you're distracted. this professor can help. · 3/25/13 you're distracted. this professor...

3/25/13 You're Distracted. This Professor Can Help. - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education

chronicle.com/article/Youre-Distracted-This/138079/?cid=wb&utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en 1/14

Home New s Technology

T

Technology

March 24, 2013

You're Distracted. This Professor Can Help.By Marc ParryBy Marc Parry

Seattle

Matthew Ryan Williams for TheChronicle

Before each class session, DavidLevy leads his students in a fewminutes of meditation.

o complete her homework assignment, Meran Hill neededtotal concentration. The University of Washington seniorshut the blinds in her studio apartment. She turned off the

music. She took a few deep breaths.

Then she plunged into the task: Spend 15 minutes doing e-mail.Only e-mail, and nothing else.

Soon enough, though, a familiar craving bubbled up. For somepeople, the rabbit hole of Internet distraction begins with catvideos. For Ms. Hill, who calls herself "a massive weather geek," itstarts with a compulsion to check conditions in outer space.

As Ms. Hill plowed through e-mails, the voice beckoned: If I couldonly just leave and go to Spaceweather.com ...

http://chronicle.com/section/Home/5/

http://chronicle.com/section/News/6/

http://chronicle.com/section/Technology/30/

http://chronicle.com/

http://chronicle.com/section/Technology/30/



But the assignment had her trapped. After a while, she says,staying on e-mail felt more natural.

The e-mail drill was one of numerous mind-training exercises in aunique class designed to raise students' awareness about how theyuse their digital tools. Colleges have experimented with short-termsocial-media blackouts in the past. But Ms. Hill's course,"Information and Contemplation," goes way further. Participantsscrutinize their use of technology: how much time they spend withit, how it affects their emotions, how it fragments their attention.They watch videos of themselves multitasking and write guidelinesfor improving their habits. They also practice meditation—duringclass—to sharpen their attention.

Their professor, David M. Levy, sees these techniques as the templatefor a grass-roots movement that could spur similar investigationson other campuses and beyond. Mr. Levy hopes to open a freshwindow on the polarized cultural debate about Internet distractionand information abundance.

At its extreme, that debate plays out in the writing of authorswhom the critic Adam Gopnik has dubbed the Never-Betters and theBetter-Nevers. Those camps duke it out over whether the Internetwill unleash vast reservoirs of human potential (Clay Shirky) ordestroy our capacity for concentration and contemplation(Nicholas Carr).

On college campuses, meanwhile, educators struggle to managewhat the Stanford University multitasking researcher Clifford Nassdescribes as a radical shift in the nature of attention. Mr. Nass,who lives in a freshman dormitory as a "dorm parent," sees thatshift on students' screens. They write papers while toggling amongYouTube and Facebook and Spotify. They text and talk onsmartphones. They hang out in lounges where the TV is on.

Amid this scampering attention, some fear for the future of long-form reading. That was a theme of a keynote speech at this year'sconference of the American Historical Association by the group'sdeparting president, William J. Cronon, a professor at theUniversity of Wisconsin at Madison. Speaking to a ballroom ofbook-worshiping professors, the environmental historianexpressed his anxiety about what he called "the Anna Kareninaproblem."

Within 20 years, he wondered, will students manage to muster thedozens of hours of attention necessary to get through a lengthynovel like Tolstoy's 19th-century classic? If not, what does thatmean for works of history that are even harder to read?

When I ask Mr. Cronon what prompted him to stress that issue, hepoints to an encounter that illustrates the peril to the discipline ofhistory:

A young man came up to him after a lecture he gave at anotheruniversity. The talk had presented the themes of a 500- to 800-page book that Mr. Cronon is writing about the history of a smallWisconsin town, called Portage, from the glacier to the present.The young man told the historian how much he liked the lecture,but lamented that he could never read the book. Looking sad andashamed, he said he had never read anything that lengthy.

But Mr. Levy, a professor in the Information School at Universityof Washington, sees a problem with many discussions about whattechnology is doing to our minds.

