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by luzojeda 589 days ago
IMO the correct analogy would be a physical object where you could switch back and forth between Harry Potter and books used for learning. If that were the case I'd agree with you. But here we are talking about two separate distinct physical objects, the Harry Potter book and, for example, a biology book.

When a person is reading the latter they can't easily switch to HP, but I can do that while learning anything in my computer. It's as easy as doing ctrl + T + red + enter and I get to the infinite entertainment that is Reddit thanks to the browser autocomplete, for example.

1 comments

Switching to nonsense with physical books is as easy as having two books in your bag/desk, or reading a physical newspaper with a comics section. Treating the ability to switch context quickly as essentially bad for learning is reductive, especially when the ability to add more context (searching unknown words, useful videos, articles etc) can obviously be incredibly useful.

Stopping the ability to do ctrl+T+reddit.com also prevents the huge amount of info the rest of the informative internet can provide.

The article also includes smart watches as computers, and personally as a Apple Watch user, the amount that this device can distract is incredibly low, and obvious to viewers like a teacher.