brain research distance ed

The Implications of Brain Research for Distance Education

Katrina A. Meyer
Assistant Professor, Department of Educational Leadership
University of North Dakota
katrina_meyer@und.nodak.edu

posted on FB in 2013 https://www.facebook.com/plamen.miltenoff/posts/10100455869591041

The brain is actually three brains: the ancient reptilian brain, the limbic brain, and the cortical brain. This article will focus on the limbic brain, because it may be most important to successfully using interactive video or web-based video. The limbic brain monitors the external world and the internal body, taking in information through the senses as well as body temperature and blood pressure, among others. It is the limbic brain that generates and interprets facial expressions and handles emotions, while the cortical brain handles symbolic activities such as language as well as action and strategizing. The two interact when an emotion is sent from the limbic to the cortical brain and generates a conscious thought; in response to a feeling of fear (limbic), you ask, “what should I do?” (cortical).

The importance of direct eye contact and deciphering body language is also important for sending and picking up clues about social context.

The loss of social cues is important because it may affect the quality of the content of the presentation (by not allowing timely feedback or questions) but also because students may feel less engaged and become frustrated with the interaction, and subsequently lower their assessment of the class and the instructor (Reeves & Nass, 1996). Fortunately, faculty can provide such social cues verbally, once they are aware of the importance of helping students use these new media.

Attachment theory also supports the importance of physical and emotional connections.

As many a struggling teacher knows, students are often impervious to learning new concepts. They may replay the new information for a test, but after time passes, they revert to the earlier (and likely wrong) information. This is referred to as the “power of mental models.” As explained in Marchese (2000), when we view a tree, it is not as if we see the tree in our head, as in photography.

The coping strategies of the two hemispheres are fundamentally different. The left hemisphere’s job is to create a belief system or model and to fold new experiences into that belief system. If confronted with some new information that doesn’t fit the model, it relies on Freudian defense mechanisms to deny, repress or confabulate – anything to preserve the status quo. The right hemisphere’s strategy is to play “Devil’s Advocate,” to question the status quo and look for global inconsistencies. When the anomalous information reaches a certain threshold, the right hemisphere decides that it is time to force a complete revision of the entire model and start from scratch (Ramachandran & Blakeslee, 1998, p. 136).

While much hemispheric-based research has been repudiated as an oversimplification (Gackenbach, 1999), the above description of how new information eventually overwhelms an old world view may be the result of multiple brain functions – some of which work to preserve our models and others to alter – that help us both maintain and change as needed.

Self-talk is the “the root of empathy, understanding, cooperation, and rules that allow us to be successful social beings. Any sense of moral behavior requires thought before action” (Ratey, 2001, p. 255).

Healy (1999) argues that based on what we know about brain development in children, new computer media may be responsible for developing brains that are largely different from the brains of adults. This is because “many brain connections have become specialized for . . . media” (p. 133); in this view, a brain formed by language and reading is different from a brain formed by hypermedia. Different media lead to different synaptic connections being laid down and reinforced, creating different brains in youngsters raised on fast-paced, visually-stimulating computer applications and video games. “Newer technologies emphasize rapid processing of visual symbols . . . and deemphasize traditional verbal learning . . . and the linear, analytic thought process . . . [making it] more difficult to deal with abstract verbal reasoning” (Healy, 1999, p. 142).

 

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more on distance ed in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=distance+education

Teach like a pirate

Burgess, D. (2012). Teach like a pirate: Increase student engagement, boost your creativity, and transform your life as an educator. San Diego, Calif.: Dave Burgess Consulting, Inc..

Riddell, R. (2018, February 1). FETC: How can administrators ensure digital-age classrooms are best serving learners? Retrieved February 2, 2018, from https://www.educationdive.com/news/fetc-how-can-administrators-ensure-digital-age-classrooms-are-best-serving/516059/
his switch flipped when he learned more about why students like to play games. Games, he said, provide an environment where we get to try without penalty because failure is part of the journey. Everyone can be a hero, and games are goal-oriented and provide, in some ways, a representation of the world students want to be a part of. They’re social and provide positive stress.

