Wise old heads

The commercial popularity of medical self help books seems to be a testament to the desire of the digital immigrant to prevent the spread of tropical diseases in the digital homeland, or at the very least to enjoy a greater quality of life than any previous generation has experienced.  Concerns about dementia, coupled with new discoveries in brain scanning can also illuminate a major theme of this blog: a critique of the Digital Natives Digital Immigrants model.

In a new book, Secrets of the Grown up Brain: the surprising talents of the middle aged mind (2010),  Barbara Strauch argues that brains actually get better at lots of things with age.  She challenges the factoid that we lose up to a third of our brain cells as we age.  In a healthy person, the brain stays reasonably intact.

As Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie’s  fictional detective was fond of saying, our brains consist of grey cells, but they do not work alone.  They are connected by bundles of nerve tissue, which are white in appearance and these white cells are covered in a fatty substance called myelin.  (So there is some truth in the insult hurled at Billy Bunter, Owl of the Remove at Greyfriars School.  We are fat heads.)  However, current thinking is that the more myelin we have, the better we think, because the myelin has some function in helping the white matter connect the grey cells.  Current research appears to suggest that the process of covering the nerve fibres with myelin continues well into middle age, and, moreover, that this is a good thing.  Strauch refers to the result as “great connected brains”, able to think better, see patterns, connect ideas.

If you follow this blog, you might expect that I will now link Strauch’s findings to Marc Prensky’s idea that young people’s brains are wired differently.  What all the brain research reveals, is that our brains are plastic, so Prensky is partly correct.  The net generation, through their exposure to and use of digital technology, do think differently, but do they think better? Strauch would suggest better thinking comes with maturity.  I think the more interesting conclusion is that our brains are capable of change throughout our lives.  It is not that the Net gen brains are wired differently, it is that all of us are changing in our mental capacities throughout our lives.  In colonial New Zealand, a British immigrant who adopted coarser colonial ways was said to have “eaten his toot”;  “toot’ being a corruption of the Maori word, Tutu, for a poisonous berry responsible for the deaths of large numbers of sheep.  It seems we can all “eat our toot’ and become digital natives.

It may be a fact that “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks”, but it is a factoid when we apply that adage to human beings. Toot! Toot!

Amazons or Athenians, what tribe is this?

In the legends of Ancient Greece. are the stories about warrior women, the Amazons, whose queen Hippolyta was finally subdued by the Athenian hero Theseus.  The story of their marriage forms the backdrop to Shakespeare’s play, A Midsummer’s Nights Dream.  The moral for the Greeks, presumably was that men were the superior sex.  Modern thinking has debunked that view, but it comes to the surface again in pseudo scientific guises

In a book published in 2006, (The Female Brain) the science writer Louann  Brizendine developed a thesis that women’s brains work differently from men’s.  One piece of Brizendine’s  evidence was seized on by a large audience, the claim that women uttered 20,000 words a day against the 7,000 spoken by men.  The Daily Mail for example argued “It is something one half of the population has long suspected – and the other half always vocally denied.”  The Washington Post : “Women talk too much, and men only think about sex…you need a Ph.D. to figure that out?”   The book went into numerous translations with much the same effect .  The German publisher wrote in their blurb “Warum gebrauchen Frauen 20 000 Worter am Tag, wahrend Manner nur 7000?”

However, none of the people who seized on this claim actually bothered to look seriously at her evidence.  The Female Brain certainly is a weighty tome with about thirty percent of the text given over to footnotes, making the book look academic.   Fortunately, Mark Lieberman from the University of Pennsylvania did comb through the book looking for the evidence and found just one reference to support this claim.  It came from a book by Alan Pease and Allan Garner.    Pease is the author of self help books on letter writing and body language which always struck me as more entertaining  than useful.  Lieberman read their book Talk Language: how to use conversation for profit and pleasure  (2003) (Pease Training Corporation) and found that Pease had no evidence to support the claim either.

