On Leveraging Technology—part five: a sorting

When I started writing about technology in the classroom back in October I began with these central questions:

• How do we teach mindful use of technology to students who are already immersed in technology?
• How do I deal with the inherent assumptions in the previous question that imply such immersion is negative?
• Is such immersion negative?

A host of other questions has arisen from my explorations.

Context: My district decided against one-to-one technology adoption after passing our technology levy. The district my children attended adopted one-to-one. The comparison has been interesting. Of course, the comparison is not perfect. I’m a teacher in one district, and a parent in another. Obviously different perspectives. I’ve also made some clear decisions about my kids and technology, and technology in my personal life, which I laid out in the first post.

Here I am at the end of March, the longest month, and where am I really with answering these questions?

Nowhere. The problem is I keep coming up with new questions, and not with answers. The good news is the questions are getting more complicated, which, to my mind, indicates progress.

For example, why am I more comfortable asking students to put their nose in a book and less comfortable asking them to face screens?

The short answer is there is a raft of research against using screens for long periods of time. It is hard on our eyes, our brains, our focus, our sociability, our self-image, and on and on. Despite all this longitudinal research, we are using screens more than ever as a society. Personally, they have creeped into my life. I teach online, I use Google classroom with my face to face classes, and I write on a machine more than ever (though I still use a notebook daily).

I’ve been using screens this year in my high school classes attempting to implement more inquiry based lessons. For example, in my AP Language class, we spend all year defining terms and practicing finding them in texts. When we reached the device of fallacies I created this assignment in Google Classroom: I gave students a list of twenty-four fallacies with definitions and examples. Then they were to use documents we’d read previously in class or articles from a list of provided sources to find examples of fallacies in action. I provided context explaining how fallacies are considered a lapse in logic, but are not always an error, or wrong. Sometimes they are, in fact, the best way to make an argument. Their effect is dependent on context and the rhetorical situation. I put them in groups and they had to divide and conquer the list as well as agree on the examples.

I like this assignment. It promotes inquiry, asks students to demonstrate skills independently we’ve been working on all year in a variety of ways. It moves vocabulary straight into real contexts and makes them talk about it with each other. The entire project is done looking into a screen with some side conversations, and that makes me weary.

Is this mindful use of technology? My children’s district makes the argument that educational screen time is not the same as entertainment screen time. Is it? If it is why is page 19 of the 1:1 technology handbook titled “Health and Wellness in a Digital World,” and is followed by a page of ten websites devoted to helping families safely use technology. The entire focus of their “technology resources for families” page on their website is devoted to health, ways to protect kids, and create healthy limits around screen usage. If we were providing students with books and hands on labs would we feel the need to offer these sorts of resources and warnings?

I find myself thinking like Nicolas Carr, who in his 2008 article, Is Google Making Us Stupid, says,

“Maybe I’m just a worrywart. Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).”

While I will admit I am completely convinced that our new technology of portable screens and pocket sized computers will cause people to “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful,” and that many people don’t even have to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction” to be “thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant,” they just have to know the internet is there, and knowing they can “Google” something at any given moment allows the false impression to the self and to others that they actually carry that knowledge.

Two recent and small instances in my classrooms: A student argued with another student that cracking knuckles does not cause arthritis. He cited Nobel Prize winning research as evidence. I told him to show us. Turns out it won an “I G Nobel” prize, a slightly less dubious award than the Darwin Awards. Another student tried to convince me that there is such an animal as a “tree octopus.” She cited a website, pulled it up, and all I had to do was read—“the tree octopus is an internet hoax….” I was careful not to shame these students. One has the definition of ignoble seared into his long-term memory, the other the notion that she should read the captions of webpages, but both of these instances point to a larger trend of off-loading critical thought. Something Carr warned about, and Sven Birkerts before him, and Neil Postman before him, and Marshal Mcluhan, and Ray Bradbury, and George Orwell, and Aldus Huxley, before them. I feel as though I’m living in a slightly less distressing dystopia than those authors foresaw, but their central concerns have come very true. And what if dystopias are as unattainable as utopias seem to be and this particular reality should be more concerning to us?

Or is that just alarmist, worrywart, luddite, pessimism? It might be, and it might not be wrong for it. I don’t think there is any denying the fact that writing, then books, then the printing press changed thought and knowledge and basically everything we conceive of as modern life came out of those changes. As Nietzche points out (once again via Carr), our writing instruments impact the way we think. His sight was going and he began using a typewriter, which changed how he wrote and thought.

There are a number of contemporary moralists, philosophers, and theologians who are writing about the problem of technology and the role it plays in our lives. What if the problem encompasses and transcends all of those categories? I mean, what if any dithering along those lines is just pointless? I increasingly come back to the commencement speech David Foster Wallace gave to Kenyon College graduates in 2016, titled “This is Water.” In his speech he tells the graduates that the greatest gift of their education is teaching them “how to think.” That their liberal arts education teaches them to see things from multiple perspectives, to rationalize their way through problems, to reserve judgement. He talks about how this both applies to the most high-minded elitist thinking possible, but also to the ability to remain compassionate when cut off by a large truck in traffic. When one has been trained to use their mind (educated), they get to choose what they focus on. “Everyone worships,” he says. And every object of worship, spiritual or material, selfish or magnanimous comes with consequences. What we worship changes who we are, how we feel, how we treat others.

Finland continually wins “happiest people on earth” in recent global census surveys. And they don’t like it, because the very notion of being the happiest people flies in the face of why they have earned that moniker. This is a country that has decided to invest in its people for the last two decades. Social programs and educational programs thrust them into the world spotlight when students began scoring at the top of international exams. They were surprised. Most of what they have implemented is common sense (and advice we have been historically given by theologians, philosophers, moralists, novelist, and psychologists). When you read about Finnish happiness balance is the central trope. When stressed they slow down. Swim. Eat fruit. Look at the northern lights. One might say they worship equanimity. Not shocking that they are happy and dislike the attention.

So, what does all of this look like in my classroom? A balance of assignments on the computer and assignments on paper. Equal time spent looking into the screen and into each other’s faces? Equal time speaking and listening? Sitting. Walking. Stepping outside (sans screens). Perhaps. There is still the problem of my own children, who had screen time limited to a few hours a week until their schools put a computer into their hands and increased that time exponentially. There is still the problem that some of my students manage to look at their phone six hours a day at school regardless of the balance I might tabulate of screen/off screen in my classroom. With all of those variables, does it really matter what I do? Can I teach them the meta-cognitive practices that may allow them to make critical decisions about their technology use? Does that compromise my curriculum? If they don’t see the increase of technology as a problem, because in their world it is not an increase, but simply natural as the air they breathe is that problematic? Will we just adapt or evolve, learn to breathe new air as we did with the written word? Will new and deeper and inconceivable types of knowledge and intelligence thrive and transcend class/race/gender in ways our historical moment cannot see yet—just as Socrates could not see the benefits of writing?

I don’t know. I know I feel worse on days I spend more hours on a computer. I also know I am able to support my family in ways I would not be able to if I could not teach online in addition to my day job.  Perhaps these are just the major ambiguities of our time.