"As Ms. Davidson puts it: 'Pundits may be asking if the Internet is bad for our children’s mental development, but the better question is whether the form of learning and knowledge-making we are instilling in our children is useful to their future.' In her galvanic new book, “Now You See It,” Ms. Davidson asks, and ingeniously answers, that question. One of the nation’s great digital minds, she has written an immensely enjoyable omni-manifesto that’s officially about the brain science of attention. But the book also challenges nearly every assumption about American education. . . . As scholarly as “Now You See It” is — as rooted in field experience, as well as rigorous history, philosophy and science — this book about education happens to double as an optimistic, even thrilling, summer read. It supplies reasons for hope about the future. Take it to the beach. That much hope, plus that much scholarship, amounts to a distinctly unguilty pleasure."
--Virginia Heffernen,
Education Needs a Digital-Age Upgrade, Opinionator column in The New York Times, August, 8 2011
"A remarkable new book,
Now You See It . . . offers a fresh and reassuring perspective on how to manage anxieties about the bewildering pace of technological change. . . . Her work is the most powerful yet to insist that we can and should manage the impact of these changes in our lives."
--Anya Kamenetz,
"Duke's Cathy Davidson Has a Bold Plan For Change," Fast Company, July 2011
“Davidson has produced an exceptional and critically important book, one that is all-but-impossible to put down and likely to shape discussions for years to come.”
Publisher's Weekly Review, 5/30/2011
"In a chatty, enthusiastic style, the author takes us on a journey through contemporary classrooms and offices to describe how they are changing—or, according to her, should change. Among much else, we need to build schools and workplaces that match the demands of our multitasking brains. That means emphasizing "nonlinear thinking," "social networks" and "crowdsourcing." ..Now You See It is filled with instructive anecdotes and genuine insights."
"
Now You See It shows how mind and technology can meet, with the latter becoming an extension of the mind - not simply a tool, but a mind tool. . . . Neatly presented in an accessible style, this account is peppered liberally with personal anecdotes and is laced with empirical evidence from psychological studies. Indeed, Davidson has taken great care in achieving this fine balance.
Now You See It is humorous, poignant, entertaining, endearing, touching and challenging. It is a book I would happily recommend to anyone engaged in teaching at any level, because it aims both to comfort and to disrupt; it is devised to convince readers that the human mind is ready for the next quantum advance into our collective future, whatever that may be. It is certainly all-embracing in its scope, demonstrating how a sound knowledge of the many ways we can learn in new, media-rich environments might provide a better understanding of how individuals can attain their optimum potential."
Book of the Week,
Times Higher Education, reviewed by Steve Wheeler, September 8, 2011
"
Now You See It shows how mind and technology can meet, with the latter becoming an extension of the mind - not simply a tool, but a mind tool. . . . Neatly presented in an accessible style, this account is peppered liberally with personal anecdotes and is laced with empirical evidence from psychological studies. Indeed, Davidson has taken great care in achieving this fine balance.
Now You See It is humorous, poignant, entertaining, endearing, touching and challenging. It is a book I would happily recommend to anyone engaged in teaching at any level, because it aims both to comfort and to disrupt; it is devised to convince readers that the human mind is ready for the next quantum advance into our collective future, whatever that may be. It is certainly all-embracing in its scope, demonstrating how a sound knowledge of the many ways we can learn in new, media-rich environments might provide a better understanding of how individuals can attain their optimum potential."
Book of the Week,
Times Higher Education, reviewed by Steve Wheeler, September 8, 2011
"Davidson profiles workplaces that have thrown out the industrial age rule of command and control, of management as supervision rather than leadership and support, detailing how these employers achieve both high profits and high staff retention.
I'm so pleased that
Now You See It came out of our academic world, written by someone who works within our system. Her critique of higher education is that of an insider who wants to reform and improve the system, not blow it up. "
Joshua Kim,
Blog U on Inside Higher Ed, Sept. 5, 2011
"While the New York Times continually publishes articles on the detrimental effects of technology for our concentration, Davidson takes the technological bull by the horns and argues that concentration hasn't gone downhill with the internet: we're just operating with an outdated notion of attention, in the workplace and at home."
