Living in a Digital World

I just took my last exam after turning in all my essays on Wednesday and finishing up with Anthro on Tuesday, and now I am done! First semester has flown by; I can’t even believe how fast it’s been. I still feel like I’m figuring things out, but I think once the Febs get here I’ll realize just how much I have it down already. I did well in my classes, met a lot of really awesome people, stretched my mind, stayed active, and got involved. I just can’t wait to take more classes, meet more people, stretch further, explore more, and get even more involved!!!

When I signed up for DML this summer, I had just gotten back to the US after a year of being abroad, and I was struggling with the role of technology in US American culture. I came back and Snapchat was everywhere, my friends all had iPhones complete with a wide variety of apps that they used all the time, people were consumed by their social networking, and I didn’t get it. Instead of rejecting and isolating myself, I decided to put DML on my list of choices. After having this class for a semester, I don’t think I’ve changed much on my position and attitude toward technology, but I understand both sides of the debate better. I get how media helps relationships, how it gives voice to those who couldn’t be writers before, how it shouldn’t be meant to replace the face-to-face, and I realize that people have resisted every step of technology for all of history with the argument that it will make us less intelligent.

But I think that the rate of development of technology has accelerated to a point much faster than what was happening before. When written language was developed, it took hundreds of years for the printing press to develop, and then typewriters happened much later. The internet became a part of our lives just 20 years ago, and now it runs our society. The rate of technological development outruns our ability as a society to respond to it in a healthy way. I think that media affects our psyche by distracting us from ourselves and the people around us. It inhibits the development of emotional and social skills. Though it has a wide array of benefits: it is an amazing supplement to relationships and is a medium for negotiation, we need life, awareness, and intelligence as bases on which we can use technology to expand upon. That should be its role rather than serving as a distraction, time waster and an excuse not to master material. Technology should be a tool, but I think too many people use it as a key definer of their lives.

For some spontaneous reason, I deleted my Facebook on Tuesday. Instead of planning to do it and making excuses not to, I just did it. Since this summer, I’ve wanted to retest my ability to stay off the site but made excuses like, “I’m going to a new place” “I need it for college” “I’ll be meeting tons of new people,” when actually I’ve been trying to limit the ways that technology negatively affects my day to day.

Don’t get me wrong, I think that Facebook is a great tool. During my travels, I posted a lot about what I was up to and caught up with friends from home on how college was going. It was a great way to share photos and experiences with the people I love from far away and was almost the only way that I kept in touch with people from home. Still, now, Facebook can be an awesome tool to make connections and to plan get togethers or events. But I want to test the experience of not having Facebook in college. I have a phone now and everyone who would contact me through Facebook has my number, as I have theirs, and any event that I should attend at such a small school like Middlebury I will hear about from friends or from other news.

Others may think that deleting Facebook is pointless. You can definitely control your use of Facebook so that it doesn’t interfere with how you interact with people one on one, but it also encourages social competitiveness when you do get online. I found myself making sure I was tagged in certain photos a couple weeks ago and then asked myself, “Why am I doing this?” The answer, though many people may try to cover it up with excuses or alternate explanations, is that Facebook brings out the materialistic side of all of us. The reason we want to share photos and get tagged is because we want other people to see what we are doing. I’m not going to lie to myself anymore. I was being superficial, and I don’t want superficiality to be one of my values.

Facebook, I think, is a tricky thing. It’s great for many, many reasons. I will miss out on those random Facebook encounters where people seek me out or vice versa due to some random connection, and then we actually share information and thoughts on which we can expand. I will miss getting random messages from people at home, but that just means I can either call them, text them, or just have a great conversation in 2 weeks when I see them next. Facebook is great for many reasons, but it also affects how we think and the things we care about. In deleting my Facebook, I want to see whether the benefits outweigh the takeaways. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. I’ve promised myself to at least make it till after finals.

At my high school, it felt like every other week a speaker came to talk to us about the dangers of technology. We heard horror stories of people not getting into college because of their Facebook profiles, of people being sued for sending out suggestive photos of others, and of stalkers pursuing people through information found on the internet. Cyber security is vastly important, and that’s what my partner and I are trying to get across to our middle schoolers tomorrow. Firstly, choosing what you put online is key for maintaining a private life. Secondly, choosing privacy settings greatly affects cyber security.

