 This is an informal talk, but I'm going to ask people to hold questions at the end because there's actually a reason why you all have this little these two bits of technology at your at your at your tables one is a pencil which was certainly a revolutionary technology communications technology and a card made out of machine-made paper another revolutionary technology and we're going to be doing an exercise together Two of them at the beginning and one at the end of the talk and then the one at the end of the talk We'll lead into the question-answer period. So there will be plenty of time to talk The eminent historian Robert Darden has said that there are basically four great information ages in human history and I love that perspective on our moment When he talks about this he talks about the first information age being the beginning of writing right around 4000 BC And you all remember that Socrates really didn't like that invention at all right Socrates thought writing was going to diminish attention It was going to dull intellectual discourse. It was going to solidify ideas in a very kind of demeaned way instead of the fluid interactive ways that people talk together and in dialogue form The second information age the invention of movable type with Gutenberg the third which is actually my prime my original area of study as well as Professor Darden's which is The great age of steam-powered presses and machine-made paper and ink that made books available to middle-class and even working-class people for the first time in history In America that's happening around the same time as the Constitution in fact the very same printer in the very same month Prince the preamble to the Constitution and the preamble to the first American novel which is written almost as a call-and-response to the Constitution but for in a very Populist populist way The fourth information age is now the one we're living in basically 15 years into the commercialization of the internet and 15 years in the history of technology is usually the time at which we start Thinking introspectively about what a massive change has meant and how we actually not what will happen in the future But how we've already changed I think 15 years is always been a good time because it means that it we're talking about kids Who don't remember a before and don't really care about our nostalgia about before right if you're 15 years old now You don't really remember a time before the internet and you're not really saying well the internet makes our brains dull Or any of that other stuff that you're saying about tell me about what I can do now To make use of this technology in a productive way, and I think we're at that moment And that's much what much of this talk is going to be about today How we can make institutional changes that serve the era we live in many of the institutions of school Many of the institutions of work many of the things we wouldn't even know of as school and work were in fact Created institutionalized developed for the last information age that each age of steam-powered presses And machine-made ink and paper that made it possible and circulating libraries all of which that's another one of those institutions that makes these things possible And makes a wide readership Possible in the 19th century How do we think about? Institutional change for a digital age a broadcast yourself age an age where anyone can have an idea Publish the idea and it can be read by any virtually anyone Without the mediation of a central figure without an editor without a publisher That's a new moment And before I say any more before I go into the talk itself I would like You to use these older technologies of the pencil and the card and I'm going to set my timer Two minutes, and I'd just like you to take two minutes to write down on the card Three things if you if you could change anything about higher education To make it responsive to the students coming into into classes today And who are going to be working in this this new world of work in the future What what three institutional changes might you make there's no right or wrong answers? I'm just curious about what three things you do. I'm gonna set the timer for two minutes and Just write down three things. Thank goodness You have no idea how scary it is to be up here in a silent room when you're when you're the speaker When you've been teaching your whole life to be up here in that kind of silence is really Permittable my heart is bounding Okay, however, I'm gonna set it again and this time we're gonna do something a little different I want you to turn to somebody close to you ideally someone you did not come in with and look at the three things on each of your cards and Talk together and think about what one thing what might make the biggest difference in Transforming education in this era so just find somebody who's nearby some of your are scattered away I'm saying to talk and just share the cards. I'm gonna set this again for two minutes. Thank you All right, two minutes is up Excuse me Excuse me. I'm just gonna talk a little bit about attention and you've already done like half of my work for me Okay, so thank you Can you think about the difference between the sound of the room and the first part of that? exercising in the second Basically the first part is the paradigm of education for the last 120 years and certainly the paradigm of the kind of Testing that we do which is a very huge very odd thing We tend to think of testing is and I'll be talking about this a little later testing is natural But when you think about it the time test Right, that's the foundation of so much of our educational system the time test is a pretty odd phenomena in human history But the difference between the energy level I'm sure somebody came in here with the right kind of instrument They could have rate change felt the energy change right in the first experiment in the second So the first thing I want to talk about is different modes of pedagogy What we know and there's been lots of research on that is a year from now You're far more likely to know what happened in the second half of that experiment which was interactive hit back to Socrates, right? Dialogical then in the first half Another thing we know Is you're far more likely to remember that what you what you circled with somebody else as the most important thing? You're going to probably remember it as an idea that you came up with not the other guy, right? I mean that's just that's just sort of a funny way that memory works where we're constantly That's why we have historians right because we're constantly every moment remembering our history and relative to who we are and what we are The set the other point I want to make though is that? Cognitively the second experiment you performed is the kind of thing that a lot of the rather shallow information about Multitasking and how multitasking is damaging our brains and making us distracted et cetera et cetera That was a very multitasking thing you just did right you're coming up with some kind of idea Shared with somebody in many cases who you've never met before in a very noisy room with a lot of distraction going on and You were able to focus on the task and perform the task the reason that's important is we've Suddenly in a lot of the literature about attention gotten this idea that our attention is extremely fragile and Very very easily distracted now. That's not untypical in the history of technology when there's a new technology We often use some version of distraction to describe what's happened and for the simple reason that our patterns have changed and we're suddenly being made aware of Choose George Lakoff's phrase we're becoming reflective about things that used to be reflexes habits suddenly appear to us not as habits, but as even impediments or things that aren't serving us because The need for those habits has changed the uses of those habits has changed But one of the things I wanted to emphasize by starting is and it's part of the motivation for this book When I was vice provost for interdisciplinary studies at Duke I helped to create a lot of programs with faculty and one of them was the center for neuroscience cognitive neuroscience and Because we were hiring a whole faculty and hiring directors I was reading everybody's dossier and in the best work on neuroscience. I was seeing this Incredibly interesting thing happening where the work was about neural plasticity and neural connections and how we learn attention and How excitable the world is things like the fact that 80% of the brain's energy is used in the brain talking to itself not from external distraction, but from its own own