What else are you doing when you're writing your assignments?

I've been talking to students recently about the dangers of splitting their attention whilst trying to write essays. People readily admitted to emailing, watching TV online, Facebooking, downloading music, tweeting and playing games whilst writing assignments.

Farmville seemed to come up quite often too! Have a look here at what Stephen Poole (one of my favourite writers) thinks of Farmville. It contains one swear word so you've been warned!

Don't be surprised if I continue to ask you what else you do when you're supposed to be writing essays. I find the whole subject fascinating and I promise not to be judgemental. This is mostly because it'd make me a big hypocrite as I too am very bad at sticking to one task for longer than 10 minutes.

Have a look here at the original article from by Nick Carr which first introduced me to the dangers of dividing my attention to distraction. It's brilliant.

Al