Teaching in a World of Distractions

Teaching in an increasingly distracted world is challenging. If you’ve taught in any context lately you know what I mean – students peeking at their laptops or eying their mobile phones under the table. For that matter, step into any business meeting and you’re likely to see the same thing.

So, if multitasking is the new normal, what can we as teachers or meeting facilitators do about it?  I would offer the following two tips:

Design for Maximum Engagement

Whenever students have skin in the game, they focus.  In my experience, the best way to engage students is to give them a job to do and a time limit to get it done.

For example, quite often during training programs we place learners in simulations that replicate real life. They have time to figure out a problem, and the culminating event is a meeting where they need to meet certain goals. They might need to report on research they’ve done, provide a solution to a problem or even just work to build a business relationship.

These role plays and the simulations that surround them not only are the most popular with students, but they are the most effective ways to learn. They’re hands-on. They’re often stressful. Ideally they’re sufficiently intense. They’re real-life. Students love them.  If designed well and facilitated correctly, there’s simply no time for distractions.

Training Your Brain

In an issue of Harvard Business Review from January 2012, Paul Hammerness M.D. and Margaret Moore, CEO of Wellcoaches Corporation, address the issue of multitasking in general. They propose three ways to help your brain learn to ignore distractions and ultimately improve your focus.

Tame Your Frenzy

Hammerness and Moore say that negative emotions sap your brain’s focus while positive emotions improve it. They recommend paying close attention to your emotions during the day (for example, you can take a 2-minute emotion check at www.positivityratio.com). By cultivating positive emotions each day through exercise, meditation or sleeping well, you improve your ability to focus.

The authors also suggest adding positive discussion topics and humor – whether you’re in class or a meeting – to boost everyone’s brain function.

Apply the Brakes

Distractions are not just from mobile devices. They’re everywhere – from sounds, sights, and random thoughts of the past or about the future. Hammerness and Moore say the best way to keep focus is to use the ABC method as your brain’s brake pedal.

•  Become Aware of your options – either stop what you’re doing and address the distraction or choose to let it go.
•  Breathe deeply and consider your options
• Choose thoughtfully – Do I stop or move forward?

Shift Sets

The authors say that sometimes shifting your focus to a whole new task helps. Go for a walk, climb a set of stairs, stretch out. These can all help you refocus, meanwhile your brain many times keeps cranking and new ideas often emerge when you least expect.

So, whether you’re teaching a class or running a meeting, make sure to build in breaks. Make sure there are some physical elements to help keep everyone’s brain fresh and focused.

Design and Instruction Together

To be effective, the design of a learning experience needs to work hand-in-hand with the facilitator. If the design has engaging, action-based tasks and the facilitator is vigilant in monitoring the students, asking them good questions and helping them stay on task, then the results are likely going to be exceptional.

There’s no doubt that bad learning designs make it hard for teachers to keep focus in class. But just the same, teachers who fall in love with the lecture and talk to hear the sound of their own voice make the classroom a place rife with distraction.

In these types of classrooms or meetings, by checking their phones, daydreaming or staring out the window, people are doing anything they can just to stay awake.

It’s hard to blame them, but perhaps by using the techniques above it’s possible to work together to push back and overcome distractions.

Sex or Mobile Phones: What's More Important to Us?

To us humans, it appears sex is more important than our mobile phones.

This is good news for the survival and general well being of the human race, but still a key question merits some exploration: “Just how important are mobile phones to us humans?”

Bank of America was curious about this question, so they partnered with a research company and interviewed 1,000 people, asking them basic questions related to mobile phones.

I Want My Phone Back

One question they asked was: If your phone was unexpectedly taken away, what would you be willing to give up to get it back? Nearly 80% of the respondents said they would give up either alcohol (45%) or chocolate (34%) to get it back.

They were more reluctant, however, to give up shopping (22%) or TV/movies (16%), and only 13% said they would give up sex to get their mobile phone back. So, an apparent victory for sex, you might say.

However, the study also found that even fewer people (8%) were willing to give up their car. While we still like sex and are reluctant to stop having it for our phones, sex is apparently less important than our car.

On a practical level, this makes complete sense. It’s unclear, though, whether people are willing to give up having sex in their cars to get their phones back. This question, it appears, was not asked.