Tomorrow, Sebastian and I are going in to a middle school math class. We plan to talk specifically about Facebook and its privacy settings. Using math, we will try to get the students to calculate their audiences for different posts. How many people can see your posts to “Friends?” Well, that depends on how many friends are on your friend list. But, how many people can see posts to “Friends of Friends?” My calculations amounted to some 827,000 people. “Public?” That could be any one of 1.15 billion Facebook users.

The thing I love about math is that it puts concrete measurements – numbers – on concepts. When math is applied to something like Facebook audience, it really sets in the reality of who can see my posts! I planned and created this lesson, and I was still affected when I calculated that almost a million people could see my photo albums that are set to “Friends of Friends.”

We read everywhere. Text messages, emails, Facebook and schoolwork; we’re always reading. Technically. Though there are textual words everywhere I look, and though my brain translates those symbols into meaning, media does not replace the act of reading. Sitting down and reading a book, scholarly article, poem or essay requires a different level of processing and results in a complex type of learning.

Many argue that books aren’t as necessary as before – because now we have so many other mediums for text! Right? But what do I learn from reading an email or a text other than social or personal information? Reading a piece of writing inspires thought, comparison and analysis that can be applied to form opinions or perspectives. Reading stretches the mind. Texting stretches your communication.

I think it’s somewhat of a setback that my generation doesn’t read. Yes, we can communicate to no end, but what do we learn? An obvious exception would be the individuals who read meaningful blogs, newspaper articles or research sites, and technology is an amazing avenue to be informed. However, though I have no actual data, I would say that there is a general trend in my generation of simply not liking to read. We have much faster entertainment now and are much more connected to each other than previous generations, but I really think we are missing out on something.

Real reading stretches perspectives and challenges readers to think and analyze. The vast, seemingly endless collection of literature contains so much thought and information that is available for readers to learn from. Reading enlightens and brings thoughts to a higher level of complexity.

I guess all I want to say is that I, and everyone, should read more.

This week we watched a documentary on new learning projects and programs that center around digital media. From an entire school that uses “gaming” as a base for its curriculum to an after school program for students to a motivated teacher who uses a GPS system to get his students out and learning about their town, people are embracing the use of digital media in the classroom. After all, it doesn’t make sense to continue to teach as if technology and the internet didn’t exist because they do exist. And students are going to have to navigate it in their every day lives. The classroom needs to adapt.

In my education, I can’t think of amazing ways in which teachers used technology in their lesson plans. I remember having projectors in my middle school math class where the teachers put clear pages over lights on the projector table. They they could write with erasable markers on these sheets and that would be projected onto the board behind them. I was the first person to have a laptop at age 12 (I was getting bad grades on essays because of my illegible handwriting…)… I even remember when my middle school got SmartBoards and none of the teachers knew how to use it! There are many ways in which technology was and has been a part of my education, but nothing to the extent that I saw in this documentary.

 

After reflecting a bit on my education and on the movie that we watched, I have a few different reactions. First, I’m relieved. I can’t help but be thankful that I didn’t have to design games, edit tons of movies and do all of my projects on a computer because, well, I don’t love spending time on a computer. Maybe I would like it more if I had had this type of digital education, but then I would be a different person. And that leads me to my second reaction – how is this education affecting these kids? Will they grow up to appreciate the outdoors? Certainly education helps shape who we are, and centering education (at least more-so than before) on technology changes kids. The movie seemed to be completely pro-technology without a second look; as if technology = good and education = good so technology = education. There is more room for speculation here. How does education incorporate learning about our physical environments, the species around us, and how we are affecting our planet? There is nothing like going outside, learning about ecology and connecting hands-on with that learning. I am not rejecting the value of technology, because I think it is an extremely useful tool that needs to be a part of the classroom, but I think that education is more than technology. Lastly, and I think it is necessary to include this reaction, I was very impressed with the ways that these educators were using technology. I especially enjoyed the “location-based” GPS technology. It seems like it would take a lot of programming and input of information, but once that is done the program is a great way to get students out there.

It’s the little things that change when a holiday season comes around. Clothes, decorations, advertisements, and the digital world. This Halloween, I realized more how the internet and different programs tailor toward the seasons. Advertisements on the sides of my windows fashioned pumpkins and other Halloween-related symbols. On my front page of Spotify I found a Halloween playlist ready to go for the special holiday. Facebook photos from all my friends and family around the world showed a great variety of costumes and festivities. Google, of course, had its ritual holiday home page variation. Buzzfeed tackled some hilarious Halloween themes, and I’m sure billions of Snapchats and Vines were zapping around the air featuring costumes, candies and parties.

