by Gary Woodill on August 5, 2010
Note: This item has been cross-posted to Workplace Learning Today (Aug. 6, 2010), where I also blog.
Recently, well known author Jane Bozarth wrote an article on “Brain Bandwidth – Cognitive Load Theory and Instructional Design” in Learning Solutions Magazine. Essentially, the argument in this theory is that “there is only so much new information the brain can process at one time.” This is called Cognitive Load Theory, and it is central to the work of such prominent researchers as Richard Mayer and Ruth Clark. One of the main pieces of evidence for the theory is a 1956 article by George Miller who “suggested that the largest number of discrete pieces of information the brain could manage was seven, plus or minus 2.”
Stephen Downes, in OLDaily, points to Jane’s article, but makes this critical comment: “I think cognitive load theory misrepresents how we acquire and store information. It supposes that information is atomic and symbolic, like a string of numbers.”
I have to agree with Stephen on this point.
In fact, the idea of a limited capacity of the brain to memorize a list of items goes way back to Hermann Ebbinghaus, a philosophy instructor at the University of Berlin in the 1880s. How he came up with this idea is documented in Frank Smith’s 1998 critique of learning theory, The Book of Learning and Forgetting, published by Teacher’s College Press. I quote at some length:
How could anyone make comparisons on any aspect of learning when people are so different, especially in the two things that make learning possible for anyone (according to the classic point of view) – interest and past experience? In the revealing language of science, interest and past experiences “contaminate” experiments and “invalidate” results. People who have a great interest in the topic or activity, and who have had a greater experience of it, are bound to learn more. And they ruin experiments. What experiments need is a method of control… so that the learning task is fundamentally the same for everyone.
…This was Ebbinghaus’s world-changing revelation: if you want to study how people learn without the involvement of interest and past experience — study how they learned nonsense. By definition, no one is interested in anything that makes no sense to them, and by definition, nothing in past experience can help anyone learned nonsense.
Ebbinghaus invented the nonsense syllable, a staple of psychological research ever since. He also described “the learning curve” which is that the ability to memorize nonsense syllables drops off around 10 items, and “the forgetting curve”, which is the memory of most of the nonsense syllables quickly drops off within a few hours.
As Kurt Danziger (one of my professors at York University in the late 1960s) points out in his book Naming the Mind: how psychology found its language (Sage, 1997), Ebbinghaus “defined memory in terms of the work of memorizing and not in terms of the experience of remembering. In this context ‘learning’ was used as a synonym for memorizing, and experimental investigations were designed to answer questions about the relative efficiency of different techniques of learning.” In other words, before Ebbinghaus, the word learning had several meanings in psychological, biological, and philosophical writings, but after, at least in North American psychological literature, learning became synomous with memorizing.
Rereading George Miller’s original article shows that he was talking about a limited kind of task – the ability to discriminate among different audio tones (also a nonsense task). Around 7 different tones, people start to make lots more mistakes. But he also suggests many ways of overcoming this seeming limit on working memory.
It seems that by adding more dimensions and requiring crude, binary, yes-no judgments on each attribute we can extend the span of absolute judgment from seven to at least 150. Judging from our everyday behavior, the limit is probably in the thousands, if indeed there is a limit. In my opinion, we cannot go on compounding dimensions indefinitely. I suspect that there is also a span of perceptual dimensionality and that this span is somewhere in the neighborhood of ten, but I must add at once that there is no objective evidence to support this suspicion.
This hardly seems to be hard nosed science, but it is often cited as “research” for “evidence-based learning”. We need to examine our concepts carefully and critically, and move away from research into nonsense as the basis of our instructional designs. (GW)
Nuts and Bolts: Brain Bandwidth – Cognitive Load Theory and Instructional Design | Learning Solutions Magazine | Jane Bozarth | 3 August 2010
by Gary Woodill on July 28, 2010
This website represents a shift in my practice as a consultant and analyst for emerging information technologies. The shift includes a move to independent status for me, with several interesting clients. My largest account is Brandon Hall Research, where I continue to work as a senior analyst. But I have several other projects on the go, including:
Author - I’ve just completed my second book project in less than a year, both published by McGraw-Hill. The first book, Training and Collaboration with Virtual Worlds was co-authored with my friend Alex Heiphetz, who continues to develop virtual world sites for major corporate clients. My newest book, The Mobile Learning Edge, was mostly my writing, but colleagues David Fell and Sheryl Herle each contributed a chapter. It will be available in mid-September. Click on the images of the books in the next column for more information.
Researcher – I am currently working on a project on the world-wide treatment of depression, in order to map all the teams that are working on this important problem, and to categorize their approaches to treatment. Information and suggestions are welcome. I have also been using my web research skills to locate missing persons for others who are looking for long lost relatives. So far, I have found 3 people who have not been heard from since the 1960s.
