By Lynn Zimmerman
Editor, Teacher Education
In “Study: How Twitter Is Hurting Students” on the Higher Ed Morning web site, Carin Ford gives an overview of several kinds of social networking sites and how they affect our brains.
The article includes a link to another article, “Facebook ‘Enhances Intelligence’ but Twitter ‘Diminishes It’, Claims Psychologist,” by Lucy Cockcroft, which examines the research conducted by Scottish psychologist Dr. Tracy Alloway.
Alloway contends that using Facebook helps improve working memory while Twitter, text messaging, and watching YouTube actually weaken it.
The Ford article invites readers to comment on the article and asks: Do you interact with students on Facebook? The reader responses are equally as interesting as the two articles. One response questions the validity of Alloway’s report. Others discuss pros and cons of using Twitter and Facebook in the educational setting.
These links seem to complement the various discussions that have been on ETC recently regarding the use of social networking sites in the educational setting, including Interview: Steve Cooper of TechUofA. TechUofA uses Facebook as a learning management system.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: brains, Carin Ford, Claims Psychologist, Facebook, Facebook 'Enhances Intelligence' but Twitter 'Diminishes It', Higher Ed Morning, Interview: Steve Cooper of TechUofA, Lucy Cockcroft, psychologist, Scottish, social networking, Study: How Twitter Is Hurting Students, TechUofA, Tracy Alloway, Twitter, YouTube |
John Mark Walker: "If educational communities can continue to push platform integration and content portability, in the future, students may be able to design their own personalized degrees from smaller, modular chunks that cross institutional barriers" (
Richard Koubek
Judith McDaniel
Tim Fraser-Bumatay: "Although the format leaves us far-removed physically, the online forum has its own sense of intimacy" (Judith McDaniel, "
Ryan Kelly: "For me to be able to work with people clear across the country for an extended period of time opened me up to new things" (Judith McDaniel, "
Daniel Herrera: "As a Mexican American, I know that words of identity are powerful; so to discuss white privilege with my professor and classmates in a face-to-face class would have been terrifying and impossible" (Judith McDaniel, "
Cathy Gunn: "Traditional methods for effecting change at my institution aren’t getting us even to a trickle yet, let alone to thinking about or planning for a wave!" (
Educational Technology and Change Journal 
Studies like this, and the related reportage and unsupported speculation, are what could drive me cuckoo. More accurately, taking such reportage (and the related study behind it?) seriously is likely to be far less healthy for one’s brain and working memory than Twitter.
Look closely at what’s going on here. The cited articles make no mention of how Twitter was used in the study. So I spent (wasted?) 30 minutes or so looking for the actual study. Still haven’t found it. That’s your first clue: the assertion that Twitter is bad is mostly, perhaps entirely, an echo chamber.
A Google search did not yield the study; none of the articles I found have a link to it. I did find Dr. Alloway’s web site; that should have been promising — except that I couldn’t find a link to the study there either. I found a couple of references buried on her web site and through Google searches, but none which appear to be the related study either. Much more easy to find on her web site are links to all the media coverage she’s received and the talks she’s giving. That’s your second clue.
It appears from her web site that she’s doing some good research to establish the importance of working memory, among other areas. Bravo for that. She claims that it’s more valuable than IQ as a measure of intelligence (although the study I found measure the efficacy of working memory in terms of increased performance on IQ, literacy, and numeracy tests — hmmm). But even this appears to be a double-edged sword: she is also promoting “JUNGLE MEMORY, a brain-training program based on my research and promoted by Pearson Education, improved from a grade C to a B, and a B to an A after just 12 weeks! It is the only training program scientifically proven to raise grades.” (http://www.junglememory.com/home/home.do). So her web site is long on self-promotion and short on links to actual research.
But here’s the thing: what does all this have to do with Twitter being unhealthy for working memory? Where’s the evidence, the data? I found someone who suggested that the actual study did not actually test Twitter (can’t find that reference now). Dr. Alloway herself noted in a comment on her web site that the conclusions are “based on findings from a pilot study, more to follow once the study is complete.” Hmmm. Someone else on her web site asked four weeks ago for a link to the complete study; no response was posted. The reportage also suggests that Twitter was not actually tested, and that its detrimental effects are pure speculation on Dr. Alloway’s part. As reported in the Scotsman, (http://news.scotsman.com/uk/Battle-lines-redrawn-war-games.5622308.jp) “Paul Allen, editor of ComputerActive magazine, questioned the study and said technology like Twitter was ‘too new’ to make conclusions about. He said: “‘It sounds very spurious. I don’t see a correlation between the length of a message you send someone and the effect on memory. It could be a really interesting Twitter message.'” Exactly.
