Re: Competing with Iphones

[Sean Zwagerman <sean_zwagerman@sfu.ca>]

The article states, "evidence from psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience suggests that when students multitask while doing schoolwork, their learning is far spottier and shallower than if the work had their full attention."

"Multitasking," in this case at least, is a misnomer; the students in the study are not performing multiple tasks simultaneously but rapidly switching their attention from one thing to another. So to put the study's finding in other words, students do better in school when they pay attention than when they don't.

I think the very idea of multitasking is suspect. If we cannot listen to two conversations at once, and if talking on the phone while driving is equivalent to having a BAL of .08 (http://unews.utah.edu/old/p/062206-1.html), perhaps we're simply not very good at trying to think about two things at the same time. According to the OED, the use of "multitask" as an intransitive verb was first applied to computers, then quite a bit later to cognition. If that's right, then it is yet another example of the fact that minds are not computers -- though both are welcome in my classroom.

Sean Zwagerman