Technology Futurist – I have just finished a major report on future trends in high definition videoconferencing for a Canadian client. I realized that the future of any technology has, in a sense, “already happened” in that it takes 5 to 10 years for a technology to go from invention to commercialization and widespread adoption. By digging deep, and understanding where to look for new innovations, one can discover technologies that exist today but are hidden, that may be prominent tomorrow. Having written many reports on emerging learning technologies for Brandon Hall Research, I am looking forward to more projects in this area.
I continue to monitor innovation in the learning and development industry, and post daily to the Workplace Learning Today blog. I will be updating this site regularly, along with the support website for my mobile learning book. I hope to do a number of presentations at conferences and online in the coming year, and look forward to working with old friends and new clients.
by Gary Woodill on October 15, 2009
A review of:
Sweeny, Alastair (2009) Blackberry Planet: the story of Research in Motion and the little device that took the world by storm. Mississauga, Ontario: John Wiley & Sons Canada.
In 1999, I attended a meeting on technology innovation at the Toronto Board of Trade. The person sitting next to me told me that she was investing in a Waterloo, Ontario company I had never heard of called Research in Motion (RIM). Shortly after that, I acquired my first Blackberry and was enamored with the ability to receive e-mail on my belt. I also tried to use it to read news and weather reports but found that the page by page loading was terribly slow.
The Blackberry has come a long way in the past 10 years, ranking right up there with the top two or three brands in smart phones. Alastair Sweeny’s new book Blackberry Planet chronicles the growth of RIM from its beginnings in 1984 as a two-person technology startup in a one-room office to the multibillion dollar company it is today.
The two people who started the company were Mike Lazaridis and Doug Fregin, young engineers in their early twenties. They began by making LCD display screens for the General Motors Canada assembly line. 10 years later they won an Academy Award for a film bar code reader, “a device that revolutionized Hollywood.” But, being engineers, they had little interest or focus in running a business. Luckily, in 1992 experienced businessman Jim Balsillie join the management team with a $250,000 investment, becoming the co-CEO with Mike Lazaridis.
Contracts with AT&T, Rogers, and Ericsson led to the development of RIM’s growing expertise in miniature radios and pagers in the 1990s. In 1996, RIM produced the world’s first pocket-sized, two-way pager. That led to the development of the first Blackberry, the 950, two years later.
Sweeny’s corporate biography gives details on the successes, tribulations and failures of the company from its beginnings to the present day. Sales of Blackberrys were boosted into the stratosphere by such events as the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina. In these disasters, the Blackberry e-mail network kept working while most other means of communication went down. Sweeny writes, “during the horrific attacks that day in New York and Washington, the only people trapped in the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers who were able to contact their loved ones after cell service failed were those with Blackberrys. Police, firefighters, and ambulance drivers and US Vice President Dick Cheney all used their Blackberry devices during the crisis.”
The fact that President Obama has insisted on keeping his heavily modified Blackberry in spite of concerns by the Secret Service that could be hacked, has resulted in massive positive publicity for RIM. At the present time, the US government is the single largest user of Blackberrys, owning over 500,000 of the devices.
But it was not all rosy on Blackberry Planet over the years. A whole chapter is devoted to lawsuits that were filed against RIM and by RIM for patent infringement. Particularly difficult for the company was a lawsuit filed in 2001 by NTP Inc., a company known as a “patent troll.” The business model of such companies is to buy older patents with the hope of successfully suing other companies for infringement. After lengthy court case in Richmond, Virginia, RIM settled by paying NTP $612.5 million. It could’ve been much worse.
There’s also a chapter on the problem of Blackberry addiction, and the disruptive effects that 24/7 phone and e-mail access can have on family life. In reviewing the social impact of Blackberrys, Sweeny cites a large Canadian study by Linda Duxbury and Chris Higgins who interviewed more than 100,000 mobile-device equipped Canadians and their families from 2006 to 2008. In 2007, the research team started focusing on Blackberry use almost exclusively. They came up with the following statistics on users:
- 37% checked their Blackberry occasionally.
- 37% checked their Blackberry frequently.
- 26% said they checked their Blackberry only when they were traveling/away from the office, but then used the device constantly.
- 10% said they checked their Blackberry constantly (more than 20 times per day).
Respondents also said that they handled an average of 24.7 Blackberry messages per day. The negative impact on families was apparent. “Many spouses weren’t at all pleased, and 55% said their partner was making ‘inappropriate’ use of their Blackberry several times a day, using it constantly to check their e-mails at home or in a social or family setting.”
The book ends with a chapter entitled “The Rise of the TeleBrain.” The author quotes Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media, where he calls humans “an organism that now wears its brain outside its skull and its nerves outside its hide.”
This well researched book documents how we got to this state, and where it is going to take us next.
The book has a support website at http://blackberryplanetbook.com.
