Shifting Focus: From Books to Laptops to Face-to-Face Discussion

Dr. Michael Heim

In November 1985, I joined educators in the California Educational Computing Consortium in Oakland, California, to urge adaptation of computers in the classroom. Since then, I have written books and articles about computer interaction, even arguing at the First Conference on Cyberspace (1990) that computer screens exert a nearly erotic pull on human attention. In 2008 at the University of California at Irvine, I introduced a policy that bans laptops from the classroom where I teach a discussion section of freshmen Humanities. What does this reversal mean? What are the broader implications of current struggles in business and education to balance laptops with face-to-face communication? Do we adequately appreciate the power of focus and the ability to shift the focus of attention? Is contemporary society harvesting information technology in ways that are most fruitful for shared publics?

A turning point came for me at the moment when a class of 22 students divided into smaller groups to discuss questions about a book on urban planning by Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities). With roughly five students in each group, the discussions began with two or three students in each group sitting behind laptops. In minutes, the bodies of the laptop students shifted as their individual desk chairs began to angle away from the center of each group. The perceptible shift seemed to increase by the minute and appeared to affect each group by draining fully present attention from the discussion. As energy ebbed from the discussion, other students reached into their backpacks for laptops – ostensibly checking answers or consulting notes, but they may as well have been responding to the diminishing effort by group members to face one another, observe body language, and engage in what some ethical theorists call "the responsibility of making eye contact." This weakening of embodied communication may have been happening earlier than the winter of 2008 when it first caught my eye, and it may have escaped notice because my focus is often on the computer terminal that is a fairly essential component of teaching in "smart classrooms."