“I always get a little sad when the service returns.”

^^^That’s how I feel when I’m camping, and the signal returns. Suddenly everyone’s on their phone again.

Disconnecting from our devices is sure to be an ongoing struggle, I fear.

Great post!

While I don’t have kids of my own, a number of my friends do, and they work hard to limit how much screen time their kids get each day.

Now that my best friend’s son is nearly 10, he is allowed to decide (to a point) when and what technology he wants to interact with, whether that’s YouTube videos on a Tablet or Mario Bros. on an Xbox. Lucky for his parents, he is pretty good at self-moderating how much time he spends on those activities, and he likes to play outside as well. That said, I think you’re right that kids should have limits set for them, because you can’t guarantee that kids will know to set those limits for themselves.

You said, “I feel like sitting in a high speed train that never stops.”

I said, “YES. YES! Absolutely.”

Honestly, your post could have just been that one line! As graduate students, I know this experience is expected to be the norm. Like you, I did my own blog post while being painfully aware of all the other things I needed to be doing.

…And now, I’m commenting on blog posts with about 10 tabs open, checking my email each time the notification sound goes off. Alas.

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I’m with Meghan on this; it really matters *how* you use Google as a tool, especially with respect to the research process.

I also liked your reference to “power browsing,” as it’s hard not to be guilty of that when you’re slammed with work and trying to get everything done.

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Great post, Brett. I really liked your overview of how you changed your teaching practice to reflect new knowledge gotten from that conversation with your student. It is worthy of many high fives:

“Then a random conversation with one of my undergraduate students last year made me realize that I was wrong in my reading of my students. They were doing the readings. I was not engaging them properly. I was asking questions that required longer answers than they were giving me. I learned to correct the way I ask questions and made sure that I could fire off follow-up questions to get to the material that they needed to know. I also made sure that material was covered in more of a conversational style rather than a Q&A.”

THIS IS WHAT TEACHING IS ALL ABOUT. This is an indicator of being a good teacher. After all, it’s hard to engage students, but it’s even harder to figure out how to change what you’re doing to better engage students once you realize something isn’t working.

I often do mid-semester evaluations (informal Doodle polls or something similarly anonymous) to see if there are changes I should make for my students before the semester ends. It’s not easy to do, but sometimes things are important enough to merit shifts mid-semester. Like you, it’s important to me to engage students, even if the process takes a bit of revision and ironing out of issues.

“It’s more like… a rant? No…… yep word vomit is appropriate. Again, apologies. Perhaps, you should not even read this.”

Well, you guaranteed I would read your post at this point! Honestly, I am having a hard time deciding what exactly to reply to here. (I did choose your post in part based on its title, as I was only diagnosed with ADHD in the last year. I’ve learned a lot about myself and how I learn, and I’ve also learned I need to adjust things in light of this information if I want to truly “learn” things. But I digress.)

In your post, you said, “The same author brings up the question of if we are losing our humanity due to our reliance on computers. I am wishy-washy with my answer on this. Yes, we are losing our humanity. One need only to look at one case of cyberbullying to see that truth. I think this constant use of technology and exposure to everything, and being always “on” has numbed us to so much.”

I didn’t disagree with you so much as I just wondered if we’ve always had this capacity to lose our humanity to whatever technology is emerging in a given era. After all, long before the internet, humans have found ways to be cruel and horrible to other humans. It’s just that nowadays, we have an online record of it, if that makes sense.

Great post!

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