PH COR100

(Readings at Bottom) The readings this week were in more or less two parts. The first part was a discussion of perhaps what exactly the goal is of digital citizenship, and the other part involves examples of how to properly prepare young people for that digital citizenship. When reading over the Nine Themes of Digital Citizenship, what really struck me is the fact that the themes can’t be just taught and learned, but rather there is a need to “practice” and “work out” the skills, as is mentioned at the end of the article with the REPs. It made me think of the technology classes I had in elementary and middle school. 2 days a week, the class would go into a computer lab and do activities with the computer. Thinking back on it, that is likely where I gained a lot of the basics of my knowledge of the digital world. I remember doing activities that helped us learn about Microsoft PowerPoint and how to type effectively on a computer (digital literacy) as well as activities that sho...

(Readings at bottom) The readings this week all touched on the theme of the “attention economy,” how all these social media sites and technology companies are competing for our attention. The TED talk, “How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day,” as well as the article “Our minds can be hijacked: the tech insiders who fear smartphone dystopias” had this theme as their main focus. I remember reading about the “attention economy” before, so I was not completely new to the idea, but the talk and the article really made me realize how present it is in my life. I believe I reflected on this somewhat in previous blog posts, but looking at the “attention economy” idea specifically, many of the things talked about happens in my life, perhaps the most obvious one being that I often intend to just spend a couple minutes checking over social media sites or new Reddit posts, but that quickly turns into a half hour which turns into an hour, since my brain is always th...