I don’t play video games very often any more.  This isn’t to say that I don’t still enjoy them (although I don’t play games like Call of Duty anymore because I’m not a huge fan of getting cursed out by 11 year old kids).  When I was younger, I would play video games all the time.  From 8 to 14, I was the poster child for hyper attention.  But, now that I’m older and don’t have nearly enough time to spend 3 hours a day slaying monsters or shooting Nazis, I don’t really miss it very much.  However, for as long as I’ve liked video games, I’ve always loved reading.  From Stephen King to Suzanne Collins, reading has been something that has stuck with since I was a little kid and got my first Harry Potter book.  Unfortunately, I feel like I’m in the minority.

When I come home from college, I occasionally hang out with a couple of my neighborhood friends.  However, when I say hang out, I don’t really mean the normal definition.  Usually, when this group of friends gets together, we either do one of two things:  watch something mind numbing on Netflix or play something mind numbing on Xbox.  And they seem okay with it.  All of these guys are one or two years younger than me, but they remind me so much of myself when I was age 8-14.  When we get together, everything is hyper-attentive.  Deeper meaning be damned.  I mean, why think when you can shoot your friend in the face and make jokes at his expense?  While I’m fine with playing video games every once in a while, the constant desire for hyper-attentive media overloads me, and I’m almost glad whenever I am able to leave their company to spend time with my family or other friends who don’t do that.  I’m not saying that hyper-attentiveness is a problem; I just personally can’t handle nearly as much of it as some other people can.  But maybe I’m just weird.

Now for some questions.  Does this story ring a bell with anyone?  Do you feel as though the over-saturation of hyper-attentive media has had any negative impacts on the desire of our generation or younger generations to spend time on deep attention media?  Also, is it just me or does this overflowing amount of desire for hyper attention mainly come from high school age people and younger?

You’ve read the same article multiple times for multiple different classes. I don’t want this to be a negative comment, I love re-reading articles and find it a great way to learn something you didn’t learn the first time (or the second, or third). Pencils to Pixels is one of those article for me. I can’t remember all the classes I’ve read this for, but as soon as I saw the name I remembered previous discussions I had about it. Though I value re-reading I am choosing to ignore this paper for the topic of tonights discussion. I’m going to focus on my uncertainties within our other reading for the week, Hyper and Deep Attention, which is something that is all over our news today and as a teacher am often asked about.

I know my mother isn’t the only who thinks I am crazy for jumping from one task to another at the tip of a hat. I’ve always been one of “those kids”, my mother got multiple diagnoses from teachers saying I needed to be medicated. This conversation about ADD and ADHD was in the paper throughout, and I found it refreshing that she seemed relatively against artificial chemical intervention. I struggle a lot when it comes to doing school work and it typically takes me twice as long as some of my friends, but I feel that I am a pretty good student and I question whether I would feel that way if my parents had chosen to put me on medicine. First question would be how many other people feel they are more hyper attention? Do you feel that technology and media is what caused you to be that way as the article begins to discuss on page 193.

Now, I admit I have hyper attention tendencies, I also can be extremely attentive. When I read novels, I fall into a world that isn’t my own and I read a book front to cover in two days. When I am writing I fall into another world. I write for hours at a time and don’t stop to think about anything over than what I’m doing. I think that this is a great skill to have, but can also be damaging. I once was late for work because I didn’t want to put the book I was reading down. I’ve had to pull over while driving because I got a great idea for a poem and I end up sitting and writing for a half an hour making my road trip a little pushed back. So my second question is – how many of you can see a little bit of both styles within yourselves? Do you enjoy this? Would you rather have one over the other? If so, why?

Overall, I’m curious about how you all feel about this topic and college. Do you think that there are ways both styles independently can work well in higher education? Can it hurt higher education? I personally feel that success stories don’t come around often enough in this topic but I feel as though they are all around us. I personally know that I struggle with some of the things she mentioned in her article, however, I am about to graduate undergrad and go into a masters program (hopefully, fingers crossed everybody)! I don’t want to brag, but I feel as though more of these stories need to shine and I hope if someone has one they are willing to share!

P.S. I don’t want anyone to feel they have to label themselves in this article. I was simply labeling myself for easy transitions back and forth between the article! I thought sharing my story would help let others open up if they share similar issues, but if not that is absolutely fine! Or if there is someone who is offended by something I wrote please feel free to communicate that with me, I am by no means a master at this topic just something I wanted to discuss for the evening.

