Could you survive without your laptop? Or would you be able to leave your iPod at home? Is it truly impossible to detach from your cell phone for five minutes? Well, for one class at the University of Minnesota, that’s not just a completely ludicrous notion. It’s homework.

According to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Professor Heather LaMarre gave her students one assignment: Don’t use “media or gadgets that didn’t exist before 1984.” By day three, few students remained unplugged, but, as the Star-Tribune explained, no one lasted until day five.

Unfortunately for “jacked-in” students around the country, LaMarre is not the only instructor issuing these technological marching orders. “Media fasts” are quickly becoming commonplace in college classrooms. The University of Texas at Dallas’ David Parry told his introduction the students in his electronic and digital communications class to quit Facebook for an entire week.

Other teachers are less severe, assigning 12-or-24 hour breaks from modern media technology. On the other extreme, at Macalester College in St. Paul media professor John Kim plans to pull “students out of the city and off the grid for two weeks” for his upcoming “Immedia” class.

Our Take:

Well, you can count me out of any of these classes.

While I can appreciate the sentiment of unplugging from the grid (let’s how many Matrix references I can make), for some people, myself included, technology is their umbilical cord to the world around them.

I don’t get much of a chance to just sit in front of the TV and watch the news anymore. Instead, I run through my various news apps on the train into work, thus keeping informed about the world around me, but not detracting any from my morning schedule. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.

As the Star-Tribune’s piece explains, these teachers are by no means anti-technology or anti-internet, lest anyone throw out the accusation of “crotchety old farts who are trying to make the world what it was fifty years ago.” However, the irony of an electronic and digital communication professor cutting his students off from a digital communication site is not lost on me.

Now, Facebook is one of those tricky media applications that we could afford a break from every now and again. Instead of writing on your friend’s wall, try calling them! It’s such a novel idea, isn’t it?

Finally, WTF is with this “Immedia” class at Malacaster? Taking me off the grid for two weeks? How is that even possible?

Unless his students are outlawed from having jobs, other classes, responsibilities or a life, then this can’t conceivably work no matter how cool it sounds.

Could you last five days without Facebook or your cell phone? Has your teacher handed out this near-bogus assignment? Let us know by voting in our poll, or leaving a comment below