Expected, Inspected, & Respected.
"We do not learn from experience … we learn from reflecting on experience."
-John Dewey |
"We do not learn from experience … we learn from reflecting on experience."
-John Dewey |
Once in a while, Andrea used to complain that she had a problem with her technology: she would get sucked into information rabbit holes or scroll through her Facebook feed for far longer than she wanted to and it was resulting in headaches and tight muscles. I told her she should fight fire with fire by using a technology podcast to fix her technology problems. The podcast I recommended is called Note to Self and it bills itself as a a tech show about being human. They had done a series of exercises with their listeners in 2015 as a sort of technology boot camp called "The Bored and Brilliant Project". The purpose of doing these exercises was to re-examine your relationship with technology to ensure that you are in control of your devices rather than the other way around. Ultimately, its aim was to have people reclaim the space needed for creativity, productivity, and mental health. Andrea never listened to the podcast (she doesn't care for talk radio) but when the host of the show published a book about the project, I borrowed it from the library for her and she read it. Her relationship with her phone is much more productive and less painful now. One fact that really got to her was that if you spend around 25 minutes a day scrolling through Facebook, at the end of your life, you will have spent 2 years in mindless scrollery (p. 170). Yikes. I never participated in any of these exercises because I didn't find that I had any problem with how I used my technology. However... Before my five-week practicum began at the end of November, I was trying to do some unit planning but I was finding it very difficult to stay focused on the task at hand. I wasn't being distracted away from my work by any external stimuli, I just kept switching tasks before I could make any progress on the one I had set out to work on. As I was working on my social studies unit plan, an idea for a poem to read in English would cross my mind and I would switch tasks and then I'd switch to working on a social studies lesson plan, and I'd try to refocus and get back to my priority but the process would repeat itself over and over again. I was spending a lot of time working at my computer, yet no meaningful work was actually getting done. With my practicum fast approaching, it was starting to really stress me out. That's when Andrea suggested that I take some of my own medicine and read Bored and Brilliant, because I was describing exactly the symptoms discussed in the book as resulting from a lack of boredom. It's true that I rarely give my brain any downtime; I almost always have my earbuds in and a podcast going when I have a workout, a commute, or a mindless chore to get through. I thought my podcast habit was part of being a lifelong learner. Andrea is usually right, so I read the book and have changed some habits. For instance, phones at our house are now mostly out of sight and always away at the table because, "the mere presence of a mobile device, even just lying there, seemingly benign on the kitchen counter, can lower the empathy exchanged between two friends." Also, "...conversations in the absence of mobile communication technologies were rated as significantly superior compared with those in the presence of a mobile device, above and beyond the effects of age, gender, ethnicity, and mood" (p. 56). Additionally, in the interest of good communication and staying connected to my family, I no longer wear earbuds at home if Andrea and Kaia are around. That behaviour not only fills silences, it extends them because I don't start any new conversations and if someone wants to start one with me, they always have to repeat themselves when I say, The other major worry I have about my technology usage is that I've found it harder to read for a sustained period of time without interrupting myself as well. Zomorodi explains that, "there are various aspects of the reading brain circuit that are changing along with the amount of time that we are spending on the Internet and digital reading... The human brain is adapting almost too well to the particular attributes or characteristics of Internet reading. Basically, we are losing our ability to slow-read by giving up the practice of it." I definitely read more online than on paper now and apparently it's hurting my ability to retain information. In an experiment Zomorodi explains in her book, "fifty adults read a mystery short story, with half reading the paperback version, and the other half on a Kindle e-reader. Afterward, readers filled out a questionnaire. All reacted in emotionally similar ways to the story, but there was a big difference in how they answered questions about plot chronology. The Kindle readers performed significantly worse when asked to place fourteen events that happened in the story in the correct order. Most of the subjects also showed an 'overwhelming preference for print'" (p. 47). As the majority of my university readings come from online journal databases, I thought I was doing the smart and environmentally friendly thing by reading them on my Chromebook instead of printing them out. For my final university term, that will change. I'm also going to do an audit of what I'm listening to on podcasts and cull the programs that are unnecessary. Otherwise, the episodes will just keep piling up. The other thing I have done is to download an app called Moment - Screen Time Tracker to see where my time is spent and if I need to change some unexamined habits. I'll let you know how it goes. Lastly, I want to remain vigilant about my daughter's screen time. If Steve Jobs didn't let his kids use iPads, it makes me think that maybe he knew about the addictive nature of his own product. Zomorodi says it's no coincidence that , "The only people who refer to their customers as 'users' are drug dealers, and technologists" (p. 36).
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David Wiebe
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