Multiply-torn Attentions (Jones & Hafner, Ch. 6)

Perhaps a decade ago, “multitasking” was a hot word to put on resumes.  It showed that an applicant was hip to the digital world, and knew how to navigate its competing attention-takers.  This isn’t considered much of a skill anymore.  Being able to pay attention to multiple streams of information at once is just a condition of living in the modern world.  I think most people are now aware of the constraints on attention that Jones and Hafner detail in this chapter.

I hear from older colleagues that meetings used to be fewer and smaller when they were confined to physical rooms.  The combination of conference calls and live-streaming of computer desktops has altered what Jones and Hafner call attention structures.  The biggest change is in the communication tools.  The tools I mentioned make it possible to expand a meeting beyond a meeting room, or even a city.  This affects the other attention structures as well.  The number of people involved can multiply, bringing new perspectives to the meeting.  These people also have different social relationships, making the interactions in the meetings different.

The affordances of this technology are clear.  More people get to collaborate more easily on more tasks.  But the constraints are also obvious.  The easier and wider an invitation is to send, the more get sent.  This taps into what Jones and Hafner refer to when they speak of living in an “attention economy” (90).  It’s ironic that, the easier it is to get a hold of anyone, the harder it is to…well, get a hold of everyone.  And if someone has multiple invitations to tasks that may only require that they dial a phone number and watch a screen, they’re tempted to do as many of those tasks as possible at once.

As the authors explain with the computer classroom example, the key is to align our attention structures to the right context.  In the example of meetings, it seems wise to sparingly use technologies that physically remove participants.  Those who can meet in person should, while those who absolutely can’t can connect digitally.  In this sense, multitasking becomes less of a proactive killing-two-birds-with-one-stone activity, and more of an occasional convenience.

Jones, Rodney H., and Christoph A. Hafner.  Understanding Digital Literacies: A Practical Introduction.  London: Routledge, 2012.

Contextualizing the Class Computer (Selber)

Until fifth grade, the bulk of my computer use in school consisted of playing Oregon Trail on some truly ancient Macs.  As informative as I’m sure repeatedly dying of dysentery was, it didn’t feel like an experience that grounded me in the realities of how computers would be used later in my life.  My fifth grade teacher was a little savvier.  He tried an experiment where we passed around a piece of paper, writing contributions to a conversation one student at a time.  The goal was to explain the concepts of internet chat rooms and forums.  The experiment’s success was mixed, but it forced me to think about the internet in a way I hadn’t; as a social medium that was both like and unlike the non-digital world.  The experiment contextualized the technology for me.

Stuart Selber thinks that understanding the social context of technology is vital to students’ use of it, and ultimately, how well they navigate the digital world.  He highlights how easy it is for technology to be decontextualized for students, however.  He quotes David Orr saying that conventional teaching of technology risks students having “no confrontation with the facts of life in the twenty-first century” (9).  Confrontation is the key word.  Students are at no risk of under-exposure to technology, but how well can they situate their use of technology? 

UNO has an agreement with Microsoft that gives all students access to its Office 365 suite, even on their personal devices.  It’s quite a deal, giving students free access to tools that are considered industry standards.  How the UNO announcement of the deal justifies it is telling: “As educators, everyone at UNO is united behind a single goal – help prepare our students to become the best they can be…According to IDC students with Office skills are better prepared for work in the professional world.”  The last sentence includes a link to a Microsoft article detailing the study in question.  Selber would likely see these statements as decontextualizing the technology.  It juxtaposes students “being the best they can be” with simply being good workers.  Is that the best they can be?

Selber thinks that teaching the social context of technology is too often an afterthought, and should instead be the core of instruction (21).  But economic realities seem to work against this notion.  If a company offers a university a killer deal for access to its software, university administrators aren’t likely to complain when that company wants to advertise the deal as training a new workforce.  Selber thinks that purely functional digital literacy need not be disempowering, but can serve to explore more critical analysis through humanities education.  This class is a good example of his notion.  It shows that teaching how to use a software and use it well doesn’t have to have purely vocational goals.  It’s just as possible to ask students to actively question technology (“Ja,” says Herr Heidegger) as they learn it.

Selber, Stuart A. Multiliteracies for a Digital Age. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2004.