- (recommended reading) Divided Attention. By David Glenn. The Chronicle Review 31 Jan 2010.
- Disciplinary / Institutional perceptions; highly relevant for our experiment.
- Indeed eager to know your perspective; strongly encourage discussion (below) or a blog entry — participation / blogging e.c.
- 02-Feb: see imaginary exchange below for prompt
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· Dislike
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- Imaginary exchange with David E. Meyer, 02-Feb 2010
- Meyer: “You really ‘jump around‘ too much — ’space’ (topic), place (stage), time, readings, assignments, screens, media, modes of lecture and personal anecdote; even ‘material’ in literal terms of objects, distracting everyone with ‘visual aides’ like your phone, a leaf, confections… How can anyone ‘keep up’? You should know better — students, including you apparently, have no attention span…..
- GH: “Ah, span meaning duration, but your connotation is the vertical axis of depth — for memorization and recitation. Our (in)attention spans horizontally; perhaps it were you who ‘could not keep up’ as they say? If we have accelerated the speed of thought acclimating to computation and interface processes, what pace of sensory input is necessary or optimal to stimulate attention for 44-minute duration? (riddle: ’span’ of an hour-long television program?)”
- blogosphere (collective response): TLDR
- GLU: Don’t worry, folks; the EmerAgency is working to invent the means for Flash Reason ‘as we speak’; prudence through one’s avatar.
- Electrate Pioneers (of ENG1131-7489)
- — reply:
Thanks for sharing this article! It was very interesting, and certainly relevant to today’s culture. I often find myself on facebook or other brain drain websites when I am (sub)consciously avoiding a much tougher task at hand. This is the same old procrastination that has been around since we evolved, but I do think today’s technology is making it much easier to do. Perhaps we have to try harder to focus our attention than we used toAs for banning laptops in class, I do find it especially frustrating when the person in front of me is surfing Facebook while I try to focus on the lecture. It’s rude and a waste of everyone’s time. I don’t know if I would go as far as to punish ALL laptop users, though. It’s a sticky situation.
In the end, though, the intelligent students who always have succeeded will continue to succeed. Hopefully their discipline and thirst for knowledge will barely be shaken by today’s distractions.