I just wrote about the spell casting nature of technical support when the Harry Potter metaphor extended itself.


In a grade 12 academic English class we were talking about 1984 and Brave New World.  The idea of a technological dystopia seemed very immediate for those seventeen and eighteen year old students.  They felt trapped by their technology, dependent on it, desperate for it, addicted to it!

One student mentioned that he forgot his smartphone on a recent trip and was beside himself not knowing what was going on.  I told him, “that used to happen in the old days, we called it blindness.”  It was said partly in jest, but the conversation turned to the idea that technology is becoming a part of us and when you leave a piece of personal electronics behind you actually suffer withdrawal.  Any modern teacher who has watched students in exams fidgeting and anxious will know the truth of this.


That student didn’t just feel like he’d lost a sense while he was away from his Blackberry.  The physical aspect of that very personal piece of electronics was like a missing body part; he even had phantom pains, reaching for it constantly when it wasn’t there.


With the Harry Potter spell casting through technology thing floating around in my head, it seemed a logical next step to look at his smartphone as a horcrux.  These personal pieces of electronics give us senses and abilities that a few years ago would have seemed magical.  


In the case of personal devices like smartphones, tablets and even laptops, especially the really fetishy ones that Apple is famous for (though not exclusively), our tech has become as much a part of who we are as our clothing or other worn, personal icons.  If our personal technology defines us, then it’s a small psychological step from identifying with a physical object to believing our self-worth is an aspect of it.


The difference between passive items like clothes and our interactive tech is that the tech touches our minds as well as our bodies, it feels like a piece of how we think.  From there it’s a small step to feeling like they are part of our core being; a piece of our souls.


When I was a teen, I wanted a car more than anything in the world, it meant freedom and mobility.  I had no interest in cars before I was able to drive, and then I was infatuated with them.  My encyclopedic knowledge of everything build in the ’80s and ’90s is a result of that infatuation (as well as my entirely dodgy string of vehicles).  I’ve been all about anthropomorphizing mechanical devices since I was a kid watching Lost in Space.


The relationship with personal electronics seems destined to eclipse the earlier affection we had for our mechanical devices.  The nature of these electronics means a mental as well as physical interaction, and our adaptable brains are more than ready to accomodate the change.


Voldemort put his soul into horcruxes to prevent his own destruction, much as Sauron did in Lord of the Rings.  The idea of off-loading or decentralizing ourselves to external devices isn’t a new one.  Looking at the involuntary and constant connection to smartphones in today’s teens, it appears to already be happening on a massive scale, and they themselves realize how different it makes them from the people who came before them.


You’ve got to wonder though…  why did these authors always have the villain do this de-humanizing thing for their own self-aggrandizement?

Thanks to @fitfatman I now have a working term for an emergent student behavior:

PHOTOBOARDING: an emerging student response of taking pictures of in-class notes from overheads or the board, rather than writing notes.

In a senior academic English class we began a unit on short stories.  The instructions were complex and specific (across several pages) and involved creating a lesson on the short story of their choice, and then teaching the class that lesson (good prep for university seminar work).

Pretty much every student looked over the paper without reading it, made no effort to create a plan based on the criteria and then talked about their weekend with each other (while occasionally complaining about how much reading was involved with this unit).  It’s a week before the holiday break, they weren’t particularly motivated to be there.  Fortunately universities never set exams or anything important right before the holiday break.

One of the sharp ones came up and asked for clarification.  I spent 20 minutes sketching out a timeline/chart based on the criteria in the assignment with him on the board (in other words, I made notes).  By the end of our chat he had a clear idea of what to do on this specific assignment (I didn’t suggest anything, I simply wrote down what he found in the handout).  He also had a useful means of organizing himself for future assignments.

When we were done half a dozen students came up and took photos of the board with their phone cameras.  There were maybe 50 words in the chart.  In talking to other teachers, this appears to be an emerging student habit, taking pictures of notes written in class.

