Multimedial Refocalizations of Attention in Digital Learning: An Interdisciplinary Model

Erzsébet Dani

Some years ago I created a digital-learning-related teaching model for higher-education purposes and called it HY-DE model (to be described in detail below) as it was based on the HYper and DEep modes of attention.1 It was meant to respond to the new learning environment of the digital world, which called for innovative teaching models. The theoretical model started from the circumstance that the communicational and information-searching as well as learning habits of what I term the “bit generations” (generations Y and Z) have changed; that students of the digital world have attained extremely high stimulus threshold, a refined sense of the visual, and can be characterized by an emphatic presence of hyper attention. The model works with manipulating the phases of hyper and deep attention with the help of the digital environment: starting out from the hyper phase, attention is gradually steered towards the deep phase, where serious learning can take place.

The modeled process is multidisciplinary as it comprises several disciplines. The semantic networks of the individual disciplines (discipline [=a branch of science], discipline [=rules, regulation, rigor], and disciple [=pupil, follower, student]) are all there in the way the HY-DE model operates. They refer simultaneously to research area, regulation of research (inclusive of normative methodological rigor), and teaching, which introduces the student into the terminology and methodology of the given research area. The involved disciplines transgress their boundaries, though, exerting their combined effect through a division of labor as it were (Barry, Born, & Weszkalnys, 2008). Thus self-contained disciplines transcend their own constraints to attain HY-DE objectives in synergy, yielding a new pattern of learning and more effective teaching.

It is in the affinity and interface of the various independent disciplines, subdisciplines, and branches of learning where interdisciplinarity develops, in which the theory of the method is grounded. I availed myself of the research methodology, terminology, and relevant research results of psychology, cognitive psychology, brain research, philosophy, narratology, pedagogy, digital pedagogy, reading research, sociology, learning theory, educational assessment and measurement, digital literacy, and applied informatics. Some of these areas are interdisciplinary in themselves. Thus my model can be regarded as based on multi/interdiscilinarity, doubly or even several times over.

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