While tech entrepreneurs are rubbing their hands together gleefully about the dawn of the new age of technology in the classroom, Clay Shirkey of New York University has resolved to ban all electronic devices from his classes about the new media. Why? Students could not pay attention or learn what he was teaching because they were so distracted by the messages on their cellphones, laptops, tablets, etc.
Clay Shirkey is not just any technology professor. He is one of the leaders in the study of new techologies and social media.
He writes:
“This is all just the research on multi-tasking as a stable mental phenomenon. Laptops, tablets and phones — the devices on which the struggle between focus and distraction is played out daily — are making the problem progressively worse. Any designer of software as a service has an incentive to be as ingratiating as they can be, in order to compete with other such services. “Look what a good job I’m doing! Look how much value I’m delivering!”
“This problem is especially acute with social media, because on top of the general incentive for any service to be verbose about its value, social information is immediately and emotionally engaging. Both the form and the content of a Facebook update are almost irresistibly distracting, especially compared with the hard slog of coursework. (“Your former lover tagged a photo you are in” vs. “The Crimean War was the first conflict significantly affected by use of the telegraph.” Spot the difference?)
“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.” Humans are incapable of ignoring surprising new information in our visual field, an effect that is strongest when the visual cue is slightly above and beside the area we’re focusing on. (Does that sound like the upper-right corner of a screen near you?)
“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. Our visual and emotional systems are faster and more powerful than our intellect; we are given to automatic responses when either system receives stimulus, much less both. Asking a student to stay focused while she has alerts on is like asking a chess player to concentrate while rapping their knuckles with a ruler at unpredictable intervals.”
Shirkey realized he had to choose between teaching and watching his students interact with their devices. He chose to teach.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I wrote a response to this here: http://holtthink.tumblr.com/post/100168535725. Frankly, this sounds a lot like a guy that has lost control of his class and cannot practice just some very basic classroom management skills. He writes that he wonders how he can compete with Aunt Emma’s (or something like that) new Cookie recipe. My pushback is this: If his lectures are less interesting than Aunt Emma’s cookie recipes, then he has bigger problems than laptops.
Wes Fryer put it best: “How about using our scarce and precious face-to-face time with students to have them DO something with their digital technologies instead of just asking them to sit there passively and listen and take notes?”
This is more about classroom management than it is technology. Shirky admits that his lectures cannot compete with a cookie recipe. First of all, why the heck is he lecturing in a class about social media? He gets upset when his student DO what he is teaching about. Ironic to say the least. http://holtthink.tumblr.com/post/100168535725
It might be because the material he was presenting was better suited to more direct instruction pedagogy. Also, there is not a whole lot of evidence to support discovery learning/constructivist/student centered learning as a superior pedagogy to direct instruction. See Diane’s on this very point: http://www.aft.org//sites/default/files/periodicals/Senechal_3.pdf
There is not a whole lot of evidence to support direct instruction as being superior either: http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/features/edu-103-1-1.pdf
I agree that the screens are a challenge, but banning them does not guarantee students will pay attention.
I have been a teacher for 40 years, including 12 years as a sub in a NY suburb, where I was actually expected to engage and teach all students.
With the exception of the few really troubled kids what one gets, I almost never had trouble getting the attention of the children who were in my care. I knew how to motivate each age group, and how to keep them engaged. I,like all talented professional teacher-practitioners grasped the objectives and how to present them to a seven year old or a seventeen year old, and how to engage the mind of the emergent learner in front of me.
I was no different then most of the thousands of professional, dedicated educators that were discarded when the conspiracy to end public eduction began. Given a manageable class size where every student could be engaged, and given the support of the principal to provide a safe, clean ,quiet, well supplied and organized plant, it was not hard, because I WENT TO COLLEGE AND LEARNED ABOUT THE BRAIN, AND PSHYCHOLOGY and I knew my content COLD! I grasped the need for clarity and for rewards and how to assess learning.
But I am gone, and so are most of my professional colleagues, replaced my novices and TFA youngsters, in schools deprived of everything needed for learning to occur and lacking basic support.
Yes,kids are easily distracted… but the anti-learning mandates make them nuts! And we get the blame.
