wellbeing

I’m particularly interested in Digital Wellbeing as part of the student experience. How do institutions and staff support our learners in considering the impact of technology on themselves? How do students support themselves in this regard? I’ve recently heard the term ‘Cyber Anxiety’ to refer to engagement with technology and I think this ties in with the Fear Of Missing Out(FOMO) and Jenkin’s Culture of Participation. I was reading the brilliant JISC/NUS Benchmarking Tool to give me some ideas for Focus Groups and Surveys and didn’t realise that towards the end there’s a section on Digital Wellbeing.

One of the key emergent themes from my pilot study was that of technology as a distraction or a means of procrastination and this having a perceived negative effect on our sense of wellbeing. Rosen et. al (2013) find a negative connection between looking at social media during lectures and academic performance and suggest using “technology breaks” in a similar fashion to a coffee break to mitigate this.