so it may surprise you to know that I've always been a bad student.

I started off OK.

In elementary school

I was the kind of kid who would hurry to get his homework done,

in those gaps before recess and on the way home, on the bus,

so that I could consolidate my time

to spend on the kinds of things that I wanted to do.

In middle school, I was the kid who would get in trouble for drawing

when I was supposed to be paying attention.

And I was starting to discover that I didn't always agree

with the ideas that the teacher had for my time and energy.

In high school, I would be sitting in the back row of the class

reading a novel when the teacher was lecturing.

When I went to class at all.

Often I would skip class.

I wasn't a hopeless case,

I might go to the library and learn about things I was interested in.

I might just go to the river, near my school,

and read, or draw, or write stories.

Just so my kids understand

because I know they're going to watch this:

not paying attention in school comes at a price.

When it came time for me to enter my senior year,

I found that I didn't have enough credits to graduate.

Thankfully, my parents had the idea to convince the school

to let me take independent study courses from the university

to make up the credits.

This was the early '90s and the height of technology

was audio cassettes and paper based assignments.

But I discovered that the media didn't really matter.

Because I was able to learn at my own pace and at my own place,

I could outpace the high school calendar

and learning actually became more enjoyable,

and I actually did a better job at it too.

Yay, I made it.

I went on to college and about the time I entered in college,

there was this thing called the World Wide Web,

and I had been so compelled and impressed

by that independent study experience that I immediately latched on the idea

that this Internet can help us learn differently.

And I was right.

Up until that time, I'd really thought about online education

in terms of giving you access to all these great resources

anytime, anyplace,

and also for adding that flexibility of time and space.

I didn't really think about the human interaction part of it

until one semester, an English literature professor said:

"We are going yo use this thing called the online bulletin board for discussions,

that are going to go on outside of class, in between our regular sessions.

I know, online discussions are like old hat.

This is one of the earliest forms of online education.

You are going to have to bear with me a little bit

as I walk through why these are an important way to illustrate

the flexibility of online tools for teaching.

Let's start by thinking about the traditional face to face class.

You are a teacher, and you have your class in front of you.

You may ask them a question.

As soon as you ask that question, the clock starts ticking,

and it's a race with all the students in the class

to see who can come up with an answer and quickly raise their hand.

You are going to call on maybe one or two of them,

whoever you may notice.

And then they are going to have a chance

to articulate their answer orally, in front of their peers,

with what limited knowledge and resources are available to them

at that time and space.

You don't have time to call on everybody,

which is probably just as well

because not everybody is ready to respond, and not everybody wants to respond.

Let's compare that to the online discussion.

In an online discussion, you might post a question on Monday,

and give students until the following Monday

to make their responses.

So now students are not racing against the clock.

They have time to think about their response.

They can refer to external resources, books, materials, websites, whatever,

and they all have a chance to respond.

You can actually enforce that expectation that everybody participates.

Because it's online, you as the teacher, now have a way to measure

both the quantity and the quality of their responses.

This is a good way for you to use that

as another form of assessment of their understanding.

Finally, because it's online, it's preserved,

and students can use those historic discussions

to help them prepare for exams, or write their papers,

or just to reflect on their learning at any point in the future.

I was sold and from grad school on, I dedicated almost all my energy

to designing and developing online courses and programs.

So let's fast forward a decade.

I've been doing this at the university for quite some time.

I myself had been teaching online for a number of years;

when my team was tasked with leading a new blended teaching initiative

where we would take parts of a face to face class experience

and replace it with online activities.

I thought: this is great.

I can get more faculty teaching online by easing them in through blended.

And I thought: let me go first.

Let me be the guinea pig and show you how it's done, right?

Because we can take my online course

and take it back into the face to face classroom.

This is going to be amazing, I thought.

And turned out to be a disaster

because I had been teaching online for so long, I had been out

of the face to face environment for so long,

I didn't understand what to do with the time and the space.

So I did what was probably the worst thing imaginable:

I took that existing online course and I built on top of it.

And I started by replicating the materials that I had already created online

in the classroom, via lecture.

So every single week in the face to face sessions,

students would come in,

and they would here the exact same stuff that they had already seen online.

I ended up doing what a lot of teachers do when they build a blended course

which is to create a course and a half.

