MANAGING DISTRACTION AND ATTENTION IN DIVERSE COHORTS: 21 st CENTURY CHALLENGES TO LAW STUDENT ENGAGEMENT

need to think in terms of transforming the educational experience so that it is meaningful to the information‐age learner. … [T]he challenge will be for educators and higher education institutions to incorporate the information age mindset of today’s learners into our programs so as to create communities of lifelong learners. 80

21 st century learners who choose to attend to face-to-face lectures typically come armed with an array of digital, internet enabled devices. These devices are a double-edged sword in that they may simultaneously distract students from their learning while having the potential to enhance the face-to-face learning experience. This article considers the notion of managing distraction as a barrier to student engagement and explores how teaching 21 st century law students requires a fundamental re-evaluation of pedagogy in order to assess the extent to which technology in teaching can redirect distractive energy into greater student engagement in active learning experiences.
The purpose of this paper is not to discredit traditional lectures. Given the extent of institutional commitment to the infrastructure of lecture theatres and the economies of scale they present in offering face-to-face learning to large cohorts, lectures appear to be a fixture in higher education. Rather this paper focuses on possibilities for transforming the lecture through opportunities for student engagement.
of effective teaching and learning for increased student engagement within a quality assurance landscape.
Regardless of the plethora of technologies at the disposal of legal educators, at the heart of effective teaching and learning must be an understanding of how best to engage our students. This requires an appreciation of their learning preferences, the learning environment and how these factors mesh with the fundamental tenets of effective teaching and learning.
I Is technology in teaching responsible for driving pragmatic law students away from face-to-face learning?
Embracing flexible delivery options to support learning in various attendance modes has been a key driver for adoption of technology in teaching law; live lectures may be available via podcast and course materials available online. Yet, it is doubtful this replication of traditional lecturing techniques into a modern medium has been successful in supporting face-to-face learning given the associated decline in student attendance -empty seats in lecture theatres speak volumes. 2 It seems attendance is rendered an unnecessary inconvenience when the learning experience is replicated, if not improved, in a more flexible delivery mode. 3 A fresh approach is needed to enhance the face-to-face learning experience and make attending lectures a meaningful and relevant learning experience for increasingly tech-savy 21st century learners. Face-to-face learning modes offer genuine opportunities for engagement. Where faceto-face learning is coupled with a use of technology the resulting blended learning environment offers opportunities for greater student engagement through active learning. 4 Lessons can be taken from research into successful online courses demonstrating the value of co-operative and collaborative teaching and learning activities with a strong teacher presence to foster engagement of students with one another and with the unit content. 5 Technology facilitates more than just new modes for content delivery. Connectedness is vital: 'Students not only need to feel connected to the unit content but also need to feel connected to the instructor and other students in the course, so emphasis on the social presence of the instructors makes sense'. 6 So what communication activities (between lecturer/ student and student/student) can help students to feel more connected and engaged with the course? Online social networking is one technological innovation that requires consideration given its demonstrated capacity for facilitating connections, collaboration and communication.
Learning is a profoundly social experience. Social networking lends its self to the social experience of learning, especially to the extent that communicating via micro blogging facilitates collaboration and conversation. The popularity of social media may be more anthropological than generational; this is evidenced by the sheer extent of its saturation among users with a capacity to connect. neither dominated by students identifying as 'net Gen', 19 generation Y, school leavers, mature students, first generation tertiary students, graduate entry students nor those who followed alternate pathways to their undergraduate legal studies. Yet cohort wide, law students increasingly demonstrate that they are not afraid of the idea of learning with technology and social media since they are frequently exposed to both in other parts of their lives. This is evidenced by a striking feature of the 21 st century law student; their propensity to bring an array of digital technology into the lecture theatre. graphics-first, active, connected, fun, fantasy, quick-payoff world of their video games, MTV, and Internet [students] are bored by most of today's education, well meaning as it may be'. 25 Oblinger and Oblinger concur, asserting that the Net Gen will simply tune out if the class is not engaging or is too slow. 26 Yet these observations ring true of most learners in such a learning environment, irrespective of generation and no matter how diverse the cohort. The relationship between passive learning experiences and student distraction appears disturbingly inversely proportional: The more passive the learning experience, the greater the capacity for students to be actively distracted by their mobile devices.
The student-user isn't the only person potentially distracted by the action on their laptop screen. Associate Professor of Humanities at the University of Colorado, Dianne E. Sieber has described the reaction as a 'cone of distraction' which extends the distraction parabolically to those behind and around the student viewing the laptop. 27 From the writer's own experiences of viewing student behaviour in lectures requiring only very passive levels of student engagement restricted to listening and note-taking, the cone of distraction is viral; those other students seem to become infected with the need to check their own Facebook status or twitterverse for activity. All of this behaviour distracts the students from the lecture materials and makes one wonder why they would bother to attend. If the lecturer's only goal for student engagement is for students to listen and perhaps take notes, and where the teaching approach has no higher demand for student attention, then distraction is a paramount concern whether that distraction is digital or not. The proliferation of mobile devices and their potential to distract students from their learning raises serious barriers to learning. The question that arises is: How should the lecturer manage the distraction? The impulse to ban laptops from lecture theatres is understandable given the extent of the distraction they facilitate. 28 A professor of geosciences at Princeton University reportedly banned laptops from his lectures after it was revealed that students were playing online poker during lectures. 29 A lecturer from the University of Oklahoma was broadcast on You Tube destroying a student's laptop with liquid nitrogen mid-lecture to dramatically make his point: laptops were not welcome in his lectures. 30 The challenge faced by legal educators seeking to actively engage students in their learning is to recognise that they are in the market for the attention of their students at every point in the learning process. Distraction is a real threat to undermining student engagement, and is most acute in classes requiring only passive engagement. Whether or not mobile technology is banned from the lecture theatre, students may still 'tune out' unless the lecturer skilfully captures their attention. Today's society is characterised by an overflow of information and stimuli. 21 st century learners are well practiced in making decisions regarding where, when and how they choose to devote their attention.
Maintaining attention and distraction are not new barriers to learning; the novelty here is the teaching and learning of law in an environment where so many technological distractions beyond the control of the lecturer are potentially present. Such a teaching and learning environment bares many of the hallmarks of an attention economy. When the issues raised by the teaching of law in a digital environment featuring risks of distraction are considered through the paradigm of the attention economy, insights can be gained as to how pedagogical practices can be reconsidered to achieve more effective learning outcomes. 28 Ibid; Al Tompkins, 'Profs should rethink Banning Laptops from Lecture Halls' (10 March 2010) Poynter <http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/als-morningmeeting/101319/profs-should-rethink-banning-laptops-from-lecture-halls/>; James Bone, 'American Lecturers Banning laptops from the classroom' (11 March 2010) Times Online <http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article7057511.ece >. 29 Bone, above n 28. 30 You Tube <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rK8B_7n1IdM>; Bone, above n 28.
The 'attention economy' was postulated by Nobel prize winning economist, Herbert Simon in 1971: [I]n an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. 31 The term 'attention economy' has been primarily associated with the economics relevant to e-commerce where economies are based on business, profits, and marketshare. 32 In these economies, attention is a scarce resource. Attention is paramount to student engagement in their learning. Knowledge about attention, capturing and maintaining attention, and managing distraction is of significant value; the question is to what extent this is relevant to learning and the design of effective learning experiences?
