Week 3: Learning to think in a digital age

Introduction

You will now move on from the social world of children to the potential influence of digital technology on children’s learning.

This short video introduces you to some of the key ideas about how we learn. It is not a simple case of inputting knowledge and experiences into the brain; getting to grips with the different ways in which we learn is the starting point for understanding development.

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Nathalia Gjersoe

Young children learn about the world in a number of different ways. Sometimes they think through a problem and work it out, sometimes they try out different solutions until they find something that works and sometimes they learn best from watching and talking to the people around them. How will technology affect these different but overlapping forms of learning? When children memorise facts, reason, and solve problems they are involved in 'cognitive learning'. They are deliberately thinking about the task and learning from that reflection. In the digital age children are often carrying out several tasks at once such as texting, listening to music and surfing the net.

There is some concern that this routine multitasking so early in life will compromise children's ability to focus deeply on any one task in the future. Does using digital technologies rewire children's brains for better or for worse? Often children learn simply by trying things out and seeing what works and what doesn't. Many computer games rely on this type of trial-and-error learning. Regular rewards and reinforcements are built in, which encourage the player to work out how to progress. Some critics consider computer games a time-consuming distraction. But might they actually nurture skills that are useful in the real world, such as fine motor control and hand-eye coordination? Children learn a huge amount from the people around them through observation, interacting, and exchanging ideas.

A new way of writing and speaking has evolved through digital communication technologies such as social networks and text messaging. Is this new 'text slang' damaging children's literacy skills or is it the sign of a creative new genesis of language? Get involved in the discussion as we explore some of these key topics and investigate what new research tells us about technology's influence on children's learning in the digital age.

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This week you’ll consider in particular how children might be processing new information differently with and without technology. How does digital technology help to mould the learning mind? How do the social and other experiences it offers influence our ability to learn or to retain new information, and do these experiences actually affect how we think, feel and develop?

1 A pyramid of digital engagement?

Young children learn about the world in a number of different ways. Sometimes they think through a problem and work it out, sometimes they try out different solutions until they find something that works, sometimes they learn best by watching and imitating others and sometimes by talking with the people around them, who can guide and support them.

One way of thinking about children’s learning in the digital world is to consider their actual engagement with it. How is this different from traditional ways of learning information?

Wheeler’s ‘engagement pyramid’ of digital learning (Wheeler, 2013) suggests that the majority of screen activities online involve a similar progression to those offline, from passive activities of watching, ‘lurking’ and reading to more active processes of making and collaborating. We could argue that all learning follows a similar pattern, whether online or offline. Children start to learn initially by simply watching and listening to absorb what’s going on, followed by internalisation of the process to the point where it can be used creatively. Language, maths, science, philosophy – they typically need a passive phase followed eventually by creativity and finally by ‘curating’ the individual’s own ideas.

Figure 1 Wheeler’s engagement pyramid of digital learning.

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The image shows a pyramid split into five sections. The layers of the pyramid are labelled as follows (from the bottom up): watching/lurking/reading; sharing/liking; commenting/discussing; creating/inventing; and curating.

Figure 1 Wheeler’s engagement pyramid of digital learning.

If you consider Wheeler’s pyramid, this pattern becomes clear. The wide base of the engagement pyramid suggests that a great deal of children’s digital engagement is fairly passive. For example, simply ‘watching’ or ‘lurking’ in the background. Children in this category are primarily absorbing content, like blogs, videos, podcasts or status updates, by observing others. They gather information in order to take decisions or to learn from others; or else they are looking solely for entertainment; or they want to be part of the social space where learning occurs.

Now consider the upper layers of the engagement pyramid (commenting/discussing and creating/inventing). It is only here that children actively engage with their online environment in ways that can expand their thinking, through creating, editing and communicating ideas. Children who respond to others’ content, for instance through comments on blogs, news stories, status updates or reviews, are actively participating by giving support or contributing ideas. They are also actively creating or inventing by writing and publishing their own content, for example on blogs or sharing sites such as YouTube or Tumblr. These platforms are not only about learning but also about generating revenue through placed advertisements, both for the platform owners and the content creators. The so-called ‘kid influencers’ or ‘kid YouTubers’ generate considerable amounts of money by promoting toys or clothing on their social media accounts. One might argue that their online persona diversify the family income (or significantly boost it) but one might also argue that from an extremely young age, these children are thrown into a world where success and achievement are measured by dollars and the number of views and followers. What is your view on this? Discuss or write down your answers.

1.1 Learning through communication

Figure 2 Technology offers new opportunities for learning by communicating.

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The image shows a girl holding a smart phone. There are symbols coming out of the phone, such as a thumbs up, a pencil, a smiley face, a paper aeroplane and the words ‘books’ and ‘friends’.

Figure 2 Technology offers new opportunities for learning by communicating.

Children learn a huge amount from the people around them through interacting and exchanging ideas. Very often we learn new facts and information by talking, speaking and interacting socially, and this is most evident in text messages and smartphone applications such as social networking or instant messaging.

A new way of writing and speaking has evolved through text messaging on mobile devices. In some ways, children are learning by creating and inventing new modes of communication.

