Too much of a good thing? Coping with information overload in online learning environments

Hello and welcome to this week’s blog by Joe Bloggs. Last week’s post (https://jgamblesite.wordpress.com/2016/03/01/elois-or-morlocks-the-journey-towards-a-balanced-view-of-future-online-learning-practices/) provided a nightmarish depiction of the future in terms of polarising perspectives on the future of BOE practices. The murderous Morlocks did indeed criticise many aspects of this dystopian future, although they failed to consider one critical issue of future TEL that is actually manifested to a certain degree in today’s digital educational landscape. This issue was kindly raised in a feedback comment on the blog post by Anne and relates to information overload or the effects of “mass produced knowledge”; this is the subject of this week’s blog post.

 

So is too much of a good thing a bad thing? It seems to me that the main concern of information overload from the context of TEL or BOE is that there will be a saturation of lower-quality information and that the better quality data may effectively become ‘lost in the ether’. But are these fears justified? Huang et al. (2011) certainly appear to believe so as they both acknowledge cognitive overload as an “issue that has attracted much attention in web-based learning settings” and suggest that it is accounted for by the requirement to expose one’s self to “a surfeit of online resources over a short time” (p. 96). I think that these authors make a salient point that it is the pressures of time constraints in online learning tasks that may play a significant role is the quality lessening argument, when combined with the information overload. Therefore, the key underlying issue correlates to the increased inability to navigate through the volume of information to the high quality data. But is quality the only concern with regard to information overload in TEL? Actually, cultural relevance may also constitute an important factor – especially with the overabundance of data from different cultures/countries/religions around the globe.

 

The other point that Huang et al. (2011) make relates to the alleged attention which this phenomenon is attracting. This leads me to wonder what steps are being taken to mitigate and circumvent the risks inherent in this scenario? Certainly we possess, along with this plethora of new information resource pools, the technological potential to filter and sort the data to meet the stipulations of our research needs. But are these filter/sorting tools improving at a rate consistent with the increase of information overload? On 2^nd March 2016 I attended the “Leap into Research” conference at Edinburgh Napier University (details available at http://blogs.napier.ac.uk/leap-into-research/session-details/) and this specific issue reared its ugly head. The talk by the Leader of External Funding, Dr Aileen Wood, had turned to the use of the Research Professional tool to filter and search through the thousands of global research funding opportunities across a range of disciplines. One of the delegates heavily criticised the tool’s alleged inability to produce relevant results, based on her extensive use of the tool in various searches. My personal experiences of Google Scholar as a tool for filtering and searching for relevant academic journal articles has been much more positive, with new features facilitating advanced searches of specific time ranges, information types, related articles, etc. Indeed, the importance of organisation as a catalyst in informational management is not a new concept in the digital age. For instance, Tan et al. (2003) suggested over 12 years ago that the level of material organisation has a direct impact on the quantity of information that students can absorb and recall. The negative feedback in my recent conference illustrates that this is likely to remain an ongoing bone of contention for the foreseeable future.

 

Paradoxically, I  feel that the solution to this issue of information overload (which has been triggered by technological advancements) is for individuals to develop more technological advancements in their abilities to use and navigate the range of tools search as Research Professional and Google Scholar (to name but a very few…). Indeed, Sibbel (2009) clearly highlights the repercussions of not engaging with the information sorting tools in his caveat that “[t]he limitations of the human processing system for dealing with an overwhelming amount of information add to the problem of providing useful and balanced information” (p. 79).  However, the issue of cultural relevance, as raised above, would perhaps necessitate some additional consideration. Consequently, next week’s blog post will explore cultural diversity and its effects on – and how it is affected by – the global/local aspects of BOE. Stay tuned.

 

References

Huang, T.-C., Huang, Y.-M., & Yu, F.-Y. (2011). Cooperative Weblog Learning in Higher Education: Its Facilitating Effects on Social Interaction, Time Lag, and Cognitive Load. Educational Technology & Society, 14 (1), 95–106.

Sibbel, A. (2009) “Pathways towards sustainability through higher education.”International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education 10 (1) 68-82.

Tan, O. S., Richard, D. P., Stephanie, L. H., & Deborah, S. B. (2003). Educational psychology: A practitioner-research approach, Taiwan: Cengage Learning Asia.