Two weeks after watching the culmination of months of research that became the film called Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier, I’m still thinking about some of the issues explored on the program such as the implications of spending 32 hours a week in front of television and computer screens.
Digital Nation begins at M.I.T, home to some of the smartest kids in the world who are also unbelievable multitaskers. This generation of college students has grown up multitasking so it’s now second nature. The film shows students engaged in numerous tasks at the same time including sending and receiving texts during dinner and sitting in lectures with laptops open and running applications in the background while learning. Life on the Virtual Frontier asks if all that screen time affects our ability to focus. Certainly current research at Stanford University is attempting to prove that our multitasking in front of a screen prevents us from doing any one thing well.
I wonder if the same findings about my brain receiving input from multiple channels while in front of the screen apply to parenting. Like the MIT students profiled on Digital Nation, I have multiple applications running on my computer at a time. I sit down to write a blog post and update my Facebook status for my in real life friends, run TweetDeck in the background so I can chat with my friends in the blogging world or perhaps participate in a Twitter party, while also monitoring my e-mail inbox out of the corner of my eye.
As a mom, I feel that I’m forced to multitask. These days it just seems like if I weren’t thinking 10 steps ahead about the multitude of things that need to be done during my waking hours, I probably wouldn’t get anything done whether in front of the computer or not.
Read more about why I feel that I successfully multitask on the computer and in every aspect of my life in this week’s LeapFrog Community post called Multitasking- Learned Behavior for Busy Parents or Hinderance to Success and leave a comment letting me know what you think!
I am a paid contributor to The LeapFrog Community but am not compensated to publicize my post on Tech Savvy Mama. I have not been compensated by PBS for any mentions programming on this site since it is outside my role of Community Manager for PBS Teachers.
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Original post by Tech Savvy Mama
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