Children are basically learning a new kind of language that is still evolving, and converting spoken to written language in interesting ways. The use of text message abbreviations is often referred to as ‘text speak’ or ‘textisms’ (Underwood and Farrington-Flint, 2015). While some people consider text as a method of communication can convey derogatory messages (Kleinman, 2010), the advantages of text speak are its speed and immediacy, particularly in creating newer versions of our written English. Consider these examples, where children were asked to translate text abbreviations into standard written English:

How easy was it to decipher the meaning of these text messages? For many children it’s easy, although for others it can seem like a completely new language.

Optimists view text message abbreviations as playful, inventive and creative features, but pessimists feel that they threaten more traditional standards of written English, leading to a generation of ‘linguistic ruin’ (Cingel and Sundar, 2012). For the slightly older age groups there are similar arguments about the use of Twitter, suggesting that abbreviations found in tweets are often shorthand forms that reflect nothing more than examples of poor grammar (Grosseck and Holotescu, 2008). However, the sheer popularity of texting among children prompts us to question whether these academic critiques are in fact correct.

And not all academics share the same opinion, as you’ll see in the next section.

1.2 Texting is killing language

In this fascinating talk, John McWhorter, a linguist and political commentator, argues that texting is not such a negative phenomenon. He views it as ‘miraculous’ – not just energetic, but a highly creative activity. He suggests that there’s much more to texting, linguistically and culturally, than there might seem. In relation to learning, the video demonstrates that children learn through ‘creating’ and ‘inventing’ new ways of communicating and exchanging ideas.

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John McWhorter

We always hear that texting is a scourge. The idea is that texting spells the decline and fall of any kind of serious literacy, or at least writing ability, among young people in the United States and now the whole world today. The fact of the matter is that it just isn't true. And it's easy to think that it is true, but in order to see it in another way, in order to see that actually texting is a miraculous thing, not just energetic, but a miraculous thing, a kind of emergent complexity that we're seeing happening right now. We have to pull the camera back for a bit and look at what language really is.

In which case, one thing that we see is that texting is not writing, at all. What do I mean by that? Basically if we think about language, language has existed for, perhaps, 150,000 years, at least 80,000 years, and what it arose as is speech. People talked. That's what we're probably genetically specified for; that's how we use language most. Writing is something that came along much later.

And as we saw in the last talk, there's a little bit of controversy as to exactly when that happened, but according to traditional estimates, if humanity had existed for 24 hours, then writing only came along at about 11:07pm. That's how much of a lateral thing writing is, so, first there's speech and then writing comes along as a kind of artifice. Now don't get me wrong, writing has certain advantages.

When you write, because it's a conscious process, because you can look backwards, you can do things with language that are much less likely if you're just talking. For example, imagine a passage from Edward Gibbon's, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: 'The whole engagement lasted above twelve hours, till the gradual retreat of the Persians was changed into a disorderly flight, of which the shameful example was given by the principal leaders and the Surenas himself.' That's beautiful, but let's face it, nobody talks that way, or at least they shouldn't if they're interested in reproducing. That is not the way any human being speaks casually. Casual speech is something quite different.

Linguists have actually shown that when we're speaking casually in an unmonitored way, we tend to speak in word packets of maybe seven to ten words. You'll notice this if you ever have an occasion to record yourself or a group of people talking. That's what speech is like. Speech is much looser, it's much more telegraphic, it's much less reflective. Very different from writing. So we naturally tend to think because we see language written so often, that that's what language is, but actually what language is, is speech.

There are two things. Now of course, as history has gone by, it's been natural for there to be a certain amount of bleed between speech and writing. So, for example, in a distant era now, it was common when one gave a speech to basically talk like writing. So I mean the kind of speech that you see someone giving in an old movie where they clear their throat and go, 'hmm, hmm, ladies and gentlemen' and then they speak in a certain way which has nothing to do with casual speech. It's formal, it uses long sentences like this Gibbon one. It's basically talking like you write, and so, for example, we're thinking so much these days about Lincoln because of the movie.

The Gettysburg Address was not the main meal of that event. For two hours before that, Edward Everett spoke on a topic that, frankly, cannot engage us today and barely did then. The point of it was to listen to him speaking like writing. Ordinary people stood and listened to that for two hours, it was perfectly natural. That's what people did then, speaking like writing. Well, if you can speak like writing, then logically it follows that you might want to also, sometimes, write like you speak. The problem was just that in the material, mechanical sense that was harder back in the day, for the simple reason that materials don't lend themselves to it.

It's almost impossible to do that with your hand, except in shorthand, and then communication is limited. On a manual typewriter, it was very difficult. And even when we had electric typewriters and then computer keyboards, the fact is, that even if you can type easily enough to keep up with the pace of speech, more or less, you have to have someone who can receive your message quickly. Once you have things in your pocket that can receive that message, then you have the conditions that allow that we can write like we speak. And that's where texting comes in. And so texting is very loose in its structure.

No one thinks about capital letters or punctuation when one texts, but then again, do you think about those things when you talk? No, and so therefore why would you when you were texting? What texting is, despite the fact that it involves some of the brute mechanics of something that we call writing, is fingered speech. That's what texting is, now, we can write the way we talk. It's a very interesting thing, but nevertheless easy to think that, still, it represents some sort of decline. We see this general bagginess of the structure, the lack of concern with rules and the way that we're used to learning on the blackboard. And so we think that something has gone wrong.

It's a very natural sense, but the fact of the matter is that what is going on is a kind of emergent complexity. That's what we're seeing in this fingered speech. In order to understand it, what we want to see is the way in this new kind of language, there is new structure coming up. And so, for example, there is in texting a convention which is LOL.

