A “Balanced” Media Diet

Over at Wired, Steven Leckart redoes the Food Pyramid for a “media diet” totaling nine hours daily. Click through for the full-size image. (Link via Dan.)

The proportions between different types of media were foreign to me (I guess I free up relatively more time for gaming by skipping Facebook), but the sum total kind of blew my mind. Perhaps the combination of research, writing, and teaching has thrown off my notions of how much free time normal people have. Do people—or even just the kind of geeks who’d be reading Wired—really spend that long consuming media for pleasure every day?

The Joys of Disruptive Technologies

I wanted to share a quick link from the Chronicle of Higher Education about a professor who encourages students to use Twitter during class (found via Twitter, of course—thanks @zandperl!). The course, originally taught for grad students, is called “Disruptive Technologies in Teaching and Learning,” and features a live Twitter feed projected in the background so students can offer outside links and shyly-yet-publicly consider comments that may derail the discussion.

I think it sounds neat—and, much to my surprise, so do most of those offering comments on Chronicle, it seems. A former student of the class also chimed in to offer some positive reflections and a link to her course blog, which links to other students’ blogs. That should give a sense of the conversations that these technologies encouraged.

In unrelated news, I have about a dozen drafts for new posts that I am dying to complete and post, but they’re going to have to remain drafts until I push through some of my real (i.e., deadline-bound) work. Blogging is my own personal “disruptive technology,” I suppose (but usually in a good way). I expect to be posting a lot come August, the month I defend.