The Church Task Believers

I watched single-taskers this morning. Stopped at an intersection in a university town, an ambulance, blaring siren and flashing lights, was trying to get through the clog of traffic, but no one in a group of 12 cars could multitask - they could not take in their surroundings, they could not assess the other traffic, they could not develop a plan, a solution, that would allow the ambulance to move toward the hospital. They were driving: single-tasking in the way too many educational "experts" want students to function.

According to "experts," this is impossible...

Multitasking at a Virginia Beach diner.

I thought of this as I read a blog post claiming to be a "Brilliant Report" a bit later:

"For a quarter of an hour, the investigators from the lab of Larry Rosen, a psychology professor at California State University–Dominguez Hills, marked down once a minute what the students were doing as they studied. A checklist on the form included: reading a book, writing on paper, typing on the computer—and also using email, looking at Facebook, engaging in instant messaging, texting, talking on the phone, watching television, listening to music, surfing the Web. Sitting unobtrusively at the back of the room, the observers counted the number of windows open on the students’ screens and noted whether the students were wearing earbuds.

"Although the students had been told at the outset that they should “study something important, including homework, an upcoming examination or project, or reading a book for a course,” it wasn’t long before their attention drifted: Students’ “on-task behavior” started declining around the two-minute mark as they began responding to arriving texts or checking their Facebook feeds. By the time the 15 minutes were up, they had spent only about 65 percent of the observation period actually doing their schoolwork.

'“We were amazed at how frequently they multitasked, even though they knew someone was watching,” Rosen says. “It really seems that they could not go for 15 minutes without engaging their devices,” adding, “It was kind of scary, actually.”' - Annie Murphy Paul

According to Rosen and Paul, there is something "scary" happening here. According to me, there is something "human" and "functional" here.

But then, I was not raised to be a dedicated Calvinist church-goer, or a dedicated "school student." Instead, I was raised to be a "learner."

"effective," "productivity," "on-task,"
attention-means-gaze, are all the inheritances
of our Puritan past

What Rosen and Paul want are churchgoers. Not just any churchgoers, but Calvinist Protestants of the New England Puritan mode. Sit up straight, stare front, all read together, don't you look out the window! This isn't a Catholic churchgoer, surrounded by images and movement, candles and scents, sculptures and varied light, movement and individual action - it is pure American Calvinism, it is behaviour control, compliance training. It is not about individual learning, but the kind of highly-structured group motion development inherent in our imported Prussian Model of education.

Dr. Rosen's problem, Annie Murphy Paul's problem, is that they are, without even knowing it, rejecting student engagement as an educational core.

"During the first meeting of his courses, Rosen makes a practice of calling on a student who is busy with his phone," Paul writes. “I ask him, ‘What was on the slide I just showed to the class?’ The student always pulls a blank,” Rosen reports. “Young people have a wildly inflated idea of how many things they can attend to at once, and this demonstration helps drive the point home: If you’re paying attention to your phone, you’re not paying attention to what’s going on in class.”'

The egocentrism drips here. Dr. Rosen believes his mere presence assures that students will want to stare at the bullet points on his PowerPoint. With a lecture style fully honed during the overhead projector and Kodak Carousel era, he assumes that everyone, not just a few eager teacher-pleasers in the front two rows, is paying attention. My guess is that he could have called on random students in the back ten years ago and found similar blank stares. It's an effing PowerPoint, my dear professor, its already in note form, why the hell would I be listening to you?

So here's the research question Rosen and Paul are asking: "Assuming that the best way for students to learn is to do nothing but listen to "me" and read exactly what "I" have assigned, are students listening to my every word and reading everything I have assigned?" Then they rate "learning" according to a student's ability to repeat every word they say. No, its worse, this "research" measures learning according to the metric of "seat time" - are you sitting there being "a good little white boy or girl"?

"...the promise of educational innovation is less about processing power and software code and more about the opportunity to release ourselves from general assumptions regarding how instruction is organized and delivered," Joel Rose wrote in The Atlantic last year.  "It's why our collective charge in K-12 innovation today should go beyond merely designing and producing new tools. Rather, our focus should primarily be to design new classroom models that take advantage of what these tools can do."