Now, LOL we generally think of as meaning laughing out loud, and of course, theoretically, it does. And if you look at older texts then people used it to actually indicate laughing out loud. But if you text now, or, if you are someone who is aware of the sub-strata of texting, the way it's become, then you'll notice that LOL does not mean laughing out loud, any more. It has evolved into something that is much subtler.

This is an actual text that was done by a non-male person of about 20 years old, not too long ago: 'I love the font you're using, btw'. Julie: 'lol thanks gmail is being slow right now'. If you think about it, that's not funny. No one's laughing, and yet, there it is. So, you assume there has been some sort of hiccup.

Then Susan says 'lol, I know'. Again, more guffawing than we are used to when you're talking about these inconveniences.

So Julie says 'I just sent you an email'.(Susan: 'lol, I see it'. Very funny people, if that's what LOL means.

Julie says 'So what's up?' Susan: 'lol, I have to write a 10 page paper'. She's not amused. Let's think about it. LOL is being used in a very particular way. It's a marker of empathy, it's a marker of accommodation. We linguists call things like that pragmatic particles, any spoken language that is used by real people have them. If you happen to speak Japanese, think about that little word 'ne' that you use at the end of a lot of sentences. If you listen to the way black youth today speak, think about the use of the word 'yo'. Whole dissertations could be written about it, and probably are being written about it. A pragmatic particle, that's what LOL has gradually become.

It's a way of using the language between actual people. Another example is slash. Now, we can use slash in the way that we're used to along the lines of 'we're going to have a party slash networking session'. That's kind of like what we're at. Slash is used in a very different way in texting among young people today. It's used to change the scene.

So, for example, this Sally person says 'So I need to find people to chill with' and Jake says 'Haha so you're going by yourself? Why?' You could write a dissertation about haha too but we don't have time for that.

Sally: 'For this summer program at NYU'. Jake: 'Haha. Slash I'm watching this video with suns players trying to shoot with one eye.' The slash is interesting. I don't really even know what Jake is talking about after that, but you notice that he's changing the topic. That seems kind of mundane, but think about how in real life when we're having a conversation and we want to change the topic there are ways of doing it gracefully. You don't just zip right into it. You'll pat your thighs and look wistfully off into the distance, or you'll say something like, 'hmm, makes you think', when it really didn't, but what you're really trying to do is change the topic.

You can't do that while you're texting, and so ways are developing of doing it within this medium. All spoken languages have what a linguist calls a new information marker, or two or three. Texting has developed one from this slash. So, we have a whole battery of new constructions that are developing, and yet it's easy to think that something is still wrong, that there is a lack of structure of some sort. It's not as sophisticated as the language of the Wall Street Journal. The fact of the matter is, look at this person in 1956, and this is when texting didn't exist and I Love Lucy is still on the air. 'Many do not know the alphabet or multiplication table, cannot write grammatically…'

We've heard this sort of thing, before, not just in 1956 but in 1917. Connecticut schoolteacher, 1917. This is the time when we all assume that everything somehow in terms of writing was perfect because the people on Downton Abbey are articulate, or something like that. So, 'From every college in the country goes up the cry, "Our freshmen can't spell, can't punctuate" ..and so on. We can go even further back than this. It's the president of Harvard. It's 1871; there's no electricity and people have three names. 'Bad spelling, incorrectness as well as inelegance of expression in writing...' And he's talking about people who are otherwise well prepared for college studies. You can go even further back.

In 1841, some long lost superintendent of schools is upset because of what he has, for a long time noted with regret - the almost entire neglect of art of original (blah, blah, blah), or, you can go all the way back to 63 AD. There's this poor man who doesn't like the way people are speaking Latin. As it happens, he was writing about what had become French. And so there are always people worrying about these things and the planet somehow seems to keep spinning. And so the way I'm thinking of texting these days is that what we're seeing is a whole new way of writing that young people are developing, which they're using alongside their ordinary writing skills.

And that means, they're able to do two things. Increasing evidence is that being bilingual is cognitively beneficial. That's also true of being bi-dialectal and that's certainly true of being bi-dialectal in terms of your writing. And so texting is actually evidence of a balancing act that young people are using today, not consciously, of course, but it's an expansion of their linguistic repertoire. It's very simple. If somebody from 1973 looked at what was on a dormitary message board in 1993, the slang would have changed a little bit, since the era of Love Story, but they would understand what was on that message board. Take that person from 1993. Not that long ago. This was, you know, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Those people.

Take those people and, they read a very typical text written by a 20 year old today, often, they would have no idea what half of it meant because a whole new language has developed among our young people doing something as mundane as what it looks like to us when they're batting around on their little devices. So in closing, if I could go into the future, if I could go into 2033, the first thing I would ask is whether David Simon had done a sequel to The Wire. I would wanna know. I really would ask that! Then, I would want to know actually what was going on in Downton Abbey. That would be the second thing.

The third would be, please show me a sheaf of texts written by 16 year old girls, because I would want to know where this language had developed since our times. And ideally I would send them back to you, and me, now, so we could examine this linguistic miracle happening, right under our noses. Thank you very much.

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Do you think McWhorter feels that texting has a positive or negative influence on children’s language? As he says, there are cognitive benefits; now we can write the way we talk, and texting should be seen more like ‘casual speech’ than actual writing.