See Liberman’s blog  http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/

There is research however in the linguistics literature which argues the exact opposite.  Janet Homes, for example in Women, men and politeness found that men spoke more, on average, than women.  Liberman lists a lot of the research into the incidence of talkativeness and none of it supports Brizendine’s claim.  In the year following the publication of Brizendine’s book, a study published in Science tracked 210 women and 186 men and found that women used about 3.5 per cent more words than men.  Given the result, the size of the study and its methodology, this scarcely validates Brizendine’s claim.  Perhaps the most compelling argument is that Brizendine finally agreed to remove this assertion from future editions of the book.

Why then did so many people seize on this claim and why do commentators still continue to present it as fact?  In his study of this controversy (You are what you speak) Robert Lane Greene labelled this tendency the “intellectual id”, the eagerness with which people will believe something they almost desperately want to believe is true.  William James put it another way;  “A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices. “  The fact is that we tend to form an opinion, then we look for evidence to support our point of view, while rejecting that evidence which contradicts us.

I suggest, that as with Louanne Brizendine, so with Marc Prensky.  As I have argued so often in this blog, his Digital natives, Digital Immigrants argument is fallacious.  There is no more evidence there is a generational difference in brain function than there is a gender one.

I want an iPad

Fleur Britten writing in The Sunday Times looks at the phenomenon of young children (i.e. under the age of five) using iPad.  Her discussion ranges over familiar themes:  the dangers of addiction, the question whether using iPad reduces the amount of physical activity, the value of interactive devices in cognitive development and in learning problem solving skills.  It’s a new device but the issues have a familiar ring going back to the debate about the educational value of television.

I thought it might be interesting to look at this from the Prensky analysis 0f Digital Natives.  Strangely neither Britten or her panel of experts uses this analysis.  Instead she suggests that it is Apple’s intuitive devices, the icons and the touch screen which means even a very small child can navigate the device.  Certainly there are Youtube videos of small children operating iPad’s.  Is this proof of Prensky’s claim about children being digital natives?  Well, there are just as many YouTube videos showing cats operating iPads.  I’ve never seen a cat looking at a television screen but cats can operate iPads because of the touch screen and the fact that they get a response.  It’s a little difficult to tell from the videos whether these are old cats or young cats, so we could decide if cats are digital natives or immigrants, or if this is determined by their age.

It’s great that small children can operate iPads but like Fleur Britten, I suspect that is a product of the clever design of the iPad.  I would expect older people to be able to operate one just as well.  The fact that one of the parents quotes in the article, believes her child is better at using the iPad in my view proves nothing.  This is one parent’s opinion and it can be explained by the child practicing more than the parent.

Another thought I’ve had occurred to me after my wife remarked about how her one year old grand niece could use a cell phone.  The parents of these under five year old’s are themselves the digital natives of yester year.  Prensky wrote his article ten year’s ago (2001) when today’s young parents were teenagers and certified digital natives.  If they are now digital immigrants, when did that happen?  Surely it is becoming more obvious that digital natives/digital immigrants is just not explaining what is going on.

Practice makes native

As we debate the validity of the digital natives/digital immigrants hypothesis, it is undeniable that younger users of new technologies seem more skilled at using it.  My point has always been that some older people can be just as skilled and that there are some young people who can not use computers.  Whatever is going on, it is not a function of a person’s age.

So how do we account for why some people have greater skill in using computers?   I think the answer can be found in the research into what makes exceptional people in any human endeavour: sport, games or more intellectual pursuits.   Anders Ericsson found that the key was practice.  These skills and abilities are achieved by practice. Rather than being the result of an evolutionary advance, (which is how I interpret Mark Prensky’s hypothesis) truly outstanding skill in any field is achieved with long practice which can not be done by cramming over several days but typically takes up to ten years.