Habits and conversations in fact if if it was easy For the brain to stay in a linear monotasking path when we weren't being distracted from external Circumstances the world would have a lot more boot is in it right because we have a whole eastern tradition that spent a lot of time Thinking about it very deeply what happens when you're in a meditative situation No external distractions. All you need to accomplish is mindfulness and it's very very difficult right in fact what we know and especially the work from Brackley and It's ain't what Washington University in st. Louis and more common Fletcher in Cambridge is that in fact tasks and Multitests are far easier on the brain than sustained and undivided attention I wanted to start with that just because we've had a lot of stuff and again the motivation for Writing this book was a lot of stuff lately that's saying not only does multitasking distract us, but it damages our brain. I Don't care if people tell me that multitasking makes us lonely as some people are doing that it makes you shallow that it makes us Distracted because we can change all that the idea that my child Or that I am being my brain is actually being damaged by multitasking I think it's a pernicious and evil thing Because you can't fix that and it's a terrible thing a terrible burden to put on a culture to believe that we're Damaging our brains by doing something. I promise you in that little multitasking exercise You just did no one's brain was damaged in the course of that experiment. I promise Pardon me Little animal One of the most famous experiments In multitasking about attention was Re-enacted here at Harvard. It was first done in the 1970s when there wasn't digital photography And it was done very poorly and people just simply refused to believe what they were seeing So in 1999 two very young psychologists one was a beginning assistant professor here and one was a graduate student at Harvard Had digital cameras and video and they thought well We're gonna reap we're gonna reprise the old Nizer experiment and this is it's now become almost a cliche How many people know what do you all know the gorilla experiment? Okay for those who don't I will explain what happened It's a it's an experiment in attention blindness designed to trap us In our own attention blindness so that we see it because the one thing we can't see is what we can't see so in this experiment the tester shows a video of Six people passing basketball is back and forth as you see half are in white and half are in black Videos less than two minutes long and you ask the audience to count how many times a basketball has passed between people in white Video stops and then you ask your audience who saw who counted ten basketball tosses who counted 13 who counted 14 Who counted 15 and of course if you kind of 15, that's perfect And you know people raise their hand and are very proud that they counted the 15 tosses And then the experimenter says and who saw the gorilla and this was an undergraduate student at Harvard Dan Simon's salmon Simon's and Shabris did this and Dan Simon's tells me that it was an undergraduate at Harvard They dressed her in a gorilla suit and had her walk in between the basketball tossers right in the middle of the basketball tossers She's on camera for a full nine and a half second. That's a long time in camera time She makes this face she pounds her chest, and then she kind of saunters off camera again Nearly 60 people who see the gorilla experiment for the first time When they haven't heard about it before do not see the gorilla That's so ludicrous to believe that you could really Not see the gorilla that's one of those great experiments that tricks you into Realizing that it's your own brain that's been tricking you in fact many people believe that they were tricked and that the second video When you reach reshow the tape and the gorilla's in it, they believe that someone must have substituted another tape Dan Simon's likes to say that 60% of people don't see the gorilla the first time a hundred percent of people Who have never seen the experiment are positive that if they saw it they would have seen the gorilla You know that that attention blindness is also about our inability to see that we don't see the whole world We only see a part of it There's some other hilarious experiments of attention blindness on YouTube that you can see there's one by Richard Wiseman who's a psychologist and amateur magician called the amazing color changing card trick. Have any of you seen this one? It uses one of the oldest, you know Wedding magician tricks in the book, you know, select a card from the deck show it to the audience Don't show me put it back in the deck. Look I can find your card, right? You've all seen some version of that the way it works is attention blindness While you're looking at the at the subject showing around the card The magician changes the deck so that he has a blue deck instead of a red deck So when the card gets put back in he can pick it out because the cards are all different The back end the backside of the cards have all been changed People don't recognize that in the wiseman video The camera pulls back after he tells you the trick he gives away the magic trip the camera pulls back And you see that in the course of a very short video. It's maybe four minutes long He's had this crew that are doing all these ridiculous things He and the woman that's he's working with take off their shirts. So they're wearing totally different colored shirts Somebody else takes down the background. So the background changes somebody else takes out the tablecloth So that suddenly there's a red tub of tablecloth instead of a white one most people far more than in the gorilla experiment don't see the color changes that are happening And it just as most of us don't know the secret to the to the wedding trick of the card There's a third one. That's the scariest of all. There are many of these I've probably taken 30 of these attention blindness tests This Scariest one is the one that's used to train and there are many variations to train airplane pilots You can guess where this is going In the one that I've that I've participated in the pilot is Required to land a plane in extremely challenging atmospheric conditions Velocity win for all kinds of conditions and then the video is shown and The pilot sees and in this case it can be as many as 70 percent of pilots actually land their plane on top of Another very large airplane that's that's part crossways on the runway They simply do not see it because they're so relieved at having navigated all of these these obstacles before They don't see that moment when they're poof. I can land now. It's all everything's taking care of they don't see the airline The other the other aircraft parked on the runway, which needless to say is a very good thing to learn in a flight simulator The first time I saw the gorilla experiment was at an event that my office put on it at Duke University when I was vice provost and It was an event for distinguished professors And it was an interdisciplinary event and someone showed the gorilla experiment and I saw the gorilla I saw the gorilla not because I'm good at this because I'm not I fail all the other tests But that day my office was in charge of the event So I had like one eye on the caterers and seeing who was coming in making sure everyone was seated in the right place The way you are when it's your event And I'm dyslexic So I looked at this tape and it's pretty grainy and unpleasant I thought there's no way I'm gonna do it and I've got more important things to do So I didn't pay attention and that is the very annoying fact Of how the brain is structured and that causes attention blindness when we're not paying attention We see different things than we do when we're paying attention So the first I've got two institutional lessons I want to draw from the gorilla experiment first as weird as it is to find out that you missed the gorilla it's far weirder to be in a room with your colleagues and Distinguished professors. We were all gonna count it right right I would say the the number of people who did not see the gorilla the people who did not see the gorilla Was probably 90% which is a number that's been replicated in other situations as well It's very odd to be sitting there in a room with your colleagues and Realize that you're seeing a gorilla and they're not right. I mean that's kind of it's pretty pretty strange Institutional lesson number one If there's somebody in the room who sees a gorilla Even if 90% of the people in the room don't Don't discount what they see That I would say is one of the biggest Lessons