Human
interaction
and sustainedintrospection?
There are no apps
for those.
Where
we put our attention
is not only how we decide what we will learn, it is how we show
what we value.
In
classrooms, the distracted are a distraction:
Studies show that when students
are in class multi-tasking on laptops, everyone around them learns
less. Distraction
is catching. When your classmates are checking their mail or
Amazon, it sends two signals: This class is boring, and you have
permission to check out — you, too, are free to do other things
online.
Despite
research that shows that multi-tasking is bad for learning, people
are still arguing that multi-tasking is a good idea.
In
education,
learning is the focus, and we know that multi-tasking is not
helpful, so it is up to us to actively choose uni-tasking.
Many
educators begin with an accommodation: They note that students
check websites in class — and they say, fine: This is the
21st-century equivalent of doodling and passing notes. However,
some do more than accommodate the distractions of digital media.
They take students’
new practices and see them as an opportunity to teach
in a new way. Then they call this progress.
The
Duke University literary theorist Katherine Hayles argues that
fractured attention
is the new way of thinking and that to look back to “deep
attention”
is to be unhelpfully nostalgic (wanting to value the past).
Students,
says Hayles, think in a new mode, the mode of “hyper
attention.”
Educators have a choice: “Change the students
to fit the educational environment or change that environment to
fit the students.”
For
Hayles, there is no real choice. Education
must embrace the culture of hyper attention.
As an example of a constructive way to do this, Hayles points to
experiments at the University of Southern California in a
classroom outfitted with screens.
One
mode of interaction
is “Google jockeying”: While a speaker is making a
presentation, participants search the web for appropriate content
to display on the screens — for example, sites with examples,
definitions, images, or opposing views. Another mode of
interaction
is “back channeling,” in which participants type in
comments as the speaker talks, providing running commentary on the
material being presented.
Google
jockeying speaks to our moment. Students
want to turn away from class when there is a lull. Google
jockeying implicitly says, all right, we will get rid of those
lulls. Even experienced teachers start to ramp up their PowerPoint
presentations in a spirit of competing with students’
screens. Or we tell students,
as Hayles suggests, to go to the web during class.
However,
there is another way to respond to students
who complain that they need more stimulation than class
conversation
can provide. It is to tell them that if they have a moment of
boredom,
it means that something is being asked of them: They must go
inward and draw upon their imaginative life. We can tell them what
we now know to be true: A
moment of boredom
is an opportunity for new thinking, but it can be short-circuited
if you go to the web.
If
boredom
happens in a classroom, rather than competing for student
attention
with ever-more extravagant technological fireworks, we should
encourage students
to stay with their moment of silence. We can try to build their
confidence that such moments — where you stay with your thoughts
— have a payoff. They give time to engage with yourself and with
the subject. We can present classrooms as places where you can
encounter boredom
and “walk” toward its challenges.
A
chemistry professor puts it this way: “In my class I want
students
to daydream. They can go back to the text if they missed a key
fact. However, if they went off in thought they might be making
the private connection that pulls the course together for them.”
Those
who are fluent in both deep attention
and hyper attention
have the advantage of attentional pluralism; they can switch
between the two, depending on what is needed. That fluency should
be our educational goal, but it is hard to achieve. Hyper
attention
is not only easier, it feels good, and without practice, we lose
the ability to summon deep attention.
Research
shows that when people watch online educational videos, they watch
for six minutes, no matter how long the video. So videos for
online courses are being produced at six minutes. But if you
become accustomed to getting your information in six-minute bites,
you will grow impatient with more-extended conversations.
Sherry
Turkle is a professor of the social studies of science and
technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This
essay is adapted from her new book, Reclaiming Conversation:
The Power of Talk in a Digital Age,
which will be published by Penguin Press October 6.
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