Monday, October 13, 2008

Sure, I can do that too...


I'm going to be honest - I'm blogging in class.

But I'm also listening to a great lecture, taking notes, texting with my friend, reading about the economy on CNN.com and... yes, I'm also checking Facebook.

There are about twenty students in my class, and at least a third of them have their laptops open and are attempting the same multitasking routine as myself. Yes, our ability to click between screens is amazing, but are our non-plugged-in classmates learning more than us?

Who knows. But I was inspired to google "college students" and "multitasking", and ran across an article published in TIME magazine in 2006. Pretty interesting, especially this statistic:

Today 82% of kids are online by the seventh grade, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project. And what they love about the computer, of course, is that it offers the radio/CD thing and so much more--games, movies, e-mail, IM, Google, MySpace. The big finding of a 2005 survey of Americans ages 8 to 18 by the Kaiser Family Foundation, co-authored by Roberts, is not that kids were spending a larger chunk of time using electronic media--that was holding steady at 6.5 hours a day (could it possibly get any bigger?)--but that they were packing more media exposure into that time: 8.5 hours' worth, thanks to "media multitasking"

I rarely even sleep 6.5 hours a day.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I'd be interested to see what policies various professors have related to these activities in class