I feel you’ve hit the hammer right on the head. I will argue that being engaged with the “outside world” is a great thing, but I feel that a line has to be drawn somewhere. Did we not have distractions before cell phones? We clearly did. Did some of us (including me) not phase out in our classrooms? I definitely did. But I would always constrain myself beyond a certain point. If I phased out in the last class, I would try to make it a point to listen to atleast half of the lecture before I allowed my attention to wander away. Maybe we are simply losing self control.

Great post. This is something close to my heart. I have never been able to focus too long on a single task. I used to “pretend” to multi task. I realized that I was fooling myself. New plan: I started to focus my attention on small tasks, which allowed me to change from one task to another. It takes away the monotony of being stuck with a single activity and helps me to be a “little” productive (relatively speaking of course).

Great post Syeed. We must indeed create a place for intellectual diversity in our classrooms. In research labs, this is a little more tricky. Would this not give rise to concerns about unfairness and unequal treatment among grad students?