CATW # 5

          In the article " How to do One Thing at a Time" by Nancy Jones in Women's health magazine, the author begins to explain that a large amount of evidence shows that our minds process better doing single-tasks rather than doing things simultaneously. A group project proved that students who were asked to spend a certain amount of time doing a music play list, chatting, and write a short essay either as a single tasker or multi-tasker showed that a single-tasker did better.

        I agree with this article because multi-tasking can be a losing proposition and/or a great disadvantage to your learning process. It becomes difficult to realize that so many individuals decide to talk or text while driving, knowing that it's a bad idea, so many people do anyways. Many individuals have caused car accidents which caused harm or death to adults and children due to this bad idea. It becomes a question of are we addicted to technology or is it already a force of habit to respond to our phones? A prof at M.I.T. Sherry Turkle mentioned we started to see phones advance more than ever toward the time of 9/11, a time where thousands of people died due to a terrorist attack in NYC. Our society became worried of not knowing where their loved ones were, which caused good parents to buy their children cell phones. Since the time parents allowed young teenagers to have a cell phone, text messages seemed to be more of the source of communication for teens. To these young adults it was less of an aquard silence moment through a phone conversation which allowed short phone conversation become long text conversations. For instance when i text i can have a conversation for hours but if i were to have that exact conversation on the phone it'll be at least half an hour. In another aspect to extensive technology use sometimes our focus is more on one thing rather than the other. Many children get infuriated with the lack of attention they get from their parents, a parent can get on a phone, like a blackberry which is more of a business type phone, and last on it for hours. Children need a lot of physical attention they need to know a parent is physically there to support them, not trapped in a world of technology.

          Multi-tasking can cause us to loose our strength in learning. In the article Jones quoted clifford nass " A tremendous amount of evidence shows that the brain does better when it's performing tasks in a sequence rather than all at once."  An experiment at Stanford Brown university proved it was true. Two groups of students were asked to perform three tasks, Music play list, chatting, and writing a short essay, after all is done they were given a memory test. One group was asked to do their tasks as single taskers taking 10 Min's on each project. The other group was told do everything simultaneously taking 30 Min's to do every thing at the same time. According to the article " The single-taskers did significantly better than their multi-tasking peers." In my own experience I cant study and listen to music and watch TV all at once, my full concentration would not be there. There are people who leave everything behind in order to do what they need to do like write a book or a script. In many cases people rent out cabins for a extensive period of time to be able to do there work and have nothing but the clothing they brought with them. It gives them nothing more than time to think and not anytime to think about the world or technology  of any sort. We as individuals need to learn how to balance our lives without our cell phones, websites like facebook, twitter and myspace or any type of technology in general.