The resume or via cspan who has asked to broadcast the keynote today. 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 with more than 17 campuses in broad expanse of our metropolitan region. They and others are volunteering their time and energy during those two days to ensure it goes smthly. We would normally ask them to stand and be recognized but that is not possible this year and if as you see them helping in various capacities 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 and office of elearning director of instructional design henry for leading this years conference. These amazing women are so talented and creative im overcome with pride and i know them and get to work with them. Its incredible to see the creative [inaudible] we would like to personally thank the support of the university of sta high value on teaching and learning at our university and without the support we cannot do what we do so please help me welcome our provost to share a few words and introduce todays keynote speakers. All right, good morning everyone and thank you and thank you cspan for broadcasting. I hope everyone is doing well this morning and staying healthy and sane safe. Its my sincere privilege to welcome you to the university of missouri st. Louis on such a beautiful and exciting day and i would love to welcome you to a repeatable campus and to the vibrant st. Louis region in person. Our region is rich with history and has an inspiring 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 and it is my understanding that this is the 19th annual focus on teaching and Technology Conference and that is remarkable. Conferences like this one where we can exchange ideas, Learn Together and network are how we maintain our strength and excellence in the region against challenges that many institutions of Higher Education across the nation are facing. During this unprecedented times teaching with technology has certainly helped us continue to keep our students engaged and on track for graduation. We all know that hasnt been easy. Under normal times its often not easy. Sharing ideas and strategies through venues like this one make this job later and thanks to all of us for devoting your time 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 doctor james lang, professor of english and director of the Morris Center for teaching excellence at Ascension College in massachusetts. He is the author of several books in the most recent of which are small teaching everyday lessons from the signs of learning and teaching distracted mines. Im sure we will all agree that our minds have been a little more than distracted these days and i believe you more details about doctor langs background so without further delay please join me in giving a warm welcome to professor laying in leading todays keynote address keeping distracted minds old challenges and new contacts. Im thankful for your presence and im sorry i cant be in st. Louisut my wife is from st. Louis and i got my masters at the university and i would love to be there with you l im grateful for your presence i know how difficult i is to stay focused o zuma meetings and webinars and i was just listeng to my wife to do this with mike and garden cla and i will count thiss a success if no one raises their hands and asks me to show me their catch. The bar is pretty low inerms of what we c do here but imagine when youre magic when my wife is dealing with and trying to get fe yearolds to stay on that zoom call and be focused. I will share my screen here and i would like to be start our session today by talking a little bit about getting you to think philosophically about what it is that we why attention is important and why we need to make attention and value in our teaching. Thats where i want to started re in terms of thinking more about the Bigger Picture and i would suggest to you this year that we would think about the idea that in some ways attention is the very fundamental part of what we do and it use the ecology of attention argues that teaching in a sense is the art of directing the attention of our students. The essential tasks of teaching consist in tightening 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, for example, you discipline has a kind of potential toain and that your job as a teacher is to identify what i most important that terrain and direct the attention on that material and that content in those skills. We can think about the idea here that attention is fundamental in rms of how we conceive of ourselves as teachers and how we conceive of our fundamental work to direct the attention of the students where it matters in our disciplines and classes. [inaudible] is a author of a new book called, how we learn, and i will argue but he argues today that we should be pd more attention to attention. Students arent attending to the corrt information or the right things in terms of the skills and the content in the qualities we are trying to instill in them its unlikely they will learn anything. Our greatest talent and our greatest challenge is challenging or channeling and capturinthe attention of our students. Im not going to get so muc into the cognitive theory but one of the things we know the research on how people learn is that process starts with attention and students do not payttention to whatever it is they are trying to master they will not even get to the later steps of learning so attention is a really fundamental part o the learning process and its the rst part of the learning process but i would argue that this is the value you have t make and be really deliberate abt our teaching and then we have to think carefully about how we are cultiting and sustaining the attention of our students and thats especially true now and everyone is mediated through our devices and we got this Global Pandemic raging around us and faced personal and professional challenges but its true of any moments well. When we get back to our classrooms