"So many of those debates fail to even acknowledge or realize that

http://chronicle.com/article/Harrisburg-Us-Social-Media/124510/

http://dmlevy.ischool.uw.edu/

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/02/14/110214crat_atlarge_gopnik



T

we can educate ourselves, even in the digital era, to be moreattentive," he says. "What's crucial is education."

he education of Mr. Levy's students begins with meditation:a short session at the start of every class.

I visited his classroom one recent Thursday to watch theritual unfold.

Fourteen students—tech-savvy people working towardinformation-related degrees—join Mr. Levy at a series of desksarranged in a square. Shortly after 3:30 p.m., the professorremoves his watch. He picks up a bowl-shaped bell. He pings thebell three times, slowly, with a short brown stick.

Mr. Levy, 62, settles into a dignified stillness, honed over decadesof practice. Each year he travels to Mexico and to Bellingham,Wash., for weeklong retreats where participants meditate insilence, morning to night. A practicing Jew, he also withdrawsfrom technology for a weekly Sabbath, a period of staying offlinethat lasts from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. If all thismakes you picture a crunchy hippie, don't. With his slight smileand sad eyes, gentle voice and sensible sweater, Mr. Levy comesacross more like a Manhattan psychiatrist.

As the chimes from his bell fade, the classroom fills with silence.One student sits cross-legged with her palms facing up. Anotherrests her chin, prayerlike, on clasped hands. Another stares with abemused expression. The only sounds come from outside—thesquawk of a bird, the bang of a door.

Meran Hill"It seems so simple tojust observe how youdo e-mail or observehow you multitaskbetween two things.But when you take avideo of yourself doingit and then review itlater, you notice allkinds of weird habitsyou have. We’re reallyunconscious when weuse technology. Thisclass is helping bringthat consciousness



back—of just howzoned out I am."

Michael Conyers“When I come into thatclassroom, I have a lotof things on my mind.And often when I’vebeen taught in thepast, I wouldn’t beopen to the ideas,because I was stillstuck in my way ofthinking before I gotinto class. Meditationgives you a resetbutton. I’m clearing mymind so I can give myfull attention to what isgoing to be happeningnext."

Athea Merredyth“It’s not that I’m notcomfortable withtechnology. What I’vediscovered from thisclass, and carving outthat time to really lookat my habits, is that Ifeel like I can’t meetother people’sexpectations of beingtimely."



Andrea Michelbach“Facebook, beingback in grad school,it’s been a real issue.Because it’s such adistraction. But it’salso a place where myclass has so muchcommunication that Ican’t miss it. So it’snot just how it affectsour academics. It’slike, if I’m notengaging in this, am Inot being as friendly tomy classmates as Icould be? Or notbuilding as much of arelationship as I couldbe?"All Photos by MatthewRyan Williams for TheChronicle

Those who happen to glance into this seminar, in Room 420 ofMary Gates Hall, might wonder whether the students had fallenasleep.

Just the opposite: Meditation sharpens their focus. The practice, asMr. Levy teaches it, involves repeatedly bringing your attentionback to your breathing as the mind wanders away. Think of it likelifting weights. Just as you can build up your biceps by doing reps,he says, meditation can strengthen attention.

There's nothing novel about this. As Mr. Levy has written, manycultures, over thousands of years, have developed techniques tostill the mind and cultivate attention. Scientists like Jon Kabat-Zinn and technologists like Google's Chade-Meng Tan havebrought meditation into medicine and business, and now Mr. Levy isdoing likewise in education.

His methods are secular but inspired by Buddhist tradition.Buddhism 101: Suffering is an inescapable part of life. You canavoid some of it. Much angst stems from failing to be aligned withthe present moment, as the mind cycles through anxieties aboutpast and future. Meditation trains the mind to focus on thepresent. Mr. Levy points out that other traditions besidesBuddhism have reached similar conclusions. Ancient Greekschools of philosophy, for example, taught exercises designed tobring the student into fuller engagement with the present

http://www.amazon.com/Full-Catastrophe-Living-Wisdom-Illness/dp/0385303122

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/technology/google-course-asks-employees-to-take-a-deep-breath.html?pagewanted=all&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;_r=0



F

moment, according to Pierre Hadot, a French philosopher.