Did you really read what he said about attention and what we know about it? It has nothing to do with how engaging his class is. I seem to remember a particularly revealing photo op from the back of a legislative session which revealed the lack of attention to the business at hand. While the session might have been less than exciting, I expect my legislators to be doing something at least relevant to their jobs. On-line games just do not make it. I assume his students are taking the course to learn something relevant to their interests. Research shows that multitasking claims are overblown: split attention means less attention to all tasks. If you want quality product, concentrate on one thing at a time. A lot of what I was required to wrestle with as a student had less immediate appeal than a good cookie recipe. Fortunately, no one flashed them in my face.
I think the guy was absolutely right to do so. I took the classes for my teaching credential, with my laptop open the whole time. Supposedly, I was taking notes, but in reality I was ignoring a lot of what the teacher was saying. Yeah, this was partly because they were not very skilled lecturers, but the problem was, they had valuable information, information I needed. That they did not always deliver it interestingly did not make me need it any less.
Very true re: taking notes with a laptop.
“Unexpected iDistractions”
iPhones and Facebook
And Snapchat in class:
Distracting displaced look
Who could have guessed that?
As a high school teacher in a priority school, students were given IPads . I did not use them because the studnets were consistently off task. I believe some day we will be back to copy books and pencils. 🙂
Too much stimulation in this day and age re: nonsense via electronic devices. The constant stream of ads on electronic devices are intrusive and distracting…MARKETING to the MAX.
I agree that having the students NOT engaged in your class is very frustrating. I wonder if the professor could structure a lecture with social media embedded into it. Could he mini-lecture on the Crimean War and then pose a question to the class where everyone responds using a common hashtag for the class? The class is then segmented with direct instruction, student participation, and then class conversation when the live tweets are reviewed. I believe the students could adapt to that kind of class structure and learn how to be more responsible with their technology.
cross posted at http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Why-a-Leading-Professor-of-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Diane-Ravitch_Electronica_Laptops_Learn-141020-344.html
wit this comment (which has embedded links at the Oped address)
I was a top educator and NYSEC “Educator of Excellence” in 1998.
There is no way I could have held the attention of 13 year old NYC children if I had to compete with screens. it is hard enough to create the motivations and rewards for children so they can learn to do the work necessary to acquire genuine skills.
There were no screen distractions when I taught from 1963 to 2000.
Children have enough problems learning to do real work.
The Pew funded, National Standards research for which my practice was a cohort (see my resume at my author’s page) emphasized doing WORK.
http://www.opednews.com/author/author40790.html
Developing HABITS OF MIND, was crucial if we were to ENABLE and FACILITATE LEARNING… THOSE WORDS, which describes what teachers actually do, WERE THE WORDS OF THE RESEARCH TEAMS; the REAL New Standards research was ALL about Learning. The ‘teaching’ narrative was conceited by Broad/Koch/Walton/Gates and spread there the bully pulpit of Arne Duncan.
The tech industry sells the magic elixirs… the screens, but it is the classroom educator that made public education work… and the conspiracy to end public schools, ended the authority and the voice of the professional classroom practitioner… and replaced it with SCREENS.
I don’t think this professsor is competent to teach a class in new media.
These are college students.
They probably know more about new media than he does, but have not been engaged in the study of new media via new media.
If you have an hour, look at this invited lecture at the Library of Congress created by a professor of cultural anthroplogy in Kansas. Michael Wesch and his graduate students, or look up the shorter version on TED.
If you watch the whole thing you will see what this stuck-in-his-lecturn-professor is missing, and what his students could be learning.
http://mediatedcultures.net/youtube/an-anthropological-introduction-to-youtube-presented-at-the-library-of-congress/
mediatedcultures.net/michael-wesch/
Interesting and interesting comments above.
Einstein once observed was that what he needed was a pencil and paper and time to think.
Some time ago a Harvard professor made the observation that his/her students could not concentrate for any period of time. Ostensibly these should have been some of our nations brightest students.
If memory is correct a few years ago a similar observation, about electronic gadgets and how it was affecting, negatively, our students was written up in a leading magazine, perhaps Atlantic magazine.
Something is happening it would seem when at least some of our best students cannot concentrate for any length of time.
