Much goes into the planning of the conference, and its gratifying to see a Record Number of colleagues from across the region taking advantage of our good work. For the first time ever, we hit over 1200 registrations. Welcome to our returning attendees, new attendees, and remote viewers who may be tune in through zoom or via cspan who has asked to broadcast the recording for todays keynote. We are absolutely thrilled to reach so many colleagues, wherever you might be. It took a whole team to get us here, team of colleagues representing more than 17 campuses in the broad expanse or our metropolitan region. They and others are volunteering time and energy to ensure all runs smoothly. We would nominally ask them to stand and be rick need built that not possible this year, unless you want to do so from home, please too. So as you see them convening sessions or helping, thank them for their work. Idles like to take a moment to wreck fine tee enormous effort taken by their center for teaching and learning assistant director jennifer mccannry, and emily goldsteen for leafing the conference. Look at these amazing women. Theyre so talented and creative. Im overcome with pride to know jen and emily and i get to work with them. Its incredible to see their creative touches to this years conference. We would like to personally thank the support the university of missouri leadership who places a high value on teaching and learning at our university. Without the support we couldnt do what we do. Please help me welcome our provost, marie mora for a few comments. All right. Good morning, everyone, and thank you keeta and thank you cspan for profiting the important conference. I hope everyone is doing well this morning and staying health and safe. It is my sincere explore privilege to welcome you to university of missouri st. Louis on such a beautiful and exciting day. I would have loved to welcome you to our campus and region the region is rich with history and has an inspiring set of institutions of high are education with create give innovative faculty, tv and students. Together we make the metropolitan region as strong as it is, and it is my understanding this is the 19th g and technology conference. That is remarkable. Conferences like this one where we can exchange ideas, learn together, and network, are how we maintain our strength and excellent in the region, against the challenged that many institutions of Higher Education across the nation are facing. During these unprecedented times teaching with technology hayes tend to keep students engaged and on track towards graduation and has not been easy. Sharing ideas and strategies through venues like this one maybe the job lighter. Thanks to all of your for devoting your time to think but how to to use technology to improve student learning, teaching, and research. It is my pleasure to welcome you to our keynote speaker, dr. James lang, professor of english and director of the demore center for teaching excellent at Assumption College in worcesters, massachusetts. The author of several books, the most recent of which are small teaching, everyday less fronts from the science of learning and teaching distracted minds. And im sure well all agree that our mind have been a little moyer distracted these days. I believe you have more details on his background in your conference materials. So join me in giving a warm welcome to professor lang in leading todayskey note address, featuring distractedded minds, old challenges and new contexts. Thank you. Thank youeverybody. And welcome. Im grateful for your presence. Im sorry i cant bev in st. Louis mitch wife is from st. Louis, i got my mast are at st. Louis university and i would have loved to have been there so, im grateful too for your presence during this time. I know how difficult it is to stay focused on webinars and zoom meetings. I was just listen to wife do this with her kindergarten class and ill count this as a success notify one raises the hand and asks me show show them their cat. So the bar is set pretty low. Emergency when youre struggling with the attention of your student imagine what my wife is dealing with tritrying to get fiveyearold told stay on the zoom call and be focused ill share my screen here and would like to be able to start our session today by talking a little bit about think philosophically but what about why attention is important and why we want to be able to make attention a value in our teaching, and thats where i want to get us started here in terms of thinking a little more about the bigger picture. I want to suggest to you that we should think pull out the idea that in some ways attention is a very fundamental part of what we do as teachers. Used to a book the ecology of attention argues that teaching in a sense is the earth of directing the attention of our studented. The essential task or teaching consists in heightening the ability to notice what is remarkable and important and what we are looking at and i would encourage you to income put that. The extent to which your discipline has a kind of vast potential terrain and your job as a teacher is to identity what is most identify what is most important in the terrain and direct the attention of your students to that material. That content, those skills. So think but the idea that actually attention is really fundamental in terms of how we conceive of ourselves as teachers and conceive of our fundamental work to direct the attention of the students where it matters in our disciplines and classes. Hain is a author of book called how we learn, and what he argues here ill argue as well today that we should be paying more attention to attention. If students arent attending to the correct information or the right things in terms of skills, the content, the qualities were trying to instill the them, its unlikely theyll learn anything. So our greatest talent, our greatest challenge, is challenging channeling and capturing the attention of our students, and im not going to get so much into the cognitive theory put one thing we nome from the research on how people learn is that process starts with attention. If student does not Pay Attention to whatever it is theyre trying to master, theyre not even going to get to sort of the latester later step odd learning so attention