Technology taking over our lives?

Here's a thought, with all the technology that we have at our fingertips--where many devices serve multiple functions--we are multi-tasking more than ever. While working on their homework on their computer, teens could be listening to music, checking their email, chatting via aim and facebook, texting their friends on their phone, eating and watching the TV in the background. This obviously leads to less productivity, more distractors, and possibly too much of a blending of work and play. For students that don't already have ADD, we are creating a world where students have such a stimulus overload that they are likely to struggle with the same problems people with ADD encounter. For those that already have ADD--good luck! Even the website/wiki/blog format of creating seems to almost encourage distraction because of hyperlinks. While it is great to have the information right at your fingertips (as opposed to relying on footnotes and citation chasing, which is probably fairly rare for students especially), it can be easy to get distracted clicking on the links, and then getting interested in something else, and forgetting what the true assignment or goal was. This poses issues in the classroom, because students seem to get bored and distracted easier. They expect the same sensory stimulation they are used too and want to find quick, fast answers with minimal effort. Although this encourages us to be more creative as teachers, I wonder how it affects students ability to work hard and to focus. Are we going to have to start teaching meditation in school in order to help kids learn how to concentrate on one thing at a time (such as reading). Reading effectively takes so much concentration in order to truly absorb it and I wonder if this skill is starting to get lost a bit.

Also, technology is also so pervasive in our lives that it has the unfortunate side affect of making us feel like we must be constantly available. It has become harder and harder to avoid people or put work off. There is an immediacy about things, and I think it causes people to be more impulsive, selfish/demanding and less inclined to plan ahead. Whereas things used to have to be planned in advance to insure coordination with a variety of people and to get things completed during the 9-5 work day, now people have 24 hour access to people via cell phones and email. People can monitor what you are doing through twitter and facebook status updates, and they can see when you are on facebook or gmail and chat with you right there. Because of this, people are more impatient and less likely to wait for you to get back to them when it is convenient for you. Instead they will find another medium to contact you until they are able to reach you (at their convenience, not yours). This in turn leads to impulsive behaviors, because people our coerced to make decisions or give opinions on things before they have had the time to fully look into matters. This will inevitably result in poor, uninformed decisions, at least some of the time. It is also harder for people who are indecisive (like me), because they feel more more pressure to act quickly, because that is what is valued by friends, family and professionals in our world. The 9-5 job also becomes less and less realistic, as it becomes harder and harder to get away from bringing work home or at least staring at in the face via email or phone. Add in the popular idea of "working from home" and things get even more complicated, with work and personal life interfering with each other and life becoming harder and harder to keep organized or separate, leading to more multi-tasking, less focus, and ultimately, less productivity.

There is less and less privacy and the line between personal and professional life gets blurrier and blurrier. As supervisors and teachers, how do we deem what is appropriate use of computer/work time anymore? Many people save documents in their email and share working documents on google docs, so disallowing "email" sites either through filters or through library policy becomes problematic. Also with privacy issues, coworkers and students can learn more about our personal lives than ever before if we allow to become our "facebook friends" or twitter followers. How do you keep your professional and personal life separated? Is the idea of not letting your personal life interfere with your work, or not talking about it with co-workers even possible in this situation?

Video Games and Literacy: More Than Meets the Eye

I've been doing a lot of thinking about video games and literacy, and I just want to put a couple of ideas and questions out to the group to both extend my own thinking, and maybe to frame the conversation a bit, moving it outside of the "video games are not as good as books" argument that I hear a lot.

First, I think that it's really important to define terms in a discussion like this one. One central term is literacy. Are we thinking of literacy as being able to decode symbols to create meaning (functional literacy) or are talking about literacy as the ability to understand, critique, and question text, media, or other things interacted with (critical literacy)? Or are we saying the ability to read and comprehend books (print literacy)? Another central term is video game. Is the discussion around "mini" games such as Tetris, MarioKart, BrainAge, or around "complex" games, games that require players to take on a new identity, play for more than 10-100 hours to complete the game, problem solve and face consequences for their decisions, such as Final Fantasy, Spore, Sims, DragonQuest, etc? (BTW, I borrowed these terms from Marc Prensky, who talks about them in his book Don't Bother Me Mom, I'm Learning.)

From the reading and studying that I have done, I think that complex games can probably improve critical and perhaps even functional literacy. James Paul Gee makes a case for this in What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, in which he argues that educators can study games to observe extremely effective teaching techniques. (Whatever you think of the content of games, they are very good at both motivating people to keep playing them, and teaching them an internalized implicit set of rules so that they can understand and play the game.) One example of Gee's arguments about how games can support even print literacy (there are many, and I really encourage you to check out his book if you are interested!) is that games teach players "to learn about and come to appreciate interrelations within and across multiple sign systems (images, words, actions, symbols, artifacts, etc.) as a complex system, [which is] core to the learning experience." To paraphrase, learning to read at its most basic is really a process of learning how to decode and understand a symbol set. While games may be teaching players to understand a different kind of symbol set (not the English language), they are honing the same underlying skill.

In addition games provide a unique chance for players to immerse themselves within narrative structures, becoming part of the story creation itself. Some games have better stories than others, true, but they also do something that books can't (even Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books!): they give the "reader" / player agency and power over shaping the story line.

Finally, I'm borrowing from Steven Johnson's book Everything Bad Is Good for You to make this little chart about the differences between books and video games. While books do many things very well, and we have invested them in Western culture for hundreds if not thousands of years because of the things they do well, video games do other things very well, and I don't know that it has to be an either/or dichotomy. Maybe print literacy is not the main benefit of video games, and maybe it shouldn't be. But perhaps there are other, just as valuable, skill sets that video games have to offer. Take a look and see what you think.