So, if your goal is children sitting still and "Reading, writing, listening," as Annie Paul Murphy tweeted to me, then, multitasking "disrupts" learning. But if your vision of learning looks a bit more active, then these technologies do not disrupt, they connect, engage, expand possibilities, make learning possible for those formerly labelled as "disabled."

It's not disruption, it's learning...

The sad fact here is that this is neither a question of technology, nor a question of disruption and attention. It is a question of quality teaching. In 2007 I wrote, in the Grand Rapids Press and on this blog, about the power of teaching with these tools - and of course, it isn't just a "why," but a "how." In classes I teach phones and computers are how we investigate and share information, we're not dependent on Slide Decks and bullet points. We converse on our devices via TodaysMeet and Twitter and Google Docs. We read on our devices. We use Google and Wikipedia and other search tools for discovery. We Skype with experts.

In other words, we use the communication and information tools of this century to learn, rather than bemoaning the loss of an elitist past.

We, in education, need to be better than this. While the medical profession embraces the "MTAT" - the MultiTasking Aptitude Test - because, "Emergency physicians epitomize what it's like to work in a time-pressured, interruption-based environment. Multitasking is necessary to survive in this environment where you are constantly shifting focus and addressing new tasks or problems as they arise," we have writers like Paul quoting, "David Meyer, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan who’s studied the effects of divided attention on learning," who, she says, "takes a firm line on the brain’s ability to multitask: “Under most conditions, the brain simply cannot do two complex tasks at the same time."' In other words, according to these "experts" and their "research," the work of everyone in hospital emergency rooms, or in police work, or even in short-order cooking, is impossible... because, of course, their studies prove that.

Let me end by going back to this morning. I have sat in Emergency Vehicles, driving, talking on the radio, communicating with a partner, planning a series of actions on which vast knowledge of both tactics and law must underlie, figuring out a route, knowing if anyone is on the sidewalk if driving there must be an option, and I have watched single-taskers trying to figure out how to get out of the way. I'm sure Dr. Meyer thinks planning out a life-saving strategy and communication and driving fast are all "simple tasks." I'm sure Dr. Rosen thinks I was endangering lives because my brain doesn't work like his. And I'm sure Annie Murphy Paul would think I wasn't attending to what was "important."

Not only do researchers find that multitasking is possible,
they are starting to list the advantages.

But those of us in the real world understand that humans multitask every minute. We are not sharks. We can be in love and eat at the same time. We can read and feel the sun on our skin. We can listen to complex music and still be aware of our surroundings. We can talk on the phone and work on the computer.  I can even type this post while observing a brilliant example of kids proving out a new paradigm of education.

We are multitaskers, or someone has trained us not to be.

- Ira Socol

The Sad Story of the Anti-Multitaskers

I am constantly entertained by the number of seemingly "very smart people" who are incredibly anxious to tell the world that they cannot walk and chew gum at the same time.

OK, I am being cruel, but please - We really need our "scientists" to comprehend the limitations their own questions put on their research.

Today, @derekbruff sent me to a great blog post which referenced a PBS story on multitasking. This is part of the "focus" lobby - PBS, NPR, and The New York Times are devoted to the theory that humans can do only one thing at a time. In fact, I think its at least once a week that NPR tells me that I can't possibly be driving my car because I am listening to Science Friday.

Part of what I said in a comment at that blog:

"The sad attempts to measure human multitasking via Gutenberg-era preferences continue. Here’s what these “scientists” don’t know: How human brains “looked” before Gutenberg and Calvin applied straight-line information flow and “single-tasking” to our species.

"So, 10,000 years ago developing brains were wildly multitasking. Looking for food, looking for predators, watching the weather, all while, I’m quite sure, checking out and chatting up potential mates or talking about doing so.

"We have, finally, begun to pull ourselves out of the straightjacket of 500 years of the Protestant Reformation’s belief in “focus” and linearity. Me on Human Communication

"I could indicate the level of ridiculous comments made by researchers in this video (”you cannot drive and talk or listen” – wow, there go passengers and radio) ..."

And I want to continue "that" ("indicate the level of ridiculous comments") here.  The scientists in this video imagine a static world has existed that is suddenly changing. They do this because they are not postmodernists and have not been trained in critical theories so that - I'm not just being insulting here, I really mean this - they do not know how to ask questions about the questions they are asking. And when you fail to do that, your "scientific" observations cannot be any better than the unexamined assumptions which lie behind your unchallenged questions.

