Every Picture Tells a Story

[caption id="attachment_118" align="alignright" width="272"] Logo created by SW on flaming text[/caption]

"We need to understand the importance of graphics, music, and cinema, which are just as powerful and in some ways more deeply intertwined with young people's culture." (George Lucas on Edutopia).

Lucas recognises of course that literacy and numeracy are important skills too; his point is that we are neglecting other fundamental means of communication. Just as language has a grammar which can be learned, so do visual ways of getting a message across. Yet our culture, which arbitrarily elevates some forms of expression such as literature and science, does not value as highly a literacy of visual communication.

"There is grammar in film, there is grammar in graphics, there is grammar in music, just like there are rules in math that can be taught. For instance, what emotion does the color red convey? What about blue? What does a straight line mean? How about a diagonal line?" (Lucas again)

---

 

I was reading for this post, immersed in ideas of visual literacy, typographical hierarchy and informivorous humans, when an email from a colleague pinged onto my screen asking me to:

"teach a short lesson on graphic design: use of color, placement, streamlining the final product…."

I've been asked this before and have squirmed because I don't feel particularly qualified to do it. The principles of design have not been a part of my education (which would not surprise George Lucas). I appreciate good design when it is pointed out to me, but I am in awe of those people who are capable of communicating beautifully (in my experience, the great majority is not capable, even some of those preaching about it).

Increasingly, my teaching colleagues allow their students to express their ideas in more visual forms than just essays, such as infographics. As with many of their PowerPoints and posters, however, students do not always maximise the graphical potential of the medium. And as teachers, we often do not provide the best examples with our text-dense slideshows, (not to mention our copyright-busting use of images).

So, in the time-honoured tradition of teachers remaining one step ahead of their students, I will prepare an online slideshow both explaining and demonstrating the principles of good design (to be taught tomorrow!).

My first piece of advice to the students will be to organise their work in three stages:

Research it > Plan it > Create it

Obviously, I must do that too. Researching, I selected four good sources of advice and extracted the main points. I also added a few ideas of my own.



In the Plan It stage, which I shall also require of the students, we organise the information. At this stage, what was a chaotic melée of data starts its transformation to a visual presentation. This brilliant image is one I shall share with the students, but it's not clear that I'm allowed to reproduce it here even with attribution. In the planning stage, I organised the information under headings which logically express my understanding. Once I knew what points I wanted to make, I sought out images which told the same story. This slideshow is what my slides looked like when I had organised the data and sought out some visual examples to make my points.



And finally, my Creation ...



I am not a professional designer (evidently), but the advent of desktop publishing and its descendants have introduced an expectation of production values even for the amateur. We have an obligation to employ the principles ourselves and to pass them on to our students. Furthermore (and I have experienced resistance from colleagues in this regard), our evaluation of student work should extend beyond the content and recognise skillful use of the medium. A project poster is not just a colourful essay. It must communicate visually, as well as textually. We must teach our students to parse the visual grammar of a presentation, not just its words. And we need a good rubric for that, but I haven't been able to find one yet.

The presentation, as you see it above, is my attempt, from a position of relative ignorance, to communicate ideas of visual literacy to our teachers and students.

How would you go about it?

How can I improve my message?

Social media are changing who we are

"Our body is physiologically rewarding us for talking about ourselves online" Moffit and Brown, ASAPScience video (below)

[youtube]https://youtu.be/HffWFd_6bJ0[/youtube]

It is clear from the research behind this video, that using social media not only changes what we do, but also who we biologically are. Most people in one study regularly experienced Phantom Vibration Syndrome. Being online all the time can have serious consequences. How long before smartphones get statutory health warnings?

I have been talking this week with two CoETaIL colleagues about the guidelines for using social media which our schools need but don't yet have. Our project was structured around four face-to-face skype calls over 12 days during which we evolved a process; set ourselves homework; tweaked our plans; and got to know each other. I have met Stephen briefly before in real life, but I've never met Valerie. It is appropriate that a social medium has been one of the crucial elements in our project.

"We would like to collaborate in a process to gather information and ideas to help each of our schools arrive at some guidelines for teacher and student use of social media." (Valerie, Stephen and Steve)

Our process is woven from a few strands:

1. We each conducted an investigation in our school, wishing to know how their different cultures would influence the process of drawing up social media guidelines. I received 99 responses to my survey (see right). The anonymous findings are collated in a document. We then read each other's summaries, commented and asked questions. It's not only a document but a rich conversation.


