Rumor has it that Apple is going to announce a tablet com­puter, which may well become a rev­o­lu­tion­ary new way for users to read and expe­ri­ence all kinds of edu­ca­tional content.

Will it sup­port or hin­der our Cog­ni­tive  Fitness?

In this arti­cle, I describe the cri­te­ria that a tablet com­puter and its tech­no­log­i­cal ecosys­tem must meet in order for the solu­tion to make users more knowl­edge­able and smarter. To achieve these lofty goals, the tablet must be much more than an reader. The offer­ing must be an inte­grated learn­ing envi­ron­ment with which users trans­form the infor­ma­tion that they read, hear and view on the tablet into their own knowledge.

The key con­sid­er­a­tion in design­ing such a sys­tem is that pro­duc­tive read­ing is active read­ing. In other words, learn­ing involves a lot of think­ing, writ­ing, draw­ing and com­mu­ni­cat­ing. Learn­ing involves antic­i­pat­ing what the author will say, set­ting learn­ing objec­tives, detect­ing knowl­edge gaps, writ­ing com­ments on the doc­u­ment, draw­ing diagrams.

Unfor­tu­nately, today’s com­put­ers do not make this an easy task. Most browsers, for exam­ple, do not inher­ently allow you to anno­tate text (e.g., to make a note of what is impor­tant or you don’t under­stand). Anno­tat­ing requires an add-on, and the anno­ta­tions are usu­ally just text or high­lights that are trapped in soft­ware; they can­not be linked to other doc­u­ments, email or diagrams.

In order to be a suc­cess­ful learn­ing envi­ron­ment, the Apple tablet must match the incum­bent (paper) and also address the cri­te­ria listed below.

Beat The Incum­bent Com­peti­tor — Paper

First, Apple must take into account the major strengths of a tablet’s main com­peti­tor: paper. Despite its many draw­backs com­pared to com­put­ers, paper cur­rently has many advan­tages. Spencer (2006), for exam­ple, has found that her dis­tance edu­ca­tion stu­dents find paper to be more depend­able, flex­i­ble, and ergonomic. Spencer’s stu­dents pre­ferred to print com­plex arti­cles than to read them online.

Paper has a pre­dictable struc­ture and lay­out. It is easy to use and it has a def­i­nite start and end point. Most read­ers can very rapidly access any page of a book, use the table of con­tents, index to quickly nav­i­gate. Read­ers don’t have to wait for a page to load, they can turn it. Also, paper is less busy and less dis­tract­ing: it does not beep while you are concentrating.

More­over, users can write on their own paper to their heart’s content.

These fea­tures present chal­lenges to read­ing and learn­ing technology.

Check­list for a Tablet Com­puter to Make us Smarter

In this sec­tion I focus on some of the fea­tures that can make a tablet a use­ful learn­ing envi­ron­ment. This goes beyond hard­ware, and deals with cog­ni­tive soft­ware and ser­vices. Read the rest of this entry »

Sev­eral hun­dred peo­ple par­tic­i­pated in our first Brain Fit­ness Webi­nar Series, and are glad how the exper­i­ment well. We are already think­ing of top­ics and speak­ers for a sec­ond one, so stay tuned!

In case you couldn’t attend them, we are shar­ing the slides we used (we did not record the webi­nar ses­sions). Here you go:

1) Webi­nar #1: Pre­sen­ta­tion Slides Here.

In “The State of the Brain Fit­ness Soft­ware Mar­ket, 2008, I pro­vided an overview of the sci­ence, mar­ket, and ven­dor land­scape of the emerg­ing brain fit­ness soft­ware mar­ket, based on our recent mar­ket report.
– Tar­get audi­ence: Exec­u­tives, pro­fes­sion­als, investors, reporters and blog­gers inter­ested in learn­ing more about the brain fit­ness mar­ket.
– More infor­ma­tion: Mar­ket Report.

2) Webi­nar #2: Pre­sen­ta­tion Slides Here.

In “Brain Rules for Think­ing Smarter, John Med­ina, devel­op­men­tal mol­e­c­u­lar biologist

Read the rest of this entry »

Today I had a great con­ver­sa­tion with Mar­tin Buschkuehl, one of the U Michi­gan researchers involved in the cog­ni­tive train­ing study that has received much media atten­tion since early last week, when the study was pub­lished at the Pro­ceed­ings of the National Acad­emy of Sci­ences.

I will pub­lish the inter­view notes next week. For the moment, let me para­phrase his answer to the ques­tion: “Why are com­put­er­ized pro­grams like the one you used fun­da­men­tally dif­fer­ent from, say, sim­ply doing many cross­word puzzles?”.

Read the rest of this entry »

A few updates and announcements:

- 1) My apolo­gies for slow blog­ging, due to travel. I par­tic­i­pated yes­ter­day in a fun panel dis­cus­sion at ETech on Use Your Head– The Future of Mind Hacks. You can read some take-aways (in Ital­ian, so this may be good brain exer­cise) here.

- 2) We will release our report The State of the Brain Fit­ness Soft­ware Mar­ket 2008 next Mon­day (Update: Tues­day March 11th!), to coin­cide with Brain Aware­ness Week. Make sure to visit our blog next Mon­day if you want to learn more.

- 3) The National Museum of Health and Med­i­cine at Wal­ter Reed Army Med­ical Cen­ter is plan­ning some great activ­i­ties dur­ing Brain Aware­ness Week (Thank you, Tim). Learn more about their “Part­ners in Edu­ca­tion” activ­i­ties for stu­dents in the Wash­ing­ton DC area.

- 4) The Dana Foun­da­tion has released a great research report to address the ques­tion “Are smart peo­ple drawn to the arts or does arts train­ing make peo­ple smarter?” Enjoy the report and some excel­lent related resources Here.

- 5) Eric Jensen has writ­ten a great arti­cle on Brain-Based Edu­ca­tion for PDK Inter­na­tional Jour­nal of Edu­ca­tion. Enjoy it!

Senia writes a great arti­cle on How You Tell the Story of Your Life in Pos­i­tive Psy­chol­ogy News Daily. As part of the story, she men­tions a very fun study on the power of the Placebo effect.

From Senia’s post:

“In the Feb­ru­ary, 2007 issue of Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci­ence, Langer and col­league Alia Crum reported that they took 84 hotel work­ers and told one group that “the work they do (clean­ing hotel rooms) is good exer­cise and sat­is­fies the Sur­geon General’s rec­om­men­da­tions for an active lifestyle. Exam­ples of how their work was exer­cise were pro­vided. Langer and Crum told the con­trol group noth­ing. Four weeks later, Langer and Crum returned to find some mea­sure­ments of both groups: the con­trol group hadn’t changed phys­i­cally, but the test group had decreased all of the fol­low­ing: weight, blood pres­sure, body fat, waist-to-hip ratio, and body mass index.

Langer and Crum describe this study as sup­port­ing the the­ory that exer­cise affects health at least partly due to the placebo effect. Fur­ther­more, we can ask, what are the sto­ries that these hotel work­ers are telling them­selves? Why do the hotel work­ers sud­denly believe that they actively affect their exer­cise regiment?”

Impli­ca­tion: the placebo effect is real, and it can help our health.

A few fun ques­tions to consider:

- How do we pre­vent other peo­ple from sell­ing us stuff that only works based on the placebo effect?

- Once we decide to do some­thing, shouldn’t we try to “placebo” our­selves in order to get the most of it? this is another man­i­fes­ta­tion of the impor­tance of emo­tional self-regulation.

Enjoy the long weekend