At our senior class meeting on Friday afternoon I heard for the first time about a problem in our grade 8 classroom. Kids were using their laptop computers indiscriminately, chatting during class time, and generally having many off-topic windows open. ‘Multi-tasking’ they called it. I immediately made a note to visit the class come Monday morning.
The very next day when perusing my RSS reader, I came across a post by Diana Kimball in the Digital Natives blog, titled Attention Intervention: Digital Natives and the Myth of Multi-Tasking. This post makes it quite clear that most of what goes by the name of multi-tasking is in reality switch-tasking. And there is a time cost as well as an error cost every time you switch your attention from one area to another. Best of all was a link to an exercise designed to prove the existence of these costs, provided by Dave Crenshaw from his book The Myth of Multitasking.
Dave Crenshaw & The Myth of Multitasking
So Monday morning I waltz into the grade 8 classroom armed with plenty of copies of the exercise, determined to have everyone do it to indicate the negative consequences of having many open tabs on their laptops. I told them that I wanted their participation in a small research project that wouldn’t take much of their time, but might prove to be very significant for them.
I asked them to honestly state the number of active tabs they usually had open. The 21 kids had an average of around 3 tabs open with a range of 1 to 5. Then I asked for a definition of multi-tasking; as expected it was doing several things at once. Then I explained a bit about how brains function, and compared multitasking with switch-tasking. They agreed that their conception of multi-tasking was incorrect, and that what they did was really switch-tasking. Then I introduced the exercise from Dave Crenshaw’s book and they did the exercise. After a quick look at the results, I asked the class to summarize them, research the topic and produce a reflective essay on multi-tasking vs switch-tasking. They could work in small groups. All work was to be turned in as an attachment by email by 12 noon the following Monday.
To be continued….
3 responses so far ↓
1
Dave Crenshaw
// Sep 22, 2008 at 11:52 am
Sekolah,
I’m very excited to hear the you used the experiment in your classroom. I would love to receive a copy of a few of what you feel are the best essays.
Also, if your students have any questions, I’d be glad to answer them.
All the best,
Dave Crenshaw
2
Doug Stoltz
// Sep 23, 2008 at 8:11 pm
Thanks, Dave, I’ll definitely get back to you on this.
Regards,
Doug Stoltz
3
DARING TO BE DIFFERENT | Sekolah Bogor Raya
// Nov 16, 2008 at 8:32 am
[...] The first keynote speaker was dr. ir. Ichsan Putra, talking about Educating the Next Generation of Professionals. As a flight specialist, he said he felt somewhat like a fish out of water, but he gave an excellent summary of the differences between digital immigrants and natives. He then examined three major predictive books The World is Flat (Friedman), A Whole New Mind (Pink), and Five Minds for the Future (Gardner), and examined the students’ skills required for success in the future. Most of these skills, generally soft skills like communication and leadership skills, are not explicitly taught in schools. The following breakout session was an opportunity for individuals to comment on concepts raised by Prof. Ichsan. My group discussed, amongst other topics, the multi-tasking ability of digital natives. Refer to my post of 20 September Multi-tasking vs Switch-tasking. [...]
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