The death of life on campus

A version of this post originally appeared on the Education Practice and Policy (EPP) blog. It is reproduced here with their permission. Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash. Every Wednesday, we run Shut Up and Write on campus at my university. If you aren’t familiar with Shut Up and Write, it is one of those simple but brilliant ideas. We come together in a café on campus–coffee is a necessary pre-condition for writing for some people. After saying hello and settling in, we talk briefly about what we are going to try to write that day. Then… One person turns on a 25-minute timer. Everybody writes. After 25 minutes we take a 5-minute break. We chat. The timer goes on again and we do 25-minutes writing. Then we take a 5-minute break. We rinse and repeat for three hours. Then we celebrate what we’ve written and toddle off to our individual lives. Sometimes we have lunch together. It is great! Three hours of focused writing time is a blessing. Getting to chat with other researchers from…