But in the meantime, the blogosphere has already run wild, and sooner or later you’ll be hearing someone tell you how science has shown that Twitter is bad for your brain. Just like another British scientist ran amok earlier this year with unsubstantiated speculation about how social networking sites were harming children’s brains
(http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1153583/Social-websites-harm-childrens-brains-Chilling-warning-parents-neuroscientist.html).
Fortunately, the British have also provided us with several fine words for dealing with such situations: Balderdash. Poppycock. Twaddle.
To me, the worst part about this is that it totally obscures a deeper, more important question. As Dr. Alloway says on her web site,
“Cutting-edge research has shown that working memory—the ability to store and manipulate information—is the most important learning skill a child can have. Working memory is the foundation of good grades and a successful life beyond the classroom. Without it, students would fail at every task, and with it they can dramatically improve their classroom performance.”
Clearly working memory as defined is an important skill. But why is it THE most important skill? It makes sense to say that if you believe that classroom performance as currently defined (store and manipulate information as per the teacher’s requirements) is in fact most important. But if you believe that there are more important skills, and that getting good grades is at least as much about social conditioning as it is about learning, then you would be asking a different set of questions. Ones, sadly, which we are not going to hear in this media blitz of misinformation…
At first, Dr Alloway’s criticism of Twitter may seem part of a long line that includes Rousseau’s of La Fontaine’s fables in L’Emile, Flaubert’s of novels in Madame Bovary, Orwell’s of Boys’ Weeklies, and further educational damnings of TV, transistor radio, the internet, blogs, Facebook itself. Education pundits tend to damn new things until they become familiar enough to pundit about them.
But Dr Alloway is not an education pundit, she is an educator concretely helping a group of slow-learning 11-14 year olds to improve their short term memory, and reporting what she has seen in this group. Hence the unfairness of Malcolm Parks comment to the Higher Ed Morning article about the fact she has no research paper about new media use and short term memory: one doesn’t write a research paper on such a statistical basis.
Some other comments are more constructive, suggesting the exploration of more active and learning-enhancing uses of Twitter. Also possibly relevant: danah boyd’s Twitter: “pointless babble” or peripheral awareness + social grooming? (August 16, 09), on the importance of socializing and on the fact that socializing communication – in real life too – contains a lot of phatic roughage, i.e. of utterances only aimed at indicating readiness to interact with others. If you have a bad short term memory, telling this “roughage” apart from content communication might be difficult.
But there might be a very concrete usability factor in the different impacts Facebook and Twitter have on Dr Alloway’s students. For someone who has short-time memory problems, Facebook is easier to use, because Facebook messages stay put, whereas they slide away very fast in Twitter. So her students are more likely to be paralyzed into passivity by this rapid flow than their peers who have a better short-term memory and can use the Twitter search engine, or a remembered hashtag to participate in a conversation about a given theme.
To overcome this issue, she might show her students how they can limit the number of people they are following until they get more familiar with Twitter, so that their homepage is less crowded and does not move so fast; how to bookmark the RSS feeds of hashtags for aconversation topics they’d like to participate in, how to mark a given tweet as favorite and, in general explore with them the Getting Started topics of Twitter’s help forum: help forum topics don’t glide away and they can be bookmarked in a browser.
Another possible factor might be young slow-learners’ fear of seeming dumb in a whirl of fast moving Twitter conversations, just as they do in real-life fast moving ones: people tend to equate quick-wittedness with intelligence and slower thinking with stupidity, and this is possibly even more true for pre-teens and teens.
Here, an educator might show people who need more time both to understand and to utter how to use twitter to bring people to other modes of conversation, for instance by tweeting links to blog or forum discussions where they can have enough time. This can even be automated: new posts and comments on this blog are automatically announced at/by http://twitter.com/etcjournal via twitterfeed.com, which translates the entries RSS feed and the comments RSS feed into tweets. Same with many other twitter accounts.
The twitter whirlwind might drive some people cuckoo if they enter it unprepared. But they can be shown how to use its power to steer themselves and others towards quieter conversation venues.
Using social media Facebook in college curriculua is a topic I’m very interested in. On one hand, the “creepy treehouse” comes into play (lexknowlogy.learningfield.org/2008/04/09/defining-creepy-tree-house), while on the other there are some having quite a great deal of success (dumorphology.com/2008/08/debunking-the-creepy-treehouse-the-functional-mall).
The same goes for Twitter. Some use it with great success and very happy students, while others find their students find it tedious or not worth the effort. I enjoyed this article’s assertions, though I might disagree somewhat with the Facebook assertions. It was fantastic reading the comments, and this topic (similar to the cloud computing debate) is one that will only grow in importance in the next few years.