10 Technology Ideas Your Library Can Implement Next Week

From American Libraries, this article on easy technology tweaks offers up some good ideas for libraries of any size and flavor.

Wired Kids, Negligent Parents?

In the wake of the Kaiser Family Foundation's newest report on media in the lives of young people, a four-part opinion series at the New York Times: http://bit.ly/dB7ijR

Walking into a Desert

"Watching a Digital Nation in Action" is the title of today's post on Digital Education, one of Education Week's blogs. It previews Digital Nation airing on PBS's Frontline next week (Tuesday, February 2 at 9 p.m. EST). You can also watch a preview and much of the work in progress on the PBS web site. Some of the quotes seemed particularly pertinent to our class discussion last week, especially this one on multitasking:

"Virtually all multitaskers think they're brilliant at multitasking," Sociologist Clifford Nass says. "And what we're discovering is that they're really lousy at it."

I have a very ambivalent attitude about multitasking. Some things I can do quite well together, and it just seems more efficient -- listening to a podcast while doing dishes, listening to a book on CD while driving . . . but for other tasks I end up not doing any of them very well. Or at least not as well as if I was only concentrating on just one task.

Another compelling quote is "Walking into a classroom without media," one educator says, "is like walking into a desert" for students these days. Wow. This description seems very apt. If media is ambient, flowing in a stream all around us, then no technology must be like a desert. If media is part of children's environment and life outside of school, then it needs to be part of their learning environment.

I missed another episode of Frontline earlier this year that focused specifically on children and the digital world, Growing Up Online, but that too is available to watch online. Sometimes it's pretty convenient to be living in the digital age!

Technology/Media and Youth

This week's readings and video clips were a reminder of he undeniably large role which current and emerging technologies play in young people's lives and our own. I was reminded of the commonly used expression 'too much information' and of the frustrated feeling I have at trying to keep up with all the technology available nowadays. However, I saw through these articles and videos reminders also of the exciting possibilities that new media outlets offer us all, young and old.

The article by David Buckingham examined how teenagers interact with and how they incorporate modern technology into their lives and I though he presented some arguments which I have occasionally seen bore out in the high school library where I work. In the article it was said that many adults think that teens are eager to embrace every technology which comes on to the scene and the are very proficient with them as well. At my school, I have had to show students how to do things on the computers, which I remember thinking at the time were 'things they should know' since I too have thought that teens are mostly tech savvy gurus we adults should be consulting rather than the other way around. Like Buckingham said, this isn't always the case. As I write this, one of our students who recently took over the lead in the production of our morning announcements is yet again here in the library using more of his lunch time to work on the physical equipment and software that's housed here for that purpose.

Another point of view presented here was the idea that the youth of today are somehow unique in how they utilize technology. Often times the media will take a hold of something like a 'To Catch A Predator' episode or a news story of how some teenage girls or boys were 'cyber-bullying' or 'sexting' to show that this generation has some special disreputable quality all of their own. I know I'm getting older however, I certainly can recall nasty notes my peers sent to one another or rumors of others using the existing technologies for less than appropriate purposes.

In Why Heather Can't Read from MIT's Technology Review, the article's focus on the way in which young people like Heather Lawver have used technology to further their passion for writing is encouraging. She is obviously someone like the student above from my school who I mentioned liked audio and visual productions, both like to incorporate technology in their lives albeit in different fashions. This article reminded me of another student at our school who I met recently who shared with me about her passion for writing and I thought of her when I read about these online communities of online peer reviews. I wonder if something like the Sugar Quill web site mentioned in the article would be an appealing outlet that would help her develop her writing ability.

I understand where there might be some validity to their criticism of schools inhibiting student writing somewhat by focusing too much on grammatical elements but, I also think that part of the curriculum is included in schools for no good reason. Writing is more than style and a good writer will master all aspects of the process for maximum effect. While I have some disagreement with this author about their stance on what they seem to portray as grammatical pickiness, I do think they are correct in what seems to be their stance that the Internet is a great learning environment for young adults who have a vast array of places to find inspiration and critical but hopefully constructive feedback.

Lee Rainie's presentation at the Networked Learners Symposium also proved insightful in what he shared on young adult and adult users' usage of technology. The one thing which stood out the most to me were his comments on the amount of information that is being presented to teens and how that will only grow worse as they get older. At my graduation from high school back in 1990, our superintendent somewhat prophetically told us how the amount of knowledge we'd need for the real world would double every so many years and that it would only get worse so, we needed to prepare for that world. I think the reason I remember his words so well was that I found this to be true in my life in the years since then. Young or old, if you are even somewhat technologically active in today's society you have what Mr. Rainie called truncated attention spans. A good example might be that while I was watching the video, I have to admit that I simultaneously had three other windows open on my computer searching for tickets to this weekend's men's Illini basketball game, checking back with this course's Moodle page to see what I still needed to do for this week's class, and I was typing notes on Microsoft Word from the presentation in between that all.

The times we live in currently are overwhelming when it comes to the technology and media onslaught and the prospect of facing strange new changes in this regard still leaves me with a little bit of dread. Yet, having said that I also look forward to it with anticipation-what an odd combination! As adults who work with teens we must at least try to stay abreast of these developments so we can best serve our constituents in their pursuit of personal, academic, and professional goals. I feel there will always be 'too much information' in our world from now on, but at least the young people we help will be better able to find their way through it all because they were prepared well.

Blio — New Ebook Software

Kurzweil is an idiosyncratic but expansive thinker, so I'm looking forward to seeing where this software leads!