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A couple of months ago I started experimenting with the use of Twitter and other social media in my wired college classrooms. Meanwhile, out in California, Howard Rheingold was exploring the question of wired attention spans with his UC Berkeley social media class. Rheingold turned these explorations into a series of compelling vlog posts called “Training Attention.”

All of this got me thinking about the nature of engagement in a wired world. It struck me that we’re in need of some form of scaffolding for particpatory and social media use. Specifically, the creation of some sort of attention scaffolding that transports the user beyond a state of random gratification and sensory overload.

These thoughts led to an inspiring conversation with fellow educator and webby Rabble.ca columnist Wayne Macphail. Macphail turned this dialogue into a Rabble column he called “May I halve your attention please?”

“One of the things we ported over to new media from traditional media was the notion of the passive audience. We’ve continued to expect students, viewers and conference participants to not split their attention cycles between the real and virtual worlds, or between the relatively passive world of the classroom lecture and the siren call of the interactive online communities and conversations.

For McBride that chittering back channel itself isn’t the problem. The problem is, as instructors, we haven’t given it anything useful to do. “Students are telling us they want to be engaged. So, we need to find a way to give them specific focus for that back channel. If they’re doing stuff that’s on-task we’re going to get engaged learning and ownership,” she says.

A task for you: Create your own curriculum

In the spirit of the conversation and ideas above and using Michael Wesch’s video “A Vision of Students Today” as a starting point, I’d like to ask you to take up the following challenge: Create 2 questions you might ask a high school or college aged student about this video. Please leave your 2 questions in a comment below or create a blog post of your own (based on this idea).

I designed this activity to transform your investment of (viewing) into the production of meaningful attention scaffolding for this content.