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- Tags: aprendizaje atención fav smartphones
[!summary]Entertainment apps optimize only for attention and thus outcompete learning apps that must also optimize for learning. This creates an unavoidable trade-off: making lessons as fun as pure entertainment often undermines real learning. Schools should change the environment (e.g., limit phones) because teachers cannot win the attention arms race.
Highlights
id985040113
Most of these entertainment products are trying to do just one thing: hold the user’s attention. Teachers and educational apps are also trying to hold their students’ attention. But they are trying to do another thing too: they want their students to learn. This basic dynamic is why, in a straight fight with an entertainment product, teachers and education apps will always lose out. The entertainers are optimising for one parameter, and the educators are optimising for two. However much fun you make learning, someone else will use the same techniques minus the constraint of learning. You are in an arms race where you have one arm tied behind your back. Your rival can use all the techniques you can, plus several more that you can’t.
El ecosistema mediático compite por nuestra atención. El aprendizaje compite por el mismo recurso limitado, pero con la constraint de que también debe producir aprendizaje, lo cual requiere de generar esfuerzo, que suele no ser placentero.
id985042759
I mention MrBeast deliberately because there was a recent Guardian Long Read outlining some of his methods. He has turned attention-grabbing into an art and a science. To watch one of his videos is the equivalent of watching a cheetah chase its prey. The cheetah has been optimised for speed through millennia of evolutionary pressures. MrBeast’s YouTube videos have been optimised to grab your attention through millions of data points. Expecting learning to compete is like expecting a Galapagos tortoise to evolve to outrun a cheetah. Even if it could do so, it wouldn’t be a tortoise any more by the time it had finished
Un ejemplo de la optimización desarrollada por la economía de la atención.
id985042853
Learning is the slow, ponderous and beautiful Galapagos tortoise, and online content is the invasive predator which will inevitably drive it to extinction.
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I was surprised to read the education writer Andrew Rotherham complain about school phone bans recently on the grounds that they are an admission of defeat. He thinks that educators should focus more on making their lessons exciting, and less on banning phones. In one sense he is right – banning phones IS an admission of defeat. But he is profoundly wrong to assume that there is a way teachers can win this fight by just “being more exciting”. The reason schools are banning phones is that they are realising this is a fight you can never win, and the most sensible thing to do in a fight you can never win is to change the terms of engagement. Change the battlefield to one that gives you a better chance of winning.
A propósito de la resistencia a la prohibición de uso de smartphones en colegios so pretexto de que involucra una capitulación al intento de hacer clases más engaging, o de renunciar a enseñarles a los NNJ a lidiar con esa demanda de atención.