This is an update from Week Three of "This Is Your Brain on the Internet," taught in Duke's marvelous ISIS (Information Science + Information Studies) program. I can't say enough great things about this program that spans the entire university, bringing together artists, humanists, social scientists, computer scientists, engineers, economists . . . you name it! If you are earning an ISIS certificate, you are likely to be interesting, to have an inquisitive mind that doesn't follow in the normal tracks of a university. In ISIS, there isn't even a box to think outside of. A glimpse at the first three weeks of this class will show you what I mean.

There are fifteen students in the class, plus myself, TA Katy, and Teaching Apprentice Lindsey. The three of us are what I call "new style English teachers." That is, we're each savvy scientifically in different ways. Katy is a professional stage designer who is a tech wizard. Lindsey worked with primates as an undergrad. And the class members span the spectrum of just about all of the disciplines but with a quite high-level of involvement in computer science, engineering, and pre-med, in addition to strong language-skills, excellent reading, and inquisitiveness. In a typical class, as many as 12 or 13 students out of 15 will ask a question or venture a comment. Interestingly, no one has a laptop open in this class so I've never had to address an issue that many of my peers report in their teaching these days.



In the comments section of this posting, I will paste in an updated version of our syllabus and then I'm going to invite my students to comment. I don't know if they will feel ready yet, but this posting is partly intended as a provocation to them. One requirement for the course is to contribute what they are learning to public discussions in one form or another. Matt, one of the students, has already posted to the recent, excellent HASTAC Scholars Forum on Collaboration. Most have been reluctant to take that step out into the public world, although they are actively posting to a blog on Wordpress (thanks, Mark!) set up for our class. It's one of the course requirements for each student to post on the class blog once a week at minimum and to create a portfolio of their work. Katy, Lindsey, and I batted around the idea of whether or not to make all the blogging public and decided to keep it a class blog. But maybe this public report on our class will encourage some students to make tht first, public step. I've blogged on this site before on the fact that, for some of us, writing in public is as natural as breathing. For others, it is terrifying. Some of those who work most industriously on behalf of HASTAC have never ventured to post on the HASTAC site. I respect that sense of writerly reserve, even though (obviously!) I don't share it.

The point of "This Is Your Brain on the Internet" is to cut through a lot of silly stuff people write about both the Internet and cognition. In the second half of the course we'll focus on the Internet, including the great series of studies sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation that counter with serious and intelligent research (including ethnographic) the misinformed blather of various pundits who condemn this generation of students because of the amount of the time they spend on line. We will be looking at work by Anna Everett, Tara McPherson, Anne Balsamo, John Seely Brown, and others as well as the major studies by the Pew Foundation as well as by Mizuko (Mimi) Ito's team out of Berkeley by way (now) of Irvine and UCHRI. I have blogged about all of this before and will later, as the course progresses.

One subtext of this class, for me as a teacher, is that I believe (NB: I really do believe this) that the kind of research one does every day on the Internet helps one to think in a creative, collaborative, nonlinear fashion. Rather than a world of theft and superficiality, I find that my students, quite seamlessly, participate in a world where questions can be answered with a click of a mouse--and so they are answered. They aren't just left out there in that world of "So, like, man, do you think you can really bend a spoon with your mind?" The contrast of deep, sustained research with Internet browsing seems to me apples and oranges in most cases. Rather, what the Internet offers is all the world's knowledge at one's finger tips so one can, quite simply, be easily informed. A friend at dinner the other night, for example, showed me her Obama Ap on her Iphone that lets you, in the middle of a dinner-table discussion of the current debt crisis, for example, go to a site that gives you the most accurate current numbers for everything for the U.S.'s GNP last year to definitions of "derivative trading." I believe that is a new form of quick-fix thinking that, as educators, we should be mining, describing, analyzing, and building upon in all ways, creative and critical. (Yes, that is the HASTAC mission statement. Coincidence?)

Another of my convictions is that THAT model of Internet thinking is much closer to how the mind/brain works, and that what we need most now (and I agree with Jeff Hawkins on this point) is a better model of mind to help us understand how we understand. I trust my students to be not only inquisitive but self-motivated in their search and research. I see my job as provocateur and also as critic, to help provide an interdisciplinary knowledge-basis, historical perspective, and the critical skills of a trained, attentive close reader of texts, whether those texts appear in the latest issue of Nature or in the Shakespeare canon. I also trust my students to know many, many things that I do not. I hope that they are inspired to learn in areas they had not explored before--I certainly am inspired by them and their areas of expertise, some of which I'll note in this posting.

We're spending the first part of the course exploring different models of mind, moving more and more towards an idea that the brain is far more plastic than some determinists insist, that brain localization is exaggerated, that we need to be extremely cautious about extrapolating from neuronal activity to human behavior, that evolutionary psychology needs to be thought through critically, and that the differences between and among human capacities is rich and important?and invaluable as we talk about ?collaboration by difference,? the ?here comes everybody? form of Internet collectivity.