So, fatal research mistake number one: "Humans have not been multitaskers before - this is new." And here I want to introduce another problem with the system - yes, even our "best" system which produces Ivy League faculty members - the division of content into separate silos. Because, in preparing their research into multitasking these scholars feel no requirement to walk through Notre Dame de Paris or Christchurch in Dublin to help conceive of the learning environments just a thousand years ago. They do not feel called to spend a week considering the work environment of the iron age. They do go to a place where they might pick berries while worrying about lions.

Instead they sat in libraries designed on 19th Century Calvinist theories, or sat at 18th Century ideas of what a "desk" is, and read research from the past half-century of their tiny slice of human knowledge via Gutenberg technology, or more contemporary technology mimicking Gutenberg technology. And when they did that the determined their conclusions before they made a single observation.

To build on an old metaphor, "the prepped their research in an entirely green environment, and were shocked to discover red when they opened the door." After all, if Dorothy had opened the door to Oz from the middle of Times Square, would the color have surprised her?

Fatal research mistake two is, "Our measuring systems are valid." Let us begin here with the understanding that ALL knowledge and all measurement is socially constructed. "If the aborigine drafted an IQ test, all of Western civilization would presumably flunk it." - Stanley Garn. Just to trouble you, is - in human experience of temperature, there as big a difference between 65 and 75F (17-23 C) as between 35 and 25F (+2 and -4 C)? In other words, as humans describing the weather, should we really be dependent on a scale based in the response of water to heat? But of course we are, and we are so acclimated to this that just hearing a number associated with weather - say "thirty" - immediately evokes radically different thoughts based solely on which side of the Detroit or Niagara rivers you live.


Here's an "IQ" question for you - "The assignment test: The subject is given a map and receives instructions to buy the following objects: half a hundredweight of potatoes, one-half pound of coffee, one-half pound of sausage, fifty pfennigs worth of fresh biscuits, and a pound of butter. He is further required to bring a pair of trousers to the tailor and a pair of shoes to the cobbler, as well as a ten-pound package to the post office. He is also required to pay a certain amount of tax at City Hall and to pick up a friend at the train station. The following rules are to be observed: The person leaves the house at 10:30. At 1:00 he should be back for lunch and accomplished all his tasks. Now the tax office is open only from 8 to 10 a.m., fresh bread is available only after 11 a.m., and the friend arrives at the station at 12:30. The post office and all stores are open between 12 and 2. Between the apartment and the train station runs a streetcar-which takes one-quarter of an hour and may be used at will." It was on this basis that the German government of 1934-1938 - using theories from the US State of Virginia, would decide whether to murder or at least castrate a person.

So, how we measure matters. This is how scientists "measure" attention and multitasking: They use flashing lines and symbols and other nonsense tasks in most cases. They ask odd questions, and yes, sometimes they even observe, but in every case they begin with a "grounding point" roughly equivalent to my sister Nancy (who I love dearly) sitting in a corner of the University of Edinburgh Library reading an 18th Century novel. Total, 100% involvement in a single task. For all of these research projects, that is "best" - 100 on their scales. It does not matter if, as I think often happened, Nancy would stumble out of the building hours later not knowing where she was or what the weather might be or if she had eaten today. In the measurement systems all of these studies are based on, Nancy is "100" and I am close to "Zero."

Essentially this is like saying that "72 F degrees" is the ideal temperature. That's lovely unless you are a polar bear or a tropical bird or...

But, and we must know this as we think about the education we offer our students, these researchers never question these measures. They are "mathematical scales" and they believe that a mathematical scale represents a "truth."

Fatal research mistake three is, "We know what multitasking is." Just as, say, we know what "North America" is (is it Canada, the US, Mexico? Include all of Central America? Include the whole Caribbean?), or we know what a "nation" is (The UN and FIFA have very different counts), or we know where Europe stops and Asia begins.

I might argue that all "driving" (operating a motor vehicle) is multitasking. I might argue this because the driver combing his or her hair while reading the newspaper is only a bit less scary than the person with the locked stare straight ahead. I sort of expect that drivers will be alert to many things around them at the same time, and would, perhaps, even notice if the child in the car seat in the back began choking. There's even a huge industry devoted to giving you things to read while driving, one major participant in that industry is the government.

