Information overload is something that I frequently think about. We are surrounded by information and so are our students. However, are the student’s assignments any better than those submitted by students 50 years ago and are our lectures any better than those of lecturers who preceded us? While some people believe that more choice is always better, more choice leads to more confusion and it makes it more difficult for individuals to process all the information and make an informed decision.
But is it really a question of information overload or filter failure? In one of the first posts, Gilbert mentioned that today's youngsters have developed an adapted neurological structure to meet the advancements in technology. Could it be that contemporary man is still primitive in terms of filtering information and this is why we feel a sense of information overload? In the clip below the speaker Clay Shirky argues that human beings will require “re-programming” rather than “updating” and social norms will have to change to meet the new dimensions brought about by new technology.
NOTE: The clip below is only suitable for the courageous few as it is a 23 minute information overload in itself. The speaker at the Web 2.0 Expo provides several examples to distinguish between information overload and filter failure. Some interesting points including ethical/legal issues in e-learning, the use of Facebook amongst students, etc. are brought up in his speech (always given that you can tolerate his filler words right through the presentation).
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‘I want to transfer my own knowledge to the students...I naively imposed my own knowledge on them...I didn’t understand how to situate education in their experience...Yet, I knew exactly how to teach them’ (Ira Shor 1945)
ReplyDeleteAccording to Paulo Friere the education system is similar to a ‘banking system’. According to this philosopher, educators tend to give an ‘overload’ of information without accessing the needs of the students first.
According to Piaget:
‘Good pedagogy must involve presenting the child with situations in which he himself experiments, in the broadest sense of the term – trying things out to see what happens, manipulating symbols, posing questions and seeking his own answers...’ (Piaget, 1945)
Since I mainly teach HND students, BTEC does not really provide the flexibility to choose what to teach and assess students on. Altering the topics according to the needs of the students is not an option for us. I often find, that some topics are quite irrelevant and others are not emphasized enough and since at the end of the day we have to comply with the syllabus, I find that these restrictions can be somewhat frustrating. To give the students what they need, I often try to apply my subject as much as possible. What I find beneficial in my case is that I always try to explain to my students the importance of the topic that is being taught, and how this can be eventually in their future employment. I realize that this is not always possible and I think that we all have to accept that some topics have to be taught for the only purpose to get the final certification.
Many times I also feel this 'information overload'. This happens most of the time when I am researching for a lesson or one of my own assignments. Filtering is not so simple, especially when information which is essentially the same is presented in different ways so you spend a lot of time shifting through the same material and not moving forward. This creates a feeling of confusion and of being overwhelmed and after all this, a person still ends up feeling there 'might' be more information I could have included and didn't. When I find 5 books on the same subject, my instinct is to try and see them all and somehow summarise to get the best of all and create the best notes I can but then I realise that because of time restraints, I will have to leave most of them on the shelf and hope I chose the best ones to work with!
ReplyDeleteI find this topic very relevant to teaching today since I find that most students today expect that lecturers must provide a concise and condensed list of information so that they cover only the topics and sub-topics which are going to be assessed. All other information which may have been covered in class is considered irrelevant to their needs even though it might be essential to their future careers. Therefore, it seems that most of the filtering is done by the lecturer and the student “benefits” from a summarised version of information content. Students rely heavily on course notes provided by the lecturer and additional reading suggestions are often ignored. I believe that we should actually encourage more research work within our courses since when our students will be placed in industry, they will require research skills and filtering skills. For example if an ICT student is researching about a new technology or perhaps searching for the solution to a technical problem, he/she should have the right skills to conduct valid research, which is not just limited to Wikipedia, and be able to filter the main points from the sources. From my experience in tutoring student projects, students are weak in locating the right information sources and then filtering the relevant information.
ReplyDeleteWhenever I give a mathematics problem with 'extra' information I notice that most of the students get confused.
ReplyDeleteLet's say they are asked to find the volume of a solid object and I give them all the required dimensions together with an extra dimension which is not necessary to find the volume. I have seen some students who manage to use all the information and of course they get an incorrect answer. Some of the students think that they need to use all the information that is stated in the question.
We need to make students aware that once at work they will not have a question with all the relevant information. They need to determine which information is required and solve accordingly.
@ Claire Cornish - I am not a BTEC fan and I am sure that there is lot that can be improved in this system. However, I think that standardization is important. If two students are studying at different institutions and they are both studying the same module then they should be delivered the same material and assessed on the same criteria if possible.
One of the advantages of the said system overload is the fact that students today have much more information at hand. The easy way by which information today is made available and shared, gives students the opportunity of a wider approach to research. After the process of gathering the information, students today have to embark on a narrowing down approach in order to arrive at some conclusion.
