Paying attention to attention: New economies for learning

Educational Theory

Volumn 54, Issue 4, 2004, Pages 381-397

  De Castell, Suzanne ^a   Jenson, Jennifer ^b  

^a SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

^b YORK UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33846412744     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.0013-2004.2004.00026.x     Document Type: Article

References (51)

1. Henry Jenkins, "Complete Freedom of Movement: Video Games as Gendered Play Spaces," in From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, eds. Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 262-297.
2. Lloyd P. Reiber, "Seriously Considering Play: Designing Interactive Learning Environments Based on the Blending of Microworlds, Simulations, and Games," Education Technology Research & Development 44, no. 2 (1996): 43-58;
3. and Suzanne de Castell and Jennifer Jenson, "Serious Play," Journal of Curriculum Studies 35, no. 5 (2003): 1-17.
4. This is not to suggest that game-based learning offers a useful and appropriate "motivator" or "support" for existing learning goals, but that it provides learners with an environment and a set of tools that will make them want to think and to do very different things than the curriculum guide prescribes.
5. Mark Prensky, Digital Game-Based Learning (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001).
6. James P. Gee, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
7. Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins, "Chess for Girls: Feminism and Computer Games," in From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, eds. Cassell and Jenkins, 14.
8. This also presents a powerful sociocultural disincentive to female participation in these subjects and fields.
9. One recent claim of this sort is contained in a recent report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, which concluded that "women are more likely than men to be regular players of computer and online games - approximately 60% of women compared to 40% men reported this, while about the same number of men and women reported playing video games." See Pew Internet and American Life Project, "Let the Games Begin: Gaming Technology and Entertainment Among College Students," http://www.pewinternet.org/ reports/toc.asp?Report=93 (last accessed June 25, 2004).
10. Warren Thorngate, "On Paying Attention," in Recent Trends in Theoretical Psychology, eds. William J. Baker, L. Mos, Hans van Rappard, and Henderikus J. Stam (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1988), 247-264;
11. Warren Thorngate, "The Economy of Attention and the Development of Psychology," Canadian Psychology/ Psychologie Canadienne 31, no. 3 (1990): 262-271;
12. Warren Thorngate, "More Than We Can Know: The Attentional Economics of Internet Use," in Culture of the Internet, ed. Sara Kiesler (Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1997);
13. and Warren Thorngate and Fatemeh Bagherian, "The Political Economy of Attention and the Limits of Pedagogical Technologies," in Technology/Pedagogy/Politics: Critical Visions of New Technologies in Education, eds. Lee Easton and David Hyttenraugh (Calgary, Alberta: University of Calgary Press, 1999).
14. Michael H. Goldhaber, "Attention Shoppers!"Wired Magazine 5, no. 12 (1997), http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.12/es- attention.html?pg=3&topic= (last accessed June 24, 2004).
15. Michael H. Goldhaber, "The Attention Economy Will Change Everything," Telepolis (May 1998), http://www.heise.de/tp/english/ inhalt/te/1419/1.html (last accessed June 24, 2004).
16. Ibid.
17. Fatemeh Bagherian and Warren Thorngate, "Horses to Water: StudentUse of CourseNewsgroups," First Monday 5, no. 8 (2000), http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue5-8/thorngate/index.html (last accessed June 28, 2004).
18. Herb Simon, "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World," in Computers, Communication and the Public Interest, ed. Martin Greenberger (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), 109.
19. Goldhaber, "Attention Shoppers!"
20. Goldhaber, "The Attention Economy Will Change Everything."
21. "Illusory attention" is Goldhaber's term for ways of giving others the impression that one is paying attention to them when, in fact, one's attention is directed elsewhere. Goldhaber argues that since giving attention is necessary in order to get attention, we will effectively get more attention than we give only insofar as we can devise convincing forms of illusory attention.
22. Philip W. Jackson, Life in Classrooms (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968). For a subsequent study that draws similar conclusions, see John I. Goodlad, A Place Called School (New York:McGraw-Hill, 1984).
23. Goldhaber, "Attention Shoppers!"
24. Richard A Lanham, "The Economics of Attention," Michigan Quarterly Review 36, no. 2 (Spring 1997): 270-284, also available at http://www.arl.org/arl/proceedings/124/ps2econ.html (last accessed July 27, 2004);
