Unplug and Connect

From September 14-20, Cornell students, faculty, and staff are invited to go off-line, off-screen, and off-tech to participate in Unplug and Connect 2026.   

Cornell Unplugged encourages participants to explore how mindful technology use can support personal well-being and meaningful connection, more human-centered forms of teaching and learning, and more thoughtful and sustainable modes of computing and AI use. Throughout the week, participants are encouraged to unplug from phones, computers, televisions, and other electronic devices to the greatest extent possible. Whether participants choose to unplug for a day, an hour, or an evening, every effort counts.  
 
The initiative encourages participants to reflect on how much time they spend connected to technology, and to bring awareness to three key issues:   

1. How excessive technology use can contribute to feelings of disconnection and social isolation
2. How unplugging can encourage thoughtful, innovative and human-centered forms of teaching and learning
3. How indiscriminate technology use can challenge sustainability goals and raise the environmental costs of computing and AI. 

Wondering how to unplug?

If you are interested in reconnecting with community, consider putting away devices during meals, holding in-person meetups and meetings, leaving your phone at home, or turning off social media notifications. You can also join in a wide range of in-person and off-line activities that week.

• Get involved in your residential community 
• Check out events in Athletics, Music, and the Johnson!  
• Check out the Office of Spirituality and Meaning-Making!  
• Check out the resources at NatureRx! 

If you are interested in exploring tech-free or tech-lite learning, consider integrating hands-on activities in the classroom, taking learning beyond the classroom, leaving the laptop at home, or leaning into office hours (spoiler alert: professors are humans too). 

Check out the Center for Teaching Innovations Tech-lite Classroom strategies. 

If you are interested in exploring the environmental footprint of your computing: 

Website Carbon Calculator is the best starting point for anyone curious about everyday browsing. Paste in any URL - It can be your favorite news site, your own homepage, whatever you have open right now, and it estimates that page's carbon footprint per visit. 

EcoLogits is great if you want to understand the footprint of your AI use specifically. It works with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and other similar tools. Select a provider and model, and it estimates the carbon, energy, and water impact of that query. 

CodeCarbon is a good resource for anyone who writes code or runs computational work - students, researchers, and IT teams. It's a free, open-source tool that measures the actual energy draw and emissions of a script or model as it runs on your own machine, rather than estimating from the outside.