WhatsApp, Instagram top classroom distractions

If I am not careful, my cellphone will wake me up in the wee hours with buzzes or pings to let me know that news organizations and family members on the other side of the world, in different time zones, are trying to get my attention.

Is it too dramatic to say that "there is a global war" for our attention? I don't think so.

Last year I did a little experiment with students in my Media Economics course. Each of them was asked to keep track of how many notifications or alerts they received on their phones or computers during a 45-minute lecture. The average was about 15 alerts, or one every three minutes. WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat were the chief distractions.

For a professor leading a class, these alerts could be considered competition.
(At left, Christian Zibreg tells how to remove distracting messages from the locked screen.)

The distraction industry

The competition for user attention has never been greater, and every news site and app is finding new ways to lure people away from whatever they are doing with ever-more-insistent alarms, buzzes, pings, beeps, lights, you name it.

This year, the Media Economics class is slightly larger, with 57 students, and the instructions were different: pick any 60-minute period and measure the number of alerts or notifications received--in essence, any signal that attempts to distract you from what you are doing.

On average, in 60 minutes students reported receiving 41.3 alerts (median 26).

'We interrupt this class for news of your ex-girlfriend'

As a professor, I often wonder what effect my class presentations are having on the minds of my students. Honestly, is it really possible for any human being to pay attention completely to a class for 45 minutes? Or does the mind wander?

While I am explaining the theory of market externalities, every media company in the world is fighting for the attention of those students. These companies are desperate to attract eyeballs for their content and their advertisers' messages.

They have developed ever more powerful tools to distract people from what they are doing and look at their smartphones. They use pings, vibrations, badges, flashing lights, lock-screen messages, and who knows what else.

What human being could pay attention to me when they receive a notification on their smartphone that their ex has commented on their new profile photo? Or that there is breaking news about the latest silly statements by a president? It's no contest.

Versión en español

The Notification Experiment

I wondered how this affected my students. So I did a simple survey in my Media Economics class at the University of Navarra. I asked the students to keep track of how many notifications they received from all of their apps and news sources during one 45-minute period.

"It's not students with smartphones but professors' teaching methods that are to blame"

I want to share with you my translation of a blog post (Spanish) by my friend and colleague Jose Luis Orihuela, a professor at the University of Navarra, author, and keynote speaker.

Orihuela is addressing a problem that faces many teachers and professors: they say their students are distracted by all the media on their smartphones and are not paying attention in class.

Don't blame the students, he says. Blame the professors.

"It has to be said again: the problem is not that the student is distracted by technology but that the professors have to change their methods and the content of their teaching.

"It's easy to place the blame on the students and their devices; the hard thing to do is redesign education to adjust to a culture of connectivity. You can't teach against the culture of the students. You have to build on top of it."

He mentioned a well publicized column by a professor in Uruguay who decided to throw in the towel rather than fight against students using Whatsapp and Facebook in his classes.

Orihuela went on, however, to says he encourages those teachers who are adapting and admires  those who are changing.

The real challenge isn't students using tech devices in the classrooms, but rather professors learning to be digitally literate.

In this video (Spanish), Orihuela elaborates on the topic: