My mother owned a great big book called "Society of the Mind", it was not her usual fare being sparse and almost mechanical in its tone, no doubt an artifact of some teaching conference she attended. I poured over the book because it offered a David Macaulay style explanation for what my brain cells were saying to each other. It posits that the mind works rather like a city where many agents or groups are working at seeming separate tasks but collectively they form a greater whole that represents itself as a single identity like say - Cincinnati or Chris Scott. Apparently the book, now in its third decade, is still in print  and not roundly discredited so perhaps it's worth considering in the light of learning theory.

Perhaps it is the case that so it goes with the body so it goes with mind, an individual might have some areas that are vigorous and others that are stunted and malformed. Some agents in the mind might be highly effective while other unrelated agents never really come online at all. The result of such a mismatch might be seen as learning disability or felt as frustration. Science has only begun to explore the webwork of the mind, perhaps we are as far from understanding it as medieval physicians were from understanding the black plague, our descendants may wonder how we maintained such a perfectly wrong approach for so long. Gardner proposed nine types of intelligence (and then added more), perhaps these correspond to parts of the brain itself?  

The Blanket is Everything

For my pre-practicum I'm tutoring in a high school writing center, the room is full of ten year old computers, CRT monitors and a lone inkjet printer. Newer technology enters the room in the form of iPhones, Androids, Blackberries and other officially prohibited  personal electronics. When I worked on the map Christina and I created, I tried to imagine the design that would accurately depict the way these teenagers use technology. I thought of one girl who came in - she was googling answers to her assignment, IMing, emailing, texting on her phone and shouting responses to IMs her friend a few feet over was reading to her. Without any grand design on her part, this young woman had become the center of a communications hub. She was throwing out responses that would in turn feed the beast and cause other students to text under their desks or think of cutting remarks to make in the hallway.

It would be fair to ask at this point how this connects to learning and teaching, strictly speaking her attempts at research were going poorly, Yahoo answers was not yielding up anything useful and boolean operators were not in her toolkit. On the other hand, she was playing three dimensional chess; straddling multiple streams of communication and anticipating reactions to her actions with the quickness of a sword fighter. Skilled mind + scattered attention, map that! I'd love to teach these kids about the potential of convergence technology and cloud computing. How they could view their writing projects from anywhere with google docs or print from their iPhones or use online resources to search vast libraries. Of course to do that I'd have to beat out the gossip that dominates their lives on or offline, somehow make them motivated enough to learn a few extra steps. It would also take teachers who more open to incorporating technology into their curriculum, there's a reason that printer gets used so much - teachers like to write on papers and fear file formats they cant open, God forbid they have to search for an extension to handle a docx.

I think a mindmap such as we worked on this week would be a great way to diagram a school's relationship with technology, to highlight areas where innovations could be applied and identify distractions. Finally here's that title reference from "I Heart Huckabees" which I included because the digital world is not a map, it's a blanket.

    

OMG, it's full of stars!

My Son and My Father, 21st Century Bonding

Letting kids use computers is like feeding them potato chips from Whole Foods. You feel like you're doing the right thing because you associate it with smart people but part of you suspects it's still junk. The after school crew at the Philbrick had lots to say about their digital lives but there were few bridges to their academic lives. Granted there are not a lot of spread sheets or research papers in the third grade curriculum and today's test driven classroom environment leaves little time for browsing the web. Some of the kids reported visiting scientific websites in the course of their studies but beyond that it's still a paper and pencil world in this outpost of the BPS.
On the home front things are a lot different, almost all of the students talked about playing this or that flash game online, with or without parental controls. None of the students are using social networking although one girl loved uploading cell phone pictures to her Mom's Facebook page. A few apparently have email accounts and one boy has an active cell phone. For me at least the biggest shock was the Death of Mario. I assumed everybody had at least a Wii but only two did and even they seemed to prefer computer games, maybe what my wife said, that I bought the Wii more for me than the kids, is true! In my childhood video game consoles were the end-all-be-all of home tech and now they seem to have fallen out of favor. The kids also had certain affinity websites they followed religiously, usually relating to toy lines, book series they were reading, sports teams and so on but none discussed posting things or participating in online community activities.

