Episode 084 - James Lang

In this episode, we talk with James M. Lang about distraction and attention, the subject of his new book. He is a professor of English and the director of the D’Amour Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption University in Massachusetts. He’s the author of five books, including Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning, Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty, and his most recent book, Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It. Jim writes a monthly column on teaching and learning for the Chronicle of Higher Education, and he edits the “Teaching and Learning in Higher Education” series of books for West Virginia University Press. Jim puts a ton of research into his books, and he’s an amazing communicator, as you’ll hear in this interview. We talk about laptop bans and classroom norms, the ethics of attention and cognitive diversity, and much more. Links • James Lang’s website, https://www.jamesmlang.com/ • James Lang on Twitter, https://twitter.com/LangOnCourse • Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It, https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/james-m-lang/distracted/9781541699816/ • James Lang’s essays in The Chronicle of Higher Education, https://www.chronicle.com/author/james-m-lang • From 2008, Lang’s appearance on the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching podcast, discussing teaching first-year students, https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/2008/05/episode-5-james-lang-on-teaching-first-year-students/