2. Early in the project we read "How to create social media guidelines for your school" (Anderson). It gave us a starting point for our fruitful discussion and suggested a possible process we have elaborated into our roadmap to social media guidelines which reflects the common understanding collaboration has led us to. We intend to present the document at each of our schools as a proposal for a way forward. It is embedded on my CoETaIL projects page.


3. Research into the solutions which other institutions, both educational and secular, have drawn up to support their individual circumstances. This included a pertinent exchange with John Mikton.


4. Frequent back and forth between us; not only the skype conversation, but also dozens of emails.

When that is all done, and this blogpost is finished, I will have completed CoETaIL Course 2. It has been a rewarding experience, not least the current collaboration with colleagues who, although we work in different countries, are nevertheless similarly faced with teachers and students in need of guidance about social media. As I concluded in a blogpost I wrote elsewhere, collaboration can be really difficult. We all bring our ideas to the table which enrich the project, but we must equally abandon some of them. The reward is a more complete product than any individual could have made. That has definitely been the case with Stephen, Valerie and me - and it was painless too.

During Course 2, I have been immersed in ideas about what perpetual connection to the Internet might mean:

• What will we do if the platforms to which we entrust so many of the stories of our lives do not live forever?


• How do we properly advise our children about social media when, if we are honest, we do not know many of the answers ourselves?


• What is the incentive to play fair about copyright when the chances of being caught are minimal?


• Is it wise of us to accept, however knowingly, the Faustian bargain of Facebook?


• What will be the long term effect of the digital contrail we are constantly leaving behind us?

These were the questions posed by my five blogposts during the course. I am certain that we do not definitively know the answer to any of them.

I greatly admire the performance artist Marina Abramović. You may have seen the film in which she sat in the MoMA in New York and met thousands of members of the public in silence, one-to-one, staring into their eyes, day after day. It's amazing to see.

She has a very clear view of the ways that we live our lives and how we can make changes which expose the assumptions we had taken to be facts. Speaking on the Note to Self podcast, she recommended:

"switch off your telephone... take a chair next to the window... and do absolutely nothing... What happens to all that energy that you have? You start thinking about the things you never have time to think about... you get into this state of peacefulness... three hours of your life" (Marina Abramović)

Is that really so extreme? I don't think so. We often spend three hours on activities a Martian would find strange. Sometimes, you can learn about the ubiquitous only when it is removed for a while.

So, following a couple of months in which I have spent a lot of productive time on CoETaIL, thinking about familiar things in new ways; learning to write regularly; making new friends, I have decided to call time on my life on the Internet. I don't know what it will be like, but my plan is to be completely off the grid for at least two weeks. I hope that, by cutting loose temporarily, I will gain an insight into what it means to be continually connected for the rest of the year.

"Christmas is supposed to be fun and you want to lash yourself on the back?" (my son on hearing my plans)

"We have to trust this gut feeling that we are completely f****d up with technology" (Marina Abramović in Huffington Post)

 

5 must-use social media for 21st century students

You clicked! Are you also tempted by list blogposts and then find the content disappointing? There is a list at the end of this post, however.

When I asked my colleague Dave's class of 13 year-olds here in Northern Europe how many of them were regular users of Twitter, I expected, if not a forest, at least a copse of arms. Three. All boys. In a class of twenty. Further interrogation revealed that only one of the three used his account actively (to keep in contact with players of a particular game). Other classes turned up the same picture. Dave and I had planned to use Twitter as a means to generate real-time conversations among the students. They dutifully cooperated, but treated it as a quaint adult preference. We persevered for a short time then looked elsewhere.

[caption id="attachment_105" align="alignright" width="467"] Subjective selection of data by SW[/caption]

My finding was confirmed in an interesting spreadsheet of bandwidth use on our school's wireless network shared by Olivier, the IT manager. I extracted a subjective selection of sites which I believe are used largely during students' leisure time and generated a graph. Top of the list are four 'consumption' sites, followed by Snapchat which leads the social networks. That's Google+ resting his lazy butt on Twitter, Pinterest and WhatsApp.

The idea of online social networks is still young. If it was born in 2003 with myspace.com, then it has only just become a teenager. Soon Facebook surged ahead and has maintained that lead as it continually evolves. Twitter joined the pack but seems to be flattening out in terms of active users. Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, PutieDami. When I told my students about the graph above, they were unsurprised that Snapchat is top of the tree at our school. I predict, though, that in three years' time, 13 year-olds will be communicating with a network we haven't even heard of yet. Who could have foreseen 10 years ago that the brevity of 140 characters would be so alluring, or that pictures that expired within 10 seconds would captivate a generation?

