"Hold on. What about the work of Jason Watson and David Strayer who researched “supertaskers.” They studied 200 subjects in a controlled fashion, and determined that 2.5 percent could in fact drive a car in a difficult simulation while performing a complex set of cognitive tasks (so-called OSPAN tasks). Those researchers stated (see Supertaskers: Profiles In Extraordinary Multitasking Ability):
Supertaskers are not a statistical fluke. The single-task performance of supertaskers was in the top quartile, so the superior performance in dual-task conditions cannot be attributed to regression to the mean. However, it is important to note that being a supertasker is more than just being good at the individual tasks. While supertaskers performed well in single-task conditions, they excelled at multi-tasking.
This research is continuously overlooked, especially when someone comes up with some results that seem to confirm the conventional wisdom that a) multitasking is impossible, b) people are bad at task switching, and 3) it can’t be learned."
Howard Rheingold's insight:
Is supertasking learnable? Nobody knows. I don't dispute the research by Nass et. al., and one of the first things I teach my students about infotention is that if they think they are more efficient when they are multitasking, they are probably wrong. I also talk about goals other than efficiency, about situations in which it is necessary to multitask (ask any aviator or parent of an infant), and about learning how to cut down on the cognitive costs of task-switching by working on it. This excellent piece goes through much of the scientific research and weighs its significance.
Is supertasking learnable? Nobody knows. I don't dispute the research by Nass et. al., and one of the first things I teach my students about infotention is that if they think they are more efficient when they are multitasking, they are probably wrong. I also talk about goals other than efficiency, about situations in which it is necessary to multitask (ask any aviator or parent of an infant), and about learning how to cut down on the cognitive costs of task-switching by working on it. This excellent piece goes through much of the scientific research and weighs its significance.
However, metacognition is a very complex phenomenon. It refers to the cognitive control and monitoring of all sorts of cognitive processes like perception, action, memory, reasoning or emoting. It is also plausible that control over such cognitive processes can be either exiplit (people are aware of it, i.e. they have "epistemic feelings" or infer things) or implicit (they don't reflect)."
Howard Rheingold's insight:
This edutech wiki is listed as a "stub," but it contains a very good start of listings of typologies, strategies, knowledge types, and references.
The external infotention environment includes dashboards. This from Pacific Northwest Laboratory, supported by US Dept. of Homeland Security, appears to be a dashboard for people to respond to complex emergencies -- infotention meets augmented collective intelligence.
We can understand that by looking at other disciplines. Like quarterbacks, radiologists are experts in seeing things quickly. What is invisible to us is obvious to them. They can diagnose a disease after looking at a chest X-ray for a fifth of a second, the time it takes to make a single voluntary eye movement. As they become more trained, they move their eyes less until all they have to do is glance at a few locations for a few moments to find the information they need.
This is called “selective attention.” It is a hallmark of expertise.
Adriaan de Groot, a chess master and psychologist, studied expertise by showing a chess position to players of different ranks. He found that grandmasters evaluated few moves and re-evaluated them less often than other players. One grandmaster evaluated one move twice, then evaluated another and played it. It was the best possible move. This was generally true: Grandmasters never considered moves that were not one of the top five best possible moves. Other players considered moves as poor as twenty-second-best. The less expert the player, the more options they considered, the more evaluations they made, and the worse their eventual move was.
Less thinking led to better solutions. More thinking led to worse solutions. Were grandmasters making their moves by inspiration?
No. Experts do not think less. They think more efficiently. The practiced brain eliminates poor solutions before they reach the conscious mind."
Howard Rheingold's insight:
Metacognition is the interior aspect of infotention, just as managing information streams is the exterior aspect. Training one's attention online involves a great deal of conscious practice regarding what not to pay attention to, what not to think about.
When I wrote Smart Mobs in 2001, I ended up with pages of text that I had culled, both quotes and my own drafts. I highlighted key passages and then underlined the core of the key passages. I arranged the pages in stacks of related material and created indexes for the stacks on index cards. Then I shuffled the stacks around on my desk. Scrivener has a useful index card view. Gingko combines mindmapping with indexcarding. When trying to organize complex, clumping collections of info, this could be a useful infotention tool -- I haven't tried it yet.
"The Precision Information Environment (PIE) Activity Awareness Environment was designed to improve the information synthesis process by bringing in multiple, disparate data feeds and sources, extracting features of interest and visualizing the information to give emergency response professionals insight and situational understanding in a timely and intuitive manner. The system also applies a user recommendation system to help filter the data based on the needs and activities of the user thereby giving them the right information at the right time. http://precisioninformation.org"
Howard Rheingold's insight:
Infotention comes to a community for whom it is literally a life and death manner. This video introduces a dashboard for emergency response professionals.
