The Hall of Awesomeness

Recently I bought a game for my daughter which is all about managing a wildlife park.  I made her promise to me that she would take the time to learn how to play before asking any more questions.  After playing it for a while she has given up because she couldn’t work it out.  Now, she is only little but I must admit I have seen this trend in people much older than her.

Here is another example.  Recently I told a group of my students about the final exam for a subject I am running.  I gave four very obvious hints as to what I was expecting in the exam only to be shocked and dismayed when I marked them over the last couple of days.  They didn’t get the hint.  Now, maybe I am being a little too blind to what an obvious hint is … but when you say, “This is a really obvious hint,” followed by, “you can find the answer on this page,” you begin to see my frustration.  The generation that has come after me are a special case and I have written about them before.  What I have noticed however, more and more, is that context gets lost in massive amounts of information.  So what has that to do with learning?

Learning takes place in a context

If you have ever attempt to learn a language you will know of the problem of immersion.  This is when you are placed in unfamiliar surroundings and forced to make sense of the language in order to communicate what you mean properly.   If you are learning French for example, the French in Action series forces you to study the whole damn course… in French!  They immerse you in the language so that learning is faster, richer and more contextual.  What happens though when you take large amounts of information, displayed in a shallow context across a wideband?  INFORMATION OVERLOAD!  You have lots of information, plenty of facts but very little perspective or context.

Add to that the problem facing our children.  They have unprecendented access to information in massive amounts but only know small portions of it.  That is, courtesy of a massive exposure to information from the point of education until now, we have a generation of people who are very capable at collecting large amounts of information in shallow context situations.  Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink calls a more positive version of this (based on research) “thin slicing”.

Thin Slicing and Generation Y

Thin slicing is making extremely fast decisions with a small amount of information (A good introduction to the topic can be found here).  What happens when we are forced to make fast decisions about things as a matter of practice and have only limited amounts of information?  We end up slicing that information into smaller “thinner” parts and based on our previous expertise are able to make snap judgments in a moments time.  If you think of a leg ham as a piece of knowledge… taking some of the bone should be enough for the expert to make a judgment that is probably going to be true as it is logical.  For example, if you are a mechanic and you want to diagnose a problem with a car.  You can hear a rattle and know instantly what the problem is and what the likely solution will be.   If you are an expert! Now, let’s reverse that situation for a moment and take a slightly different look at it.

When you are exposed to massive amounts of information and you are forced to make sense of it, your brain is likely (I am conjecturing here… is there a neuroscientist in the house?) to build models of the information that it thinks you want.  That is, as you are exposed to massive dispersed amounts of information, you have to compartmentalise it in order to be able to store it.  When you have too much information to choose from you build models that are shallow because you can’t actually contextualise the information as much as you should be because you have, “too much information”. In Gladwell’s book he speaks of ‘experts’ being able to glance at a problem and make snap judgments.  In some cases, this is quite profound because it enables the expert to see the connections faster than others.  In the case of Generation Y, they are building models of information this way… all the time.  They are creating shallow pools of information by thin slicing everything.  They are learning ‘enough’ of everything at a shallow level of context and then applying this knowledge to the way in which they solve their problems.

We are now starting to see the effects of this kind of thing at Griffith University.  People that have been exposed to the massive amounts of information seem to be to part of a the new learning plague… to coin a phrase.

The new learning plague

You may call this an attention problem.  We can’t hold the attention of people because they are used to having concurrent information streams available.  However, I think what’s happening is that our education system and the society we live in has created an “information monster”!  We have so much information now that in order to filter it, you need to slice it into smaller portions and be happy with the lack of depth OR become very good at one thing at the expense of having a collection of shallow knowledge OR a variety of either.   This has, in my mind at least, created a plague.  We have a generation of people who are happy to keep things at the surface level where information is linear, causally efficacious and makes perfect sense.  Don’t believe me… watch a morning show about budgeting and you get simple advice that is repeated ad nausem.

I recently tested this out at a course I went to for work about Occupational Health and Safetly.   I was sitting next to an early to mid twenties manager who was exteremly intelligent.  Throughout the course, he kept texting, talking and not really taking notes.  It really pissed me off when he got better marks than me on the test because I had my phone switched off.  When I got over myself, I noticed something I hadn’t seen before.  He was extremly good at filtering.  He could hear what the trainer was saying and filter that on a surface level whilst focusing on his text messaging at the same time.  People of my ilk will focus on one thing at a time.  Generation Y people tend to be able to move between different information mediums shallowly and filter out what they need and then move on to the next thing.   To watch this filtering process in action was something to behold.   I couldn’t believe after teaching 17 and 18 year olds for a few years that I had missed this.

Whilst having a developed skill set of dealing with information overload through thin slicing and filtering is wonderful, it can’t replace deep learning.  Deep learning challenges context, ideas, notions and themes.  I remember having to defend the way I teach a few years ago for a performance review and I picked on Mizerow who argued that in order for learning to occur, you need your subjects to be able to challenge how and what they learned by getting them to critically reflect on it.  I still believe that.  You can’t be an expert in something if you have filtered it out to a logical sequence.  Neither can you find perspective, depth or multiple streams of meaning if you are simply looking for the straightforward answer all the time.  By the way, life is pretty far from straightforward!

At the time of this writing I have move beyond frustration with people who don’t want to learn the deep way.  Instead I have developed coping strategies to help me understand why people want to learn in shallow streams of information.  It’s this… nobody is really as interested as I am! I am not even saying that this is a new phenomenon… it isn’t.  What I am saying is that we have generations of people exposed to large amounts of ‘wikipedia’ style information without bearing down a context for them to challenge these core assumptions.   People who filter out important information to get a logical core fail to realise one important point: Facts are socially constructed.

To finish up this post I thought a video would be nice… see you next time.

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