[caption id="attachment_108" align="alignleft" width="167"] Everyone has his own tech landscape[/caption]

Though claims of exponential change can appear exaggerated, social media platforms do seem to have followed an accelerating pattern. With growing frequency, each cohort of young people seeks its own medium which excludes not only their parents but even their older siblings. We do not know what will happen given that apparently big beasts can became evolutionary dead-ends within a few years; the social network ecosystem is savage.

There are consequences for our approach as educators. Many of us have realised that we must harness the power of the tools of the digital age, whose astronomical processing power and global reach enable billions to interact irrespective of geography. It makes the magic in wizarding fiction seem tame by comparison. But since your students may not be using the same tools as mine; since their younger peers are already looking elsewhere; since every tech start-up has the incentive to ensnare the next generation with novelty, what are the universal principles which will guide us in helping them to use the proliferating platforms beneficially?

It's all about communication. Do we comprehend each other? Do our exchanges promote respect and understanding? Are we making the world better? I'm not talking about digital social media here, but all of the ways in which groups of people can share ideas.

 

FIVE SOCIAL MEDIA ALL STUDENTS MUST MASTER

1 Language

Language is a medium for social exchange. We must teach our students to use it to convey meaning; to avoid misrepresentation and to develop new understandings between people.

2 Kindness

It is too easy to let our impulses get the better of us and to behave unkindly in the heat of the moment. We must help our students to recognise that there are myriad ways to treat others with consideration, each of which makes the world a better place.

3 Emotion

All human interactions have an emotional element. Our students must learn not to be afraid to communicate how they feel and to be able to read the emotions of others.

4 Critical Thinking

We have access to a virtually limitless ocean of information, much of which is unmediated by quality control. From an early age, young people must learn how to weigh carefully the words and images they are served.

5 Culture

The more we are exposed to different points of view and ways of living, the more we realise that what is familiar to us is merely one mode of being. Educators must help students to see that human experience is diverse and that no culture is superior to any other.

Explain it to me like I was thirteen

[caption id="attachment_99" align="alignright" width="378"] We are not amused: Licensed under Creative Commons by Carl Lender on wikimedia[/caption]

Two days ago I watched the film 'Queen Live at the Hammersmith Odeon' from 1975. It took me back to when I was 13 and discovering exciting cultural phenomena. My parents did not agree and pomp-rock was absent from the family playlist in those years. The enjoyment I experienced as a teenager has prevailed, however, despite the domestic disapproval of 40 years ago.

Thirteen year old Greg Hoffman got an iPhone 5 for Christmas in 2012 and the next day his fearful mother, Janell, issued him a contract. There are 18 points to the contract, of which half are rules such as: "It does not go to school with you". There's also some good advice: "See the world happening around you". Janell acted on one of the foremost duties of a parent: to protect her child from the dangers of the world. The iPhone "scared the hell out of me", she admitted. Her reaction was one-sided; there was no negotiation. She wrote up the contract in 20 minutes and presented Greg with a fait accompli. Five years later, it's still on her website, unchanged; you can download the contract and impose it on your own kids.

There are many times when our superior experience of the world entitles us to instruct our children. In issuing her commandments to Greg, Janell ("being bossy is fun") felt she knew what could go wrong and decided the best solution was to be authoritarian. It's an understandable motivation.

Many schools, in advising their students about how to use technology, do the same. They try to manage behaviour by proscription and disapproval. In loco parentis, they have the right, and sometimes the duty, to forbid harmful activities. But like anything else, adults are not qualified to make up rules about technology unless they first take the effort to learn about it.

In 2015 in the 'Status Update' edition of This American Life podcast (first 14 minutes of the episode), Ira Glass talks to Jane, Julia and Ella, teenage girls who spend a lot of their lives using Instagram. The conversation is not judgmental and the girls describe in fascinating detail the specific language and rituals of their culture. It is clear that they have thought intelligently about the pitfalls and benefits. This is not to say that they are not in need of advice and guidance on occasion, but the programme respectfully takes the opportunity to learn about why teenage girls use Instagram rather than condemning them from a position of ignorance.