Sophie Duvernoy,
LA Weekly, August 29, 2011
"The book’s purpose and strength are in detailing the important lessons we can glean from the online world. Rather than focusing on how games such as World of Warcraft or the social-networking services of Twitter and Facebook change our brains, Davidson believes we should foster these newfound skills, building curricula around interactive multiplayer games and training workers using virtual environments."
Brian Mossop,
Scientific American, August 31, 2011
Click here to view a printout of the review.
"At first blush, it seems difficult to argue with this proposition. Indeed, I eagerly gobbled up this book not only because it is well written and full of interesting examples, anecdotes and people, but also because it provides a framework for understanding my struggle to balance different aspects of my own life. And yet, people
will resist the ideas in this book because our ways of thinking — and our institutions — are so entrenched that realigning them is as revolutionary as it is sensible."
Josh Trapani,
The Washington Independent Review of Books, August 22, 2011
"Davidson’s call to experiment with digital schemes that turn students and workers into motivated problem solvers rings as clear as a bell atop a little red schoolhouse. "
Bruce Bower,
ScienceNews.com, September 10, 2011
"By looking at the historical and philosophical underpinnings of the modern school and workplace, however, Davidson, a professor of English and interdisciplinary studies, makes a persuasive case for the transformation cited in her subtitle, one that builds on current research on attentiveness and takes better advantage of the tools that modern technology has made available. "If institutions of school and work fight changes that people have happily adopted in their lives," she writes, "then perhaps the source of distraction in the workplace isn't technology—perhaps it is the outmoded practices required by our schools and workplaces.""
Marc Maximov,
Indyweek.com, August 24, 2011
“Now You See It starts where Malcolm Gladwell leaves off, showing how digital information will change our brains. Think Alvin Toffler meets Ray Kurzweil on Francis Crick's front porch. We need this book.”
Daniel Levitin, James McGill Professor of Neuroscience, McGill University and author of the New York Times bestsellers This Is Your Brain on Music and The World in Six Songs
“The technological changes around us are of unprecedented proportions. What effects this has on us and what it tells us about human nature more generally is a central question for society and for all of us personally. In this book Cathy Davidson integrates findings from psychology, attention, neuroscience, and learning theory to help us get a glimpse of the future and more importantly a better understanding of our own individual potential."
Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics, Duke University and author of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions
“Now You See It is a stunning work, one that we have all been waiting for and that I endorse wholeheartedly. Only Cathy Davidson could pull off such a sweeping book. It ‘s a true ‘wow wow.’”
John Seely Brown, formerly Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation and Director of Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and co-author of The Social Life of Information
“Cathy Davidson has one of the most interesting and wide ranging minds in contemporary scholarship, a mind that ranges comfortably over literary arts, literacy, psychology, and brain science. I've been stimulated by her writings. Her ambitious and timely book is certain to attract a lot of attention and to catalyze many discussions.”
Howard Gardner, Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Harvard University
"The self-reprogramming capacity of the human mind, together with the way our communication technologies influence our thinking, are combining to reprogram our attention. One cutting edge of educational practice is participatory learning -- giving students a more active, exploratory role based on critical inquiry -- and one frontier of brain research is what is happening to our attention in the always-on era. Cathy Davidson is a natural to bring together these neuroscientific and educational themes."
Howard Rheingold, lecturer at Berkeley and Stanford and author of Smart Mobs and The Virtual Community
"As I was writing this review, Tom Friedman, the
New York Times columnist, wrote about hiring practices in Silicon Valley, the most dynamic corner of our economy. “They are all looking for the same kind of people,” Friedman wrote—people with “the critical-thinking skills to do the valueadding jobs that technology can’t, but also people who can invent, adapt, and reinvent their jobs every day, in a market that changes faster than ever…not only doing the job today but also reinventing the job for tomorrow.”"
Read the rest of this review... or download a pdf of the review
here.
Fred Andres,
Duke Magazine, Sept.-Oct. 2011
"Her book 'Now You See It' celebrates the brain as a lean, mean, adaptive multitasking machine that — with proper care and feeding — can do much more than our hidebound institutions demand of it. The first step is transforming schools, which are out of touch with the radical new realities of the Internet era.. . . Davidson is such a good storyteller, and her characters are well drawn."