The Precision Information Environment (PIE) Activity Awareness Environment was designed to improve the information synthesis process by bringing in multiple, disparate data feeds and sources, extracting features of interest and visualizing the information to give emergency response professionals insight and situational understanding in a timely and intuitive manner. The system also applies a user recommendation system to help filter the data based on the needs and activities of the user thereby giving them the right information at the right time. http://precisioninformation.org
Tracking hashtags can be part of an infotention dashboard, especially when researching particular subjects. As always, Robin Good finds, evaluates, and explains five tools for doing so.
Hashtags are everywhere - literally. Name the network and you'll find them. Here's a useful article to help keep an eye on the hashtags you need to watch at your institution.
A Hashtag, which is a simple organizational concept that allows people to organize their tweets, thoughts, and ideas around one topic (which is represented by a hashtag), has become so powerful that even Facebook has integrated this content and users’ discovery device in its platform, making it further valuable.
Although this Scoop.it is not about curation, learning curation methods can be an excellent infotention training -- you have to analyze and make critical decisions about the information you choose to pass along to others. And Robin Good is a master.
One question though: what did you exactly mean by saying "Although this Scoop.it is not about curation..."? I think there may be something of interest in that line.
""Newer versions of Chrome spruce up the New Tab page by adding some shortcuts to your most-visited Web sites or Chrome apps. A previous extension I wrote about, New Tab Page adds the weather, some headlines, and links to Chrome apps. Onefeed does all of this, plus a custom newsfeed and social media updates from Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and Instagram. You can also attach your Dropbox account, if you really want to.
Howard Rheingold's insight:
Using dashboards such as (my favorites) Netvibes (for RSS feeds) and Hootsuite (for Twitter and Facebook) can dial up or dial down your distraction level. The critical difference, of course, lies in how you use them. It's the combination of deliberate attentional self-training and the proper use of information and knowledge tools that adds up to infotention. If you are a Chrome power-user, this replacement for your New Tab page offers a different way to roll your own dashboard.
But what if you don’t want to have to ask? Search engines are fantastic, but they still require that you go to them and then try to figure out how to formulate your query in a way that gets you decent results.
Primal already has the ability to understand what you want, and we’re now working on some technology that will let Primal deliver you the content that you truly care about before you know you want it.
Read on to learn more about Primal’s new software agent and content streaming framework.
Howard Rheingold's insight:
There was a lot of talk about software agents about ten years ago -- computer code that would seek, filter, and deliver information specific to your interests I have not tried this yet, but I'm interested that people are trying with today's technology -- and that RSS is one of its building blocks.
Sometimes you need to quickly immerse yourself in a new field. You might want to gain expertise or quickly gauge what the current issues are around a particular topic. One way of doing this is by c...
Howard Rheingold's insight:
Twitter is a powerful infotention tool if you use it that way. Discovering experts and learning from them is key. I use Diigo and Delicious as hunting groungs for expertise, then follow the expert candidates I find in a particular field via Twitter lists. These step-by-step instructions can be useful to those who don't already use Twitter this way.
CTV News Google aims to ease email overload with new Gmail sorting tabs Los Angeles Times Email overload is not a trivial problem, and companies are racing to solve it. People who have grown to hate email hate it even more on mobile devices.
Howard Rheingold's insight:
Use your inbox the way I teach my infotention learners to use their feedreader.
The free comprehensive index and social analysis tool, searches keywords, hashtags and @ signs from minutes ago or from across a span of years, retrieving your social needles from millions of haystacks of billions of tweets.
Topsy is a way to instantly discover breaking news and just released press-releases and track current conversations and just posted media."
Howard Rheingold's insight:
On the info-tools side of infotention, the ability to tune in to specific and continually updated streams of information from social media about specific topics is an important skill. I've used and recommended Topsy in my infotention courses, since Twitter has a history of changing access to its own tweetstream search engine.
During the 2012 U.S. Presidential election, Topsy and Twitter created the Twitter Political Index (or Twindex), which provided a daily gauge of voters’ sentiment for each candidate as expressed on Twitter. Using mentions of their last name or direct @mentions of their Twitter handle, the Twindex tracked sentiment for Obama and Romney from May 1 until Election day, showing when each gained momentum in the race.
