"Mary Am Shah reports in the Toronto Sun that 26-year-old Blair McMillan has banned any technology in his house post-1986,
the year he and his girlfriend Morgan were born. They're doing it
because their kids – Trey, 5, and Denton, 2 – wouldn't look up from
their parents' iPhones and iPads long enough to kick a ball around the
backyard.
'That's kind of when it hit me because I'm like, wow, when I
was a kid, I lived outside,' says Blair adding that now 'we're parenting
our kids the same way we were parented for a year just to see what it's
like.' The McMillans do their banking in person instead of online. They
develop rolls of film for $20 each instead of Instagramming their sons'
antics.
They recently traveled across the United States using paper maps
and entertaining their screaming kids with coloring books and stickers,
passing car after car with TVs embedded in the headrests and content
infants seated in the back. Their plan is to continue living like it's
1986 until April 2014.
Morgan, who admits she thought her boyfriend was
'crazy,' now devours books to pass the time and only uses a computer at
work. 'I remember the day before we started this, I was a wreck and I
was like I can't believe I have to delete my Facebook!'
Blair originally
experienced a form of phantom pain for the first few days after giving up his cellphone.
'The strangest thing without having a cellphone is that I could almost
feel my pocket vibrating and I wanted to check my pocket.' Still Morgan
says the change has been good for their family's spirit. 'We're just
closer, there's more talking,'"
And On another note:
"Made possible by a $30 million grant from the Dept. of Education's Race to the Top program, the NY Times reports that every student and teacher in 18 of Guilford County's (NC) middle schools is receiving a tablet created and sold by Amplify,
a division of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.
The tablets — 15,450
in all — are to be used for class work, homework, educational games —
just about everything. With a total annual per unit lease cost of $214, Amplify was the low bidder of those responding to Guilford's Race-to-the-Top RFP, including Apple.
Touted by Amplify as one of the largest tablet deployments in K-12 education, the deal raised some eyebrows,
since Guilford's School Superintendent once reported to an Amplify EVP
when the latter was the superintendent of Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools,
coincidentally a proving ground of the Gates Foundation.
Amplify and the Gates Foundation are partners on a controversial national K-12 student tracking database that counts the Guilford County Schools among its guinea pigs. Getting back to the hardware, after putting their John Hancock on a Student Tablet Agreement and the Acceptable Use Guidelines for Tablet, students are provided with an ASUS-made tablet "similar to ASUS MeMO Pad ME301T" ($279 at Wal-Mart).
The News & Record reports on some glitches encountered in the first week of the program, including Internet connectivity issues affecting about 5% of the tablets."
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