“You no longer have to worry about forgetting where you put your holograms”. This was something I’ll admit I never thought I would hear, but nonetheless did when listening to a reviewer discuss the latest update to Microsoft Hololens. You see with a Hololens you can pin your browser window, or music app to your office wall or coffee table and may forget where it was - but now you can tell Cortana to bring it back to where you are. Cool, so what’s the point in stating that? Proponents of AR and MR (VR your time may be limited…) essentially don’t want you to have monitors anymore and why would you, when you can have a multitude of infinite virtual monitors in your environment that don’t eat up space and power? Whilst exciting, the question needs to be asked are we preparing our students for this reality? I often think back to a conversation with a student earlier in the year regarding her phone being a grade-eating distraction as to how limited our explicit teaching of task focus really is. Add to this scenario the instant-gratification reward pathway social media is entrenching in the neural networks of our students, and the propagation of the gross misnomer ‘multitasking’, and you soon realise that we have a long way to go. Devora Zack is just one of many researchers who is able to clearly articulate how ‘single-tasking’ is good for not only efficiency but sanity, despite the silent voice of society telling us otherwise.
So how then is my student going to cope in a world of dozens of virtual screens when she struggles to manage two? There seems to be an unjustified assumption in the tech world that human nature and capacity will somehow just keep up with technological advances, that we can simply change and update our innate behavioural patterns like a software developer would to a piece of code. Yet whilst the gap between the person and the computer is narrowing in some sense, there exists a growing, more subtle gap between what efficiency means to a machine and what efficiency means to a person. As Matthew Crawford recognises, distraction through the prevalence of information has reached a point already where we pay to have less - from removing ads on that smartphone app to the Koru Lounge at the airp
ort. Does this mean that those who cannot afford otherwise are destined for sensory overload in the years to come, or simply that we as educators need to scaffold the construction of filtration systems, awareness cues, and a fundamental understanding of the neuroscience being productivity?