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December 29, 2004
Words, part IV
Lately this blog has focused mainly on endurance sports. If procrastination were a core activity, I'd have a hard time getting around to it. Unfortunately for me, it's peripheral, and thus consumes nearly all my energies.
Realizing this, I went back briefly this morning to thinking about getting a real job. It turns out that one of the two US schools I checked out, University of Illinois, has a distance learning program for the MS. They call the program LEEP.
I listened to Christine Jenkins's account of teaching course 406. She seems to have done a better job than most of our phone conf leaders. According to her, anyway. I don't know if they managed to measure students' performance afterwards somehow. My experience with long-distance synchronous communication is that at least part of the assembly engages in what Bill Joy called multitasking.
In information science, multitasking refers to running more than one program or at least thread of execution at the same time. That is, doing multiple things at once. Computers handle multitasking by storing program context in fast memory and switching quickly between tasks. Each time the computer changes tasks, it switches context. To the human being, the computer switches so rapidly it appears to be doing multiple things at once. (More recent chip designs allow computers to execute multiple threads in hardware. Computers with such chips, and computers with multiple chips, do in fact run more than one program at once.)
Bill Joy apparently convinced Scott McNealy that he could multitask effectively. So Scott let him read magazines during their staff meetings. My take is that Bill observed Scott and his staff enough to be able to predict appropriate behavior with only a few clues, and that Bill was a smart guy and fast learner in that type of setting anyway. He therefore didn't need to concentrate his full attention on meetings he found unnecessarily repetitive.
Dana does multitasking as well. He'll typically read the paper at the same time he watches television. Most parents do multitasking. They let the children do what they're doing, checking mainly for boundary conditions while actually doing something else.
I contend that whatever your level of effectiveness when multitasking, it's less than your effectiveness when monotasking. The more human beings need to grasp something difficult, the more they need to concentrate.
We find concentrating amazingly hard to do in practice, however. Mom seems to be able to do it while reading. If you call her name and she doesn't respond, the story's pretty good.
Mustering the same lack of distraction to follow something online requires more than dedication. Going to class over a browser and Real Player sounds tough. The asynchronous part I'm sure I can do, though. Worked fine to get a BS in Computer Science.
It's reproducing the "classroom" experience that leaves me dubious. We're a long way from The Age of Spiritual Machines.
Posted by Mark at December 29, 2004 08:53 AM