At first some students find it weird to meditate beside theirclassmates. "I'm sitting next to this person," says Ms. Hill. "Wecan't say anything to each other. We just made awkward eyecontact. What now?" It gets weirder. In addition to meditating atdesks, students also practice walking meditation in the halls,which, as Ms. Hill jokes, probably appears to bystanders "a bit likethe zombie apocalypse."

But meditation works like an eraser that rubs out the mentalchatter you carry up the stairs to class, says another student,Michael J. Conyers. "It opens me up to where now I can give myfull attention to this guy."

"This guy"—Mr. Levy—is one of the more unusual charactersthinking about education and technology.

After attending New York's Stuyvesant High School andDartmouth College, he earned a Ph.D. in computer science atStanford in 1979, specializing in artificial intelligence. But AI'srational, computational vision of humanity felt limited. Hedropped it and moved to London to study calligraphy andbookbinding.

Mr. Levy eventually found a base to pursue his interests in old andnew technologies: Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center. In the 1970s,the think tank had developed the first fully networked personalcomputer. As a researcher there in the 80s and 90s, Mr. Levyfocused on the transition from paper to digital documents.

But as digital tools gained momentum in the 90s, he started towonder whether technologies sold as tools of connection were alsodisconnecting people from themselves and one another.Cellphones, e-mail, Internet—all of it accelerated life. Thatcontrasted with the stillness and focus Mr. Levy cultivated inmeditation.

How could people live balanced lives in the middle of thesetechnologies?

After Mr. Levy moved to University of Washington, in 2001, thatwas the question he took into the classroom.

or his students, though, some of the most interesting resultshappen outside of class, as they use Mr. Levy's methods toanalyze and change their often unconscious tech habits.

On the second floor of Trabant, a coffee shop near campus, Ms.Hill pops open her MacBook Air to show me how the processworks.

She loves technology but would like to be better at settingboundaries, which is difficult in part because she's so busy. Inaddition to pursuing a double major in psychology andinformatics, she interns for a consulting-and-marketing companyand works as a teaching assistant.

Her iPhone, almost an extension of her hand, constantly beckons.When she first got a smartphone, she and her friends would go outto lunch and sit there in silence, glued to their gadgets.

"I started to realize that it was really making me sad," says Ms.Hill, who has short brown hair, a hoop-shaped nose ring, and atendency to pantomime her thoughts with her hands as shespeaks. "I was involved in all these cool social circles on Facebook,but it was so lonely. I would get all of my social energy out of a



computer."

She managed to dial down that Facebook addiction, but sheremained an obsessive e-mail checker—until Mr. Levy's classstarted to change her habits. It began with an assignment thatrequired students to spend 15 minutes to half an hour each dayobserving and logging their e-mail behavior. The idea, anoutgrowth of meditation, is to note what happens in the mind andbody.

Can they notice the initial impulse to check e-mail? What are theythinking and feeling at that point? What emotional reactions dothey have the moment they set eyes on the inbox? How does theirposture and breathing change as they e-mail?

After observing their own behavior for a week, students write atwo- to three-page reflection on what they saw.

In the process, they tend to discover what works for them. Theylearn how strong their attention is at different times. They see howe-mail provokes pleasure, anxiety, even hatred.

Ms. Hill was flabbergasted to find out how frequently she checkede-mail. She checked it right after waking up. She checked it ridingthe bus, crossing campus, climbing stairs, sitting in class, eatingdinner. She checked it up to 25 times a day, just on her phone. Foreach new message, her phone vibrated. It stressed her out. Oftenthe alerts concerned unimportant messages from e-mail lists.

She was reacting to robots.

Then came another assignment: "e-mail meditation." This meantconcentrating only on e-mail for 15 minutes or so at a stretch. Noanswering the phone. No texting. No checking the weather inspace.

When the mind wandered, students were instructed to refocustheir attention on the e-mail, just as they bring their attentionback to the breath in traditional meditation.

