The attention and motivation problem
When people talk about “digital education,” the conversation often quickly drifts towards one word: distraction. Multiple teachers told me the same thing in plain language:
“Honestly, pretty bad. If I’m not lecturing or giving instructions, they’re playing games or watching YouTube.” (upper-secondary teacher)
“For many, the computer is perfect for doing something else if they don’t feel like listening. They drift off…” (upper-secondary teacher)
“Switching tabs takes half a second—being in the classroom isn’t enough.” (upper-secondary teacher)
“But at least half of students do something else on the computer anyway—games, distractions. I do the same if I have a computer in front of me. None of us manage that well.” (upper-secondary teacher)
So yes: the browser makes it easy to leave the lesson.
But the easy conclusion often skips over an interesting question: why do some students leave the lesson and others don’t—despite having the same temptations one click away?
Distraction as a symptom (not a root cause)
In the weightlifting analogy, people check out when the “weight” is wrong for them.
That shows up in the interviews too, just in classroom language.
One teacher described a very consistent pattern:
“Often the very strong students and the very weak ones. The strong ones get bored, the weak ones have lost motivation. The middle group is usually fine.” (teacher)
Another teacher described students disappearing when the work gets hard:
“Often those with less background knowledge. When discussions become difficult, they disappear into the computer.” (upper-secondary teacher)
And one interview summary put it even more directly:
“Many students — especially boys and often students with NPF diagnoses — play games during lessons as a way to escape when things feel hard.” (upper-secondary teacher)
This is the piece that feels under-acknowledged in public debates. “The internet is distracting” is true but shallow. The interviews repeatedly point at something more human:
- students drift when they’re bored
- students drift when they’re overwhelmed
- students drift when they don’t see the value, or don’t believe they can do it
The browser isn’t the reason those internal states exist. It’s the thing that makes exiting the task cheap and emotionally rewarding. Shallowly engaging with a task is better than not engaging, but not by much, what we really want is deep engagement.
Motivation isn’t evenly distributed (and that matters)
Several teachers basically described the same split: motivated students can handle the environment; unmotivated students get pulled away.
“Motivated students manage screens and AI well; unmotivated students are the most negatively affected.” (upper-secondary teacher)
And another teacher, after 30+ years of teaching, framed it in terms of interest:
“If students are interested, they focus. If they’re not, they don’t.” (teacher)
This matters because it changes what “the attention problem” even is. If you believe the problem is “devices are addictive,” you reach for bans and moralizing. If you believe the problem is “students are bored or avoidant,” you reach for better calibration, better scaffolding, and fewer escape hatches during the moments when effort is required.
Teachers are already trying to recreate a “classroom boundary”
When teachers describe what they actually do about distraction, it’s striking how often the solution is “recreate the boundaries of a physical classroom.”
One teacher described a routine that’s basically a ritualized boundary:
“Her workaround is a practice she calls ‘active listening.’ During these moments, all laptops must be closed while she explains key points.” (Summary from interview with upper-secondary teacher)
Another described moving attention back to concrete, low-noise formats:
“Phones are usually collected in a basket. Computers can pull attention too—too many colors, highlights, visual noise. Sometimes simplicity works better. Black and white can be enough.” (teacher)
And some teachers explicitly call for “analog weeks” or handwriting constraints—not because they hate technology, but because they can feel the attention cost of constant access:
“And I’d want analog weeks… Management doesn’t allow phone collection, but I see how much devices affect students.” (upper-secondary teacher)
The pattern is consistent: teachers are trying to carve out a bounded environment where the default mode is doing the work, not evading it.
The browser is currently a terrible “digital classroom”
Here is the uncomfortable framing that keeps coming up in the interviews:
the physical classroom works partly because it is not the town square.
It is a place you opt into, with boundaries that remove most immediate temptations. Digital learning increasingly happens in the browser, but the browser is (by default) the town square: infinite novelty, notifications, entertainment, and shortcuts—two clicks away.
And if the underlying motivation is fragile—because the work is too hard, too easy, or just not meaningful—then “two clicks away” is all it takes.
Which is why I think we need a digital classroom that feels more like a classroom: a browsing environment where teachers can control what is accessible during learning time, so attention doesn’t have to be won against the entire internet every minute.
This is only half the battle. We also need to solve the learning rate problem.