351–358 of 358 posts
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With all due respect, I think this says a lot about you if you honestly equate boredom as pre-smartphones. Millions upon millions of us led a boredom-free life prior to the smart and/or cellular/mobile phone. And there's far more to do these days.
Please tell how you passed the 3 hours at the DMV without boredom pre-smart phone?
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Children given unsupervised access to the internet is ridiculous. People freak out if a predator lives int heir neighborhood but they let their child be accessible to millions of predators via their phone or table. This is why kids initial exposure to porn is 8 in the US and 10 when kids are getting addicted. This is all happening prior to puberty. I still remember working with children and teens and found out, throu…
I'm torn on the issue. On the one hand, I view the early internet as saving me/raising me. I detested school, still do. Sure there were dangers back then too, but that's why we learnt to be skeptics, anonymous, question people's motives, and actually understand the technology. On the other hand, social networks weren't around, videos weren't really around, advertising wasn't around, nothing was monetized, there was n…
There is also the path not taken: perhaps you'd have been better off without the Internet.
I do not know you nor do I believe I can make these value judgements. Just a thought.
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Would it not be possible to have a box at the front of the room that everyone has to put their phone in when they come to class, then they can get it back after class is over? If anyone's ever been in a secure facility, they have little mail slots, sometimes locking with a key you can take, to store your phone while you go inside. Seems like we could just put one of these in every classroom. That should take care of…
We used to call them 'lockers'.
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>Having every student disable all push notifications during class time would have solved nearly all the problems I witnessed. Back in highschool IT would heavily rate-limit sites that were doing real time updates (basically just Facebook) because our pipe was small enough that 50% of people having Facebook open in a tab was a big enough amount of traffic to care about. We also implemented network level ad-block and r…
Why in the world would a school have public access wifi for phones? That is about the worst network policy I have heard of. Also bottle necking WiFi will not make people think the WiFi sucks but that the IT Department sucks by both students and staff.
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I agree with you in general, but I guess it's a matter of pragmatism and establishing social norms. Here in Austria the newly elected right wing government is going to cancel plans of banning smoking completely in restaurants (up till now there was a solution that involved having a separate smoking area if your premises exceeded a certain dimension). I'm not for a smoking ban, because I think it's too much of an intr…
As someone who grew up in the 80s near Chicago and then moved to California for the second half of my so-far life around 2000, and thereby had to spend an immense amount of time being looked at like I was insane when I went to a restaurant and automatically said "table for two, non-smoking"... no: you smoking in a restaurant is absolutely not a "personal lifestyle choice" :/ it is forcing everyone else in that restau…
I'm surprised that someone who grew up in the 80s near Chicago calls cigarettes cancer-sticks. The Illinoisans I'm familiar don't seem particularly histrionic to me. Guess you've found your place to call home in California.
Can we limit them for use by parents as well? Playgrounds seem to be the place parents go to look at Facebook while their kids yell "look at me mummy" forlornly.
Something I see a lot in the UK that really saddens me is parents engrossed with their smartphone and occasionally barking at the child to 'play where I can see you' every two minutes. It makes me feel like snatching the phone from their hand and doing something rather unpleasant with it. '...while their kids yell "look at me mummy" forlornly.' One thing I have noticed a lot in Spain (where I live half the time) is k…
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My children do not have cell phones (if they want one they can buy it and a data plan themselves - so far that hasn't happened until they are about 18), but teachers assume that every student has a cell phone. The teachers then ask the kids to do things with their cell phones like you are describing. When my kids say they don't have one they are not believed and receive failing grades for the assignment. I've complai…
Assuming you can afford at least some kind of inexpensive phone for your kid(s), this is kind of a messed up position to take. Your children are failing classes because you want to make them purchase their own phones and plans, which of course is not realistic. So they failed because of something completely beyond their control and entirely within yours. As a parent, I’d be ashamed of myself if I had allowed that to…