Goldhaber has described attention economics as 'the study of how best to deploy and structure attention to the greatest effect'. 33 In a legal education context, the benefit of gaining and retaining student attention to the greatest effect is that it opens up with the flood of data/information. 34 This was accomplished by transforming the information so as to enable the user to engage with it in the way most beneficial to them. 35 The key to Lanham's design framework was to encourage the user to approach the information in a particular way or to frame the information so as to make it compelling and interesting to the user. 36 When student engagement is viewed through the lens of attention economics, the answer to the critical pedagogical question of how lecturers should best manage distraction, is to deploy and structure attention in learning activities designed for effective learning. These factors can be addressed at the coalface of teaching and learning in legal education by selecting teaching methods with an acute awareness of the risk of distraction, particularly distraction from students' mobile devices. The solution may lie in using the technology to distract the students back into the lecture theatre through carefully designed blended learning experiences scaffolded to best capture and maintain student attention. Blended learning technologies can scaffold a range of activities that may appeal to a range teaching and learning styles. The paramount concern remains effective teaching and learning.

D. Using technological innovation to address barriers to learning and encourage effective teaching towards student engagement
The use of a variety of emerging technologies to foster student engagement and direct and deploy student attention is consistent with accepted theory of effective teaching and learning. 37 It seeks to support a range of learners with different learning styles and, similarly scaffolds a range of different teaching methods and preferences. Best practice would typically also involve a strong presence of the teacher who uses the features of 34  Scaffolding student engagement through technology could provide support where it is most needed and change and adapt over the years of the students' bachelor degree. For example first year students may benefit most from intensive, highly structured, face-toface learning experiences; in the middle years activities should be scaffolded to promote and encourage students becoming more independent in their learning, more skilled in articulating questions, and constructing arguments, more adept at collaboration and more confident in inquiring as to the state of the law and challenging the assumptions upon which the law is predicated. This scaffolded process could culminate in independent final year students skilled at self-paced learning activities and taking greater personal responsibility for their progress. At each stage a strong instructor presence as the facilitator of the learning activity is important and demonstrates academic preparedness to take responsibility for overseeing the process of supporting students in becoming skilled, knowledgeable, adaptive learners. This approach targets student engagement; students are more likely to feel connected to the instructor and other students in the course as well as to the content being studied. 39 Blended learning technologies can scaffold a range of activities that may appeal to a range teaching and learning styles. Social media such as Facebook and twitter are being used in teaching and learning in higher education. Further, commercially developed educational technology is increasingly making its way into this space; 40 Socrative and Go Soapbox are two examples. The siren call to use technology in teaching is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. Yet the focus must remain on effective pedagogy. To simply embrace technology without considering the required educational outcomes would be, at best, to put the cart before the horse, and at worst pointless. A more authentic process is for academics and educational designers to lead the process to 38  Many of these features instinctively appeal to student users of social networking media, yet avail the academic of control within the University network. Student privacy is respected through a system of preserving peer-peer anonymity, a functionality that seeks to address a traditional reluctance to speak up in large classes. 47 This technology has been put to use in a range of teaching and learning experiences to create a carefully scaffolded learning opportunities encouraging communication and collaboration even within traditionally passive learning environment. One example will be given to demonstrate the possible teaching and learning experiences that present themselves in a large undergraduate corporate law lecture on the topic of corporate constitutions, where typically the focus of the lecture is content delivery covering a multitude of complex statutory provisions and case law.
Under a traditional teaching and learning approach, where independent learning has not been scaffolded and standard passive content delivery is deployed, the lecturer may explain the underlying statutory requirements and relevance of a corporate constitution. Students may be assigned readings of key cases and chapters from the text. 47 Evans and Matthew, 'Please leave your mobile phone on', above n 46.
These readings are unlikely to be undertaken before the lecture. Neither the caselaw nor the statutory provisions engender much student enthusiasm or interest in and of themselves. The difficulty with this traditional approach is that there is very little, if any, active learning involved. Worse still, the more information presented, the quieter and more passive students appear to become. There is little to 'motivate learners to engage in understanding', 48 since the learning activity is focused on the law lecturer communicating knowledge of the topic.
This 'stand and deliver' approach is not desirable since it encourages only very passive learning behaviours such as listening and note taking. It offers minimal opportunity for student engagement with the lecture materials. In such a learning environment the potential for student distraction, digital or otherwise is rife. Learning is a profoundly social experience, yet such a learning environment actively negates this. If the extent of the lecturer's adoption of technology is a text rich PowerPoint presentation consuming large bright screens in a slightly darkened ampitheatre style lecture theatre, then student engagement is unlikely and students may 'tune out' to the spoken word in order to focus on the PowerPoint presentation. Research has established this phenomenon as a dysfunctional allocation of attention: students are inclined to focus intently on the slides and suppress the spoken lecture in order to maintain that focus. 49 The traditional corporate law learning experience often involves content delivery If the learning experience is reconsidered with a clear focus on accepted principles of effective teaching and learning, the primary concern becomes how to make the learning experience a more engaging, active learning experience. To what extent is this possible if the lecture is still to be used for content delivery? Appropriate use of technology can afford a more enhanced teaching and learning construct.
In this new construct students in the face-to-face learning environment of the lecture theatre can be encouraged to go online via their own internet-enabled devices to access a particular company's constitution, and then to read and consider it in small groups formed with the students sitting immediately next to them. Similarly, they can also be asked to access legislation or one of the relevant cases online. Student reading and discussion can be guided by a quiz uploaded to their mobile devices to identify the key provisions of the constitution and their relevance to the statutory provisions from the initial debrief. In this approach, technology can be used to provide a framework within which students can process the lectured material. Students can upload their answers to the quiz and immediately see the results in graphic form. This can be used to provide feedback to the students on their understanding of the topic as well as to afford them the opportunity to see how their peers answered the quiz.
OWL adopts many of the features of social networking technology in an educational technology construct: It allows students to set their own quiz questions to challenge other students or to answer challenges from other groups of students. They can 'like' or respond to other student's posts. The quiz results and collaborative online discussion can be used by the lecturer to inform and direct the next step taken in the lecture. The lecturer's role is transformed. In this teaching and learning environment, the lecturer's primary role is to be responsive to the students' learning needs. This will involve responding to what he or she identifies as gaps which have been revealed in the students' understanding of the area. At the conclusion of the lecture a record of the online conversational learning is uploaded to the unit's website for the benefit of students not able to attend and for revision. 50 This new construct allows for a richer, authentic learning experience where students are shown the practical and theoretical relevance of the material and are 'encouraged and enabled to engage repeatedly in the goal-action-feedback-reflection-adaptionrevision cycle'. 51 The lecturer is able to 'motivate the iterative exchange of ideas' and students 'have an increased sense of ownership of the whole' learning experience since 'their own contributions clearly playing a role in the synthesis of ideas'. 52 The critical point is that the technology is not the driver of the learning approach.
The starting point is determining a teaching and learning approach directed at effective teaching and learning; this is considered in Part III. Consideration can then be given to whether technology can enhance the pedagogical approach. In the example above, OWL was chosen as the technological platform to support the chosen teaching and learning approach after consideration of a range of technologies all of which would have involved deployment of the students' mobile devices in the learning activities. Both Twitter and Facebook facilitate near instantaneous micro blogging features, while raising new challenges in directing conversational threads. Neither readily facilitates polling. Facebook offers extensive opportunity for collaboration but opens a Pandora's box of privacy issues associated with keeping personal/work/study discrete.
Commercial applications generally, even those that are developed as education specific technologies, raise concerns associated with a loss of institutional control over student use. The extent to which web based technology such as OWL affords effective teaching and learning is considered in Part IV.

Student in a quality assurance landscape
Regardless of the plethora of technologies at the disposal of legal educators today, pedagogic priority remains effective teaching and learning. Extensive research establishes as a truism that teaching and learning is most likely to be effective when students are actively engaged in their learning. 53 In an effective teaching and learning matrix, formulating engaging teaching practices must take into account the nature of the 21 st century learner and their attitudes to learning, and should explore pedagogies, environments, and techniques that are supportive of learning goals. Effective teaching is of critical importance and 'require[s] an ongoing evaluation by the teacher of the effect of the teaching on the learning of students, and modifying the teaching in light of the information collected'. 54 This may necessitate adapting the teaching and learning environment to meet the learners' needs and then reflection upon the teaching and learning experiences and outcomes 'in order to improve either the task practice or … articulation of the theory or concept'. 55 It has been argued here that student distraction emanating from use of mobile devices in face-to-face learning is a barrier to learning for the 21 st century law student. Rapid technological change and the affordances it offers for engaging face-to-face learning are critical considerations in a re-evaluation of pedagogy focused on effective teaching and learning approaches that address barriers to learning. Such re-evaluation of 21 st century pedagogy takes place within a quality assurance landscape. This adds further complexity, while demonstrating the wider relevance of the affordances technology offers in effective teaching and learning.
Legal education across the globe now embraces skill development and graduate capabilities as integral to law school curriculum. The focus is on producing students who are knowledgeable and capable with adaptable, transferable skills. If legal education is to retain authenticity in its approach of equipping undergraduates with the 53 Ramsden, above n 4; Biggs and Tang, above n 4; Gibbs and Habeshaw, above n 4; Keyes and Johnstone, above n 37; Johnstone, above n 37. 54 Johnstone, above n 37, 29 citing Paul Ramsden and Agnes Dodds, Improving teaching and courses: A guide to evaluation (University of Melbourne: Centre for the Study of Higher Education, 1989); Richard Johnstone, 'Evaluating law teaching: Towards the improvement of teaching or performance Assessment (1990) 2 Legal Education Review 101; Paul Ramsden, 'Evaluating and improving teaching in higher education  skills necessary for them to become 'adaptive learners', 56 well placed to learn in new environments such as those into which they will emerge as new practitioners of law, then the universities equipping them with those adaptive skills ought also demonstrate commitment to adaptive learning themselves by engaging in reflective and adaptive practice in rethinking pedagogy in changing learning environments. This will involve commitment at both an institutional level and at the coalface of teaching and learning.
There are opportunities here for learning design to address more recent priorities introduced into the higher education landscape. Government initiatives seeking to address standards and quality assurance in higher education have seen the establishment of the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA). TEQSA is responsible for the development of a quality assurance framework in higher education. The scaffolding of the framework is discipline specific academic standards. have identified that 'many students are now proficient in such skills before they arrive at university'. 65 TLO 5 casts a wide net for 'collaborating effectively' extending beyond teamwork to 'working in groups and working collaboratively with others'. 66 The Notes include enthusiastic statements in support of TLO 5 from stakeholders consulted in the process of developing the TLOs: 67 Through the LTAS consultation process, many members of the profession have emphasised these skills as critical to the modern legal workplace.
Delighted to see collaboration with others! This is routinely difficult to develop, and we know that it leads to success professionally. There are opportunities here to harness technology as a platform for enabling interaction directed at the synergies that result from fluid real time collaboration.
Technology can enhance and enable learning activities that support students in developing the skills targeted in TLO 5 by supporting them in learning how to formulate questions, building student confidence in asking question, formulating appropriate responses, being supportive of other student as they develop skill and confidence in learning the same, and learning throughout the whole process about the synergy that comes with successful collaboration. The micro blogging and 'like' features of social media and ideation tools are particularly supportive of this approach.