Let’s talk (:

read to the end; why get confused? / it’s just “me,” talking with “you”

I said in class last week that I have a hard time processing what people say to me in time to come up with a conversationally timely response. So I’m asking you, friends: when that happens, is it because I’m taking the time to be sure that I mean what I say? Or is it because I take that long to process things—to make meaning from their words for myself?

Very often, when I do respond quickly, I talk “at” a person or at a statement—not usually on the same track as the question but intersecting it at an angle, meeting at a point, and diverging again (like words in scrabble). Friends, why do I do that?

“When you’re holding a cup of coffee, why do you occasionally raise it to your mouth and drink from it?” Friends? Why do you?

About that: I use coffee as an example a lot of the time. Why do I assume that “you” drink coffee? It seems common enough, but among whom? I can’t be too sure. So when I say that (above) or something like it, I’m not really talking about “you” to “you.” Even though I’m saying “you,” I’m talking about “me” to “you,” but that is something that I can do for you. I drink coffee. You don’t need me to talk about “you” to “you.” You do that for yourself, even if (only) for having read what I have to say about “me.”

But it seems like that’s where meaning is made.

Because “you” got to tell “me” about “me” above, now “I” want to tell “you” about “you.”

I began noticing in class about two weeks ago that we’re starting to pick up (intimately) on each other’s ideas. And I’ve noticed it on the blogs. It can be subtle (at first). We’re becoming more alike, y’all! One person says something that reminds me of a second person; another person says things that remind me of things I’m saying. But isn’t that literacy in use? Isn’t that a class? Our class?

“I” am not going to make specific cases—for one, “I” would have to prove that “we” are actually paying attention to each other in class and that “we” are reading each other’s posts. What do “I” know? “You” might know. So do “we” know? And anyway, I’ve forgotten some of the specific instances from our class discussions. But, just as if I had made specific cases, you’ll have to decide if “you” are going to believe them.

So why don’t we just write about ourselves and read what other people have to say about themselves? I do; it has gotten “me” this far—this close, now, to all of “you.”  And I think “we” all already do, but we pretend not to by saying “you.” Friends, why don’t we just?

As we endeavor into Week 11 of 15, I’d encourage you to think about this (meaning is made when “you” do). Is something like this going on? First of all, what is going on? Why? How? Are we—all of us—attuning to ourselves/our own ideas by seeing things like our own ideas outside of ourselves? Are we attuning to other people/their ideas by making meaning inside of ourselves, on our own terms—or on theirs? Are we attuning to identified/constructed common ideas on common terms?

(attuning—getting in tune? Harmony? A blue note?)

(Why do I always go meta? Doesn’t literacy require it? When we want to talk “about” literacy, don’t we always mean the “who? and the “what?” and the “why?” and the “how?”)

(Usually my posts are just over 1000 words. This one is just over 500, including these end comments. There’s space for “you.”)

As students in a composition class, we know the tedious struggle of producing quality writing. I’m curious about your thoughts on the conclusion of From Pencils to Pixels, where Baron reveals that “Teachers preferred pencils without erasers, arguing that students would do better, more premeditated work if they didn’t have the option of revising” (31).

Most of us have been in the position of writing something the night or hours before it’s due and ending up with a decent, sometimes great final product. Experiences like this seem to oppose the current method of producing multiple drafts of a piece. Should this procedure be left as a personal preference rather than a requirement?

In Malcom Gladwell’s book Outliers, which concerns itself with talent and success, he proposes the 10,000 hours theory–essentially to become an expert at something, a person needs to practice the skills of this field for 10,000 hours. He adds though, that the practice needs to be “deliberate practice”–working on the skills where you are weakest, not simply repeating the skills you’ve mastered.

Could the allowance of drafting and revisions weaken the teaching and learning of writing by forcing students to go through a process that might not be contributing to the refinement of their style?

Near the end of Hyper and Deep Attention, Hayles describes different types of new interactive lectures where students participate in the learning process by looking up and sharing relevant material and comments through linked computers and screens. It’s a strange concept to me–it seems like these methods would be distracting more so than helpful and diminish the purpose of attending a class as opposed to just Googling what you’d like to know.

It doesn’t seem like the alternative methods detailed on page 196 promote interaction among the students and professor so much as interaction with a device of some kind. If someone starts presenting information, how useful is it to immediately start your own research on the topic while the lecture is still in progress? Why is commentary being a passive, background activity instead of a live conversation that engages the entire group?

