In a Wired.com interview, Maggie Jackson, author of Distracted:  The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age suggests that,

This degree of interruption (in the connected workspace) is correlated with stress and frustration and lowered creativity. That makes sense. When you’re scattered and diffuse, you’re less creative. When your times of reflection are always punctured, it’s hard to go deeply into problem-solving, into relating, into thinking.

These are the problems of attention in our new world. Gadgets and technologies give us extraordinary opportunities, the potential to connect and to learn. At the same time, we’ve created a culture, and are making choices, that undermine our powers of attention.

 Neuroscience tells us that the executive functions system in our brains is responsible for how we manage novel experiences and information.  It encompasses our ability to engage with new ideas.  The web 2.0 world does appear at first glance to be a chaotic inundation of novel information overloading our ability to engage deeply.  Think about the last time that you hopped on the web to check your email, or find information on Wikipedia.  If you are like me, you may have been drawn in to further meanderings as hyperlinked information caught your attention and begged further inquiry.

Deep Surfing?

This non-linear surfing experience may indeed signal a lack of attention or focus, but I think that it also offers the possibility of refining and augmenting the ability to engage in higher levels of cognitive processing.  Each time I click through a link to expand my schema – the cognitive library of background information I’ve acquired – my executive functions system is called into action.  And it is called into action to engage in higher order processes of analysis, evaluation and synthesis.  I need to accept/reject information, based on criteria that are responsive to and reflective of my purpose.  If I accept information, I need to analyze its` import for my purpose.  Through that analysis, I proceed to synthesize the information with my schema.  My schema is thereby augmented and reorganized to reflect new understandings.

My argument is that I don’t think that it is the environment that is connected and therefore richer in information and interaction that needs to be quieted down.  What causes stress in the connected environment is the increased cognitive load placed on our executive functions system when we encounter new ideas, information and experiences more rapidly than in the past.  The analysis, evaluation and synthesis of new information encountered via the digitally mediated environment has not yet become a collectively automatized skill – at least not for those of us born in the pre web world.

While as teachers we may find ourselves and our colleagues lamenting the apparent lack of attention evident within our classrooms, I have to wonder how much of what we are seeing is a result of the fact that our lessons, stuck in the pre web 2.0 pedagogical frame, are not engaging a generation for whom the tasks of acquiring, analyzing, evaluating and synthesizing new information and experiences may be further automatized than our own.  In other words, I wonder if their engagement with the online environment has altered the speed or ways with which they process information and develop schema? 

Frankly, I’m not sure.  This is definitely a thought in process, but what I do know is this:  If I see students in my classroom who are unable to focus on the task at hand, I need to reflect on what might be changed in my own practice in order to continue to engage and stretch my students. 

And you can bet I`ll be checking out Jackson`s book to expand my own thinking around neuroscience, attention and focus.