The brief.
In this IP we tracked our attention once every hour (or more) including multi-tasking and for how much of the hour we paid attention to any combination of objects. We needed to try and identify/characterize the attentional object and how it arose. Using our notes, after some time had passed, we needed to sort through our notes for patterns and relationships and then create a visual representation and analysis of our notes on attention.
*We were also invited to have a ponder about “what varieties of attention seem to you to be most educationally important and why”.
Attention chart.
I tracked my attention over 12 hours. I wrote notes in my phone as I was moving through my day, then consolidated them into a short journal entry per hour, though more time was tracked that just once every hour. I didn’t break down the hours into small brackets of time, rather I narrated the events as they happened in real time.
Note analysis.
Looking through my notes, here is what I was paying attention to as items for analysis: digital communication, face to face communication, paper-based notes, digital devices, digital tools, sensations, other people, locations of other people, things I was meant to remember, textual information, space, the environment outside, my needs, prices, looking for things, time. Immediately, some larger themes stick out. I am paying attention to time in nearly all of the hours I’ve tracked. In fact, I was paying attention to time to track the hours I was recording within as well as the time things within the hours were taking. Other people and the spaces they occupy were also a big attentional matter of concern for me. Sensations seemed to also play a big part in what I was paying attention to. Look at the pie chart below for how often in my original scratch notes I thought about each topic. To clarify, the chart below shows a count of how often I paid attention out of 12 hours. If I paid attention to time 4 times within one hour, it was still counted as once. I counted the number of hours in which an attentional event occurred around a topic. The analysis is fleshed-out below, using this basic tick-style count as a leaping off point to generate infographic information.
Attention allocation.
The analysis.
The infographic below is constructed using Yves Citton’s 2017 Ecology of Attention to frame the highest frequency attention events in the above pie chart. The bulk of my attention was spent on time itself, on my own embodied sensations and needs, on other people (especially in face-to-face and digital communication mediated by note-taking), on digital devices, and on the environment outside. These patterns are configured through Citton’s lens to illuminate how my attention has been configured at different levels and how it forms an ecology around me and my environment.
An ‘educational’ bonus.
To answer the last question in the IP: What are the types of attention that might be most educationally important?
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According to Citton (2017), the mother of all attentions. Perhaps, if we zoom out from what Citton might mean here regarding technological devices and applications, we could incorporate other tools under this attentional umbrella. Not only do the materiality of our devices configure attention and create future materialities, but so do our pedagogies, learning outcomes, and classroom/virtual learning environment configurations. In education, our attention is constantly being configured and framed by ‘tools’ both technological and pedagogical.
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Those involved in teaching and learning processed constitute unpredictability in the center of technogenetic attention in the ways that we individually superimpose frameworks of meaning over the information we’ve attended to (Citton, 2017). In understanding we have agency in how we approach our environment via these frameworks and in understanding that how we approach that environment affects our information-attended-to in the future, we become re-centered in the attention ecology. Educationally, this seems vitally important to help re-center learners and teachers in the process of attending and to improve the ability of learners to live a good life.
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In the commodification of their attention (not the re-centering of their agency, but in the exploitation of their attention as consumers), learners have more choices in how their attention is deployed (de Castell & Jenson, 2004). In thinking about games as a way to harness more attention as unison, we might find ways of strengthening the frameworks learners use to shape what they attend to, as well as extending attentional resources (de Castell & Jenson, 2017; Green & Bavelier, 2012). Games recall earlier forms of ‘pre-literate attentional practices’ (p. 390) to engage with information, its medium of conveyance, and how it is disseminated (de Castell & Jenson, 2017). They may also put sensations of pleasure back into the learning process, so it becomes more fully embodied (de Castell & Jenson, 2017).
References.
Citton, Y. (2017). The ecology of attention. Polity Press.
de Castell, S., & Jenson, J. (2004). Paying attention to attention: New economies for learning. Educational Theory, 54(4), 381–397.
Green, C.S., & Bavelier, D. (2012). Learning, attentional control, and action video games. Current Biology 22(6), R197–R206.