I also might argue, as one website notes, that some of our most complex, attention demanding work environments are multitasking environments. "Emergency physicians epitomize what it's like to work in a time-pressured, interruption-based environment. Multitasking is necessary to survive in this environment where you are constantly shifting focus and addressing new tasks or problems as they arise." Would we really want airline pilots who could only pay attention to one thing at a time?

So, if medicine and operating a car are multitasking, as I might add, is walking down the street, what are these researchers measuring?

They have not asked. Largely because "we," education-as-we-know-it, have not taught them to ask.

Understanding the unexamined assumptions which lie beneath our "knowledge" is a vital issue that we rarely engage in our schools. And assuming that the "best" path to knowledge transfer or work is my sister Nancy's path - lovely as that may be - is offensive.

Or so I say while writing two documents plus this, answering email, tweeting, and watching Two Knights from Brooklyn.

- Ira Socol

The Question of Attention

"He came the following Sunday afternoon. I had a television set. We played one ballgame on the TV, another on the radio, and kept switching to a third and kept track of all that was happening every moment. "Remember, Sal, Hodges is on second in Brooklyn so while the relief pitcher is coming in for the Phillies we'll switch to Giants-Boston and at the same time notice there DiMaggio has three balls count and the pitcher is fiddling with the resin bag, so we quickly find out what happened to Bobby Thomson when we left him thirty seconds ago with a man on third. Yes!"' - Jack Kerouac, On The Road

It is 1949 and Kerouac and Neal Cassady are experiencing new media multitasking. Who knew that 60 years on that idea would be more controversial than anything else in that breakthrough novel?

"Thus far, the neuroscience of multitasking has tended to follow a predictable pattern. Scientists take a handful of test subjects out of their offices and make them watch colored squares dance on a screen in a lab somewhere. Then they determine that multitasking makes you slightly less able to focus. A study reported on early this month found that heavy multitaskers performed about 10 to 20 percent worse on most tests than light multitaskers." - Steven Johnson in The New York Times

The kind of research "proving" multitasking is "impossible" [NPR] is available in this New York Times test.

Is your ability to attend to random flashing red rectangles a fair measuring system? Well, that's what always makes research funny. In order to quantify the human experience in a "valid" way you have to strip it down to a point where the experience itself is completely out of context and thus meaningless.

This "out of context research" is why, for example, I see so many high school graduates these days who can read perfectly fluently (which "research" says is important) while not comprehending one word. And, in the case of "attention," it is why we have so many smart people suddenly declaring that they are unable to "walk and chew gum at the same time."

And this matters because, at least since the end of the World War we have been fighting a bizarre battle against our children. "You can't listen to the radio and do your homework." "You can't watch television and do your homework." "You can't look out the window and hear the teacher."

This notion of "attention" is, of course, religious, not scientific. Early Calvinist churches stripped everything but the book and the minister from the worship space because your mind was supposed to be single-focused, not wandering as in a Catholic Mass in a Cathedral. On the other hand humans would never have made it out of the trees if they hadn't been able to gather berries while watching out for large cats. Yet, because brain science remains cultural, our scientists still pursue that Protestant notion of "attention" as if it is a scientific ideal. And this crushes children's learning - and comfort - in school.

What's funny is that NPR will broadcast this story to an audience that is 70 percent driving. Yes, all those NPR listeners are dealing with the complex issues of Science Friday while navigating a two ton vehicle moving at over a kilometer and a half every 60 seconds. The rest of the audience is at work, or cooking dinner, or whatever, but damn few are single-tasking.

The New York Times is writing that story for an audience that is eating breakfast, riding the subway, opening mail at their desk, listening to a meeting in their conference room. Probably more are multi-tasking than not.

Yet, the stories are put out there, despite the overwhelming evidence that they really cannot possibly be true.

See, scientists can debate whether we are multi-tasking or "rapid shifting," but that's theoretical entertainment only. It does not matter. While you are driving, listening to NPR, you don't drive off the road because you "rapidly shift" to looking in your rear-view mirrors. You don't stop the car to change the air conditioning setting. The previous task continues, in actuality and in your brain, until you fully return to it.

