Emma's Tech Blog

  Generation labels are complicated for many people. Personally, I am on the cusp between Millennial and Gen Z but always aligned more with Millennials because I grew up with all older siblings and feel that I share their cultural touch points more than those of Gen Z. As I have grown older, however, I think I am much more solidly in between these two controversial generations. I say controversial because it seems that these generations are always scapegoated by the older generations, with claims of laziness and ungratefulness being the most frequent , in my experience. The rapid advances in technology have completely altered how people interact with each other and how information is spread. It is a completely different world than the one of generations past and that is often a sticking point when it comes to intergenerational communication.   This generational gap is evident in the Pew Research Ce nters work centering on the belief that it is harder to be a teen today th...

Effective active learning for me is active learning that does not present itself as such. Until I began my MLIS (Master of Library and Information Science) degree, I had never encountered the phrase active learning . I  definitely participated in active learning activities in school . I just did not know that there was a name or broader goal and thought process behind those activities. Now that I am technically in a teaching profession, it is important for me to stay up on engaging learning strategies in case I ever have to teach an information literacy class . In this blog I will investigate one active learning activity that I have personally found helpful while a student. But first, what exactly is active learning?   What is Active Learning?   As opposed to the older way of doing things, active learning is not instructor focused. Although lectures are still valuable in some instances, and I personally enjoy and gain a lot from this type of teaching, the cur...

I try not to be on my phone a lot. This boundary is something I have deliberately tried to keep up since I began using a smartphone when I was younger. I am old enough to remember a time before the iPhone, but I also am young enough that I had a cell phone (read: flip phone) in middle school mostly intended for parental contact. But I have watched and participated as the smartphone has become more and more essential to our daily lives . Perhaps, I was born with luddite tendencies, or I learned this judgment subconsciously, but I was never quite comfortable with phone and internet use overtaking my life. For this reason, I have an on-again, off-again relationship with the Instagram app and find myself deleting it off my phone several times a year only to redownload it after an appropriate time away . I also don’t have that many apps on my phone; I have three pages and none of them are full. I have never understood why people need so many apps. If you have more than three pages o...