Over the past 15 years, I've studied technologies of mobile connection and talked to hundreds of people of all ages and circumstances about their plugged-in lives. My students tell me about an important new skill: it involves maintaining eye contact with someone while you text someone else it's hard, but it can be done. We text (and shop and go on Facebook) during classes and when we're on dates. At work executives text during board meetings. At home, families sit together, texting and reading e-mail. And yet we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection. WE live in a technological universe in which we are always communicating. "The World Unplugged" exercise enabled experiential learning students gained increased self-awareness about the role of media in their lives and faculty came to better understand the Internet usage patterns of their students, enhancing their ability to help young people become more media literate. Students also reported that having constant access to digital technology is integral to their personal identities it is essential to the way they construct and manage their work and social lives. Results showed that going without media made students dramatically more cognizant of their own media habits -with many self-reporting an "addiction" to media- a finding further supported by a clear majority in every country admitting outright failure of their efforts to go unplugged. Researchers at the University of Maryland gathered students' narrative responses to the going without media assignment and analyzed them by using grounded theory and analytic abduction, assisted by IBM's ManyEyes computer analysis software. In the fall of 2010, nearly 1,000 students from a dozen universities across five continents took part in "The World Unplugged" study.
This article outlines a "24 hours without media" exercise in accordance with the guidelines set in Module 7, Unit 1 of the UNESCO curriculum. Across the globe, many students have easy and constant access to media, yet they often receive little or no instruction about the impact of their media consumption.
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