ReplyDeleteThis is nothing different from the logic used by students fifty years ago. The only difference is the amount of information readily available upon which students take their decisions. In my opinion, today's students are taking much more informed decisions due to the fact that they are having to review much more material and therefore have the possiblity of seeing a larger part of the picture. I don't contest that the issue is a question of filtering.
Deeply I believe that students are deepening their understanding on subjects because they have to carry out a wider anlaysis in order to present the results of their research. The development of these filters, is what is really making students capable of making a better analysis of information and much more informed decisions. Though this factor might put greater pressure on the student, it certainly serves as an enriching learning experience through which students have a better opporutnity to excel.
As to the argument of having better lecturers, we can not compare today's lecturers with those of fifty years ago, since the educational environment and the conditions have very much changed I would say. We have much more resources and information at hand, and therefore are immediately advantaged over our predecessors. I believe that we have been broughtup in a generation open to free flowing information. This fact has naturally made us develop our thinking and assimilation process in order for us to analyse and learn what needs to be learnt.
Although a big part of this development comes naturally, it still remains on us what to filter and what not to. The filtering process in itself is already a learning experience through which one uses his acquired knowledge to select the right pieces of information. This process in se, has transformed us into people of deeper thaughts and wider opinion. Our lines of thaught might not be narrow as much of our predecessors.
For this reason, I agree with Clay Shirkey and therefore dont consider information overload as a real problem as long as it continues to happen gradually over generations. Until our frame of mind changes in parallel, our minds will remain safe!
Mariella
The problem of information overload is a serious one and not easy to solve. I am sure you have noticed by now how even the Blogs we have started are grossly overloaded with information and it has become a problem which ones to read and which ones to answer! The tendency will be to ignore most blogs which would otherwise have merited an answer.
ReplyDeleteOur life has become one big information overload : we are constantly being bombarded with information and we sort it out sometimes naturally and sometimes unconsciously (Would you read any information before you if this has no significance or relevance to you? ).
So naturally this problem exists in schools and of course at MCAST. Now if you couple to it the fact that students have different learning abilties and that today`s students have millions of distractions to lure them away from study, you will start realising the complexity of the issues involved.
Every year at around this time I always say to myself that come September I will try to simplify my lecturing to make my lessons more interesting and to make sure that the students get only the amount of information which is essential for their students. Every September I always end up looking for new books, journals and web-sites so as to have the latest information at hand and so again end up with this information overload problem.
The right balance has to be struck but then again, what is the right balance?
I tend to disagree that today's students are making more informed decisions. Certainly, they would be able to make more informed decisions... if only they can read, analyse and categorise all the information that is available to them in a limited time! However, I am highly inclined to think that the resulting stress of filtering volumes of information is putting some students off from reading any information in the first place. There are many authors who have discussed decision theories and usually most authors agree that in reality, more choice usually means less choice. This argument is presented very well in a book entitled The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less by Schwartz. As Schwarz argues, sometimes the stress caused by choice can even "erode our psychological well-being" rather than liberating us.
ReplyDeleteFor instance, most of us remember a time when our TVs only transmitted TVM, Rai, Italia 1, Canale 5, Rete 4 and a handful of other channels. At home we used to watch Italia 1 and Canale 5 most of the time (and 8 o'clock news on TVM). One fine day, cable TV came along and finally there was a choice - a much wider choice! I myself remember trying to convince my parents to get cable TV. When we finally got this at home, I would get hold of the remote and go through all the channels one by one, certain of finding an interesting programme to watch. Choosing between all these TV stations was indeed stressful because at times I wanted to watch multiple programmes myself and similarly other family members wanted to watch other programmes. At other times I would spend most of the time going through all the channels one by one rather than actually watching and absorbing information from any given TV programme. Nowadays I simply avoid the hustle and bustle of choosing between channels and I go directly to Italia 1, Canale 5, Rai and TVM (I should also add discovery channel to that list).
Similarly, if students have access to two books on any given subject, they might go through both books. But if they have twenty, fifty, thousands, millions of books on the same subject, I am almost certain that a good number of students will just decide not to read anything. To make matters worse, the avalanche of information on the web amplifies this feeling of helplessness. All this choice is overwhelming and it works in the opposite way because the human brain as it is today simply can't cope with it - unless students/lecturers learn to practice the art of satisficing.
As my colleagues have rightly mentioned above, our current system is one complete information overload.
