We absolutely thrilled to meet so many colleagues wherever you might be. It took all team to get his hair, a team of colleagues representing more than 17 campuses. They and others are volunteering their time and energy during these days. We would normally ask them to stand and be recognized but alas thats not possible unless you want to do so from home, please do. As you see them convening sessions are helping various capacities in the conference, please take a moment to thank them for their work. I would also like to take a moment to recognize the enormous effort taken by our assistant director jennifer mckanry and also director of design Emily Goldstein are leading this years conference. Look at these amazing women, they are so talented and creative. I overcome with pride to know them and they get to work with them. Its incredible to see the creative touches to this years conference. We would like to personally thank the support of the university of missouri st. Louis leadership who places a high value on teaching and learning at our university. Without the support we couldnt do what we do. Please help a welcome our provost, marie mora come to share a few words of welcome and introduced todays keynote speaker. Are right. Good morning, everyone and thank you keeta and thank you cspan for broadcasting this important conference. I helped one is doing well and staying healthy and safe. It is my sincere pleasure and privilege to welcome you to university of missouri st. Louis on such a beautiful and exciting day. I wouldve loved to look at me to a beautiful campus and to the vibrant st. Louis region in person. Our region is rich with history nsa and ss5 set of institutions of Higher Education all with creative and innovative faculty, staff and students. Together we make the metropolitan region as strong as it is. It is my understanding this is the 19th annual focus on teaching and technology conference. That is remarkable. Conferences like this one where we can exchange ideas, Learn Together and network how we maintain our strength and excellence in the region against the challenges many institutions of our education across the nation are facing. During this unprecedented time teaching with technology has helped us continue to keep our students engaged and on track for graduation and we all know that hasnt been easy. Even under normal times it is often not that easy. Sharing ideas and strategies through venues like this one make this job a little lighter. Thanks to all of you for donating over time these days to think about how to use technology to improve student learning, teaching and research. It is my pleasure to welcome you to our keynote speaker, dr. James lincoln professor of english and director of the center for teaching excellence at Assumption College in worcester, massachusetts. Hes authored several books, the most recent of which are small teaching everyday lessons from the times of learning, and teaching distracted mind. Im sure we will all agree our might to been more than distracted these days. I believe give more details about his background in your conference materials. So without further delay please join in getting a warm welcome to professor lang in todays keynote address, distracted why students cant focus and what you can do about , distra why students cant focus and what you can do about it. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. Welcome. Im grateful for your presence. Im sorry i cant be in st. Louis. My wife is from st. Louis. I got my masters at st. Louis university, and i wouldve loved to have been there with you all. I am grateful for your presence during this time, i know a difficult it is to stay focused on webinars and zoom meetings over the course of a couple of days. I was just listening to my wife tried do this with her kindergarten class and im going to count this as a success if no one raises their hand and asked to show me their cat. The bar is pretty low in terms of what we can do here. But imagine when youre having, struggling with potential of your students cant imagine what my wife is seen with trying to get fiveyearolds to stay on that soon call and be focused. Im going to share my screen, and i would like to be able to start our session today by talking a little bit about thinking philosophically about what it is that, while attention is important why we want to be able to make attention a value in our teaching. Thats why want to get a a stat in terms of thinking more about the bigger pictures in terms of attention. What i want to suggest to you is we should think about the idea that in some ways attention is a very fundamental part of what we do as teachers. I am used to telling in this book, the ecology of attention argues teaching in essence is the art of directing the attention of our students. The essential task of teaching consists in heightening the ability to notice what is remarkable and important and what we are looking at. I would encourage you to think about that, the extent to which your discipline has a kind of vast potential terrain and that your job as a teacher is to identify whats most important in that terrain and direct the attention of your students to that material, that content, those skills. We can think about the idea that actually attention is really fundamental in terms of how we conceive of ourselves as teachers and heavy conceive of a fundamental work to direct the attention of the students where it matters in our disciplines and our classes. Stanislas argues i will argue as well today, that we should be paying more attention to attention. If students are not attending to their correct information or the right things in terms of the skills come the content, qualities were trying to instill in them its unlikely they will learn anything. Our greatest talent, greatest challenge is channeling and capturing the attention of our students. Im not going to get so much into the cognitive theory of this but one of the things we know from the research on how people learn is that process starts with attention. If students do not Pay Attention to whatever it is theyre trying to master