Monday, December 08, 2008

Change Blindness/Attention Blindness

Wow! I was just reading up on some research about attention blindness or change blindness.

This is some fascinating stuff!

I was turned on to it by the video study completed by Dan Simons that showed the people passing a ball around and you had to focus on how many passes the white t-shirt people made. You can see the video here: http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/media/dateline.html

You will want to read the description in the "basketball" section. Make sure you focus on how many passes the white team makes. Another good account of this experiment is found through the TED Talks (via Google video): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g74hJAAg1Ks

Another researcher that is doing incredible things is Ronald Rensink. His work on change blindness is pretty cool. Play with the java applet a little while. It is incredible what a difference "time between change" makes.

My question...how does this affect school, learning, classroom management, content distribution?

My first thoughts take me to work done by Roy Pea that looks at distributed cognition and the power of your "surround". Dr. Pea did a lot of work looking at the systems and surround in an airplane cockpit. Think about your classroom surround.

Does is every change?
Is it used to help students learn different concepts?
Does is help set classroom culture?
What would happen if you moved a poster - would anyone notice?
Do you do your lectures from the same spot every time? Would it make a difference if you sat in a different location?

We had a kindergarten art teacher that had to miss one of the first days of school this year. The first time students come to art class, she needs to spend some time setting the rules and explaining what is in the room. She decided to make a video of herself doing it the first time and using that video with the classes that she couldn't attend. She noticed that the kids that watched the video of her, had a better understanding of the classroom than the ones that saw her live. It was enough of a difference that she ended up showing it even when she was there the rest of the days when introducing the classroom.

I have some theories as to why that happened, but to make the post a little shorter, let's leave that to discussion.

Any other ideas?