EmergingSocialSoftware

Rather than seeking to ban these devices from the lecture hall and the classroom, we aim to ask what precisely they have on offer for a culture that equates individual attentional behavior with intellectual and moral aptitude.

his comes into clear relief in the context of formal education.

By the early 20th century, this rational-empiricist conception of mind had become pervasive and the command of attention was considered a normative aspect of modern life.

In short, distraction is a logical by-product of a successive array of technologies of attention.

the ability to focus one’s attention is tantamount to proper socialization.

Rather than assuming that their presence "takes away" from an established order of attention, we are seeking to understand how they reconfigure that order in ways that might allow for new methods of engagement.

The present essay grows out of a project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities where we are studying the integration methods of remote participation and digital backchannels into live scholarly events (http://digitallyceum.org).

New technologies are employed to make attentive the naturally distracted minds of youth,

In the absence of strong conventions for shaping the conduct of these events, the presence of the network and multiple channels for interaction could, indeed, prove highly disorienting

we suggest that, if properly choreographed, these channels, just like the organization of chairs and podiums in a lecture hall, can augment the live event in new and powerful ways

controlled distraction enables participants to experience richer, multimodal relations without wandering outside the space(s) of the event.

Goffman’s contention is that, in comparison to other live performances like a stage play or a ballet, the lecture typically aspires to diminish attention to the staging and organization and direct the audience toward a focus on the subject matter itself

These efforts and "special effects" might be a good opening joke, an interesting aside, an evocative turn of phrase, or a moment of clarity in an otherwise abstruse topic that transports the audience members from their natural state of distraction toward a focus on the topic-at-hand.

audience members communicate constantly with one another, through, for instance, smiles or unsettled glances between two people, the shifting in chairs that takes place when an audience collectively expects the talk to be over, or the quiet contemplation during a particularly riveting moment.

we might speculate that the hesitancy on the part of some academics to integrate emerging media into their pedagogical practice is part of a larger hesitancy to consider these performative conventions as central to their craft as educators.

It is our contention that the presence of laptops and other networked devices within "live" academic events changes the texture, flow, and distribution of attention, and that this change in the practical order of these events therefore requires a rethinking and a redesign of how they are organized and performed.

On this argument, the ability to shape people’s attention is now a more valuable commodity than the things around which our attention is presumably focused.

But if significant choices that require little energy (like aiming at a fly in a urinal) are designed into our environments, we are more likely to make use of them. If economists, architects, and lecturers, actually pay attention to fluff, then stuff will get done.

when network spaces are left unplanned, they add complexity without encouraging focus, dissemination without articulating message. User attention needs our attention.

When there is no choice architecture to nudge the distracted participant, there is little motivation for her to integrate additional information channels into the way she assimilates information and there is no framework for her to share that information with the event community.

gently nudging attention instead of commanding it,

When backchannels are successfully implemented, the parameters of the lecturer’s work must, in turn, expand to take account of the user practices that are part of the overall composition of the event.

transforming what is typically referred to as backchannels into channels of parallel discourse that amplify audience participation.

n 2007, two thirds of U.S. college classrooms were wireless [CCS 2007]. However, the pedagogical need to design the sort of communication made possible by that access is routinely ignored.

This physical set-up provided a good context for introducing digital backchannels. We built a tool that aggregated feeds from Delicious, the social bookmarking site, and Flickr, the photo sharing site; it also included a video feed, a space in Second Life and an open source question tool called backchan.nl (http://backchan.nl) [Harry et al. 2008]. When the symposium started, we announced that these features were available and we invited everybody’s participation. Throughout the day, we periodically projected various feeds onto the secondary screen and the live moderator referenced questions and discussions that were taking place online.

There is significant research on how computers and networks facilitate collaboration ([Billinghurst et al. 2007]; [Liang et al. 2005]; [Page et al. 2005]; [Billinghurst and Hirokazu 2002], but little has been written about how the practices associated with these technologies transform the presentation, assimilation and dissemination of knowledge within large educational spaces.

We do acknowledge, however, that more channels do not necessarily equal richer communication.

providing these channels crippled the participatory capabilities of those without laptops, making the un-connected participant feel left out of the conversation.

The successful choreography of attention, therefore, considers how architectural space, digital channels and screens combine to produce a situation that is inclusive and expansive.

During our symposium, we could have taken several measures to mitigate user fatigue or unproductive distraction. By providing more onscreen prompts to help participants find the designated tools we could have reduced barriers to participation.

One of the challenges we confronted early on was the integration of proximate and remote audiences.

he Second Life audience had no access to the live audience.

those attending virtually had the most forward-focused attentional experience of the event.

Another element that fell short in our experiment was the frequency with which the moderator addressed the backchannel conversations.

raditional structures of attention should not simply be protected or rejected; they should be negotiated. Along with tables and chairs, wifi accessibility and data projection, the twenty-first century education environment has to design the frameworks of attention into its four walls.

Bauerlein 2007 Bauerlein, Mark. 2007. The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30). New York: Penguin Books.

Billinghurst and Hirokazu 2002 Billinghurst, Mark, and Kato Hirokazu. 2002. "Collaborative Augmented Reality". Communications of the ACM 45 (7):64-70.

Billinghurst et al. 2007 Billinghurst, Mark, S. Hayes, A. Gupta, Y. Sannohe, H. Kato, and K. Kiyokawa. 2007. "Communication Behaviors of Co-Located Users in Collaborative AR Interfaces". Paper read at International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality, at Darmstadt, Germany.

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Lanham 2006 Lanham, Richard. 2006. The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Thaler and Sunstein 2008a Thaler, Richard, and Cass Sunstein. 2008. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New Haven: Yale University Press.