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Multitasking, or "continuous partial attention" as Linda Stone has called another form of attention-splitting, or "hyper attention" as N. Katherine Hayles has called another contemporary variant,2 are not necessarily bad alternatives to focused attention. It depends on what is happening in our own external and internal worlds at the moment.

As students become more aware of how they are directing their attention, I begin to emphasize the idea of using blogs and wikis as a means of connecting with their public voice and beginning to act with others in mind. Just because many students today are very good at learning and using online applications and at connecting and participating with friends and classmates via social media, that does not necessarily mean that they understand the implications of their participation within a much larger public.

ut how to participate in a way that's valuable to others as well as to yourself, I agree with Yochai Benkler, Henry Jenkins, and others that participating, even if it's no good and nobody cares, gives one a different sense of being in the world. When you participate, you become an active citizen rather than simply a passive consumer of what is sold to you, what is taught to you, and what your government wants you to believe. Simply participating is a start. (Note that I am not guaranteeing that having a sense of agency compels people to perform only true, good, and beautiful actions.)

I don't believe in the myth of the digital natives who are magically empowered and fluent in the use of social media simply because they carry laptops, they're never far from their phones, they're gamers, and they know how to use technologies. We are seeing a change in their participation in society—yet this does not mean that they automatically understand the rhetorics of participation, something that is particularly important for citizens.

Critical consumption, or what Ernest Hemingway called "crap detection," is the literacy of trying to figure out what and who is trustworthy—and what and who is not trustworthy—online. If you find people, whether you know them or not, who you can trust to be an authority on something or another, add them to your personal network. Consult them personally, consult what they've written, and consult their opinion about the subject.

Finally, crap detection takes us back, full circle, to the literacy of attention. When I assign my students to set up an RSS reader or a Twitter account, they panic. They ask how they are supposed to keep up with the overwhelming flood of information. I explain that social media is not a queue; it's a flow. An e-mail inbox is a queue, because we have to deal with each message in one way or another, even if we simply delete them. But no one can catch up on all 5,000 or so unread feeds in their RSS reader; no one can go back through all of the hundreds (or thousands) of tweets that were posted overnight. Using Twitter, one has to ask: "Do I pay attention to this? Do I click through? Do I open a tab and check it out later today? Do I bookmark it because I might be interested in the future?" We have to learn to sample the flow, and doing so involves knowing how to focus our attention.

“It’s not about teaching shortcuts, it’s about teaching them not to take the long way to a goal,” says Elisa Addlesperger, a reference and instruction librarian at DePaul. “They’re taking very long, circuitous routes to their goals.… I think it embitters them and makes them hate learning.” Teaching efficiency is not a compromise of librarianship, adds Jagman; it is a value.

One type of photography in which setting is very important is travel photography.

Using landmarks, monuments, or famous natural elements in a photograph is a core technique for evoking a sense of place.

The photographer selects the focal point not only by focusing the camera but also through other techniques.

shutter speed to bring only one element into focus immediately elevates that to the most important part of the image.

one element in the photograph is strongly backlit, it may seem to glow and thus draw the viewer’s attention.

What is the photographer’s thought process as she composes, frames, shoots and selects an image? Listen as photographer Lisa Maizlish narrates the decisions she made in photographing the students featured on the PBS reality show American High.

viewers have to decide how to interpret a photograph’s context

information about the people, events, setting, and so on are made explicit by the photographer — there are distinct visual clues that tell us who the people are, what they are doing, and where and when the photograph was taken.

implicit — implied but not clearly communicated by the photographer, or left to be inferred by the viewer.

identities of the people

unclear

their purpose may be unknown

time and place may be difficult or impossible to discern.

Viewers may not even realize that they are making those assumptions

Just as successful written communication requires that the writer and reader speak the same language, successful visual communication requires that the photographer and viewer share a common "visual language" of signs, clues, and assumptions.

Were your assumptions correct? Can you always trust your first instinct? (And even having read the caption, how much do we really know about these girls and their lives?)

a different culture might ask why this round brown object is

we have to be careful that we have enough cultural background in common with the photographer to correctly interpret what we see.

The photograph by itself tells us very little about what’s going on; we probably could have invented any number of captions, and you’d have believed us!

hen, in a comprehensive study of over 100 high school students with dyslexia done in 2013, using techniques that included eye tracking, we were able to confirm that the shortened line formats produced a benefit for many who otherwise struggled with reading.

For example, Marco Zorzi and his colleagues in Italy and France showed in 2012 that when letter spacing is increased to reduce crowding, children with dyslexia read more effectively.

A clever web application called Beeline Reader, developed by Nick Lum, a lawyer from San Francisco, may accomplish something similar using colors to guide the reader’s attention forward along the line.  Beeline does this by washing each line of text in a color gradient, to create text that looks a bit like a tie-dyed tee-shirt.

one aims to increase the throughput of the brain’s reading buffers by changing their capacity for information processing, while the other seeks to activate alternate channels for reading that will allow information to be processed in parallel, and thereby increase the capacity of the language processing able to be performed during reading. 

The brain is said to be plastic, meaning that it is possible to change its abilities.

people can be taught to roughly double their reading speed, without compromising comprehension.

Consider that we process language, first and foremost, through speech. And yet, in the traditional design of reading we are forced to read using our eyes. Even though the brain already includes a fully developed auditory pathway for language, the traditional design for reading makes little use of the auditory processing capabilities of the brain

While the visual pathways are being strained to capacity by reading, the auditory network for language remains relatively under-utilized.

Importantly, our early indications suggest that the least effective method of reading may be the one society has been clinging to for centuries: reading on paper.