With increasing competition on people's attention through information technology and multimedia, educators have to provide strategies to ensure improved learning in their institutions. I report on an empirical study I conducted during a flipped classroom approach, also taking into account parameters tied to considerations on learning having to do with cognition and aspects of visual perception [1] [2]. Recently in cognitive studies, the notion of interest has again come to the forefront [3]. Many educators [ 4] point to the notions of interest, attention and curiosity as crucial for learning. Therefore, I used these notions to choose disciplinary content or ways of presenting it, more apt at getting students to continue concentrating to reach higher levels of sophistication. Classroom tasks can be designed around interest and motivation, engagement and interest, self-efficacy and self-regulation and achievement goals. In visual cognition, researchers have recently revisited the need to be willing to focus on something if one is to learn [5] [6]. This could explain the high impact of technology. From the vast spread of offerings, a person will willingly choose to concentrate on something of personal interest, hence this information will be identified. Not only do the eyes need to choose what to focus on but following this there is the need to want to learn that specific content. Moreover, other researchers [7] [8] believe that the data accessed will also require working on it to produce "modified output". The idea of "inter-thinking" had been developed earlier [9]. This impinges on the idea that we use language to refine our thinking together, to understand our experiences as a collective and to solve common problems. These contributions helped our understanding of collective knowledge, not looking only at what exists in a single person's mind but taking into consideration the sum of what people know and the resources shared by a community. These resources go beyond oral or written language forms. The importance of exploration is also stressed. Partners are encouraged to interact critically but constructively with others' ideas. Connected information can be given for learning in joint activities. Questions will engage students in reasoning and looking for alternatives. However, to make common progress there is a need to reach a consensus. People in a group have to learn to negotiate to agree on an outcome. In the process, what is learned has to be comprehensible and the reasoning behind it has to be clear to everyone involved. This is very important in order to allow the crystallization of thought for memory storage. In line with helping students learn across zones of difficulty [10], such as a developmental zone between the instructor and learners, distance among learners can be narrowed through discussion and joined activities [ 9], based on contextual foundations of common knowledge and a shared objective. I set up tasks to be completed or problem solving, with a common goal for the group. Researchers [9] insist upon giving explicit expectations. As a backdrop there needs to be a context for discussions as basic conversational strategies have to be established. Specialists in graphic arts and design [11] [12] also express their need to constantly grab people's attention for their products to be noticed. Findings from recent research in this field points to the help of transgression and disruption in order to make people choose to focus on the things that they wanted them to focus on. These underlying theoretical notions were taken into account when planning the activities and tasks in the flipped classroom model. The method used was qualitative. The study was conducted for five weeks with four class meetings per week with a total of 46 participants working in groups. Tasks were for instance, taking on a role stemming from the readings, or each group designing a task intended to be completed in a rotation from group activity to group activity on different tables set up. Data were collected through checkmarks on a grid prepared on etic categories and notes taken on emic categories. Completed group products were also analyzed to further support the observational notes and for triangulation. Data were analyzed initially to group new categories uncovered, then subcategories were grouped together into major ones. Results show that interest was spurred in groups by some of the participants' enthusiasm. When activities contained something odd (e.g. a snowflake to be cut out first, talking about the activity around it where it landed during some important event), participation was more cheerful. When a time limit was given it also forced them to engage more fully. When task demands were high, students negotiated more and more metacognitive strategies were used. There was a mixture of levels of functioning, with different levels of perspective taking. A conclusion to be drawn is that perhaps, the first discussion should be deciding on how to best approach the given task. In addition to establishing rules for conversational interactions [9], I suggest that strategies for mediation and task completion should be agreed upon to provide more effective outcomes. Another recommendation would be to give students more freedom in writing style and assess mostly their ideas. Better users of language sometimes took over when a written product was expected, however the visions of the different group members had more impact, the richness of the contributions came from the mix of students' backgrounds sometimes using different "Englishes". We present more of the major findings and discuss pathways for further research.