they are not even going to get to sort of the later steps of learning. So attention is a fundamental part of the learning process and its the first part of the learning process. I would argue this is kind of a value that we have to make, you really delivered about in our teaching and that we have to think very carefully about how we are cultivating and sustain the attention of our students. Thats true especially now when we are all dealing with working through our everything mediated through our devices. We have got this sort of Global Pandemic raging around us facing personal and professional challenges but its true at any moment as well. When we get back into our classrooms, one hopes next year, then we will still need to be thinking about how do we cultivate and sustain the attention of our students. I want to finish this little open philosophical bigger by just noticing also that not only is it our challenge to sort of capture and assisting student attention but the challenge is made difficult by the fact that attention is a limited Capacity Resource and weve all experienced this on our zoom calls and in their everyday lives as well paying attention to this, not paying attention to that. In fact, attention fatigues overtime that attention more difficult to pay in certain kinds of contacts so we followed these experiences on a regular everyday basis. And so we want to think about ourselves as Michelle Miller here argues, shes a cognitive psychologist from Northern Arizona university, that we are the stewards of our students attention. She argues as Stanislas Dehaene does, foundation as instructors in the cognitive system its a precious limited resource. Since we are the designers of learning experiences we need to think about ourselves as stewards of the attention of our students. What kind of stewardship are we offering to our students . What are we doing to support the attention of our students in the classroom . Prior to the pandemic when we were, the biggest question i get whenever i spoke to people about attention and distraction was what do i do about the devices in our room . The question has been pushed aside in our current context but the question sort of still is always what kind of stewardship are we offering to our students . Are we to say no, put your devices way, students can Pay Attention anymore or im actually trying to take a proactive positive stance to say im here to help support you in your efforts to Pay Attention in this classroom and want to be a partner with you in thinking about how we do that together, and as part of what im going to argue and when arguing the book as well. Okay so i like to begin our conversation about attention and distraction by just sort of giving a little Historical Context of this. There is a lot of concern today about the extent to which our devices are not sort of slowly degrading our inability to Pay Attention, making us into creatures who can no longer Pay Attention because were so used to this sort of constant stimulation of our phones and other devices. I think its worth stepping back a little bit to get some Historical Context on that and i can help us think more carefully about the kinds of solutions that we use in order to help make attention a stronger value in our teaching. So we can go back a long way here to aristotle writes in his ethics the people who are passionately devoted to the flute are unable to Pay Attention to arguments if they hear some playing the flute since they enjoy the flute playing more than the activity that presently occupies them. You may substitute here listening to arguments as being in your classroom and flute playing his youtube videos on your phone. So we can see going back almost as far as we had people writing about the mind, and goes back further than aristotle even for ancient religious texts, the people were express concern about our ability to stay focused especially on something that is cognitively challenging like listening to following along in argument. When extra temptations come along about things that are more pleasant easier for us we can to default to those things. We step away from the challenging thing and we go to the easier or more pleasant thing so we can see and actually augustine writes about this is welcome lots of ancient writers wrote about this problem of our ability or inability to Pay Attention to when we want to. We have the desire to listen to the argument. We know its going to be helpful to us in some way and yet still somehow we cant ignore that flute playing off in the distance. John donne wrote he found difficult at he throws himself done in this chamber to pray, put myself in the position i fight god and his angels to come and then when they arrived i neglect god and his angels for a fly or the coach was outside, the whining of a door. You notice here this splits into two parts, identify the two ways in which we typically are distracted. One is the external stuff whether its flute playing or that fly but theres a second part which is things that come inside my head, a memory of yesterdays pleasures, i i fearf tomorrows dangers. Noise in my mind, anything, nothing, fintech and all these things trouble in his prayer. What you see here is were noticing there are two kinds of things that can distract us, things outside of us and things that are inside our own heads. We probably noticed during the pandemic a lot of the distraction has been things inside her own head as we are thinking about global issues and our personal and professional challenges. Thats making more and more difficult for us to stay focused. I love this with as example that 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 that are giving forecast for what could happen in 1907. You have two sort of nattily dressed edwardian store looking at the telegraph machines and who are not as resulting attention to one another. Its kind of striking up with this picture, think about a relationship to the pictures we see of teenagers all huddled over their phones at a restaurant table. Theres this cultural lament we dont talk to each other anymore. When it looking one another in