Yesterday, after free writing, I asked my students if they had any comments or questions about the syllabus, my expectations, or policies. There were two comments: the first a comment that the student felt his writing was freer than if he knew it was going to be graded; the second comment from another student was to say that he wished his other professors were doing the same.
A couple of the students (out of five) did not complete the assignment for class, which was to watch the Frontline documentary "Digital Nation". One student said he had internet issues with his router and I asked if he had gone to the library and logged in there. He said he did not and quickly realized that he could have watched the video that way. A lightbulb moment of 'oh, I could have solved this problem on my own'. The other student did the wrong assignment. We talked about the calendar, which has all of the assigned readings and videos due for each class and this was followed by "what will you do differently next time?" In both cases, these students are freshmen.
In my grade-less class, there is no real penalty for making these mistakes, other than that you can't really participate in the discussion about the video. From our candid discussions, we talked about ways to keep ourselves organized. I showed them my planner and shared my life-long struggle with forgetfulness.
For the rest of class, I had already planned to make the discussion about the larger issues presented in "Digital Nation". After a focused free write about what they remember from the video and a sharing of those ideas, we moved on to five articles about multitasking vs task switching, which was one of the central ideas presented in the video and which several students addressed in their writing. Each student read their article silently and then we discussed them as a group, often reflecting on these issues in our own lives. One of the articles used the analogy of animal foraging as way to describe our habits of multitasking. I really liked this article because the authors of the first book we are reading, Distracted Mind, talk about how now that we no longer have to forage for food like our ancestors, we have shifted this instinctual behavior to foraging for information. This was a good primer for that longer next conversation on Monday.
The students will be given a more formal writing assignment on Monday, a technological autobiography. I think that enough time has passed for them to have some deeper ideas about their history with and use of technology. Also, it will give me an opportunity to see some of their writing and give them feedback on it.
“An empirical philosophy is in any case a kind of intellectual disrobing. We cannot permanently divest ourselves of the intellectual habits we take on and wear when we assimilate the culture of our own time and place. But intelligent furthering of culture demands that we take some of them off, that we inspect them critically to see what they are made of and what wearing them does to us.” ― John Dewey, Experience and Nature
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