is the fundamental part of the learning process and the firstpast of the learning process and this is a value we have to make be really deliberate about in our teaching and have 0 think carefully how we are cultivating and sustaining the attention of our students. Thats true especially now, when were all dealing with working through our everything mediated through our devices, have this Global Pandemic raging round is, faces permanent and professional challenge but its true at any moment as well, so when we get back into our classrooms, one hopes, next year, then we will still need to be thinking pout how to cultivate and sustain the attention of our students. Ill finish this philosophical part by noticing not only is it our challenge to sort of capture and sustain student attention, but that challenge is made difficult by the fact that attention is a limited Capacity Resource. We have all experienced this on or zoom calls and everyday lives as well, paying attention to this, not paying attention to that. The fact that attention fatigues over time and its more difficult to pay in sort contexts and we have thats experiences every day and we want to think pout ourselves as Michelle Miller argues, a cog cognitive psychologist that we are stewart offed thank you students attention and she argues here that attention is the foundation for everything we want to do atas instructors as instructors but within the cognitive system its a precious limited resource, so since we are the designers of learning experiences we need to think about ourselves as stewards of the attention of tower students. What kind of stewardship are we offer to our students . What are we doing to support the attention of students in the classroom . Prior to the pandemic when we were the biggest question i got when he spoke to people about attention and distraction was what do i do put a the guys our room. That question has been pushed aside in our current context. But the question sort of is always what kind of stewardship are we offering to our students . Are we just saying, no, put your devices away, students cant Pay Attention anymore or actually trying to take a proactive positive stance and say im here to help support you in your effort to Pay Attention and i want to be a partner with you and thinking how to do that together and thats part of what ill argue here and what i argue in the poock as well. I like to bin our conversations by give putticcal context there is a lot of concern today but the extent to which our devices are sort of slowly degrading our ability to Pay Attention, our maintenance into teachers who can no longer Pay Attention because were so used to the sort of constant stimulation of our phones and other devices. So i think its worth stepping back a little bit to good some Historical Context and that can help us think more carefully about the kinds of solutions. So we can go back a long way to aristotle who writes that people who are passionately devoted to the flute are unable to Pay Attention to arguments if they hear someone playing a flute because they enjoy the flute playing more than the activity that presently occupies them. You might substitute here, listening to arguments as being in your classroom, and flute playing is youtube videos on your phone. So we can see going back almost as far as we have people writing about the mind, ill go back further an air to the dish aristotle, people were expression concern about the ability to stay focused especially to stay focused on michigan thats cognitively challenging like his. Ing to, following an argue. When storm temptations come along but external temp temptations come along, we step away from the challenging things and we go to the easier or more pleasant things. So we can see in this actually augustin writes, other writers wrote about the problem of our inability to Pay Attention when we want to. So we had the tee steir listen to the argue; we know its going to be helpful and yet still somehow we cant ignore that flute playing off in the distance. John dunn wrote the step to which he found attention disinfect in this prayers as a cleric. Notice what happens her when the throws himself town in the chamber pray. I put missiles in the position, invited guide and is a angels to come and then when i arrive i next god and his angel foods the fly, the winding of a door, and helps with this quote splits into two parts to identify the two ways in which we typically are distracted. One is the external stuff whether its flu play forking thefully but theres a second part which is thing that come inside my head. A memory of yesterdays pleasures. A fear of tomorrows dangers. Strong, noise in my a nothing, fans, all these things. But you notice that there are actually two kinds of things that can distract us, things outside of us and things inside our own heads and probably notice during the pandemic, a lot of the distraction has been things inside our own heads as were kind of thinking but global issues and our personal and professional challenges, thats making it more and more difficult for us to stay focused. Okay, i love this one as an example of how we start to worry about the technological distractions that arise, so this is a cartoon from the british magazine punch, and its from 1906, and its a series of cartoons giving forecasts for what will happen in 1907. So you have two sort of gnatly dressed wardans looking at their telegraph mons and not as a result paying attention to one another and its striking to put this picture in think but in relationship to the pictures we see of teenagers all huddled over the offends and the lament we dont talk to each other, were not communicating with ewan another so this is another concern we have that goes back a very long way. By the way, just to sort of note this i this talk two parts. The forthpart is the philosophy context history biology part of it and ill pause after that part, after im finished with that part and take questions from the chat, so meals if you have questions along the way or comments, feel free to put them in the chat, and then our moderators will let me know what is coming and ill stop and respond to some of those. Then well do the second half and the second half will be the same something, be able to put your questions the chat and