The push to integrate more and more technology into classrooms seems to enable diffused attention. Perhaps students are becoming less and less able to have deep attention because their classes are being made into hyper attentive experiences.

In some ways, the difference between the previous generation and our generation’s experience of learning is personal responsibility–we need to learn to invest attention more deliberately instead of requiring more and more stimuli. According to the reading, less than 10% of the population has an identifiable disorder that prevents them from being able to focus themselves. It might be the comment by the professor who assigns short stories instead of novels, but I think the concessions being made to cater to those without focus are getting out of hand.

At what point can we say that young people need to learn the skill of deep attention instead of adapting teaching methods to a ridiculous extent?

Looking over the reading material provided on the Tar Heel Reader site, I don’t see it as a valuable resource for people who are learning to read. It works well as a repository of practice sentences, but lacks features that would motivate students. The similar structure and minimal content of the books provided on the site fail to present reading as an engaging or important experience.

Each page of a reading consists of a large stock photo above a bland 3-7 word sentence of the form subject-verb-either adjective/direct object/predicate nominative. Truman Capote said of Jack Kerouac’s work, “That’s not writing, that’s typing,” exactly how I would describe the collections of sentences offered as books from Tar Heel Reader.

It’s not only an issue of this site, but a trend in the materials created for beginning readers. Last week I wanted to pick up a Halloween themed book to read with a 6 year old child I babysit because she’s been learning to read and asked if we could practice together. The only books I could find that were suggested for her age-range had less than 40 words in them. They had 2-4 words per page and usually repeated many of these words.

When I was learning to read, I read from Winnie the Pooh, Beatrix Potter, and Dr. Seuss. These had more than 40 words on a page, and except for Green Eggs and Ham, most of them presented a large variety of words, phrases, and sentence structures. Not only did they challenge me with their structure and semantic content, I wanted to move further in the stories they held. Some of these newer readers have a unified concept, but not much of an engrossing story–This is a cat. The cat is lost. The cat is sad. The cat sees a path. The cat finds its home.

I don’t feel that the material on the Tar Heel Reader site, or a lot of the readings made to help beginning readers stimulate them enough to motivate them to learn basic literacy skills, let alone engender a life-long, positive relationship with reading. For younger students, the books are just flat, for older students, such as adults who are learning to read, the simplicity of these stories could be insulting.

Are there advantages to using materials like those provided by the Tar Heel Reader site? Why do you think there may have been a shift from using more substantial texts to teach beginning readers to more simplified books? What sort of materials did you use when learning to read?

I found this article interesting that once more it is talking about twelve year olds in the year when I myself was about thirteen years old. Once more it is projecting what life will be like when people my age hit college, and I must say I was disappointed in how little hope this article seemed to portray for my own future, but at the same time I believe I have as little of hope in most of today’s young people (kids around the age of twelve).

When I first read this article I was displeased because yet again, this was another article saying that what my brain does on a daily basis is impossible, making me abnormal. It disproved the ability to multitask. I for one am a very gifted multi-tasker. And no I am not just saying I can listen to music while I study (which I can do no problem). I am saying that I can have three conversations at once. Granted only one of them is real and the others are just in my head, but still I find that to be pretty impressive.

As far as this article goes, it says that students no longer have the capacity to read full books. I can read an Edith Wharton novel while one of my “neighbors” is belting his guts out singing yet another Broadway show tune. I can fight to the death over whether or not I am allowed to eat on any given day while pouring through a book of poetry. I am far more capable than for what this article likes to give me credit.

Now I know my case is different. Most people my age do not struggle with this, but I am curious as to whether or not this article makes others feel slighted or overlooked.

During this weeks learning, I was actually quite surprised to see a piece of work that did not directly attack technology in learning or use the phrase, “kids these days” in their arguments.  It was pretty refreshing to finally see a article that looks at the way millennials use and learn about technology. Most importantly, I enjoyed how it suggested that with the development of technology, there are more resources available to individuals. With the easiness and sheer availability of all these resources, the individual can play an active role in their education.

