Category Archives: Professional

A decade ago those of us interested in computers and learning were convinced that multitasking, encouraged by the internet in particular, was going to change what it meant to be human. Everything had to be redesigned to encourage multitasking; we had to accept, we told ourselves, that our (younger) students would be even better at it, because they would know no work or play without it.

We were a little put off by the prospect of the world becoming utterly strange, but their ascendancy seemed inevitable. A handful of more scientific minded folk took these ideas very seriously and started devising experiments and tests to see if it were really true. The news is not good. I just listened to an interview with Clifford Nass, a sociologist at Stanford on the Canadian show Spark (Episode 142, here);

The evidence is clear, Nass says: our brains are not designed to multitask and the more we try to multitask the worse our cognitive performance becomes. More and more people are reporting that multitasking is unproductive and the single task has become daunting. We’ve unlearned concentration and focus, and Nass believes, we need to relearn how to keep our minds on a single task.

Lot’s of people (in the U.S. anyway) tend to react badly when they hear the word “regulation.” That’s mostly thanks to a long right-wing campaign to undermine the very idea of government. Of course, without regulation we’d be drinking poisoned water or living in houses that might burn down or buying products that could kill us. In fact, logically, given the still emerging ramifications of global warming, or the ongoing crisis of the financial industry, here and in Europe, we don’t have enough regulation. Or, perhaps, we don’t have enough regulators. The for-profit industry should fight for a strong, adequately staffed regulatory system.

The for-profit sector is no more or less corrupt than the public, but the regulations outlined in “Accreditor to Offer New Model That Looks Into Corporate Practices of For-Profit Colleges” should be welcomed. A strong accreditation system, tailor-made for the for-profits, is a necessity.The current era of for-profit growth is rooted in the sheer number of students left out- or pushed out- of the pubic system. As the market matures over the next decade or so, this growth will slow to a crawl and students will become much more selective. When that happens, we will need strong accreditation systems to compete.