Digital Detox: Cleaning Up Our Personal Digital Environments

As a fellow Domain of One’s Own school, I’ve been following what Middlebury College has been up to for a while. Through their newly formed Office of Digital Learning and Inquiry (DLINQ), headed up by Amy Collier, they’ve started a Digital Detox program. As described on the website:

Digital Detox is a pilot initiative to reduce the toxicity of our personal digital environments and how we engage with them. By mindfully taking on this detox, you will begin to develop critical habits that will improve your overall well-being and reduce risks to your personal digital data.

The program is a series of bi-weekly newsletters that "offer helpful resources and activities you can do to detoxify your digital life." They are half-way through the program and the newsletters are archived on the site.  The topics includes things like "Mindful social media," "Better passwords and password management," and "Fact checking quickly." Amy Collier, in a series of tweets, outlines how successful the pilot has been thus far. Alongside their information environmentalism initiative (inspired by Mike Caulfield‘s work which I’ve written about here on ProfHacker), Middlebury is sharing their work with us to help our own institutions grapple with these issues. On our own campus, we’ve developed a series of flexible modules to incorporate digital fluency skills for faculty to incorporate into their courses.

I know I’ll be using some of these newsletters from DLNQ when I teach my own course at DHSI this summer on Building Your Academic Digital Identity (still spaces available!).

What are you doing on your campus to deal with the current digital environment?

[Photo by Austin Chan on Unsplash]