Five Days

Are you troubled by students in your classes distracted by laptops, Facebook, iPods, cellphones, text messaging, and the Internet? You might want to try this novel approach from The University of Minnesota's Heather LaMarre - challenge your students to go a 5 days without media or gadgets. I can't do it for one day ... sigh.

Toughest college test: No cell phone, no Facebook

Heather LaMarre calls her students 'the wired generation.' The University of Minnesota professor sees that they don't listen to an iPod, talk on a cell phone or surf on a laptop -- they do all three at once. She reads articles about their numbness to technology and knows that if one e-mails her at 10:30 p.m. on a Saturday and she doesn't write back by 11:30, he'll freak out.

So she did something about it.

Last week's class assignment: Five days without media or gadgets that didn't exist before 1984.[emphasis added - MQ]