Schools often do not give their students this degree of consideration. The adults, alarmed by the potential for misuse of mobile devices, and sometimes influenced by anecdote rather than research, devise rules which seek to ban the unpreventable. Their false assumptions are twofold. Firstly, they assume they know what the students are doing; secondly, they assume the students are unaware of the consequences. Children are more sophisticated and reflective than we often give them credit for.

The school where I work is trying to respond rationally to the use of social media. We have a 'Digital Citizen's Agreement' which applies to all members of the community. The agreement considers in general terms "Internet and devices" and addresses "abusive behaviour", but does not offer answers to the questions we have about how, if at all, we should integrate social media into school life (of course, this integration did not wait until we had a policy and has already happened organically).

What would a good 'Social Media Policy' look like? Presumably it would have to address many aspects of school: social communication by adults and students; educational uses; marketing of the school; teaching strategies. The policy might discourage or prohibit certain activities, but it would be written from a position of knowledge obtained by research. Crucially, I hope it would embrace how students and teachers actually use social media and it will also look forward to ways in which we can promote positive attitudes to life online and off. This is where we are right now, wondering where to go next.

Last week, at the ECIS Annual Conference, I met fellow Online 7 cohort member Stephen Reiach. We agreed how each of our schools is in need of a robust policy covering social media. We are now discussing how we can make the process of informing a social media policy the focus of our joint Course 2 project. Are any readers of this blog interested in joining us? If so, please leave a comment below.

Please leave a comment even if you are not wanting to work with us!

 

I finally renounce my life of crime

Many years ago while holidaying in South America, my friend and I were robbed at knifepoint. We had ignored advice and ventured into a deprived area of town. The young men who surrounded us were probably disappointed, however, when, wrenching it from my wrist, my Rolex fell apart in their hands. Sadly for them I was not a rich mark, but rather a cheapskate buyer of counterfeited goods.

[caption id="attachment_96" align="alignright" width="306"] Pirate loot[/caption]

My history as a pirate began many years earlier and I feel it is finally time to confess. Forgive me, for I have sinned. I have recorded hundreds of albums on cassette tape; I have bought bootleg LPs; ripped CDs; torrented music and movies. As I have moved to new destinations around the world, I have quickly learned where the illegal DVDs are sold and how the local authorities tolerate the trade.

Nor in my work have I been scrupulous. I have downloaded videos and music from YouTube; used photos without attribution; uploaded past exam papers to the public Web. I have done these things for what I thought was the benefit of my students. I turned a blind eye to colleagues who did the same; in fact I taught them the mantra: Everything is acceptable in the pursuit of educating young minds which is a sacred task. I didn't try to find out what the rules actually were; I assumed they were complex and inconvenient. I was confident that I wouldn't get into trouble. When a bounty hunter working for the IB got some of the exam papers taken down, I shrugged.

There may have been more (did I mention the Converse All Stars that weren’t? The boxed set of The Wire?), but that's more or less the size of it. Amen. I did it because I could, because it was easier and because I got away with it.

As we are often quick to tell our students, it's not relevant whether other people are doing something wrong too. I wasn't trying to make money, I just repeated the mantra and carried on teaching my students. I have learned over the years that, whatever they say, in many cases, people are more motivated by the fear of being caught than ethical issues.

I have, at least, always been respectful of writers and have given credit for the words I have used. But, as members of society, we shouldn't just make up rules to suit our own prejudices. Even though there are cases in life for civil disobedience, disregarding the intellectual property of other people is not one of them. The ownership of the products of one's creative labours is an important right and the fact that "in the digital world the one fact we can't escape is that every single use of culture produces a copy" (Lessig) does not mean that copyright is unimportant.

[caption id="attachment_95" align="alignleft" width="355"] Licensed under Creative Commons by Silvia Tolisano[/caption]

Surprise, surprise, it's not actually that complicated. Clever explainers like Larry Lessig and Silvia Tolisano have helped me to understand what I need to know about Creative Commons and why it is important. Lessig is a modern-day hero who has applied his creative legal mind to the new situation where culture embraces the remix. Tolisano (left) has provided a superb and useful summary of the precise recipes we can employ for almost every situation we find ourselves in. Inspired by their work, I am contrite and I shall perform three immediate actions.

In the past, my attributions have been inconsistent, but now I am going back through my writings (at least on this blog) to put things right.

Secondly, for some time I have been creating my own images to illustrate my blogs and presentations. I shall begin to use Creative Commons licenses for these artifacts to make clear the re-use I am happy to accept.