the eye, not communicating with one another. This is another concern we witt goes back a very long way. By the way just to note, im going to talk, this is basically two parts. The first part is a philosophy context, history biology part of it. Im going to pause after that part and take questions from the chat. So please 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 there and i will stop and respond to some of those. Then we would do the second half and the second half of the same thing, you can put your questions in the chat and we will discuss them at the end of the session. So to time for questions and answers throughout the webinar. What we see is a kind of new element adding that the extern distractions that, for example, the fly and the door wherever it might be now has the sort it complication of the technologies which are drawing our attention to them. My favorite quote is from a novel called the provincial lady in london, provincially was a series of novels about the woman who deal with all the kind of challenges of household management while she was trying to start a literary career as well and one of the novels called the provincial lady in london she writes about attending a literary conference for the first time and youll see im sorry to fight attention wandering to entirely unrelated topics, companionate marriage, absence of radiators in church, difficult intricate ice. She doubled down on her attention at that point will try to stay focused by taking notes and then later discovers her notes refer to getting postcards for her children, memorandum about address that needs a stitch of finding her local bank in case she runs out of money. This is some 1936 1936 02 disd during the conference just know youre not alone in that experience. You are the provincial lady shares your pain. I want to get now to the kind of wrapping up this sort of initial kind of historical overview by showing you a kind of, sort of before and after quote in terms of the way our contemporary technologies have affected the way we think about technology and distraction. This is a quote from 1741, isaac watts wrote a book called the improvement of the mind and one of the things he writes about is the extent to which if you put yourself continuously in the company of distraction, it makes you a more distractible person. What hes arguing is about people going to coffee shops. You might know and a 16th and 17th centuries coffee shops were swarmed into england and europe more generally and these were places of heightened activity. They were buzzing with people talking, newspapers, meeting, all kinds of stuff like that. Watts was saying dont go to those places if youre trying to study because all of the things that strike your eyes and your ear have a tendency to steal the mind away from steady pursuit of any subject. Thats the normal distractions we all experience when he argues is Something Different and thereby your soul gets into a habit of trifling and wandering. In other words, if you spend a lot of time in the company of her distractions you become a more distracted person. Now once you see that isaac watts has been arguing this in the 18th century, they can give us a little bit of context for the arguments made by people like Nicholas Carr in the shallows in 2010. You see Nicholas Carr arguing in the shallows that the calm, hes arguing about what the internet has done to our ability to Pay Attention, our distractibility. Called, focus, undistracted, the linear mind is pushed aside by a new kind of mind that once a needs to take a mentor that information and short, disjointed overlapping verse. The faster the better. You can see now about the extent to which that concern is a very ancient one actually. So the idea that some out our new technologies are fundamentally changing us becomes less plausible when received extent to which these concerns, we have been having this for a very long time now. Another thing i hope you have seen in the quotes i have huge already is we never really had a calm, focused, undistracted and linear minds. Thats not the way the human mind works. The idea that we had, there was this prelab syrian state in which we call may set and focus on things for as long as we wanted, thats kind of a myth. We never had a mind like that. I want you to think about this now as we go forward. Humans have distractible mines and so the idea of this talk of teaching distracted minds is meant to convey the fact that all of our minds are distracted. As a result we need to think carefully about how we teach to a distracted mind. One striking thing about all those historical quotes, and the book has a look at more of this, quote from a sort of righty cultures and time periods, and one striking thing youll notice in all of this quote is they are laments. We are unhappy about the fact that our minds are easily distractible. We seem to want a mind that is better able to Pay Attention and engage in a long reach that sustain focus. Whenever we talk about our distractibility we seem to be unhappy about it. Thats a real kind of interesting thing to notice about all these comments about reminds and it should make us wonder, why do we have these distracted minds . Why were we given these, why did we evolve with these minds that we wish were different . That we wish we had this ability to push away our distractions and just lock in and focus. I want to spend a few minutes talking about that as well and what sort of biologist else about why we have this distractible mind. One really nice description of this comes from a psychiatrist and author of the divided brain and this comes from an animated video lecture that he gives. If you google you can see it. He gives the example here of a bird trying to pack for seeds against a difficult background. As he points out, the bird has to have two different forms of attention. It needs to be able to focus to pick out the seed against that background. At the same time it has to be aware of its surroundings because its got to be aware of the potential for predators, for other birds around it and for, it has to be generally aware of its s