What to do with texting in class?

If you talk to college professors about modern US students, you will hear a lot of complaints about short attention spans, laziness and indifference. A recent article in the Chronicle got its readers' pulse rate up by asking Are American Students Lazy? Many people agreed, others defended the students and found flaws in the author's argument. But blaming aside, it's still up to us to figure out how to be effective teachers in the modern times. Here is an interesting article Designing Choreographies for the "New Economy of Attention" that explores what we as teachers can do to direct student attention towards learning.

"Rather than banning laptops and phones from the lecture hall and the classroom, we aim to ask what precisely they have on offer for these settings understood as performative sites, as well as for a culture that equates individual attentional behavior with intellectual and moral aptitude."

Gordon, Eric and David Bogen, “Designing Choreographies for the ‘New Economy of Attention,’ Digital Humanities Quarterly, 3.2 (2009)