- Home
- ∨ About LIFE Center
- LIFE Knowledge Base »
- News »
- ∨ Events
- Connect with LIFE »
- ∨ LIFE Project Workspace
About LIFE Knowledge Base
Research Seminar Report: The impacts of media multitasking on children’s learning and development
A collaborative partnership of the CHIMe Lab at Stanford University, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, and the LIFE Center brought together academic and industry leaders with the goal of encouraging a new community that will engage in interdisciplinary knowledge sharing, agenda-setting, and collaborative research on media multitasking and children’s learning and development. The LIFE Center is pleased to release the workshop report from the first research seminar on this vital area at the interface of scientific research, cultural practices and public policy. This first research seminar was held on Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 at Stanford University.
Download the workshop report in PDF format: Media Multitasking (82)
Other details, papers, and related materials can be found at the Media Multitasking web site: http://multitasking.stanford.edu
Preface from the Report:
New technology sometimes brings change that is so swift and so sweeping, that the impact and implications are hard to grasp. So it is with the rapid expansion of media use by children and adults–at work and at play, alone and in groups, for ever larger portions of their waking hours. Media multitasking–engaging in more than one media activity at a time–has rapidly become a way of life for American youth, according to a 2005 report from the Kaiser Family Foundation (Roberts, Foehr, & Rideout, 2005), and yet little is known about how this behavior affects their learning and development, their ability to attend, to plan, to think, and to relate to other people. The same may be said for adults, many of whom have taken to media multitasking to the point of “crackBerry” obsession. Aside from the recent alarming reports about the dangers of cell phone use while driving1 or the impact of web surfing on worker productivity, little is known about the larger implications of this now ubiquitous
behavior.
To begin to address this gap in knowledge and to frame a coherent research agenda, a multidisciplinary group of scholars in the emerging field of multitasking assembled for a one-day seminar on media multitasking and its impact on children’s learning and development at Stanford University on July 15, 2009. With grants from the National Science Foundation and the Spencer Foundation, the seminar was jointly organized by Principal Investigator Clifford Nass, the CHIME (Communication between Humans and Interactive Media) Lab Director and the Thomas M. Storke Professor at Stanford University; co-Principal Investigator Roy Pea, representing the LIFE (Learning in Informal and Formal Environments) Center and Professor of Education at Stanford University; and co-Principal Investigator Michael Levine, Executive Director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. Participants included recognized scholars from neuroscience, child development, cognitive science, communication, and
education fields, along with business, policy, and advocacy leaders.
This report summarizes the ideas brought to light at the seminar, including an agenda for next steps by participants and for the larger research community. A glossary of terms, list of seminar participants, a background paper, and a list of questions generated at the seminar appear in the Appendices. Brief memos written by seminar participants on media multitasking in advance of the seminar may be downloaded from http://multitasking.stanford.edu/artifacts.html#memos and http://www.joanganzcooneycenter.org/
Print This Post
Leave a Reply
