educating for the journey

Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism.
- Carl Jung

I got in today to find these two articles waiting for me: “Game over for China’s net addicts” and “Stop Surfing, Make Friends, Indian Students Told“. Thanks Yahoo.
Honestly, it did make me start thinking of my students, myself and my son though. What does this new world have in store for me/us/them? At what point do the incredible opportunities made available by the internet become liabilities? Surely we all have our individual tipping point. As an example take this weekend, i started messing with Facebook (to get a better idea of what my students were doing when they got home each night). In what seemed like no time to me i had killed a couple hours. Then i started thinking of a co-worker’s sons, they routinely drive three hours to go to an incredible beach; he spends the entire weekend in their wireless hotel room “connecting.”
Is that just a rite of passage or is there a cause for alarm? Is this him rebelling and being a teenager or is there something else going on?

Personally i grew up without video games in my house and as much as i hated it at the time i am very thankful for it now. The world has changed however and i actually heard a college recruiter say this fall: “parents who don’t allow their children to play video games are doing them a disservice.” My mother would have keeled over had she heard it.
In my first year at Queen’s i could (and did on many an occasion) spend all night in the world of Doom. There, eyes staring, with whoever felt like procrastinating for just a few more hours. I noticed then, and do now, that my demeanor changes with too much time in front of the computer. I am not wired for the insanely long sessions mentioned in these articles. Besides that Doom was a different place; the game did not have (or promote) the interaction that today’s web does.

I want my students blogging, i want them interacting with people they know and safely with people they don’t, i want my teachers to fully integrate technology into their curriculum but i don’t want to aid in creating sedentary students who are addicted to the intenet. I completely believe that these are realistic expectations, like so many things in life finding a balance is the key; i was just thinking about it today.

some more reads: “Best of the Nets…“, “8 Chinese Laws to Improve Teenage Life and Prevent Internet Addiction“, “Technology to prevent Internet addiction considered.”

Ironically i ran into this somewhere on the weekend and passed it on to our E-club (i apologize for not being able to site it, as i found it and moved on before i thought of this post):

img 1: http://tonova.typepad.com/thesuddencurve/images/internet_addiction.jpg
img 2: http://www.boilingpoint.com/~jasonyu/cs240/images/doom.jpg
img 3: unsited with apologies to Toles