Innovation planning a two Day Conference like this one Record Number of colleagues across the region and for the First Time Ever we had over 1200 registrations and those looking at the keynote address or vs cspan we are absolutely thrilled wherever you may be a Technical Team to get us here team of colleagues and 17 campuses and the metropolitan region volunteering their time and energy we nearly asked him to stand and be recognized by know thats not possible we nearly asked him to stand and be recognized by know thats not possible in various capacities please take a moment to thank them for their work. Also to take a moment to recognize the enormous effort with the assistant director Jennifer Mchenry and director of instructional design work at these amazing women i am over time with i and i get to work with them we would like to personally thank the university of st. Louis leadership the high value on teaching and learning without support we cannot do what we like to do and then to introduce the keynote speaker. Good morning thank you cspan for podcasting this conference. I hope you stay healthy and safe its my privilege i would love to welcome you to the vibrancy this region rich with history with inspiring set of education with creative with staff and students to make the metropolitan region and its my understanding it is the 19th annual focus of Technology Conference and that is remarkable where we can Exchange Ideas and Learn Together and network on how we maintain against the challenges of Higher Education across the nation are facing during these unprecedented times to help us continue to keep students engaged and on track for graduation and we all know that hasnt been easy. Sharing ideas and strategies make the job a little later thank you to all of you to think about how to use technology to improve Student Learning and research. Welcome to the keynote speaker professor of english for the Centers Teaching excellence in winchester massachusetts author of several books the most recent of which are every day lessons in the science of learning and teaching distracted mayans i think we will agree him minds of been a little more distracted these days more detail is in the background so please give me one morgan one a warm welcome to our speaker. Thank you. Thank you everybody. I am grateful for your presence but im sorry i cannot be in st. Louis my wife is from st. Louis. I got my masters at st. Louis university of would love to have been there with you all. So during this time i know how difficult it is to stay focused on webinars and zoom meetings just listening to my wife and i will count this as a success. So far is pretty low and then imagine what my wife is doing with to get that five to stay on as in colon be focused. And then to start our session today by to think philosophically why we want to make attention the value and then to start hearing about the Bigger Picture so we should think about the idea that is a fundamental part of what we do. And the ecology of attention argues it is the art of directing the attention of students. And then to notice what is remarkable and important than what were looking at and i would encourage you to that extent to have a vast potential and that your job as a teacher is to identify whats most important and direct to the attention of your students to that material and those skills to think about that attention is fundamental how we conceive of ourselves and the fundamental work to direct the attention of the students where it matters and discipline and classes and the book how we learn so to pay more attention to attention and with the right thing in terms of skills or content that we try to instill in them so our greatest challenge is channeling and capturing the attention of our students. I will not get so much into the cognitive theory but one of the things that we know from the research on how people learn is a process starts with attention to whatever it is they are trying to master they will not even get to the later steps of learning so it is a fundamental part of the learning process and the first part. I would argue this is a value we have to make and we have to think very carefully how we are cultivating and sustaining the attention of our students. Especially now through our devices we have a Global Pandemic region with National Challenges but when we get back into our classrooms next year then we still need to think about how we cultivate to sustain the attention of our students. And not only is it a challenge to sustain attention but it is made difficult by the fact it is a limited Capacity Resource. And the fact it is achieved over time and more difficult to pay some involved had these experiences on a regular everyday basis so we want to think about ourselves that we are the stewards of our students attention and she argues here is the foundation for everything we want to do as instructors but within a precious limited Resource Center the designer of learning experiences we need to think of ourselves as stewards of the attention of our students what type of stewardship are we offering . What are we doing to support the attention of students in the classroom . Prior to the pandemic the biggest question i got what do i do about the devices in our room . But the question is what kind of stewardship are we offering to our students to receive you are devices way they can Pay Attention or is it proactive and positive stance that im here to support you . In order to help. A stronger value and are teaching but we can go back a long way. He writes people who are devoted are unable to Pay Attention to arguments because they enjoy the activity that presently it buys them. Listing two arguments in classrooms and put playing his youtube videos on your phone. We can see going back as far as we have people writing about the mind and back to aristotle people were expressing concern about our ability to stay focused especially to stay focused on something