James Lang’s book, Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It offers useful context around ideas about distraction and tips on how to understand it, educate around it, and manage it. Lang notes “The difference between us and our nineteenth-century cousins is not that our attention capacities have somehow been permanently diminished, as Carr would have it, but that people and devices that seek out attention have become better at soliciting it from us” (pg. 48). Lang urges us to “cultivate attention” rather than “prevent distraction,” and argues that supporting students to understand the nature of distraction and the ways in which their devices leverage the understanding of distraction can be helpful; below are a few ideas from Lang on how to do this.