A further worry from the pessimists is that text messaging and using different kinds of technology might not be helpful to children’s learning but in fact act simply as a distraction.

1.3 Ebooks are killing reading

It is not just writing that is being sharped by new ways of content sharing. Reading on and with screens has changed what it means to read for pleasure and for learning. When it comes to reading textbooks or online information, the access to digital texts has been harnessed by many schools worldwide. Unlike print textbooks, learning material accessed on the computer can be connected to teachers’ online environments where they can check on their individual dashboard as well as the whole classroom’s progress, provide personalised feedback and access ready made or tailored content. When students access information online for learning purposes, they need to develop critical literacy skills to differentiate what is real and what is fake information, and how to trust sources. The iFuCO project involved research groups from three Finnish and two Chilean universities, led by the University of Turku in Finland. It focused on 11–13-year-olds in Finland and explicit teaching of online enquiry skills. The students were taught how to search for information, how to evaluate and how to synthesise it. Interestingly, this teaching happened through videos, designed by the researchers, and proved to be very successful.

But what about reading for pleasure? Some academics who study children’s literature and literacy voiced the concern that children’s reading of stories digitally impacts negatively on their reading experience. Other scholars argue that the format doesn’t matter, that it is all about the content, the story, that needs to deeply engage readers. There are two key things to remember as you think about this. First, think of the design of the digital text format. Ask yourself: are there many ‘bells and whistles’ in the form of interactive features, hyperlinks or advertisements taking the reader’s attention away from the content? If the answer is yes, then it is unlikely that it will support the readers’ comprehension of the text but instead take them to other experiences. Second, ask yourself whether the digital format offers something that a print format couldn’t. For example, while print books can be customised by readers physically marking their pages or choosing the next story as in the Choose Your Own Adventure series, digital books can be personalised with information about the reader’s real-time progress of reading, the reader’s photograph or voice-over. In addition, Goodreaders personaliser recommendations provide recommendations for millions of books, together with readers’ evaluations. There are places where the reader chooses the path or where responses to quiz questions determine the path.

Before you read the next section, ask yourself: what is the added value and what is the value lost with reading digitally?

Figure 3 How is reading on screen different from reading on paper?

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The image shows a girl in front of a laptop, wearing headphones with a microphone.

Figure 3 How is reading on screen different from reading on paper?

1.4 Multitasking as a new way of learning

The problem with multitasking is the need to keep changing backwards and forwards from one activity to another, switching your thoughts between tasks repeatedly. Multitasking with a phone is so prevalent among those with access to these technologies that one study even called it the ‘epidemic of distraction’ (Valkenburg, 2011). The question whether heavy multitaskers disadvantage their future development is taken up by Lui and Wong (2012), who show the negative consequences of multitasking. Children have been shown to perform poorly in certain cognitive tasks involving task switching, selective attention and working memory, possibly because they tend to pay superficial attention to lots of information all at the same time without focusing sufficiently on the information that is most relevant to the task (Lui and Wong, 2012). You can imagine the media headline related to this: ‘Modern kids unable to focus due to distractions’ or similar.

Figure 4 Perhaps video games can make us more alert and improve learning.

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The image shows two boys holding games console controllers and smiling.

Figure 4 Perhaps video games can make us more alert and improve learning.

Again, however, not all experts agree that multitasking is bad for children. Some scientific studies (Granic, Lobel and Engels, 2014; Cardoso-Leite, Green and Bavelier, 2015) have also shown positive effects of multitasking.

In video games, for example, children need to focus on several things at any one time and learn simply by trying things out and seeing what works and what doesn’t. Many video games rely on this type of trial-and-error learning, which offers regular rewards and reinforcements that improve learning. Researchers have found that playing video games can be beneficial as they can promote divided attention skills, a sound foundation for multitasking. Playing games can even help promote alertness, quick reactions and thus may contribute to healthy brain development, although there is no solid evidence for this.

2 Brain development in a hyper-tech world

Figure 5 Different parts of the brain are involved in the development of different cognitive skills.

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The image shows a person’s head in profile, in silhouette. Where the brain would be, there is an illustration of a lit-up brain.

Figure 5 Different parts of the brain are involved in the development of different cognitive skills.

In the face of the barrage of technology-induced stimulation, and new ways of learning and communicating, a common question from parents, educators and scientists is ‘how is this affecting young brains?’

In Week 1, you were introduced to the idea of a ‘digital native’ (Prensky, 2001) and this was linked to the view of neuroscientists that brains can, and do, change constantly with new input throughout our lives, which is a process called neuroplasticity.

A central discovery of neuroscience is that the brain continues to develop its ‘wiring diagram’ well into a person’s twenties at least. The frontal lobes, regions critical to high-level cognitive skills such as judgement, multitasking, executive control and emotional regulation, are the last to develop fully.

It might be useful to revisit those suggestions again and consider whether children’s brains are changing as a result of their engagement with technology, especially video games.

2.1 A young brain and video games

Brain scientist Daphne Bavelier wants to know how fast-paced video games affect the brain. She has some surprising news about how video games, even action-packed shooter games, influence our learning and focus.

As you watch the video, think about the key points that Bavelier raises with regard to the impact of video games on children’s development.

