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.