Deanya and all: I think your point here is valid. This is why I decided that my study structure wasn't really able to answer the question I had. I wanted to know more about the way students blended multiple sources of stimulation while they were writing. For example, if they would report that the music they listened to help them form a sense of tone for their writing or if switching back and forth between talking to a friend about a paper and writing the paper itself was helpful. What I found instead was a set of discreet task switching that happened in really fast intervals and often didn't contribute to any one goal. As others have suggested, I don' t think there is such a thing as tru multitasking (ie truly accomplishing two or more tasks as once). Instead, what I think we may be seeing is an active task and a passive task going on at virtually the same time. For example, I can read and respond to email while listening to a podcast. My ears are paying attention to the item in the podcast I'm most interested in and when I hear a key word I'm looking for I stop reading and typing to listen. I can't really tell you what was discussed on the podcast before, only that it wasn't what I was listening for. Just as I can read and watch tv at the same time, when in reality what I'm doing is reading through commercials and pasisvely listening for the show to come back on to switch from reading to watching. Of course, if we follow this line of thinking, we have to assume that students who are engaged in IMing or emailing etc during class can only passively listen to discussion or lecture (assuming that the online activity is what is drawing their active attention). The skill I'm interested in is the ability to sort of passively survey other inputs while paying close attention to one important one. Sort of peripheral attention. What do you think? S On 10/15/06, Deanya Lattimore <mdlattim@syr.edu> wrote:
The term "multitasking" is still being used in all of these discussions to signify too many conflated variables to reach any significant conclusions from these data.
My point earlier was about processing differences. Auditory and visual processing are different things to me, and so I assume to some others as well -- probably dozens of different things. Measuring someone's ability to switch back and forth between windows to accomplish multiple tasks -- something that I can do with lightning speed -- says nothing about one's ability to listen in class and gloss over words on a screen at the same time, something that I would NOT be able to do with any measure of "success."
The windows task seems to be something visual for me -- I have no trouble processing many visual cues at one time. The paying attention to words task seems to be auditory for me: two different "noises" no matter whether I am reading them or hearing them.
We'll have to accept that we have different kinds of processing abilities that transcend distinctions between a "multitasking" and "non-multitasking" dichotomy before we'll figure out how to design studies that can really teach us something.
Has anyone done anything to establish baseline processing differences before the "multitasking" tasks were recorded?
Deanya
_______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
-- Sarah "Intellagirl" Robbins http://www.intellagirl.com http://secondlife.intellagirl.com Yahoo: Intellagirl Skype: Intellagirl SecondLife: Intellagirl Tully