Education gaze traditionally foregrounds student agency and pedagogical approaches to smartphone distraction in the classroom try to reclaim an illusory independent human agency.
Therefore, more stimulating and engaging pedagogy alone is not the answer to smartphone distraction when students already have their smartphones in their hands.
My answer is stimulating and engaging pedagogy plus nudges; when students already have their smartphones in their hands we need to use adaptive digital nudges at appropriate times to nudge the student to get back on task.
How to do this is to use software agents. As software agents continue to evolve, “these software agents will ostensibly know enough about you, and be tirelessly connected and competent enough regarding all things digital, to be your concierge, research assistant, tutor, etc.” (David Vogt, ETEC 523 course, Summer 2020, UBC).
I showcase exemplars of next generation software agents soon to be available to be at the service of teachers and students which, alongside stimulating and engaging pedagogy, combat smartphone distraction in the classroom.
Read all about it here on my website. I welcome your comments. Please tell me, what do you think?
I have been a fan of nudge theory for quite a while, Dr. Jaclyn Broadbent at Deakin University in Australia has been a using intelligent agents and nudge theory to enhance student performance in her online psychology courses with over 1000 students per term. She uses nudge theory and intelligent agents to keep students on track and engaged. What I found missing in your OER were practical examples on how to use these tools in a the classroom. A great source for some examples would be here https://www.jaclynbroadbent.com/ in the Innovation section. Another great place to look is around an open source tool called OnTask (https://learninganalytics.ubc.ca/get-started/try-a-pilot-tool/ontask/). Theories are always of interest and the ideas are great but giving some concrete, practical examples allows the readers to put it into context.
My insurance company is asking to install this app on my smartphone to get a discount for good driving. https://www.tdinsurance.com/products-services/auto-car-insurance/my-advantage
The website says “The program collects and analyzes driving data such as acceleration, braking, speeding, cornering, and time of day, and assigns a driving score for each trip.” I am reading the documents they sent me and it tells me that the app uses GPS to collect data on all your trips, even when you are walking and if you are not driving but sitting in a vehicle as a passenger. From the document “The App will also collect all Data that identifies a movement with the mobile device, including when you walk. Once the App can accurately identify your Trips, Data not associated with a Trip will not generate a driving score and will not be used to calculate the Program discount. It will only be used for the purpose of improving the accuracy of the App. You may also correct inaccurate Data in
accordance with Section 6.3 (Correcting your Data) provided herein.”
Ram, I really loved the nudges part also – and it’s maybe given me some added inspiration for A3. I really appreciate the home page of the site too (and by the way, what a great site – so well laid out) where we can kind of choose to follow whichever path we see fit. I did a project last year for another one of Dr Vogt’s courses where I “created” a website/resource called Choose Your Own Ed-venture. Your site reminded me pleasantly of that. I like very much the idea of getting to choose your areas of interest without having to wade through a lot of other stuff.
From your site: “When Siri grows up, I predict that students’ smartphones would be inhabited with software agents to combat distraction that face-off against the leagues of software agents coming from global economic networks outside of the classroom and the interests of tech companies such as Facebook, Google and Apple.”
That’s an interesting idea to me. My mind immediately goes to the idea of Apple building in blocks to other massive tech companies so as to keep people on task. Money talks and I have a hard time seeing a world where Facebook doesn’t spend some cash to get around certain digital roadblocks – but I’m definitely a pessimist when it comes to things related to the prevalence of capitalism.
I will say I’d have liked to see a little bit of mixed media to make easier to digest the information after we’ve clicked through to our topics of choice.
But for those who are earnestly looking for information and data on this or that topic, they’ll be willing to put in a lot of time reading through your thorough postings.
Overall I really enjoyed the site visually and informationally. And I learned a couple of things immediately. And I got some inspiration. So for me this OER is a big winner!
Hi Tyler,
Thank you for your comments. I appreciate it very much. You made some really astute observations about Facebook, Google, Apple and the other giants. Thinking about 5G, should we throw in Bell, Rogers and Telus? The future should be interesting.
I will be building on this for my A3 so that makes two of us.
Thanks, Ram.
Hi Ram,
Great website and blog features! I enjoyed the information about education gaze and the points about pedagogy and its impacts with this. Because I don’t have experience with students who have their own devices in school, I can’t comment on knowing what it’s like to have them in class. I was thinking about nudges and how it would be important to use them in conjunction with engaging teaching strategies to support the students. I was wondering if at some point students would just ignore the nudges and begin to develop a negative connotation with them? Perhaps, tailoring the nudges so they are positive/encouraging reminders versus negative ones may help in this case? For example: Instead of the nudge reminding students “to get on task” it could be something like “almost finished, 1 paragraph to go.” Again, I don’t have experience with students who have mobiles, so it’s difficult for me to relate, but that is what came to mind.
