{"id":375,"date":"2016-06-02T17:55:04","date_gmt":"2016-06-03T00:55:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/wicnews\/?p=375"},"modified":"2016-06-03T16:39:51","modified_gmt":"2016-06-03T23:39:51","slug":"mindfulness-distracted-writers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/wicnews\/2016\/06\/02\/mindfulness-distracted-writers\/","title":{"rendered":"Mindfulness for Distracted Writers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"H5Y00D4OFT\"<\/a><\/p>\n

By Vicki Tolar Burton, WIC Director\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

We are all distracted writers. David Levy, Professor of Information Sciences at the University of Washington, is so concerned about the effects of omnipresent media on his students that he asks them to study themselves and their own media-driven distractibility. Try this: While you are reading this article, make a hash-mark every time you think about your phone or email and what new message might have arrived. Don\u2019t check it, just mark it down. Or ask your students to do this for the first fifteen minutes of class tomorrow. Levy believes that our immersion in technology has a cost, and that cost is loss of the ability to maintain focus. Not only do Levy\u2019s computer science students meditate for five minutes at the beginning of each class, but they also conduct reflective inquiries regarding their own technology habits. Using the screen-capture video tool Camtasia, students video themselves working on email for 15 minutes. The software records their facial expressions while they complete\u2014or skip around among\u2014online tasks, and tracks every move they make online during the fifteen minutes. Then students review their video and data and write a paper analyzing their own online habits as revealed during that time. Levy\u2019s pedagogical goal is to teach his students contemplative and reflective practices that will help them improve focus and attention span. (Pod Talk, October 2012)<\/p>\n

Stanford\u2019s Alex Soojung-Kim Pang describes himself as an intellectual omnivore and futurist focusing on technology trends. Much like Levy, Pang claims that we live in in a state of permanent semi-distraction and that there is a need in our lives for deep, extended thinking. We must relearn how to support the life of the mind because, \u201cDistracted people never change the world.\u201d Pang asks his students to keep a technology diary in which they record and reflect on their lives in technology. He aims to help his students change the way they relate to technology through what he calls Contemplative Computing, which is also the name of his website. In his book Addicted to Distraction<\/em>, Pang advocates for apps referred to as Zenware\u2014software that simplifies the interface so that your screen has as few distractions as possible. Zenware is designed to help writers manage their online clutter, focus on the task at hand, clear the screen of toolbars and icons, and write more productively. WriteRoom for Macs and DarkRoom for PCs are among the most popularly reviewed clean-screen apps.<\/p>\n

We university teachers have much to learn from colleagues like Levy and Pang. The distracted students in Levy\u2019s IT classes have their counterparts in our own courses. We see them in class, eyes lowered and hands cupped together as if in prayer. They are not praying, of course, but reading and sending text messages on their tiny, addictive phones. Instead of turning iphones into contraband and us into the tech police, I suggest that we can find ways we can help our students improve their ability to focus, think, and write in a sustained way by bringing contemplative pedagogy to our classrooms.<\/p>\n

I approach both mindful practices and their use in writing pedagogy with an experimental mind. I like to try things. I ask students to try things with me and on their own. I ask them to turn off their phones when they are writing, to reflect and write about what happens. I invite them to dwell with their topic, and as they do so, to let go of distractions, to break the technology trance or whatever trance is distracting them.<\/p>\n

Mindfulness seems suddenly ubiquitous, even making the cover of Time<\/em> as the next big thing. Daniel P. Barbezat and Mirabelle Bush, in their 2014 monograph Contemplative Practices in Higher Education<\/em>, identify contemplative practices and pedagogies as inward or first-person focused approaches that promote introspection, and reflection<\/em>. \u201cWhether they are analytical exercises asking students to examine a concept deeply or opportunities to simply attend to what is arising, the practices all have a . . . focus that creates opportunities for greater connection and insight\u201d (5). Their goal is \u201cto stimulate inquiry\u201d (6). According to Barbezat and Bush, the goals of contemplative pedagogies include:<\/p>\n