one hopes nt year then we wl still need to be thinking about how do we cultivate and sustain the attention of o students. I will finish this opening b being philosophical here and ting that not only is it our challenge to capre and sustain human aention but that challenge is made difficult by the fact that attention is a limited Capacity Resource weve all experienced this o our resume calls and in our everyda lives as well on paying attention to this and im not paid attentiono that and the fact that attention fatigues over time and attention is more difficult to pay and certain kinds ofontext so weve all had these experiences on a regular, everyday basis and so we want to think about ourselves as it is argued here and shes a cognitive psychologist fro Northern Michigan university that we are students of our students attention and she argu here thatttention is the foundation for every sgle one that we do as instructors butithin 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 aention of our students and what kind o stewardsp are we offering to our students and what are we doing to support the attention of our students in the classroom and prior to the pandemic when we, the biggest question i got when i spoke to people about attention and distraction was what to do about the devices in our room and that question is being pushe aside in our current context but the question sort of still is always what ewardship are we offering to r students, right . Are just saying no, but the devices away and students ct Pay Attention anymore or are we trying t take a proactive positi stance and say im here to help support you andour efforts to Pay Attention in this classroom and i want to be a partner with you and thinking about how we do that together. That is part of what i will argue here and what i argue in the book as well. Okay, i like to begin our conversations about in attention and distraction by giving Historical Context. There is a lot of concern today about the extent to which our devices are slowly degrading our ability to Pay Attention in making us into creatures who can no longer Pay Attention because we are so used to the sort of constant stimulation of our phones and devices so i think its worth steppingack a little bit to get Historical Context on that and help us think more carefully about the kinds of solutions that we use in order to help make attention stronger value in our teaching so we can go back long way to aristotle and people who are passionately devoted to the flu arent able to Pay Attention and they theynjoy the flu plane more than presely occupies them. You might substitute here listening to arguments as being in her classroom and flutelane is due to videos o your phone. So we conceive going back almost as far as we have pple writing about the mind and goes back aristotle that people were exprsing concerns about our ability to stay focused escially on the stay focused onomething cognitively challenging like listening to following along in our green with externalemptations, along about things that are more easier f us we tend to default to those things and we step away from the challenging things and we go to the easierr more [inaudible] thing so we can see augustine ites us about this while in a lot of ancient writers wrote about this problem of our inability to Pay Attention to the way we want to. We have the dese to listen to the argume and we know it will be helpful and yet still we cant ignore that flute pying in the distance john donne english poet wrote about the extent to which he found attention in his prayers and notes about what he now dow in the chamber to pray i put myself in the position and i asked god toend the angels and when the arrived i neglect god as angels as a fly in a coat outside this vote splits into two part and i identified two ways in which we are distracted. One is the external stuff whether flute plane or tha flight but theres a second partier which ishings that come inse my head. A memory of yesterdays easures, fear of tomorrows dangers. Anything, nothing, a fancy, all of these things struggl with hi prayer. What you will see a we noticed ere are two kinds of things that can distract us, things outside of us of things that are inside our own heads. We probably notic during the pandemic that a lot of the distractio has been rings side our own head as we think about global issues in our personal and professional challenges and that is making it morend mor difficult for us to stay focused. Okay, i lovehis one is an example of how we start to worry abou the technological distractio that arise and so this is a cartoonor the british magazi punch and its from 1906 and a series of cartoons that are giving forecasts for what wil happen in 1907 so you have two sort of natalie dressed and horny and looking at the telegraph machines are not, as a result, paid attention to one another. It striking to puthis picture and think about it in relationip to the pictures we see of teegers all huddled over their phones at a restaura table and weve theres a ctural lament that we dont talk to each oer anymore and not looking at one another in the eye or communicate with one anotherut this is another concern we have the goes back a very long way. Then ouroderators will let yoknow what is coming in and ill stop to respond to me of those, and the second halfill bethe same thing. You can submit questions to the chat and we will discuss them at the end of session. Okay. What we see here is a kind of new element that the external distractions that for example whatever it ght be, we have this sort of application of the technology drawing our attention tohem. My favorite quote is from a novel from pvincial lady in lond, ovincial lady was a series of novels about a woman who was aling with all the challeng of household management while e was trying to start a literary career as well a one of the novels of provcial lady of london s writes about attending a literary