So, this is one fight we should stop having. We are human. We multitask. We can understand it and get better at it, or we can stop functioning in the world and hide in a corner with our linear print books.

Let's go back to Steven Johnson:

"It’s no accident that most of the great scientific and technological innovation over the last millennium has taken place in crowded, distracting urban centers. The printed page itself encouraged those manifold connections, by allowing ideas to be stored and shared and circulated more efficiently. One can make the case that the Enlightenment depended more on the exchange of ideas than it did on solitary, deep-focus reading.

"Quiet contemplation has led to its fair share of important thoughts. But it cannot be denied that good ideas also emerge in networks.

"Yes, we are a little less focused, thanks to the electric stimulus of the screen. Yes, we are reading slightly fewer long-form narratives and arguments than we did 50 years ago, though the Kindle and the iPad may well change that. Those are costs, to be sure. But what of the other side of the ledger? We are reading more text, writing far more often, than we were in the heyday of television.

"And the speed with which we can follow the trail of an idea, or discover new perspectives on a problem, has increased by several orders of magnitude. We are marginally less focused, and exponentially more connected. That’s a bargain all of us should be happy to make."

- Ira Socol

Back to the Future

“It’s just like living in a village, where it’s actually hard to lie because everybody knows the truth already,” Tufekci said [Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County]. “The current generation is never unconnected. They’re never losing touch with their friends. So we’re going back to a more normal place, historically. If you look at human history, the idea that you would drift through life, going from new relation to new relation, that’s very new. It’s just the 20th century.”

In last Sunday's New York Times Magazine an article by Clive Thompson on The Brave New World of Digital Intimacy explored the experience of Facebook and Twitter et al and came to this interesting conclusion - the change in social connections brought on by new media technologies may not be "de-normalising" anything, rather, we may be experiencing a "re-normalisation" after a couple of centuries of a very strange social experiment.

"This is the ultimate effect of the new awareness: It brings back the dynamics of small-town life, where everybody knows your business. Young people at college are the ones to experience this most viscerally, because, with more than 90 percent of their peers using Facebook, it is especially difficult for them to opt out." Thompson writes. And whether this is "good" or "bad" is really not a question we can answer. Instead it is a fact of life we will deal with, as surely as the denizens of Peyton Place were controlled by the stories which spread through that semi-fictional town, as certainly as all the people of Artigat truly knew who was who when "Martin Guerre" returned.

“You know that old cartoon? ‘On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog’? On the Internet today, everybody knows you’re a dog! [Tufekci said] If you don’t want people to know you’re a dog, you’d better stay away from a keyboard.”

Thompson's article is part of a growing re-learning which is taking place everywhere except within US academia. People are starting to see the last 300 years as - perhaps - an aberration, and not as the end all, be all of human progress. Linear thinking, linear literacy, individual literacy, formalized, industrialized schooling, urban isolation and privacy, absolute communication rules, the primacy of print as the medium of information exchange, the classroom, the novel, the system of credentials itself - all the standards of "educated culture," all the inventions of the past half millennia which so many now accept as historical inevitabilities, are threatened by new technologies and by the "new" human information and communication modes - modes which bear a striking similarity the systems which existed before Luther, before Calvin, before Gutenberg.

Think about this - before this "modern age" most communication was both multimedia and flexible. Images and text, voice and gesture all combined, and all was adapted as it passed user to user (that "nightmare" of Wikipedia style knowledge). Information was altered for the audience at hand (no one ever performed the entire Iliad, the components were chosen which connected the tale to the place of performance), and adjusted for the needs of the "learner." No book created by a scribe was ever exactly the same as the book he had copied, and a "reader" looking at The Arch of Titus or the Temple of Dendur or the Cathedral in Rheims would begin their engagement in the story at the point of their choosing.

Self education was accepted. Nobody asked Alexander Hamilton why he dropped out of Kings College. Gutenberg, of course, lacked any sort of "communications engineering" credential. And information was spread by many sources who established their authority through repeated reliability. Literacy had value, so did memory, so did the ability to judge the quality of sources, so did the ability to discriminate among many fragments of data coming at you - from the shape of approaching clouds to the rumours spread by your neighbor.

