I wonder if anyone has tried to coin the term absent-mindful.   Absent because I haven’t been very present here lately (some might also not very present in other places, but more on that later).  Mindful because in my absence I’ve been trying to figure some things out.  I suppose it could be considered a different kind of distance learning: in this case it’s more about learning from things from distance-for-perspective instead of distance-as-geographical-reality.

And yet I’ve been doing a lot lately: teaching a full line, prepping and leading a couple of faculty meetings, writing a nice 900-word piece for the school paper, and reading a chunk of non-fiction about technology and habits and what in the world has been happening to our world without most of us thinking about it.  And while I don’t feel fully formed, and while it’s been more of a hill-top than a mountain-top experience for me, I’d like to think maybe I’ve got a few things to offer, a couple of fingers left to point in particular directions.

So let me direct your attention to this short video based on Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows.  It seems that it is possible for our context to change even if our geography remains the same.  This clip on “What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains” is a nice place to understand the shift.

I’ll be putting a few more pieces out here over the next few days, kind of like what Mitch Hurwitz is doing with the upcoming run of Arrested Development episodes on Netflix.  Tomorrow: that really cool video of David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon Commencement Address.