Attention is important

Free Super Bowl tickets here!  

There, now that I have your attention, I can only hope that you will stay to read the rest of my blog.  Yes, I agree that was a cheesy approach to an age old problem.  How to get the attention of students so that they can learn the presented material.

I have been thinking about this alot this week and chose to research this further with articles about how information is processed in "chunks" and that may lead to better understanding of how our short term memory works.  George Miller did an interesting article about Information Processing where he explains that the human mind's, short term memory, can only hold information in bits, or "chunks" as he calls them and that "5-9 chunks of information can only be housed in our STM at a time."

This has to be meaningful information such as visual stimulus, faces, game pieces, puzzle pieces, etc..., whatever is right in front of them at the moment. That means that we need to make sure we have the attention of the individuals, present material in a meaningful way so that the stimulus is received and in their working STM and then work on moving this to LTM through other various methods. 

These other methods are all part of how humans process information, encode it, and the retrieval process.  All extremely important in the learning process that designers must think about all the time.  As instructional designers, it will be up to us to be able to teach in the most valuable way for our students and make the most impact.

George Miller wrote this over 50 years ago but it is still relevant and I highly suggest taking the time to read this informative article.  

And on to new trends to teach old and seeming forgotten social skills.  There is a new game now that is "teaching" dinner etiquette to people called the "Phone stacking craze".  To learn new behaviors of actually sitting and talking to one another at a dinner engagement, all guests must place their phones on the table in a pile and the first person to look at their phone picks up the check for everyone! Brilliant way to have fun and get back to social behaviors that seem to be preferred by more in our society than previously thought.  Play this next time you go to dinner with friends and see how easy it is!   See the link below for the Trending Now blog.

Here are the website for my articles:

Miller, G.A. (1956)
http://uqu.edu.sa/files2/tiny_mce/plugins/filemanager/files/4052486/information%20processing-adel.pdf

Yahoo Trending Now blog.
http://uqu.edu.sa/files2/tiny_mce/plugins/filemanager/files/4052486/information%20processing-adel.pdf