Tag: technology

The Attention Gym: Building Capacity for Attentiveness in the Classroom

This post discusses the importance of learning how to pay attention for undergraduate students, highlighting its decline in today’s digital age. It emphasizes fostering students’ attentiveness through classroom practices, framing the learning environment as an “attention gym” or a workout for the mind. Through various exercises, assignments, and reflections educators can help students reclaim focus and develop essential skills for vocational discernment.

A series on how to help our students strengthen their abilities to pay attention to their lives, the world, and their vocations.

Fred Rogers

In a 2022 Atlantic article about Fred Rogers, Adelia Moore recounts her experience in the 1970s as a one-time guest on an episode of his television show, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and her subsequent friendship with him. In addition to his “gentleness, kindness, and empathy,” she describes the most magnetic and distinctive part of Mr. Rogers’ persona as his attentiveness, claiming that the character trait that made him such a powerful figure was “his capacity to pay attention.” This capacity, she laments, has become increasingly rare in today’s world.

Attention as a necessary and threatened resource has been on the minds of many (if not all) of us in higher education for a long time, especially those of us who think about undergraduate education in vocational terms. For obvious reasons, that concern intensified during and after the pandemic: on this blog in 2021, Jason Stevens argued that attention may be the resource most under threat in our current moment. In the last decade, several books—by authors like Tim Wu, Jenny Odell, and Chris Hayes—attest to this ongoing and worsening threat. Jonathan Haidt, author of the widely read The Anxious Generation, has recently said that he increasingly sees the assault on children’s attention as on par with the mental health consequences he attributes to children’s smartphone use.

My contention is that, in order to help students develop their attentive faculties, we must not only help them see the problem clearly (which so many of them are already acutely aware of); we also need to give them active ways of reclaiming and strengthening their capacity for sustained focus. One way to do that is to name the classroom an attention gym—a space where a key goal is to develop the muscles we need to become more attentive people.

Continue reading “The Attention Gym: Building Capacity for Attentiveness in the Classroom”

Saying Yes to Weirdness and Wandering

We are earthlings. Walking the earth is a practice of being who we are. Culturally, however, we are viewed as weird if we befriend birds and listen to the wind and hug trees, or find ourselves in our embodied earthliness rather than in our tech-mediated identity and status.

I always arrive for class five or ten minutes early to set up—log in to the computer, turn on the projector, get my notes arranged, the usual. When I began teaching in 2009, the classroom was generally noisy with student chatter during these minutes. Over the years, and especially since the start of the pandemic, things have grown quieter. Many students now walk into the room with headphones on, looking at their phones. I have to speak loudly just to cut through the silence with my “Okay, let’s get started.” Recently, a student left his earbuds in, and when I asked him to remove them, he told me it made no difference since they were on “transparency mode.”

I get it; I have earbuds, too. I seldom run an errand without entertainment running through my head or go for a walk without a reality buffer. Like my students, and, indeed, like many in this society, I find habits of attention difficult to cultivate. Part of the problem is my trying to remember and practice these intentions alone, while the alternative is backed by corporate interests and the attention-capturing tech they design. As Thomas Merton says, we live in “a world in which [human beings] are dominated by massive organizations and rigid institutions which seek only to exploit them for money and power.” Even when we intentionally use our phones and other technology for felicitous purposes, we are buying into something whose intended aim is indifferent to our happiness.

Continue reading “Saying Yes to Weirdness and Wandering”

First Year, First Virtue: Attentiveness, Technology, and First Year Writing

Attentiveness is essential to beginning our vocational journeys. And few things are under greater assault in our culture.

If I want to rile students up and get debate going, I mention Vermont State Senator John Rodger’s recent proposed bill to ban smartphones for anyone under 21, and his remark that smartphones are “just as dangerous as guns.” Student response to the debate over technology is a mixture of spirited defense and despairing acknowledgement of its harms. More and more, this debate has taken a vocational inflection for me. I think that the first-year writing course is an excellent place to begin to make students aware of, concerned by, and proactive about that which imperils their ability to thoughtfully and responsibly engage in their many callings, and especially their calling to conversations.

In Living Vocationally: The Journey of the Called Life, Paul J. Wadell and Charlie Pinches suggest that the first virtue required to begin our vocational journeys is attentiveness. Paying attention, so the argument runs, matters because “at the basis of every calling, whether a friendship, a career, or being patient with a stranger, is a summons to responsibility; however, we cannot be responsible without an accurate perception of reality, and we cannot accurately perceive reality without growing in attentiveness” (159). For Wadell and Pinches, attention is a “situating virtue” (along with humility and gratitude) because “instead of the thoughtlessness or indifference by which we turn in on ourselves and become carelessly disengaged with life, the virtue of attention forms us into persons who are fully present to life” (157). I agree that attentiveness is essential to beginning our vocational journeys. And few things are under greater assault in our culture than attentiveness.

