COETAIL: Multitasking and Swatting at Distractions

A post toward obtaining my Certificate in Educational Technology and Information Literacy (COETAIL)

I've become increasingly aware of the effect of multitasking on my own creativity, and over the last year have had to take initiatives to better compartmentalize my time. Online obligations have increased--blogging, tweeting, mounds of emails and more--and the net result is a decrease in writing time and a lack of focus.

When I write I'm generally online since I use a dictionary, thesaurus, and other web tools often conduct internet searches related to my writing. If I happen to notice that an email has come in, or someone mentioned me in a tweet, or messaged me on Facebook, my concentration is shattered. It then takes more energy for me to refocus on my writing, and my days seem to be less and less productive.

I've been concerned about this multitasking lifestyle affecting my concentration, and have also suspected that multitasking has been gradually interfering with abilities of students to concentrate on the basic focused tasks of reading and writing. Schools where students use laptops and devices in nearly all their classes are dealing with this multitasking dilemma all the time.

In "How Does Multitasking Change the Way Kids Learn" Annie Murphy Paul takes a look at studies on media multitasking while learning, citing various studies and discussing at length various negative effects of multitasking while doing schoolwork. Psychology professor David Meyer mentions the possibility that we may be raising shallow learners, and psychology professor Larry Rosen advises keeping only one computer window open when doing schoolwork and taking tech breaks to satisfy tech cravings.

Parents and teachers can try, but this is much harder than it sounds. It's not a simple matter of closing windows or tabs. Schoolwork these days often requires more than one window to be open, sometimes many. Much schoolwork is collaborative, handled on Facebook, Skype, Twitter, and various Google Apps. Distractions slip in, like mosquitoes through the mesh of a window screen, and you know how it is--there's always one still buzzing around.

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NPR recently aired The Myth of Multitasking and discussed the effect of multitasking on creativity and concentration and the idea that our brains actually need to be retrained once we've been heavily multitasking, and that it's healthy for the brain to multitasking doing integrative things but not nonintegrative things. There are many articles in the news these days on this topic.

So how can we help eliminate these distractions for students? Sharing the results of studies citied in Paul's article and other research with parents, teachers and students is a good start.  Recognizing that we need to counteract  the distractions by providing much more structure for focusing on tasks like reading and writing is another.