First up, the Leamnson results.  If you look at the panels, you will note that it was a good survey size of Fall Day CUH students, at N=73.  There are several key points in the results:

• Social media is the main time drain for CUH students—with no variation between intro and upper-division students. Even more compelling was the ambivalence you have (collectively) towards social media, seeing it as a social requirement but seeing as a major factor of emotional and social stress.  Somewhat unique to the Pacific, it was also frequently noted as a way that relatives micro-manage your affairs long-distance, another major source of stress.  It’s important to place this within the time-disruption findings, that it takes 25-30 minutes to get back on-task after media disruption.  If there is emotional input, that number goes up radically.  So your ability to get quality work done on time is seriously compromised by the dominance of social media.
• Most upsetting to those of us who are academics, CUH students only spend the same amount of out-of-class time on course material as that spent sitting in class. At best there was a 1:1 correlation between in-class/outside-class time—note that this includes readings, assignments, everything.  From my end of that equation I don’t see how students can gain knowledge of the material, but that’s your numbers.
• The ONLY difference in the numbers wasn’t between lower and upper-division courses, but whether they were required or not. Required courses you spend the absolute minimum of your time on—but on elective courses you spend significantly more time.  In the end, you take away a lot more knowledge from the courses you choose to take than from the courses you have to take.

LEARNING SKILLS MODULE: Better titled ‘Being Employable’

These are the list of skills you need to have [taken from a number of sources and also from my own background as a consultant].  To put this in context, think of the robot barrista vid I sent out.  If you work at Starbucks that’s not competition you want to see.  Many of the careers you will be in haven’t been invented yet, and many of the careers around now will be gone or seriously morphed within 10 years.  Statistically, you will be changing jobs every 4-6 years, and changing CAREERS every 10-12 years.  So knowing how to learn will keep you employable in the future.

Key Points:

• You have to develop these skills until they become habits—at best, permanent habits that you automatically use on almost all occasions. If you have to consciously think to use these skills then you haven’t trained or used them enough.
• You should have been trained in these from your K-12 education experience, but as far as we can see, it never happened. Much of this appears to be the result of family and other social groups outside of the formal school system dropping the ball on training you, but the Educational system also failed by emphasizing short-term memory skills (no child left behind measures for example).  End result is most of you don’t have these skills in any functional way.
• During the Semester we will go through some strategies to help you build up this skill set, though it’s trickier online vs. sit-down. So we’ll have to see how it goes.  This means that I need feedback from you when you don’t get something, want clarification, alternatives, more detail—whatever.
• The Assessing Thinking bullets are those developed for what is sometimes called active listening, and should be used whenever material [like this class material] is presented to you.
• Being comfortable with the Educational Skills is a major factor in being an attractive job candidate, so practice them.

We will be getting into the techniques of how-to next week