Incidentally, the data on chocolate showed that women were much less likely to give up chocolate than men. A mere 27% of women were willing to part with chocolate, but 42% of men were fine with chocolate abstinence. It’s worth noting that no such gender breakdown was provided on the willingness to give up sex.

Your Hygiene or Your Phone?

Clearly phones are important to people. We’d give up guilty pleasures to reclaim them. But how does the phone rank against life’s basics? Is the mobile phone the most important item in our daily lives?

The answer is, in fact, yes. According to the bank’s study, for 18-24 year olds specifically, mobile phones ranked highest among all “life’s basic” options at 96%, edging out staples like the toothbrush (93%) and deodorant (90%). For this age range, mobile phones appear more important than personal hygiene, which could be a good thing to know.

But you can’t say it’s a generational thing. For all study respondents, nearly 50% felt they could not last more than one day without their phone. Of that group 13% said they could not be without their phone for more than one hour. These folks are what the study called “compulsive checkers.”  Another 34%, who the study said felt “naked without their phone,” confessed that they couldn’t go more than 24 hours without it.

Check, Check, and Re-Check…

How often each day do people actually check their phones? The bank’s study didn’t focused on this, but a 2015 Internet Trends report showed that on average people check their phones 150 times a day. (Incidentally, if you’re curious of your phone-checking habit, you can download an app that will track the number of times you check each day. Brilliant, right?)

Think about that for a second. Assume you’re awake 16 of the 24 hours. Checking your phone 150 times a day means doing it over 9 times per hour or roughly every six minutes. This alone speaks to our mobile phone addiction and informs the now popular acronym “FOMO” or “Fear of Missing Out.”

Today we fear that if we don’t check our phone – our pocket-sized gateway to social media, e-mail, news, texts and so much more – we could miss something important.  The fact that our urban dictionary includes a term like “FOMO” is evidence enough of the explosive growth of mobile phones in our world.

How explosive? Consider that mobile traffic in 2014 alone increased 69% over the prior year, according to the Internet Trends Report authored by research guru Mary Meeker.

Consider also the nearly 20-year growth of mobile phones. In 1995, just 80 million people – 1% of our global population – had a mobile phone. In 2014, that number has climbed to 5.2 billion or a whopping 73% of our global population.

I’d say that qualifies as a trend, wouldn’t you?

Numbers Don’t Lie

Mobile phones are big money, too. Facebook, for example, has 1.4 billion users, and of those 1.2 billion people access Facebook via mobile devices on a monthly basis.  An amazing 798 million people access Facebook every day via their mobile phones.

Mobile ads on Facebook account for nearly two-thirds of the company’s revenue. Twitter is even more mobile. Of its 302 million active users, 80% are mobile. In the first quarter 2015, 89% of Twitter’s revenue came from mobile ads.

The money explains why so many companies, like Bank of America for instance, want to understand the mobile habits of us humans. They want to know what we think, what we do and what we value so they can place their investment and advertising bets appropriately.

So, as we’ve established, the good news is that to most of us humans sex still trumps the mobile phone. Remember, though, that 13 percent of the study participants said they’d give up sex to get their phone back. That’s 130 people!

But please be aware that if that a certain special moment arises with that certain special someone in your life (cue the sexy, romantic music) and in that very moment your instinct is to pause first to check your phone, I would suggest that we as a race of people might be in serious trouble.

(Graph credits: Bank of America Study "Bank of America: Trends in Consumer Mobility Report, 2014)

The Afterglow of a Bonafide Know-It-All

We live in a world with a vast amount of knowledge, so for someone to claim to be a “know-it-all” is fairly preposterous.

Ken Jennings, however, would have a legitimate shot at this admittedly absurd title. Jennings is a Jeopardy legend, winning 74 games in a row between June and November 2004, raking in more than $3 million in prize money.  

Ken Jennings annihilating the competition

Despite this unprecedented feat, Jennings would dismiss the “know-it-all” label on two grounds: 

1. It’s impossible to “know all” given the staggering growth of the amount of information in today’s world – doubling in quantity every 18 months or so. 
2. It’s a worthless title because in this age of mobile phones, search engines and ubiquitous internet, knowing is less important since we can just look it up. 

