My browser has 23+1 tabs open right now. You?

As I'm writing this, I have 23 tabs open in my browser. About 4 of them are for my EME6414 assignments — including Canvas — and another 6 or so are for a proposal I'm working on with my advisor. The remaining 13? All about my upcoming July vacation back to Korea.

Don't judge me, though. I'd like to think I'm not doing that badly. I've at least organized them by category: EME6414 / proposal / vacation hotels / vacation food. Oh wait — I forgot to count the YouTube tab playing Yunchan Lim's piano performance, my go-to work background music. So make that 24 tabs total.

The mix of tabs obviously shifts depending on what I'm doing. When I'm working on EME6414, I've got Canvas, Google Scholar, FSU Library, NotebookLM, and a stack of paper PDFs going. When I switch to trip planning mode, it's Kakao Map (genuinely better than Google Maps in Korea), hotel booking sites, and an endless pile of blog reviews layered on top of each other. I don't always open them with a clear intention, but somehow the right combination just... assembles itself.

This week's readings introduced me to the concept of the Personal Learning Environment, or PLE, from Dabbagh and Kitsantas (2012). It's basically the idea of a self-designed and self-managed learning ecosystem built around the learner. My first reaction was, oh, I'm already doing this. The paper talks about building PLEs through blogs, wikis, and social media, but for me, it seems to show up as a particular arrangement of browser tabs. My second thought was that my messy tab situation looks a lot like the state of my desk — a little chaotic, but somehow mine.

Now, is my tab curation always efficient? Absolutely not. When a hotel booking page is sitting right next to a paper I'm supposed to be reading... well, you can guess what happens. (Full disclosure: I spent a good chunk of today bouncing back and forth because I was genuinely so excited about a hotel I found.) But maybe that's actually a pretty honest picture of what it looks like when formal and informal learning blend together in real life. A perfectly organized learning environment sounds nice, but these tabs — fluid, shifting, shaped by whatever I happen to care about in the moment — feel a lot more like me. (I'm type B, rather non-organized person.) Even if they're not always the most productive version of me.

At the end of the day, my browser isn't just a tool. It might be the most accurate map of where my head is at any given moment.


References

Dabbagh, N., & Kitsantas, A. (2012). Personal Learning Environments, social media, and self-regulated learning: A natural formula for connecting formal and informal learning. The Internet and Higher Education, 15(1), 3–8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2011.06.002

Trevisan, O., Langran, E., Christensen, R., Parent, S., Goda, Y., Michaux-Colin, F., Cotnam-Kappel, M., Deschênes, M., Egan, A., Costello, E., & Saito, T. (2026). Reimagining Digital Citizenship Through Postdigital Ecosystems: A Polylogue Across Contexts. Computers and Education Open, Article 100380. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.caeo.2026.100380

Comments

  1. Lydia JMay 31, 2026 at 7:45 PM

    I can totally relate!! I think I have more than that open, and I don't realize it until my laptop starts to move slow! I'm a teacher and grad student, so I usually have tabs open to coursework/lesson plans/research/etc. Along with tabs for random things that catch my interest. I feel like my tabs are a window into my brain! I enjoyed reading your post!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Felipe VernequeJune 2, 2026 at 7:42 AM

    In this moment I have 46 tabs opened in my browser! 😱 However I need this because I'm a multitask man. 😜

    ReplyDelete
  3. thnJune 4, 2026 at 7:56 AM

    I can relate as well. Recently, I have been "grouping" my tabs because there are too many, and to "destress" my old computer :D

    ReplyDelete
  4. VanessaJune 5, 2026 at 4:55 AM

    FSU makes me updated my browser every 5 days (or so it seems), and I am always amazed at how quickly I end up with 10 windows, 15 tabs apiece, half of them Canvas or my.fsu

    ReplyDelete

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