Thanks to another LAK12 participant I found this great presentation on participation from Marty Kaplan called “From Attention to Engagement“.  He quotes Herbert Simon

  What information consumes is rather obvious; it consumes the attention of its recipients”

Attention is limited; information is not and the amount of attention you can give cannot take in all the information now available.  People have a limited bandwidth, and Kaplan shows a quick video from Mihaly Csikszentmihaly to reinforce the point – you need to process about 60 bits per second but you can absorb only 110 bits per second so you can’t listen to two people at once.  (Couldn’t any infant class teacher or mother of more than one child give you specific examples of this problem?) The computer distracts my attention from the focus of my work.  For instance, I had a recording as a sound file to send a colleague so I opened my email to send it but it is too big a  file so I have to download software (Audacity) to convert the file to a smaller format so that it is small enough to attach to any email.  That’s only a minor hiccup before I can go back drafting the email, but if you’ve got a slow computer (old and low specification), then it can take an hour or more to do, by which time you’ve almost forgotten what you were doing.  Or you’ve lost that great idea you had, as did this PhD Comic student.

Or you can divert your attention to writing a blog, but my students would thank me for my attention when I get back  to marking their assignments.