The Church Task Believers

I watched single-taskers this morning. Stopped at an intersection in a university town, an ambulance, blaring siren and flashing lights, was trying to get through the clog of traffic, but no one in a group of 12 cars could multitask - they could not take in their surroundings, they could not assess the other traffic, they could not develop a plan, a solution, that would allow the ambulance to move toward the hospital. They were driving: single-tasking in the way too many educational "experts" want students to function.

According to "experts," this is impossible...

Multitasking at a Virginia Beach diner.

I thought of this as I read a blog post claiming to be a "Brilliant Report" a bit later:

"For a quarter of an hour, the investigators from the lab of Larry Rosen, a psychology professor at California State University–Dominguez Hills, marked down once a minute what the students were doing as they studied. A checklist on the form included: reading a book, writing on paper, typing on the computer—and also using email, looking at Facebook, engaging in instant messaging, texting, talking on the phone, watching television, listening to music, surfing the Web. Sitting unobtrusively at the back of the room, the observers counted the number of windows open on the students’ screens and noted whether the students were wearing earbuds.

"Although the students had been told at the outset that they should “study something important, including homework, an upcoming examination or project, or reading a book for a course,” it wasn’t long before their attention drifted: Students’ “on-task behavior” started declining around the two-minute mark as they began responding to arriving texts or checking their Facebook feeds. By the time the 15 minutes were up, they had spent only about 65 percent of the observation period actually doing their schoolwork.

'“We were amazed at how frequently they multitasked, even though they knew someone was watching,” Rosen says. “It really seems that they could not go for 15 minutes without engaging their devices,” adding, “It was kind of scary, actually.”' - Annie Murphy Paul

According to Rosen and Paul, there is something "scary" happening here. According to me, there is something "human" and "functional" here.

But then, I was not raised to be a dedicated Calvinist church-goer, or a dedicated "school student." Instead, I was raised to be a "learner."

"effective," "productivity," "on-task,"
attention-means-gaze, are all the inheritances
of our Puritan past

What Rosen and Paul want are churchgoers. Not just any churchgoers, but Calvinist Protestants of the New England Puritan mode. Sit up straight, stare front, all read together, don't you look out the window! This isn't a Catholic churchgoer, surrounded by images and movement, candles and scents, sculptures and varied light, movement and individual action - it is pure American Calvinism, it is behaviour control, compliance training. It is not about individual learning, but the kind of highly-structured group motion development inherent in our imported Prussian Model of education.

Dr. Rosen's problem, Annie Murphy Paul's problem, is that they are, without even knowing it, rejecting student engagement as an educational core.

"During the first meeting of his courses, Rosen makes a practice of calling on a student who is busy with his phone," Paul writes. “I ask him, ‘What was on the slide I just showed to the class?’ The student always pulls a blank,” Rosen reports. “Young people have a wildly inflated idea of how many things they can attend to at once, and this demonstration helps drive the point home: If you’re paying attention to your phone, you’re not paying attention to what’s going on in class.”'

The egocentrism drips here. Dr. Rosen believes his mere presence assures that students will want to stare at the bullet points on his PowerPoint. With a lecture style fully honed during the overhead projector and Kodak Carousel era, he assumes that everyone, not just a few eager teacher-pleasers in the front two rows, is paying attention. My guess is that he could have called on random students in the back ten years ago and found similar blank stares. It's an effing PowerPoint, my dear professor, its already in note form, why the hell would I be listening to you?

So here's the research question Rosen and Paul are asking: "Assuming that the best way for students to learn is to do nothing but listen to "me" and read exactly what "I" have assigned, are students listening to my every word and reading everything I have assigned?" Then they rate "learning" according to a student's ability to repeat every word they say. No, its worse, this "research" measures learning according to the metric of "seat time" - are you sitting there being "a good little white boy or girl"?

"...the promise of educational innovation is less about processing power and software code and more about the opportunity to release ourselves from general assumptions regarding how instruction is organized and delivered," Joel Rose wrote in The Atlantic last year.  "It's why our collective charge in K-12 innovation today should go beyond merely designing and producing new tools. Rather, our focus should primarily be to design new classroom models that take advantage of what these tools can do."

So, if your goal is children sitting still and "Reading, writing, listening," as Annie Paul Murphy tweeted to me, then, multitasking "disrupts" learning. But if your vision of learning looks a bit more active, then these technologies do not disrupt, they connect, engage, expand possibilities, make learning possible for those formerly labelled as "disabled."

It's not disruption, it's learning...

