In the Spring 2009 edition of Digital Humanities Quarterly, Eric Gordon of Emerson College and David Bogen of RISD write about “Designing Choreographies for the 'New Economy of Attention.'” This is one of the smartest pieces I've seen about the use of multiple forms of wireless media in the classroom because it goes beyond the old binaries of support/subvert.

http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/2/000049.html

Gordon and Bogen write, “Our concern is not to critique the new social media as extensions of a shallow and historical amnesiac mass culture, nor alternatively to take a position on the efficiency of new technologies for delivering educational content or their efficacy at meeting students "where they live," and thereby entering into the competition for their time and attention. Indeed, our central concern is not about technology at all, but is instead about more stable and enduring features of human performative practice that enter into and shape the physical and symbolic sites of teaching and learning wherever and however they are organized.”

They provide short intellectual histories of “attentiveness” as a focus of cultural and intellectual value, via Simmel and Munsterberg, and of performativity, via Goffman, and describe an NEH-funded project in which they incorporated multiple backchannels into a lecture, which necessitated considerations not only of the online technology but of the structuring of the setting—arrangements of tables, screens, etc.

They write, “we depart from the trend in the literature on e-learning that continues to treat distraction as a problem to be solved as opposed to an emerging set of practices to be cultivated. Attention is performative and situational; as such, we make the argument that designing and implementing new choreographies of attention should be central to building sustainable models for knowledge production and dissemination in the contemporary academy.”