Attention
What ideas do you have for holding your learners’ attention in meaningful ways throughout the experiences you design? What role might form play in your ideas?
After reading Julie Dirksen’s chapter on engagement and attention and also participating in our in class analysis activity, our team was able to solidify a few different plans for maintaining attention in our own learning experience. Dirksen’s bike analogy that she expanded upon in this chapter (shown below) initiated an interesting conversation for our group surrounding the appropriate scaffolding and build up for a learning experience centered around reframing failure. With such a big and intangible end goal, we have found it both challenging and necessary to identify ways to ease our learner’s into the experience while still generating new and interesting questions to get (and hold) their attention.
The generative research we have been conducting, in which participants fill out an empty concept map about their perception of failure and success, has also helped us to confirm the need for easing people into the subject matter. Though we have found a good amount of overlap between these concept maps and have gotten very interesting discussions out of them, we quickly noticed that participants were kind of overwhelmed and/or taken aback by the open-ended nature of our topic and the questions we were asking. In turn, we found that the participants felt more pressure to give formalized, “correct” answers as opposed to more genuine feelings and behaviors. This really highlighted for us the importance of creating an accessible, but still intriguing, entry point into the experience so that we don’t overwhelm our learners and lose their attention right off the bat. A few ideas we have come up with for doing so include; structuring the content from more concrete to more abstract (i.e moving from superficial or everyday “failures” such as a failed dish to professional and finally personal failures), or having learners work through past, present, and future (from reflection on tangible experiences to application of skills and lessons moving forward). Another thing we would like to consider as we continue working through this attention dilemma is how much should be disclosed to the learners at the very start of the experience. Should the learners know upfront that the end goal is to open up about failure and question common tendencies, or should we work up to it slowly and hope that that happens naturally? Would terms like failure and success scare people way and if so, should we consider different terminology?
In tangent to these questions regarding the entry and build up of the experience, we also began to think more critically about where we might to incorporate breaks, points of reflection, and/or space for learners to really internalize these difficult concepts (again, referring back to Dirksen’s bike diagram). Should our experience have built-in time and space for this internalization (potentially through asynchronous components), or does it simply expand into something the learners can continue to engage with and revisit over time? While we haven’t quite answered this question yet, we did find some very useful inspiration through the in- class attention exercise. For example, we noticed that the game that Sophia’s group analyzed, Spent, was really effective in holding learners’ attention by intermixing deep game play (immersing them in the “synthetic world” as described by Zimmerman) and interesting, real- world facts that help to ground the players and provide applicable knowledge. We also found that storytelling turned out to be a very powerful tool across all three learning experiences that we analyzed, and one that we really want to leverage, primarily by facilitating a space for our learners to exchange and create their own stories or narratives. Leveraging learners existing habits, on the other hand, was not the most prevalent attention tactic across these experiences, though it is another one that we think could be especially useful to explore further as it could help our learners work towards mindset and behavioral shifts.
