So, assuming you see evidence of hyper attention in your students–and maybe even in yourself–how do you address that in your teaching, your creation of assignments, your expectations and setting of course outcomes? What are the typical, traditional assignments in your field and how might they be reconfigured, not only to address this different cognitive mode of hyper attention, but to advance learning?

Hayles (cited in the previous post) notes that some activities, like playing video games, require both deep and hyper attention, and that young people are willing to devote the needed deep attention in order to “reach the highest level of proficiency.” But, short of trying to turn every assignment or course into a game, are there ways to attract both kinds of attention to course work?

1. Stand your ground (at least a little) and demand more attention. Howard Rheingold is right that we must address attention in the classroom and cultivate it by making students aware of where their attention is going and asking them to devote a more focused attention to you, the topic at hand, an in-class task.
2. Short of banning all technology for an entire face-to-face class–it’s just not practical–require periods when personal devices must be turned off, with the promise that they can be used later in the session. If you let students know your presentation and notes will be available after class for review, there is no need for them to be transcribing on their devices.
3. Perhaps you already divide your class session into chunks of material, alternating between small presentations of material, open discussion, group work, self-check quizzes. These diverse activities worked long before the current explosion of personal electronic devices and will still work.
4. Incorporate the capabilities of the devices into group work, asking one person in a group or the entire group to find a resource for discussion or as evidence to back up a point of view. We have the option to do instant research right there in the classroom and to discuss how to do it well. No longer just faculty show and tell at the front of the room, handheld devices broaden participation.
5. Do you have the skills to create gamified activities from some of your traditional assignments, or is there a resource on your campus that can help you develop them? It might be just a matter of something like collecting points for achievements and viewing the course as having levels to move into, which seems like a different way of viewing what you already do, or it might involve reconfiguring the assignment itself. (We have a game-knowledgeable person at one of our campuses.)
6. In this interesting discussion on teaching millennial students from DePaul University, you will be gratified to read that setting high expectations and offering team-based learning activities are two methods that work today: http://teachingcommons.depaul.edu/Classroom_Activities/teachingmcs.html. In short, today’s instructors, of any subject, have to spend some time teaching students how to learn in an environment that pulls at their attention from all directions.

I’m sure you have already found things that work to your students’ skill sets. What works for you or what are you thinking of trying? Do you think you need to address hyper-attention in the online classroom as well?

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 3,000 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 50 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

The topic hasn’t gone away, though, whether we are teaching face-to-face or online. Faculty are still bothered when students seem distracted by their personal technologies in the classroom and wonder if they have students’ attention online, as well. Lynda Weinman’s EDUCAUSE 2011 session, “The Changing Role of Educators in the Digital Age,” stuck with me out of all the sessions I attended, even though I can see how it supported a few of the more popular session speakers’ ideas (Seth Godin, Anya Kamenetz, Danah Boyd). You can find many of the presentations and/or resources here: http://www.educause.edu/Resources/Browse/EDU11/41762

Weinman’s session description did not sound like anything very new, promising to discuss how to be more of a facilitator and less of a “‘sage on the stage’” (there’s a time-worn phrase). She distributed flash drives to each session participant with resources, like this annotated PDF of her slides: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/41589476/changingrole_educators_annotated.pdf. i perked up when she brought up the idea of attention and referenced N. Katherine Hayles and her article on “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes,” (PROFESSION 2007).

You are probably skilled in deep attention, being able to sit with a novel and get lost in it, devoting all your attention to it. You wish your students could do the same, but you wonder if they are even able to do it, and you might be right. Traditional-aged students today are more likely to be skilled in hyper attention, the ability that Rheingold describes as having all the lights turned on “to be aware of as much as possible.” Hayles nicely describes the rift between educators and students and convinces me that hyper attention is not a defect, but another cognitive mode, one that we need to address in our teaching styles.

…maybe that’s plenty for one post. I feel a Part 2 coming on after the winter break, but that will give you time to read Hayles’ article.

What? You didn’t know you had your own Channel? Yep, every YouTube account has its own Channel on which you can display a playlist and a list of Channels you subscribe to, as well as upload your own videos. It is a great way to collect a series of videos related to your field and display them for students. You could keep your Channel strictly for that purpose or mix it up, in which case you would have to direct students to the particular videos you want them to view.

And let’s not make this service just a show-and-tell to students. Have students create their own Channels on a research subject and include video presentations of their findings.

Keeping a channel for your courses is a whole lot easier than embedding each video in each of your Blackboard sites as needed, and with time it can become quite an interesting collection. As with all such collections, you will have to keep an eye on videos that no longer work or have been removed from YouTube, but that should be a minor maintenance issue.

I subscribe to at least one faculty Channel where he posts video lectures for students, so this would be another way to supplement a course. How often do you use YouTube videos in your courses? A little or a lot, it might make sense to think about using your Channel more effectively.

