Classroom Laptop Users Distract Others As Well As Themselves Thursday, April 25, 2013 It won’t surprise anyone to learn that having a laptop computer open in a lecture class is an invitation to distraction for the user. But what about the students sitting nearby? A new study by a group of researchers at McMaster and York universities, both in Canada, finds evidence that laptop use in college classrooms distracts not just laptop owners, but their classmates as well. The researchers begin their article, published last month in the journal Computers & Education, by reviewing what we know about learning while our attention is divided: “Research suggests that we have limited resources available to attend to, process, encode, and store information for later retrieval. When we eventually retrieve information that was processed without interruptions, as a primary task, we are likely to experience minimal errors. These findings “are especially significant when considered in the context of student learning,” the authors note: The authors conclude:
Innovation and the Future Workforce: key trends for the decade ahead We are currently living in an era of unprecedented change. It’s not just that technology has speeded up business cycles, or connected us into a pulsing 24-7 never-stop global community. It’s not even that stakeholders require instant responses in the midst of turbulent markets and increasingly complex supply chains and business partnerships. We are actually at a point in history where fundamental and deep structural change is happening at multiple levels of society, politics and economics. My research team’s particular interest is in the new world of work, and how people will influence and be influenced by it. 1. People all around the world – not just in developed countries – will be delaying retirement and staying longer in the workforce as they adjust to longer lifespans. How many products and services do you have specifically focused on the older age group? 2. The world’s population will reach 7 billion in October 2011, and is destined to reach 8 billion in about 2025. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Less Than 10% Of The Web In 2012 Is Mobile Ready Mobile’s overall share of Web traffic in the United States has increased to about 9% (according to StatCounter) which is also the same percentage of Quantcast’s Top Million sites that are deemed ready for mobile in 2012 according to data from the Mongoose Metrics Data Series. Since there wasn’t the same data pull last year, it could be compared loosely to data from Brand Anymore in late 2010, which determined that of 7,000 retail websites only 4.8% were mobile ready – a nearly doubling of the Web’s mobile readiness in a year. In the Mongoose Metrics data set, 118,000 of the 1,000,000 sites could not be crawled for a variety of reasons, resulting in approximately 882,000 sites that could be used for this data. As 79,133 sites either rendered a mobile version on the same URL or redirected to a mobile version of the site under a different URL when a smartphone user agent was detected, this number dropped to 76,241 when a feature phone user agent was used.
Divided attention and memory: evidence of substantial interference ... 5 Reasons Why Traditional Employment Is in Trouble According to the U.S. Labor Department, 2.1 million people resigned their jobs in February, the most in any month since the start of the Great Recession. This is startling given that the economy is not strong and that millions are out of work. The natural inclination would seem to me to be to hunker down and hang on to the job you have, no matter how bad it is. In discussions with some of them, I heard talk about feeling they having been used to bolster executive salaries and inflate shareholder expectations unrealistically. And with eroding benefits and the potential of better access to health care, the hold that corporations used to have is loosening. I think we are seeing the early signs that the attitudes and expectations of the emerging and experienced workforce are changing faster than many thought likely and that traditional firms may find it harder and harder to employ the best people. But many corporations and recruiters are in denial. Expectations Have Changed Choice, Not Control
Educational technology and innovation at the edges | A World Bank Blog on ICT use in Education As part of my duties at the World Bank, I talk with lots (and lots!) of people and groups. Mostly, I talk to people within the World Bank and in other development institutions (this is part of my official responsibilities, to support the work of such people as a 'subject expert'); to our counterparts in governments around the world (we say 'clients' but I am not a big fan of this formulation); and with lots of consultants and practitioners*. (*Some of you may quickly identify a pretty important group that is missing here: 'users', or beneficiaries. This is a pretty big, if not fundamental, omission, in my view. Talking with practitioners is a sort of proxy for talking with end users and beneficiaries ... I also speak with lots of companies. Occasionally I speak not to individual companies, but to large industry groups. Investing, not just sellingI often say to companies entering new markets in developing countries for the first time is that your first sale might be the easiest.
How Does Multitasking Change the Way Kids Learn? Using tech tools that students are familiar with and already enjoy using is attractive to educators, but getting students focused on the project at hand might be more difficult because of it. Living rooms, dens, kitchens, even bedrooms: Investigators followed students into the spaces where homework gets done. Pens poised over their “study observation forms,” the observers watched intently as the students—in middle school, high school, and college, 263 in all—opened their books and turned on their computers. For a quarter of an hour, the investigators from the lab of Larry Rosen, a psychology professor at California State University-Dominguez Hills, marked down once a minute what the students were doing as they studied. A checklist on the form included: reading a book, writing on paper, typing on the computer—and also using email, looking at Facebook, engaging in instant messaging, texting, talking on the phone, watching television, listening to music, surfing the web. Related
How Facebook Finds The Best Design Talent, And Keeps Them Happy If you take a close look at Facebook’s S-1 registration statement, you’ll notice something striking: Designers are called out as key to the company’s long-term strategic success. Tech company filings often call out certain job functions--like engineering--and the organization’s ability to fill those positions as crucial to its success. But designers? That’s almost unheard of. And yet, there they are. The mentions underline the importance (little-noticed until now) that Facebook places on its design team. Designing for Facebook, Cox said, gets at “the science of things you can’t reason about, that you just feel.” That mindset is only going to become increasingly important. Notably, tracking down the right people and persuading them to join the team is so important that Facebook doesn’t leave the job to HR alone. For some targets, Facebook even brings out the big guns. That email led to a visit to Facebook headquarters for then-New York-based Felton and his partner Ryan Case.
ICT for climate-smart agriculture and "green growth": Online forum 5-16 March 2012 Climate-smart agriculture and green growth – can ICT help? Climate-smart agriculture seeks to increase productivity while reducing contributions to climate change. Success is essential in order to provide enough food for the world’s population and to mitigate environmental damage. The World Bank, FAO and the e-Agriculture community invite you to explore how information and communication technologies (ICT) can support "green growth" and climate-smart agriculture. ICT holds real promise in two particular areas: as tools for land use planning and management; and, as risk management tools for climate change adaptation. This will be the focus of the two week online discussion. Subject Matter Experts This is the second in a series of discussions following the publication of the "ICT in Agriculture" Sourcebook, responding to the growing demand for knowledge on how to use ICT to improve agricultural productivity and raise smallholder incomes.