Scripted Lives

I've been mulling this over on the motorcycle side of things, but the idea runs throughout modern digital life, so I'm going to open it up further here.

Being a computer technology teacher I have a passing acquaintance with software.  I'd even say I'm pretty handy with it, but I don't really like where it's going since it has become an integrated part of modern life.

Since we started carrying networked computers around with us we have become scripted creatures.  Our devices wake us up, tell us what we're doing, and how to get where we're going.  They remove doubts and make memory redundant.  We no longer guess at unknown information, or watch media by accident.  We live in a walled garden of playlists and information at our fingertips, surprises seldom happen.  Technology gives us access to information and media, as well as allowing us to communicate, but it changes how we do it; the medium is indeed the message.

When we connect to The Network we are operating within a script, quite literally, all the time.  Software scripts dictate what we see, how we see it, and how we express ourselves. Complex human relationships are being reduced to scripted simplicity dictated by technological limitations rather than the full range of human ability.  This restriction has begun to redefine what people are capable of doing.

I struggle to find non-scripted moments when software isn't dictating my responses.  You'd think this only happens when you make a choice to connect on a device, but it happens constantly in the world of action.  I can't stop my car in heavy snow as quickly because a computer steps in to keep the wheels spinning, even when I'm making a conscious choice to lock them.  Scripts are written for the largest possible population.  We're all being held to the outcomes of average thinking.

As Kenneth Clark states in Civilisation:
35:36: The obvious: "...our increasing reliance on machines. They have really ceased to be tools and have begun to give us directions..."

... and that was his angle on things in 1969.  Things have come a long way since.  Our brave new world of technology is levelling everyone off.  Individual ability doesn't matter when we are all just variables in an equation.

Students experience education, entertainment and interpersonal relationships through a digital lens whose singular intent is that of continued engagement.  When your world is housed within a simplistic digital process designed to constantly get your attention you have a lot of trouble dealing with your irrelevance in the real world.

How can you do that? They say, it's so dangerous, they say.
Fear driven risk reduction is a big part of why the scripted
world exists.  It's thinking pushed by actuarial accountants.
It isn't real if it's designed to be unfailable, if there is no risk.. 

When prompted into unscripted situations where I am asking them to critically analyze a piece of media, students long for a Google search to tell them what to think.  When given a opportunity to express themselves many students will leap into the same template to organize other people's material they copy off the internet.  When given a stochastic engineering problem with no clear, linear resolution they freeze up and long to return to scripted experience.

Technology is such an enabler, but it's also limited by its capabilities.  If friendship is now understood through the lens of social media then it isn't what it once was, it's less with more people.  More isn't necessarily better even though we're told that it is more efficient.  If communication with a student is primarily through screens then teaching isn't what it once was, it's more information with less learning.  Both friendship and teaching pre-date digital communication and have deep, nuanced social histories, but we are happy to simplify them into oblivion for convenience and the illusion of efficiency.

If you ever find yourself struggling against invisible limitations, fighting to express yourself but finding it increasingly difficult, you're up against this reductive technology.  That freedom of choice you feel when you put aside the digital and reclaim your full range of sense and capability is intoxicating.  It supercharges your mind and allows you to retain your humanity.  That I see so few people having those moments is a real cause for concern.

My son and I searching the tidal pools at Pacific Rim National Park on the edge of the world.  Carefully selected technology (a motorbike - so no digital distractions and out in the world) got us there, and then we put it all down and got lost in the world with no scripts telling us how to interact with it.  When was the last time you were unplugged?

This was such a complicated idea it spawned a number of others, including these thoughts of gamification.  The wise Skillen of the internet also shared this article on distraction prevention by a new media professor, which led to thoughts on distraction.

They Know Not What They Do

Yesterday the Waterloo Region District School Board didn't cancel school due to inclement weather.  The response they got on Twitter was, to say the least, shocking.  That students don't understand how the internet works is apparent in how they present themselves online.  Some of their comments not only reflected their ignorance but also uncovered a mob mentality that frequently appears online.  Students think they are private and anonymous when they are in fact standing on a world-wide stage making fools of themselves.

People outside of Kitchener can see Twitter? Dude!

The fellow on the left is surprised that people not from Kitchener are responding to tweets.  The entire world could see these tweets and they're now a permanent part of the digital record, you can't take back what was said in anger online.  You can only imagine what this does for their digital footprint, not that anyone is teaching them this in school.

