Clay Shirky’s “Laptops Away” article really hit me because distractions in the classroom are at an all-time high. I’m not sure there was one thing incorrect Shirky mentioned in his article. Shirky claims that multi-tasking degrades efficiency, especially for college students, because of the one key distraction all college students have while in class: a smartphone. He frequently mentions “the elephant and the rider” metaphor as a way of emphasizing classroom-smartphone tension. The rider is the professor teaching the class, or the “intellect,” while the elephant is the distraction, or the “emotion.” Whenever we get a notification or text message on our phone, it almost immediately takes most people out of the realm the professor had been taking all students throughout the class period. The one thing Shirky realizes is that because of the power of technology in the classroom, it’s impossible for him to grab everyone’s attention. He learned his lesson by banning all forms of technology, which has helped the classroom atmosphere for him compared to when he never enforced a policy that most professors require nowadays. “Some of the students will opt out, of course, which remains their prerogative and rightly so, but if I want to help the ones who do want to pay attention, I’ve decided it’s time to admit that I’ve brought whiteboard markers to a gun fight, and act accordingly.” That is perhaps the quote of the readings we’ve read so far. Everything Shirky said is true, and he seemed concerned about the future of the classroom. The bottom line is that he should be, because technologies are only going to keep expanding as the days go by and make it harder for him and other professors to keep students constantly engaged in their discussions.
Mostly everything with that Henry Jenkins mentioned in his YouTube propositions article is straightforward. We know it’s a interactive site with a ton of complexity. We also know YouTube is heavily relied on by journalists and the mass media, largely because of the ability we have to take a minute long video with our smartphone and then post it to potentially millions of views. However, the last two propositions were the most intriguing. The 8th propositions talked about how younger people are going to need to adapt social and cultural skills because of YouTube. A lot of information related to this can be easily found on YouTube, so Jenkins brought up an interesting point there. The 9th proposition, however, struck me the most because Jenkins claims that YouTube is not really diverse, and that most of the video views on YouTube are from white middle class males. That would be especially concerning if that was still occurring today, but because this article was written over a decade ago, I find it hard to believe that YouTube still isn’t a diverse community. YouTube has grown so much over the last 10 years and it is pretty much a news source for most people. All major companies now have a page because the content they post requires a lot of views, something that did not exist 10 years ago. Whether the videos are from news organizations, sports organizations, sports franchises, etc., a lot of the content those organizations share has a lot of diversity, especially in the sports world because of the significant diversity sports has nowadays.