problem solving

This essay is a hypothesis with focus on the generational shift from deep attention, towards hyper attention in cognitive modes. Deep attention is a cognitive mode witch will allow you to focus long term, problemsolving, analyzing etc. Reading a long novella, solving a mathproblem. Hyper attention is the cognitive mode where you multitask, lots of minor tasks at once, as in playing a videogame, using social media, etc. In this mode your focus has a short timeline and tends to affect your attention span conserning long time problemsolving.
The article discusses the educational preparedness in the future, when this problem is likely to affect us. As a society the problem of this generational shift has already started to show itself,
but the educational system need to prepare for the changes that will arise, when todays 10 year olds enter the area of higher education. It is suggested that being prepared could be to use new pedagogical models, that provide greater stimulation than the typical classrom.
The author concludes that the two cognitive modes are and should be side by side, and that educators has a responsibility to adapt to the changes that are surfacing now, and to the changes that will only increase in the years ahead.

People draw on many diverse sources of real-world knowledge in order to make up stories, including the following: knowledge of the physical world; rules of social behavior and relationships; techniques for solving everyday problems such as transportation, acquisition of objects, and acquisition of information; knowledge about physical needs such as hunger and thirst; knowledge about stories their organization and contents; knowledge about planning behavior and the relationships between kinds of goals; and knowledge about expressing a story in a natural language. This thesis describes a computer program which uses all information to write stories. The areas of knowledge, called problem domains, are defined by a set of representational primitives, a set of problems expressed in terms of those primitives, and a set of procedures for solving those problems. These may vary from one domain to the next. All this specialized knowledge must be integrated in order to accomplish a task such as storytelling. The program, called TALE-SPIN, produces stories in English, interacting with the user, who specifies characters, personality characteristics, and relationships between characters. Operating in a different mode, the program can make those decisions in order to produce Aesop-like fables.

(Source: Author's abstract)