of attention blindness for business but also for learning That it's very very easy to discount the minority the minority Opinion and to assume that the person who sees something that the rest of us smarty pants Don't see it all that they're somehow seeing something that doesn't exist It's important to count basketballs. It's important to see the gorilla It's almost impossible to do both at the same time but To discount the what one person is seeing when you're all paying attention to different direction is to miss a valuable opportunity So one of the things that my organization Organization I helped to create haystack does is we've created a method called collaboration by difference Which says that if you work with the right? Partners, this is also this is borrowed from the lessons of the World Wide Web if you work with the right partners in the right situations with the right tools and With a method that privileges the oddball opinion You have a chance of counting those basketballs and seeing the gorilla if You don't actually construct a method for doing it You never will because she will always be convinced that you're seeing everything there is to see that's the kind of fundamental List lesson of attention blindness if you're a web developer Any web people here? There any? Okay, one of the most famous essays on the open web is the Cathedral in the Bazaar by Eric Raymond and The dicta of that is a one of these kind of geeky things which is with enough eyeballs All bugs are shallow Definitely a mixed metaphor English teacher ear is ringing here What that means is when you're doing web development? If you have Everybody working from the same point of view and everyone agreeing on the same end you're going to have faulty code There's going to be bugs in your code If you keep the situation of development Collaborative development as open as possible. So there is many but many eyeballs That's and in many different eyeballs as possible and they're not regulated You have an excellent chance of actually catching each other's mistakes and making Making the web happen make the making the World Wide Web happen. That was probably the principle The most important principle that Tim Berners-Lee Used in creating the world in addition to writing HTML code to actually well and actually in contributing to HTML code Creating the World Wide Web was having as many diverse Points of view on the code as possible in order to co-create The World Wide Web. It's how Wikipedia Is created as well Which I'll talk about in a little bit One of the things about attention that's important is it's not innate We know that infants do not discriminate newborn babies Pay attention to everything. It could be a fan blade. It could be a shadow. It can be anything And part of what learning is from birth on From birth on is learning what in your world it's worth paying attention to There've been some phenomenal really really interesting infant Neonatal work being done on what Infants actually learn and some of my favorite in the last two years Has been the German and French baby experiments where it turns out that the birth cry as babies are being born Is either a German or a French birth cry and you can you can train your ear? And so people can say oh that be you know without seeing who's being born just hearing recordings That must be a French baby. That must be a German baby It's because you can hear from the six months of gestation and already in the womb Babies are hearing the cries of their culture and learning how to cry In the accent of those around them. That's a pretty amazing Amazing finding And it couldn't it's like bird calls like the science of bird calls has just grown exponentially in the last little while because of Digital recordings these are not things that human ears are trained to hear But when you do them and you crunch all the data you can actually see the variations And then once you see it's attention blindness is scientific research once you see the variations You can then tell people what to listen for and actually train them to listen in a certain way We now know for example that there's that bird calls have semantics and grammar and vocabularies in a way We never believed before through the precisely the same kinds of research methods We also know we used to believe that you've got more neurons as you grew up the same way you've got taller Or weighed more in the world that you somehow gained more neurons. We The best neuroscience now it says that in fact adults have about 40 percent less Neural connections than infants do and that and this is why it's this is important to the idea of multitasking one of the things we do as we learn as we make Certain very efficient neural pathways and we don't make other neural pathways One of my favorite and infant experiments about that is with Japanese babies Japanese babies can tell the difference between R&L by about six or seventh month They cannot tell the difference between R&L anymore because there's no R&L distinction in Japanese If a Japanese adult Wants to learn English where the R&L distinction is crucial. We use R&L a lot in English They have to retrain their ear to hear something that at birth they were able to hear Basically all learning works that way with certain kinds of efficiencies that are schooled To the cultural more norms of our time I'm not going to talk about this today, but in other talks that I've given the new work on how quickly we learn gender and racial roles is pretty amazing and the iPads been very efficient in this because The iPad is an infant interface that very very very young children can use Pre-lingual children can use them and they've done experiments where they'll basically say who's the daddy in this and they'll show white Be white adults black adults different classes male female Well-dressed not well dressed and tiny kids who can't yet speak can arrange the figures on this iPad in ways that it's a shocking Shocking redaction of the racism and gender assumptions and class assumptions of the society. They happen to be born into This is brand new research that's being done in the last six months, but it's it's pretty pretty amazing stuff one of the things that I'm interested in is how School reinforces a certain kind of attention how we school attention for the industrial work workplace the media theorist clay shirky says Institutions tend to preserve the problem they were designed to solve Institutions tend to preserve the problems they were designed to solve what I'm arguing what I argue in in now You see it is that many of the institutions we think of as school We're actually revisions to the medieval Especially higher education revisions to the medieval Academy that made school much more pertinent To the industrial age and the problem that that our institutions are solving is how to pay attention in the industrial age Some of the problems that the that industrial age Education are designed to solve are the problem of how you keep focused attention timeliness Standards and standardization hierarchy specialization metrics and the two cultures arts and humanities and the social sciences on one hand the sciences on the other The symbol of compulsory education. This is not higher education now But public education of the 19th century is of course the school bell Right because you had to convince people the time was important In a pre-industrial world if you're a farmer you don't care that it's 805 You care that the Sun is up and you can do the work for the day and the work might be fixing a fence or shooing a horse or Sewing crops or weeding you do what needs to be done part of what compulsory school was doing was saying no no no that's not the right way of doing things What we need is everybody in school at the same time everyone's sitting in a row everyone doing the same kind of work at the same time by task And learning how to accomplish that task the way our first First little exercise did in a timed way because of course that's the kind of workforce that's needed in the 19th century for the industrial workplace So school becomes the place of regulating time and space Task to street task and attention to a very discrete discrete task for a sustained time Far more than normal attention allows Most people say at three minutes we start to our mind starts to wander at five. We're pretty much gone forget 20 minutes That's kind of humbling to think about that the mind actually starts to wander from it's from a single task That quickly typical school subject might be an hour. That's a lot To expect of a child, but that's what you're trying to do for the industrial workforce is school that kind of attention The two people