The sad fact here is that this is neither a question of technology, nor a question of disruption and attention. It is a question of quality teaching. In 2007 I wrote, in the Grand Rapids Press and on this blog, about the power of teaching with these tools - and of course, it isn't just a "why," but a "how." In classes I teach phones and computers are how we investigate and share information, we're not dependent on Slide Decks and bullet points. We converse on our devices via TodaysMeet and Twitter and Google Docs. We read on our devices. We use Google and Wikipedia and other search tools for discovery. We Skype with experts.

In other words, we use the communication and information tools of this century to learn, rather than bemoaning the loss of an elitist past.

We, in education, need to be better than this. While the medical profession embraces the "MTAT" - the MultiTasking Aptitude Test - because, "Emergency physicians epitomize what it's like to work in a time-pressured, interruption-based environment. Multitasking is necessary to survive in this environment where you are constantly shifting focus and addressing new tasks or problems as they arise," we have writers like Paul quoting, "David Meyer, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan who’s studied the effects of divided attention on learning," who, she says, "takes a firm line on the brain’s ability to multitask: “Under most conditions, the brain simply cannot do two complex tasks at the same time."' In other words, according to these "experts" and their "research," the work of everyone in hospital emergency rooms, or in police work, or even in short-order cooking, is impossible... because, of course, their studies prove that.

Let me end by going back to this morning. I have sat in Emergency Vehicles, driving, talking on the radio, communicating with a partner, planning a series of actions on which vast knowledge of both tactics and law must underlie, figuring out a route, knowing if anyone is on the sidewalk if driving there must be an option, and I have watched single-taskers trying to figure out how to get out of the way. I'm sure Dr. Meyer thinks planning out a life-saving strategy and communication and driving fast are all "simple tasks." I'm sure Dr. Rosen thinks I was endangering lives because my brain doesn't work like his. And I'm sure Annie Murphy Paul would think I wasn't attending to what was "important."

Not only do researchers find that multitasking is possible,
they are starting to list the advantages.

But those of us in the real world understand that humans multitask every minute. We are not sharks. We can be in love and eat at the same time. We can read and feel the sun on our skin. We can listen to complex music and still be aware of our surroundings. We can talk on the phone and work on the computer.  I can even type this post while observing a brilliant example of kids proving out a new paradigm of education.

We are multitaskers, or someone has trained us not to be.

- Ira Socol

The Sad Story of the Anti-Multitaskers

I am constantly entertained by the number of seemingly "very smart people" who are incredibly anxious to tell the world that they cannot walk and chew gum at the same time.

OK, I am being cruel, but please - We really need our "scientists" to comprehend the limitations their own questions put on their research.

Today, @derekbruff sent me to a great blog post which referenced a PBS story on multitasking. This is part of the "focus" lobby - PBS, NPR, and The New York Times are devoted to the theory that humans can do only one thing at a time. In fact, I think its at least once a week that NPR tells me that I can't possibly be driving my car because I am listening to Science Friday.

Part of what I said in a comment at that blog:

"The sad attempts to measure human multitasking via Gutenberg-era preferences continue. Here’s what these “scientists” don’t know: How human brains “looked” before Gutenberg and Calvin applied straight-line information flow and “single-tasking” to our species.

"So, 10,000 years ago developing brains were wildly multitasking. Looking for food, looking for predators, watching the weather, all while, I’m quite sure, checking out and chatting up potential mates or talking about doing so.

"We have, finally, begun to pull ourselves out of the straightjacket of 500 years of the Protestant Reformation’s belief in “focus” and linearity. Me on Human Communication

"I could indicate the level of ridiculous comments made by researchers in this video (”you cannot drive and talk or listen” – wow, there go passengers and radio) ..."

And I want to continue "that" ("indicate the level of ridiculous comments") here.  The scientists in this video imagine a static world has existed that is suddenly changing. They do this because they are not postmodernists and have not been trained in critical theories so that - I'm not just being insulting here, I really mean this - they do not know how to ask questions about the questions they are asking. And when you fail to do that, your "scientific" observations cannot be any better than the unexamined assumptions which lie behind your unchallenged questions.

So, fatal research mistake number one: "Humans have not been multitaskers before - this is new." And here I want to introduce another problem with the system - yes, even our "best" system which produces Ivy League faculty members - the division of content into separate silos. Because, in preparing their research into multitasking these scholars feel no requirement to walk through Notre Dame de Paris or Christchurch in Dublin to help conceive of the learning environments just a thousand years ago. They do not feel called to spend a week considering the work environment of the iron age. They do go to a place where they might pick berries while worrying about lions.

