I recently wrote about being connected while traveling and said that I didn’t think it was necessarily a good thing. A recent study suggests that too much connectedness, called hyperconnectivity, is actually counter-productive for workers. We should all disconnect as an effort to help the flagging US economy. We can call it patriotism.
{May 14, 2008} Hyperconnectivity
{May 4, 2008} Traveling with Technology
I just got back from the annual Eastern Communication Conference in Pittsburgh. As I sat in the airport waiting to come home, I started thinking about the amount of technology I was carrying with me. I had a cell phone, an MP3 player and a laptop. I called home from the airport on the cell phone. I used the laptop to look at my email using the free wireless network in the airport. And I listened to music on my MP3 player both in the airport and on the plane.
I used to travel a lot for business–in fact, for one year in the late 1980s, I traveled to Parkersburg, West Virginia from Western Massachusetts nearly every week. At that time, the only thing I would carry with me was a book. Very low-tech. Once I left for the airport, I was out of touch with my office. And that was actually ok. Everyone survived. Our work got done on time. I’m not sure that it’s an advance to be so connected all the time.
{April 16, 2008} Professional vs. Personal
Ann recently said to me that she was surprised to find that I had put pictures of my niece and nephew on my PSU web page. She had expected my web site to present the professional side of me and not the personal side. Her comment started me thinking about how to separate these two sides of myself. I’m not sure I can. If I think about my life as a continuum, with the professional side on one end and the personal side on the other, I can see that some things fall clearly on one end or the other. Most things, however, fall somewhere in the middle of the continuum.
For example, I have been a huge game player since childhood. I played all kinds of games with my family. One of my favorite game-playing memories is of playing Scrabble with my mother when I was about eight and she had no mercy on me and my eight-year-old vocabulary. I played organized sports all through high school, college and into adulthood. I play video games and board games and card games even now. For most of my life, I would have considered this to be on the personal end of the continuum. But then, about nine years ago, I started to incorporate games into my classes. When I taught Fundamentals of Computing, I would have students play Sherlock and then write an algorithm for how to make guesses in the game. When I taught Client/Server Programming, I had students work on an Internet-based game for their semester project. When I taught Artificial Intelligence, I used games of all sorts to motivate the discussion of various algorithms. When Evelyn and I wrote our Software Engineering book, the project that we developed within the text was a large-scale, multi-player, Internet-based game. Gradually, my interest in game playing has moved further and further to the middle of the continuum between my professional and personal life.
And then two years ago, I had the opportunity to move to the Communication and Media Studies department and teach classes in Digital Media. With this move, my interests in game-playing have become the center of my professional life. Now I spend some part of every day thinking about games, talking about games, writing about games, teaching about games, and playing games. Games are everywhere in my life. How could I separate the professional aspect of game-playing from the personal aspect? I don’t think I can. And that’s part of what I both love and hate about academia.
{April 3, 2008} Email Problems
We have been having some email problems on campus this week. I’m not sure what’s happening but I do know that our email server will be updated in some way on Sunday. I’m guessing the announcement of this update has something to do with the problems that I’ve been experiencing.
Email has been very slow. I’m using Zimbra as my email client and the slowness manifests itself in a number of ways. First, when I click on a message in my list, it sometimes takes 5 minutes or more for the body of the message to appear in the reading pane below the list. Second, once the message appears and I try to reply, it can take so long for the server to respond that I get a message saying that the server appears to be busy. The dialog box that appears makes it seem as though I can cancel the request to send the email and therefore, send the message again. Doing so will send the message to the recipient twice. Of course, waiting for the server to respond as I move from email to email or try to respond to an email is incredibly frustrating.
The thing that strikes me this week is how much I rely on email. I almost feel like I can’t work at all when my email isn’t working properly. I rely on email for so many things–committee communications, students handing in assignments, me grading assignments and sending the grades back to the students. Yesterday morning, I was trying to grade assignments for a class that had been sent via email and the delays between choosing the email from the list and the email actually being displayed were so significant that I would lose my train of thought about what I was doing. I was unable to grade the assignments in time for my class. The delays in email prevented me from doing my job! It’s not until email doesn’t work properly that I realize how much I rely on it in my work.