Technology should not be adopted in teaching without a strong pedagogical basis for its use: technology should not be used for technology's sake. 68 Such an approach lacks authenticity; students are unlikely to see the point and less likely to engage in such learning activities. This is true of teaching methods generally; as Johnstone explained in the context of exploring the different teaching methods at the disposal of law teachers in 1992, well before the technological avalanche that began with the Internet and the World Wide Web: These methods should not be used as ends in themselves, but only with clear purposes which should be communicated to the class. If students do not appreciate why they are using a particular method, they may resist its use. 69 A considered approach is to re-evaluate existing pedagogy in light of new barriers to learning, and to pursue innovation only if it has the potential to both address these barriers to learning, benefit the teaching and learning process and, in a legal education context, keep a firm eye on the Bachelor of Laws TLOs. Such an approach is more likely to result in design for more effective and innovative teaching and learning experiences, Siemens has suggested that existing learning theories are limited by the central tenet that 'learning occurs inside a person' and fail to take account of learning that occurs outside of people or through organisational knowledge. Siemens has suggested a new learning theory -connectivism -in which knowledge can be 'actionable' in the sense that knowledge is stored, for example on databases, and then manipulated through the use of technology. 70 As such, the bedrock of connectivism is the connections of interplay between learners, teachers and information that enable learning. Siemens suggests that connectivism is better placed to account for the learning that happens in a networked environment saturated with information. 71 Laurillard's conversational framework 72 also accommodates connectedness as a necessary part of the dialogic nature of the framework requiring 'repeated interative interaction'. 73 Existing learning frameworks can benefit from technologies that embrace and enable similarly dialogic connectedness. 74 Teaching has become a design science in which technology can facilitate effective learning. 75 The possibilities for learning afforded by students' own mobile devices and other emerging technological innovation are far broader than merely offering another platform for traditional communication techniques already used in learning and lecturing in law; using technology as just a more flexible platform for traditional content delivery is simply 'using the digital to emulate the conventional'. 76 While websites and podcasts may add value, they are also still largely passive learning experiences; '[t]he additional value they offer is logistic rather than pedagogic: They offer more flexible study'. 77 Yet innovative technologies can be exploited to enhance learning by exploiting the features of the technology to shift the focus of the learning activities from 'teacherfocused to learner-focused activities', 78 as an essential part of the 'the continual iteration between theory and practice, learner and learner, and learner and teacher'. 79 We need to think in terms of transforming the educational experience so that it is meaningful to the information-age learner. … [T]he challenge will be for educators and higher education institutions to incorporate the information age mindset of today's learners into our programs so as to create communities of lifelong learners. 80 This paper has suggested that harnessing the appeal of social media in a learning environment, deploys collaborative learning strategies offering opportunities for greater communication, collaboration and interaction in learning. Such an approach to learning design is steeped in appropriate theory supporting active, effective learning. It has been contended that learning experiences constructed for multi-modal collaboration motivate quality learning in a way that is more powerful than 'a partial contribution to a class discussion'. 81 Use of technology in this way gives rise to possibilities to transform and enhance the learner's learning experience: 'The introduction of the digital technology enables the teacher to design at the level of much more precise learning iterations'. 82 These considerations may also inform the better design of learning experiences to encourage engagement of online students, whose current experiences with learning technologies may be restricted to listening to podcasts. Technology rich learning spaces 83 facilitate opportunities for live involvement of external audiences in the face-to-face learning. Such approaches address barriers to 76 Laurillard, 'The pedagogical challenges', above n 48, 15. 77 Ibid 12. 78  learning including isolation of the remote student and can inform learning design for more engaging effective learning even among the remote audience.
Even in traditional lecture theatres the technological possibilities afforded by students' own mobile devices may well unlock the key to effective learning in an attention economy. While it may be convenient to think of mobile devices as part of the problem, the better approach is to look at it as integral to the solution of facilitating engaging learning experiences.
IV Evaluation: to what extent do these technologies successfully facilitate engagement Further research is required exploring the extent to which technologies such as those explored in this paper facilitate engagement. Web based technologies that are specifically designed for educational use are based on extensive research demonstrating the pedagogical effectiveness of clicker systems. There is a preponderance of academic literature on blended learning reporting on the impact on learning of lecturing to large groups with student response systems (SRS), also known as clickers. 84 This research supports teaching and learning approaches using clickers to transform the traditional large lecture from an impersonal, passive, anonymous learning environment into a personal, active and responsible one. 85 In these studies, clickers were found to have contributed to effective, active learning, 86 increased student engagement, 87 increased interest in unit materials, 88 fostering critical thinking skills, 89 improved understanding of content, 90 positively influencing learning outcomes and exam performance. 91 Teaching with clicker technology affords opportunities for interaction, and scaffolded solutions to encouraging more extensive communication through student contribution of questions, ideas and comments giving the lecturer an immediate opportunity to assess understanding and provide meaningful feedback to students in the learning environment. 92 It is this clicker enabled scaffolding that Wieman and Perkins attribute as the key driver of the positive impact of clickers on student engagement. 93 Hoekstra's ethnographic study concluded that clickers not only contributed to making the learning environment 'feel more active and engaging', but also helped students to manage distraction, 'develop conceptual knowledge, work with discipline specific terminology, practice critical thinking, and cultivate peer relationships beneficial to the learning process', and afforded opportunities for alleviating boredom in lectures. 94 While the success of student response systems in promoting effective teaching and learning towards greater student engagement is encouraging, these systems do not make full use of technological innovation where they are based on a largely one-way digital communication medium, and further, they do not necessarily address barriers to learning such as distractions from students' own internet enabled mobile devices.
