Garry’s Rambles

Martin’s experience and expertise is in neuroscience. He says that the brain grows by the growth of the connections between cells and these connections reflect our experience. It’s the personalisation of the brian. (150 trillion). He says that repetition uses the connections and the pathways for the connections, but that emotion plays an important role in laying down these connections. This is most important when kids become anxious about say learning maths. Chemicals may prevent these connections communicating. The forming of new connections and the breaking of the connections occur all the time. This is what we call plasticity.

Martin described how the world has changed, how the technology has changed, how the kids have changed, but our system has not changed…or at least not very much. In fact, they respond in a negative way to the technology but recognise the significant power of technology to change. He says that kids have responded by using the internet to avoid work. See this link ‘Cheats prevented’. Martin says that the internet is used by kids for socialistion and not information finding only.

Martin says that ‘it’s not the technology that changes the way that you think - its about you and what you do with it’.

Martin says that the myth that technology replaces existing behaviours (eg reading) is not true. The kids use technology to enhance their normal experiences. He also suggested that when you go to a surgeon don’t ask how many operations have you done before, but what is your highest score in Monkey Balls 2. He says that there is evidence to suggest that gaming does improve a surgeon’s ability. He says games have a massive amount of information that the user needs to take in and demand a high capacity for attention. They develop attentional capacity!! This is why Mark Prensky rightly says ‘kids go to school to powerdown’

More to come later….Garry