers about where they could read the report referred to for themselves; for a former teacher and Chief Inspector of Schools that was a bit disappointing. The BBC News site was a bit more helpful and although their headline Tech addiction harms learning (15 September 2009) was as sensationalist as Woodhead’s at least it contained a reference to the primary report Techno Addicts: Young Person Addiction to Technology which is a $25 “white paper download” from the independent academic publisher Sigel Press although a 9 September 2009 Cranfield University School of Management news release provides a synopsis (at an attractive $0).

Because I’m as interested in the potentially detrimental effects for learning of using technology as I am in potential enhancements I’m happy to include the Cranfield report in my techno-dysfunctions category but its publication also reminded me of Martin Bean’s (the new VC of the UK Open University) keynote at ALT-C 2009. Martin’s energetic presentation included earlier examples of how the fire of Hades that was supposedly going to be visited upon each generation by the ‘new’ technologies of the day. For example at about 7: 20 and 7: 53 into his presentation Martin highlighted how some earlier technological ‘advances’ exercised those concerned with their impact upon learning:

Martin Bean ALT-C 2009 slide on paper

Martin Bean ALT-C 2009 slide on fountain pens

But the Cranfield report is not just opinion. It takes its place in a growing body of work and commentary that reminds us that we need to make informed choices instead of getting carried along in a wave of techno hype and hubris.

I’ve alluded to some of the scholarly work behind, sometimes alarmist, press headlines in previous Auricle postings including Social networking as a killer app … not? (Auricle, 15 April 2009)

In the UK we are also informed by the Committee of Inquiry into the Changing Learner Experience (12 May 2009) which in para 98 stated:

“… This does not necessarily mean wholesale incorporation of ICT into teaching and learning. To assume that would be to mistake the issue. This, in our view, is adapting to, and capitalising on, evolving and intensifying behaviours that are being shaped by the experience of the newest technologies. In practice, it means going with the flow and building on and steering the positive aspects of those behaviours such as experimentation, collaboration and teamworking while addressing the negatives such as a casual and insufficiently critical attitude to information.The means to these ends should be the best tools for the job whatever they may be. The role of HEIs is to enable informed choice in the matter of those tools, and to support them and their effective deployment.”

But prior to such committees of inquiry we have also have the work of popular authors and media columnists like Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google, in his Atlantic Monthly article Is Google Making Us Stupid? (July/August 2008) cites Nietzsche who, in 1882, in responding to a friend’s observation that his writing style had changed since he had moved from longhand to a typewriter wrote:

“our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Carr goes on: Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler, Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”

Carr’s article makes for even more uncomfortable reading when he suggests there is a degradation in his own analytical and reflective abilities. He compares this to the process HAL the sinister computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey whose hyper, but killer, intellect was removed memory-board by memory-board by the astronaut he had tried to kill. Carr’s powerful introduction states:

“My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle … As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.”

As is common in many media articles, Carr went on to highlight some ongoing scholarly work without identifying its source. The provenance, however, was sound. The January 2008 report Information behaviour of the researcher of the future originates from University College London’s School of Library, Archive and Information Studies (SLAIS) Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research (CIBER) research activities. The briefing paper is part of longer term work commissioned by the British Library and JISC that suggests that far from encouraging active reflective reading hyperconnectivity appears to be creating “power browsers”. In the section of the briefing “How do people currently behave in virtual libraries?” the UCL researchers state:

The average times that users spend on e-book and ejournal sites are very short: typically four and eight minutes respectively. It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense, indeed there are signs that new forms of `reading’ are emerging as users ‘power browse’ horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense. (p10)

In the section Google Generation: Myth or Reality? the UCL Researchers find that their is support for the contention that this is a tendency towards “cut and paste”. They also go on to assert that easily digested chunks of surface learning is not limited to the world of the undergraduate, i.e.

“… from undergraduate to professors, people show a strong tendency towards shallow, horizontal, “flicking” behaviour in digital libraries. Power browsing and viewing appear to be the norm for all. The popularity for abstracts among older researchers rather gives the game away. Society is dumbing down.” What’s interesting here is that the CIBER team used “deep log studies” to uncover this evidence. I have one concern with that methodology, i.e. the availability of such digital logs for study is a relatively new phenomenon. How can we be sure that such behaviours didn’t predate the digital world we now are constructing and were just hidden from analysis? After all who is going to question an established scholar and what incentive is for them to own up to “browsing” for abstracts.

As regards the supposed information finding expertise of the above Google Generation the UCL research team indicate that we should not confuse apparent digital literacy with information literacy, e.g.

“A careful look at the literature over the last 25 years finds no improvement (or deterioration) in young people’s information skills”

Andrew Brown’s piece Google isn’t making us dumb – or smart. That’s the problem (Guardian 2 July 2009) 2009 reflected on the 2008 Carr aritcle and is itself the source of some memorable quotes including:

It’s not the technology that damages our ability to think. It’s the habits of mind that technology promotes. The habits of disciplined, careful thought that linear reading promotes are more useful for understanding a changing world than the ability to pay superficial attention to five different streams of information. I don’t think computers make it more difficult. It has always been difficult. But if they allow us to pretend we don’t need it any more, then they are really helping us to become a lot more stupid, fluidly or not.