The digital world has its ways of reflecting society. Whether it reflects trending debates, relevant current events or simply just the holiday in season at the moment, media spits out exactly what people are talking about. It’s interesting to think how whoever-is-behind-media-sites makes these decisions. How much of it is generated from the public? How much of it is decided to be relevant before people even care about it? I know that the day after Thanksgiving is over and the radio starts playing Christmas songs and the stores all start to advertise Christmas sales, it’s not coming 100% from consumers. It’s mostly pre-decided to be relevant for us.

But can I also apply this to aspects other than radio and advertising? News sites, to an extent that varies from site to site, decide what is important by putting different articles and different pictures in more prominent places than others. To another extent, publicity is generated from the public, but what we see on the internet comes from a mix of these two influences: the people who are in charge of the sites and us.

Yesterday we had an education class come in and, essentially, teach us how to teach. In the next coming weeks, we have to teach middle school classes something about technology. As interesting as it was to find out the thinking behind what teachers make us do in class, I don’t think teaching is for me. I found it difficult even to think of an idea, figure out what was important to get across, come up with ways to teach it, and then create some sort of assessment to see if the students understood what I taught. It takes extreme patience and social skills to be a good teacher; all characteristics that I admire and respect, but not necessarily what I think I excel at.

Overall, I learned that teachers need to create goals for the class on the large and small scale – what do I want students to do this semester? what am I going to get across today? Then, they need to recheck in with those goals constantly by assessing, reevaluating and discussing. Things like essential questions, skills, understandings, and knowledge all make up the content and purpose of a class or a course. All of this I understand while separated from it, but how do I actually get up in front of the class and teach?

I’m struggling even with the task of choosing a topic: what do the students already know? what would be useful to them? what am I allowed/not allowed to talk about? It’s extremely difficult to find out what’s relevant to the students and their classes without having the students for a long period of time. I guess this is how substitutes feel like.

The art of traveling usually depends on apps and 4G, but the beautiful thing about not having a smart phone is trying to get around without those things. This fall break, I visited a very good friend of mine who goes to school in Boston. To get there, of course, I reserved my tickets online, but the rest was up to me. The bus dropped us off around the corner from South Station, where I depended on instructions from my friend that I had jotted down and the good nature of Bostonians (joke) to get to where I was going. Though people in the city especially up North aren’t known to be super friendly, I managed to meet a few people as I navigated the subway. It was engaging – checking the maps, finding the right station, looking at street signs and such. I got there speedily and efficiently without any GPS! That was relatively easy. As the weekend progressed, I started to understand Boston because I had to plan out how to get places. Instead of having directions laid out for me, I had to be able to tell my friend where I was, find a place that was convenient to meet up, and get there. That was the real challenge, but it made me know Boston better.

It reminded me of when I first started driving versus when I started driving without a smart phone. For the first two years I had my license, I depended on my phone to get around my own city. This past summer, however, I had to actually learn where things were. I started to notice where places connected and where friends’ houses were in relation to each other. I’m not known for having a great sense of direction, so I needed a bit of a push to actually know where I was going. Which, I guess, is part of the reason I decided to stay dumb with my phone choice.

As I watched Disconnected yesterday – on a computer in the library, I must point out – I struggled with the purpose for which someone would ever attempt to go without a computer for three weeks. The students in the movie, I think, found that over and over again they were only frustrating librarians, teachers and friends alike. In the end they simply needed to rely on others to do their computer work for them. One of the kids’ boss had to log his work hours for him, the same person had to make a friend send out an email for him, the other guy made his classmate who works at the library look up the call numbers for certain books for him, etc. Perhaps going through the process of realizing that most systems are online has value in itself, but to me it seems impossible to live without computers while being a student. It is certainly possible to take a long backpacking trip or to buy a cabin in the woods where you live happily without computers, but in the modern university it is pretty much required to have your own personal computer.

In the end these three people found that even without computers, they depended on computer systems simply to survive as a student. If someone tried to do this today, it would be even more difficult. The students in the documentary  used the typewriters available in the library to type their work, whereas today typewriters aren’t even accessible. They are fully put away, shelved, or fully trashed by 2013. One of the guys registered for classes by paper, which probably wouldn’t be possible at Middlebury anymore either, unless you wanted to get the last pick of classes or make someone to register online for you.

It is important to understand that most of our systems to make a university work depend on computers, but trying to reject computers only puts yourself at a disadvantage and inconveniences everyone around you. You don’t need a smartphone, an ipod, a camera, or an ipad, per say, but you do need to be able to use a computer, and that will never change.