that are perhaps most important or at least today the two people I want to just talk about Who are most important for theorizing the work of attention the 19th century or William James the great founder of modern psychology and friend Rick Winslow Taylor the Philosopher of the industrial workforce James wines in chapter 11 and principle of psychology that nobody else in English has bothered to write about attention and In fact when he's writing about attention in chapter 11. He does an interesting thing He says what he's interested in his attention and it's opposite and then this is a direct quote what the French call distraction The first time I've been reading James I wrote a bachelor's thesis on James and so I've been reading James for a long time I was shocked when I was going back in the course of writing this book and seeing that and of course the word distraction has been in The English language for a long time, but in its modern usage of Taking you off task He had to go to the French for a French usage of a word in order to put it in his chapter on attention I think that's very very interesting decade after James Frederick Winslow Taylor decides not to go to Harvard Law School But in fact instead to go into industrial work and he starts as a laborer much to the chagrin of his Very very well educated in blue blood family from Philadelphia He decides to go Into the factory because he thinks this is the future and he becomes a manager of attention in the industrial workforce And I this is kind of an old story, but I just want to read a very quick little thing from Taylor's time in motion studies quote How long does it take a laborer with a wheelbarrow full of looster to wheel it approximately 100 feet exactly? 240 times in a 10-hour day. I mean that's focused attention, right? He also believed in quotas For delivering that kind of work on time and if you did it well and did it on a quote on quota You were a soldier and in the Q&A period if you want we can talk about milk militarism and 19th and 20th century attention and if you didn't Make the quota you were a malingerer or a loafer so very punitive terms For not being able to carry out your task to quota on time This is my only real Contentful PowerPoint and I just add to it whenever I come up with come across and yet another sort of major innovation The compulsory public education goes from Massachusetts to Mississippi from 1852 to 1918 most of the other things on that list Are happening between a period of about 1890 and 1920 it's a lot of What we think of as school and work that are being developed at this time Including things and again. This was new to me when I started doing this work The whole idea of standard deviation which has a very very very interesting etiology and I mean etymology in Neither of those is the right word I'm looking for it has a very interesting history in Eugenics the father of Standard deviation was also eugenicists who believed the British upper-class people should be paid to have children and poor people should Stereolized and that's that's a pretty interesting history as well. It's a cousin of Darwin's and a social Darwinist My favorite thing in all of these is the item response test At one point and when I was writing this book my editor said well You're really hard on multiple-choice tests who invented the multiple-choice test anyway And I had to admit I had no idea never even occurred to me that there was a person that invented the multiple-choice test There is his name was Frederick J. Kelly he Invented the multiple-choice test in 1914 He a war was on Men were in fighting in Europe Women were in the factories immigrants were pouring into America at a remarkable rate and Laws had just been passed requiring two years of compulsory secondary school Before that high school was kind of college prep Suddenly, there's a teacher shortage a terrible teacher shortage. So Kelly who's getting his PhD At Kansas State Teachers College now Emporium State Decides he's gonna write a dissertation to solve this problem. And what he says is If we can turn out Model T's Using standardized Mechanized assembly line fashion. What can we do to get us through this crisis this terrible teacher shortage now? In American hit right now at this moment That's like the Model T and he invents the first item response test If you've ever looked in on a child's End of grade test that's part of our national compulsory no child left behind National policy passed in 2002 You will recognize a test. This is a quote from a Kelly test in his dissertation in 1914 Circle the animal from these four that is a farm animal dog cow Crocodile dinosaur It goes on to say fill in the whole circle Do this on time everyone open your book at the same time you must complete your task at the same time it's Taylor for the multiple-choice test and of course, there's two interesting things about that test one If you're a farm kid, why isn't a dog a farm a farm animal, right? So part of what multiple-choice testing is from the beginning Intrinsically is how to think in a way that is about attention blindness how to think in a way that passes the test What we call teaching teaching to the test, right? How not to think about logic how not to think about ambiguity how not to think about associations But to think about what is the answer thereafter so I can get a higher score So I can fill my quota in this test by filling in this bubble, right? The second thing is if you're a kid today, and I did this and you Google farm animal Say like you were confused by that dog in that cow on your farm test On your on your multiple-choice test and you Google farm animal you're gonna get 21,000,900,000 responses What about an a b c d? World prepares a child for a world where they're 21,000,900,000 responses to what is a farm animal? Even more you can do this if you go to farm animals and you see that Google will get you 21,000,900,000 Responses the top one is a fabulous site done by educators. It's a marvelous I spend time on it. It's a fabulous site called farm kids Adorable Only when you read deep into the guts of farm kids do you realize it's a product of Microsoft You need to have the most recent internet Explorer browser to use it. It does not play well with Apple It says right in the fine print this if you're using if you're on an Apple computer. This isn't gonna work right What about a b c d or none of the above? teaches a child in this era how to cope with the avalanche of information and How to deal with this world where information that seems to be free right information is free is in fact proprietary Right what I'm saying is that we've been training kids to a certain kind of attention for the industrial age and in fact Our kids are dealing with all kinds of challenges that are very very different from the ones that That these tests and our whole educational system is geared to In writing now you see it one thing I did was I interviewed You know the found the people who created the World Wide Web and people like Jimmy Wales who is the co-founder of Wikipedia and I said to Jimmy Wales is when you were you know in 2001 When before you'd even launched the first version of of Wikipedia did you have any idea that? 90,000 people would contribute to the largest encyclopedia the world has ever known 282 languages for free voluntarily Anonymously you have to kind of go into the guts of Wikipedia to even find out who's editing what and that other people would edit the work to Make it better and that the American Library Association would first wisely say you've got to be suspicious about this and then With huge admiration I say this because it's not very often that institutions and especially those who are charged with Accuracy and being reference librarians would redo their own work and in recent years They're the American Library Association studies have been saying that in fact Wikipedia is not any more or less Accurate than print refereed encyclopedias, right? That's different than certain, you know specialized research But actually when I was again when I was writing this book I looked up calculus I was a math geek my whole childhood and I looked up calculus On Wikipedia and I was shocked and I thought this is a this is corrupt. There's no way this can be true, right? We all know Newton and Leibniz created calculus and it had all this stuff about Egypt and China and India and The Arab world and Arab mathematicians. I mean, of course, we've all heard a little bit about the great Arab thinkers who contributed to mathematics But this was a whole world of stuff that I had never heard before so I called the head of reference librarians the reference library at Duke and I said