Yes, your point is valid, the inattention of young, emergent learned has always been a problem when an educator needs some serious thinking/reflection, which of core involves WORK!
But things have changed and the science is there.
Era’s of great transformation evade predictions of far futures.
I read an Atlantic Magazine essay on this subject, decades ago. One does not have to be a lifelong reader of science fiction, as I am, to know that small changes go unnoticed until the entire fabric of society rips.
No one could have predicted the effect of the steam engines on the industrial age and the use of coal and oil that this era expanded to the detriment of our environment.
Many neuroscientist and sociologists, and authors predict what occurs when humans are distracted. Jerry Mander, in fact, predicted what television would do, but this was before the internet. Orwell knew, too.
As for me, as a teacher, a public speaker, a writer and a playwright, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that motivation is the key. CONVINCING an audience, any audience, that there is something in it for them, is the key for ANY speaker –a teacher, a salesman or an actor.
An interested audience is required, and adolescents are a difficult lot at any time, but the science is there, if you take the time to look at the studies. The brain can only process so much information, and our kids (and ourselves) are inundated by noise.
In this transformational era, one of information technology, there are inadvertent consequences, for being unable to PAU ATTENTION, like when driving. The studies are there ,too.
I can only speak from my 4 decade experience in the classroom: http://www.opednews.com/author/author40790.html
and with the insight that the Harvard and LRDC research teams offered when I was the NYC cohort for the standards.
Motivation is key to any lesson, and rewards for achievement and for hard work, which included note-taking, accountable talk, reflective writing and some benefit at the end.
A grade is a nice reward, but real performance assessment such as what I did, offered so much more. They learned that what they thought, what they said and what they wrote mattered TO ME, but overall they paid attention because they enjoyed my lessons.
I do not believe that today, I could have competed with the screens and the squirts of seritonin that the tweets evoke!
The researchers told me that my students showed pleasure when I returned their work with my letters. They waited for my comments on their writing– my letters to them –explaining what they did well, and offering incentives for more work. There was a reward, but today, I could not compete with the easy rewards of a Facebook notification.
Rewards for achievementIS the SECOND PRINCIPLE OF LEARNING in the Pew research on effort based learning.
Click to access challengestandards.pdf
So, let me be clear:
I could not offer the students of today the same curricula.
They are losing the ability to pay attention; it is the outcome of the research, not mere opinion. THIS alone has dire consequences, much as the melting of the arctic ice and permafrost will have dire consequences. Small changes, big consequences.
The brain must build neural pathways in order to master any skill, and thinking is actually a skill. A human who can remember information, and then can return to this prior knowledge when there is a need to make a comparison, is able to detect misinformation and thus to make good choices.
We all know Bloom’s taxonomy of thinking skills (Uh, we do, DON’T WE???)
Comparison and analysis… in order to hypothesize; seeking contrasts and looking for similarities takes practice, but if there is little PRIOR KNOWLEDGE…. the big IF
— if the student has not put in the R&R time… (repetition and review which memorizing demands) and
— IF, in fact, the student was barely listening the first time because his brain was wondering what his friends were doing, then ALL IS LOST.
Paying attention is a learned behavior, and the incentive must outweigh the pleasure of these distractions. I do not know what that incentive would be today.
I could not teach today, if I had to put on a dog and pony show in order to engage adolescent minds in my seventh grade, let alone such ‘learners’ were now sitting in a college class. but I can tell you this, I WOULD NOT ALLOW A SCREEN IN MY ROOM, unless I was using them as a tool/materials for a particular less
I use a signal blocker in my classroom (Bought it at a church auction…) It captures/blocks their signal releases it when out of range, 911 still works though…I just tell the kids that they are in a bad zone and they go with that. Is it wrong? Sure but is it wrong to implement BYOD to school without a comprehensive plan on dealing with it? Now all the teachers want one.
Reblogged this on peakmemory and commented:
“he had to choose between teaching and watching his students interact with their devices. He chose to teach.”
My class rule: All technological devices must be off and stored when the student comes in the room. I provide all the technology that they will need for learning Spanish.
For me some of the issues are: students lack of focus power, false belief in multitasking, and then the equity issues of some students having access and others not.