I'm not going to deny the limitations of this world of human communication, but maybe there's something inherently "natural" in the rhythms and systems of communications both "pre" and "post" Gutenberg. And maybe the ways in which learning takes place outside of "the modern era" have some real value, at least for the mass of children who have never succeeded in the isolated, linear, rationalist, constructed environment which has defined learning these past two centuries.

It's at least worth considering, right? Even if it threatens the sense of self we have built within that constructed environment.

- Ira Socol

In Praise of Distraction

(Warning... long bit of thinking 'out loud'...)

Long ago I sat in an undergraduate lecture hall. The course was architectural engineering - steel structures. I sat there reading the New York Daily News. The comics pages or the sports boxes. Usually I held the newspaper up, blocking my view of the professor and his view of me.

"You drive him crazy," a friend told me. "Every day he calls on you and asks you some absurd question to see if he can catch you, and every time you give him the right answer, and you don't even really look at him. He just can't handle it."

Today I sit in a room with multiple computers, one with multiple screens, and 16 tabs open in Firefox (still Firefox 2, see below). Two are email links. No, three. The television is on. The window is open. Twhirl is feeding Twitter updates to me.

I have five things I am writing. All are open in Word or in Google Docs. I've conversed with a student. Had long email conversations with three different people at my university, written about 6,000 words today. Set up a computer. Learned about the Little Ice Age on The History Channel. I've discussed architecture with Rufus and assessment with Dance. Argued the Irish EU vote with friends - no, I guess it was more of an attempted explanation. Watched Germany beat Portugal.

Am I the poster child for multi-tasking or the poster child for tech-enhanced ADHD?

And therein lies the question.

A collection of things came together for me in the past week or so, about attention, about distraction, about the web generation.

One of my favorite profs gave me a great article by Dr. Noah Sobe on "The Subject of Attention.""It is important to note that Montessori understood the child’s "intense attention" as purposeful and not as an expression of involuntary, distracted perception. Her realization that "fixedness" was possible did not, for Montessori, disprove the notion that the child’s attention might also shift rapidly and distractedly. Instead, this stable attention, when placed alongside an observed instability of attention, suggested both a surface and techniques for shaping the individual."

Sobe looks at what he calls the "pedagogy of attention." And he looks at the markers we usually use for determining a student's attentiveness, and wonders about that.

Then Coffee-on-the-Keyboard (who is my kid) put up a great post on resource discovery. And discussed the way information comes to him and the way he seeks information. One of the things I paid attention to today was his follow-up on Twitter.

And I've been relistening to Jack Kerouac's On The Road, and heard a part where he describes what might be the beginning of the phenomenon of "tech distraction" in 1949 or 1950. Dean Moriarty tracking three baseball games at once, one on television, two on the radio.

Grad Student Madness brought me to an Atlantic article wondering if Google was destroying our brains. "I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle."

The New York Times (relentlessly anti-technology as they are) published a piece on Silicon Valley companies struggling with the distraction of email. Yes, that was classic weak journalism. Of course. It pretends that no worker without a computer was ever distracted, and it accepts statements without links to, or quotes from, any relevant data. Still, it is in the Times, so people will believe it, and quote it. "The fractured attention comes at a cost. In the United States, more than $650 billion a year in productivity is lost because of unnecessary interruptions, predominately mundane matters, according to Basex. The firm says that a big chunk of that cost comes from the time it takes people to recover from an interruption and get back to work."

All right. Listen, put me in a quiet room to study or take a test and the most likely product of that will be nothing. Zero. Nil. Nada. Let me loose among my distractions and I can be the most productive guy in town.

It is not that I work despite the distractions. It is not that at all. It is that the distractions contribute to my ability to pay attention, to function, to get things done. These inputs collide and contribute to a whole. Perhaps they also allow micro attentional shifts which give my brain breathing space it does not get when, say, a teacher tries to pour a continuous stream of information into me.

In this I think of the metaphor of moving through a very dark night. You can not really see anything in the zone you are staring straight at. All that is visible there is dark. And if you turn on your flashlight you will see only exactly what it is shining on - and you will have no chance to see anything outside that beam of light. But if you relax and stop staring you steadily become aware of all the things going on around you.

Does all this make me strange? Does it make me normal? Does it require me to avail myself of special educational needs services?

