Motivation to do difficult things, TikTok counters decision fatigue, Digital media use and the brain, Generative AI and filling skills gaps
This week
1/ 📚Education: Mobile phone bans in schools
2/ 🪴Development: Motivation to do difficult things
3/ ⚡️Social: TikTok counters decision fatigue
4/ 🔍 Research: Digital media use and the brain
5/ 🦉Learning: Generative AI and filling skills gaps
If you have feedback, questions or topics you’d like me to address in a future issue, get in touch at raised[at]edaith.com
Tina
1/ 📚Education
Mobile phone bans in schools
Mobile phone use in schools is a tricky subject, with school wide bans becoming more common due to their role in bullying, distraction as well as recording and posting content filmed at school.
There have been calls for a nation-wide ban in the U.S. Globally, there are bans on mobile phones in public schools in some states of Australia, the British government issued new guidelines recommending that student mobile use be prohibited in schools, Italy banned phones during lessons, and China has barred children from taking phones to school.
But at the same time, some organisations advocate that bans are not the solution. For example, a new UNESO report suggests that exposure to digital tools like cellphones could help students develop a critical lens on emerging technologies:
“Students need to learn the risks and opportunities that come with technology, develop critical skills, and understand to live with and without technology… Shielding students from new and innovative technology can put them at a disadvantage.”
Personally, I’m for bans until the upper high school years, at which point regulating behaviour with phones, including utilising them as learning aides, is a useful life skill we could support young people with before adulthood and the workforce.
🔗 School Cellphone Bans Are Trending. Do They Work? (NYT - paywall)
2/ 🪴Development
Motivation to do difficult things
Great explanation of how dopamine affects our motivation to undertake difficult tasks. Includes content not suitable for children, but a good reference to translate into screen time strategy for the household in terms of the benefits of dopamine detox and leveraging high dopamine activities to get things done.
3/ ⚡️Social
TikTok counters decision fatigue
TikTok is designed around discovering content for you, not giving you a platform to find it for yourself. These types of hyper curated feeds are more like how TV used to be before streaming, where someone else decided what you watch, and in contrast to more recent interactive social media that required much more involvement in shaping your experience of the platform:
“It’s been decades since internet access was introduced to the mass market, and the novelty of endless choice has worn off. There’s something to be said for having something or someone else pick what you see and do. Which is how things used to work before the internet, of course, just not with the granularity that’s possible now.”
🔗 TikTok is confusing by design (Vox)
4/ 🔍 Research
Digital media use and the brain
Boredom to counter screen time is key:
“The growing human brain is constantly building neural connections while pruning away less-used ones, and digital media use plays an active role in that process, according to Rich. Much of what happens on screen provides “impoverished” stimulation of the developing brain compared to reality, he says.”
Although the Growing Up Digital Study tracking the impact of digital technology on the wellbeing of youth isn’t going to have insights for some time, the article has some useful tips on digital media use at home.
🔗 Screen Time and the Brain (Harvard Medical School)
5/ 🦉Learning
Generative AI and filling skills gaps
The need to upskill and reskill workforces amidst technological and workplace change is clear, although companies are looking to find affordable ways to achieve this.
Generative AI in future could support learning solutions with personalised content, including written instructions, voice, image, and video generation to adapt to different people’s interests and learning styles.
However, this article is a little overly optimistic - the problems of hallucination, bias and over generalisation remain. Rather than designing education with ‘AI at its core,’ a focus on human development would be of greatest benefit, with AI as an important but not central enabling mechanism.
🔗 Generative AI: The teacher that can help close the skills gap? (VentureBeat)
🔗 Chris Dede, who is an expert on the history of educational technologies, on the Ways Teachers Are Using ChatGPT in the Classroom (Time)
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