Preparing for the Future with Emerging Technologies

In order to learn new conceptual ideas and new skills, we need to focus our attention -our conscious thinking – on the material we’re trying to learn. There’s a place for some intentional ‘attention-grabbing’ – something that breaks the rhythm of an exchange; something that’s a bit ‘whizz bang’ – but this kind of episodic attention might not always lead to the conceptual learning we’re seeking and certainly can’t be sustained. There’s also the hope that the material is simply intrinsically interesting – the book, the story, the lecture, the maths exercise… we might want to imagine students will sustain attention just to continue the sheer joy of the learning. But we all know that even in very interesting films, books and lectures, our attention can drift. We’re human. And of course the students with the least prior knowledge and weakest powers of self-regulation will drift fastest.