Each student wrote up personal e-mail guidelines. Ms. Hillrealized that she hadn't been paying close enough attention toimportant messages as she tapped out one rapid-fire reply afteranother. She removed her university e-mail account from herphone, so it wouldn't tempt her, and started handling e-mail inbatches several times a day.

"For me, that type of hyperfocus really worked," she says of the e-mail meditation. "If I'm just constantly dipping out of my own lifeto go check my e-mail, and not giving my life or the e-mail fullfocus, it's almost like a waste of time."

On her laptop, Ms. Hill opens up software called Camtasia to showme another behavior she's trying to improve: multitasking.

Camtasia records what happens on her screen as Ms. Hill uses thecomputer. Meanwhile, hidden from view, it also deploys her Webcam to film her: her posture; her expression; and her physicalenvironment, like the acoustic guitar and green couch visible overher shoulder.

Mr. Levy's students use the software to record 15-minutemultitasking sessions. It's the first of multiple exercises aimed atteaching them to multitask more mindfully, by noticing the desireto switch activities and deciding whether to follow it.

When students play back the Camtasia recording, they see what



A

was happening on their screens with their own faces displayed in acorner. They watch themselves flit among Words With Friends, e-mail, Words With Friends, Spotify, Words With Friends, and thatgoofy video of a cat rolling up against a sake bottle.

Some are disturbed to observe that they got so distracted theyforgot to work on the main task they had set out to accomplish,like reading an article.

Sample Experiment

Ms. Hill clicks play.

"Look at my face—I do not look happy," she says. "My posture islike this." She slouches her shoulders, aping what she sees in thevideo. The video shows her switching among e-mail, the Web, andPDFs. Three minutes in, her phone chirps. A new text message!

She leans back, smiling.

"The emotional quality of what I'm doing on the computer screenis so, like, negative," she says. "And then what's happening on mycellphone screen is so incredibly positive. It's like this back-and-forth thing, almost like I'm switching rooms, you know?"

In the recording, another text message interrupts her. Andanother.

That happens four times over the 15-minute session.

Ms. Hill sips her tea and giggles at the video.

"I don't know how I get anything done," she says.

ll this breathing and self-observation may sound goofy, butMr. Levy grounds it in science.

Last year he and a team of colleagues reported the results of aNational Science Foundation-backed experiment that combinedmeditation with multitasking.

The subjects were human-resource managers. Some gotmeditation training, and others did not. They were then asked tocomplete tasks, such as scheduling a meeting, amid a barrage ofinterruptions from e-mail, instant messages, phone calls, andknocks on the door.

The results: Those who had received meditation training were lessfragmented in their work, switching tasks less frequently and

http://faculty.washington.edu/wobbrock/pubs/gi-12.02.pdf



spending more time on each one. They also showed less stress andbetter memory. The experiment was the latest in a growing pile ofneuroscientific studies to find that meditation may improveemotional regulation and attention.

Other research highlights the cognitive costs of not payingattention. Ulrich Mayr, a professor of psychology at the Universityof Oregon, studies multitasking. When Stanford convened aconference on that subject in 2009, he emphasized that"multitasking is actually rapid task switching, since the humanbrain does just one thing at a time."

In a phone interview, I ask him to elaborate. Mr. Mayr offers theexample of watching television while doing homework from atextbook. While you're trying to follow a story on television, youwon't be doing your homework, he says, and while doing yourhomework, you won't get the TV story. Simple as that.

What's more, he says, you pay a price for switching—withmoments of mental "dead time" unproductive for either task. Forevery activity, your brain must reconfigure itself to do aconstellation of things required for the type of task. Keeping trackof a TV show, for instance, involves activating brain areas that dealwith visual inputs as well as consulting long-term memory toretrieve what you know about the characters. Want to switch tomath problems? A different set of brain areas must come together.And writing the equations on paper for homework takes yetanother set for motor output.

All of that carries implications for teaching. The cost of classroommultitasking, he says, can be a failure to learn.

Say a professor presents new concepts. To understand the ideas,students need to link them to things they already know, creating anetwork of associations that Mr. Mayr describes as "a richknowledge structure." That happens only if they pay attention andthink about the lesson.