There are a couple of difficulties with this.

It turns out that writing by hand creates all sorts of interesting neurological connections between the sense experience of hearing and seeing, and the development of memory structures around new ideas.  I’m guessing that the ‘push a button’ approach doesn’t create the same linkages, and doesn’t allow you to work through the material a piece at a time so much as simply grab it up all at once, and they aren’t even the ones doing the grabbing.

The other difficulty lies in what this approach says about what happens in a classroom.  Students often come in after missing a class and ask what they missed.  They expect access to information, easily handed over, often online.  If information transmission is all that happens in the classroom, then you really don’t need a teacher to do that.  If information transmission is the point of education, then we really don’t need many people at all.

In the moment that I modeled, experimented and tried to demonstrate a self-sufficient way for a motivated student to get a handle on complex instructions, I wasn’t merely transmitting information, I was trying to create a memorable moment using written and verbal cues that would give him the tools to deal with this situation in the future.  The notes were an expression of this, but the goal was a change in his behavior that allows him to be more self sufficient and effective in dealing with complex tasks.

Taking a picture of the notes, reducing that moment of teaching to a few pieces of information on the board, fails to recognize the importance of internalizing learning.  If we develop digital habits that limit our ability to effectively remember what happens, and in the process reduce the complex internalization of ideas by simplifying teaching and learning into information transmission, we’re one of the main components in the creation of digital natives who wallow in the shallow end of learning.

Many teachers speak of their students’ horrific memory.  Without the process of deep reading and writing to gradually introduce ideas into our minds, we become surface dwellers, never considering ideas in deep, contextual ways.  Our brains are able to consume great amounts of detail if the information is streamed in (reading and writing happen to do this wonderfully well); snapping a picture does not allow for that.

The mechanics of reading and writing aside, my real concern is in the externalization of ideas.  It is going to become increasingly difficult to teach (encourage growth in understanding and resultant behavior change) if the process of learning is simplified into data transference.  In courses of study that develop complex curriculum over long periods of time (ie: all of them), we are displacing complex neurological actions that develop deep, contextual understanding and provoke personal growth with the click of a button.

As long as technology is seen and sold as a means of simplification and way of reducing effort, we’re doing our students a disservice by pushing it, and ultimately creating imbeciles.  Until we begin to advocate for technology that doesn’t dumb us down, for technology that allows us to effectively complicate and empower our thought processes, we’re part of a major societal problem.

In the meantime, students take photos of notes, replacing a cognitively engaging means of remembering and internalizing new ideas in a personal, contextual manner with the push of a button jpeg.  Most digitally interested teachers would call this efficiency, but we seem to be constantly confusing efficiency with gross simplification.

Why We Remember What We Write
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/writing-and-remembering-why-we-remember-what-we-write.html

Memory & Writing
http://www.neurology.org/content/46/5/1467

What is learning?
http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/whatlearn.htm

Deep Reading & Memory: A professor’s guide to integrating writing…

How do you show someone what something really is when they already think they know?

Building digital competency is made harder by the fact that students believe that they already know what they’re doing.  Students who think the our networked world consists of facebook, youtube and Google think they know it all, because it’s all they know.

If we’re going to develop meaningful skill sets in students, we need to break down some long standing habits around believing that computers exist only for recreational use, and show students just how world wide the world wide web really is.

If we can break them out of their habits, and their very limited idea of what computers can do for them, we might be able to break the curse of the digital zombie, and develop some technology savvy students who are able to use technology instead of having technology using them

Operating a computer is like driving a car.  In both cases the technology enhances our natural abilities, and in both cases there is virtually nothing in the way of real understanding of what the technology is doing on the part of most users.  The vast majority of drivers are habitual creatures with little idea of the physics and mechanics behind what they are doing.  The majority of computer users are unimaginative, habitual users of their machines who stay away from experimentation in favour of what they know, mostly for fear of breaking what they know they can’t fix.