Instead they sat in libraries designed on 19th Century Calvinist theories, or sat at 18th Century ideas of what a "desk" is, and read research from the past half-century of their tiny slice of human knowledge via Gutenberg technology, or more contemporary technology mimicking Gutenberg technology. And when they did that the determined their conclusions before they made a single observation.

To build on an old metaphor, "the prepped their research in an entirely green environment, and were shocked to discover red when they opened the door." After all, if Dorothy had opened the door to Oz from the middle of Times Square, would the color have surprised her?

Fatal research mistake two is, "Our measuring systems are valid." Let us begin here with the understanding that ALL knowledge and all measurement is socially constructed. "If the aborigine drafted an IQ test, all of Western civilization would presumably flunk it." - Stanley Garn. Just to trouble you, is - in human experience of temperature, there as big a difference between 65 and 75F (17-23 C) as between 35 and 25F (+2 and -4 C)? In other words, as humans describing the weather, should we really be dependent on a scale based in the response of water to heat? But of course we are, and we are so acclimated to this that just hearing a number associated with weather - say "thirty" - immediately evokes radically different thoughts based solely on which side of the Detroit or Niagara rivers you live.


Here's an "IQ" question for you - "The assignment test: The subject is given a map and receives instructions to buy the following objects: half a hundredweight of potatoes, one-half pound of coffee, one-half pound of sausage, fifty pfennigs worth of fresh biscuits, and a pound of butter. He is further required to bring a pair of trousers to the tailor and a pair of shoes to the cobbler, as well as a ten-pound package to the post office. He is also required to pay a certain amount of tax at City Hall and to pick up a friend at the train station. The following rules are to be observed: The person leaves the house at 10:30. At 1:00 he should be back for lunch and accomplished all his tasks. Now the tax office is open only from 8 to 10 a.m., fresh bread is available only after 11 a.m., and the friend arrives at the station at 12:30. The post office and all stores are open between 12 and 2. Between the apartment and the train station runs a streetcar-which takes one-quarter of an hour and may be used at will." It was on this basis that the German government of 1934-1938 - using theories from the US State of Virginia, would decide whether to murder or at least castrate a person.

So, how we measure matters. This is how scientists "measure" attention and multitasking: They use flashing lines and symbols and other nonsense tasks in most cases. They ask odd questions, and yes, sometimes they even observe, but in every case they begin with a "grounding point" roughly equivalent to my sister Nancy (who I love dearly) sitting in a corner of the University of Edinburgh Library reading an 18th Century novel. Total, 100% involvement in a single task. For all of these research projects, that is "best" - 100 on their scales. It does not matter if, as I think often happened, Nancy would stumble out of the building hours later not knowing where she was or what the weather might be or if she had eaten today. In the measurement systems all of these studies are based on, Nancy is "100" and I am close to "Zero."

Essentially this is like saying that "72 F degrees" is the ideal temperature. That's lovely unless you are a polar bear or a tropical bird or...

But, and we must know this as we think about the education we offer our students, these researchers never question these measures. They are "mathematical scales" and they believe that a mathematical scale represents a "truth."

Fatal research mistake three is, "We know what multitasking is." Just as, say, we know what "North America" is (is it Canada, the US, Mexico? Include all of Central America? Include the whole Caribbean?), or we know what a "nation" is (The UN and FIFA have very different counts), or we know where Europe stops and Asia begins.

I might argue that all "driving" (operating a motor vehicle) is multitasking. I might argue this because the driver combing his or her hair while reading the newspaper is only a bit less scary than the person with the locked stare straight ahead. I sort of expect that drivers will be alert to many things around them at the same time, and would, perhaps, even notice if the child in the car seat in the back began choking. There's even a huge industry devoted to giving you things to read while driving, one major participant in that industry is the government.

I also might argue, as one website notes, that some of our most complex, attention demanding work environments are multitasking environments. "Emergency physicians epitomize what it's like to work in a time-pressured, interruption-based environment. Multitasking is necessary to survive in this environment where you are constantly shifting focus and addressing new tasks or problems as they arise." Would we really want airline pilots who could only pay attention to one thing at a time?

So, if medicine and operating a car are multitasking, as I might add, is walking down the street, what are these researchers measuring?

They have not asked. Largely because "we," education-as-we-know-it, have not taught them to ask.

Understanding the unexamined assumptions which lie beneath our "knowledge" is a vital issue that we rarely engage in our schools. And assuming that the "best" path to knowledge transfer or work is my sister Nancy's path - lovely as that may be - is offensive.

Or so I say while writing two documents plus this, answering email, tweeting, and watching Two Knights from Brooklyn.

- Ira Socol