Update 11/18: Here’s the story from The Chronicle of Higher Education

Here are a couple of good responses that put the FERPA issues in perspective. Especially note the second one that posits a comparison of an audience of classmates and a public audience.

http://bavatuesdays.com/you-cant-spell-ferpa-without-fear/

http://hapgood.tumblr.com/post/12881977343/dont-fear-the-ferpa

As I’ve heard all over Twitter and Google+ it is common that in all discussions of using open collaborative web tools like blogs and wikis for course work, the first question from faculty is about FERPA. Faculty have a right to be concerned about protecting students’ privacy, and we often err on the conservative side, mostly because FERPA seems to be difficult to interpret, particularly in this new digital era. The two main issues go to “what is a student record?” and “what constitutes a violation of student privacy?” Those questions can be debated, but you can find a few answers here as interpreted by one institution’s policies on using social networks/software:

Indiana University Teaching Handbook: http://www.teaching.iub.edu/finder/wrapper.php?inc_id=s2_6_tech_04_cloud.shtml

What can you do to continue to use blogs and wikis for course projects, short of working solely inside a private LMS (which can defeat your objective of writing for an authentic audience)?

1. If the work in the blog or wiki is required, offer students other options for completing the work:
1. allow students to write content outside of the technology and submit to you alone
2. allow students to create a private blog or wiki that is only shared with you
2. Suggest that students create accounts using pseudonyms and keep a list of who’s who
3. Instruct students on what personal data to protect (SS#, contact info) and how to do it
4. Never discuss grades or give grades in a public space, such as in the comments area
5. Do not post information about the course name or number that would reveal student enrollment in a particular course

Most higher ed educators see the action taken at Georgia Tech as draconian and fear that other institutions, out of fear of litigation and a misunderstanding of FERPA policies, will react in like manner, which would be a sad situation for the future of open collaboration in learning.

One questioner at Kamenetz’s DIY U session asked “What happens to academic freedom?” in her vision of the educational landscape. I think he meant to indicate that professors would be losing a lot of control over things like the shape of curriculum within a major. The question that popped into my head–that I did not ask–was “What happens to the professoriate?” I’m still wondering about that and have been since long before the conference.

Working with instructional technology every day has had me noticing the shift in the professorial role to facilitator. A quick search for a definition describes the facilitator as educating by “providing indirect or unobtrusive assistance, guidance, or supervision,” and I get that, because it fits into the move toward a more learner-centered instruction, but it sure sounds like the professor is becoming invisible and it begs the question of whether such indirect educating will one day be done by a technocrat or a machine.

We have been wondering about the shrinking profession of being a professor for many years, now, but it still persists, even if limping a little. What can be done to prevent it from going the way of Borders, which failed to see the correct response to a changing audience of readers? Just yesterday a Tweet pointed me to this despairing blog post: “Open Letter to My Students: No, You Cannot Be a Professor.” It seems to be ringing the death knell, calling the current generation of professors the last. So, I”m still left with the question “What’s next?” and what is technology’s role in what’s next? Can technology save the professoriate instead of killing it off? Sorry I don’t have the answer for you here.

Chaos. The landscape in education is a wild west of freely available tools that are the gateway to the world’s knowledge. Both liberating and scary. On the liberating side:

Seth Godin talked about us not creating an “educational industrial complex” while demonstrating that the components for constructing a better education are at our fingertips, and so (to paraphrase) “we should send our children to public schools during the day because we are a community and home school them at night” to add counterweight.

Anya Kamenetz tapped into the high cost of higher ed and ballooning student debt to argue for a “DIY U” education cobbled together with open source tools and social networks, certified with badges instead of diplomas, leading to internships, I guess where people take a chance on you. I don’t think that will get you into medical school, but we’ll see where it goes.

Then I stumbled on a Twitter discussion of unbundling your LMS, which is nothing more than substituting your own choice of free tools on the web for all the features in your LMS. At first, I brushed it off as more squawking from Blackboard haters, and maybe that’s part of it, but it resonated with the sense of educational chaos I was still feeling from the conference. On the one hand, our Blackboard course sites do all the organizing for us and offer our students a one-stop shop. Opponents of the LMS like to point out that traditional-age students live in a world where they interact throughout the day with multiple technologies and that we should offer them the same sort of mix, to prevent the sense of suffocation of the enclosed LMS system.

You know I’m going to cite the special constituencies of the community college –our student body is more likely to consist of non-traditional age students with varying levels of access to technology, but I would also point out that our diverse faculty, with its high percentage of adjuncts, can sometimes have the same access issues or levels of technological know how.

Where would you start if you did want to unbundle your LMS? Would you try to build a complete new system of pieces or try out one or two to supplement your course site?

Or do you want to mix up your textbooks to include both print and electronic texts? Are there some texts that you think must be or are better in print? I kind of like having a writing handbook in print, because I like to imagine students actually having it next to them as they write, flipping through pages to check on a formatting or grammar issue. I know, it’s not like me to be optimistic?

Or have you gone out on a limb and decided on no required textbook in a course, depending on cobbling together a course of online material? I’m not ready for that, but I have tried it sporadically as supplemental material. In a literature course, depending on the historical period, you can find over 36.000 works in the Project Gutenberg. Could you put together a course in your field using free online news and magazine sources, supplementing it with scholarly works from our library databases? I think you could. Here’s an interesting account from 2005 of such a course: No Books, No Problem: Teaching Without a Text.

What bothers me the most about a textbook is that the whole thing cannot be reasonably covered in one semester, in my case, because I need my students to stop reading and write–a lot. And when I am required to require multiple books, I feel sorry for the students’ wallets. I kept all my college textbooks for many years, but I know that is not an option for everyone.

What have you tried or wish you had tried that is a little out of the box in textbook adoption?