I think what bothers older generations the most is the quickness of independence that technology can provide. There is no longer an authoritative figure that stands in front of the school room, telling the children everything about everything.  Those generations had to rely on the technology available to them at the time, books, to pursue their own interests. Now we can google a topic and know the basic concepts of a topic in less than a minute. To me, that speed of knowledge would be off-putting if I had to spend the day going to the library, using the Dewey Decimal system to find the correct book, then reading until you found the topic you actually wanted to learn about. The speed of learning is important to us, but also the availability of these resources. Even at an early age we are surrounded with technology. Starting out so young learning about the world at our own pleasure and speed will obviously make us feel more independent. Knowing how to count and recite the alphabet before we even start kindergarten is going to make us harder to teach and socialize with. It is not that technology necessarily only downplayed social skills, but it increased our self-reliance. We have become the hardest generation to market to because we want to feel that we found out about a product by ourselves, not from someone telling us.

Has technology actually affected our social skills? Or do we know about these skills and just choose to become more independent?

One particular aspect of “Living and Learning with New Media” I found interesting was the idea that kids who do not have internet access at home and have to use library or school computers are missing out on the social aspect that the internet offers. Schools and libraries block websites that kids would use to communicate with others their age and engage in popular culture. I never considered that not having social media could affect the way  kids interact with their environment. Just because one kid does not have Twitter, Instagram, etc., does not mean he/she won’t know what these websites are or can’t use a friend’s, but it does mean they can’t interact in this way unless it is through someone else. Even if a kid uses a friend’s account when they are together, he/she cannot share personal thoughts because someone else’s will always be included. There is something to be said about not having the option to participate in a major cultural aspect of growing up. If a kid only has access to a computer and the internet when doing homework or research at the library or in school, what will his/her relationship be with technology? It will be associated with work rather than interacting with peers and putting filters on pictures for everyone to see.

Technology is a massive part of growing up for kids today. I have worked with kids every summer since I was allowed to work, and I have seen the way that technology affects the way they interact with each other and the world. I had six year old campers arriving in tank tops that said “#CRAYCRAY” in sparkly letters (that is not a joke). My campers and gymnasts try to add me on Facebook, Instagram, and follow me on Twitter and get upset when I tell them I won’t/can’t accept them. It is their way of trying to further our relationship and gain a closer bond, and they take it personally when I do not accept. This is the way they are growing up. If you like someone as person and have a bond with them of any kind you want to solidify it with social media and be a part of his/her life in another way. People my age were taught not to request people like camp counselors, coaches, teachers, etc., because it isn’t appropriate. What does this say about how technology is changing our relationship?

Something I want to talk about from the Mizuko Ito, et al. article is the concept that media capitalizes peer-based learning, because, in a way, it does. The white papers don’t expand on this idea too much, so I don’t know what exactly they meant by this but I know that the idea definitely caught my attention and sparked my own thoughts. I don’t know if today’s youth learn how to become “media literate” through peer pressure, I think that youth become pressured to become “media literate” through their peers. What I mean is that I don’t believe the youth are teaching the youth the “ins and outs” of media, I mean that the youth are encouraging each other to use media, therefore, the youth are teaching themselves. Peers are pressuring each other to use the tools that make them become “media literate.”

Therefore, I feel that media is a way for students to become literate in a language all on their own; a way for students to teach themselves…without even realizing they are learning. Aside from high schools offering a typing or computer program course, I believe that students teach themselves most of what they know about media, and they actually do it in a similar way as in-class learning, except without a teacher.

For example,

In class: teacher teaches a concept, student doesn’t understand, teacher provides material for better understanding, student practices.

Media: student discovers a concept, student doesn’t understand, student further researches help for better understanding, student practices.

Honestly, when I really started to think about that idea, becoming “media literate” seems to be beneficial for today’s youth. I understand that some people are salty about technology taking over and I do agree that media is harmful for some aspect of a youth’s life, however, learning a new “language” is a way that media is helping today’s youth become successful. The youth learning how to teach themselves, an idea that is going to benefit them in their futures. When people realize they can find the answer on their own, they are going to be less likely to rely on someone else.

Furthermore, not to mention, TODAY’S YOUTH ARE SURROUNDED BY MEDIA. Therefore, they NEED to become literate in the language if they want any hopes of becoming successful. Hell, included on resumes nowadays is that you are “proficient in Microsoft Word and Excel.” It is basically a must.

My question for you is that now that you’ve considered the idea of media encouraging peer-based learning, as well as individual learning, what are your thoughts? Would you say that the media is helpful in the sense that students are teaching themselves to find answers on their own? Or do you think that the cons outweigh the pros, in the sense that the material the youth may discover when searching away is more harmful than the helpful resources they find and the concepts they teach themselves.