Good things make you smarter too…

A recent study has found that music training helps boost cognitive development. The interesting part is this:

They found the musical group performed better on a memory test also designed to assess general intelligence skills such as literacy and maths ability.

Sadly, the BBC article does not say what the control group were doing with their time when the study group were being taught music. Potentially a range of factors could influence the results other than the music training itself, including the additional time spent in programmed activity or additional adult contact time. The original paper can be got from here, and does give a break down of hobbies - but I still wonder what could be found by a comparative study.

And another thing…

Further to the last post on learning and play, I found there is a 2004 book out with the title “Everything I Know About Business I Learned from Monopoly: Successful Executives Reveal Strategic Lessons from the World’s Greatest Board Game”. Available at all the usual book sellers.

Children learn through play

I’m still waiting for my own copy of “Don’t Bother Me Mom - I’m Learning”, but in the meantime I have borrowed a colleagues copy. Flipping through it I found this gem on page 55:

With only a few “nerdy” exceptions - chess, go, strategy games, Dungeons and Dragons - our games were generally devoid of any great importance, meaning, or learning. In other words, they were trivial. … Learning from games , if there was any, was mostly limited to trivia.

Now consider how much learning is involved in playing Monopoly - arithmetic from counting the money, strategy (which properties should I buy?), physical and verbal social interaction and lots more. Playing snakes’n'ladders? Rudimentary arithmetic, physical and verbal social interaction, first hand experience with real world physics (look at that dice roll!), turn-taking. Playing with toy figures? Playing snap or other simple card games?

These all have real learning potential. It is one thing to big up the learning achieved in digital games, but to say that non-digital games had no (or next to no) learning involved is frankly ridiculous. I haven’t read it myself, and developmental psychology is not my native research area, but a quick web search located this interesting looking book on learning and play.

Multi-tasking makes you stupid

Dug out an old copy of the New Scientist - 24th June 2006 (no. 2557, p46-49). Included a mention of some research from 2005 which showed that dealing with emails and phone calls while working has a greater IQ lowering effect than smoking marijuana. Can read more in this press release from the original report.

The 2006 article (see online article here) is about technology in development which seeks to help reduce interruptions, but also includes some practical advice such as:

If an interruption is likely to take longer than 2 minutes, add it to your to-do list and go back to what you were already doing.

It certainly seems that the current generation of office workers perform worse when they attempt to multi-task.

Students today… bah humbug!

Well, not today, but back in February. Recently came across an old issue of THES with this news story about new students starting university with very weak skills in writing, numeracy and general problem solving.

Feedback from a range of British universities found that many courses were moving first year material into the second year, second year material into third year and creating new courses to teach students how to learn. (At Paisley we have introduced one new first year module called ‘Programmer Development’ - I think its quite a good one, actually. The goal is the same - help students learn how they can further develop their own programming skills. I am aware of some courses at other universities which now avoid teaching programming in the first year at all.)

A lot of blame is set on over-assessment and league tables in schools - with teaching directed purely at getting passes and grades. Teaching to the exam, rather than teaching for the sake of education.

That the students now starting university watch more television and play more computer games than previous generations does not seem to have helped much.

Smarter and Sillier!

I’m finding it entertaining at the minute reading bits from “Everything bad…” alongside sections of Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death”. We know Johnson has read the Postman book - he refers to it towards the very end at least - but it is interesting how he avoids its arguments entirely. In looking to the ‘cognitive challenges’ that pop culture makes of it viewers and participants, Johnson generally (but not always) avoids discussing the content.
Postman, on the other hand, argues that the medium constrains and shapes the content in very real ways.
Johnson finds that Pop Culture is making us smarter. Postman, that due to popular culture - and the mediums that carry it - “we are getting sillier by the minute”. Postman did not see the rise of blogs and wikis, but his comments on the fragmentation of information surely apply at least equally as well to these new forms of communication as they did to television.

Is it possible that as pop culture sharpens the abilities to deal with visual media, the speed by which people react to visual cues increases, the ability to track multiple threads grows (to accept Johnson’s arguments) that the abilities to search for depth rather than breadth, to concentrate on individual tasks, to build extended and reasoned arguments is impaired?

How do I feel?

In the current issue of New Scientist (16th Sept. 2006), Sherry Turkle is interviewed. In reponse to the question “Is social networking changing the way people relate to each other?”, she has this to say:

For some people, things move from “I have a feeling, I want to call a friend” to “I want to feel something, I need to make a call”. In either case, what is not being cultivated is the ability to be alone and to manage and contain one’s emotions. When technology brings us to the point where we’re used to sharing our thoughts and feelings instantaneously, it can lead to a new dependence, sometimes to the extent that we need others in order to feel our feelings in the first place.

oops

I really should have checked with google before I registered this blog.

My first reason for scepticism

If games are so good for learning, why do I meet so many great gamers who are under-achievers? Amongst my friends and students I have known over the years a number of super high-achieving gamers - when you consider their gaming prowess that is. Some of these have done well academically and professionally, but many others have struggled.

In my own experience, there is no correlation between being good at problem solving in computer games and being good at doing so in the real world. The impression I have from my own students is that those most dedicated to playing games are generally amongst those least likely to succeed.

Are all games good for learning?

Today GameDaily has an interview with Prof. Henry Jenkins. A lot of stuff there, and I haven’t had time to read it all carefully, but at one point he outlines the two key concepts behind educational games as:

“1. All games are educational in that they are teaching us new modes of thought, new ways of processing information, and new strategies for problem solving.

2. There is a value in harnessing the best elements of contemporary game design and deploying them around content which we have traditionally seen as educationally valuable.”

I have no problem at all with the second assertion. It will take me some time, and a later date, to address the first.