If you recently attended a course in a classroom, you know what this story is going to be about. A professor talking to the group, and students looking at their laptops or telephones.

Are they taking notes? Or are they IM-ing with their buddies?  Does the professor in any of these two situaties have the full attention?

Howard Rheingold shines an interesting light on this dilemma.

When I asked the students to reflect on that question in our online for, they started confessing that they knew from experience that multitasking in class almost always means withdrawing attention from the teacher and other students.

Then I allowed them to use laptops again, and captured and replayed video of them doing it. Then for several class sessions, only three students at a time kept their laptops open, and were responsible for taking notes for the class.

In this article he also points at  Linda Stone’s work on what she calls “continuous partial attention” and his Stanford colleague Cliff Nass’ experimental work measuring the effectiveness of multitaskers. Recently, a book named ” RAPT: Attention and the Focused Life was published.

You can also look at this handy widget, a tool that keeps you up-to-date with all the sites Rheingold bookmarks with the tag “attention.”