The following exerpt from David Shenk’s The genius in all of us sets out the argument quite well:
“For those on their way to greatness [in physical or intellectual endeavours],
several themes regarding practice consistently come to light:

1. Practice changes your body. Researchers have recorded a constellation of physical changes (occurring in direct response to practice) in the muscles, nerves, hearts, lungs, and brains of those showing profound increases in skill level in any domain.
2. Skills are specific. Individuals becoming great at one particular skill do not serendipitously become great at other skills. Chess champions can remember hundreds of intricate chess positions in sequence but can have a perfectly ordinary memory for everything else. Physical and intellectual changes are ultraspecific responses to particular skill requirements.
3. The brain drives the brawn. Even among athletes, changes in the brain are arguably the most profound, with a vast increase in precise task knowledge, a shift from conscious analysis to intuitive thinking (saving time and energy), and elaborate self-monitoring mechanisms that allow for constant adjustments in real time.
4. Practice style is crucial. Ordinary practice, where your current skill level is simply being reinforced, is not enough to get better. It takes a special kind of practice to force your mind and body into the kind of change necessary to improve.
5. Short-term intensity cannot replace long-term commitment. Many crucial changes take place over long periods of time. Physiologically, it’s impossible to become great overnight.

“Across the board, these last two variables – practice style and practice
time – emerged as universal and critical. From Scrabble players to dart players to soccer players to violin players, it was observed that the uppermost achievers not only spent significantly more time in solitary study and drills, but also exhibited a consistent (and persistent) style of preparation that K. Anders Ericsson came to call ‘deliberate practice.’ First introduced in a 1993 Psychological Review article, the notion of deliberate practice went far beyond the simple idea of hard work. It conveyed a method of continual skill improvement. ‘Deliberate practice is a very special form of activity that differs from mere experience and mindless drill,’ explains Ericsson. ‘Unlike playful engagement with peers, deliberate practice is not inherently enjoyable. It does not involve a mere execution or repetition of already attained skills but repeated attempts to reach beyond one’s current level which is associated with frequent failures.’ …

“In other words, it is practice that doesn’t take no for an answer; practice that perseveres; the type of practice where the individual keeps raising the
bar of what he or she considers success. …

“[One example of research in this field is] Eleanor Maguire’s 1999 brain scans of London cabbies, which revealed greatly enlarged representation in the brain region that controls spatial awareness. The same holds for any specific task being honed; the relevant brain regions adapt accordingly. …

“[Practice of the kind Ericsson described] requires a constant self-critique, a pathological restlessness, a passion to aim consistently just beyond one’s capability so that daily disappointment and failure is actually desired, and a never-ending resolve to dust oneself off and try again and again and again. …

“The physiology of this process also requires extraordinary amounts of
elapsed time – not just hours and hours of deliberate practice each day,
Ericsson found, but also thousands of hours over the course of many years. Interestingly, a number of separate studies have turned up the same common number, concluding that truly outstanding skill in any domain is rarely achieved in less than ten thousand hours of practice over ten years’ time (which comes to an average of three hours per day). From sublime pianists to unusually profound physicists, researchers have been very hard-pressed to find any examples of truly extraordinary performers in any field who reached the top of their game before that ten-thousand-hour mark.”

Shenk, David, (2010) The genius in all of us, Doubleday, NY pages 53-57.

Ericsson, K.A. and Lehmann A.C. (1996) Expert and exceptional performance; evidence of maximal adaptation to task constraints, Annual Review of Psychology .

Maguire E.A., Frackowiak R.S.J., Frith C.D., (1997) Recalling routes around London, activation of the right hippocampus in taxi drivers, Journal of Neuroscience Vol 17 Number 18, September.

Is it truly possible to be too old to learn?

I think the term “Digital natives, Digital immigrants” is a gross generalisation, and as such unhelpful to our discussion.

