Musing about walking and chewing gum at the same time

Frontline ran a program titled "Digital_Nation" which included a section on the impact of multitasking on kids, especially university students.  The section included the idea that kids no longer have the deep, lengthly concentration to do well on difficult mental tasks. (Remember we used to talk about people too dumb to walk and chew gum at the same time? Multitasking is nothing new. My father used to tell about his mother trying to get breakfast on the table and 12 kids and a husband ready to leave for school and work every morning -- talk about multitasking!)

I wonder whether the studies included kids who are deeply involved in strategy games, especially those kids involved in strategy games that involve economic challenges such as building construction, population maintenance, and resource management. It seems to me that kids involved in such games are likely to develop the skills for deep concentration for hours at a time. Indeed, I would hope that there would be games that would require the mastery of in depth background information for the player to reach the highest level of proficiency. (I have used simulations in the classroom as a teaching tool, and they seem to work very well.)

Of course, not everyone needs or wants to have the same skills. I suspect that a lot of today's kids will do very well with their multitasking skills in tomorrows world which will throw huge amounts of information their way and demand lots of fast (if not perfect) responses. We will certainly need some deep thinkers as well, and maybe they will emerge from strategy game players (as some did from the chess playing community in the past) or from some other set of experiences.



I was troubled by the assumption by some of the talking heads that long books were the best way to convey information. A lot of what I read annoys me by failing to distinguish between that which is important and that which is not, between that which one will remember versus that which one will remember to look up versus that which one will surely forget. Perhaps this is because I am an impatient old guy, or because I have some expertise (so I already know some things and look for things to add to my knowledge structures), or because I have been converted to multitasking, but maybe it is because far too many authors pad their writing or feel that they need to write down everything they know rather than do the hard work of distilling that of their knowledge which is really important.

And what does the success of Watson in whipping Jeopardy's two greatest champions ever mean in terms of what our kids will be asked to do in the future?