Thursday, November 25, 2010

Not too sick to blog

Is there such a thing as being too sick for social media?

Apparently not.

A couple of weeks ago a student emailed me saying he was sick and would miss my class. Nothing wrong with that; we want sick students to get well as quickly as possible, and we don’t want them to make their classmates sick.

But within a couple of hours this student posted a new blog entry. Several tweets followed in short order.

When I inquired about his health, he said he had decided to blog from home to be productive.

Now, we don’t expect sick people to be productive. We expect them to work on getting better.

That usually means resting, perhaps seeing a doctor and taking medication.

It means refraining from daily activities even if they can be done sitting or lying down, such as blogging and tweeting.

I can only conclude that this student was not sick of anything other than my class.