It was interesting to see your concept map of the outcome of addictions that can occur from mobiles. I had not heard the term “nomophobia” before and it made me really think about how students could develop a great dependency without their phones and become “nomophobic” which is a scary thought.
So, how much do we want our students to rely on intelligent software agents without compromising their well-being.
Thank you for a wonderful website of information!
Thanks Kat. Yes, you are absolutely right, positive reminders are the way to go. I agree with you. I like your example of helping the students manage their tasks and encouragement. The example on the website is for information workers in the workforce. I think an app for students would need to have more children/student friendly interface and language.
This is a great insight into Distractions with the many mobile tech we have use. I was interested in what you stated about productivity at work and distractions as that is where most working individuals fall and sometimes fail today. I do not work with students, but I can relate to the “Information workers interrupted by conversation were more likely to return to work on more peripheral tasks such as emails and web searches, rather than resume their previous task.” The being “focused at work” is dependant on the jobs we have and types of technology and multi devices we use.
I have tired using task apps as intelligent agents to help in managing productivity and it is a hit and miss and depends on the one’s discipline on using it. A hardware example is the apple watch – when it was release it was hailed as something to keep our lives manageable, track lifestyle and numerous other things. However, after using it after a month, it was never picked up again. Maybe discipline wore off or there was not enough nudging to keep using it.
Thanks Luke. You are correct, I think intelligent agents offerings in the consumer marketplace are yet to mature. Take Siri, for example, she is just an intelligent conversational agent or what are also called chatbots.
Both your responses, Ram and Luke had me thinking about intelligent agents that could build in disciplinary methods to help serve our daily life needs? I am not sure exactly how you teach discipline and if it would become just an annoyance if the “nudges” or reminders became quite nag-like.
I know for students at school, when teachers try to kindly reminder students, it either becomes annoying or the reminders become less effective with its repetitive nature. As for in the workforce, I really enjoy and often need the reminders throughout the day. With Luke’s example with the iWatch, I have been using mine for a couple of years. One of the nudges I enjoy is the mindful breathing. In fact, I will often use it alongside with my students at school and we do mindful breathing together as a class…sometimes even if it’s just a couple of breaths, it really resets our tone and mood and allows us to get back to our work.
Did you come across any information on intelligent agents, keeping track of your “daily habits” and user privacy?
Hi Kat,
I believe that we just have to use positive reinforcement and hope it works. The reminders part I understand for sure. I have to set myself reminders for practically everything in my life … even reminders that I need to remind my children about something (if they are sleeping and I need a reminder to speak to them in the morning). It could be that we just need to remind kids all the time: “that is due tomorrow”, “you left your garbage on the desk, please pick it up, the next class is coming”. Reminders, reminders all the time.
About privacy, I believe that depends on the application. If you need the agent to do more things then you would be sharing a lot. Now TurboTax has everything about you because they are online and your taxes are stored on their server. On the other hand, if we have an agent which sends the student a reminder to complete a task then all the agent would need to have is a task list of my assigned tasks and due dates to send the student a reminder that they are not active in Mathletics when that is what they should be doing.
Thank you, Ram for clarifying about privacy! It’s a really good thing to know.
I appreciate the information. It’s time to set reminders now for these assignment due dates!
Much appreciated
Hi Ram – Ha – your reminders seem to be taking over your life. Perhaps tech has allowed ourselves to be attached to our devices, which not sure if that is good or bad. But at work, I do have to put reminders on every email that I can’t response right away as they get buried with the rest.
My thinking is that we have taken more than we can handle and technology is like the extension that is taking care of this buffer of extras that we cannot get to or our brains are loosing focus.
I asked my 70 year old parents how they managed as they constantly say why do I have 2 screens and a laptop with all these programs open. When they were in their office back in the 70s/80s, they just have MS word or an in house data entry program they used. They were never stressed and few reminders.
Oh how times have changed. 🙂
Nudges like this make sense. Nudges (vibrations telling us we have a message) serve to distract us, especially when using our own devices in a BYOD model. Having nudges remind us to keep on-task just makes sense. I browsed through the categories on your site and there were neat examples of various forms of future-software that could alter human behaviour but I didn’t see something like a simple app that would remind you that you’ve been off-task for 5 minutes etc. An app like this could slowly get “smarter” as new tech is developed and as it monitors your habits and the developers add functions to it.
I am excited for the day when AI becomes a lot more intelligent and can have a conversation with me. I was impressed by Google’s demonstration last year of its assistant making phone calls, but I haven’t had any fluid interactions with any digital assistants and I have read that this is pretty far off still.
Thank you, Jonathan. I agree with you. I believe we are still awaiting more AI solutions to come available in the marketplace. Notice that the ones I reported on are still research prototypes.