Shortly before the midpoint of my adult life, I decided that I wanted to change careers. A rewarding few decades in technology were not how I had expected to invest my time for paychecks but that is what happened. Helping people had been the focus of my career. Building technology was just one way to accomplish that task.

In August 2021, I waved goodbye to what felt like a lifetime of work at Amazon.com but having been a terrible student during my first pass through college, I started taking classes at UMN in May. Those first four classes during the summer proved to admissions that I could do the work.By September, I had added minors in Applied Educational Psychology and Learning Technology and I learned that my path to becoming a high school teacher would be longer than expected. Being a relatively patient guy, the extra time would be no biggie.

This website reflects what I have learned during my studies of Digital and Learning Technology at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities. 

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Social Media Profiles 

Absent from social media since 2020, this class was an opportunity to reconnect.
LinkedIn has been useful to keep up with news about former colleagues.
My first peep on ​Twitter was an assignment for this class.
Email me if you have anything to share.
Poetry Website, click here. 

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Social Media: First Reflection Assignment

Social media can cause us to be more spontaneous, less conscientious with our speech, and connects us to our various groups of people; all in ways that were impossible just 15 or 20 years ago. It has had a huge impact on industries that rely on mass publicity for marketing by diminishing the cost per eyeball, but also by engaging a bigger audience while understanding much more about all of them. We expect a connection to individuals we knew long ago because we continue to see them on platforms, which may keep us more closely knit as a community, but seems to be having a negative effect on our decisions to support others in real ways – i.e., entirely offline. I found it interesting to learn last semester that a private note with a private donation was far more likely to recur than a donation that was associated with a public post on the donation site or social media.

Also, I was surprised to learn in a class last semester that the majority of daily social media users check social media in the morning when they wake up and in the evening before bed. The affect on our sleeping patterns caused by the blue screen light, and just the extra light in general, may be very significant though difficult to measure. Our expectations for an audience for our thoughts has grown so much that the entire social digital environment may be more commercialized than it is social. It seems like the real world matters more than our digital existence, which may be driving the monetization but which may also be the reason that what free tools we are offered to socialize include advertisements, or require us to share our data without being properly valued or compensated.

​Technology occupies a much larger share of our daily lives because, in general, it makes what we do easier and less effort. Access to our friends, family, co-workers, and acquaintances has become an expectation instead of a bit of good timing. In my opinion, the revolution is with data – analysis, trading, and selling – that is produced by use of social media. Facebook supplies most of the data needed by the advertising industry and commercial retail. They connect our identity, which we offer to their platform, to the filaments offered by ads and credit card purchases so that the businesses can reduce costs or generate new revenue streams, to which we contribute instead of receiving monetary benefits. The relevance of social media will continue to be refined by the companies that provide the platform, but also by users of the services who need to bend what is offered to their own personal goals.

Social Media blog assignments on Medium.com

​​Teen Social Media (June 22, 2022)
Being Online (May 2, 2022)
Healthy Gaming Habits, the Road Less Traveled (April 24. 2022)
​Good Intentions (March 21, 2022)
Social Identities (February 13, 2022)