Sunday, January 20, 2008
Multi-tasking Among the Immigrants
I am not going to reveal my age, but I am old enough to be considered an digital immigrant. I am proud to say that I seem to be doing a better job of assimilating into the digital native culture. My roommate is a doctoral student and we find ourselves on a Sunday night watching football while we each are on our wireless laptops. I am blogging while he looks up videos on YouTube. He is also on his Blackberry making jokes about blogging. (Due to the public nature of this forum, I will not go into detail about that.) However the non-native in me cannot help feel like my attention span is being compromised. Am I getting more done because I am doing more at once or am I just doing sub-par work on several things at once? It is hard to tell sometimes. Another sign that I am not completely part of this new culture is my dismay at a series of commercials. These commercials are aimed at encouraging kids to go out and play. I am all for encouraging kids to go out, the part that makes me cring everytime is at that end of the commercial they encourage kids to go online for ideas for what to play. Looking at what they can create with technology, surely kids today have enough imagination to play without consulting a website. I am not sure my attention span is up to doing all these things at once as the natives seem to do with ease. Are the digital natives really able to do several things at once with no adverse effects? Are their brains wired differently because they have grown up with all this technology? Surely there is a study out there. I will have to Google that...
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4 comments:
A study was just released last week (Googling Pew and Estabrook may get you to it) and one of the findings was that digital natives don't do well at evaluating the many information resources out there. They can retrieve them but they can't sort through them.
Jenny,
In some ways I think we are lucky to have come from another time; to be digital immigrants. I mean we probably do have better imaginations than the "natives“; we are intelligent and can learn the technical skills we need, and, as Dr. Ball pointed out, we generally posses better evaluating skills. Having these skills and abilities will make us well-rounded candidates when we begin to send out our resumes.
Michael
Are you guys telling me that everything on the internet is not reliable!?! :-0
Something that distresses me is when students go to do research they cannot ( or will not)make connections between what they know and what they are reading. When I was an elementary MS, the fourth grade did famous Hoosier projects and one of the questions they had to answer is "What makes your person a Hoosier?" Several kids approached me, research in hand because the could not figure it out. No where was the phrase "John Doe is a Hoosier because..." so they would give up. I would look at their research and ask, where was he/she born? The student would answer something like Indianapolis. "What state is Indianapolis in?" Oh. There is a definite reluctance to do any actual thinking and evaluation requires brainpower.
Michael,
I am also thankful for my immigrant status. From our years in the dark ages of using indexes and such, I know I am a more effective surfer.
Jenny,
I found your comments about kids and technology interesting. I remember hearing about a study done very recently that concluded that, because of all-encompassing technology that surrounds children, their thinking processes are actually developing differently...it makes me wonder if all of the "multitasking" kids do these days between their ipods and mp3 players and pcs doesn't have something to do with the increase in diagnoses of ADD/ADHD. I'm certainly no expert, but it makes me wonder. And, it makes my sad. Kids miss out on a lot when they don't have the opportunity to just sit and think and come up with their own ideas...everything is pre-figured for them, it seems. I don't think technology is BAD for children, I just think it can take over their lives (just like adults) and then they don't have time for other important stuff. Just my thoughts...
Kris
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