This is wrong, right? This is made up. This is some kind of problem and To a credit she said let me let me get back to you Took her a week and she ended up talking to her equivalent head of reference librarians in Egypt in Iran in India and in China and she said, you know what it's right But there was no reference book in English that gave credit to those other sources nor was there in Egyptian Farsi, you know mandarin and the other sources That's kind of amazing Right, and I think it goes again back to the idea of attention blindness and what we can think about as knowledge as attention What happens if we take that funny phrase from the creation of the open web With enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow and apply it to all the ways we can make knowledge together It's it's a different kind of process. It's certainly not filling in the right answers to a bubble test. It's open-ended It's hard to verify. I mean it took her a week before she felt confident getting back to me But it's also a world of knowledge that I would admit I would say we did not even know existed Even 20 years ago When I said to Jimmy Wales, did you know he said we had no idea When you asked him Berners-Lee did he know that they could make the World Wide Web? Remember the World Wide Web doesn't have a boss, right? It has a consortium who ever heard of something as massive as the World Wide Web run by a consortium Right Berners-Lee said he had no idea this code was being written There's a legend I don't know if this is true or not that there was this code being written by someone in Japan It turned out to be a 16 year old high school dropout in Japan It was contributing to the code that became the World Wide Web And that's again by legend Joey Ito who's now head of creative comments and one of the major major figures in Contemporary technology and contemporary thinking about technology Mozilla right open-source browser Passionate about keeping the web free Has claimed 30% of the world's browser usage. That's pretty amazing right a voluntary nonprofit going up against Microsoft and Claiming 30% of the world's share of users of browsers the Mozilla governance is so antithetical to Fredwick Winslow Taylor It's almost comical the if you go on to the Mozilla website and click on governance It says quote Mozilla is an open-source project governed as a meritocracy Our community is structured as a virtual organization where authority is distributed to both volunteer and employed Employed community members as they show their abilities through contributions to the project really I mean, I think by most 20th century views of human nature. That's impossible Right rational choice economic theory isn't that old right the idea that you're only motivated by self-interest that you The idea that this could be done voluntarily for some greater good Kind of astonishing and I don't think we've remotely plumbed what that could mean for education in The century we're living in I Want to open this to questions and answers very quickly But before I do I'd love you to just pick up your card and just shout out some of the things that you circle together About what kinds of Institutional changes we could make if we were really taking seriously the world We've inherited or the world our kids are inheriting and tried to make an education for this moment this historical moment Any things anyone wants to? Yes, please Absolutely, and there's no employer that doesn't say that and especially I don't know in fast company this week There was a wonderful interview with one of the architects of India's If who says critic when they when Indian students come South Asian students come to America's to learn this thing called critical thinking because it's so Important to the Indian workforce critical thing great. Yes Self-designed curriculum for a self-designed world interesting. Okay other things. Yes fantastic Yes, oh, that's interesting. Thank you other ones yes Fantastic, you all heard like this That's a great one I've been loosely involved with a project at Stanford this year where there's we were making an artificial intelligence course Open source and online with feedback done by students etc. So then we thought maybe 20,000 people No, we actually we did we thought 20 people maybe a hundred people Maybe a maybe a thousand people would sign up a hundred thousand people have signed up for this course It's just kind of kind of crazy But yes by what that means to take our knowledge and make it public any other yes Free education absolutely This is a huge issue and one I'm I think probably many of us share the the erosion of what's what that means to have a public educational system eroded and Too expensive for most people We know that the number Two reason people from lower incomes don't do well on standardized tests is Maybe they don't have enough knowledge base, etc. The number one is It's really hard to focus on The kind of thinking odd kind of thinking that you can game now kind of thinking on a multiple-choice test And if you don't believe it's gonna get you somewhere you don't So a lot of the tello test scores are more about attention than they are about knowledge Which I think is very interesting In writing now you see it I interviewed lots and lots of people who are already doing many of the things that you've already talked about and that you have On your card Some of my favorites Are somebody who's actually gotten a lot of attention since since then Thorkelson a who has a program called Company called special specialist turn he was a software writer in Denmark who also had an autistic son and Realized that in his company. He wasn't able to find software performance testers. It's something that only humans can do It's not machine doable But then his son did it brilliantly and he changed his company entirely and created a new company where he only employs autistic people as software performance testers The problem is he has to hire go-betweens between the software performance testers and so-called NTS Which is the audio word for neurotypicals? because the autistic people are so frustrated at how stupid the NTS are and how Unable to pay attention they are and how they spend all their time out Gossiping instead of doing their work, etc. etc. So they have you know, he has to have these trainers who say it's okay They still contribute to the company in other ways. I know they're inferior at software performance testing But they really they have their use don't just write them off. We really need them. It's okay Another person at one point I thought what's what part of our world has not been transformed Is there any part of a world that hasn't been transformed and I thought building trades right brick and mortar? How has that been trade changed by the internet? I was trying to be my own devil's advocate about how big this change is Is this really the fourth great information age in all human history? So I'm decided okay building trades then I'm driving along and on NPR Someone named Dennis Quaintance was being interviewed. He's a local builder in Greensboro, North Carolina successful developer in Greensboro, North Carolina a small southern city and He talks about how he had twins when he was 40 and his wife were walking along the riverbank with their twins and Wondering when these kids grew up. Are they gonna be proud of us? And he said, you know, I'm affluent. I'm successful I'm respected. I'm a good guy. Yeah, they're gonna be proud and his wife said what about what we've contributed to the environment and He was about to have a contract for a 30 million dollar hotel in Greensboro And he said what if we tried to make a sustainable hotel? He called together the 60 people that had worked on all of his previous builds building projects and He charged each of them. This is collaboration by difference You who've done electricity before find out about sustainable electric work You find out about sustainable plumbing that he called it toilet of the week because every week They'd bring in a new toilet to see how it worked. Was it efficient? Was it beautiful? Was it elegant? Did it save water? It was trial and error and doing a lot of collaborative work Learning through what other people had learned on the internet though. Tells beautiful. I'm a design snob and it's beautiful It would be a hotel that would be beautiful by Cambridge standards by New York standards by Paris standards by LA standards It feels great when you're in the proximity hotel I've spent time there You feel like you're at the beach and you realize you've never breathed air like this before But the big thing is when the lead association LED came To see how sustainable it