Scatterbrain

After finishing almost six hours worth of online learning,
I have now certified my brain as mush.

I've taken a number of online courses before, and most of the packaged courses I got are basically glorified powerpoint presentations with some interactive features with a pre-recorded speaker's voice droning in the background.

Supposedly this allows you to finish a class at your own pace and the canned presentation the educators to standardize their lectures.

But this doesnt work for me.

Back in college, the only ways for me to keep myself awake during class were:

• 1. Draw the teacher in various idiotic situations and pass it around during class
  
  2. Ask enough intelligent/rhetorical/smartass/idiotic questions to keep the professor on his/her toes, but not enough to trigger a heart attack (though some came dangerously close)
  
  or
  3. Just cut the damn class altogether
  

All of these, I obviously cannot do while taking an online course.

Thus, I have no other option but to blog while listening.

But I digress... This post is not about online courses, as with all major posts in this blog, this is about me.

I have the attention span of a velociraptor-- If it aint moving, I dont move in for the kill.

It's weird actually, I need to keep my brain occupied doing many different things at the same time.

Just check my desktop right now: There's my email, YM, the company instant messenger, three lotus 123s, six notepads, four MS Words and lots of IE browsers open. Add to that, texting with my two celphones and talking with people on my landline, you pretty much have an idea of how messed up my brain is.

Is this normal?

Apparently it is.

For nerds, at least.

There is a need for some people to multitask many things at the same time. Some can eat popcorn while watching TV, while reading a book while texting with their free hand. Some can switch between talking using different languages and chatting between multiple chatsites at the same time. And some can keep multiple GFs, gimmick buddies and "special friends" all at once.

This is a phenomenon (except maybe for the last example) a certain blogger calls Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder or NADD. Drop by his site for a good read on this subject.

Anyway, stop reading this post right now.

Look at your desktop.

How many tasks are you working on besides reading this weblog? 10? 15? More than 20?

Then you got NADD, my kindred geek-in-hiding. And I am not alone.
_____________

Anyways, back to the online courses.
I just figured out how to take three of em at the same time.