Mapping the Collision Course
Is it possible to listen to Katy Perry on an mp3 player while completing an online math assignment and texting a cousin in Poughkeepsie? If you ask anyone born with a silver mouse in hand, it’s not only possible, it can be done effectively. Not so, say the experts.
While multitasking may be cool and so 21st century, what we call multitasking is, in most cases, just switching from one task to another, avoiding a collision course of information. Most of us can’t do it very well, as evidenced by the incidence of automobile accidents caused by texting drivers. In fact, brain research indicates that distractions can change the way people learn, especially as it affects using that knowledge later on.
Work conducted at Stanford University and reported in an article by Constance Holden in ScienceNOW Daily News indicates,
“Cognitive performance declines when people try to pay attention to many media channels at once.”
Not surprisingly we tune in and out depending on the attractiveness of what else is happening around us.
In an age when more and more people are simultaneously working on their computer, social networking, texting, or talking on their smart phones, and listening to music, the implications are frightening. Not only are we not learning or working at capacity, we are actually fooling ourselves into think we’re good at this multitasking.
Like it or not, multitasking is present – in our lives, our classrooms, and the workplace. Instead of trying to convince students to disconnect from their chosen media sources, it’s our job as teachers to help them understand how they can learn most efficiently. We must teach them how to manage the media and the information that freely flows in “the Information Age.”
It’s part of the job.
One of the benefits of ODYSSEYWARE is that it engages the interest of students in grades 3-12 with interactive tools and stimulating curriculum that helps them to stay on task, improving learning and their academic success.
What can you do as a 21st century educator to teach the fine art of managing information, keeping students on task while they multitask?
There are a couple of flaws in this piece. First, you can not equate driving and texting to multitasking and education. Driving takes motor skills and eye hand coordination. The multitasking that student perform, like on World of Warcraft, is more like piloting a jet fighter. They are inputting information, talking on a radio, keeping track of the traffic around them, and moving through an environment. Why can’t education be set up the same way? You learn by being exposed to the same topic via various stimuli. Isn’t it possible to develop the same as a teaching tool?
Perhaps the driving and texting analogy was a stretch, but the point of this commentary is to acknowledge the research that suggests that when we do multiple tasks, we do them all less effectively. Once we acknowledge this, our next job is simply to learn to manage the information that fills our world in the most effective way possible, not only in the world of education, but across all aspects of our lives. As curriculum providers, we endorse learning games that engage multiple senses. At the same time, we accept the responsibility to teach today’s students how to best manage these and other learning tools as they work their way toward their own academic achievement.
From Dennis:
What if we don’t acknowledge or agree with the research? The brain is amazing. It takes in data, analyzes it, and makes connections in terabytes of information per second. I believe as curriculum providers it is our job to manage the connections.
Are you saying that games are fine as long as the user understands the subject matter inside of the context of the game?
Brain research is what it is, and will be either proven or disproven with time. And I agree that curriculum providers must give students opportunities to learn to manage the connections and the flow of information.
In the meantime, students are barraged by multiple messages as they learn. Within the framework of learning games, students are challenged to choose which pieces of the incoming information are necessary to make the correct choices to “win”, encouraging critical thinking. On the other hand, simultaneously playing a game, texting a friend, and listening to instructions given by an instructor challenge a student to choose which messages take priority. The others will, by default, get less attention.
Are you not bothered by someone talking to you while you’re on level 10 of your favorite game? And how often to you have to pause and say, “Huh?”
The big questions becomes, how do we best manage all of this information, and how do we teach students to do the same?