Adventures in EdTech

In one of my earlier blog posts, I did some back-of-the-napkin math on just how much time we are spending online, and as a result, how many ads we are consuming every day. I framed that information based on internet use, and while spending more time on the internet might have streamlined the ability to take in ideas and advertisements, this is not a new human experience. The internet is far from the only form of media people can engage with (think radio, television, print, etc.)-it just happens to be the most common flavor for many in contemporary society. If we look at media as a complete idea, between the internet (and all the ways we can access it), TV, radio, print, etc., our engagement with media stretches far beyond the 6 hours per day I wrote about before. As this article from Statista states, estimates were made that by 2020, Americans would spend 13.5 hours per day engaging with some sort of media. This article breaks down the difference between digital and traditional media...

Algorithms . A term that many of us were not familiar with even just a handful of years ago, and now something that can dominate our day-to-day lives, or at minimum our engagement in media platforms. I have had some awareness and familiarity about the basic workings and influences of algorithms, but before this week I did not fully understand just how far the reach of algorithms extended. Honestly, the first thing that usually popped into my head when thinking about algorithms is this scene from Ron Swanson in the show Parks & Rec: Video Source Video courtesy of Peacock, retrieved from YouTube Numbers Dive I wanted to do a little digging, just to get a feel for how often an algorithm might impact someone on social media. This article reports internet users being on social media around 2 hours and 23 minutes per day on average, the same figure reported by this report from Statista. This is roughly the same level that has been seen since 2018, and with estimates above 2 hours per d...