Students today are becoming more involved in
appropriation, multi-tasking, and distributed cognition. Students are taking
ideas from other artists and building upon their ideas and making it their
own. Students appropriate across all
forms of media, including, books, videos, music, and images.The Lenhardt
& Madden Pew study of 2005, found that "Almost one-quarter of American
teens had sampled and remixed existing media content," (32).
Students are multi-tasking more than they were years ago.
Multi-tasking involves shifting attention to multiple things at once instead of
focusing on one task at a time. Students are not concentrating on one task at a
time, instead they are constantly shifting their attention. "The attention
span of teens at PARC is often between
30 seconds and five minutes parallels that of top managers, who operate in a
world of fast context-switching. So the short attention span of today's youth
may turn out to be far from dysfunctional for future work worlds," (35).
Multi-tasking can be a good skill to have, but not everyone can multi-task
effectively.
There are many tools and
technologies that can help us become more intelligent, we just need to learn
how to use them. Distributed Cognition is "the ability to interact
meaningfully with tools that expand our mental capacities," (37).
Distributed cognition can help us solve everyday problems and is used by
students, teachers and gamers. Students need to learn how to use tools and
information technologies that are available, and also learn which tools to use
in different situations. In the Comparative Media Studies Program
"students experimented with the use of handhelds to allow tourists to
access old photographs of historic neighborhoods and compare them with what
they are seeing on location," (Jenkins 2004).
I think that appropriation, multi-tasking, and
distributed cognition are all great learning tools. When students are
appropriating they are taking ideas from other people and making it their own.
Appropriating or sampling teaches students to create something based off of
another person's idea without copying it word for word. I think appropriating
is a useful skill when students are doing homework, because they learn how to put
things into their own words.
I think that multi-tasking is a good skill to have, but
shouldn't be used all of the time. There are many things that require your full
attention and that you have to take the time to complete. Adults and students
need to learn how to stay focused on one task at a time in certain situations.
When you are driving your focus and full attention needs to be on the road and
you should not be texting or talking on the phone.
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