[UCI-Calit2] Seminar Tuesday: Studies on Multi-Tasking in the Workplace

Stuart Ross stuross at calit2.uci.edu
Sun Jul 31 15:45:58 PDT 2011


Calit2 announces another seminar in the 2011 program for Summer
Undergraduate Fellowships in Information Technology (SURF-IT).  

The seminar is open to the public.

 

"Multi-tasking in the Workplace: Tasks, Information, and Interaction
Contexts"

 

Dr. Gloria Mark

Department of Informatics

Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

 

Tuesday, August 2, 11:45 AM

Room 3008, Calit2 Building

A light lunch will be available at 11:45; the seminar will begin at
12:00

 

Summary by Dr. Mark:  For the last five years I have been trying to
understand the nature of multitasking. In this talk I will present
empirical results from fieldwork observations and experiments over the
last few years which detail the extent to which information workers
multitask, irrespective of their organizational role. I will discuss how
multi-tasking impacts collaboration and communication in the workplace.
Not only do information workers switch continually among multiple tasks
but they also switch continually among interactions in varied workplace
contexts, such as the work home and organization. Interruptions are
correlated with stress: people compensate for interruptions by working
faster, but this comes at a price of experiencing more stress. These
results challenge the traditional way that most IT is designed to
organize information, i.e. in terms of distinct tasks. Instead, I will
discuss how IT should support information organization in a way
consistent with how most people were found to organize their work, in
terms of much larger thematically connected units of work. I will
present technology prototypes designed to support people in their
multi-tasking and will also discuss opportunities for new social and
technical solutions to support multi-tasking in the workplace.  I will
also talk about an ongoing study where we are examining the effects of
restricting people from access to digital media. 

Dr. Gloria Mark is a Professor in the Department of Informatics at UC
Irvine. Dr. Mark received her Ph.D. in Psychology from Columbia
University. Prior to joining UCI in 2000, she was a Research Scientist
at the GMD (German National Research Center for Information Technology),
in Bonn, a visiting research scientist at the Boeing Company, and a
research scientist at the Electronic Data Systems Center for Advanced
Research.  Dr. Mark's research focuses on the design and evaluation of
collaborative systems.  Her current projects include studying
multi-tasking of information workers, technology use in disrupted
environments and virtual telemedicine.   In 2006, she received a
Fulbright scholarship to conduct research at the Humboldt University in
Berlin.  Dr. Mark has published in numerous national and international
conferences and journals.  She was program chair for the 2006 ACM
conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), is the program
chair for ACM CSCW'12 and is on the editorial board of ACM Transactions
on Computer Human Interaction, the CSCW journal and e-commerce
Quarterly.   Her work has also appeared in the popular press, including
The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

 

 

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