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If I am not careful, my cellphone will wake me up in the wee hours with buzzes or pings to let me know that news organizations and family members on the other side of the world, in different time zones, are trying to get my attention. Is it too dramatic to say that "there is a global war" for our attention? I don't think so. Last year I did a little experiment with students in my Media Economics course . Each of them was asked to keep track of how many notifications or alerts they received on their phones or computers during a 45-minute lecture. The average was about 15 alerts, or one every three minutes. WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat were the chief distractions. For a professor leading a class, these alerts could be considered competition. (At left, Christian Zibreg tells how to remove distracting messages from the locked screen.) The distraction industry The competition for user attention has never been greater, and every news site and app is fin...

I want to share with you my translation of a blog post (Spanish) by my friend and colleague Jose Luis Orihuela, a professor at the University of Navarra, author, and keynote speaker. Orihuela is addressing a problem that faces many teachers and professors: they say their students are distracted by all the media on their smartphones and are not paying attention in class. Don't blame the students, he says. Blame the professors . "It has to be said again: the problem is not that the student is distracted by technology but that the professors have to change their methods and the content of their teaching. "It's easy to place the blame on the students and their devices; the hard thing to do is redesign education to adjust to a culture of connectivity. You can't teach against the culture of the students. You have to build on top of it." He mentioned a well publicized column by a professor in Uruguay who decided to throw in the towel rather than fight against stu...

At the end of a semester-long course in digital journalism , I asked my students at the University of Navarra in Spain to say what they thought was the most interesting or useful part of the course. The survey was anonymous, so I give it some credibility. The question was open-ended. The second-most-mentioned item was a class exercise I gave them in which they had to judge the navigability, usability, transparency , and other factors of any website they liked. This group exercise put theory into practice and developed their analytical skills . (No. 1 was the video interviews with digital media entrepreneurs from Latin America. They are in Spanish and can be seen on my YouTube channel . Accompanying text in English is available elsewhere on this blog.) The exercise took 45 minutes and followed a 45-minute lecture on the theory of Internet design, especially as it applied to taking advantage of mobile and social platforms. First, I told the students that they were going to do an ungrade...

Photo from U.S. News & World Report The Internet is a revolutionary tool of communication. Because of that, teachers of communication have to face up to the possibility that our models for teaching and learning are becoming less effective and relevant. Like many of my teaching colleagues, I have complained that students don't read. Well, they do read, but in a different way. To understand the trend, we should step back and look at another communications tool that was revolutionary in its own day -- the Book. ( Versi�n en espa�ol ) For at least 500 years, research and teaching at universities has been built around the Book. We teachers of communication are still People of the Book while our students are People of the Internet . The professor and journalist Jose Cervera explains the difference (in Spanish) in a brief article called "In Praise of the User", on his blog, El Retiario (The Net Warrior), published on Spain's public television website. El Retiario com...