I'm not sure what it adds up to, I only know my son's relationship with technology in any great detail. I know that just as I used to get up early on Saturday to watch cartoons he gets up to sneak in computer game time before my wife wakes up. He's learned how use the basic commands on my cast off Macbook and is better at Angry Birds than I ever will be. He will explore learning websites when directed to them but much prefers to spread out with a pile of books to do his research, his latest obsession is astronomy. Recently he wanted to go outside and look at the night sky for various planets. The view from our porch was of a light flooded orange and purple city night sky, only a few stars eeked through. Remembering a commercial I had seen, I quickly downloaded the Google Sky app to my android. Pointing the phone at the sky turned the screen into a real time planetarium, the haze was gone and the constellations were made whole and for a moment, I was the coolest Dad in the galaxy.

Will the Real Tomorrow Please Stand Up?

Oh dear, I thought, a tech article from 2000! That's technically the last millennium and whats this Xerox he keeps going on about? Surprisingly the article doesn't sound too dated, that's because the writer is discussing ideas that are still coming into being. We are living in an increasingly wired age where the "cross pollination" of ideas seems to have become unstoppable. Even though I cringe when CNN describes Twitter as an agent of regime change there is at last some fire for all the smoke.

The question that concerns us should not be the spread or penetration of the digital age but the meaning of it and in particular its impact on education. As I noted we're more than a decade past the publishing of this article so lets revisit and review a few themes -


"Now, with incredible amounts
of information available through the Web,
we find a “new” kind of learning assuming
pre-eminence—learning that’s discovery based. "

Well, how about it? This reminds me of sites like Digg or Stumbleupon, but are we expanding our exposure to new ideas and opinions online or are we burrowing into our niches? As online information consumers people tend to search for things that reinforce their existing beliefs and interests, imagine someone deciding to research how they might be wrong about immigration or climate change for example. In the old days you had to open a newspaper to read about the events of the day. On your way from the front page to the sports section you'd "stumbleupon" an article about a local issue you weren't aware of and maybe it would change something, now you just go straight to your drip feed and bypass the rest.


Now let’s overlay on top of this physicalsocial region the Web, and look back to the example of students participating in local, face-to-face groups but tying also into virtual ones. A key understanding is that on the Web there seldom is such a thing as just a producer or just a consumer; on the Web, each of us is part consumer and part producer. We read and we write, we absorb and we critique, we listen  and we tell stories, we help and we seek help. This is life on the Web.


I think it's true that the Web has been the great leveler of authority, by providing a platform to big too control and so easy to access technology has empowered all of us. With nothing more than a smartphone and a Youtube account anyone can influence the news or even bring down a powerful figure. Wikis when they work are simply amazing, I've hacked cameras and game consoles relying on community built guides that are constantly evolving and building on each others break throughs. Of course there's always the nagging issue of finding an audience, it was once said of poetry that there were far more poets than readers of poems... With blogs I suspect it's even worse and with that, I thank you for making it to the bottom of this post.

The Interconnected World - thinking of Egypt, driving in the storm

Going Native - If Darwin studied the Digital Generation

"Oh why is the VCR always blinking twelve o'clock, better call the grandkids"

Remember that one? The truth is nobody ever learned to program a VCR and certainly not en eight year old. I think my Dad did once shortly after he got one in a well meaning attempt to record NASCAR but it never worked out quite right. My own eight year old still needs help firing up Netflix on the Wii but we'll get him there because he really wants on-demand cartoons. It's that need, that got have it craving, that compels a person (of any generation) to learn how to use technology. Like Darwin's finches with beaks shaped to reach termites we find people who self-specialized to master the areas that satisfy their cravings. Knowledge follows interest, no one ever opened Word without an eye to writing something or downloaded a torrent client just to see what it was.

Having worked collaboratively with a fair number of the Net Generation I can say that in many cases, I (a tail end Gen X'er) often find myself teaching them how to use modern tools. Most of them are stuck on the Word 2000 their high school taught them, nevermind sharing docs or adding graphics to a project. Theres a vast difference between using Xbox Live and using a networked printer but this distinction seems lost on the media and for that I appreciate Neil Selwyn's paper. His behind the hype perspective is a welcome breath of fresh air into the panic stricken halls of the establishment, the establishment which has been all too willing to play the hapless Grandparent when it comes to new technology. Changes are coming to be sure, no more record stores and maybe no more bookstore, nobody wants the yellowpages and yes you can find anybody on facebook but enough already with new world leaving the old behind. Culture is a meshing together of all of us, when the train leaves the station for whatever lies ahead we'll all be on board, even Gramps.