This is your brain on Twitter/facebook/email/iPhone/TV/crack cocaine. Very simple and what should be an obvious message for site designers in online learning: never show exactly the same page twice. In learning we move from one novelty to the next – that’s part of what makes it such fun. One problem with a typical coursel site that shows a static content hierarchy (rather a lot of LMS – based courses) is that the jump-off page tends to vary little. In a program I used to run I insisted that the entry point for every course was the discussion forum, driven by Michael Moore’s transactional distance theory more than anything else. However, it was a pretty good motivator too, bringing people to the sites more frequently than those for static content course sites. I thought it was just because people like to socialise and also had to keep visiting in order to know what was happening. Turns out that dopamine may have played a role in this too!
Address of the bookmark: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/russell-poldrack/multitasking-the-brain-se_b_334674.html