If a student listens to the professor with one ear while surfingFacebook, Mr. Mayr says, "I'm 100 percent certain that that criticalprocess of creating new knowledge structures is not happening inthe student's head."

What's tricky is that someone who does surf the Web whilelistening to a lecture will very likely have the impression of doingjust fine, Mr. Mayr says. That's because our minds lay a trap. Allcontent in long-term memory is represented in two ways: "as asense of familiarity on the one hand, and whether or not you trulyunderstand it."

People often mistake familiarity for understanding. They open thetextbook after getting home from a lecture, and they recognize thematerial. They think: I get this. Then they take a test—and bomb it.

Another researcher, Mr. Nass, of Stanford, has found that peoplewho chronically multitask are less able to focus and worse atmanaging working memory. They're also worse at switchingbetween tasks.

"The thing that one would assume is at the heart of multitasking,they're actually quite bad at," Mr. Nass says. "It shocked the hellout of me."

Mr. Mayr, however, cautions against drawing the conclusion thatmultitasking weakens attention. If anything, he says, it's probablythe opposite: People whose attention doesn't function well in the



first place are probably most susceptible to the lure of distractingstimuli.

The big question—whether multitasking changes how our brainswork—remains unanswered, he says. That's because it's difficult tostudy. Ideally you would run a controlled experiment over severalyears, with one group of kids multitasking as usual and a controlgroup of kids not exposed to those distractions. But it's basicallyimpossible to create that control group.

Mr. Levy, meanwhile, is encouraging other colleges to bring age-old contemplative practices to their wired campuses. (He isn't theonly one: The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, anonprofit group, has for years supported such efforts in highereducation.) He has visited other campuses, giving public lectures,running training workshops for faculty and staff, and meeting withstudents to discuss their online behavior.

Back in his own class, Mr. Levy pings the bell once more to signalthe end of meditation and the start of discussion. Students rubtheir eyes. They shift positions. One cracks his back.

The students begin to debate a series of readings on multitasking.These include a feature in Scientific American Mind about thediscovery of "Supertaskers"—a tiny sliver of humanity whomultitask with ease—as well as a report from that 2009multitasking seminar at Stanford.

The Stanford report strikes notes of urgency. Mr. Levy points hisstudents to one section in particular: a plea for guidance to helpthe public handle its concerns about the effects of multitasking oneducation and family life.

"I don't think that we have to just wait for the longitudinal studiesin order to figure some stuff out," the professor tells the students."What we're doing in this course is figuring some things out forourselves."

Information and Contemplation: a Reading List

A selection of readings from a course taught by David M. Levy atthe University of Washington

Introduction to Contemplative Practice

Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation inEveryday Life, by Jon Kabat-Zinn (pages 3-19)

Alfred W. Kaszniak, "Contemplative Pedagogy: Perspectives FromCognitive and Affective Science," in Contemplative Approaches toLearning and Inquiry Across Disciplines

Smart or Stupid?

Adam Gopnik, "The Information: How the Internet Gets Inside Us,"The New Yorker (2011)

Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More FromTechnology and Less From Each Other (2011; pages 151-170)

Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Betterand How They Can Change the World (2011; introduction andconclusion)

Attention

Warren Thorngate, "On Paying Attention" (1988) in Recent Trendsin Theoretical Psychology (1993; pages 247-263)

Antoine Lutz, Heleen A. Slagter, John D. Dunne, and Richard J.

http://chronicle.com/article/Meditate-on-It/12344/

http://multitasking.stanford.edu/MM_FinalReport_030510.pdf

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/02/14/110214crat_atlarge_gopnik



with your Chronicle account: Don't have an account? Create one now. Or log in using one of these alternatives:

Log in to post

Davidson, "Attention Regulation and Monitoring in Meditation,"Trends in Cognitive Sciences (2008; pages 163-169)

E-mail

Stephen R. Barley, Debra E. Meyerson, and Stine Grodal, "E-Mailas Source and Symbol of Stress," Organization Science (2010)

Linda Stone, "Just Breathe: Building the Case for Email Apnea,"Huffington Post (2008)

The Body

Galen Cranz, The Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body, and Design(1998; chapters 3-4)

"Is All That Sitting Really Killing Us?," The New York Times, "Roomfor Debate" (2010)

Emotional Regulation

Chade-Meng-Tan, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path toAchieving Success, Happiness and World Peace (2012; Meng, as heis known, founded Google's mindfulness course, "Search InsideYourself.")

