Multi-tasking and distributed cognition

I really enjoyed this article because I think that the evolution of education and technology is really interesting and I think this offers a good discussion of where we’re headed. I read the sections on multi-tasking and distributed cognition. The multi-tasking section was very interesting because it brings up the issue of distraction versus actual multi-tasking. The article suggests that we teach our students how to tell when they are really multi-tasking or not. I think a great way to do this is to help our students recognize relevancy in what they’re doing. For example, checking facebook probably isn’t helping them with the homework they’re supposed to be doing. However, if the tasks they are switching back and forth from, complement each other, I think that’s a good sign of multi-tasking. Often when I am writing something I have the internet up and music playing, but if I’m reading, I can’t have the music on. I mention this because I think the issue of distraction and multi-tasking is one that might be different for each of our students. Perhaps our goal should be to give them a variety of different situations in which we present information and learning takes place.
The second section that I read about talked about something called distributed cognition which is basically when a person uses tools to expand their knowledge or complement what they already know. I saw a great example of this the other day in the news; a teenage girl built and patented a new kind of prosthetic arm, but she didn’t do it on her own. The girl always loved building things, but she didn’t really have the expertise to build a prosthetic arm, so she sought out experts from local colleges and other people who build prosthesis. In doing so, she was able to combine their knowledge into a vast collective, from which she chose the best ideas and put them together to come up with a great outline for this new prosthetic arm. After that, she was able to actually build a prototype of her prosthetic at a local university (or it may have been a pharmaceutical company, I can’t remember). In any case, I think that situations like this are rare. It’s not very often that students have access to experts and tools besides what’s available at a regular public school. I know as a teacher it takes added effort to build lessons that allow students to expand their knowledge outside of the classroom and seek out experts in different subjects, but it’s so beneficial and pertinent to the students. The article mentioned that a lot of students learn the skills they use in their future careers, in high school, and in my life, I can definitely see how that is true. I think our society values experts and so we need to expose our students to experts in the fields they are interested in and we need to help our students become experts. In the article there were a lot of ideas mentioned about how we might go about doing so, and one of my favorite examples was to use a class wiki. I have personally done this in several of my classes so far in college and I can’t stress how helpful (and fun!) it is. I’ve also used google docs in almost every one of my classes here at BYU. I think it’s so important that we show our students how to seek out the information that they don’t have from people who do have the tools or information that they need, whether it’s their fellow students or experts in a field. Another great example of this from my own experience as a student is that when I was in high school I wrote for the school newspaper. During my senior year, the local newspaper (which is now defunct) hired me on as a student columnist. It really made me value my writing to write for an actual newspaper and I was able to build up the skills I had learned writing for my school paper. After high school graduation, the local paper hired me on as a news and feature writer and I actually had a couple of my pieces published in daily newspapers, which was a huge break for me. I think that as teachers, the more opportunities we can give students to utilize their skills outside of the classroom, the more relevant they will feel their learning is. Plus, it gives us a great chance to teach students how to seek out the tools and people they need to accomplish a task. The article mentions that we need to move away from solely autonomous learning and move towards distributed cognition and I definitely agree. As an adult, most of the tasks that I complete, I seek out other information to help me or I get help from others. I think if we don’t teach our students how to be an adult who knows where to turn for good, accurate information and how to asses that information and also how to seek out and ask for help from experts, we are ill preparing them to survive in our world. If they can’t learn to work collectively that means that every task they accomplish has to be based on their own knowledge. In my opinion, that stunts the possibilities that they have in life because they have to relearn or find information that could more easily be conveyed to them by someone who already understands or knows that information. It’s why everyone loves Wikipedia – because it’s easier to go to one site and get all types of different information on a single subject rather than researching it all on your own. We just have to make our students aware of how to function in a collective knowledge society in an effective and safe manner by teaching them good research methods and encouraging healthy skepticism that allows them to analyze the information that they find in a collective knowledge situation.