well discuss them at the end. We see a new element addle thats external distractions that, for example, the fly and the door, whatever it might be, now we have the sort of added mix mix indication complication of technology. The favorite quote is from a november veil call the provincial lady in london argues series of novels about a woman who is dealing withall the challenges of household management while she was trying start a literary career as well, and in one of the novels called a provincial lady in london she writes about attending a literary conference for the first time, and she youll see, im sorry to find attention wandering to spirally unrelated topics, companion at marriage, absence of radiators in church, difficulty in preparing ice, she doubles down on her attention and tries to stay focused by taking notes, and then alert stop that her notes refer to getting post cards are for her children, memorandum but a dress that needs to stitch and finding her local bankers in case she runs out 0 money. Thrift is from 1930. So if youre feeling distracted during the conference, just know that you are not alone in that experience,ow are the provincial lady share yours pain. Way dont show you a before and after quote in term odd the way our contemporary technologies affect the way we think about technology and distraction. This is a quote from 1741, isaac watts wrote book called the improvement of the mind write pout the extent to which if you put yourself continuously in the company of distraction, it makes you a more distractable person. So what he is arguing here is pout people going to coffee shops. Might not have known in the 16th and 17th century coffee shops swarmed into england and europe more generally, places of kind of heightened activity, buzzing with people talking, newspapers, meetings, stuff like that. And he is saying dont go to to the place is if youre trying to study because all the things that strike you eye and your ear have a tendency to steal the mind from a steady pursuit of any subject so thats the normal distractions but he argues and thereby your sole gets into a habit of trifling and wandering so if you spend a lot of time in the company our your distracts you back more distracted person. Once you see that ice cack watt has been arguing this in the 18th century, it can give us a little context for the argue. Ed made by people like Nicholas Carr in 2010. You see he argues in the shallows that the calm what the internet has done to our ability to Pay Attention, our distractibility, hand focuses indistrict linear mind is pushed if a side by a new kind of mind, who wants to take and n and toll owl information in short disjointed overlapping verse, the faster the better. And you can see now the extent to which that concern is a very ancient one actually. So the idea that somehow our new technologies are fundamentally changing us becomes less plausible when well see the extent to which these concerns we have been having these concerns for a very long time now. Another thing i hope you have soon in the quotes ive showed you already is we never really had a calm, focused undistracted and linear mind. Thats not the way the human mind works. The idea that we had this there was this prelaps stayed in which we calmly sat and focused on things for as long as we wanted. Thats kind of a myth. We never really had a mind like that. So, i want you to kind of think about this now as we go forward. Humans have distractable minds and the idea of this talk, teaching distracted minds, is meant to convey the fact that all of our minds are distracted and so as a result, we need to think carefully about how we teach to a distracted mind. Now, one striking thing pull out all those historical wrotes in the book has a little bit more of this, quotes from variety of cultures and time periods, and one striking thing youll notice in all of those quotes is that they are laments. We are unhappy pout the fact that our minds are easily distractable. We seem to want a mind that is better able to Pay Attention and engage in long periods of sustained focus, and so whenever we talk about our distractibility, we seem to be unhappy about it. Thats a really kind of interesting thing to notice but a owl these comments about our mind and it should make us wonder, why do we have these distractable minds . Why did we evolve with these mind we wish were a little bit different. We wish we had this ability to push if a distractions and look in and focus. So i want to spined a spend a few multiples talk us minutes talking about that. One of the really nice descriptions of this comes from a psychiatrist author of the divided brain and this comes from an animated video can lecture he gives. And he fifths an example here of a bird trying to peck for seeds against the difficult background and as he pointed out here the bird actually kind of has to have two different forms of attention. It needs to be able to focus to pick out the seed fence that background, and at the same time it has to be aware of its surroundings, because its got be aware of the potential for predators, for other birds around it, for kind of just has to be generally aware of its surroundings. And this in fact is true for us as well. We need to be able to focus but we also need to be aware of what is going around us to be alert to friends and enemies, dangers, we dont have the predators coming at us the same way the bird does but think about the way in which we evolved and its was important for us to be able to track an animal or to be able to start a fire but to be aware of the potential dangers around us as well as the potential positive things new food sources, new potential social groups, that kind of thing. So, along our evolutionary history its for a good reason we developed this ability to focus as well as kind of the ability to the capacity for awareness and our kind of to be easily distracted to the things around it that might actually be helpful to us. Now, the striking thing pout primates and other animals as well is the extent to which that kind of divide ability to focus is kind of intensified by the fact that we especially as primates are really drawn toward novelty. And so in the distracted mind which i one of my favorite books about this issue of distraction in a more gene