The Classroom as Arcade (Inside Higher Ed)

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[[{“type”:“media”,“view_mode”:“media_large”,“fid”:null,“attributes”:{“class”:“media-image alignright size-full wp-image-1603”,“typeof”:“foaf:Image”,“style”:“”,“width”:“100”,“height”:“100”,“alt”:“Inside Higher Ed”}}]]“Clearly, the lure of the laptop is too compelling to resist,” writes Dartmouth’s Mary Flanagan in an Inside Higher Ed opinion piece.

Some students habitually engage with their Facebook pages or play video games during class, to their own detriment and to the detriment of their classmates, writes Flanagan, a professor of film and media studies and the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities.

“Multitasking makes us poor learners, studies show,” Flanagan writes. “It not only hurts the perpetrator by splitting their focus and attention, but it hurts those sitting around the multitasker and lowers everyone’s overall performance on each task. While millennials may think they have better multitasking chops than older generations, data show this assumption to be false.”

Read the full opinion piece, published 6/6/14 by Inside Higher Ed.

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