My graduate seminar on social media is starting to wind down, so it seemed like a good time to shake things up. For our meeting on "Attention and Distraction," which was all about multi-tasking and attention spans and our apparently growing inability to think great thoughts, I issued a ban on technology -- beginning with my own instructor's computer and moving right on down to pens and pencils.
We had to pay attention to each other.
I've tried this a couple of times before with undergrads, but this was a two-hour graduate seminar, so I was curious how it would go. Several people admitted to feeling twitchy -- we commiserated about phantom rings/vibrations, for example, and at least one student broke the rules by taking out her pen to make a to-do list because she was too worried about forgetting things to pay attention anyway, but I think most of us actually enjoyed the experience. I know for sure that more people contributed to the conversation than usual, and there were actually a couple of disagreements among students, which means they were truly engaged. It made me realize that their typically distracted behavior is damaging to the class because they're missing out on real collaboration from their colleagues.
The thing that surprised me most was the extent to which several of them refused to believe they aren't good at multitasking, even though we read/watched evidence that no one is good at multitasking. They insist that they can get more done if they have their phones or computers surgically attached to their hands. That may be true, but I'm sure they got more out of the class than usual yesterday, whether they want to admit it or not. They also admitted to often being distracted in their classes but said that the pros outweigh the cons, and they seemed to agree that self-discipline is a required part of having technology at hand.
The assignments:
At the end I told them that back in the day, when I was in graduate school (somewhere around the time most of them were born), we used to sit around for 3 hours at a time to discuss the readings and that wasn't considered a special day. They weren't impressed.
