Keri Stephens' Blog

Intellectual Adrenaline Junkie experiencing & studying this communication technology-filled world!

Fall 2012 Reading Round-Up Opportunity

Experience Alone Together at the Fall 2012 Reading Round-Up
with Professor Keri Stephens
As you enter into college, your mobile phone will come with you. You will use social media to remain connected to your friends and to learn about the latest meetings and parties on campus. Your mobile devices will enter our classrooms and some of you will Google content to contribute productively to a class discussion. But our constant connection to technology can also create problems for us as we learn to manage our time and to create new relationships. Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less from Each Other, by Sherry Turkle at MIT, explores the benefits and challenges created by technology. Professor Turkle invites us to examine our communication and rediscover the humans around us. Her book provides a justification for why students in my communication technology classes are asked to try to live 24 hours with no communication technologies and share their experiences with the class. This technology deprivation experience causes us to briefly live the stories told in this book.

I’d love to have you join me for our 2012 Reading Round-Up on Tuesday, August 28th from 10am-12noon! We will share our experiences with the book and challenge ourselves to keep from checking Facebook and our text messages for two glorious hours! If you would like to learn more about the courses I teach and my research on communication technologies, feel free to check out my blog or my UT website. Hook ‘em!