I agree with the idea of doing one activity at a time. When I have a lot of things to do, I try to work on everything during the day. At the end, I do not make any progress.

On the other hand, I really liked your expression “Distraction is only one side of the evil”. The Internet is my biggest distraction, especially as you said when I am writing a paper. When I am struggling thinking about what to write. At the end, I waste so much time.

An eye-catching class can be broadcasted as a movie. I liked this statement of you. As you said, people concentrate on a movie and should do the same in a class. In fact, there is a similarity, we pay for both. Once a professor said, students are the only customers who demand less than what they pay for.

Great! You actively did many things on diversity. I was reading the materials on writing a diversity statement, it seems so difficult without any prior relevant experience.

All things in moderation is a good rule of thumb, but very difficult in practice as an instructor. I talked about this in my blog post — how hard it’s been for me to develop a tech policy in my class. So far I explicitly ban all Internet devices, except in cases of disability and/or the need to use translation software. I dislike this because tit forces disabled and non-English-fluent students to “out” themselves to their peers. Bethany commented on my post and suggested that I tell students my preference is against device use, explain why, but still allow it – if they sit up front. I like that solution, although it’s still not perfect since it’s not universally applicable; not everyone can sit in the first two rows, and not all classrooms are set up in rows.
My fear is that the addictive power of tech is so strong that it eclipses our good intention with regards to moderation / “finding a happy medium.” I think we’re all already slightly addicted, so our judgment may be impaired…

Interesting post Grace – my high-school students used to call what you described in your post as FOMO i.e. Fear Of Missing Out and spent hours on social media just trying to catch up so that they knew everything of what was going on. The thing is that people don’t recognize that no matter how much we know, we still can’t know everything and more importantly we do actually control our devices but rather than exercising that privilege we give in to the temptation.

Interesting post Syeed. It is definitely a great example of handling intellectual diversity delicately. It must be a great environment to work in for all of you.

The irony of the situation – we are all looking for connection and in the meantime disconnecting (that was a pun I did not intend but now that its there we can’t help it) – the fact is that the accessibility of technology and all that comes along with it has taken us away from the things that are actually important, whether that be in life, in education, or at work.

Great pictures! And all very good points. I like your diversity statement a lot, but I’m concerned that it may be confusing to students. Even though everything you say is true, and probably will ring true for a lot of your students — hopefully many will appreciate your candor — I would also lean toward taking a more affirmative stance that explicitly denounces xenophobia, especially in its most common forms. But then again, maybe I am particularly riled up about this given the political milieu of the last year…

You bring up some good awareness of the issue at hand and I will say that it definitely depends on person to person and teacher to teacher on how technological methods can be used in the classrooms to make it a better and more conducive environment for meaningful learning.

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Thank you for sharing Anurag! I definitely agree that the change from reading an entire novel in a day to not being able to read one after two renewals is pretty discouraging :/ I do agree that multi-tasking is a myth that is not long lasting for sure.