Brad Belbas's List: Impact of Laptop Use in Classrooms

• Volume 9: Special Edition:Educational Outcomes and Research from 1:1 Computing Settings

• "Heavy multitaskers are often extremely confident in their abilities," says Clifford I. Nass, a professor of psychology at Stanford University. "But there's evidence that those people are actually worse at multitasking than most people."
• Swedish neuroscientist Torkel Klingberg explains in his recent book The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory (Oxford University Press), scholars are far from agreement about how to describe the relationship between attention and working memory. Does a poor attention system cause poor working-memory performance, or does the causation sometimes work in the other direction?
• "Why is it that some people seem to reason well and others don't?" asks Michael J. Kane
• "Variability in working-memory capacity accounts for about half the variability in novel reasoning and reading comprehension. There's disagreement about what to make of that relationship. But there are a number of mechanisms that seem to be candidates for part of the story."
• Many other scholars say instructors should make peace with the new world of skimming and multitasking. N. Katherine Hayles, a professor emerita of English at the University of California at Los Angeles, has argued in a series of essays that the new, multimedia world generates "hyper attention"—which is different from, but not necessarily worse than, attention as traditionally understood. In a media-rich environment, she believes, young people's brains are getting better at making conceptual connections across a wide variety of domains.

  • Ahh...English. She's an English Professor.

  • On what basis can she maske this claim? What is her disciplinary background?
• Nass is skeptical. In a recent unpublished study, he and his colleagues found that chronic media multitaskers—people who spent several hours a day juggling multiple screen tasks—performed worse than otherwise similar peers on analytic questions drawn from the LSAT.
• "One of the deepest questions in this field," Nass says, "is whether media multitasking is driven by a desire for new information or by an avoidance of existing information. Are people in these settings multitasking because the other media are alluring—that is, they're really dying to play Freecell or read Facebook or shop on eBay—or is it just an aversion to the task at hand?"

5 more annotations...