My wife suggested that if WRDSB hadn't let all their elementary librarians go in the last ten years, those librarians might have been there to teach this generation of 'digital natives' how not to make fools of themselves online.  I only wish that were true.  The vast majority of librarians I've met are determined not to address digital citizenship because they feel that technology is a threat to traditional (book based) learning.  Alanna herself didn't get hired recently because she 'was too digitally focused'.  I fear that librarians themselves and the people who hire them aren't the ones to fix this.

So who does teach digital citizenship?  I've got a teacher at my school who does it because he feels it's a vital part of any relevant, modern civics course - he doesn't even have a full contract.  The only people addressing digital citizenship are outliers, though our students (those digital natives) are expressing themselves inappropriately through this technology all the time.

The mob mentality and the righteousness that comes with it.

Take a moment to look over the tweets directed at WRDSB in the last 24 hours and you see students making the common mistake (because the formats are similar) of assuming tweets are like texts.  In the student's mind they are texting directly to their school board but, of course, that is not how Twitter works.  You see students unaware they they are publishing death threats publicly, you see students encouraging the mob mentality that had them hurling invective at their school board.  You have to wonder what a kid in Rwanda thinks about all of these grammar impaired, spoiled, first world kids commplaining about having to go to school.  Yes, people in Rwanda can read your tweets.

So we're left with an awkward, embarrassing situation here, and not one limited to Waterloo Region.  We have students who spend the majority of their time in digital communications without realizing what it is or how it works.  We have students who are essentially making themselves unemployable by creating such deplorable digital footprints that no one would touch them.  Can you imagine what you'd do if you googled the kid who just asked for a job and found death threats against their school board published online?  It shows a startling lack of prudence.

 Instead of embracing digital communications to create a live résumé that would generate job offers for them, they are building themselves a digital ghetto, and this is happening on a massive scale.  An entire generation of students are making themselves irrelevant.  I wonder how many more times this will happen before we start to integrate digital citizenship into curriculum like it matters.

Cultivating Genius & the Zen Teacher

A recent issue of WIRED has an article on student directed learning called: The Next Steve Jobs, which asks some hard questions about teaching and learning during an information revolution.

The idea of regimented learning in rows in classrooms is so obviously indicative of 19th Century factory thinking that it begs for change, but many traditional education organizations have so much invested in the status quo that they will spend all our time and money hammering people into system-serving standardized thinking.  Instead of developing the skills vital for learning in an information revolution, we cling to politics and habits.  Nowhere was this more obvious than in a poor Mexican school that wasn't serving a genius in their mix.

You have to wonder how many of our students are marginalized and never see their own potential because we are wringing our hands about how not-average they are and how they don't respond appropriately to being indoctrinated by an archaic education system.

The article leans on technology, brain science and student centred and directed learning to bring out real genius in a student who was otherwise disengaged.  The brain research is fairly straightforward (though ignored by most education systems):

“The bottom line is, if you’re not the one who’s controlling your learning, you’re not going to learn as well,” says lead researcher Joel Voss, now a neuroscientist at Northwestern University.

Neuroscience has proven this again and again, but education stubbornly holds to an information limited, rigidly programmed learning system because these traditions support the political makeup of that education system.

“If you put a computer in front of children and remove all other adult restrictions, they will self-organize around it,” Mitra says, “like bees around a flower.”

Mitra's research still assumes a teaching presence that will bump students along when they run into repetitive habitual patterns.  The key is a good leading question and then that dogged support as students find their own way to an answer.  The urge to interfere in this process in order to make learning clinical and exact is great, and many teachers do this with the best possible intentions, but what they are actually doing is taking away the student's opportunity to internalize learning.

Learning is a messy process, at its best teaching is a subtle presence focused on producing a fecund environment for fearless experimentation and research.  An idea is only learned when it is internalized by the learner and that can only happen experientially.  Any time you see a teacher talking at students there isn't any learning happening.

Faith in the self direction of a learner is something we've tried to remove from every aspect of the education system.  The system becomes the intent rather than the learner's learning.  Words like curriculum, assessment and standardized data become watchwords for how effective the system is as a system, it all has nothing to do with learning.  

Many of the fads we embrace in education around self-directed learning are little more than smoke and mirrors - the appearance of self-direction in order to fool the student into engagement with otherwise rigid systemic need.  This is exactly why a genius in a poor Mexican school couldn't engage enough to show her talents until her teacher threw away the paradigm.