Current innovation in learning design has the potential to move beyond clicker technologies to a new level of active blended learning experiences by incorporating many of the features of social networking technologies. These technologies enable teaching to harness the real time connectivism facilitated by internet enabled social networking technology.
To the extent that HiST and OWL use students own devices in the face-to-face learning activities, these uses of technology in teaching offer the lecturer opportunities to scaffold learning activities in a way that will provide the students a framework for information/unit content. Using the students' own devices for interactivity related to the lecture must also limit the extent to which the device remains available to distract the student via the inevitable array of distraction of which the device is otherwise capable. The HiST study reported that students found the technology effective in their learning, made attending lectures more enjoyable and were in favour of the technology being deployed in every lecture. 95  inherent in the adoption of on-line commercial social networking applications in university teaching. While commercial social networking sites offer effective and popular means of facilitating communication, there is no guarantee that student users will adhere to their university's internet use agreement. There is little doubt that universities seeking to minimise potential risks associated with offensive or potentially defamatory postings, would prefer to have the capacity to take down information. 101 This is an important consideration at the institutional level. Davies and Lee warn that virtual education involving engagement with social networking technologies will increasingly have to cope with the potential for malevolent or inappropriate user behaviour as the 'virtual education world' expands. 102 Where the technology chosen is beyond the university's control, particular issues arise as to best practice in student and staff use. QUT has developed Social Media Guidelines for Learning and Teaching to specifically cover best practice in educational use of commercial social media applications. 103

V CONCLUSION
Students today are overloaded with information and confronted by escalating levels of distraction. The challenge for academics is to recognise that they are in the market for the attention of the students all the time; to get them to enroll, while they are in face-toface learning environments and while they are engaged in study outside the classroom.
Students are likely to be increasingly tech savvy and to be carrying powerful mobile devices. Paradoxically, while this is the source of distraction for many students, it is also the key to creating opportunity for teaching methods which will hold their attention.
These mobile devices create a whole new paradigm for the construction of a dynamic interactive learning experience in the classroom. Exciting opportunities exist for scaffolding learning and rethinking pedagogy to embrace the technology, manage distraction and compete effectively for student attention in an attention economy. Such interactive teaching and learning experiences have the potential to enhance teaching and learning. Importantly, while the technology is changing, the principles of effective teaching and learning remain the same. If face-to-face legal education is to remain relevant enough to survive amid distraction in an attention economy, the need to rethink pedagogy so as to embrace emerging technology is inescapable.
Universities may continue to develop and evolve their own integrated learning technologies such as HiST and OWL. Commercial applications are likely to increasingly dominate the educational landscape. The advantage of developing in house applications is the institutional control it creates over content, access, and methodology. An emerging area of future research will involve testing the effectiveness of the uses of current and emerging technologies in achieving student engagement and delivering enhanced teaching and learning outcomes.
As with any economy, competition will produce winners and losers and ultimately only market leaders will survive. The challenge for lecturers in law is to embrace the creation of an efficient face-to-face product offering that can take advantage of (rather than suffer at the hands of) the 'digital backpack', 104 and deliver enhanced teaching and learning outcomes.