IP 8 Attentional Record and Analysis

It is interesting to record how my time, focus and attention is allocated in a typical weekday :D

Obviously, I am multi-tasking every minute if no every second...thanks to the highly accessible and instant feed from my iPhone, iPad, PC...sometimes, I even want those gadgets to plug in my brain so that i can skip the visual information in-take process to get immediate response from the expected, or, unexpected...but take some time to ponder, how much information is indeed what I need, and some are passively taken in, and a bit waste of time to digest and delete?

Yves Citton bring up an interesting concept of “attention economy” in her book “the Ecology of Attention” with live examples. Google lives off this attention in two ways. On one side, our searches – our interests, our questions, our clicking choices, or even the time spent on one page, the links we establish or activate – give abundant information and personal data to Google’s intelligence whose algorithm feeds on and runs happily. Google lives off our active attention, which continually nourish and refine the effectiveness of the accuracy of advertisement feed. On another hand, companies like Google tends increasingly to sell our attention to advertisers that would appear on top of your gmail. It is the advertisers who need to pay companies like Google who “own” user’s data and Google get the chance to monetize / cash out from this unsolicited usage of data.

 

Lesson learned from companies like Google, also Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Tictok, Ecommerce platform like Taobao, Temu, is our attention has a price tag. However, it is never paid to us!

 

Citton then migrate the concept of Attention Economy to classroom and discuss the characteristics of class relationships in the digital age. Based on the self data collection and analysis of focus / time spent during a typical day of life, it is obvious and not uncommon for us to admit that with the gadgets surrounded us, our brain is like plugged in with endless news feed, message alert, notification from Facebook friends that is not time sensitive, no need response, and probably the majority of which are just purely waste of our time and most importantly, attention! If an adult, who I would put myself as highly disciplined person, cannot resist the temptation to take a “break” from time to time for more “interesting” and easy stories of life, how could we ask our kids or teenagers to stay focused with the classroom, not to say, with the help of gadgets, gamification, video games, AR/VR, instant messaging – you name it, how easily kids could be distracted from the instructions or classroom!

 

So the question is, how to guide our students stay focused? In traditional classroom, some techniques like, one two three clapping hands, or “trading” off attention by tricks, like incentives, praise, candies …so what we can do in digital classroom? Some solutions I can think of, including, switching off news feed, set limit time for video games, set lock function for video games when it’s study time etc.

 

References:

 

Citton, Y. (2017). The ecology of attention. John Wiley & Sons.

Crawford, K. (2021). Atlas of AI. Yale University Press.