The half-life of uranium? The MVP of the 1953 baseball World Series? The meaning of the Latin term “habeas corpus”? The origin of the term chickpea? It’s all there on your trusty phone.

I listened to Jennings deliver a spirited, funny and insightful keynote address this week in Austin to kick-off mLearnCon, a conference to explore the massive growth and future potential of mobile learning. During his remarks, which were highlighted by photos of his Jeopardy glory days, Jennings essentially declared that the “I Know” world is dead. For him personally, as a man heralded as arguably the best game show contestant in history, this has been a somewhat humbling reality.

“I was no longer a special little snowflake,” he told the audience of more than 1,000 learning and technology professionals assembled for the 2-½ day gathering.

Jennings’ status as special certainly started early and was by no means accidental. At the age of 10, after many months of savings, he purchased a world atlas and slept with it every night. As a kid living in South Korea, he religiously watched Jeopardy – aided greatly by the fact that it was a feature program on the one English-speaking TV channel available. In the 1980s, young Ken was wildly obsessed with the game Trivial Pursuit.

He was a self-confessed knowledge junkie. Despite his success and clear prowess, Jennings knows that computers are better at remembering information than humans. They are built to remember and do so quickly, accurately and consistently (for the most part).

Two brains and an IBM computer

He recounted his 2011 return to Jeopardy to face a menacing IBM computer named Watson. The high-powered string of servers was specifically designed to beat the pants off of mere mortal Jennings. And it did.

Computers can just do some things better than humans, and Jennings used this moment to speculate that computers will continue to render obsolete other knowledge-based jobs in our economy.  Computer-filled prescriptions, he pondered, could eliminate or lessen the need for pharmacists. Computers could do the research paralegals do, he offered. What about long-range truck drivers replaced with driverless rigs controlled by technology like Google maps?

Not only is it possible technologically, but the finances look attractive considering computers don’t get tired, need vacations or require health care benefits. They also don’t need those pesky pensions that seem to be crippling just about every state and municipality these days.

But Jennings stopped short of painting a picture of a gloomy, computer-dominated world. He suggested that in this world of abundant, accessible, ever-growing knowledge, our challenge as humans is determining what to do with it. Computers may recall, but they are much less adept at creating, making connections and being creative.

He recalled that in his epic computer smack down, Watson incorrectly answered “What is Toronto?” when Jeopardy host Alex Trebek stated, “Its largest airport is named for a World War II hero; its second largest for a World War II battle.” Ken and his other human opponent, Brad Rutter, correctly answered “Chicago”. They both could make the connection. The computer, despite its memory, circuitry and speed, could not.

Data input does not compute...

We humans have an unparalleled ability to tie information together and draw conclusions. We know, for example, that the question to answer, “Drop 1 letter from the type of creature sonic is in video games and you get this, one who monopolizes the aisle seat” is “edge-hog.”  We are creative. We can continue to put together knowledge in service of creative thinking and innovation.

Jennings also noted that we have the advantage of observation and timing. While computers are marvelous, we humans can use our brains and knowledge in ways that are impossible to predict and at moments that might prove incredibly timely.

He recalled the story of 10-year-old Tilly Smith from the UK. In December 2004, she was on the beach in Thailand with her mother, father and sister. While staring at the ocean, Tilly noticed it was behaving strangely – receding and also frothing near the shore. 

This triggered a geography lesson she’d just had on tsunamis two weeks earlier. Convinced that a tsunami was coming, a vocal Tilly proceeded to throw such a fuss, she convinced her parents and the lifeguards to clear the beach, saving nearly 100 lives before the massive tsunami soon hit.  

In his post-Jeopardy glow, Jennings has moved on to become a best-selling author, including a series of children’s books called, “Junior Genius Guides” on a range of topics. He is still an admitted knowledge junkie and is unapologetic for calling for us to adopt continual learning as a way of moving through the world.

In concluding his talk, Jennings quoted little known 18^th-Century theologian and thinker Dr. Samuel Parr as saying, “It’s always better to know a thing than not to know it.”

He believes in unbridled curiosity because he knows despite what you know, there is always more to discover.  Specifically what we discover and what amazing connections we will make is entirely up to each of us.

Yours truly in an awkward face-off with Ken