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Daphne Bavelier

I'm a brain scientist, and as a brain scientist, I'm actually interested in how the brain learns. I'm especially interested in the possibility of making our brains smarter, better and faster. It is in this context that I'm going to tell you about video games. When we say video game, most of you think about children. It's true, 90 per cent of children do play video games, but let's be frank, when the kids are in bed, who is in front of the Play Station? Most of you. The average age of a gamer is 33 years old, not eight years old. In fact, if we look at the projected demographics of video game play, the video game players of tomorrow are older adults.

So video games are pervasive throughout our society. It is clearly here to stay. It has an amazing impact on our everyday life. Consider these statistics released by Activision. After one month of release of the game Call of Duty - Black Ops it had been played for 68,000 years, worldwide. Would any of you complain if this was the case about doing linear algebra? So what we are asking in the lab is how can we leverage that power? I want to step back a bit. I know most of you have had the experience of coming back home and finding your kids playing this kind of games. The name of the game is to get after your enemies, zombies, bad guys, before they get to you, right?

And I'm almost sure most of you have thought, Oh, come on, can't you do something more intelligent than shooting at zombies? I'd like you to put this kind of knee-jerk reaction in the context of what you would have thought if you had found your girl playing Sudoku, or your boy reading Shakespeare. Most parents would find that great. Well, I'm not going to tell you that playing video games days in and days out is actually good for your health. It's not, and binging is never good. But I'm going to argue that in reasonable doses, actually the very game I showed you at the beginning, those action-packed shooter games, have quite powerful effects and quite positive effects on many different aspects of our behaviour.

There's not one week that goes without some major headlines in the media about whether video games are good or bad for you, right? You're all bombarded with that. I'd like to put this kind of Friday night bar discussion aside and get you to actually step into the lab. What we do in the lab is actually measure directly, in a quantitative fashion, what is the impact of video games on the brain. I'm going to take a few examples from our work. One first saying that I'm sure you all have heard, is the fact that too much screen time makes your eyesight worse. That's a statement about vision. There may be vision scientists among you who actually know how to test that statement.

We can step into the lab and measure how good your vision is. Well, guess what? People that don't play a lot of action games, that don't actually spend a lot of time in front of screens have normal, or what we call 'corrected to normal', vision. That's ok. The issue is what happens with these guys that actually indulge into playing video games, like five hours per week, ten hours a week, fifteen hours a week. By that statement, their vision should be really bad, right? Guess what, their vision is really, really good. It's better than those that don't play. It's better in two different ways. The first way is that they are able to resolve small detail in the context of clutter.

That means being able to read the fine print on prescriptions rather than using magnifying glasses you can actually do it with just your eye sight. The other way that they are better is actually being able to resolve different levels of grey. Imagine you are driving in the fog. That makes the difference between seeing the car in front of you and avoiding an accident, or getting into an accident. So we're actually leveraging that work to develop games for patients with low vision, and to have an impact on retraining their brain to see better. Clearly, when it comes to action video games, screen time doesn't make your eyesight worse.

Another saying that I'm sure you have all heard around is video games lead to attention problems and greater distractibility. We know how to measure attention, in the lab. I'm actually going to give you an example of how we do so. I'm going to ask you to participate, so you're going to have to play the game with me. I'm going to show you coloured words, and I want you to shout out the colour of the ink, so, this is the first example...

Daphne Bavelier/Audience:

Orange. Good.Green, red, yellow, red, yellow, green.

Daphne Bavelier:

You get my point, right?

You're getting better, but it's hard. Why is it hard? Because I introduced a conflict between the word itself and its colour. How good your attention is determines actually how fast you resolve that conflict, so the young guys here, at the top of their game, probably did a little better than some of us who are older. We can show that when you do this sort of task with people that play a lot of action games, they actually resolve the conflict faster. So clearly, playing those action games doesn't lead to attention problems. Actually those action video game players have many other advantages, in terms of attention.

And one aspect of attention which is also improved for the better is our ability to track objects around in the world. This is something we use all the time. When you're driving, you're tracking, keeping track of the cars around you, and you're also keeping track of the pedestrian, the running dog, and that's how you can actually be safe driving, right? In the lab, we get people to come to the lab, sit in front of a computer screen, and we give them little tasks that I'm going to get you to do again. You're going to see yellow happy faces, and a few sad blue faces. These are children in a school yard in Geneva during a recess during winter.

Most kids are happy, it's actually recess, but a few kids are sad and blue because they've forgotten their coat. Everybody begins to move around, and your task is to keep track of who had a coat at the beginning, and who didn't. I'm going to show you an example where there is only one sad kid. It's easy because you can actually track it with your eyes, you can track, and track, and when it stops and forms a question mark and I will ask you, did this kid have a coat or not? Was it yellow initially or blue? I hear yellow, good. Most of you have a brain. I'm now going to ask you to do the task, but now with a little more challenging task.

There are going to be three of them that are blue. Don't move your eyes; please don't move your eyes. Keep your eyes fixated and expand, pool your attention. That's the only way you can actually do it. If you move your eyes, you're doomed. Yellow or blue?

Audience

Yellow.

Daphne Bavelier

Good. So your typical, normal young adult can have a span of about three or four objects of attention. That's what we just did. Your action video game player has a span of about 6 to 7 objects of attention which is what’s shown in this video here, that's for you guys, action video game player, a bit more challenging right? Yellow or blue?

Audience

Blue.