How Twitter used Topsy APIs
Twitter used Topsy’s content and metrics API data to create a custom dashboard to help capture the nuance of public opinion.
Live tracking of sentiment to produce the Twindex. Additional, minute-level analysis during convention speeches and debatesMention counts on a wide array of topic areas—including the economy, foreign policy, and immigration—on a minute, hourly, and daily basisHistorical comparative analysis between the Gallup poll for presidential approval between 2010-2012 and Topsy sentiment for Obama, demonstrating a strong correlation between the two (and strongest when Topsy sentiment led the Gallup numbers by a few days)
Para buscar información en twitter desde 2007. Para explorar temas al instante. Prueba #viacatalana, por ejemplo. Veras los twitts del último dia, la ultima semana, el último més 413.000. Las fotos, los links. Un invento!
Great tool to gain data / intelligence / trend / emotions from Twitter . The social analytics section is a great tool to compare keywords and concepts.
"Commercial companies have claimed for years that computer games can make the user smarter, but have been criticized for failing to show that improved skills in the game translate into better performance in daily life1. Now a study published this week in Nature2 — the one in which Linsey participated — convincingly shows that if a game is tailored to a precise cognitive deficit, in this case multitasking in older people, it can indeed be effective."
Howard Rheingold's insight:
The possibility that attentional practices can be trained through deliberate practice is fundamental to infotention. I chronicled a certain amount of research into this in Net Smart. Now the prestigious journal Nature has published a study that lends support to the claim that online games (this one is called "Neuroracer") can be used for attention training (in this case, helping older people improve their capacity to multitask.)
A lot of attention is focused these days on managing distraction and avoiding multitasking. But there are few lives, practices, professions, situations, in which it is even possible to completely eliminate multitasking. Knowing when not to multitask is essential, but knowing how to multitask more effectively is also essential.
As usual, Robin Good is tracking the cutting edge in info-discovery. In addition to RSS feeds of persistent news searches and other kinds of searches and social media monitoring services like talkwalker.com, Ping.it looks like a potentially useful infotention tool (off to test it...)
Ping.it (review), a web app which allows you to monitor and discover relevant news in your areas of interest, has just introduced a new powerful feature with makes it possible to track any relevant content being published around a specific keyword.
Just specify the set of keywords or keyphrase you want to track, and almost instantly Ping.it provides you with a preview of relevant content items.
Probes can be tailored to your specific needs, by applying specific search parameters and social popularity filters. It is also possible to exclude specific keywords.
I find Ping.it and its keyword monitoring facility very effective and capable of bringing me only high quality results in my field of interest. I would not hesitate to recommend it to those who need to seriously monitor any topic.
"Finely-woven, globe-spanning digital networks, together with the radical miniaturization and embedding of information, communication, and sensor electronics into almost everything, have made human-to-computer bonds truely ubiquitous and pervasive. Accordingly, our approach to human-computer interaction is reversing: while HCI previously addressed issues related to how humans initiate interaction with ICT systems, we now increasingly observe ICT system designs that also approach humans. Within this "human computer confluence", human attention—more than processor speed, communication bandwidth, and storage resources—becomes the single most critical (yet least understood) resource in pervasive system design today.
While previously considered a mental variable that could not be quantified and measured, attention now constitutes a fundamental element of psychological research. Today, everyone has an intuitive understanding of what attention is, how it can be assessed, and how it impacts perception, memory, expectation, awareness, relevance, decision-making, and other behaviours. This special issue focusses on novel approaches to attention modelling, attention representation, attention sensing, recognition or estimation, together with attention management as a theoretical and practical principle for designing Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing systems."
Howard Rheingold's insight:
The proceedings of this conference are supposed to be available in Jan-Mar 2014. This might be a key step in Engelbart's vision of bootstrapping collective IQ through concurrent development of thinking tools, study of how people use those tools, and redesign of both the tools and the language, methodology, and training that go with it. This is probably too technical for non-specialists, but it could be a weak signal indicating an emerging trend in attention-centered design of information technologies.
"Technology is what is now being blamed for multitasking overload. In some situations, that is certainly the case. In other situations, the issue might be too much work, an inefficient office, or just boredom with the job or school work. We can change some of those conditions and not others—but we cannot even sort out what is causing our frustration, exhaustion, or sense of failure until we understand what multitasking is. Once we realize that multitasking itself is the human condition—not an outcome only of too much email or social networking—then we can find practical ways to address the real problem, not the mythical one."