VR in education must experiment

Riddell, R. (2018, February 2). Ed shouldn’t invest heavily in VR yet, but experimentation is key. Retrieved February 2, 2018, from https://www.educationdive.com/news/ed-shouldnt-invest-heavily-in-vr-yet-but-experimentation-is-key/516160/
Google, for instance, has made virtual field trips to inaccessible locations easier for history and social studies classes with its Cardboard viewers used in conjunction with the Expeditions app. And technologies like zSpace have expanded opportunities in STEM subjects with virtual interactive dissections, diagrams and experiments.

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more on VR in education in this IMS blog

Qi Gong

Dr. Jerry Wellik will lead
When: every Monday
Where: in Atwood’s Maple Room
FREE Qi Gong sessions. Here is more info: https://www.springforestqigong.com/

Who: Faculty, staff, students and all community members are welcome.

Please consider also introducing in your classes to contemplative computing. Here is more information:

https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=contemplative+computing

You may have heard the names of
David Levy (https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2016/06/01/mindful-tech/ )

Dan Barberzat (https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2013/11/05/getting-unplugged/ )
and, naturally,
Sherry Turkle

Please let us know, if you need more information, regarding the well-being of you and your students in relation to technology.

media technology and well being

Kushlev, K. (2018). Media technology and well-being: A complementarity-interference model. In E.Diener, S. Oishi, & L. Tay (Eds.), Handbook of well-being. Salt Lake City, UT: DEF Publishers. DOI:nobascholar.com.  Retrieved from https://www.academia.edu/35761357/Media_Technology_and_Well-Being_A_Complementarity-Interference_Model
Media technology—from mass media to social media and from video gaming to computer-mediated communication—plays an increasingly central role in people’s lives. Due to exponential increases in computing power, people now carry incredibly powerful computers—their smartphones—everywhere they go. This ever-greater access to media technology is generating an ever-greater conflict between media activities and the unmediated activities critical for psychological well-being—from our face-to-face conversations and family time to our down time and work lives. What are the costs and benefits of people’s modern media technology use for psychological well-being? Using a complementarity-interference (CI) framework, I review research to illuminate key psychological processes (i.e., mediators) and conditions (i.e., moderators) of the relationship between media technology and psychological well-being. Based on the existing evidence, I propose an initial theoretical CI model of the effects of media technology on psychological well-being. I use this CI model to outline important directions for future research, providing guidelines for an integrated, theoretically informed research on media technology.
Keywords: Media, Communication technology, Computer-mediated communication (CMC), Subjective well-being, Human-computer interaction (HCI)
Definition Media Technology
Media technology. In this chapter, we will explore psychological well-being in the context of modern media technology. In common parlance, we often think of the word ‘media’ as referring to mass media, such as news media (e.g., TV, radio), and more recently, to social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram). But media—the plural of medium—broadly refers to any technological tool that serves as a bridge or conduit to stimuli not otherwise available in the immediate physical environment. Thus, media technology refers to books and newspapers, radio and television, video and computer games—or to any device or method people use to transcend the constraints of their immediate physical environment: from yesterday’s dial-up telephone to the today’s smartphone, and from writing a hand-written letter to texting a friend (c.f., Okdie et al., 2014). Related terms also exist in the literature including information and communication technology, or ICT, as well as computer-mediated communication, or CMC. Most of the findings discussed here apply to—and in fact come from—the literature on ICT and CMC
While using the broad term, media technology, this chapter will focus primarily on the effects of media technology developed in the past century or so, including television, video games, and, most recently, mobile computers such as smartphones. In other words, we will be focusing on screen media technology. I will use the term mediated to refer to the stimuli afforded by the media technology, and the term unmediated to refer to behavior that does not involve the use of media (e.g., face-to-face interactions). Even though media technology itself is physical, I will use the term immediate physical environment to refer to the environment in which the media technology use occurs.

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more on contemplative computing in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=contemplative+computing

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