Eloise's thoughts and fancies

This month's big question concerns instructing people in an information snacking culture.

In case you're not familiar with the concept of an information snacking culture it is a sort of combination of "they all have attention deficits" and "google is making us stupid" - the concept that everyone will only look stuff up immediately and quickly, skim what they want and move on. As you might tell from this I'm not convinced.

That's not to say that as a culture we don't exhibit this behaviour sometimes. I certainly do. The other day I had the TV on and an actor I recognised strongly and couldn't place at all walked by in a trailer. A few minutes later, looking the show up, scanning through the cast list, hitting the relevant wikipedia page and I knew who he was and where I remembered him from. Given in one show he was a short-haired, sharp-dressing lawyer and in the other a long-haired, drop-out, criminal with cowboy roots and there's about a decade between the shows, I'm kind of surprised I recognised him at all!

Using this example, think of what you might have done in 1990 and 2000 with the same set up. In 1990, you'd have been pretty stuck but might have asked your friends for help. By 2000 you probably had the internet at work, maybe dial-up at home. You could probably (but not definitely, although TV shows were adopting the internet for advertising and information by then I seem to remember) have found the information out (not on Google and Wikipedia though) but you might well have waited until you were at work, or until you dialed your ISP for your email or similar before looking them up. Now - you could do all of that with your phone in the pub, and get a faster download than over a dial-up modem too!

The point I'm trying to make is that we now have the capacity to find out the answer to these (relatively idle) questions quickly and easily, however, we always had the desire to have them answered.

Learners, on the other hand, at least in a formal learning environment and at post-compulsory educational age, are able to concentrate for longer periods. They cope with 1hour or longer lectures, 2 hour seminars, 3 hour long practical classes and the like. They still manage to focus for long enough to do an honours project spread over several months. Are the five year olds any different? That's not clear to me, not from personal experience, but a large part of me thinks not. My dim memories of being 5 at school, and talking to my mother who used to teach that age group when I was 5, and who talks to her neighbour's daughter who is doing it now, says that while some things have changed - the national curriculum for example has changed the way they structure a day somewhat, as has the increase in children who have been to kindergarten before school (almost unheard of when I was 5, now almost ubiquitous) however broadly there isn't a big change. Primary teachers have to work to teach children how to study and work for longer periods of time, now and then, even if this isn't clearly written into their lesson plans. By and large they succeed.

If you go through to the other end of the educational spectrum, the proportions of students taking Masters degrees and Doctorates hasn't changed that much. Numbers taking degrees have increased, at least in the UK, because there is a drive to get more students into university - this is supposed to indicate that we're all brighter and better educated, but the ones that thrive and go further have remained about the same. Proportions leaving school without basic literacy and numeracy skills have stayed the same too - so those that the educational system fails hasn't really changed. (There are better systems in place to catch adults without basic literacy/numeracy and offer them training however, but that's a different story.)

So it looks like, despite this ability to have our idle questions answered easily, in formal learning situations, the best learners and the worse are doing about the same. The middle ground is harder to determine, at least here, because of political changes to make it easier to get into university, but despite a flood of people studying for media studies and the like, and away from chemistry and the like, it's pretty tempting to suggest that the middle, educationally speaking, has probably stayed the same in terms of aptitude and ability - just the labels that they get have changed somewhat.

Based on that, do we, the instructors need to change how we teach? No. We do for other reasons, but not for that one. We are for other reasons too, by and large. One thing that we might, culturally, like to consider however is the following: let's twist my example of the actor I wanted to "information Snack" about to something we might consider a less-than-idle question. Perhaps something about the inheritance of diabetes, or the origin and context of a famous quote "I wouldn't be a member of any club that would take me" to use a recent personal example. These could both be things that you might want to know idly or as part of your studies, although in different subjects. Maybe we should invade wikipedia, create a "deeper learning wiki" and link to and from wikipedia. Support those that want to skim for idle questions AND those who need to get the deeper information.

And, of course, another question springs to mind. By the end of the educational process we expect learners to be able to engage in deep learning. But just about all forms of that require discourse in any sense that I've seen. Perhaps we need to work out how to encourage that too - the internet is a great place to do that after all.