Continue reading “First Year, First Virtue: Attentiveness, Technology, and First Year Writing”

Back to the Future III: Does the Future Belong to Smart Machines?

In this series of posts, I have been exploring how the future figures into vocational discernment. So far, my explorations have been more philosophical in nature as I have pondered the “prolepsis of vocation” and the importance of Aristotle’s notion of “Becoming.” In this post, I briefly consider how technology will increasingly affect such ponderings.

Continue reading “Back to the Future III: Does the Future Belong to Smart Machines?”

Vocation in a Global Frame: Four Considerations

Our students will likely live and work in a world even more interconnected and interdependent than we do now. The complex issues that face us spill across national borders, oceans and continents, involve communities with varying histories, cultures, beliefs, languages, political structures and forms of creative expression. These complex global issues and this interconnectedness shape the work-world our students enter. Students seek to discern vocation, not just once, but again and yet again, within this context.

How does globalization impact vocation?

We deepen and enrich our students’ understanding of vocational discernment, and we better understand it ourselves, when we situate the practice of reflection, anticipation and choice of life path within this global frame, when we consider how best to mentor students who are not privileged in their citizenship, circumstances and freedom or range of choice. 

Here are four components of the intersection of vocational discernment and globalization that seem pressing to me. These are not the only components, and readers are likely to identify additional significant, complex global issues affecting the work world our students enter. We live in a dynamic, constantly changing, highly interdependent world: by calling out these four major intersections of vocational discernment and globalization my hope is to initiate an open-ended conversation, to encourage reflection and dialogue. Continue reading “Vocation in a Global Frame: Four Considerations”

Vocation & Vacation: Challenging the “Culture of Competitive Martyrdom”

How often have you heard this joke? “Question: What are the three best reasons to become a professor? Answer: June, July, and August.”

Anyone inside the profession, however, experiences a very different world and many academics find themselves in a paradoxical situation inherent in the very nature of their work. From the outside, viewed by, say truck drivers or dentists or factory workers, their jobs look embarrassingly easy. Just 4-12 hours/week of actual time in class, no requirement beyond a few office hours to “clock-in” to a particular place, no direct oversight of the classroom (“my class is my castle”), and unheard-of-in-other-fields job security (believe me, they have heard of tenure and don’t realize how tenuous it is). Oh yes, and three months of vacation. Every year. Continue reading “Vocation & Vacation: Challenging the “Culture of Competitive Martyrdom””

Connecting the Dots: What we can learn from Steve Jobs, college drop-out

In his 2005 Stanford commencement address, Steve Jobs reflected upon his life: his birth and adoption, his early firing from Apple and marriage and then his scare with death after being diagnosed with cancer.  The first part of the speech was dedicated to “connecting the dots” and to his early life and college experience. Like Jobs, our most successful students are able to “connect the dots” and take important risks. Continue reading “Connecting the Dots: What we can learn from Steve Jobs, college drop-out”

A heresy worth considering…

Image result for geek heresy images
Geek Heresy

I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Kentaro Toyama back in February 2018 when he visited our campus for an engaging seminar on the role of technology in addressing social problems. Dr. Toyama is the W.K. Kellogg Associate Professor of Community Information at the University of Michigan, and his 2015 book, Geek Heresy, articulates what I consider “hard won” insight into the role of technology in society and, more specifically, how technology impacts social change.

Toyama began his career as a computer scientist working for Microsoft in their research division.  If you have ever enjoyed the Kinect accessory in Microsoft’s XBox—the stereo imaging system that converts a player’s motion into real-time video game inputs—you are at least tangentially familiar with some of Toyama’s early research that led to the development of Kinect.  Ultimately, though, Toyama found this work unfulfilling and a far cry from the idealism of his youth that had drawn him to the sciences in the first place.  His original goal was to help solve the energy crisis. Continue reading “A heresy worth considering…”

Smartphones and vocational reflection

Do smartphones help or hinder reflection upon vocation? It depends. Medieval Christians distinguished between curiositas—a vice—and studiositas—a virtue. Curiositas is inconsistent with vocational reflection; studiositas undergirds real reflection upon calling. Although I enjoy my iPhone, I know it encourages shallow curiosity rather than contemplative wonder.

Smartphones constitute ideal technology for cultivating and satisfying curiositas. These pocket-sized gadgets provide easy access to new knowledge on demand, so that a hunger for novelty finds endless fodder, inadequate though it is for real intellectual sustenance. Smartphones also present Continue reading “Smartphones and vocational reflection”