was the proximity hotel got the only the world's only platinum lead designation for a hotel 60 people Learning how to be sustainable So when I said to Dennis well, what was the what did what was the learn message from all this? You know, what did you take away from this? He said well, I took away a message. It's both really happy and really sad Said the happy part is that we're 60 people most of us don't even have high school educations we're from Greensboro, North Carolina and We taught ourselves how to be sustainable because we believed in it He also saved money the project was 30 million and it came in at 31 million. He saved a million dollars on the HVAC within a year pretty amazing And on there were tax breaks as well But it's and when the recession came they're doing well because they've gotten all this attention is the world's only platinum lead hotel And people all are working because they're the only Sustainable developer contractors in North Carolina, so they're doing great Said so that was the happy part. We learned we taught ourselves We worked together. We came up with this new method method of working for a goal And we got recognized for it. The world's only platinum lead hotel. That's the happy part. The sad part is wasn't that difficult And of course why that sad is if you can make a change that momentous and it's not that difficult Why isn't everybody doing it if we have the means if we have the tools to change the way we do things Why don't we what is stopping us? And I'm convinced that a lot of what's stopping us is a hundred years of schooling towards a certain kind of ideal and method and Education for an industrial age Why I wanted to start with those cards is I believe that we it's not that difficult and I think we all Know we have within our hands literally, right? We have ideas about how we can change and I actually don't believe it's that difficult and that's where I'd like to end today Thank you Have you come across more? Have you come across in your research ways of encouraging more collaborative learning Initiatives I guess in classes that routinely use lectures and Aren't really conducive to that kind of learning. I guess I have any examples I'm now hearing because I gotten so much trouble from my how to crowdsource grading blog, which is this whole Collaborative way of learning and teaching and peer grading together and peer learning peer judgment together But I now hear from people all over who are using different methods including in large lecture classes The little card thing is one that actually learned from somebody else and that's something she uses In her classes and I now do that with just about all my classes where I have people write Individually then collectively and then I sometimes mix it up in different ways I've organized 60 people 60 students to do innovation challenges Where I will set a task and then they have to solve the task collaboratively sometimes in a Two-hour period sometimes in a two-day period But it's an actually some kind of project that they have to build together do together The one I just found recently I gave a talk a couple weeks ago at the University of Southern California in their Think it's called cinematic arts the School of Cinematic Arts and it's a school where they have filmmakers people thinking doing critical theory about media Script writers Production people very very different and they found that people weren't talking to each other So they made an augmented reality game for their introductory class, which is about 200 students where Hidden in the lectures are clues that different teams of students each week have to Manipulate in such a way you might either get an email or you might get a text that says 437 and what you do in the lectures you listen for 437 and there's some clue Embedded in that and it tells you to go to a project and then there's another clue that unfolds So there's both the lecture that's happening and these are cinematic students So they're doing it in a very creative way, but when I gave my lecture they had me read a little script in the middle of my talk that was a clue and The only way you can solve the clue is by working across the different Disciplines they've arranged this this event so that it's basically like a cinema like a film crew Coming together where everybody has to collaborate their different tasks in order to find it and by the end of the term they will have a credibly made a collaborative Video project of the whole class in addition to what they're learning in these sort of lecture lecture classes now That's the most elaborate one I've heard and you can go I think online and find and for the School of Cinematic Arts and find out the details of that There's other ones Mike Wesh. Do you know Mike Wesh is somebody who teaches that? I'm gonna tear do a terrible thing. It's either Kansas State or University of Kansas. Does anyone know one of those Kansas State. Thank you Mike does Anthropologies of media where he involves the students in making a video of the course and It's very low-tech pieces of paper with writing on it But students have to research it and then they produce something together these videos get hits in I think probably they're up to Vision of students today. I think it's had over four million hits so far on YouTube But they produce these collaborative works that they do on YouTube So none of those is the things I'm describing aren't every day doing something collaborative But ways to take the lecture class and make it more collaborative. I've also taught with clickers My students a year and a half ago actually made something Called the feedbacker that was a sort of non punitive back channel where they could Be asking each other questions as my life as the lecture was going on and then Contributing to the lecture. I think you have one. I think around said you said that I'm ours You said there was something here at The Berkman if we've chosen to use it where there's a back channel that's going on and people from the audience can be Putting things in a Twitter feed that are or in some kind of a feed It's a double feed and then you can actually incorporate that into the lecture So there are ways of doing that. I've also had people with Fiona We've done things at big lectures at conferences where people have tweeted Questions and Fiona's collect collected their questions and been asking them in the course of a panel discussion You know, so there are ways of getting The back channel to talk And they're sometimes pretty massive ways of doing it IBM has a proprietary system that does a pretty good job of having as many as a hundred people Where I build a talk together in a conference call and back channel at the same time and be able to do a kind of simultaneous conversation Unfortunately educational technology. I think it's way Behind a graded surveillance terrible at collaboration and we're not quite there yet But I'm hoping the students today will start inventing better better kinds of collaborative tools And I bet in this audience there are people right here in this room. I'm sure there are people who already have found interesting ways Thank you Yes lots lots of thoughts one of my favorite places that I studied was a sixth grade class where it was called Creative productions and the point of this class was to take everything students learned in all of their other classes and find kind of real-world Uses for it and this teacher who was 25 brand-new teacher Had each student decide do I want to do this alone? Do I want a collaborative team and what kind of what kind of team do I want? And they actually part of what they did as sixth graders was talked about their collaborations And so if somebody wasn't contributing they would come in in the beginning of the day and would write It's like, you know, I want to talk today about how frustrated I am that all my team members aren't contributing And his point was in the real world. Yeah, everything works on teams and there's still people not carrying their weight Right Anybody who's been in this room who's ever worked collaboratively knows that there's sometimes if you're gonna get the job done it means Yeah, teamwork you're doing the work right you're doing it When I just to finish that story when I asked Duncan where he learned how to do this method it turned out his dad is a Consultant for Fortune 500 companies that are going through technological changes and the workforce is dislocated And he was giving a sixth grader this Collaboration sheet that his dad uses for executives at training session. They were doing it. I mean that was pretty amazing Interesting Interesting. Well when I did thank you, that's it. I like your