Davidson begins with focusing the reader’s own attention on two avenues of attention. One is how the “Cymbalta” antidepressant commercial can only hold the viewer’s attention for a span of 6.5 seconds where the entire ad runs for 75 seconds. The other avenue is within a selective attention test that was created by Harvard psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simmons where they had participants view a video of people passing a basketball and asked the participants to count the number of passes the team in white made. At the end of the less than two minute video, the viewers were asked how many passes the white team made. Then the participants were then asked, “How many people saw the gorilla?” Unless the participants were specifically looking, their attention was elsewhere. This is a predominant fixture in current education as current educational practices do not allow for the varied attention spans of teens. The term that Davidson uses to reinforce this lack of attention is “attention blindness” and says that there are many challenges to today’s society with how we perceive technology and the world around us.
The “Invisible Gorilla Experiment”
As a teacher of students ranging from 12 years old to college level in an educational society still adapting to new technology, I find myself often “attention blind,” as Davidson would say, and realize how tough it is to adapt traditional non-technology based lessons into something that would hold a student’s attention. Beginning Davidson’s book, I read the entire thing during the course of a week, even taking it to a doctor’s appointment where I ended up discussing attention and the lack thereof with my doctor to the point that my doctor is purchasing a copy to read for her own use and practice!
Within education, Davidson and her colleagues at Duke University gave the entering freshman class of 2003 new iPods as collaboration between the university and the “Apple Digital Campus” project. The freshmen were challenged to use their iPods within the classroom and create new ways of using modern technology in education. This is also the focus of Davidson’s parallel discussion between the educational practices of her former mother-in-law, a teacher in rural Canada and the education that today’s students receive. Davidson notes that today’s students are more “attention blind” due to the technology they are inundated with day after day, and as educators one needs to be receptive to using the technology in the classroom to enhance the learning that is taking place, not to stifle the student’s creativity.
Davidson is adamant about how the brain changes and adapts to technology and the environments we are in. This is shown through her examination of “Baby Andy,” an infant who learns to adapt his attention to what he desires. Babies begin to “chart out the concepts and the distinctions made by those whose world they mirror; they are learning the value of those distinctions and the values of those who made them.” This is also evident with adolescents, whether they are using current technology or simply modeling appropriate or inappropriate societal behaviors. As educators, we feel that the digital era is “damaging our children” but this is also based on the older ideas of fixed neural adaptation, not the flexible brain adaptation. We make new brain patterns as they are required, which can make us attention blind, but we should be embracing the learning that is happening by using technology instead of undermining the way we learn and process.
Davidson also touts that “for over a century, we’ve been schooling ourselves and our children to take advantage of the affordances of the industrial-age workplace. It’s time to rethink the affordances of the digital workplace.” The educational system we work in is flawed in thinking that our society is still the be-all-end-all of 19th century industry and creating workers to embrace this type of learning. Rather, we need to reevaluate how we are teaching the young minds in our classrooms to embrace new technology as Davidson notes with passion, “why, exactly, would we want to do things the way we did them before?...The question isn’t which is better, the past or the present. The question is, given the present possibilities, how can we imagine and work toward a better future?”
When teaching writing, embrace the SMARTboard or Promethian boards to diagram sentences or create word webs which, in turn, provide the students with a different way to focus their attention, allow the students to use word processing software to write their essays, or even have the students blog, text, or Tweet about books they are reading. All of these ideas and more are designed to help embrace the digital generation that we teachers are currently educating. Plus, the variety of activities that can help students enhance their learning will make them better focused students while allowing them to take some pride in their learning and, hopefully, bring back passion into the field of education. My own students have adapted to using their SmartPhones and the dictionary.com application in addition to a print dictionary, and they have also created multimedia presentations for their Literature and Math finals, which resulted in a combined “What I want to do when I grow up” talk and presentation.
Finally, make the work meaningful to students, especially to hold their attention and ever growing and adapting brains. “Attitude,” Davidson notes, “plays a tremendous role at any age, in one’s cognitive and physical health and in one’s ability to make a change.” If we educators have a positive attitude about the technology we are using, and if it is holding true to transforming our educational practices, then we are doing our job.