as cognitively challenging like listening to following along with argument. When external temptations come along about things that are more pleasant week tend to default to those things. We step away from the challenging things to make under the easier more pleasant things and augustine writes about this as well. Ancient writers wrote about this problem about her inability to Pay Attention when we want to. We have the desire to listen to the argument and we know its going to be helpful to us in some way and still somehow we cant ignore that flew playing off in the distance. John dunn the english poet wrote to the extent to which he found a tense and difficult in his prayers and notice when he throws himself down the chamber to pray. I put myself in that position and i invite god to come in the minute they arrived i neglect gods angels for the whining of the door. The discussion is listened to two parts and we identify the two ways which they describe it. One is the external whether the flew playing or the fly but theres a second part which is things that come inside my head a memory of yesterdays pleasure of fear of tomorrows dangers and immediate noise like anything and nothing of fantasy all these things come into his prayer but what we see here is now where noticing two kinds of things that can distract us things outside of us and things inside of our own head and you probably noticed during the pandemic a lot of the destruction has been things inside of her own head as we are thinking about global issues and personal professional challenges and thats making it more difficult for us to stay focused. I love this one is an example of how we start to worry about technological distractions. This is a cartoon from the british magazine punch and its from 1906 to the cartoons our forecast for whats going to happen in 1907 so you have two natalie dressed accordions looking at the telegraph machines and are not paying attention to one another. Striking to think about it in relationship to tensions we see of teenagers huddled over their phones at a restaurant table and how much we lament we are talking to each other and we dont look at each other in the eye read this as another concern we have the goes back a very long way. By the way im going to talk basically in two parts for the first part is the context history biology part of it and im going to pause after an and finish that part and take questions from the chat. Please if you have questions along the way her comments feel free to put them in the chat and our moderators will let me know how to stop and respond to some of those in the second half we will do the same thing. You build up what your questions in the chat and we will discuss them at the end of the sessions at two times your questions and answers during the webinar could always see as the external distractions that for example the fly in the door whatever it might be and now we have this added competition of technology which is drawing your attention to them. My favorite quote is from a novel called the provincial lady in london. Provincial lady was a series of novels about a woman whos feeling all the challenges of household management while she was trying to start as well as one of the novels she writes about attending a literary conference for the first time and she says im sorry to find attention wandering to entirely unrelated topics difficulty in doubling down on her attention that point didnt really try to stay focused by taking notes and later they discovered she referred to getting postcards from her children a memorandum and finding her local bankers in case she runs out of money. This is from 1930 so if youre feeling distracted anytime during the conference know that you are not alone in that experience. The provincial lady shares your pain. I want to get now to a kind of wrapping up this initial historical overview by showing you a beforeandafter quote in terms of the way our contemporary technologies expand 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 wanted things he writes about here is the extent to which if you put yourself continuously in the company of distraction and makes you a more distractible person. Waits arguing here is actually people going to coffee shops. In the 17th century coffee shops were swarmed into an england and more generally in these were places that tighten activity buzzing with people talking newspapers meetings and all kinds of stuff like that and dont go to those places if youre trying to study. All of the things that strike your eye and your ear have a tendency to steal the mind away from the steady pursuit of any subject so thats the normal distractions we experience but we argue something a little bit different. Thereby you get into a habit of trying to wonder. In other words he spent a lot of time in the company for distractions and you become a more distracted person. Once you see that isaac watts and argues an 18th century can give us context for the arguments made by people like Nicholas Carr in 2010. Nicholas carr arguing in the shadow arguing about what the internet has done to her ability to Pay Attention or distractibility and undistracted linear minds is pushed aside by a new kind of mind that wants to take in and dole out information in an overlapping bursts. You can see the extent to which that concern is a very ancient one. The idea that somehow our new tech melodies are fundamentally changing us becomes less plausible when we see the extent to which these concerns we have been having these concerns for a very long time now. The other thing ive hope youve seen and what ive shown you already is but we never really had a calm undistracted linear mind. Thats not the way the human mind works. The idea that we had this. Lapsed state in which we sort of calmly said and focused on things for as long as we wanted that kind of the myth did we never really had a mind like that so i want you to kind of thing about this knowledge is to go forward. Humans have distractible minds so the idea of this teaching distracted minds talk is meant to convey the fact that all of our minds are distracted so as a result we need to think carefully about week how we teach to a distracted mind. One striking thing about this in the book has a little more of this with the variety of cultures and time periods and one striking thing youll notice 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 long periods of sustained focus so whenever we talk about our distracted noise we seem to be unhappy about it. Thats an interesting thing to notice about all these and should make us wonder little bit why do we have these distractible minds . Why do we evolve with minds that we wish were a little bit different and we wish we have the ability to push it where distractions and lock in our focus. We will talk about that a wide aisle just tell us we have this distractible mind could one nice description comes from a psychiatrist and this comes from an animated video that he gives that is 10 or 15 minutes long could he gives the example of a bird trying to pack seeds against a difficult background and as he points out here the bird has two different forms of attention. He needs to be a lot of focus to take out the seeds 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 and other birds around it and it has to be generally aware of its surroundings. This in fact is true for us as well. We need to be able to focus but we also need to be aware of whats going on around us to be alert to friends and they dont quite have the predators coming at us in the same way that the bird does but if you think about the way in which we have evolved and that evolutionary process it was important for us not only to be able to track an animal or to deal the start of fire but to be aware of the potential dangers around us as well as the potential positive things, new food sources, new potential social roots all that kind of thing. Along this evolutionary history is for a very good reason that we have developed this ability to focus as well as have the ability and the capacity for awareness to be easily distracted to the things around us that might be helpful to us. Now, the striking thing about primates is, and other animals as well, extent to which that kind of divided ability to focus its intensified by the fact that we especially as primates are really drawn towards novels. In a distracted mind which is one of my favorite things about distraction more generally in i will show you in image at the end of the talk, they argue that we are information seeking creatures and Research Shows in addition to foraging for food and drink our brains have the vault to new information it continually seeks new information. Again there a long history was useful for us to say im doing this but i wonder whats going on over there for maybe five tried Something Different what would happen . We are continually pushing ourselves to ask questions and to kind of look for novelty and see what things are and to ask ourselves questions and to wonder and to take a whole different pathway that might lead somewhere unexpected and this might be helpful to us. What has happened recently and i kind of wanted to show you the first part of the talk so youd notice that the distraction is an agent problem but i do want to down play the fact that technologies are Getting Better and better at playing on these aspects of our minds. What we have now that we are dealing with here with our phones are these are machines that have been carefully designed in order to appeal to our desire for novelty. I want you to think about what your phone does for you in terms of providing you with novel information. Its constant so its always available to give you something when you are looking for something. You can check your email to see what are your emails are in now you can pop over to twitter and theres bound to be something new on twitter. When twitter is tapped out you good instagram and see whats available there and by the time youre done with that you probably have some more emails so if you are looking for novelty the phone is a perfectly designed machine to provide you with that. Not only that but you should consider the fact that this is a billiondollar many billiondollar industry trying to capture attention through these devices. So there is a lot of Energy Invested in trying to ensure that these devices capture and keep your attention. The difference is today the machines have gotten better at playing on the aspects of our minds that have always been there. The companies are Getting Better at this and they put time and energy and work power into it. Now the question is have they gotten so good that you hear people saying this all the time paradigm no longer able to Pay Attention. My students are no longer able to Pay Attention and somehow these devices are rewiring our minds. Mike one of my favorite psychologist says Dan Willingham at the university of virginia and willingham and everyone else i have read on the subject suggests we probably should step back from that concern because the fact that its so essential to our ability to think. Imagine that somehow in the course of a few years it has undergone a significant deterioration. That would require all kinds of retrofitting of other cognitive function and that kind of reorganization of our brain and the species level is going to happen over an evolutionary time and not just because we started playing with our smartphones. It could change our brain in two ways. For short periods of time that kind of deeper wiring that we hear people talking about that you may be concerned about for yourself doesnt seem to be good evidence that is happening in those architectural levels of our brain. To me thats great news. What it tells us is our brains are still there and they have always been. Their distractible because they have always been distractible but they are also able to