Education

David M. Levy, "No Time to Think: Reflections on InformationTechnology and Contemplative Scholarship," Ethics andInformation Technology (2007)

Multitasking

Claudia Wallis, "The Impacts of Media Multitasking on Children'sLearning and Development" (2010; report from research seminar,Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop)

Victor M. González and Gloria Mark, "'Constant, Constant, Multi-Tasking

Craziness': Managing Multiple Working Spheres" (2004; paperpresented at Conference on Human Factors in ComputingSystems)

David L. Strayer and Jason M. Watson, "Supertaskers and theMultitasking Brain" (2012), Scientific American Mind (pages 22-29)

David M. Levy, Jacob O. Wobbrock, Alfred W. Kaszniak, andMarilyn Ostergren, "The Effects of Mindfulness Meditation Training onMultitasking in a High-Stress Information Environment" (2012;paper presented at Graphics Interface Conference)

Unplugging

David M. Levy, "More, Faster, Better: Governance in an Age ofOverload, Busyness, and Speed" (2006; First Monday)

Judith Shulevitz, The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a DifferentOrder of Time (2010)

"The Unplugged Challenge," The New York Times (2010)

Sabbath Manifesto (Web site)

CommentsPowered by DISQUS

Add a comment

http://chronicle.com/article/Youre-Distracted-This/138079/?cid=wb&utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en#

http://chronicle.com/myaccount/login?goto=/article/Youre-Distracted-This/138079/&anchor=disqus_thread




http://chronicle.com/myaccount/createfreeaccount

http://brainimaging.waisman.wisc.edu/~lutz/Lutz_attention_regulation_monitoring_meditation_tics_2008.pdf

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/linda-stone/just-breathe-building-the_b_85651.html

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/is-all-that-sitting-really-killing-us/

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10676-007-9142-6?LI=true#page-1

http://multitasking.stanford.edu/MM_FinalReport_030510.pdf

http://www.isr.uci.edu/~gmark/CHI2004.pdf

http://faculty.washington.edu/wobbrock/pubs/gi-12.02.pdf

http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1618/1533

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/08/02/technology/unplugged.html

http://www.sabbathmanifesto.org/

http://disqus.com/

http://disqus.com/



Fantastic article. It is refreshing to see this kind of research being done. I startedmindfulness meditations in undergrad (9 y ears ago) and have found it to be one of the bestdecisions of my life.

My only piece of adv ice would be this. Don't try to meditate for any specific purpose. If y ougo in with a purpose "I want to get better at multitasking", y ou have missed the point. Thepoint is to sit quietly and watch y our thoughts. That's all. This kind of attitude will serve y oubetter as y ou progress.

Thank y ou for the fantastic piece.

Kent

4 people liked this. Like

Interesting article, excellent reading list. Thank y ou all for enriching my life by bringinginsights and challenging thoughts I need to work through. Focus-Interaction-Entertainment-Relationship-Reflection-Insight-Creation-Rest. All vy ing for attention and priority .Sometimes the students learn more from a professor in an example of "centering" than from asemester of books and lectures. Again, thank y ou for opening this classroom to me.

Like

Excellent reading list? I find student reflections on this a bit more informative thanstudies from people who are not experiencing the shifts in how reality is constructedfirst hand. The under 25s-if any one, should be authorities on this. The studies of usoldies about them are put together from our warped, print-era perspectives.

