I lecture via PowerPoint, with mutimedia content where possible. I generally don’t say anything if a student occasionally sleeps (my classes are in the evenings, after work mostly), but I generally don’t permit them to do texting or phone usage. That’s distracting to fellow students, as well as me. Some students take notes on their computers, and generally don’t abuse that situation to surf the net.

They find if they don’t pay attention, they don’t learn, and they don’t get good grades. Or they don’t pass. The multitasking thing is nonsense in my situation or discipline. If they don’t focus, they won’t get it. I feel my job is to make the material accessible, often being a conduit to hard to understand topics in the text to them. They have to participate to get something out of the course. And if they are distracted by things other than the lecture, they aren’t going to benefit from what I do.

The multimedia wiki blog technology thing doesn’t really make sense to implement in science lecture courses on the student end. I have enough problems just trying to get them to submit a paper electronically as pdf files. And I’ve found our online offerings for the same lecture courses pale in their ability to educate students. Students need to focus on the concepts and not be distracted by the crappy user interfaces of distance learning systems. Very few of my students are as computer or even internet savvy as you seem to think this generation is. Most of them don’t show much interest in learning things beyond browsing the web. That tech generation you are talking about is really not there yet, other than the MySpace/FaceBook thing. And unfortunately, I don’t have time to educate them on digital literacy, let alone mundane computer tasks (e.g., show them how to save a file in the right place on their PCs/Macs).

So, your digital spaces thing might work in other disciplines or student populations, but not for the majority of students I come across or for my discipline. There is a lot of value in Face-to-Face teaching, that should not be diminished by distractions.

My immediate reaction was (and is usually) exactly the “wrong” one you’ve described above (the “Hey! Look at the person speaking with your eyes!”), but I’m glad you raised the points you did. I recently was looking back through N. Katherine Hayles’ article “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes, ” where she describes a generational shift in kinds of attention, but I would have to look back to see what she says specifically about the classroom environment. You also raised the excellent point of teachers being boring, and I think that has a lot to do with my own anxieties as a teacher, the fear of being really, really boring.

Thanks for posting – I’ll be sure to check out Howard Rheingold’s videos on attention before the next class session!

- classrooms must be wireless/wired
- some teachers are boring (that’s a fact)
- students are able to more than one thing at a time
- but students must understand they’re part of a learning community
- eye contact, though important, may be overrated (sometimes)

I teach in a mac lab. Part of my class time is lecture (a small amount) the other half lab. But I’m continually referencing things online so the first part is never focused entirely on me – because I’m continually referencing online stuff – often they’ll just look these things up on their own.

The problem I have is usually near the start of my web courses where I’m getting at what we’ll be doing and where things are at with the web. There are, surprisingly, a great many 20-somethings who are overwhelmed by it all and are participating less and less as a result – they’ve told me! They will go to facebook and read email and IM but they’re not exploring a whole lot of other stuff or, more critically, creating their own original content (as Lessig and others like to suggest). In fact, fewer and fewer of them seem to be *taking* part in the great participatory user revolution mostly because of TIME (the same reason anybody else says they don’t have time for a blog, etc). Though they will and can find time to update their wall – often during my class

If students are doing other stuff during our classes I think this is not always symptomatic (as we self involved educators like to think) of what’s happening in the “learning space” or our merit or approaches in pedagogy. No, they’re time strapped. And they’re willing to take the risk of emailing during my class as a result. I did this myself when I took web courses. But there’s another problem with this.

Sometimes students assume they know more about what they’re going to learn – or what we’re doing with our course – prior to any legitimate claim to this insight. In essence, they have already decided some sort of economic arrangement of their time and attention (as one of Howard’s students said – and he referenced in the second video) – *they* decide what’s interesting or boring, what matters or doesn’t. Unfortunately, if you’ve never operated a CMS (and need to learn that), you don’t know what RSS is (and need to learn it), never heard of Larry Lessig or creative commons or net neutrality or any of the other stuff that is critically important in a particular course, you’re not going to get much out of it if you walk in saying – I’ve never heard of any of this stuff and it sounds boring and irrelevant so I’m deciding – right now – that I’d rather spend my time in your class on Facebook. And this is most often and precisely the kind of thinking that accompanies any new and different and challenging experience of learning. It’s, as my ed psych teacher ed prof explained: disequilibrium (i.e., this thing I don’t know about doesn’t feel right/good. I don’t like that feeling. I feel destabilized by all this “not knowing” so I am going to rush towards something that I DO know about and something that makes me feel good and knowledgeable).

I think the challenge isn’t attention but the classic problems of engagement/disengagement and making that yucky feeling of disequilibrium less yucky – through fun, skill and ON TASK learning.

Perhaps we need to be more like high school and elementary teachers and keep things continually moving – don’t talk for more than 10 minutes at a time, use activities, keep things varied. Post secondary education IS boring and it has to change. So let’s explore this issue as both a very classic problem in learning as well.

I’ve linked this comment back to my own response to Howard’s attention training – and the unique challenge he posed for educators.