"Watching a Digital Nation in Action" is the title of today's post on Digital Education, one of Education Week's blogs. It previews Digital Nation airing on PBS's Frontline next week (Tuesday, February 2 at 9 p.m. EST). You can also watch a preview and much of the work in progress on the PBS web site. Some of the quotes seemed particularly pertinent to our class discussion last week, especially this one on multitasking:
"Virtually all multitaskers think they're brilliant at multitasking," Sociologist Clifford Nass says. "And what we're discovering is that they're really lousy at it."
I have a very ambivalent attitude about multitasking. Some things I can do quite well together, and it just seems more efficient -- listening to a podcast while doing dishes, listening to a book on CD while driving . . . but for other tasks I end up not doing any of them very well. Or at least not as well as if I was only concentrating on just one task.
Another compelling quote is "Walking into a classroom without media," one educator says, "is like walking into a desert" for students these days. Wow. This description seems very apt. If media is ambient, flowing in a stream all around us, then no technology must be like a desert. If media is part of children's environment and life outside of school, then it needs to be part of their learning environment.
I missed another episode of Frontline earlier this year that focused specifically on children and the digital world, Growing Up Online, but that too is available to watch online. Sometimes it's pretty convenient to be living in the digital age!
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Recently this idea of multitasking has come up, interestingly enough, on the Oprah Winfrey show. She has been pushing this No Phone Zone pledge in which she asks people to stop talking and texting while driving because of how dangerous it is. What has been interesting about this is how many people talk about going through something akin to withdrawals because they are no longer able to text and/or talk on the phone while driving. People used to do it while sitting at stop signs or red lights, and now, they find that they just have idle time during those pauses in driving. They now simply listen to music or look at people during those times as opposed to working. One woman talked about actually physically feeling panicked because she couldn't check her email; she likened it to when she quit smoking and she had to figure out something else to do with her hands!
ReplyDeleteIt is quite amazing to me to see how lost people seem to be without the ability to multitask while driving - even though driving is such an engaging task in and of itself. Oprah's staff members seem to have a great deal of trouble because they were used to conducting business in the car. Because Oprah asked them to put phones in the back seat of the car or somewhere else out of reach, these employees are now finding themselves pulling over onto the side of the roads in order to still do so. I wonder if Oprah will notice a slight drop in productivity?
I might liken walking into a classroom without media to walking from the noise and confusion of the city into a calm, quiet forest. You might miss the noise at first, but just imagine what you would have missed if you had never walked into the forest at all!
ReplyDeleteI am as attached to my cell phone and my internet access as the next person, but there are reasons to leave it behind, and there is much to be gained outside the confines of an internet connection.