Daphne Bavelier

Blue. We have some people who are serious out there. Yeah, good! In the same way that we actually see the effects of video games on people's behaviour, we can use brain imaging and look at the impact of video games on the brain. We do find many changes, but the main changes are actually to the brain networks that control attention. So one part is a parietal cortex which is very well known to control the orientation of attention. The other one is the frontal lobe which controls how we sustain attention, and another one is the anterior cingulate which controls how we locate and regulate attention and resolve conflict.

When we do brain imaging, we find that all three of these networks are actually much more efficient in people that play action games. This actually leads me to rather counter-intuitive finding in the literature about technology and the brain. You all know about multi-tasking, and you've all been faulty of multi-tasking, when you're driving and you pick up your cell phone. Bad idea. Very bad idea. Why? Because as your attention shifts to the cell phone, you are actually losing the capacity to react swiftly to the car braking in front of you and so you are much more likely to get engaged into a car accident. We can measure that kind of skills in the lab.

We obviously don't ask people to drive around and see how many car accidents they will have, that would be a little costly proposition. But we design task on the computer where we can measure to the millisecond of accuracy how good they are at switching from one task to another. When we do that we actually find that people that play a lot of action games are really, really good, they switch very fast, very swiftly, they pay a very small cost. I'd like you to remember that result and put it in the context of another group of technology users. A group which is much revered by society which are people that are engaged in multimedia tasking. What is multimedia tasking?

It's a fact that most of us, most of our children, are engaged into listening to music at the same time as doing a search on the web and chatting on Facebook with their friends. That's a multimedia tasker. There was a first study done by colleagues at Stanford, and they were replicated, that showed that those people that identify as being high multimedia taskers are absolutely abysmal at multitasking. When we measured them in the labs, they were really bad. This kind of result really makes two main points. The first one is that not all media are created equal. You can't compare the effect of multimedia tasking and the effect of playing action games. They have totally different effects on different aspects of cognition, perception and attention.

Even within video games, I'm telling you, right now, about these action packed video games. Different video games have a different effect on your brain. So we actually need to step back into the lab and really measure what is the effect of each video game. The other lesson is that general wisdom carries no weight. I showed that to you, already, like we looked at the fact that despite a lot of screen time, thpse action gamers have a lot of very good vision, etcetera. Here, what is very striking, is that these undergraduates that actually report engaging a lot of high multimedia tasking are convinced they aced the test. So you show them their data, you show them they're bad and they're like, ‘not possible’.

They have this sort of gut feeling that really they are doing really, really good. That's another argument for why we need to step into the lab and really measure the impact of technology on the brain. In a sense, when we think about the effect of video games on the brain, it's very similar to the effect of wine on the health. There are some very poor uses of wine and there are some very poor uses of video games, but when consumed in reasonable doses, and at the right age, wine can be very good for health. There are actually specific molecules that have been identified in red wine as leading to greater life expectancy.

In the same way, those action video games have a number of ingredients that are actually really powerful for brain plasticity, learning, attention, vision, etcetera, and so we need and are working on, what are those active ingredients so that we can leverage them to deliver better games either for education, or for rehabilitation of patients. Now, because we're interested in having an impact for education or rehabilitation of patients, we are actually not that interested in how those of you that choose to play video games for many hours perform. I'm much more interested in taking any of you, and showing that by forcing you to play an action game, I can actually change your vision for the better.

Whether you want to play that action game, or not, that's point for rehabilitation or education. Most kids don't go to school saying, 'great, two hours of math'. That's really the crux of the research, and to do that, we need to go one more step. One more step is to do training studies. Let me illustrate that step with a task which is called mental rotation. Mental rotation is a task where I'm going to ask you, and again I’m going to ask you to do the task, to look at this shape, study it, it's a target shape, and I'm going to present you four different shapes. One of these four different shapes is actually a rotated version of this shape. I want you to tell me which one.

The first one, second one, third one or fourth one? I'll help you. Fourth one. One more. Get those brains working. C'mon! That's our target shape.

Third, good! This is hard, right? The reason I asked you to do that is because you can really feel your brain cringing, right? It doesn't really feel like playing mindless action video games. Well, what we do in these training studies is, people come to the lab, they do tasks like this one. We then force them to play 10 hours of action games. They don't play 10 hours of action games in a row, they do distributed practice, so little shots of forty minutes on several days, over a period of two weeks. Then once they are done with their training, they come back a few days later, and they are tested, again, on a similar type of mental rotation task.

This is work from a colleague in Toronto where they showed us that initially, subjects performed where they were expected to perform, given their age. After two weeks of training on action video games, they actually performed better, and the improvement is still there five months after having done the training. That's really, really important. Why? Because I told you, we want to use these games for education or for rehabilitation, so we need to have affects that are going to be long-lasting.

At this point, a number of you are probably wondering, why are you waiting for putting on the market a game that would be good for the attention of my grandmother, and that she would actually enjoy, or a game that would be great to rehabilitate the vision of my grandson who has Amblyopia, for example? Well, we're working on it, but here is a challenge. There are brain scientists like me, who are beginning to understand what are the good ingredients in games to promote positive effects. That's what I'm going to call the broccoli side of the equation. There is an entertainment software industry which is extremely deft at coming up with appealing products that you can't resist. That's the chocolate side of the equation.