It is a generalisation because it is abundantly clear that while children can pick up new technologies very quickly, this is not inevitable.   Children raised in traditional communities will not pick up new technologies because they do not have the opportunities and they are socialised to avoid and resist.   Imagine an Amish child presented with a computer.

Secondly, young people adopt new technologies much like adults, some are early adopters and some stoutly resist.  Most fall somewhere in between along a continuum between the two extremes.  This point is well made in a recent report by the [United States] National Schools Board Association, Creating and Connecting//Research and Guidelines on Online Social – and Educational – Networking.  The report discusses the “Nonconformist” who is at the cutting edge of adopting new technologies.   It also mentions by omission the adolescents who do not participate in online communities

The dichotomy suggested by “Digital natives, Digital immigrants” also implies the idea behind the old saying “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks”.   There may be some truth in that saying but I question whether we should apply an understanding which we have gained about dogs and apply it to human beings.

Like young people, adults adopt new technologies at different rates.   The educational community might learn a little from market research which has coined the term “early adopters”.

One of the many things which separate human beings from animals is that adults do learn.  What is more useful to grasp is that adults learn differently to children and adolescents.    In 1975, Malcolm Knowles published his ideas on what he called “andragogy” (to distinguish it from pedagogy).

His principles are that:

1. Adults need to be involved in the planning and evaluation of their instruction (Self-concept and Motivation to learn).
2. Experience (including mistakes) provides the basis for learning activities (Experience).
3. Adults are most interested in learning subjects that have immediate relevance to their job or personal life (Readiness to learn).
4. Adult learning is problem-centered rather than content-oriented (Orientation to learning).

I suggest these principles are more useful than “Digital natives, Digital immigrants”.

Facing the future: can Facebook be a future space?

My old school’s song has lyrics by its most famous principal, Frank Milner, a man born in the Ninteenth Century so his lyrics have a Edwardian feel but the sentiments can be quite modern. 

“Facing the future with nought to dismay us

We shall not fear what the years may unfold”

This song has always seemed to me to be a call to embrace the new as opportunities, not threats, so I am one of the Woodstock Generation who tweeted on Facebook about it being forty years since Woodstock.  (You would be surprised how my Thirty Something colleagues and my Generation Y sons reacted to that post!)  I also set up this blog to explore how the new information and communication technologies could be used in education.   I am aware of others older than myself, who are also tweeting and blogging and supporting my point of view, which is why I reject the opinion that older people can not adapt to these new technologies.

Yet it is true there is resistance  and disbelief  throughout the community that there can be any value in social media.  Last year while exploring with other residents of my community the idea of e-government at the local level, the convenor spoke of “silent resistance”, the phenomenon of decision makers and managers who, while speaking in support of change, will themselves revert to older methods and express an unwillingness to make the changes in their own lives.  Dennis Littky and Robby Fried, in 1988 called this type  “the Glad-Handing Administrator”.

Today I write about a challenge issued by The Learning Circuits Blog to discuss this issue, although I disagree with the writer’s analysis which sees the issue as a generational one.  Just as there are those of the Woodstock Generation open to new ideas, there are those in Generation X and Generation Y who have closed minds, – the Champions of Inertia  and the Programmatic Power-Mongers described by Littky and Fried in their article.

Is the issue all doom and gloom then?  I believe human beings have a capacity to keep on learning all their lives.  The motives which work against them adopting change are the same things which motivate our economy, fear and greed, perhaps with a big helping of ignorance.  Bolstered by the negative publicity towards new media by the traditional news media, many are fearful of what they don’t know.  They are fearful of appearing foolish if they “get it wrong”.   They also can perhaps glimpse that the new age of collaboration means that traditional hierarchical power structures will become irrelevant and, with it, the loss of their own positions of power.

Reference

Littky, Dennis and Fried, Robbie (1988) “The Challenge to make good schools great” NEA Today 6 No. 6 (January) P4-8.

