Device Use Policy (adapted from Ryan Cordell)

We are living in the Golden Age of Distraction. Our attention is being reshaped on the daily by hundreds of different entities asking for a quick glance or listen, flashing, beeping, buzzing, or haptically massaging parts of us. The thing they want us to pay attention to is itself often in a brief (5-15s) format and suspended in a web of other, similar artifacts of short duration.

Reading and discussing cultural theory requires a very different quality and quantity of attention than, say, TikToks or tweets. Both have their place, but to be successful in this class (and many others) you must commit to making our classroom, and whatever spaces you use to do your reading, writing, and prep, spaces of unitasking, of deep focus.

You may think that you are an excellent multi-tasker, but there is a growing body of evidence that argues multitasking is a myth: trying to do multiple things simultaneously means you do all those things worse than if you focused on them serially—the act of multitasking literally drains your brain’s energy reserves In a discussion-focused class like this one, it’s usually pretty easy to tell when a student is checking in and and out of class an other on-screen activities.

In your professional lives, people will have their phones and other devices with them at their jobs, in meetings, at conferences, and so on. Adults do not have their devices taken away from them. They are expected to manage their own use.

You may have your phone and/or laptop on hand during class, but if so you should use them only for accessing our readings, class resources, or for finding outside materials pertinent to our discussions and activities. You should not use them to follow a game, message your friends, check your friends’ IGs, etc. Your friends and family will actually survive three hours each week without direct updates as to your whereabouts and doings. Hit them at 11:16 each Monday and Thursday with a text about the literary theory or ideas of genre. They’ll be so grateful, they’ll look past your temporary absence from the # extremelyonline world

If you want to do yourself a favor, consider the following:

• invest in printed books. I’m a big fan of digital technology and teach graduate courses in the digital humanities, but the book is a damn good technology: durable, the batteries last for centuries, you can write on it, and you own it forever.
• take notes on paper: research shows that writing stuff down helps us commit things to memory. Paper-based notation is also more graphically flexible and spontaneous, allowing you to connect and spatialize ideas with great sophistication.
• if you depend on the convenience and cost savings of reading .pdfs rather than books, which I understand, consider using a tablet, stylus, and good reading interface, like iPad + GoodNotes for iOS, or the ReMarkable .pdf reader. Using a tablet and a stylus, especially with a device dedicated to reading that does not also text, email, and surf, combines the advantages of digital and paper-based notation systems, if used well.

Periodically during the semester I may ask folks to put screens away. This means I want everyone—myself included—to focus attention on another aspect of class. In fact, it would be a very good idea to have a physical notebook available for classes when phones and laptops cannot be used.

Device Use Rubric

The rubric below (taken from Ryan Cordell’s excellent teaching site) outlines my expectations for device use in this classroom. We can discuss these expectations in our first days together and edit them if the class agrees on amendments. I will not be recording marks for device use in every class. Instead, I will assess your use periodically and include these measures in my assessment of your class contributions.