Howard Rheingold's insight:
Cathy Davidson's "Now You See It" is an infotentionist's must-read. This blog post is more than a year old, but worth considering as a counterpoint to the experimental evidence that multitasking degrades performance. Maybe performance on single tasks isn't always the point. Like it or not, we live a world that requires multiple attentional antennae just to walk down the street (which you definitely should not do while looking at your phone).
Excellent article that I have read more than once,and has certainly challenged me to think about so many themes: Leadership, Communication, Teaching, etc.
Thank you Ivon for sharing with us!!!
I particularly agree with this statement: "We can blame technology for our inefficiency but the real issue is competing desires that yield competing desires on our attention."
Are we leveraging technology and running it to fit our lives....or is technology running us?
"The increasing volume, complexity, and interconnectedness of published studies in neuroscience make it difficult to determine what is known, what is uncertain, and how to contribute effectively to one’s field. There is a pressing need to develop automated strategies to help researchers navigate the vastness of the published record. Simplified, interactive, and unbiased representations of previous findings (i.e., research maps) would be invaluable in preparing research surveys, in guiding experiment planning, and in evaluating research plans and contributions. Principles normally used in weighing research findings, including reproducibility and convergence, could be automated and incorporated into research maps. Here, we discuss a series of recent advances that are bringing us closer than ever to being able to derive systematic, comprehensive, but also interactive and user-friendly research maps. These maps could revolutionize the way we review the literature, plan experiments, and fund and publish science."
Howard Rheingold's insight:
In April, 1945, Vannevar Bush foresaw and kicked off the development of information tools to help navigate the knowledge that modern science has been creating at an accelerating rate, when he noted in "As We May Think" that "The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships." In this article in a neuroscience journal, the authors describe a tool that could help scientists and other knowledge-seekers deal with this problem: "research maps."
"Decugis tells me that Scoop.it was created as a better response to an “information overload” environment. Typically, Internet sites use sophisticated algorithms to find huge volumes of information and then drown us in it. Little of that information is directly related to an individual user’s needs or interests.
“Human beings aren’t predictable,” Decugis says. “We realized algorithms alone aren’t great at predicting the content you will want.” Scoop.it’s solution has been to combine the best of computer brains with human brains. A community of real humans works to screen and curate information so that it flows to the right channels.
Real humans can use real judgment, real intuition and real common sense to identify what other real humans are craving—even as they use a certain amount of electronic wizardry to help sort through a rushing river of data. “We don’t just publish content,” Decugis says. “We rank it and optimize it.” This model may be a solid bet for reducing the havoc of information overload."
Howard Rheingold's insight:
I realize that it's a bit recurseive to Scoop an article on Scoop.it, but one of the reasons I use Scoop.it is as an infotention tool. I collect a lot of material through the wide end of my info-tunnel, mostly bookmarking and tagging simultaneously via Diigo and Delicious. For very complex and organized sets of curated resources, I use Pearltrees. But when I want to bring a set of resources, framed by my micro-insights, to a specific public, Scoop.it fills the bill. The process of composing a Scoop is an infotentional process -- why should I select this resource to share from my wider collection? What do I want to choose as a represenative snippet? What do I want to say about why this resource is worthy of attention? These questions are all part of both the curation process and infotention self-training.
Don't Miss About to be an amazing conversation between GREAT thinkers on Kutcher, Scoop.it, Web 3.0 and the meaning of life here on G+: http://bit.ly/195EPQZ
I know this because my friend @MarkTraphagen just bated the trapped :). Weigh In!
Scoop.it Rocks Forbes asks us to bet on a smarter web. Not sure that is a bet I'm willing to make. Forbes is asking the wrong question in the wrong way. I love that they are half promoting Scoop.it as the path to a smarter web, but the zero sum nature of their questioning seems limited and goofystupid.
Goofystupid because the web is the land of AND not OR. We can have millions following Ashton Kutcher and the elegant and beautiful can exist for those willing to find it. Scoop.it makes elegance and grace easier to find. The one (Kutcher's millions of followers) is not necessarily a sign of the apocalypse nor does it subtract from the other (our ability to find and connect with "like me" tribes.
I write this knowing that drawing an imaginary line between good and evil is a common practice (one I've used too), but the web is capable of rewarding small, medium and large. AND the rewards often fit perfectly :). Kutcher gets the millions of fans he wants and little guys like me will get several people to several hundred a day who contribute, think and expand the dialogue about what Internet marketing is and can be.
Seems fair to me. That Scoop.it is our tool of choice isn't surprising since it helps curate content. Curation is more important than creation for a host or reasons (greater reach, more efficient content marketing testing and cheap).