Lastly, I shall delete the pages on my old website which the "anti-piracy" man working for IBO has failed to find. It doesn't matter that the papers are old, freely available elsewhere and useful to teachers and students, nor that my goal is purely educational, the IBO has a right to keep them to itself if it wishes. We can't pick and choose.

So, why are our students bad at respecting copyright? There are various obvious reasons (such as a lack of modelling from their teachers), but we should ask ourselves: "What is their incentive to observe others' intellectual property rights?" when being 'good' is inconvenient, time consuming and, in general, there are no adverse consequences if we're bad.

My colleague, Becky and I have discussed how best to instill this important attitude in our Grade 6 students. After explaining the mechanics of Creative Commons, we have set a task for the students to make their own creative work (a personal logo). At the end of the unit, they will all obtain their own Creative Commons license for the logo, making personal decisions about attribution, sharing and derivations. We are hoping that seeing themselves as creators with rights, they will more readily appreciate the rights of others.

---

Footnote: So I have put a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License on this blog (see below) which is the most permissive, only requiring attribution. it covers everything on the blog that is mine. I'd be very interested in any comments as to whether I have made a good choice and done the right thing (for example, what is that copyright sign doing there?).

An educational revolution? Really?

You say you’ve got a real solution

Well, you know

We’d all love to see the plan (Lennon and McCartney, Revolution)

Once upon a time, in the 1970s, a huge political upheaval changed the educational landscape in the UK. The state system had been academically selective, funneling children into different schools on the basis of one examination taken at the age of 11. I never took the 11-plus exam; the system was abolished and all of the children in the area where I lived were sent to the same school. One year earlier, it had been a selective school for girls with teachers who had grown up in that system and had never expected the rug to be pulled from under their feet. Suddenly, the tide of academic girls was replaced by a tsunami of undifferentiated boys and girls. Leaving aside the question of whether or not the decision was just and educational, the teachers had not been prepared for this seismic change. I remember many who rose to the uninvited challenge and I have been influenced by their inspiring teaching to this day. But some teachers stubbornly declined to adapt to the new situation, floundered, and took early retirement as soon as the opportunity arose. I have great sympathy for those women who could not get their heads around the ‘new normal’. They were probably highly skilled in the task they had been doing and it was unfair to assume that, without any preparation, they would thrive in the new environment.

We are experiencing a similar moment, but this time it is not implacable government which is declaring a new paradigm, it is technological change in society. While it is clear to industry, services and business that they need to embrace new technologies, the argument for using computers in education is more nuanced. There is no consensus about the purpose of education, and your attitude to the use of computers in the classroom depends on your answer to the question: “What are schools for?”.

127 ideas enough for you?

“A revolution is taking place... we are living on the future edge” (Global Digital Citizen Foundation video). Really? The majority of teachers are not revolutionaries and such talk scares or annoys them. When many teachers hear these enormous claims in dramatic language, it puts them off.

Our children are Digital Natives living Globally Connected Lives. Their schools are Learning Organisations in which teachers Flip the Classroom; teach 21st Century Skills; and the students Own the Learning. Technology is Redefining learning tasks. The picture is appealing but these models do not always live up to close scrutiny. My students could be regarded as digital natives, but many have a small vocabulary and the strong immigrant accent of their teachers does not impair their ability to communicate. When models and metaphors are used as if they were facts rather than opinions, it puts teachers off.

My teaching life has changed greatly in the last decade. I have developed resources using wikispaces, Google Drive, OneNote, Evernote, Edmodo, Twitter and many more. Maybe I could write a blogpost introducing “Six Tools Every 21st Teacher Should Use”. Or do you think there are enough of those already? Articles which are lists, repeatedly retweeted, contribute to an avalanche of apps which puts teachers off.

Why are many teachers put off? Simply, they are not revolutionaries and do not like to be told that the world around them is changing unrecognisably. It’s not what they see and it’s not what they want. Furthermore, when they are told that they must teach differently to stay relevant, they feel devalued. They know they are good teachers already.

Undeniably, new technology has unveiled an era of amazing potential, but it has not decreed that everything must be different. More realistically, it offers the opportunity for good teachers to adapt and evolve by adding new approaches to their repertoire. Most teachers who are reluctant to learn skills are not refusing. They have been put off by excitable and impractical language and the uncritical attitudes of technology advocates.

