Technology & Multi-tasking
Technology and schools, great combination right? According to some law schools that is a big NO. The Christian Science Monitor recently ran a piece about how the University of Michigan Law School is one of many graduate schools to ban the use of laptops in the classroom. The reason given is that students are too distracted by internet shopping, text messaging, or even legitimate note-taking to fully absorb classroom discussions.
The problem professors face is "continuous partial attention," an expression coined by Linda Stone, a former Microsoft executive, to describe how people check e-mail and try to listen to someone at the same time.
Following this line of reasoning to its conclusion, multi-tasking negatively impacts a person's classroom experience. If multi-tasking is a negative in the graduate school environment, doesn't it also follow that multi-tasking is a negative in business environment as well?
