Eric Calvert's List: Post to TeachThinkTech

• A growing chorus of voices argue that the internet is making us dumber. Web-connected laptops, smartphones and videogame consoles have all been cast as distracting brain mushers. But there’s reason to believe some of the newest devices might not erode our minds. In fact, some scientists think they could even make us smarter.
• Could the cleaner and more modern interfaces that we see on iPads, iPhones and Android smartphones better suit the way our minds were meant to work?
• This idea challenges the conclusions of web cynics like Nicholas Carr. In his new book, The Shallows, Carr draws on a plethora of studies that collectively conclude the internet is shattering our focus and rewiring our brains to make us shallower thinkers. However, these arguments may not apply to the newest wave of devices.
• After completing his study, Demirbilek found that subjects using the tiled-windows interface were significantly less disoriented than subjects using an overlapping-windows interface. He also found that participants working with overlapping windows were substantially more likely to experience cognitive overload than those working with tiled windows
• Carr’s cited studies focus on interfaces that will soon be out-of-date. Newer mobile devices such as the iPhone, iPad and Android smartphones abolish the traditional graphical user interface we’re accustomed to. Gone are the mouse pointer and the mess of windows cluttering our desktop. On these mobile technologies — especially the iPad with its bigger 9.7-inch display — all the emphasis is placed on the content, and each launched app completely takes over the screen.
• “I think that the interface of [the] iPad could work well for young children because it maps onto how kids already do things in their daily life,” he said. “Sweeping things across the screen fits exactly with how very young children behave and think.”

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• Understanding that kids are excellent innovators, Latitude Research in conjunction with ReadWriteWeb recently conducted a study asking children to ideate concepts for new computer and Web technologies - and the results are in
• While it's not too surprising that kids today think about digital technologies (and the experiences they enable) as a given, the study found that kids desire increasingly immersive content experiences, better integration of digital technology into physical objects, spaces and activities, and more intuitive interfaces - 37% of participants' creations didn't even bother with the traditional keyboard/mouse interface.
• What's more, our participants' ideas weren't just forward-thinking; they were also surprisingly down-to-earth, with only 4% of kids' "future requests" being impossible demands for today's developers (e.g. time-travel, teleportation, etc.)
• Kids today have different experiences with technology during a critical learning period than present adults did, which means they also have different understandings about what it can and should do. "Kids will figure out how to use whatever they get in front of, and that will become the framework inside of which they experience, critique, and create everything else," said Geoff Barnes, Director of User Experience at Elliance.

• The study was comprised of 126 children, aged 12 and under, from across the globe. Here's what we asked them:

    

  "What would be really interesting or fun to do on your computer or the Internet that your computer  can't do right now? Please draw a picture of what this activity looks like."

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