ReplyDeleteThe modern technology have placed all the information we need just a couple of finger clicks away where as, 50 years ago a greater time frame, more labor intensive research was needed to arrive to the same results. Does this mean that the students today are better?
In my opinion now, its just that the skills they have to develop are different. In the past students had to recognise how to go about researching the subject and physically go to libraries and search manually for the information needed. Nowadays students are presented with a huge list of information many of it irrelevant or out of context, their skill consists in sifting through this information until the desired information can be extracted.
Hence what really distinguishes our students today: Is the student feeding us garbage that he is gathering over the net or is he really sifting through the garbage to get the juice out of it?
The issue can also be directed to the lecturing staff, are we overloading the students with knowledge? As Tonio rightly put it, were do we draw the line of what is enough?
Are we teaching our students the art of sifting through the information given or are we doing the sifting for them? I don't really think this is an easy question to answer.
david
Reading through the posts above, I cannot but agree with most of the points you are stating. Rachel rightly pointed out that whilst students SHOULD be doing more informed decisions, they are actually not doing so. Most probably they tend to find it difficult especially when so much information is repetitive and has only minor variations.
ReplyDeleteAn example of this is this same blog...Many topics are repeated by many users, and it takes a very long time to read through all of them to extract the main points. So with the increase in information, time to review and eventually filter information has become a more restricting factor!
In line with what Alison Shaw was saying, I find that my students are reluctant to take the leap and augment their information, other than that provided in slides. In fact, when in one particular unit instead of developing slides I referred to an e-book which was actually made available on Moodle, they still did not refer to it, even when knowing when part of the assignment was based on it! The same pattern was observed with a number of degree students, who instead of contextualizing the gathered information, just copied and pasted whole chunks in their assignments without even considering the validity of the content.
So once again I find that training in research methodologies should be at the base of any course, especially at higher levels.
I totally agree with you all. The problem with students is that they think that everything can be just pasted on an assignment for example without even verifying the source. They don't care some of them to think what they have been asked or what do they already know or what they need to find. The majority of students do not bother to brainstorm and ask themselves questions.
ReplyDeleteThey usually search only the internet. Books, magazines etc. are rarely being used. Searching the internet is a way of getting easily ready information which I believe if done in a certain way it can be beneficial to the students. However students should at least do the above together with:
- taking notes and compile a reference list.
- Read, evaluate, and record ideas and source details.
- Organise how to sort this into a sensible order
- Make presentation of information in an appropriate format
- At the end judge how are you doing and if the question asked has been answered
In most situations the two issues being mentioned in this blog, namely the issue of information overload and the lack of information filtering result in students handing in assignments which are way too long but full of bits and pieces of information from a wide range of internet sources. Such assignments however are not the problem but they are the result of a number of problems. Personally I can point out a number of culprits for such a situation.
ReplyDelete1. Most of our courses are contain too many subjects. One has to keep in mind that students, especially those enrolling for the entry level courses such as the foundation, have obtained, due to one reason or another very few , if any O’levels. Giving such students too many subjects, most of which are totally new for them, at one go is giving them an indigestion of subjects. This in turn is being counterproductive as students are not only struggling with the huge amount of information that is being dished out at them, but they also take the easy and time saving option of including in their assignments all the “relevant” information which they come across.
2. A second issue is that some students lack self confidence in their academic abilities. Thus they feel much safer to include most of the information they come across as they do not possess [or at least they do not feel they possess] the required skills to decide what should be included and what should not. Whatever they find in a website they consider to be correct and relevant.
3. One lat issue is the matter of lack of good writing skills. Most students have little idea of how they could paraphrase written text. Most of them do reference the material, however they find it difficult to re write it in their own words.
I really think that any student today should be given a few lessons on how to properly formulate a search term on the Internet.
ReplyDeleteFor instance something that is very useful and yet not many people use is placing full terms in double quotes. Also particularly useful when you hear a song on the radio to which you don't know its name, type a part of the lyrics you remember inside double quotes, and voila- a page with the song is very likely to come up.
Let's say you hear Ira Losco's song on the readio and you remember one line. You type it into google:
i don't care you don't know me enough to talk about me
This would generate 14 million results with nothing close to Ira Losco coming up. However put some simple double quotes at the start and end of your search term:
"i don't care you don't know me enough to talk about me"
And you get just five results directly related to Ira's song 'love me or hate me'. This is quite a petty example I gave here related to song lyrics, but it is pretty useful when you type in google a phrase from a book so that you can read the entire chapter, and for a multitude of other reasons. Naturally there is a lot more than just double quoting search terms. Both us and our students should learn this skill so as to make our life much easier in finding the information that we really need.