25. and Richard A. Lanham, "What's Next for Text?" Education, Communication and Information 1, no. 2 (2001), http://www.open.ac.uk/eci/lanham/ femoset.html (last accessed June 25, 2004). The latter work will be cited as WN in the text for all subsequent references.
26. For more on this issue, see Gee, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy;
27. Gunther Kress, Literacy in the New Media Age (London and New York: Routledge, 2003);
28. and Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel, New Literacies: Changing Knowledge and Classroom Learning (Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2003).
29. Lanham, "The Economics of Attention."
30. He articulates this most fully in Lanham, "What's Next for Text?"
31. To illustrate these forms of multimedia information display, Lanham gives examples from avionics, in which complex images are combined with alphanumeric displays in airplane cockpits, and of CD-ROM versions of books in which an author can appear with, within, and superimposed upon her or his text to assume multiple roles, not least the hitherto quite separate roles of both author and critic simultaneously.
32. See, for example, Eric Havelock, "Instruction of Preliterate Cultures," in Language, Authority and Criticism, eds. Suzanne de Castell, Allan Luke, and Carmen Luke (London: Falmer Press, 1988), 223-232;
33. and Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 278-293.
34. See, for example, Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982);
35. and Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964).
36. Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
37. For extensive discussions on the importance of a multimodal literacy, see Donna E. Alvermann, Adolescents and Literacies in a Digital World (New York: Peter Lang, 2002);
38. Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, Multimodal Discourse (New York and London: Oxford University Press and Arnold, 2001);
39. Kress, Literacy in the New Media Age; Gee, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy; Lankshear and Knobel, New Literacies.
40. Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel, "Do We Have Your Attention? New Literacies, Digital Technologies and the Education of Adolescents," in Adolescents and Literacies in a Digital World, ed. Alvermann, 19-39;
41. and Lankshear and Knobel, New Literacies. The former work will be cited as YA in the text for all subsequent references.
42. We should note that Lankshear and Knobel actually describe three perspectives; however, we take the third - drawn from advertising's concern with gaining consumer attention - to be sufficiently similar to Goldhaber's analysis to justify treating them as a single perspective, one that is focused on seeking, gaining, and maintaining attention. Whether that securing of attention is for individual satisfaction or for corporate gain seems, from an educational standpoint, more a difference of degree than of kind. For more on Goldhaber's account, see Goldhaber, "Attention Shoppers!";
43. and Michael H. Goldhaber, "The Attention Economy and the Net," First Monday 2, no. 4 (1997), http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue2-4/ goldhaber/ (last accessed June 25, 2004).
44. This is an argument for the development of a theory of attentional economy better attuned to educational ends, and although its intent is to offer some generative directions for that project, it by no means achieves the larger goal of theory development.
45. de Castell and Jenson, "Serious Play"; and Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play."
46. This may represent a very significant difference between pedagogy in nonformal versus formal educative environments. In schools, curricular objectives, which are scoped, sequenced, and timetabled, regulate prescriptive attentional economies; in nonformal learning environments, it is more often the learner's attention, including both its focus and its duration, that shapes how learning activities are regulated. For a more extensive discussion of the centrality of learners' attention to developing non-schoolbased pedagogies, see Suzanne de Castell and Jennifer Jenson, "It's All Happening at the Zoo: Attentional Economies in Non-formal Learning Environments," in preparation.
47. Lankshear and Knobel, New Literacies, 203.
48. Gee, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy.
49. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949).
50. Steven Poole, Trigger Happy: Video Games and the Entertainment Revolution (London: Fourth Estate, 2000), 178.
51. For more on how policy entrenches traditional text-based definitions of literacy, see Allan Luke, "What Happens to Literacies Old and New When They're Turned into Policy," in Adolescents and Literacies in a Digital World, ed. Alvermann, 186-203. For a recent discussion of new theories of literacy, see Kress, Literacy in the New Media Age.