conference for the firstime and says im sorry to find attention wandering two entirely unrelated topics , difficulty in securi authors and ubles down on her intentions and tries to stay focused by taking notes and then later they discover that the not, she was getting postcards from her children, a memorandum finding her local bankers and in case she runs out of money so this is from the 1930s so if youre distracted at any point, just know you are not alone that experience. You are the provincial lady shares your pain. Im ing to get now to the kind of wrapping up this sort of itial historical overew by showing you kind of sort of a before and after quote in terms of the way our contemporary technologies efctive the way we think about technology and distraction. Thiss a quote from 1741. Isaac kloss wrote a book called the improvement of the mind and onef the things she writes about is the extent to which if you put yourself continuously in the coany of distraction, it makes you a more distractible person. But what hes arguing hereis about people going to coffee shops. You might know this is the 17thentury, coffee shops have swarmed intengland and europe more generallin these woplaces of activity, buzzing with people talking, newspapers,meetings, all kinds of stuff like that. Dont go to those places if youre trying to study because all of the things that strike your eye and your ear have a ndency to steal the mind away from the steady pursuit of any sject so that the normal distractions we all experience but he argues hear somethg different. Anthereby your soul gets into a habit of wondering. In oer words you spent alot of time in the compa of your distractions, you become a mo distracted person. Now, once you see what isaac argues in the 18thcentury , it can give us context f the arguments made by people like Nicholas Carr in the shadows in 2010. Using cholas carr arguing in the shallows that arguing abt what the internet has done to our abilitto Pay Attention,ur distractibility. Called, focused, t linear mind is typified by a new kind of mind, one that taken and doled out information in shortdisjointed overlapping bursts. And you can see now about 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 we see the extent to which these concerns, even having these concernsfor a long time no. Another thing i hope youve seen in the course of what ive shown you already is weve never really had a calm focus on distracted linear mis. Thats not the waythe human mind works. The idea that we had this sort of relapsed state in whicwe should quarrel sort of calmly sit and focus on things along as we wanted, thats kind of a myth. We never d a mind like that so i want you to think about this knowledge as we go rward. So the idea of this talk, teaching distracted minds aze the fact that all our mindare distracted so as a result we need to think carefully about how we preach to a distracted mind. One striking thingbout all these historical quotes and the book has a bit more of it with a variety of cultures and time period and one striking thing youll notice is all those, we are unhappy about the fact that our minds are easily distracted. We seem to want a mind that is better able to Pay Attention and engage in long periods of sustained focus and when we talk about our distractibility we seem be unhappy about it. Thats a very interesting thing to notice about all these comments about our mind thatshould make us wonder a little bit. Why do we have ese distracted minds . Why ha we evolved these minds at we wish were a bit different , th we wish we had this ability to push away our distractions and lock into focuso i want to talk about that as well , where biologists tell us about why we have this distractible mind so one nice instructi of this comes from a psychiatrist and author of the divided brain and this comes from an animated video lecture that he gives , you can see it and he gives the exple here of a bird trying to pack out a seed against diffult background and as he points out the bird has to have two different forms of attention. He needs to be able to focus and pick out the seed against that background. At the same time there hato be aware of s surroundings because its got to be potential for predator for others around him. It 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 and we also need to be aware of whats going on around us for fries, enemies, dangers. We dont quite havthese predators coming out us in the same way think about the way in which we evolved and that evolutionary process. It was iortant for us to not only be able to track an animal or to be able to start a fire to the aware of the potentl dangers around us as well ashe potential positive things. New food sources, new social groups, all that kindf thing so for a long evolutionary history theres very good reason we have develod this focus as well as the ability to, the capacity for awaness d to be easily distracted that might actually be helpful to us. The striking thing about timing and some her animals as well is that the tent to which they had best divided ability to focus intensified by the fact that we especially e drawn towards novelty. And so in a distracted mind whichwas one of my favorite books about this issue of distraction in a more general way , ill show you the end ofhe talk. They argue that we are information seeking creatures. And that when Research Shows that in addition to kind of foraging for food and ink, our breed evolved to forge you information d continually be curious about new iniration so close again, for our longistory, was useful for uto say im ing this but i want to return ovethere. Or maybeif i tried this a little bit differently someing different will happ. Though its kind of continually pushing ourselve to ask questions as a kind look f novelty and see what things areto ask ourselves questions, to nder and to take rabbit holes andpathways that mht lead somewhere unexpected and its ultimately