That?s a lot. And, so far, it seems to be working. The kinds of questions in class are almost never of the ?Will this be on the midterm?? variety and more likely to be, to quote Ben, ?So is second-language acquisition also in the basal ganglia?? (see, for example, http://tinyurl.com/alw5ww) or, from Ananth, ?Doesn?t the concept of neural plasticity make us think more about the kinds of alternative views of mind that are familiar in South Asia??). Those are questions that make a teacher smile.

We began the class with Bauby?s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a memoir that Bauby, an editor of French Elle, dictated by blinking his eye in response to recitation of the alphabet after he had a massive brain stem stroke that resulted in ?locked-in syndrome.? In this syndrome, thinking is unaffected but, in his case, only one eye?s blinking allowed him to communicate with the outside world. On the first day of class, right after discussing the syllabus, I passed around alphabet sheets, arranged by letter frequency, and students worked in pairs, one as the locked-in person and one as the amanuensis, taking the cues and writing them down. We discussed the collaborative form of this communication. Then we read the book, saw the movie. Esi, Ashleigh, and Jennifer did interesting background research and told us about how legal issues (i.e. the former wife owns the copyright!) shaped some of the differences between the book and the movie. They led us on an intriguing discussion of memoir, travel literature, and filmic conventions.

Students next went to a discussion, a rehearsal, and then a performance by Shen Wei, the brilliant choreographer who designed the opening of the Beijing Olympics and who (lucky for us!) got his start in the U.S. in 1995 at the American Dance Festival, which is housed at Duke University. He spent two weeks in residence working on a new piece and premiered three exquisite excerpts from it here. My students were able to see such collaborative wonders as a dancer protesting that she didn?t want to be beautiful as she choreographed her own part of the dance, and then the result on stage, each individual?s dances melded into a sinuous, continuous, but not at all linear whole. Morgan, who is a dancer, gave us insights into body memory and modern dance. Steffi, an athlete, has helped us understand collective physical and even mental exertions and how they shape a victory in a sport like rowing that requires both individual performance and mental synchrony. When i asked the students how many of them had never been to a modern dance performance before, about 10 or 11 of the 15 raised their hands. About the same never said they had never experienced Virtual Reality (we have a field trip to Duke's DIVE, a six-sided virtual reality "cave," coming up next.)

We?ve read Daniel Levitin?s This Is Your Brain on Music (the inspiration for our course title and, if you haven?t read it, a marvelous music lover?s guide to the brain) and are in the middle of Norman Doidge?s The Brain that Changes Itself. We?ve talked about everything from infant (and adult) synesthesia, to the limits of plasticity as a model, to definitions of ?disability,? to the relationship between bodies, brains, mind, culture, and technology.

Each class is led by two students and a pattern is developing where they read the blogs of the other students and also write their own blogs, sometimes with links or interesting visuals, that we read even before the class. In the second half of the class, we will continue reading but each Wednesday will be student-driven by a collaborative project formally presented to us by teams of students.

Is the brain a serial or a parallel processor? Clearly it is a parallel processor. But even computers are becoming ever-more parallel in their abilities. One student, a computer science major, is interesting in doing his collaborative project on parallel processing and the future of GPU?s. Mike recommends the opening discussion of GPU?s from Wikipedia: ?A graphics processing unit or GPU (also occasionally called visual processing unit or VPU) is a dedicated graphics rendering device for a personal computer, workstation, or game console. Modern GPUs are very efficient at manipulating and displaying computer graphics, and their highly parallel structure makes them more effective than general-purpose CPUs for a range of complex algorithms. A GPU can sit on top of a video card, or it can be integrated directly into the motherboard. More than 90% of new desktop and notebook computers have integrated GPUs, which are usually far less powerful than those on a video card.?

I also like the final paragraph from Wikipedia: ?Most approaches compile linear or tree programs on the host PC and transfer the executable to the GPU to run. Typically the performance advantage is only obtained by running the single active program simultaneously on many example problems in parallel using the GPU's SIMD architecture. However, substantial acceleration can also be obtained by not compiling the programs but instead transferring them to the GPU and interpreting them there. Acceleration can then be obtained by either interpreting multiple programs simultaneously, simultaneously running multiple example problems, or combinations of both. A modern GPU (e.g. 8800 GTX) can readily simultaneously interpret hundreds of thousands of very small programs.?

?Interpreting multiple programs simultaneously.? Interesting. That?s feeling a lot like our class, ?This Is Your Brain on the Internet.?

Thanks, everybody, for making my return to the classroom such a pleasure.

Now, I hope you?ll share some of your own thoughts this week here, in the Comments section below, for All the HASTAC World to See!

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--Special thanks to Flickr community member Ocean Flynn for sharing this image (please click on it for full documentation and more of the photostream).