Education and technology

Do you have a poor attention span? Here are some reflections about how our fragmented media may be affecting the educational experiences of today's college students.

Many of today's college students have their cell phones, iPods, and laptops at their disposal, and are never too far from their MySpace or Facebook pages. The technology of the Generation Y college student is amazing, but is it impacting education negatively? (See my satirical article on how technology might make classrooms obsolete.)

My media classes are discussing technology right now, and I had a great conversation with a student named Ryan. We discussed the relationship between poor attention spans and our fragmented experiences with technology. In the 1950s, people used to watch television shows and listen to records from start to finish. Today, we can flip the remote control to a new station if we're bored, or record shows on TiVo and zap past commercials and uninteresting scenes. With digital music, we can listen to a song until we're bored with it, and then press a button and hear a portion of different song. The web lends itself more to scanning than actual reading, and there's always a hyperlink ready to take you somewhere else if you're bored.

In addition, today's media experience is fragmented because we're accustomed to multitasking and paying attention to multiple stimuli. We listen to music as we IM and skim through news headlines, read a textbook as we watch TV, and text message in class as we scan through the professor's Power Point slides. We develop valuable multitasking skills, but how much of each source of information do we really absorb?

So how is this affecting our education? Do students have poor attention spans because they are so used to enjoying fragments of media that can be switched at the touch of a button when boredom sets in? In classrooms, students are asked to sit still and listen for an hour at a time. People don't even listen to four minute songs on their iPods from start to finish!

Neil Postman, author of Amusing Ourselves to Death, argued in 1986 that thanks to the entertaining, image-based world of television, we've lost the ability to concentrate on topics of importance. Postman died a few years ago, but I can imagine that he would have felt that our fragmented digital technologies have thoroughly destroyed students' ability to pay attention.

Now, Postman was kind of technological determinist, which means he ascribed an awful lot of power to technologies. I'm not nearly as pessimistic. However, I do think he has a point. When I discuss this with students, most agree that they have poor attention spans and that this has quite a bit to do with technology.

So, what should be done? In part, professors need to adapt to Generation Y and their fragmented experiences with technology. This doesn't mean professors need to stand on their heads to be entertaining, but it does mean the traditional lecture format doesn't work as well as it used to and needs to be combined with interactive activities and media resources. However, students need to adapt as well. There are many situations in life that will require full attention, so listening to a professor is good practice. Lecturing might be a dying art, but it is a valuable art, and students ought to pay attention.

I love talking to students about these issues, so thanks for inspiring this blog entry, Ryan! I'd love to hear what some of you have to say as well, if you're still paying attention to this article and haven't clicked on a link already!