The issue is we need to put the two together, and it's a little bit like with food. Who really wants to eat chocolate covered broccoli? None of you! You've probably have had that feeling, right, picking up an education game and sort of feeling hmmm, it's not really fun, it's not really engaging. So what we need is really a new brand of chocolate – a brand of chocolate that is irresistible, that you really want to play, but that has all the ingredients, the good ingredients, that are extracted from the broccoli that you can't recognise that are still working on your brains. And we're working on it, but it takes to come and to get together brain scientists, people that work in the entertainment software industry and publishers.

So these are not people that usually meet every day, but it's actually doable, and we are on the right track. I'd like to leave you with that thought, and thank you for your attention.

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The next section summarises other views on this topic.

2.2 The good, the bad and the ugly

Figure 6 What is the balance of pros and cons for video games?

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This image shows two boys playing video games, shot from behind so that you can see the game on the television screen.

Figure 6 What is the balance of pros and cons for video games?

Although Daphne Bavelier suggests that video games can be extremely popular and supportive to children and their learning, not everyone takes this view. Since it is still early days in terms of the volume of research, there are as yet no definitive answers.

Consider some of the psychological evidence around the positive and negative aspects of gaming from an article The positive and negative effects of video games  focused on younger children (three to six years old), from the Raise Smart Kid website.

Positive aspects may include:

• developing children’s problem-solving and logical thinking
• supporting hand–eye coordination, fine motor and spatial skills
• encouraging quick thinking and decision making
• stimulating memory and concentration and the ability to engage in multitasking.

Negative aspects may include:

• screen time binging is bad for the eyes
• violent video games are likely to increase aggressive thoughts, feelings and behaviours
• frequent and prolonged playing of video games can increase attention problems and distractibility
• immersive video games, especially those with virtual reality and 3D elements can encourage children to confused reality with fantasy.

2.3 Your view on video games

Next, you will think about your own views on video games.

If you would like to explore more detailed accounts of the academic debate about such a ‘rewiring the brain’ topic, then we would recommend comparing the views of two researchers. Read this article by Professor Susan Greenfield, a professor of psychology and pharmacology at Oxford University: Living online is changing our brains. Compare it to the response from Neil Levy, Head of Neuroethics at The Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, University of Melbourne: Your brain on the internet: a response to Susan Greenfield.

3 The strengths of new technology

In the following audio, educational psychologist Paul Howard-Jones offers his views on the impact of gaming on children’s development. He joins Daphne Bavelier in being more of an optimist. In particular, he focuses on how technology can help to shape the neural connections in the brain and strengthen the acquisition of new skills.

Figure 7

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Transcript

MONTAGUE

What is it about computer games that makes them so difficult to put down? My guest today thinks the answer to that could transform the way young people learn. But his research is going even further, from gaming into gambling. Children with even the shortest attention span will spend hours trying to make progress within the world of a game. It’s all about choices based on trial and error. But what if adding those same elements to a classroom – luck and reward, the basis of gambling – could turn children into better learners?

Paul Howard-Jones is an educational psychologist specialising in neuroscience. He’s from the University of Bristol’s Graduate School of Education.

Now Paul, we’ll talk about the gambling aspect in a moment but let’s start with the gaming because most people, certainly parents, will recognise that there is almost a magnetic power about computer games. What do we know about the magic that gets people hooked?

HOWARD-JONES

Well we certainly don’t know nearly as much as we’d like to but I think many scientists are becoming interested in video games because they also, as well as engaging their players, they also seem to be very, very good teachers. What we’re seeing are a whole range of effects. So, for example, improved visual motor response, improvements in switching attention, even improvements in being able to not be distracted – these sorts of things. Now this is important because scientists have been trying to improve these functions for quite some time and now they’re waking up to the fact that through all those years of relative failure this has been occurring in bedrooms around the world as children play their action video games.

MONTAGUE

But for a child to be able to get better at responding quickly to something, perhaps they can react quicker when they see something, that’s different from actually speeding up learning isn’t it?

HOWARD-JONES

Yes, so for many years people have been trying to put the curriculum, if you like, the educational curriculum into games and to some extent it’s been a bit of a disaster. The most common outcome is that the child will turn around and say is this supposed to be fun, you know, so educational games have had pretty bad press. And I think part of the reason for that is we haven’t really understood what the underlying processes are. So when people are observing theses video games, having such effects in terms of basic cognitive function, it’s obviously of interest to try and find out how that is achieved. But you’re right, that there is then quite a step, there’s quite a leap to make, in terms of applying those processes to teach curriculum.

MONTAGUE

So what is it that we have learnt that we know that children like and will be gripped by that might be applied in education?

HOWARD-JONES

Well what we’re seeing is an increase in the way in which the brain is responding in the reward system, so when they’re playing the video games you see this very significant uptake of dopamine in the mid-brain region. So it’s the sort of thing you get when you see chocolate cake or sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, basically all those visceral motivations produce that response. So the next question is well why does that happen and what we’re seeing in video games is this very rapid schedule of rewards and more than that these rewards are uncertain, in the sense that they rely on some element of luck or chance. Now if you take that research and you link it to other research that has shown if there is an element of chance then you get more of this mid-brain dopamine response then you can begin to understand that video games probably should have that potential to make us much more engaged and excited.

MONTAGUE

It’s the lack of predictability.

HOWARD-JONES

It’s the lack of predictability but also this very rapid schedule of uncertain rewards.

MONTAGUE

Now there have been huge advances in what we’re learning about the brain in the last few years, I mean there’s obviously a lot of argument about the different advantages and what we can say about it, so I wonder actually given all that you know about the literature whether you apply it at home?