This didn't do much to help my reputation as a tough teacher, I can tell you.

And because it was redundant, the students stopped attending the class

and their engagement started to dwindled.

And I felt really bad about it.

The right way to go about doing a blended course

is to first start by fully understanding

the benefits and the limitations of both modes, online and face to face,

and to create assessments and activities in line with those outcomes

according to the different affordances of each.

So I created some new in class activities.

We did peer critiques face to face, to help soften the blow.

We did some usability tests, some MOOC usability tests,

so that students could actually see all of the actions of their classmates,

and we did some hands-on problem solving that took advantage of real time.

Today, technology continues to advance, and I think we are starting to see

some of those limitations of online fade away.

For example, that same online discussion forum,

that same asynchronous discussion forum,

can happen, not just with text, but also with video.

It can happen in just a couple of clicks, on your laptop or even on your phone.

But the idea of blending online and face to face is still fascinating,

in part because today, we all live blended lives.

When I wake up, my phone has been tracking my sleep patterns.

I know, I'm kind of a nerd.

You guys probably all use an online calendar

to help you get to physical appointments on time.

And when I collaborate on a document with my colleagues,

it's usually online, even if we are in the same room.

When I go out to lunch with a friend, we use an app to help us find restaurants,

and so on and so forth.

So while I'm teaching classes nowadays, my LMS will notify me

when there are new assignments I need to grade,

which helps me be more prompting giving feedback,

and I can give feedback using multimedia.

It's really interesting to think about

how our lives are becoming increasingly blended.

But it does make me wonder if perhaps,

in the same way that I built a course and a half for my students,

we might not be building a life and a half for ourselves.

Because we have access to information all the time.

We are almost constantly connected,

and because time now seems so easily managed,

we think we can do it all.

How did we get this way?

Let me give you a little bit of perspective

by sharing with you David Levy's ideas about the history of reading,

as they move through these three different stages:

from intensive to extensive to hyperextensive.

So the intensive stage of reading was when there were very few books,

they were all made by hand,

very few people knew how to read and had access to those books,

and so they did read those books very intensely, very deeply,

in a very narrow set of topics.

Then, the Gutenberg press came.

Reading materials were made more accessible to more people.

Society's literacy rates improved,

and the extensive stage of reading lasted through the 20th century,

and it gave us access to enough kinds of reading materials and information

that we could go fairly broad and fairly deep on any given topic.

Then came the web,

and the floodgates of information were opened up.

Now, when we go looking for information,

we can find just that one particular piece of information on the web

that satisfies our need at any given moment.

This is called the hyperextensive stage,

where we move very broadly and rather shallowy

from one piece of information to the other.

So this idea of hyperextensive reading

is backed up by evidence from usability studies

that use eye-tracking software to understand what you are looking at

and what you are reading at any given point in time on the web.

And this study showed

that not only do people read very little online,

but they moved from one webpage to another very rapidly.

These habits are encapsulated in this term: informavore

which is a way of describing our behaviour online,

as we track down the scent of information.

This always has a cost-benefit decision associated with it

as we get online, and we go from one page to another,

we click on one link or another.

The benefits are going to be new information, more information,

some sort of social reinforcement, some kind of entertainment, perhaps.

But the cost is always going to be our time and energy,

and I think Eliot was speaking ironically here when he said:

"There will be time, there will time..."

because there is never enough time.

And so, we multitask.

And it doesn't really work.

It just puts us in this state of continuous partial attention,

and the thing that is more painful to me

is that it inhibits us from entering states of flow.

The states of flow which Csíkszentmihályi describes

as those periods of concentrated attention where you are able to focus

on the thing that you are really good at in a challenging way,

and your sense of time and space warps.

You are in that moment,

and not only are you on the path to mastery,

but you are fulfilling your potential, and you are fully enjoying life.

This is my son, his name is Willem.

He is 11.

Don't let the computer fool you.

Willem is the poster child for flow states.

In fact, in this picture,

he's building a computer game using the software Scratch.

He does this everyday for hours, literally hours everyday.

He gets so concentrated, his attention is so focused,

that he actually can't stand to be interrupted.

He gets a little bit angry, even at the mildest distraction

that might impede his progress in building his game.

And I like that.