Sometimes Common Sense Is Right

I'd think most people would agree that when we try to do two things at the same time, we often don't do them as well as we would if we focused our attention on one or the other of them. "Multi-tasking" exists, but much of the time what we mean that word to describe is the ability to switch between tasks and more or less not "lose our place," so to speak, at the task which is on hold. We usually don't really mean doing more than one thing at the same time.

A lot of online literature suggests that young people multi-task when they are learning -- they check phone messages when studying, they're online and scanning Facebook or texting someone while also reading course material or reviewing their notes. One of the places this is supposed to happen is the classroom, where many students bring their laptops with a stated purpose of note-taking. Some of them may actually mean that, but talk to professors and you will probably learn that most of those laptop covers they see facing them are concealing Facebook pages, internet surfing or maybe even movie or TV watching.

Again, this wouldn't seem like surprising news to anyone who's ever been online or sat through a college class at the ripe old age of 20. One of those activities is diverting and entertaining. One of them isn't. This story in The Times Higher Education outlines how a professor at Lehigh University saw that his students who brought laptops didn't do as well on tests as students who took notes the old-fashioned way. The story also digs into some neurological research that says the same thing.

Essentially, our brains seem to work a little like our ears do in this respect. If you are supposed to listen to a sound, you can do it much more easily when fewer other sounds are made around you, especially if those other sounds are more pleasant or more interesting than the one you are supposed to listen to. I, for example, would pay attention to the air conditioner if you told me that's what I was supposed to do. But if, say, Angie Harmon began talking in the background, I would pretty quickly abandon the air conditioner for a sound that is of far more interest to me.

The funny thing is that universities and colleges have spent quite a bit of money making their campuses internet-friendly as a way of attracting students, or at least as a way to avoid running them off. But now they find that campus-wide internet capability can often get in the way of the things that were supposed to be at the center of their reason for existing -- teaching and learning. It's almost as if the entire college experience wasn't really about learning anymore or something...

(H/T University Diaries)