HOWARD-JONES

I try to, is the honest answer, but I am a parent in the real world and it’s not always straightforward. So the things that really come through to me as important are sleep, nutrition and things like caffeine and technology can be very disruptive. I mean sleep is important for learning, not just in terms of being rested the next day but actually remembering what happened the day before because sleep helps consolidate your memory. So if you have disrupted sleep then you will not be able to remember your homework so well. And in fact a study has been done on that with 10-11 year olds where they’ve shown that depending on whether you watch TV, a computer game or no technology at all your sleep will be disrupted in a different way and you will remember more or less of the homework that you do after that experience.

MONTAGUE

Okay, so the best is what?

HOWARD-JONES

No technology. Second best TV and the thing which disrupts sleep and homework memory the most is unfortunately the video games.

MONTAGUE

So what time – in your household – what time do video games go off or what time should they – I mean…?

HOWARD-JONES

It depends on the age because one of the problems here of course is that teenagers need to start becoming more independent and making their own decisions and video games are part of teenage culture and so are mobile phones, mobile phones are another element of trouble in terms of disrupting sleep. So in an ideal world I think probably I would restrict technology to at least before – seven o’clock I think would be the time when you want to pull the plug out really. That’s what we do. But then I’m not – I haven’t mentioned the older ones and that’s where you have the difficulty because they’re on Facebook…

MONTAGUE

And they’re not going to listen to you.

HOWARD-JONES

…they’re communicating with their friends. Well it’s a negotiation isn’t it, it’s negotiation. So I, during revision periods I’m much stricter about it but then they need to have some freedom and find out actually how awful they feel sometimes if they’ve been up till 10 or 11 o’clock playing video games.

MONTAGUE

And if they’re sleeping in till 10 or 11 o’clock that’s a good thing because teenagers need that?

HOWARD-JONES

It’s a good thing for them to be sleeping in at the weekends I think.

MONTAGUE

What about this other idea that you should show students the images of their brain at times where there is activity? Because you have argued that this is a good thing – that actually if you can…

HOWARD-JONES

What I’ve argued is it is good for children to be aware and thinking about their own mental processes and be aware about what their brain needs to function well. I think if you want to talk to children about things like working memory, how much you can keep in your attention at once, then brain images could be particularly helpful for that. But also, learning about the plasticity of the brain is really important as well. We know, for example, a study that was done with teenagers in the States that if teenagers know more about the maleability of their brain they see it less as a biological limit. And that can improve their self-concept and it can improve their academic trajectory as well. And actually on that subject, it's also true that teachers need to know about this. So we've been, just the last few weeks, we've been been trawling through data from around the world looking at some of the strange ideas that teenagers have, but also their ideas about the role of genetics in education. You know there's been a lot of discussion about that lately. And what we've found is that in our Greek sample, in our Chinese sample and in our British sample of trainee teachers, we found that there's a correlation between believing that genetics has a very big role in the educational outcome and thinking that there is less that you can do for the student in the classroom, and teacher attitudes do have knock-on effects on students outcomes.

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Do you agree with his views?

3.1 Digital books

Parents and teachers as well as many librarians and book authors often ask whether ebooks are better than paper books or whether reading on screen is worse or better than reading on paper. Comparing the two formats as if one of them could be eliminated is an unhelpful dichotomy. Children need both formats, and both formats are here to stay. A more productive question therefore would be to ask who they work for, how they work, under which conditions and for which purpose of reading.

If you are interested in reading more about the research on children’s digital books, check out this article written by one of the course authors: Reading to your child? Digital books are as important as print books.

3.2 Costs and benefits

This week you focused on how digital technology may be changing the way the digital child thinks and learns. You have looked briefly at some of the influences on that change, such as texting and the way that we engage with information and each other in an online environment.

You considered the impact of a digital culture on children’s brain development and whether the benefits afforded by the digital world outweigh any costs. We hope this has prompted you to consider innovative uses of technology for children and to explore how video games can actually help support and promote learning in interesting ways.

In the final week, you will look to the future for the digital child as a learner and what the learning environment might look like for them.

References

Acknowledgements

This free course was written by Nathalia Gjersoe, Natalia Kucirkova and John Oates. It was first published in October 2016 and updated in January 2020.

Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see terms and conditions), this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence.

The material acknowledged below is Proprietary and used under licence (not subject to Creative Commons Licence). Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this free course:

Figures

Figure 1 Source adapted from Wheeler, 2013

Figure 2 © Anatolii Babii/iStockPhoto.com

Figure 3 © Jevtic/iStockPhoto.com

Figure 4 © ManoAfrica/iStockPhoto.com

Figure 6 © PeopleImages/iStockPhoto.com

Figure 7 Images © monkeybusinessimages/iStockPhoto.com, © University of Bristol

Figure 8 © ManoAfrica/iStockPhoto.com

Text

3.2.2 Extract from: Raise Smart Kid (no date) ‘The positive and negative effects of video games online’ [online]. Available at http://www.raisesmartkid.com/3-to-6-years-old/4-articles/34-the-good-and-badeffects-of-video-games

Audio visual

Video

3.1.2 Texting is killing language, 3.2.1 Your brain and video games © TED Conferences LLC TED.com

Audio

3.3 The Educators, Episode 5, 10 September 2014, © BBC

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