Blake's Bistro

  There is a very specific version of me that exists after a long night working at the restaurant. My social battery has been depleted, and I’m ready to be off my feet. So naturally, when I finally sit down, I open TikTok or Instagram. "Just for a few minutes." One video becomes another. A cooking video becomes a restaurant video, which becomes a sommelier blind tasting, which somehow becomes a guy restoring an abandoned swimming pool, which later turns into the new ‘bob’ and ‘bald’ trend (I won’t be going for either hairstyle). Suddenly I've spent an hour consuming an enormous amount of content without really remembering much of it. Before this course, I don't think I questioned that behavior very much. I knew what doomscrolling was and that algorithms were influencing what appeared on my screen (I literally recognized that it was adapting to my preferences AS I was scrolling on TikTok). However, I still thought of myself as the one choosing what I consumed. One of ...

  I had one of those "kids these days..." moments recently and felt particularly old. My nephew sat down to play a few of my suggestions: Wii Sports Resort, Donut County, and, oddly enough, Dave the Diver . I guess he knew about this indie darling from a Fortnite skin (figures..). Within minutes, he was organizing his inventory like he'd been playing for years: fish went where they belonged, resources were grouped together and valuable items were protected. Nothing seemed random. It reminded me of how naturally he plays Minecraft, too- watching him made me think back to my own childhood. When I first played games like World of Warcraft or Skyrim , inventory management felt like work. I remember backpacks constantly filling up, forgetting where I stored items, accidentally selling something important and having to buy it back for just as much as the original cost, or carrying around way too much junk because I didn't know what I'd need later. Inventory management ...

  *Some hints of spoilers for this movie later in the blog* When the first trailer for Toy Story 5 introduced Lily Pad, a new tablet that appears to distract Bonnie from her toys, many people immediately assumed the movie was making the familiar argument that "technology is ruining childhood." At first, I thought so too. I also thought that I was going to really despise the Smarty Pants toy voiced by none other than Conan O’Brien, but I stand corrected on that too. After reading this week's articles on global technology use, I started wondering if the movie is actually criticizing technology itself, or something much more specific. One statistic that surprised me came from Pew Research. Germany has internet access rates comparable to many developed countries, with nearly nine in ten adults using the internet. Smartphone ownership is also widespread, yet Germans use social media much less frequently than Americans. The issue isn't access to technology; it's how pe...

One of my favorite hobbies is cooking, so naturally my social media feeds are full of recipes. Open TikTok and I'll probably see someone making homemade focaccia in 45 seconds. Instagram Reels will convince me I need to make Korean fried chicken tonight. Facebook serves me "three-ingredient" recipes that somehow become dinner. YouTube Shorts are no different... they're just not great teachers. That's not necessarily a criticism of short-form media. It's asking these platforms to do something they weren't designed to do. A 30-second recipe is less like taking a cooking class and more like looking at someone's sketchbook. You see the highlights, the finished product, and maybe one or two important techniques, but almost everything in between disappears. The mistakes are edited out, the waiting is removed, and the explanations are skipped. Temperatures, substitutions, and why something works often receive less attention than the final reveal.  I've s...

 If you walked into my classroom during independent work time, you might think some of my students were completely off task. When they're finished early on Thursdays and Fridays, a surprising number of them immediately open GeoGuessr or start wandering around Google Maps and Google Earth. They're dropping themselves into random countries, zooming into neighborhoods, following highways, debating where a picture was taken, and mostly finding each other's houses. My first instinct as a teacher was exactly what you'd expect:  "Seriously? We're doing math." But the more I've watched them over the past year, the more I've started wondering if something deeper is happening. GeoGuessr isn't asking students to memorize capitals or recite facts about countries. Instead, it rewards observation, pattern recognition, and spatial reasoning. Students begin noticing road markings, vegetation, mountain ranges, architecture, languages, climate, traffic pattern...

I've spent the last several blog posts talking about online communities, algorithms, digital footprints, adaptive data tracking, messaging apps, and the ways social media shapes how we learn. This week, though, I experienced something that made me realize some of the best learning technologies don't always feel like learning technologies. I spent 3 days at Disney World, which may be 1 to 2 days longer than needed with my 6-year-old daughter and my 5- and 7-year-old nephews. Now, before anyone says, "Of course the Disney app is good—they're Disney," hear me out. I wasn't impressed because it looked pretty (aesthetically, it is nice though). I was impressed because it quietly became my performance support system for the week. I never had to ask a Cast Member where the nearest restroom was. I never wondered whether Pirates of the Caribbean had a shorter wait than Tiana’s Water Ride (which is not a disappointment, considering all the hardcore Splash Mountain fan...