In the March volume of ASCD's Educational Leadership journal there are a number of very interesting articles related to utilizing technology in the 21st century classroom. One article that particularly caught my attention was "Mastering Multitasking" by Urs Gasser and John Palfrey.
In their article they point out the difference between multitasking and task switching - something that I had given little thought to before. When we discuss digital natives and multitasking we often assume that the native's brain is wired differently, so differently that it enables them to write a paper, maintain an instant chat with friends, and watch a movie online all at the same time. What Gasser and Palfrey point out is that true multitasking is actually doing two things simultaneously - like reading a book and listening to music, or running and listening to an audio book.
What our digital natives do most of the time is task switching - work on a paper then switch to their chat then check a web site then go back to their paper and so on. This leads to the paper that the student is working taking a lot longer to get completed than if the student was just concentrating on that one task.
Do our digital native students know about this? According to Gasser and Palfrey they do not. One of our challenges as 21st teachers is to engage students "...in intentional conversations about its [multitasking] promises and limits..." (Gasser and Palfrey, 2008). By helping students to discover when multitasking might be helpful and when it might be distracting and dangerous, we can help them to become more effective and powerful users of the available technologies.
Source: Gasser, U. & Palfrey, J. (2009) "Mastering Multitasking". Educational Leadership Vol. 66, No. 6, pp. 14-19.
Thanks for the information i'll pass it on to my son, Peter Baek.
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