If you're not at least somewhat concerned about most social media platforms right now, you're not paying attention. I won't give an exhaustive, or even comprehensive, list of reasons for concern here because you either know lots of them or can find them yourselves. But they include the ways in which many devices/apps/netowrks and combinations …
Hiatus
A few days ago, I became aware that some of the older posts on this blog (mostly between 2013 and 2017) had broken links. Others were supposed to include images, but did not. It seems as if something may have gone wrong when I last updated the site to a new template. For now, I've …
Replacing absences and extensions with sick days and personal days
There's one week left before the end of the semester. That makes it crunch-time for students. (Then it's crunch-time for faculty who have to grade. Some of my students calculated that I'd have over 600 pages of work to grade just from one class.) With crunch-time comes the inevitable barrage of requests for excused absences …
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Nine guidelines to shape my use of social media
I’ve been rethinking my social media engagement for a while, especially since November 8. I’m not the only one.For me, it’s not so much the election results that prompted reconsideration. Instead, I’m convinced that social media, on balance, has played a not insignificant role in creating the crisis of alienation we’re currently dealing with. For …
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Experiments in reducing distraction and multitasking
While traveling this week, I read a few very good pieces on our epidemic of distraction:“The Binge Breaker” is The Atlantic profile of Tristan Harris, co-founder of Time Well Spent.“The Perils of Peak Attention,” a review of The Attention Merchants and The Four-Dimensional Human at The New Republic.“Don’t Look Now! How Your Devices Hurt Your Productivity”I …
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A Five-Part Tribute to Brett Foster
1Last night I witnessed Arena Theater’s moving tribute to my dear friend, Brett Foster. The performance included a carefully curated selection of Brett’s poems – equal parts innocent delight and worldly passion. The poems read especially revealed Brett’s ability to take in the world around him, to hear it and see it for what it …