Yes Scoop.it ROCKS AND Kutcher has millions of followers. That is NOT the seventh sign and we don't all need to hoard water and can goods :).
Marie Jeffery's comment August 8, 2013 9:16 AM
Well said, Marty! I clicked on this article because I was curious why you had a photo of Ashton Kutcher, and knew it would be an insightful post! Not disappointed - I'm a quiet lurker who has learned a lot about marketing from your Scoop.it Revolution pages! Thanks for your generosity.
Check out this short video where I showcase some of the best ways to make Hootnote, make that Eversuite, work for you!
Howard Rheingold's insight:
As I note (perhaps too often), infotention involves practicing attentional self-training in conjunction with learning appropriate information tools. Dashboards such as Netvibes (RSS) and Hootsuite (social media) can help you coordinate the internal and external components. I use both Evernote and Hootsuite, so was pleased to see this short (under 5 minute) video about how to combine them productively
Two of my most-used social media services working in tangent? Too good to be true? The sum of the parts actually delivers a new and very useful productivity tool.
"Metacognition is a critically important, yet often overlooked component of learning. Effective learning involves planning and goal-setting, monitoring one's progress, and adapting as needed. All of these activities are metacognitive in nature. By teaching students these skills - all of which can be learned - we can improve student learning. There are three critical steps to teaching metacognition:
Teaching students that their ability to learn is mutable
Teaching planning and goal-setting
Giving students ample opportunities to practice monitoring their learning and adapting as necessary"
Howard Rheingold's insight:
I teach metacognition to my Stanford students by starting with exercises that help them develop an awareness of how, where, and why they are directing their attention online ("self-monitoring strategies"). This presentation, summarized here (with a link to the slides and podcast of the original) talks about the importance of teaching metacognition to improve learning.
A wonderful and useful skill to teach our students. I haven't come across many articles on metacognition, but found this on Howard Rheingold's Scoop.it page. Enjoy.
However, the practice is really meant to highlight this natural trajectory of the mind, and in doing so, it trains your attention systems to become more aware of the mental landscape at any given moment, and more adept at navigating it. With repeated practice, it doesn’t take so long to notice that you’ve slipped into some kind of rumination or daydream. It also becomes easier to drop your current train of thought and return your focus to the breath. Those who practice say that thoughts start to seem less “sticky”—they don’t have such a hold on you..
Howard Rheingold's insight:
An excellent short overview of the benefits of conscious metacognitive exercise -- the attentional side of infotention. There's a lot of touchy-feely and neurobollocks about metacognition and meditation lately.
"when people’s minds were wandering, they tended to be less happy, presumably because our thoughts often tend towards negative rumination or stress."
That is presuming a lot since meditation affects our minds on so many levels. Familiarity with our thought process helps us to realize that we are not solid and that change/flux is the norm. It helps us realize that we have some control; albeit paradoxical control. Meditation slows our reactivity to people events and helps us appreciate our lives and other people. That's what I've experienced anyway.
"Hours spent at the video gaming console probably train the brain to make better and faster use of visual input, according to Duke University researchers.
“Gamers see the world differently,” said Greg Appelbaum, an assistant professor of psychiatry in the Duke School of Medicine. “They are able to extract more information from a visual scene.”"
Howard Rheingold's insight:
The key here is that apparently practice can lower the cognitive costs associated with rapidly switching fro task to task. And that learning can involve the whole visual system, not just attention.
A World Made of Glass. Huffington Post And the current state of information overload that is overwhelming us all will have a new and more effective filter. But the trade-offs are real, and they aren't without consequences.
Howard Rheingold's insight:
Google Glass and other augmented reality/wearable computing devices as infotention tools. The author, who wrote a book on curation, also notes the potential social collisions and trade-offs that will come with this emerging technology.
To get content containing either thought or leadership enter:
To get content containing both thought and leadership enter:
To get content containing the expression thought leadership enter:
You can enter several keywords and you can refine them whenever you want. Our suggestion engine uses more signals but entering a few keywords here will rapidly give you great content to curate.
Your new post is loading...
Is supertasking learnable? Nobody knows. I don't dispute the research by Nass et. al., and one of the first things I teach my students about infotention is that if they think they are more efficient when they are multitasking, they are probably wrong. I also talk about goals other than efficiency, about situations in which it is necessary to multitask (ask any aviator or parent of an infant), and about learning how to cut down on the cognitive costs of task-switching by working on it. This excellent piece goes through much of the scientific research and weighs its significance.