Is the Internet making us dumber? Or do we just like to think so?

Great thanks to Jean Bomeisl, for forwarding the article from SmartPlanet, "Using the Internet Affects Your Memory, Study Says," to start a discussion.

It's a fascinating read, but that's got to be the most misleading title for an article ever.

(Fludd)

It should read, "humans choose to remember written facts more if we know they will be erased later," or "we change which information we store in our brains if we have access to external storage."  But that's not very sexy, or scary.

The studies show nothing at all about the Internet.

A Challenge: Are You Encouraging Your Students To Fail Enough?

Part 1

Here's a puzzle for you:

In this puzzle, three numbers: 16, 14 and 38, need to be assigned to one of the rows of numbers below. To which row should each number be assigned?

Before I give you the answer, I have a question for you:  

How long would you work on this problem before you gave up?

Now, if you don't want the pleasure of grappling with puzzle this on your own, the answer is at the end of this post. Click 'Read More' at the bottom to get there.

Here's a related question:

How long do you want your students to work at a puzzling problem before they give up?

How long they will depends upon many things -- their incentives, the time of day, their feeling about the particular content of the challenge, peer pressure -- but it primarily depends upon a character quality we usually call "perseverance."  Kurt Hahn, founder of Outward Bound, called it "tenacity of pursuit."

Perseverance is so important, we make up aphorisms to teach it ("If at first you don't succeed, try, try again") and create seemingly hundreds of posters to inspire it in employees and students:

Perseverance: Cliffhanger. Digital image. Art.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Oct. 2012.

But, in order to build the confidence to tackle problems despite failure, students need to encounter failure.

In fact, if we really want students to learn, we should probably increase the number of times they fail.  Tom Watson, arguably one of the greatest golfers of all time, and therefore an expert on perseverance, observed: "If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate."  In the business world, the best model seems to be to make many attempts, ignore your failures, focus on a success and try to replicate it.

Yet in schools, we do anything but encourage students to fail.  We demonize failure.  We record failure. We make failure permanent.

In doing so, we encourage our students to avoid failure -- and many of our kids do this by avoiding trying altogether.

If author Orson Scott Card is right, and "the essence of training is to allow error without consequence," then we need to change how we do things in schools.  The Marines thought Card was right.  They required that all of the cadets in their officer training program read his sci-fi novel, Ender's Game.  Marines fail again and again in their training programs, so that they don't fail in the field.

Believe it or not, in this respect we could actually take a lesson from video games, not because they are electronic or flashy, but because they ignore failure altogether (some simple ideas follow).

So, what about you?  Do you see enough of your students tackling difficult problems and persisting when they don't get it right away? How many times can a student completely fail at something major in your class before they can no longer earn an A?  How long does a student's failure follow him or her in your gradebook?

Below are some suggestions, from the trivial to the terrifying  -- from a single sentence that makes students more persistent, to a radical grading overhaul -- that might change your teaching practice, and allow your students to fail more now, and succeed more down the road.  (More to come in a subsequent post)

Provoke dialogue about your subject with a quick walk-in survey

Controversy causes engagement.

If you get your students arguing about the core matters of your discipline, they may understand its relevance even more, and even begin to think differently about how they approach the content.

At the heart of every discipline are controversies about how the discipline should be approached, what it means for the world, and what it takes to be good.  So, force your kids to take a stand on a question to provoke a debate.

Terry Fortunato designed and ran this simple SMART Board activity -- a single page, designed to solicit deep critical thinking and debate about science, and her students responded with a variety of thoughtful responses (below):

Deftly download digital videos

Wish you could just download those excellent videos you find on the Internet?  Well, you can.

No video downloading tool works in every instance, so it's good to have a variety of arrows in your digital downloading quiver.  Here are a few:

Websites that help you download video

To use these, just cut and paste the URL of your video and go to the site.  You can always bookmark the site in your toolbar to access them quickly.

• KeepVid only seems to work reliably on Firefox.  KeepVid gives you an easy way to drag a button bookmark to your browser's toolbar, too.

• Zamzar.com will also download a video for you -- it sends you a link via email, but Zamzar only converts videos up to 100 MB.   (Zamzar also converts all sorts of other files, too -- PDFs to Word, for example.)

Tools you can add to your browser to download video

There are also some Firefox + Chrome extensions / add-ons that you can add to your browser (you can do this on your own - they don't require administrator authentication):

• Firefox: In Firefox, go to Tools > Add-Ons and search for Video Download Helper. Install that -- and once you restart Firefox, whenever you're on a site with video, a little icon in your status bar with three colored globes will become animated. Flash Video Downloader is another Firefox add-on that works.

• Chrome: In Chrome, click on the Settings icon -- a wrench or three parallel horizontal lines on the far right of the status bar, then choose Tools > Extensions. You can add FVD Video Downloader.

3 Ways To Engage Students In The Election...Digitally

Want an easy way to get your students involved in the election?  Have them start their own Super PAC.  Or....just have them access one of these interactive resources online so your students can simulate election strategy, peruse polls for data, or listen to experts discuss the issues particular to this election.

Here are 3 resources that might intrigue your students, from most simple to most complex:

Numero Uno:  iCivics.org

This is Sandra Day O'Connor's project to help students understand the workings of government -- students can play a game in which they manage their own presidential campaign, and teachers can download a variety of lessons, games, and materials to teach about the election.

iCivics.org

Numero Dos: Play the Election (this is condensed from Richard Byrne, at Free Technology for Teachers)

From Rand McNally -- it has 3 main sections.

1. An interactive Electoral College map with current polling data, links to articles, and historical data back to 1960.

2. Play the Election Game Central has 11 games, including State by State, which has interactive mini-infographics about the concerns and preferences of each state -- students predict candidates win in each state  (currently only 4 are up, more on the way).

3. You can also find lessons in the Classroom Manager which are aligned to Common Core standards. Teachers can also use Classroom Manager to see the statistics for the games their students play (students have to register and log-in as class members)

Numero Tres: Take a course at Stanford, online:

Your students can audit an entire course at Stanford, but you could also assign individual videos/lectures as homework.

Rob Reich, professor of political science, and David Kennedy, pulitzer-prize winning historian and editor of The American Pageant, are curating one of Stanford's first online courses, open to the public.  They're bringing in different lecturers and experts, and have downloadable panels + videos.  

Here's what has happened so far:

The first class from this past Tuesday ... was a discussion of campaign strategy featuring:

• Chris Lehane (Democratic Political Consultant, former Press Secretary for Vice President Al Gore and for his 2000 Presidential campaign)
• Mark McKinnon (political consultant for President George W. Bush, Senator John McCain, and co-founder of No Labels)
• Gary Segura (Professor of Political Science, Stanford University and Principal Investigator of the 2012 American National Election Study)

Guests in coming weeks include:

• John Taylor and Kenneth J. Arrow on the economy
• Goodwin Liu and Pam Karlan on the courts
• Stanford's President Hennessy on the implications of the election for California and Silicon Valley
• Bruce Cain and Gavin Newsom on California politics and ballot initiatives

To enroll and gain access to the site:http://itunes.apple.com/us/course/id565286438