I’m in a google state of mind

One of the things I have been critical of in my comments on Marc Prensky and his Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants hypothesis is that there is no evidence which would  support his claim that Digital Natives by virtue of their exposure to computers and the internet, have differently wired brains.  Apparently, neuro scientists do believe in a concept they call neuro plasticity but that in itself does not support Prensky’s hypothesis.

In 2008 Dr Gary Small published a book iBrain: surviving the technological alteration of the Modern Mind, along with his partner, Gigi Vorgon,  a freelance writer. Small is an eminent medical researcher who pioneered MRI scans to show there was physical evidence that the brain aged, and he was able to show evidence of Altzheimer’s Disease in living persons.  It would follow, therefore, that his adoption of the Digital Native Digital Immigrant model in his book would give much weight to Prensky’s case.

In iBrain, Small is writing about young people, Generation Y, but his research has been with older people, mostly, but not always, the elderly.  We see this in a paper he published in February 2009  in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychology. (I said he has lots of street cred!)

To this untutored person, what Small, Moody, Siddarth and Bookheimer found actually argues against the Prensky hypothesis.  The study asked a group of older people to conduct on line searches in Google while the researchers studied their brain activity, hence the title of their paper, Patterns of cerebral activation during internet searching.  The subjects varied in age, the youngest was 55, and some were experienced users of the internet while others were novices.  The conclusion was that all subjects showed changes in the ways their brains worked during and after their searching.  The trouble for the Prensky hypothesis is it argues that only Digital Natives will show  changes to their brains. Whatever you call the people born between 1945 and 1955, Baby Boomers, Woodstock Generation, Generation Jones,  they are all part of Prensky’s Digital Immigrants and this should not be happening.  The fact that this research was conducted by a researcher who had previously supported the Prensky hypothesis should give pause for thought.

Small, Garry W., Moody, T.D.,  Siddarth, P., and Bookheimer, S.Y., (2009) Patterns of Cerebral Activation during internet searching, American Journal of Geriatric Psychology pp 116-126.

Small, Garry W and Vorgon, Gigi (2008) iBrain: surviving the technological alteration of the modern mind, Collins 256p.

The devil you know

The research supports the evidence coming from the media and the conversations of most adolescents.  Social Networks are big.

The media focuses on the negative.  Tonight we have a repeat television story  about how a hoax site was used to undermine a 15 year old girl’s self esteem and encourage her to join a suicide pact. The radio had a story about how a fan obtained the contact details of a celeb on Facebook.   No wonder most older people treat this new medium with suspicion.

Academic research is more objective and more positive.   Without dismissing the harm caused on social network sites, we should see that the overwhelming majority of young people use these sites without any adverse effects.

As I have argued in posts about using texting, we are in danger of letting the opportunity to use these sites for educational purposes go begging.

It seems to me that Facebook because it allows add-ons has more potential than the other sites which evolve much more slowly.   One use I quite like is the ability to add “causes” to your Facebook profile.  This allows like minded people to network and so become a more cohesive grouping which can act together.

Tweet what you eat

How’s this for a practical application of Twitter? Alex Rossi has set up an on-line food diary where users tweet their daily food intake.  Big tweeters (the pun is deliberate) such as Stephen Fry, credit this simple approach as helping them lose weight. With obesity a major health problem, the time is fast approaching when the detractors will have to fall silent and let users develop Twitter in whatver way appeals to them.

Who’s twittering now?

In the media’s on going interest in Twitter, more and more stories are coming to light about how Twitter can be used for purposes never thought of by its creators.  The latest comes from Pittsburgh where two self confessed anarchists, Elliott Madison and Michael Wallschlaeger have been using Twitter to update protesters at the G20 summit about police movements.  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/6260255/Anarchists-used-Twitter-to-inform-protesters-of-police-movements-at-G20-protests.html The police have found a way to charge them with criminal misuse of a communications device.    It is interesting how law enforcement can catch up with new technologies when there is a strong enough incentive.