answer better. That's very good When I teach taught this is your brand on the internet Three years ago I Came up with a syllabus My students two students would be in charge of the class each week they would read the syllabus What was assigned that week they would decide whether they wanted to use that Augmented or get rid of it and do something else They would make assignments to the class then and and read the assignments and at the end of the class I thought all of these students are gonna think this is the most brilliant class They've ever taken and and they were very generous in their comments But three of my students including the only two a pluses I think I've ever given Got together and said, you know what we don't like about this class is you've taught us so much about peer contribution But you're grading so you just said your grading system is the conventional grading system. We think you need to change that Yes, and you know if you're a terrible teacher if you don't listen to your a critique first of all It's hard for students to write a signed critique and for your eight if your eight-plus students are saying there's a problem There's a problem. So that's what made me go to the system where Same assignment Old-fashioned 60s contract grading but to decide whether the assignments are Satisfactory enough the two students in charge have to give feedback and decide whether it's satisfactory than the next two next week They're students again and two other students do it So the class is really about collaboration and feedback and how we can learn from one another That changed the dynamic entirely that that was that was definitely the most remarkable Experience I've ever had as a teacher. It was it was it was truly mind-boggling, but seeing students Understand what feedback is it's kind of amazing because we're very poor at that We're really good at telling students what they're doing wrong or or but we're not very good at telling them how you take and incorporate Feedback into their learning fact I kind of think shows like American Idol and so you think you can dance and project runway and all of those reality shows where feedback is so crucial and you see Somebody struggling and get feedback from the judges and it seems so harsh and then the next time they've incorporated it And they've gotten better. I kind of think that that's almost doing the job that as educators We're not doing enough of teaching students in this era How to really give and receive tough feedback when I teach that way people always cynics always say Oh, that's probably the easiest class they teach at Duke Well about a quarter of this no students ever think that and about quarter of the students drop out And but there's since I'm the only one who teaches that way There's always a long waiting list and another quarter come in so it's a little self-selective But it's an it's a formidable class I usually have to calm the students down because they're working too hard much and there's lots of research on this much harder To impress peers and teachers right if you're a student at Harvard or a student at Duke You've got a lot of experience doing well for a teacher doing well for your peers is really tough really tough Yes That's really it's really interesting gender is an issue that's Very very interesting to me. I am also a real groupie of research design I mean, I love reading in the guts of research design. I haven't yet read articles on Research on gender collaboration that I'm convinced by there's some interesting stuff on multitasking That's mostly about young children how early on we take three and four year old girls and ask them to do multiple Very responsible tasks at a much earlier age than we in our society Then what we require boys to do and there's some extra I'm not sure about the extrapolations from it that that research is pretty solid The extrapolation from it is that women do better at multitasking than men because it's just expected in a different way So there may be some carry over to collaboration too, but I haven't yet met one that where the research design feels like it's Enough of a control to really convince me I'm a skeptic about research design because I really do love great research for design But but it's I think it's an area that people should be doing more research on be really interesting There's lots of cross-cultural work on collaboration, you know where some cultures do it much better than others big, you know Because it's part of the culture. It's one of those things you learn early on Yes Yeah, this is a bit of a generic question But I'm just want to have you take on what do you think of the effect on of video games on attention because there's a bit of Two school and thoughts on that. Yeah, there's so many schools of thoughts on that You know back in the 80s and before Columbine before 1999 almost all the work was positive on video games Good for retention good for memory good for spatial configurations good for certain kinds of 3d modeling And that research is has gone into incredibly productive game mechanics that are being used for rehab especially of stroke victims For training of pilots military training Robotic surgery training all kinds of things that need Some kind of actually They use really interesting game mechanics to teach people how to do better on multiple-choice tests the research that almost stopped in 1999 and I think it's partly Columbine the horrible tragedy of Columbine and Around the same time video games start getting more and more Narrative and graphic and scary first-person shooter games instead of Pac-Man and you know the first-person games The research really starts Going towards how video games hurt us So it's really only been I think in about the last two or three years maybe five years Partly because of the Berkman Institute and Pew and MacArthur and other places that are really looking at how kids and young people Actually use video games that there's been some been research again saying you know it really doesn't destroy your brain There are benefits here, but there was about a ten-year eight-year gap Where the research almost entirely was for the elderly handicapped professional training a sports training military training and we just lost work on video games during that time I think cross-culturally historically games, you know that In the in the purest form of a contest or a challenge where when you do well in the challenge You don't get a time out or a research you get a harder challenge is a fantastic way of learning and I'm pretty interested I don't like what's so-called called gamification, but I do like individual performance-based testing where the test is Incorporated into the learning method mechanism. So you actually do something like an algebra problem and Depending on how you do on the algebra problem. You're then another problem is generated It's either harder or less hard and either a challenge or not challenge. I think those mechanics tend to work quite well But it's you know, we have to catch up on research I think I don't think the research is I think there's a lot of platitudes and a lot of prejudices and not necessarily as much Research as we need to have So I'm not I'm not trying to be evasive. I'm trying to be as precise as possible For rehab and things it's we know that it's you know, that it's an extremely good motivator in boring tasks Right, you know like people having to rehab Learn to read again after they've had disabilities debilitating strokes. It's you know, it's terribly terribly boring work and Game mechanics can really video games can really help make that doable And if you don't practice it, you don't you don't recover. It's that simple So some of that work is really impressive especially work that's coming out of the Netherlands. It's really really interesting Thanks That might be a good sort of segue to a question about medicine And I don't know if that's you've talked about that much But when I go to get some form of medical care Often not any longer being able to see it the doctor the god of the dispensing of care But now relegated to the new rising category of physicians assistant I find that I'm sitting with somebody who is spending and this happens with doctors too Who's spending all his or her time looking at a computer screen and not dealing with me at all? and Interestingly the I forget his name, but he has a popular best-seller out called cutting for stone Who had an op-ed piece in the New York Times about this very? issue for Doctors and patients and people dealing with in that environment where he was sort of saying let's get back to Contact real, you know touch And interaction with the patient instead