Paying Attention in the Classroom

Alan Jacobs banned laptops (and other internet-enabled devices) from his class. His reason was that his students were getting distracted. My instinctive reaction was to disagree with him: shouldn't he accept the reality of the ubiquitous connected device and adapt his teaching to align with them? Who refers to a book after college anyway (except for ultra-specialized topics)? Don't we just dip into the perfect recall of Google?

Then recently, at work, I found it better to learn a new field (pneumatics and mechanical engineering) by taking notes on a book than on my laptop. The laptop was distracting me with every new mail and message. Clay Shirky sums it up perfectly:

“Multi-tasking is cognitively exhausting.”

On the other hand, aren't many teachers bad at teaching? Did any of us ever learn anything from those teachers even in the pre-connected-device-in-every-pocket era? But Shirky brings out a point I hadn't realized (even though it was right under my nose), namely that the Internet, especially social media, is designed to be attention grabbing and thus distractive:

“Both the form and the content of a Facebook update are almost irresistibly distracting, especially compared with the hard slog of coursework.”

Shirky adds that even the OS's of the Internet era devices (iOS and Android) are designed to distract!

“Worse, the designers of operating systems have every incentive to be arms dealers to the social media firms. Beeps and pings and pop-ups and icons, contemporary interfaces provide an extraordinary array of attention-getting devices, emphasis on “getting.””

And so, Shirky sums up this deadly combination thus:

“The form and content of a Facebook update may be almost irresistible, but when combined with a visual alert in your immediate peripheral vision, it is—really, actually, biologically—impossible to resist.”

Even worse, Shirky goes so far as to say that even the best teacher can't hold the students' attention against the devices:

“The (IT + social media + devices) industry has committed itself to an arms race for my students’ attention, and if it’s me against Facebook and Apple, I lose.”

Further, says Nick Carr, it is not true that someone quietly checking Facebook and mails in the classroom doesn't affect others:

“Our attention is governed not just by our will but by our environment. That’s how we’re built.”

Maybe Jacobs was right after all. But he never could convince me with his arguments. Whereas Shirky and Carr did.