Fears and concerns over changes in higher education persist.

Whether it is our disdain for lecturing to a bunch of disconnected, texting and Facebooking students, or their boredom at being put to sleep by a droning professor reading from his powerpoint, something’s got to give…

In today’s episode, Dr. Cathy Davidson joins us to talk about finding the right practice, and the right tools, and being able to see what we’ve been missing in higher ed.

Podcast notes

Guest: Dr. Cathy Davidson

Cathy on Twitter 

Attention

The gorilla experiment

Selective attention test video by Simons and Chabris (1999)

We have a capacity for learning constantly. -Cathy Davidson

Patients as co-learners with their physicians in the healing process

Examples of facilitation of learning, unlearning, and relearning

Students write a class constitution

What happens if you take responsibility for your own learning? – Cathy Davidson

Alvin Toffler’s term: unlearning

Alvin Toffler has said that, “…in the rapidly changing world of the twenty-first century, the most important skill anyone can have is the ability to stop in ones tracks, see what isn’t working, and then find ways to unlearn old patterns and relearn how to learn.

This requires all of the other skills in this program but is perhaps the most important single skill we will teach.”

…Sadly, we all find gorillas in our lives. They usually come through tragedy… We have all had those moments when there’s a before and an after in your life when the world looks different. The world was not different. What changed was your ability to see a world that you didn’t have to see when you were priviledged not to… when you thought the world only had basketball tosses in it. It wasn’t that the gorilla didn’t exist; it was that you didn’t see it. -Cathy Davidson

Multitasking

• Fears about the calculator
• Debates in state legislatures and in the senate when Motorola wanted to put a radio in the car
• Radio actually helped save lives, especially in night driving, to combat the issue of falling asleep at the wheel
• Brain is constantly multitasking; we just don’t realize it

Flow tasks (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi)

• Brain surgery, playing chess, dancing to rock music, video game playing
• Reading a book is not considered a flow task – people go off the page in 2-3 minutes; we think we are concentrating, when we are not

Unitasking

• Howard Rheingold on Attention Literacy
• There’s always something we are missing
• Index cards: Write down three things we’ve missed and we haven’t talked about…
• Tools, methods, and partners are needed to fight attention blindness

Recommendations

• Field Notes for 21st Century Literacies
• Social Media Literacy article by Rheingold on Educause
• HASTAC is an alliance of more than 13,000 humanists, artists, social scientists, scientists and technologists working together to transform the future of learning.
• The Futures Initiatives on HASTAC
• Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality by Dan Ariely
• NetSmart by Howard Rheingold
• Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
• It’s Complicated by Dana Boyd

Closing Credits

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