of with the computer screen. So I wonder if this inspires any thoughts I'm fast and I mean Haystack the organization I co-founded is trying to take the lessons of open web developers and apply them to education Two years ago. I got this letter. I mean it was a physical letter in an envelope From the head of the Mozilla corporation saying we've looked world over for organizations that are interested in learning and we think you're it And I thought well, this is cheesy, right? There's a post-it note on a call me mark sermon and a phone number I was like yeah oldest trick in the book and I almost threw it out and and one of my haystack team said just call So I called and it's mark sermon I said this is really like yeah, well, we knew you were an English teacher So we thought you'd want a real letter You know and we thought putting a post-it note on was clever. He didn't know it was cheesy He thought that was really clever would get my attention, but I've been hanging out with the Mozilla Foundation people since then They have more parties and more meet-ups and more face-to-face than anyone I've ever encountered They're always looking for an excuse to have face-to-face, and in fact they say they do far more traveling to be together Because they spend all their time online, and they know how important a human is the reason that's important is I think well Whenever we're techno determinists in the sense of believing that technology makes us either smarter or dumber We forget that these are tools That we need to use wisely and I figure if you're head of the Mozilla Foundation You kind of know about Technology, but you also know about human spirit in fact any 11th Monday at 11 o'clock Anyone in the world can call mark and talk to him on the phone There's a phone number on the website and anyone can call and ask about anything any Monday at 11 o'clock So that pardon me He's in Toronto, so I think that's Eastern time. No, it's absolutely. It's interesting. You'll you have no idea What's gonna have they posted agenda, but there's also an open call that anyone can do it But the point is the people who are making and keeping the web open know we're humans Why would we give over our power to a machine? Why would we why would you a doctor look at a computer screen if I if I want to look at a computer screen? I'm gonna you know if my elbow is hurting I'm gonna go to my elbow calm and find out from my elbow calm what to do if I'm going to a doctor I want a doctor to pay attention to me and it's odd I mean I think you know the internet is making us dumber the internet is damaging our brains Logic is also that we're powerless. No, we're not and I think the important point and again We're 15 years in so we're right on time is to take in the fact that we can use these tools in a way That serves us instead of the other way around and we're at the right time to be doing that I just wanted to add that this was one of the things it was has always been distressing to me about the Obama administration Emphasis and Obama's emphasis on computerization of medical records and medical care Which seems to miss what it's already You know some of what it's already doing in some ways in some of the ways in which it's been applied and is being used And I like no Please no more computerization of medical care, although I realize it's you know medical records are another category, but Anyway, actually I personally think that's helping to solve the human problem of lost medical records You know I would like there to actually be to when you can move around in our mobile society forever records move with it I think that's different than person care But I I'm so with you about the staring at the computer screen instead of me if I'm actually that's what I say about teaching If I can be replaced by a computer screen, I should be In other words if there's no value added about us having this precious time together to talk and do something together Put it online Right. I want the experience of face-to-face to be something that honors how rare It isn't our busy lives to have face-to-face and that really takes that as a special moment And there's lots of you know football games There's lots of crowd activities that are important to share with other people but to honor that the visceral bodily Part of that kind of participation is I think part of understanding the digital age I Have a question that sort of may veer into the the issue of optimism and attention because part of what I'm hearing in your discussion of The sclerosis of education government Process even in business has to do with the sort of mixed need for creativity and advancement and preservation of the status quo and we do things the way we've always done them because if I talk myself out of a construction Job by doing the work faster. I'm out of work sooner So there are examples of foundations that want to spend down their capital of bands that want to break up on a certain Date to avoid becoming shelf-stale. Can you talk about how the the need for attention and longevity is at odds increasingly with this need for institutional knowledge and longevity It's a There are many ways I can approach that and I can think of many ways to approach that I do think Clay Shurkey's partly right that institutions like to preserve the problem for which they were Tend to preserve the problems for which they were created, but I also think Institutions have within them the forces of change that there's something about Institutions are human. It's almost like what we were just talking about with the computer screen, you know Institutions are both intractable and the more intractable. We think they are the more intractable. They are trying to Help people feel they're powerful enough to make an institutional change It's you know, it's often arduous to make an institutional change But I think it's not only doable, but I also think there are moments where organizations Feel they're being Held back by not going through the changes that need to happen and at that moment Being as informed as we can be to act and to see how we can make changes is extremely important I mean what because I like to put myself out there doing these crazy educational experiments. I always get a Certain amount of negative stuff and people are like wow, that's so scary. Why would you do that? It's because what people don't know is I'm also getting So much more excitement and people asking what's happening and the 350,000 Mostly students around the world who are coming to these Haystack Scholar forums student-run forums, you know there's something really astonishing about that and But but how we get over our fear at institutional change in order to make change happen is that You know that that requires somebody with a different Expertise than me, but I do think Dennis Quintin's that's why I love that story so much really wasn't that hard That's that's pretty inspiring People always call me an optimist actually don't know that I'm an optimist. Well, maybe yeah, yeah, okay Yes, I Do you have any hope for a a few portals that are going to be able to basically refer to Good experiments about being an optimist about mindfulness about Measuring these that are and have been happening in overlapping circles such as the mind and body conference Which is yearly with the Dalai Lama there as a scientist not as I know you and there's another One coming up. I think that MIT the end of the month and it's a basically future of information and health and they're including starting right off with some of the things like music and the things that are not what you think of as cognitive Measurable but they're measurable they are measurable and they can show the Resulting in increase in whatever the task is Teambuilding whatever there's you have criteria that are measurable. They're doing that. So I'm asking about the portal portals maybe through some More stable organization like the NIH which is Overlapping these disciplines and just saying well, there's these seed projects They didn't happen to get funded, but they had very good results in this is the area with music therapy or this is the area with teens and mindfulness of projects and or teens and mentoring like gangs New York gang people Mentoring kids and they're doing they're they're being the big brother and there's measurable results in the socio Social improvement area I'll give you my card afterwards and if you feel free to email me because there's hundreds of them There's so much going on and I can tell that I better cut this short But please please do write to me and I'll be happy to pass on what I can't because there's lots and lots and Just thank you all for being such so great