"What is also making teaching difficult nowadays is the reduced attention span of students as a result of overuse of technology. It won't be long before all but a few students won't be able to read cover-to-cover big books such as the Bhagavad Gita or Smith's Wealth of Nations or Marx's Capital or Mann's Magic Mountain or Sen's Idea of Justice even if they were given inordinate time Many students can't get off Facebook during lecture or turn off their cell phones in the library." Not this student! ok I'm only 300 pages into the wealth of nations but i had legitimate reasons (and other books) that got in the way!
More seriously, I think this is wrong. Technology isn't making students less interested and less apt to pay attention, it's giving them an outlet to pour their boredom into. do you really think that if you handed a laptop to the average student 30 years ago they wouldn't pay less attention in class? this isn't because it magically makes their attention span smaller, it's because they aren't used to engaging with a concept, idea or body of knowledge. In many (pre-college) schools across this country learning is an alienated process whereby kids absorb the basic (and often reductionist) body of ideas presented by their teacher, and then regurgitate it. Regurgitation doesn't demand complete attention, or even some attention if the textbook (and wikipedia) is good enough. If students were taught to argue, debate and analyze ideas, histories and bodies of thought, they pay more attention and are more apt to put the technology away (or at least juggle both more effectively). Even when college educations take this form, students struggle to abandon the negative history of their defective previous education. You don't know how many students have complained to me that "there is no right answer anymore" and that classes consist of "asking questions which lead to more questions, which never lead to a definitive answer". _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