As part of our own therapy against “power browsing” I encourage an active reflective read of the full Nicholas Carr article and the UCL briefing paper but before moving on I cannot resist one final quote from Carr:

“… we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self.”

Further food for thought is offered by Susan Greenfield’s controversial book ID: the quest for identity in the 21st century. Some of the reviews on this are also worthwhile, e.g. Is technology ruining children?, Sunday Times, 27 April 2008. For the more podcast oriented Susan Greenfield gave a number of media interviews defending an clarifying her standpoint, one to the BBC’s The World Technology podcast (2 March 2009) and the other to the Guardian’s Tech Weekly podcast (28 April 2009).

A 27 October 2008 BBC Today programme news item and short interview titled Teen brainpower deteriorating reinforces a view of a downward spiral. This item was informed by a British Psychological Society journal item by Professor Michael Shayer.

On the reading theme the US National Endowment for the Arts study, To Read or Not to Read (19 November 2007) suggests that there are global implications. For example, the proportion of US college graduates who were proficient in reading prose declined 23 percent from 1992 to 2003. In summary, the NEA compendium finds that Americans are reading less and less well and that this has profound social and economic consequences, e.g.

On average, Americans ages 15 to 24 spend almost two hours a day watching TV, and only seven minutes of their daily leisure time on reading … Nearly two-thirds of employers ranked reading comprehension “very important” for high school graduates. Yet 38 percent consider most high school graduates deficient in this basic skill … Literary readers are more likely than non-readers to engage in positive civic and individual activities – such as volunteering, attending sports or cultural events, and exercising.

If reading motivation and proficiency is on the decline as some assert that has some implications for another technology of learning that seeks to break through into mainstream use, i.e. the much vaunted ebook? Theoretically, as I’ve suggested in previous Auricle postings (particularly those related to my suggestion that the internet could be creating a possible ‘filling station’ model of e-learning) a mature ebook technology should be able to enhance learning opportunities and experiences by acting as a local repository of reading material (journals, books, and papers) related to students’ interests and studies. I also suggested that such a possible future was being frustrated by proprietary interests, expensive devices, and rights management technologies which would constrain uptake and possibly kill the nascent market. A recent article in the popular press offers an even more pessimistic perspective. In I’ll never be caught reading and ebook (Sunday Times, 13 July 2008) the journalist and author Nick Hornby offers a well reasoned argument for what will continue to constrain the ebook concept. I recommend reading his full article but here’s a few extracts which to me have some resonances with both the Carr article and the UCL study highlighted earlier:

We don’t buy many books – seven per person per year, a couple of which, we must assume, are presents for other people. Three paperbacks bought in a three-for-two offer – expenditure, £14 approx – will do most of us for months. The advantages of the iLiad and the Kindle, Amazon’s version of the ebook – that you can take vast numbers of books away with you – are of no interest to the average book-buyer … How much reading has been done historically, simply because there is no television available on a bus or a train or a sun-lounger? But that’s no longer true. You could watch a whole series of The Sopranos by the pool on your iPod touchscreen, if you wanted. Reading is going to take a hit from this … while people are so resistant to the act of reading itself, the £400 reader is not going to be the must-have accessory of the near future.

Brian Appleyard challenges the myth of a multitasking Google generation in his article Stoooopid …. why the Google generation isn’t as smart as it thinks: The digital age is destroying us by ruining our ability to concentrate (Sunday Times, 20 July 2008) and refers to Maggie Jackson’s Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age as well as citing David Meyer’s (director of the University of Michigan’s Brain, Cognition, and Action Laboratory) proposal that the chronic distraction impact of modern technology can have non trivial effects, e.g.

Chronic distraction, from which we all now suffer, kills you more slowly. Meyer says there is evidence that people in chronically distracted jobs are, in early middle age, appearing with the same symptoms of burn-out as air traffic controllers … the damage is not caused by overwork, it’s caused by multiple distracted work

David Meyer in collaboration with his colleague David Kieras have undertaken extensive work in the modelling of executive cognitive processes, working memory, and multitasking.

On a similar theme the following quote by Stanford professor Donald Knuth should give us all pause for reflection particularly as it’s written by a leading computer scientist:

“Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.”

Appleyard also highlights the massive economic forces behind the technologies of distraction none more so than when he refers to Mark Bauerlein’s depressing picture of youth incapable of concentrating long enough to read a book in The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardises Our Future. To quote Appleyard:

… this isn’t the informational paradise dreamt of by Bill Gates and Google: 90% of sites visited by teenagers are social networks. They are immersed not in knowledge but in “gossip and social banter” … The concern of all these writers and thinkers is that it is precisely these skills that will vanish from the world as we become infantilised cyber-serfs, our entertainments and impulses maintained and controlled by the techno-geek aristocracy. They have all noted – either in themselves or in others – diminishing attention spans, inability to focus, a loss of the meditative mode … These things do make our lives easier, but only by destroying the very selves that should be protesting at every distraction, demanding peace, quiet and contemplation.

