Gloria Mark on Multi-tasking in the Digital Information Age

Gloria Mark from the University of California, Irvine will be giving a talk in UCD's School of Information and Library Studies (SILS). The talk is titled "Multi-tasking in the Digital Information Age: Tasks, Information, and Interaction Contexts."

Multi-tasking is a way of life for information workers. Gloria will discuss empirical results from fieldwork observations and experiments which detail the extent to which information workers multitask with digital data and will discuss how multi-tasking impacts various aspects of collaboration and communication in the workplace. Multi-tasking changes with collocation, gender, and interruptions. People compensate for interruptions by working faster, but this comes at a cost of experiencing higher stress. She will also discuss how the results present opportunities for new social and technical solutions to support multi-tasking in the workplace.

Gloria Mark is a Professor in the Department of Informatics, University of California, Irvine. Her principle research areas are in human-computer interaction and computer-supported cooperative work. Her research focuses on the design and evaluation of collaborative systems. Her current projects include studying multi-tasking of information workers, IT use for resilience in disrupted environments, and Big Data analytics.Gloria Mark on Multi-tasking in the Digital Information Age