Graduate Student, Gevirtz Graduate School of Education, UC Santa Barbara
Monica Bulger is a doctoral student at the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education and Director of the Bren Graduate Writing Center. Her research interests include educational technologies, online literacy, and student engagement. She currently works with the Technology in Education research initiative, an interdisciplinary team that studies the impacts of technology on student learning.
If the new form of literacy for the information age is the ability to manage, process, and filter multiple documents from multiple modes and sources, what types of cognitive skills do readers need? Access to information is no longer a problem, instead the challenge lies in distilling meaning.
Distraction, attention deficit, or lack of concentration are common, in the visual field as well other fields of perception, as a defense against overstimulation; forces of habit or automatism are widely regarded as normal, as inference in the somatic field; and the peer group exerts an influence, creating a common libidinal bond which is a kind of suggestion ... From the vantage point of a dialectic of attention and distraction, any appeal against forgetting is an attempt to dictate what people should think.