“The Brain Melt Is Real”: On Student and Instructor Notions of Digital Technology-Induced Distractedness at McMaster University
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines the rapid expansion of the ‘discourse of distraction,’ which I define as a widespread public perception that students who grew up with access to digital activities are unable to concentrate on academic tasks, and, that such activities in adulthood are distracting. Based on a literature review and semi-structured interviews with Social Sciences undergraduate students and faculty at McMaster University, I argue that the contemporary socio-political environment of universities has facilitated the utilization of digital technologies in a manner which is harmful students’ ability to concentrate. I also argue that digital technologies impact various socio-cultural dimensions of the university. Finally, I suggest that the discourse of distraction has sufficient force to change how people interact with digital technology and schoolwork altogether.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.039 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".