Christopher Chabris,
"Is the Brain Good at What It Does?" New York Times, October 14, 2011.
"Now You See It” is meant as “a field guide and a survival manual for the digital age,” and author Cathy Davidson hits that target square . . . There’s no doubt that this audiobook is intriguing. Davidson uses anecdotes and statistics to back up her ideas, offering lots of usable information that makes sense. She engages readers with wit and appropriate factlets, and it’s hard not to be completely mesmerized by what she presents. . . . Can you afford to ignore such important information? If you’re in business, I think not. For you, for sure, “Now You See It” is research to notice."
Terri Schlichenmeyer is the author of The Bookworm Sez, which is published in more than 200 newspapers and 50 magazines throughout the U.S. and Canada, including
The Alaska Journal of Commerce,
Real Aspen, and
The Sojourner's Truth.
"A lot has changed in 50 years. Schools, workplaces and even the nature of how we work has been fundamentally redefined with the advent of new technologies. Those who have grown up with these new technologies embrace it and continue along their way until another little revolution comes along and we are forced to adapt.
In Davidson’s book, we go on a journey through life, starting from birth and continuing through school and the workforce; examining how the focus of our attention has shifted over the years. The author explores how we learn to recognise what is important and deserving of our attention and how that affects us later in life. She redefines and challenges the perception of children who have learning disabilities, suggesting that it’s not the kids, but rather the teaching techniques that are outdated and need to evolve, showcasing programs where those diagnosed with ‘learning disabilities’ have flourished, simply by using changed teaching methods.
Turning to the work environment, Davidson examines how new technology is forcing a change in workplace practices while some still cling to the old ways of the industrial era. She champions innovative ideas and methods that appeal to the individual and persuades companies to come up to speed."
Oliver Chan,
Cosmos magazine, Issue 41
"Cathy N. Davidson, Professor of English and Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University, has written a piece in the newest edition of
Academe on the ongoing crisis in the humanities and what to do about it. Framed by the story of a chance encounter in the late 1970s with the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Michigan State University, where she was working at the time, and their ensuing conversation about the role of the humanities in the university and in society as a whole, Davidson outlines seven main prescriptions for confronting this crisis, which, as she points out, is “never-ending” and has more or less been an issue since at least the late 1970s."
Lindsay Thomas,
4Humanities, Oct. 4, 2011
"The best part of the book for me is the description of the roots of our standard educational approach going back to the early 20th century: Taylorism, the IQ, and standardized testing on a large scale. These approaches made sense when education’s focus was the creation of disciplined, managerial, bureaucratic middle-managers for hierarchical, command-and-control corporations. "
John Eckman,
Open Parenthesis, Sept. 20, 2011
"Davidson uses anecdotal evidence to make a claim that our greater social blindness has caused us to lose sight of our static educational systems falling behind in an ever-changing world. She points out that many of our social structures still are catering to a world that no longer exists, and only through conscious change can we realign it with the modern demands."
Sean Davis,
CourierPress.com, Sept. 18, 2011
"This book is a must-read for anyone concerned with transforming both the workplace and public education to better suit the world that has evolved so dramatically “since that fateful day in April 1993 when Mosaic 1.0, the first popular Web browser” unleashed the Internet for widespread use as the author notes. "
Reyn Bowman,
Bull City Mutterings, August 24, 2011
"...And yet most schools still follow a model not all that different from when Henry Ford was pumping out Model Ts and Pittsburgh actually had steel mills. Education then—and now—is geared to serve an industrial economy, one in which conformity and punctuality kept the engine running and creativity gunked it up. To Davidson, a professor of English and interdisciplinary studies at Duke University, this makes about as much sense as teaching kids how to make wooden barrels. There was a reason her students who turned in lame term papers could also churn out perfectly fine blogs. The latter was about writing for the world in which they lived, a highly social place where ideas bounce around like marbles in an empty bathtub, feedback is immediate and sharing trumps syntax."--
Innovations, Smithsonian.com, August 22, 2011