I used to think I was a dynamite driver, then I took a performance driving course at Shannonville, and realized how little I knew.  Following this up with a couple of years of cart racing in Japan, and I started to develop the craft of driving, rather than reinforcing the habit.

The defeat of habit in developing skill is the key to mastery.  If you can create a sense of perspective and experimentation with what you know, and what you don’t, you can learn to develop a set of skills beyond what you’ve already habitualized.  If your ignorance restricts you to the idea that you know everything, you are unlikely to ever move beyond that false sense of security and ignorance.

Many of our students live in this cave, watching the flickering lights, thinking that the flicking lights are all there are.  Pulling them out of their habitual ignorance is difficult, and I’ve often found that it’s best served by a drop in the deep end.  I’ve gotten more traction daring students to do something they thought they couldn’t than I ever have doing it for them (again and again).

As long as you can hang in the Zone of Proximal Development, you’ll be able to make them aware of their ignorance while offering them the tools to overcome it; the real heart of the teachable moment.

When I see the vast majority of digital natives (something I’ve raged against previously) attempt to make constructive use of a computer in class, they are constantly sideswiped by how little they know.  Watching my students struggle with their own urge to pointlessness in a blended learning career studies pilot last year was very enlightening.  If you hand them a computer, for the vast majority, the first thing they do is open Facebook, no matter what the reason for working on the computer was, it’s like a digital tether, 90% of their digital self is stored in that one place (the other 10 is on youtube).  College humor hits the digital natives where they live with this.

When a student whose primary relationship with computers is one of entertainment, they have great difficulty thinking of it as anything other than a gaming console for asinine videos and Facebook.

One of Carr’s angles in The Shallows is the loss of deep reading in a digital format.  Our memories can very efficiently manage the linear data stream we generate when we read deeply, but not if we’re continuously interrupted (by links, navbars, hypertext, incoming social media etc).  Interrupted reading (or any kind of interrupted focused attention) results in substantially lower understanding and retention.  This isn’t an opinion, it’s a fact of our biology.

The ‘wild’ (read: increasingly monetized and corporately directed) internet caters to this.  Google thrives on page views and the internet thrives on Google, so the medium has continually evolved into a distraction engine that encourages disrupted thinking and rapid, trivial surfing of web pages.  This isn’t the fault of digital technology, it’s the fault of human beings intent on squeezing wealth from it.

The technology itself could as easily be adapted to protect its users and encourage and engage a focused mind.  Off the top of my head, THIS would be a good start.  We could as easily create deep research apps and other digital tools that encourage and reward focused attention online (we do all the time, they’re games).  The feedback loops I recently read about in WIRED would serve this well.  People wouldn’t be so reckless on the web if their recklessness was quantified.

One of the ways we try to deal with this as educators is to validate fractured thinking.  We start to think that skills like multi-tasking should be assessed and graded.  Multi-tasking isn’t a skill, it’s a series of single tasks we do in a much less effective way.  Rather than encouraging it, we should be angling students toward short term intense focus if they have to deal with multiple tasks.  A quote from M*A*S*H has always stayed with me.  “I do one thing at a time, I do it very well and then I move on.”  It’s from Charles who won’t adopt a meatball surgery approach to his work, he won’t be rushed into doing many things poorly.

If we’re going to be technologically inspired and effective educators (and I desperately think that all teachers must be), then we need to train a very clear eye on what the internet does and how it (dangerously) simplifies our thinking.

In the meantime, herds of edtech educators get giddy about a new app with many flashing buttons on it.

@GlblCanuck posted this on our school email today: 

Whole responses on each to follow, but right now here’s what the ECOO 2011 Conference germinated for me:

• thanks to a question during my Dancing in the Datasphere presentation (which almost 500 people have viewed now!): “has anyone thought though this from a how it harms the students perspective?  Or are we all just rushing to ipad up each child?“

CBC radio was playing a phone call from parent with a child diagnosed with ADHD yesterday afternoon and I’m having a knee jerk reaction to it.  The responses were based on THIS story.

