MAY 9, 2013, 2:36 PM
Reading Club | Digital DistractionBy KATHERINE SCHULTEN and AMANDA CHRISTY BROWN
How many times will you check Facebook, Twitter, your e-mail, or another tab on your Internet browser as you read this post, and what does that do to your ability to absorb what you read?
How does this “rapidly toggling between tasks” affect our brains in general? Does dividing our concentration this way change how we learn? If so, what should we do about it?
...We offer a pair of articles — one from The New York Times’s Sunday Review and the other from the KQED Mind/Shift blog — that detail new research on the potential costs of this “rapid toggling” that most of us engage in every day.
Read both “Brain, Interrupted” and “How Does Multitasking Change the Way Kids Learn?”, then weigh in on how your own life experience meshes with this research.
Here are some questions that may help — though you can feel free to ignore them if you’ve got plenty to say on your own:
Reading Club | Digital DistractionBy KATHERINE SCHULTEN and AMANDA CHRISTY BROWN
How many times will you check Facebook, Twitter, your e-mail, or another tab on your Internet browser as you read this post, and what does that do to your ability to absorb what you read?
How does this “rapidly toggling between tasks” affect our brains in general? Does dividing our concentration this way change how we learn? If so, what should we do about it?
...We offer a pair of articles — one from The New York Times’s Sunday Review and the other from the KQED Mind/Shift blog — that detail new research on the potential costs of this “rapid toggling” that most of us engage in every day.
Read both “Brain, Interrupted” and “How Does Multitasking Change the Way Kids Learn?”, then weigh in on how your own life experience meshes with this research.
Here are some questions that may help — though you can feel free to ignore them if you’ve got plenty to say on your own:
- Do you text, listen to music, watch videos or check Facebook, Instagram or Twitter while doing schoolwork at home? At school? How do you think that “toggling” affects how you learn?
- How easy is it for you to ignore digital temptations while reading, writing or doing other kinds of schoolwork? What examples of that can you share?
- In your experience, are “interruptions making us dumber”? Do you think toggling between tasks affects your ability to do thoughtful work, or do you think you have trained yourself for distractions?
- Have you, your parents or your teachers set limits on when and how you use technology? How have those limits affected you?
- Which of the many studies cited in these two articles seem most interesting or relevant to you? Why? What questions do they raise for you?
- How should teenagers, teachers and parents respond to these studies? Why?