Aaron From Minnesota

I was completely engrossed in the "debate" here between Marc Prensky (Prensky 2012) and Paul Kirschner (Kirschner 2016) about the existence of "digital natives," whether or not they have different skills, and whether education should be catering more to their abilities and tendencies. I was curious so I looked it up, and it seems as though Prensky never directly responded to Kirschner's criticism, which is a shame, because I think he's right ... kind-of. To me the debate all comes down to the section in Kirschner's article where he's focused on the indisputable fact that humans cannot truly "multi-task" and that studies show that there's correlation between people who are frequent media multi-taskers (MMTs) and reduced grey matter in the anterior singulate cortex.  ...there is evidence that constantly switching between tasks may be lead to a person losing the ability to focus on a single task and/or ignore distracters and that intensive...

In 2002, right near the onset of the blogging phenomenon, I started one of my own. It was a comedy blog, and part of a "blog ring" with a group of friends I had in New York City (many of whom went on to be successful writers and stand-ups, not that I'm bitter). In 2003, my now-wife found my blog because one of her friends followed me. She thought it was funny, and sent me an email introducing herself and linking to her own blog, which I found very funny as well. Over the next year or so, we'd exchange jokes through the comment sections on our respective blogs, and we got to know each other through our senses of humor. She had one photo of herself on her blog and it was when she was six years old. I had one photo of myself on my blog, and I was dressed up like Anne of Green Gables , pigtails and all. Neither of us had any idea what the other looked like nor had we ever met in person or spoken to each other; our initiating phase was entirely written, and lasted nearly ...

I thought it was interesting that this week's questions referred to "social networking" as opposed to "social media," which really made me think about the two different but parallel roles that these platforms play in our lives. I'll be totally honest, I typically refer to these platforms as social media, but I think this is because I tend to use these sites as providers of content, as opposed to ways to connect with others. I'm more of a consumer than a networker. :)  The exception for me personally is Reddit, which by design (Gutman-Wei) has an extra layer of anonymity and privacy to it, in that I'm not communicating with people I know in real life, nor am I using my real name. This gives me a lot of freedom to connect with others on topics I'm not comfortable talking about as myself. (Even though this blog is technically public, it's unlikely that any future employers will search for me here, so I'm okay talking about it here too ... I...

Okay, I'm not actually "from from" here, but I moved here in March with my family, just outside Minneapolis. And honestly right now with everything going on in my (relative) backyard it's hard to imagine being in a worse mindset to be undertaking this assignment, but I shall do my best.  I'm Aaron, like the title of my blog says. I'm a Psychology major here at Oregon State, and a returning student going back to school after a few decades of working, most of which I've spent in the nonprofit and social justice world. Here I am with my older kid I live in Minnesota, having moved here from Oakland, CA ... having moved there from New York, NY ... having moved there from Boston, MA ... having moved there from a bunch of other small cities and towns scattered around New England ...  and back to just outside Providence, RI where I was born and raised. This is my first time living in the Central Time Zone, or really anywhere not within an hour of a coast. I took ...