Having just been to my first unconference, I’m still buzzing with the energy, collaboration, disagreement and accord.  It wasn’t easy, or comfortable, but it was relevant, and it was VERY ENERGIZING.

This week I head to one of my favourite not un-conferences, ECOO.  This is the conference that got me onto twitter, got me building pln, got me blogging, got me into so many different ideas around technology in the classroom that it has changed my practice, it’s a fantastic piece of work.  It’s also the first conference I ever presented at, and I’m presenting there again this year.  ECOO works for me on so many levels, but this year I’m worried about the linchpin to the whole thing: the keynote addresses.

This year, as in other years, they’ve trotted up American presenters who, for the most part, present a consistent polemic of fear, anxiety and need for radical change.  It’s all very exciting, and radical, and urgent, and necessary, if you’re in America.  In the U.S. they’ve demonized the teaching profession (and public service jobs in general), gutted public education (and services in general) and done everything in their power to privatize what’s left.  In the process they are astonished that they’ve  become uncompetitive.

What I fear is going to happen at ECOO is that two Americans are going to stand up and quote American statistics at us (again), while urging us to throw out everything we’re doing and radically revise our failing education system.  Ah, the polemics of fear and upheaval; what happens when you let short term business interests (there are no other) run your society.

Except, of course, the Canadian education system isn’t failing, it’s fantastic.  We graduate more students, reach more with special needs and do it at a higher rate than almost any other human society on earth.  We have to keep working at it as hard as we have to keep it at the front, but throwing out everything we’ve done only works for a system that’s in tatters, like the U.S. system.

I live in hope that the keynotes will actually research what they are walking in to and not treat us like a 51st state (again).  If they don’t, expect some snippy back channel comments come Thursday morning.  I’m prepared to defend what we have done and what we are doing, it’s important.

I’ve already had to go through this once this year (at great cost to my board), I’m going to lose patience doing it again.

Note:  The speakers were fantastic, taking an audience participation approach, heavily using technology (when the hotel internet would work… I thought private business was supposed to be all masterful with this stuff), and emphasizing what we are doing right, rather than what the US is doing wrong.  Well done all.

Caught this by accident while walking around Parliament Hill at sunset the other day. The Ottawa natives were too cool to stick around, but we’re glad we did.

I’m an immigrant to Canada, and it took me a long time to get my citizenship, but moments like this laying on the lawn with my son and wife in front of Parliament seeing such an honest and heartfelt expression of the Canadian experience was truly moving.

If you’re in Ottawa and are hanging out downtown around sunset, do yourself a favour and go catch this show.

I’ve got a soft spot for building projection systems anyway, it’s architecture made fluid and digital. I’d love to take the cold, institutional grey building bricks of my school and digitize it like this, but the projectors are wicked expensive! When you see something like Mosaika, you begin to realize just how powerful fluid digital architecture and lighting can be.

http://youtu.be/VgJYr6ix29Q

Via Flickr:
Mosaika is the story of Canada – our story. A powerful narrative set against the spectacular backdrop of Parliament Hill, Mosaika takes the audience on an unforgettable journey of sound and light, as we explore Canada’s physical, historical and cultural landscapes.

Don’t miss this free, bilingual show. Presented nightly in Canada’s Capital Region. From July 8 through September 12, 2010.

Mosaika raconte l’histoire du Canada — notre histoire. Par la magie du son et de la lumière, ce saisissant spectacle, présenté sur la colline du Parlement, nous fait vivre un voyage inoubliable à la découverte des paysages, de l’histoire et de la culture du Canada.

Ne manquez pas ce spectacle bilingue gratuit, présenté tous les soirs, du 8 juillet au 12 septembre 2010, dans la région de la capitale du Canada.