I will say this. I sure know that not everyone works best this way. I have a sister whose highest comfort comes from an isolated spot with a book. I doubt she was ever truly happier or ever truly more attentive than the years she spent at university curled up in a corner of the library at Edinburgh reading 17th Century novels and early church history with the dark Scottish day outside. I have friends who range all over the scale between my sister and I.

What I know from this is that "the classroom," as we know it, can not work. The perfect environment for study and productivity for one group of students will be poisonous to others.

For the past 150-200 years or so we have, as a society, come to believe in a certain paradigm of attention and productivity. Attention means focusing on a single task at a time. Productivity means doing one thing at a time. This made perfect sense in the mills of Dickensian Britain or the factories of Horatio Alger's America. And it made perfect sense when the function of schools was to train pupils, through repetition, to work in those mills and factories.

Before the rise of Protestantism was joined to nascent Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, these concepts did not exist, because the world did not need people who would repeat the same exact task all day long (long boat oarsmen being the exception). In those first half million years of human history multi-tasking was a given, as was divided attention. You needed to be both hunt and avoid predators. In order to hunt successfully you needed to pay attention to hundreds of things. Any subsistence farmer does the same. As does anyone building their own house. As does anyone sailing a ship, tending a flock of sheep, raising a family, cooking a meal, serving as a soldier.

In all of these learning/working environments "attention" was what your typical educator or pundit today calls "distraction." It was (and is) far closer to the idea of having 20 windows open across multiple monitors than it is to any activity in the typical classroom. What is the wind doing? What does the sky look like? Does Thor look like he's getting tired? What's moving behind that tree line? What animal left these tracks? I wonder if the dream I had last night means anything? Does this look like our last hunt/sail/mission?

We'd now call this "multi-tasking," pretending it is both new and difficult. I'd call it "human-tasking." It is one of the definitions of human operation. Sharks have one thing on their minds. Ants go about their business pretty single-mindedly. Humans take in the world, and assemble what they know through the most complex set of observations. And those observations are additive. If I watch how the students around me in the classroom behave it can actually help me understand everything from history to philosophy to economics. If I watch the rain begin to fall out of the clouds it may help me understand both science and poetry. If I overhear teachers talking I might be better prepared to understand Gramscian definitions of power.

Not every person does this the same way. Not every person handles the same quantities of information. There have always been the people who succeeded both ways. Sea captains who needed to handle a million bits of data constantly, bakers who operated with fewer inputs. Those who learned something the first time they saw it at age five and those who, despite the hundred times you've showed them, still can't quite record a television show for later viewing.

The classroom, the very structure of school, collides with these facts about human beings. By insisting that students - more-or-less - learn the same things at the same time in the same way, we limit learning in dramatic ways, removing context, removing thinking time, removing space for individual processing, and the option of a differing learning order.

This is why technology is so essential in the classroom. (see, you knew that if you stuck around I'd get somewhere) Not because technology is the only way to offer a varied learning environment, but because it is the only way we can do this without tearing down every school building and abandoning our idea of the school day.

Technology - computers, mobiles, etc. in all their configurations, linked to the internet - can allow each learner to adapt the school environment to their own needs. Those like my sister can roam the stacks of old libraries and find that book to concentrate on. Those like me can let the world flood in.

Resistance to technology is often (see any tech column on Inside Higher Ed or the Chronicle of Higher Education) based in the belief in "gaze." The idea that if a student is not staring at a teacher, they are not learning. That's a powerful belief, but it now seems a historical blip in the history of the human species. 200 years, maybe 400 if you really want to stretch it, out of all the time since we climbed out of those African trees.

But technology is actually the humane way. The human way. It lets humans get back to their natural ways of learning.

At an end-of-the-semester party, a fellow student who'd sat next to me through seminar after seminar said, "He's amazing, I've never seen anyone work harder in a class. Everything he hears he looks up, then he looks up what that suggests. Then he answers email. Then he emails the class about what he found. Then he looks at a newspaper site. Then he looks something else up." I said, "Wow, you noticed." She said, "It was amazing to watch."

See. Neither of us was looking at the teacher. Both of us were learning.

- Ira Socol

The Drool Room by Ira David Socol, a novel in stories that has - as at least one focus - life within "Special Education in America" - is now available from the River Foyle Press through lulu.com

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