The second meeting of the reading group was held on April 15th on Zoom at 12:45 p.m.

We continued our discussion of Part I  of the book and began to review Part II.
We talked about the use of a concentration exercise to have students focus by viewing the same photograph, painting or document at various points in time during the semester. The point of the activity is for them to see how their experiences change their perspective on the focus object.

We also discussed apps that can be used for communicating with students that are more visual and more intuitive than BB. Lang’s research indicates that attention has a very strong social component and if he want to have less distracted students, we must find way to get their attention.  So communication turns out to be a key factor in reducing distraction. We have to work on capturing student’s attention, rather than focusing on eliminating distraction.

The 1st  meeting held on zoom was on  Mar 18, 2021 12:45 PM

There were 6 in attendance. We began with a discussion of the part 1 of the book.

In this section, the reason for distraction is explored by Lang. We all tend to blame technology but Lang believes that it may not be the true cause of distraction.  It’s not only our students that are distracted, but all of us are often distracted and technology seems to be more of a symptom than a cause of distraction.
We talked about developing a technology policy for the classroom as Lang suggests, there are many ways to develop such a policy.  Some instructors ban technology but such policies may not be appropriate and can be problematic when some students use technology for learning accommodations.  We also discussed the particular challenges we face in this remote learning environment.

This semester we are reading the book DISTRACTED by James Lang

Here are links discussing the book.

DISTRACTED JAMES LANG

https://www.c-span.org/video/?476451-1/distracted  8 minutes key-note speaker

https://resources.depaul.edu/teaching-commons/teaching-guides/learning-activities/Pages/the-first-day.aspx

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Distracted/UebTDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover