Multitasking vs Time on Tasking? Let the debate continue!

Cathy Davidson, of Duke University, brings us this fascinating summary of a variety of topics - yet all tied together well.  The essay alone compels me to want to read her book.  Highlights that caught my eye:

Collaborative Learning for the Digital Age - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education (8/31/11)

It's not easy to acknowledge that everything we've learned about how to pay attention means that we've been missing everything else. It's not easy for us rational, competent, confident types to admit that the very key to our success—our ability to pinpoint a problem and solve it, an achievement honed in all those years in school and beyond—may be exactly what limits us. For more than a hundred years, we've been training people to see in a particularly individual, deliberative way. No one ever told us that our way of seeing excluded everything else.

Time on Task or time on tasks??? - revisited?

Unfortunately, current practices of our educational institutions—and
workplaces—are a mismatch between the age we live in and the
institutions we have built over the last 100-plus years. The 20th
century taught us that completing one task before starting another one
was the route to success. Everything about 20th-century education, like
the 20th-century workplace, has been designed to reinforce our attention
to regular, systematic tasks that we take to completion. Attention to
task is at the heart of industrial labor management, from the assembly
line to the modern office, and of educational philosophy, from grade
school to graduate school.

Collaboration by difference

We used a method that I call "collaboration by difference."
Collaboration by difference is an antidote to attention blindness. It
signifies that the complex and interconnected problems of our time
cannot be solved by anyone alone, and that those who think they can act
in an entirely focused, solitary fashion are undoubtedly missing the
main point that is right there in front of them, thumping its chest and
staring them in the face. Collaboration by difference respects and
rewards different forms and levels of expertise, perspective, culture,
age, ability, and insight, treating difference not as a deficit but as a
point of distinction. It always seems more cumbersome in the short run
to seek out divergent and even quirky opinions, but it turns out to be
efficient in the end and necessary for success if one seeks an outcome
that is unexpected and sustainable. That's what I was aiming for.

Turning over traditional notions of evaluation

Research indicates that, at every age level, people take their writing
more seriously when it will be evaluated by peers than when it is to be
judged by teachers.

And in a classic moment of reflection, Davidson admits in her own courses a need to relearn:

They pointed out that I had used entirely conventional methods for
testing and evaluating their work. We had talked as a class about the
new modes of assessment on the Internet—like public commenting on
products and services and leaderboards (peer evaluations adapted from
sports sites)—where the consumer of content could also evaluate that
content. These students said they loved the class but were perplexed
that my assessment method had been so 20th century: Midterm. Final.
Research paper. Graded A, B, C, D. The students were right. You couldn't
get more 20th century than that.

Fascinating essay.  My compliments to the author and her exploratory work - and for the willingness to be open about its results.  Her book: Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn,  Viking Press.