But the consequences of technologies are unpredictable and depend on how they are employed and how people react to their use. An old cliche perhaps but is gunpowder inherently evil or is the use to which it is put that matters? Simon Jenkins makes some interesting comments about how computers ironically are facilitating more face-to-face in his newspaper column Computer says get a life – and we have (Sunday Times, 6 July 2008), e.g.

People do not want to spend their spare time in front of the same screens at which they increasingly work. They want to “go out”. They will use the internet and iPod, MySpace and YouTube, but as a proxy for the real … Recorded music became overnight what it had not been since the invention of recording: publicity for live rather than live being publicity for recording … The festival and lecture circuit, well exploited by retired politicians, may yet be many a writer’s chief source of income … Lectures – surely the most archaic form of public entertainment – now cram the London what’s-on schedules. Popular debating series such as IQ2 regularly sell out at the Royal Geographical Society in Kensington … As with show business, the internet supports live but is in no way a substitute for it. Clicking a mouse can never beat pumping flesh … Futurology has a built-in distortion towards technological novelty, while ignoring the continued appeal of what has gone before. It cannot recognise what the historian David Edgerton of Imperial College has dubbed “the shock of the old”. Our demands rarely change over time, only the way in which the market supplies the … I find this form of conservatism vastly encouraging. People like people. They crave the immediacy of human contact and congregation. They want to see those who inspire or excite them live, not digitised … The money is now being made in supplying a public craving not for technology but for human experience. It lies in flesh and blood.

But back to email for a moment. I’ve often quoted Myst-Technology’s Bill French who in 2003 said :

Email is where knowledge goes to die (Bill French, Myst-Technology, April 2003). In my posting Blogs and podcasts: Educause shows the way? (Auricle, 17 February 2005) I applauded Educase for being amongs those who provide the tools for their members to share, not hide, knowledge and points of view.

The “Email is where knowledge goes to die!” quote reinforces the emphemeral nature of much modern communication and that has considerable implications for academia and scholarliness? Readers may find something of interest in a 2004 Auricle posting of mine called Digital Dust? (28 October 2004)

More recently, Paul Hemp’s Is that message really necessary (titled Information Overload in the online version) offers an interesting overview of many of the issues relating to the plethora of content now offered via online channels – a plethora that can impede meaningful information flow (Guardian, 24 September 2009). Hemp’s article also highlights the work of the Information Overload Research Group whose mission is to work collaboratively to:

“understand, publicize and solve the information overload problem“.

Still on the information overload theme a BBC’s World Technology Podcast (16 July 2007) also contains an item about Gil Gordon’s book “Turn it off” . In fact there is an emerging branch of study called “interruption science” which was highlighted in the 16 October 2005 New York Times article Meet the Life Hackers. Input “cogntive overload + technology” or “email interruption” into your favourite scholarly search engine and see what emerges.

Another area of potential interest to students of techno-dysfunction is in how organisations and people are required to shape their behaviour and processes around what the technology will allow them to do even when they consider this inferior to previous approaches or technology solutions. In a series of Auricle postings over the years I’ve frequently cited and quoted from the work of James Cornford and Neil Pollock who emphasize how the organisation adjusts its processes and practices to meeting the needs to the technology and not vice versa, i.e. organisations end up serving the ‘machine’.

… the application of the new technologies is generating a myriad of demands for re-institutionalisation of the university as a far more ‘corporate’, one might even say concrete, kind of organization … (in Cornford J (2000) The Virtual University is (paradoxically) the University Made Concrete.

… universities may be increasingly forced to consider institutional changes in order to maintain alignment with the system. (in Implications of Enterprise Resource Planning Systems for Universities: An Analysis of Benefits and Risks, Observatory on Borderless Higher Education, Issue 3, p13, April 2005).

My NPfIT or not? posting (Auricle, 4 August 2009) refered to some of the tensions arising when aspects of a new IT medical and healthcare system for the UK National Health Service were perceived to be inferior to what had gone before and with staff having to adapt to the system’s expectations and constraints.

Undoubtedly, technology offers human societies many affordances and, as the Martin Bean screenshots above show, there has always been sincerely held beliefs that some developments should not always embraced as positives. Our digital world, however, carries particular risks because the speed of development and potential absorption, and therefore time to impact has shrunk so that there is much less opportunity to both detect and respond effectively to unexpected or unwanted techno side effects and identify contraindications to use. Indeed an inappropriate or ill-considered response, e.g. ban “xyz” may prove to be exceptionally counterproductive.

It would also be foolish, however, not to take account of, and study, the detrimental effects on human behaviour and learning of those so attractive technologies both in the workplace and social space. Every time someone sends me an email even when they are sitting in close physical proximity or they could talk to me by phone or face-to-face I reflect deeply on the more unwelcome consequences of this digital revolution and our need to become much more aware of the pathways we choose.

But there’s no more time to finish this posting … there’s yet another email in my main inbox… and my other inbox … and an SMS message … I see someone has tweeted … my mobile is ringing … someone is calling me on the landline … what’s that in my Facebook? … I wonder how my MySpace account … perhaps I should be on LinkedIn? … must check my aggregator … better post something on Auricle … … 🙂