Multitasking always or just following the Mob ?
Introductory statement:
The Public Sphere-Recalling Habermas – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%BCrgen_Habermas
George Siemens said that the Moodle Forum is the place for discussion (not until now. I did not find the place to do it)
, an Agora. Very interesting concept. This remind me of Habermas philosophy and his communication act.
Habermas defined that knowledge is created when a commutation act, mediated by language between persons, happens.
The communication act aims at getting consensus. The agent who wants to communicate claims for himself the aspect of Correction (follow norms), Truth (prove of evidence) and Sincerity (express his subject experiences – tacit knowledge). So with this in mind I express the following on the subject of multitasking in this space.
We know that the cognitivism theory in mapping the brain processes to computer design is excessive. Some analogies or metaphors, though, help me to understand better learning activities. One of which is the multitasking concepts.
In computer techniques multitasking is performed with:
a) Several CPU´s running in parallel and sharing resources distributing them to processing requests.
b) Threading – allocating Time CPU slots to processes.
This second method allows having several programs in a computer running apparently “at the same time” as long as they not exceed the CPU resources.
Multitasking, as is recognized in the proposed , is used by younger’s when they use certain media (Computers, not games or TV, according to my reading). Deducting from some declarations of participants in this study, I think youngsters are able to switch between task because they can (computers tend to take a long time to have available , ready to act, programs or webpages needed). It is this latency that permits multitasking.
In computer technology, CPUs switch between tasks, sending several data to a common stack (Temporary memory) where they can pick them up later to update registers and pointers allowing the resuming of processes.
According to Jeff Hawkins
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Hawkins
( our mind receives information from sensory interfaces (visual and audio) and from internal channel (Long Term Memory- memory of sequences) that’s allows predictions. The internal channel has information already processed, so we deduct that we can resume thinking when we switch task depending only on the sensory channels. As we have limited capacity (bandwidth ) and limited working memory (7 items according to Miller http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_or_Minus_Two
)
improving the shifting of focus as needed to salient environment’s details (MIT – Fenry Jenkins on Participatory Culture on the 21 st Century) must rely on Distributed Cognition (Interact with tools that expand mental capacities ) .
Furthermore, as stated on the Multitask media paper, the best time to reach a young person attention with a message (vehicle of learning) is when that person is seeking for it (synchronizing with the slot allocation of attention of that relevant interest) . Delivering a message is not enough, one has to broadcast it and the person has to fetch it (The Networking skills) .
The first method - providing multitasking paralleling CPUs- is built distributing them in a bus or in a Grid. The Bus way has less latency but can generate a lot of overload (because of the broadcast techniques).
The Grid has selective potentialities but does depend heavily on switching technology, bandwidth and topology . The skill involved, in this anthropomorphic method of paralleling CPUs, is the Collective Intelligence (compare notes towards the common goal). This ideas pull me to -We, Borg speculations on hive Minds as a Posthuman Sate - Sandberg http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Global/Posthumanity/WeBorg.html -
), where we have to recognized that we are at the same time a part of a planetary mind and an independent individual.
So…
Questions:
1 - Can we link up to the Collective Intelligence at will, or;
2 – We are always connected but we have some mental levels to ourselves while others are reserved to the collective- (Again the question of mind sharing resources mapping?)
Connectivism all the way , don’t you think ?
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