The digital literacy of controlling attention and focus

As I am about to embark on some serious study I have been thinking a lot about enhancing the small amounts of time I do get to spare on reading and scholarship.
Apart from sheer 'interest/motivation' as a dominant factor in directing attention, with more than a nod to Prof Goodyear, there is more to books than mere nostalgia and aesthetics, there is ergonomics. A book will not bleep or blink at me. Taking the fight to the technology, so often the source of distractions, if it's a 'digital book', it may even read with me. I have been recently interested in the idea that getting the computer to read aloud as I read the text may help attention, engagement and cognition. What do you/others think? Am struggling to locate research about it... along the lines of Driver and Noesselt 2008.
This new paper in JC-MC by Courbet et al is heading in the right direction before concentrating on advertising:

Faced with an abundance of advertising messages, Internet users occupied with their current task activate selective perception and processing strategies that lead them to allocate only minimal cognitive resources to advertising, which generally interests them very little.  (p274)

In psychology, we have the concept of flow, a phenomenon studied by Csikszentmihalyi in artists who were so immersed in their work that they ignored bodily needs for food or sleep. Flow is one of a range of psychological states, see the image below (souce: wikimedia commons), indicating the strong links with this 'ideal' state and motivation. Sadly, students are often faced with learning episodes that do anything but encourage flow.

Contextualising information fluency

It was time again to deliver my 'collaboration lecture' morning. I blogged about this previously in July 2011 in terms of the activity I set students upon as part of it. This time I went in with a discussion about digital literacies still buzzing around my mind. Joe was probing about the ways in which, for example, presentations, happen in clinical areas, giving the 'digital' practice a compelling context that students could see themselves participating in when joining the workforce. Conveniently, the students were just back off placement, returning for the final theory block of their second year - they were chatty, especially with each other!
The module assessment requires them to work in groups towards a summative group presentation (which has 10% of the marks awarded by their peers for their contributions towards the groupwork). In order to build a case for learning about and through collaboration I decided to ask them what had they seen of presentations, broadly defined, out in practice areas. Out of 80 or so students, I had about four or five responses. Here is a flavour:

• Mufti-Disciplinary Team meetings, where the patient's notes and scans support case reviews.
• A doctor leading a session for patients about their condition.
• A nurse, leading a small group teaching session

That last example was the only one featuring a nurse actually doing the presenting. So I called upon the fact that nurses have a professional commitment to the continuing development of themselves and those around them. They could expect to be responsible for the practice-based learning of their own students one day. More than that, on qualification and registration, all nurses are duty-bound to act as 'Stage 1 Mentors', meeting the requirements set for that role by the national regulatory body, the NMC, "you must facilitate students and others to develop their competence" and that could well imply the development or use of an online resource.
In another context, it is a real possibility that they would deliver a conference presentation at some point in the future. I tell the students that working alone is 'easy'. You can be as lazy about the way you work as you like on your own. Once you involve others in a collaboration, it becomes vital that they make some key decisions about how they are going to work together. Part of that must include how the group will curate artifacts of the collaboration (agreed search strategies, articles found, summaries compiled, ideas noted, the presentation itself, etc.) and communication, including discussion, either face-to-face or online. Of course, these methods are useful when working alone but collaboration opens up the potential for a richer, perhaps riskier learning experience.
So the students get some ideas about how to manage the artifacts of collaboration, but little or nothing about the act of parleying with the knowledge acquired or presented by them or their collaborators. This is where epistemic fluency comes in, a key transferable skill - but a rare and shy 'animal'. Goodyear et al only capture a glimpse of it in their study... If it is so scarce, is it too difficult, too ambitious to expect to be able to conceptualise and present to students (or staff, come to that) as something really vital? And yet, have the students really got the most out of collaborative learning projects without actively trying to leverage the opportunity to maximise gains in epistemic fluency?

Goodyear P, Ellis R, Brew A and Sachs J (2007) The development of epistemic fluency: Learning to think for a living. In: Transforming a university: The scholarship of teaching and learning in practice. Sydney: Sydney University Press. Available at: http://hdl.handle.net/2123/2115

Hyperlinks in Grademark rubrics

We've been rolling out Grademark this academic year and we're still in the business of creating our rubrics within the system. A rubric is a table that a marker clicks inside to select the performance they wish to award the assignment under scrutiny. Technology has affordances and constraints, what it enables and what it denies (I was enjoying Peter Goodyear's (2006) comments recently about how impoverished online meetings are compared to face-to-face). On the one hand, the rubric cell will 'only' allow us to use up to 1000 characters of text. This is quite a bit but not enough for what we wanted to do with it recently. On the other hand, a solution was to use hyperlinks, because the rubric does allow very simple html. Frustratingly, hyperlinks within the Turnitin assignments were disabled for some reason, and so I didnt imagine that they would work in rubrics. The question then is, how best to exploit such linking?
I was trying to see if I could go for deep linking to a section of an online version of Price and Harrington's  'Critical thinking and writing for nursing students'. Sadly, I do not think that the permanent linking, that includes a redirect for Shibboleth login will work for this book. But there may be other resources, or our own Confluence-powered Student Handbook that could hang around for long enough to make the effort of hyper-linking Grademark rubrics in this way worthwhile. Come to that, there's no reason to think that the developers behind Grademark will be so kind as to continue to allow html in rubrics so you could go to all that effort of enriching them and come in one day to find none of the links worked any more (check this twitter conversation I had with Turnitin).

Goodyear, P. (2006). Technology and the articulation of vocational and academic interests: reflections on time, space and e-learning. Studies in Continuing Education, 28(2), 83–98. doi:10.1080/01580370600750973

  Price, B., & Harrington, A. (2010). Critical thinking and writing for nursing students. Exeter: Learning Matters Ltd. Retrieved from http://www.dawsonera.com/depp/reader/protected/external/EBookView/S9780857255877/S126

.

Epistemic what?

This is the response you'll likely get if you voice 'epistemic fluency' as an aspirational outcome for students in higher education... unless you've looked at Peter Goodyear's work on it. Maria Zenios recently published a paper in J-CAL which extended...

Ohlsson's (1995) list of epistemic tasks to include activities such as reasoning, negotiating, comparing, exploring, clarifying meanings, and offering new perspectives. (p9)

Back at the office, we were discussing how a proposed workload metric could account for 'corridor conversations', having been chatting over some key/current issues.
We're looking at developing a new curriculum and I waved a copy of Maria's paper around in the hope of getting a chance to advertise epistemic fluency. Another issue was a complaint about the behaviour of a group of students in a session where they would learn a practical clinical skill. I wasnt that familiar with it so youtubed to locate a few examples. The tutor immediately started to critique the video I'd found. I suggested that this was exactly the activity that we would want students engaging in. One nice thing about video is that they include cultural settings and artifacts, like uniforms, experienced/expert staff: exactly the conditions that students face and have to challenge when they enter the clinical area. I challenged my colleague to come up with an 'epistemic activity' that framed the way that students would search for, find, evaluate and share those videos, supporting their learning of the clinical skill. It's the first time I'd really seen clinical skills as something wider than merely teaching a person to perform a physical task, and the first time I'd made such a concrete connection between epistemic fluency and learning a primarily physical skill.

Zenios, M. (2011). Epistemic activities and collaborative learning: towards an analytical model for studying knowledge construction in networked learning settings. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, doi:10.1111/j.1365-2729.2010.00394.x