Like

This is fascinating. I've been searching way s to help improve my attention after beingdiagnosed with ADD during my second quarter of college. It's alway s been there, but I'vebeen able to work around it by being a good test-taker and being able to "binge work" at theend of semesters to catch up on work that I'd missed simply through inattention. My studyhabits sucked and I just assumed I was "bad at school". Although I've been diagnosed, Icannot afford to get screened by my university so that they can issue their "official" diagnosisthat will allow me to use my student health insurance to get medication I can afford. Thus,I've been looking for alternative therapies for redirecting attention. I'd love to learn moreabout this guy 's studies and what their affects are, and I'm also curious as to whether he's hadmany ADD students in his class (I imagine so) and what the results are with them.

Like

Where are the studies that confirm "long form" reading is superior to exposure to the samematerial v ia tweets, y outube, and facebook? The people study ing and writing about this topicseem to be from a pre-digital age. I suppose this nostalgia will continue a few more y ears...


Showing 11 comments

Sort by Oldest first Follow comments: by e-mail by RSS

Real-time updating is paused. (Resume)

kent_tophat 21 hours ago

David O 20 hours ago

judithb 13 hours ago in reply to David O

Rebecca H. 17 hours ago

judithb 13 hours ago

http://disqus.com/chronicle-97fb32508a8142bb89ace71119d0d4cd/

http://disqus.com/Kyrke/

http://disqus.com/chronicle-0bc62a46a62d62d087f7632713fc4e76/

http://disqus.com/twitter-20214295/

http://disqus.com/chronicle-0bc62a46a62d62d087f7632713fc4e76/


http://thechronicleofhighereducation.disqus.com/youre_distracted_this_professor_can_help/latest.rss


http://chronicle.com/article/Youre-Distracted-This/138079/?cid=wb&utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en#comment-840752198



http://twitter.com/rjh4509





The same material? What a laugh. Do y ou want me to tweet Tolstoy to y ou, 140characters at a time?


my classmate's sister-in-law makes $69/hr on the computer. She hasbeen unemploy ed for 8 months but last month her pay check was $17 856 just workingon the computer for a few hours. Read more on Ask25.com

Like

Good for her . She worked 258 hours in one month.Did y ou do that ever .I am glad she found the right place to work .


I've been looking for alternative therapies for redirecting attention. ATMEGA64

Like

Just two y ears ago, I probably would have skipped this article. However, the explosivegrowth in smart phones (including the fact that I now own one and can speak firsthand of thethreats to my concentration from the little monster), combined with what I see in my ownstruggling students (such as mistaking the sense of familiarity with one of understanding),has convinced me that we need to take the bull by the horns and address the fact that oury oung students need help and guidance if they are to learn every thing we have to to teachthem. Mastering this technology won't just happen to many of these students: I now believethat we have a responsibility to help them.

Like

Great article--! I usually introduce mindfulness techniques and ask students to 'sit' for 1-2min at the beginning of class--they 'arrive' and feel better though some of them feel itchallenges their religion. Calling it mindfulness techniques has helped a bit but not entirely -despite the differences they feel. Regarding technology an long reading--hmm--this is an issue but some really interestingideas on social reading are being developed by Bob Stein and his hoard. SocialBook

I thought this might be added to y our resource list:acmhe.org is (the) resource for scholars and academics across disciplines usingcontemplative techniques in higher education. Association for Contemplative for HigherEducation. Regarding

Caleb50 11 hours ago in reply to judithb

bernhardruge55cy 9 hours ago in reply to judithb

(Edited by author 9 hours ago)

ilhan2000 2 hours ago in reply to bernhardruge55cy

nannasin smith 6 hours ago

grward 17 minutes ago

katsim 15 minutes ago

http://disqus.com/Caleb50/

http://disqus.com/bernhardruge55cy/

http://disqus.com/chronicle-e8bc6f9f3022daa29c907618a6d5843a/

http://disqus.com/google-f11a077b274f973486b099fee87fbf87/

http://www.hqew.net/product-data/ATMEGA64

http://disqus.com/chronicle-d59bdfef92aa796a0b87eff753e654e1/

http://disqus.com/chronicle-d879fdfcc5f8d38fa63706ddcdf01b2a/

http://acmhe.org/







you're distracted. this professor can help. · 3/25/13 you're distracted. this professor...

Documents