On a bitter January afternoon, the heater in 208 Cohen Hall is chugging away with modest results. “Does somebody want to build a fire?” asks Associate Professor of Education Simon Jorgenson upon entering the classroom. He’s leading the experimental new class, titled Unplugged: Questioning Technology in Education and Culture, that’s about to begin.

Students Maya Jhawar and Vivian Summerlin pull stuffed flames, logs, and rocks from a bag in the center and arrange them like a campfire.

“I think it’s catching,” says Jhawar as she stacks the flames.

Tending a hearth used to be a critical job to provide light and heat in a home. Tending to it was both time-consuming and purpose-giving. Central heating has largely replaced that task. Now, we often forget about the heat until we suddenly realize there isn’t enough.

Contemplating technology

Simon Jorgenson first pondered technology in the classroom while teaching at a middle school that was an early adopter of laptops for all students. Decades later, and the parent of two teenagers, Jorgenson felt pulled to develop a course that wrestles with the role technology plays in our lives. Because he has questions—and he doesn’t think he’s alone.

“I just feel like students are aching to put the phones down,” Jorgenson says, “… that people are wanting to connect and to commit to being unplugged. And I do too.”

Special topics courses like Unplugged are test classes, Jorgenson explains. Unplugged is an introductory philosophy of technology course, but it’s also an educational experiment: What happens when students put down their devices and pick up focal practices?

There are no PowerPoint presentations, no laptops in the classroom. The students rarely see a notification from Brightspace—UVM’s course management system. Between classes, Jorgenson occasionally writes them snail mail. Class discussions cover the impact of the screens of childhood to the joys of making analog maps and music.

“It’s wildly different from my other classes,” explains Sam Schoendorf, a first-year biochemistry major. “When we have breaks, we are making tea and talking.”

She enrolled to reduce her dependence on her phone. Schoendorf already has her phone set to grayscale to dampen the constant allure of notifications. But her phone increasingly functions as her key to unlock everything from homework assignments to buildings. For her, Unplugged is a three-hour respite from screens.

She isn’t the only one who feels this way.

Breaking us down or building us up?

“I don’t want to spend 17 years on a phone,” says Maya Jhawar.

During the second week of class, the sophomore biology major reflects on the time suck that social media can be. The number is not arbitrary. Jhawar once calculated how much time she would spend looking at her phone if she didn’t modify her behavior over the course of her life. While Jhawar views the merging of tech commodification with the social connection that humans are wired to desire as “a dangerous combination,” she also uses social media.

“Social media is social,” she says. “There is a network out there.”

Vivian Summerlin understands the struggle. Stints in nature away from her phone made her realize she was more attentive to her life when logged off it. Summerlin quit social media a year ago and hopes to encourage others to reexamine their relationships with their phones, maybe even tuck them away one day a week and meet up in-person with people instead.

“I feel way more present,” Summerlin says. “We are not supposed to know or see this many people every day. … I think it breaks us down.”

Bee Wainner isn’t sure. He believes meaningful connections can be made and maintained over social media. In fact, that is how he and Schoendorf met and became roommates. It’s how he stays in touch with friends in Canada.

“I think there is a lot of good that can come from it,” Wainner says.

Conversation pivots between the idea of social media as a technology that connects people, to it being a place of constant comparison.

An arena for self-expression and a prison where the students add and delete the same apps over and over again. This complexity is what Jorgenson wants students to examine.

“This course is questioning technology and culture,” he explains. “It’s not anti-tech. It’s about questioning and creating space to reflect on our device-driven culture.”

The focal practice

In February, the class piles into a van destined for the Vermont Commons School’s Outdoor Education Center in Charlotte. The plan? Hike to a yurt and build a fire to talk about things. “Things” being a technical term, according to the philosopher Albert Borgmann, whose ideas are woven throughout the class.

“This is designed to be an experience to visit a thing to model the difference between a thing and a device,” Jorgenson explains in the parking lot.

Fresh snow sparkles under a bluebird sky. The class wends through the woods, occasionally snapping photos with their phones. Inside the yurt, they break into teams to open the window shades and build a fire.

“Start with little pieces,” Summerlin instructs as she tears strips of newspaper. “You want them to be textured and a little crumply.”

After a few minutes the kindling begins to burn.

“This is an ancient practice we are doing,” Jhawar smiles.

Around the fire, the students discuss their ideas of a focal practice, a central component of Unplugged. The idea is to commit to learning a new skill or practice they refine and journal about for the remainder of the course.

The joy of connection—and silence

Maya Jhawar grew up in Silicon Valley and vividly recalls when her family got its first iPad—she was five years old. She loved it, and her phone, until she noticed her attachment to this phone that is so much more than a phone. It’s a compass, a Rolodex, the world’s encyclopedia, she muses. “At the end of the day it’s the greatest tool you will ever hold in your hand.”

And she hates that. Jhawar believes communicating over screens has made many of her peers more introverted and afraid to interact with others. She thinks playing card games could help.

“It’s a way to connect with people that isn’t awkward,” Jhawar notes.

She recently started a card game club and committed to learning card tricks. One night, while struggling with mastering card springing, she pushed herself to practice for an hour and had a minor breakthrough.

“It was nice to be focused on that,” she says.

Bee Wainner is taking a different tack: silence. He committed to spending 20 minutes in solitude outside every day.

“My hope is that by doing this every day and being more mindful and taking the time to be bored, to explore, that I will become a little bit more connected to the things in my life,” he says.

Wainner loved the class trip to the Cohen boiler room and attic to learn how the building is heated and cooled—an excursion led by James Lang, physical plant manager, and devised so students can meet the often unseen skilled workers on campus and better understand the local energy system and what they are unplugging from. Wainner wants to use meditation to notice the world and be more present in it.

“I love my phone but I kind of hate it,” he says. “I hate being attached to it. I hate that it’s necessary for everyday life.”

Whenever he notices picking up his phone is a tic rather than a plan, Wainner deletes the apps until he feels control over himself. He hopes Unplugged will help him gain a healthy habit.

“I think it would be good for me to know of the joy that silence can be,” Wainner says. “I would love to hate my phone at the end of this—to figure out some alternative.”