by Jon Lackman | 29 May 2010 | Teaching
As I was listening to this interesting “On the Media” segment recently, I became intrigued when I got the impression that everyone but me had read this article (pdf), “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes,” by Kathleen Hayles. (In fact, it’s not all that well known.)
This is a topic I’ve thought some about, while teaching. I admire Hayles’s willingness to sidestep the bias among academics against “ADD generation” habits and examine it afresh. Too many academics seek only to create students in their own image, a point that Ken Robinson made eloquently in a 2006 talk:
If you were to visit education, as an alien, and say “What’s it for, public education?” I think you’d have to conclude — if you look at the output, who really succeeds by this, who does everything that they should, who gets all the brownie points, who are the winners — I think you’d have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors. Isn’t it? They’re the people who come out the top. And I used to be one, so there. (Laughter) And I like university professors, but you know, we shouldn’t hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement … If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn’t valued, or was actually stigmatized.
Now, here is what Hayles has to say about “deep attention” and “hyper attention”:
Deep attention, the cognitive style traditionally associated with the humanities, is characterized by concentrating on a single object for long periods (say, a novel by Dickens), ignoring outside stimuli while so engaged, preferring a single information stream, and having a high tolerance for long focus times. Hyper attention, by contrast, is characterized by switching focus rapidly between different tasks, preferring multiple information streams, seeking a high level of stimulation, and having a low tolerance for boredom … Each cognitive mode has advantages and limitations. Deep attention is superb for solving complex problems represented in a single medium, but it comes at the price of environmental alertness and flexibility of response. Hyper attention excels at negotiating rapidly changing environments in which multiple foci compete for attention; its disadvantage is impatience with focusing for long periods on a non-interactive object such as a Victorian novel or complicated math problem.
Hayles goes on to argue that, like it or not, college students are increasingly drawn to hyper attention. What are the consequences of this for teaching?
… educators face a choice: change the students to fit the educational environment, or change the environment to fit the students … How can the considerable benefits of deep attention be cultivated in a generation of students who prefer high levels of stimulation and have low thresholds for boredom? … [In an] interactive classroom at the University of Southern California … Fourteen large screens span the walls, providing display space for input controlled by wireless laptop computers scattered around a large conference table. One mode of interaction is “Google jockeying”; while a speaker is making a presentation, participants search the Web for appropriate content to display on the screens, for example web sites with examples, definitions, images, or opposing views. Another mode of interaction is “backchanneling,” in which participants type in comments as the speaker talks, providing running commentary on the material being presented … [Or] Imagine a course that begins by studying strategies of self-presentation at the wildly popular Facebook.com, including naiveté, deception, ironic juxtaposition, competition, cooperation, betrayal, and compelling narrative. This provides a rich context in which the sly and subversive self-presentations in The Education of Henry Adams can be analyzed, including an assignment that asks students to compose Facebook entries for the book’s ironic persona.
Hayles writes that these experiments have so far produced mixed results, but I found them inspiring nonetheless. After all, trying to respond creatively to the new wave of students seems much more interesting than simply trying to bludgeon them with the old, decreasingly effective methods, at ever higher volumes, which, I’ll admit, has been my instinct in the past.
Fascinating study. I’m proud to say that the institution where I teach practices Learner-Centered education. I agree with Hayles that both hyper and deep attention have their merits, and should be cultivated. It’s true that most of our students seem to be fairly adept at hyper-attention while struggling with deep attention (with exceptions of course). One of my goals as an instructor is help students realize the value of deep attention, which many regard with great suspicion. If I can produce a moment for a student which reads something like “I really can learn and understand more by studying a work of art in great detail, and I like it!”, I feel I’ve done my work well.