They are already expert teachers who understand how children learn and we need them on our side.

What we mean when we talk about privacy

Have you seen this video?



It demonstrates how far we have come in a short time, that these people receiving week-old news remind us of Rip van Winkle.

So we bemoan our loss of privacy. We expect Facebook to allow us to join its network for free and then complain that we don’t like the deal. It’s too late to claim sanctimoniously that “the line between our private lives and the public persona are blurring.” (unnamed author on The Rebel Yell). You don’t have to be on Facebook (no, you don’t). If (like me) you do choose to, don’t claim you weren’t aware that it is a transaction.

“Faustian bargains are by their nature tragic or self-defeating for the person who makes them, because what is surrendered is ultimately far more valuable than what is obtained, whether or not the bargainer appreciates that fact.” (Brittanica.com)

[caption id="attachment_86" align="alignleft" width="167"] SW: Site of antisocial media[/caption]


So that’s easy. Just don’t use Facebook, or refuse friend requests from everyone but the very closest. You can also fix it so that no-one but you can post anything about you on your timeline and if you have been tagged elsewhere it won’t be seen by your friends. The drawbridge to your castle is well and truly up; anything which leaves is scrutinised by vigilant guards. Thankfully, your friends are not quite so cautious about their information, otherwise Facebook would be a much more boring place than it is. You can still check out what is going on in your network including the uncurated serendipities you stumble upon:

“Oh interesting: I didn’t know those two knew each other!”

“That acquaintance is in town; I’ve always wanted to know him better.”

“My son shouldn’t be doing that at parties!”.

“Everybody lurks. Only the blithe let on.” (Elle Hunt in The Guardian)

It does seem a bit unfair, though. The world gets your controlled brand whilst you enjoy their warts and all adventures. Maybe you should refuse to read stuff about other people which you wouldn’t tell about yourself. Presidential candidate’s unguarded comments? No thanks, I wouldn’t like anyone releasing my candid chats. Private emails? Hands off, they were hacked.

When we talk about privacy, it seems, we may be more concerned about our own than other people’s. Surely it works both ways, though. In the real world, when you hide yourself away in your room, you don’t see anyone else. When’s the last time you were offline for a week? A day? Even a  waking hour? Our students may never have experienced a time in their lives when they were unreachable.

[caption id="attachment_87" align="alignright" width="300"] Image licensed under Creative Commons by Brad Higham on Flickr[/caption]

When I think back to pre-email visits to friends, I wonder how we arranged it at all. I’m not saying those days were better, just that something has occurred which has profoundly changed ...er... something. I’m not sure what it is that’s changed, though. My children do not live near to me, but we speak at least once a week and exchange messages pretty much daily. Contrastingly, when I left home, I heard new music only on the radio or from friends; read one physical daily newspaper; learned the lessons my teachers chose to teach me. I regularly communicated only with the handful of people I actually met. I was often alone and had no knowledge of what other people were doing at that time, nor was I following world events minute by minute.

Last year, I went walking across the Belgian Ardennes for seven days. I didn’t go online at all (though, pathetically, I had my phone with me “for emergencies”). On Day 5, when I thought I’d listen to a podcast, I swiftly removed my earbuds again as I found the disembodied voices disturbing in a woodland setting. Since then, although I came home with a restful feeling, I haven’t had another Internet-free day.

For the new generation, the connected environment is the only one they have known. No doubt they find our reminiscences about house phones and encyclopedias quaint. As their educators, though, we must do our best to evaluate the advantages, but also the losses. I relish the permanently online world and its expanded horizons, but wonder whether another species of experience has become endangered, if not extinct.

Sometimes the only way to know what you have is to remove it for a while. I have tried the experiment in my leisure time, but I am curious what effect it would have in a classroom if I were to ask my students and colleagues to work without any technology at all for a time. We could analyse what difference a Screen Free Week (or day?) made to the learning without attaching a value judgement.

Every experience has value and the pre-Internet situation embodied a kind of empowering ignorance (you don’t have to know everything right now, especially about your friends). Furthermore, in experiments where participants were deprived of constant stimuli, “boring activities resulted in increased creativity” (Mann and Cadman). One of our responsibilities as educators is to ensure that through exposure to a variety of experiences our students come to know how they learn and live best. We want them to see technology as an addition to their learning toolkit, not just a new normal.

[caption id="attachment_88" align="aligncenter" width="775"] Image: SW and public domain mashup[/caption]