Avi Zenilman has a (somewhat rambling) piece at Slate on the impact of WiFi access on lecture classes at college.
It could even be that distractions make for better students. Last year, a high-achieving friend of mine—fellowship finalist, budding academic, campus leader—brought the classic video game Quake to class one day, and afterward he claimed that the distraction enhanced his educational experience:
The part of my brain that handles spatial relationships and tactical thinking is clearly distinct from the part that reads, writes, and analyzes historically. I ended up both winning the game with a well-placed rocket and learning everything [the Prof] said.
You'd have to be a little dim, as a prof, not to know that there's a substantial amount of off-task work going on in your classes, particularly lectures. WiFi may increase this, but I'm not sure. (Actually, thanks to WiFi, I now do the same thing at faculty meetings.)
We don't know enough yet about multi-tasking, beyond relatively rudimentary studies about issues like doing math calculations while reading text, to condemn it. And as far as I can tell, such studies don't control for expertise at multi-tasking--it's not the sort of thing everyone is good at. There are things I do that require full, sustained attention, but many others for which partial attention seems better--not just "good enough," but actually better.
[via Slashdot]
Posted by johndanseven at November 19, 2005 10:18 PM