The Sounds of Silence

Over Christmas break my wife, Susan Lucille Davis, and I enjoyed a fabulous week in Venice.  Going into the trip, I expected I would have Internet access in my hotel and at other spots around the tourist destination.  After all, we'd enjoyed being connected, at least on a limited basis, three years years ago when we traveled to Prague. However, that turned out not to be the case. While our hotel was wonderful in all other respects, its only Internet access was a painfully slow connection from a laptop kept in the hotel's lobby for guest use. For the most part, I had no access to the Internet for an entire week.

In a word, that experience was liberating.  I felt freed of the need to check-in, share, catch up, make sure all was well at work, etc.

During that week, instead of my wife and I being on our respective devices, as we are as I'm writing this,

we spent our time enjoying each other's company, reading out loud, and solving the New York Times crossword puzzles that I'd downloaded to my iPad before we left the States. I came away from that experience determined to bring back to my life some of that mindfulness, of being wholly cognizant in the moment of my experiences, that I felt during that wonderful vacation.

Of course, as soon as I got home, I happily got back on the grid. Still, I made a conscious effort to change my practice. As I was curating the plethora of junk emails I had received while away, instead of simply deleting them, I requested to be removed from future emails.  I also began to think more deeply about such distractions and their influence on my life.

Reading Net Smart

About that time, I started reading Howard Rheingold's Net Smart.  Rheingold's book had been nominated by my friend Vinnie Vrotny for the ISTE SIGIS fall book discussion for 2013. The timing of my picking up this book could not have been more perfect. Rheingold deftly describes the attention problems we create for ourselves with new media and devices and how these problems are solvable as we become more mindful in our practice.

My copy of Net Smart has become so marked up that it looks like it's been vandalized by graffiti artists.  I've also picked up extra copies for colleagues at work. More importantly, I've started visiting classes at my school and having conversations with students about the importance of mindfulness, with particular emphasis on technology.  This topic has also worked its way into my interactions with parents. Just as students get all worked up about the pyrotechnics of the technology itself, parents become so concerned about technology safety for their children that they stop being mindful of their own actions. Parents need to learn to be more mindful (as I am working to become) themselves.

Conversations with Colleagues

 At my school we have a wonderful three-week mini-semester that frequently serves as a sandbox for teachers to try doing new things in new ways.  It's also a time for travel. A teacher, who was on a trip to China discussed with me how some of the kids purchased Internet connectivity from China before they left on the trip. Another group of students had no access to the Internet.  She found that the students who had no Internet access were happier on the trip than were the students with access.  I shared my experience on my trip to Venice and the importance of following up such epiphanies with greater deliberate mindfulness upon my return. As Howard Rheingold points out in Net Smart, "not drowning is not the same as swimming" (p. 98).

 Conversations with Kids

Pure happenstance, a colleague of mine, Christa Forster, taught mini-semester class on mindfulness and writing.  She invited me to join her class for a day. After we meditated for 10 minutes, we had a terrific hour-long discussion about being mindful when using technology. The day after my visit Christa had her students reflect on the lessons we learned from our discussion together.  A couple of their reflections follow:

It's clear that the students I worked with enjoyed learning that adults are struggling with the same issues that they are.  They clearly want to have conversations with adults who care about them about mindfulness and technology.  Most of their prior interactions with adults involved negative lecturing.  Nobody likes being lectured to.

 Conversations with Parents 

Interestingly, when working with parents, I usually bring up how important it is for them to model mindful behavior with regard to their own cell phone use. Nervous laughter inevitably follows. Although their laughter is most likely an admission of guilt, we can't really blame them. All of this is new. None of us has been trained in how to use these tools. However, their recognition that they should be more mindful of how their behavior affects their kids serves as an important starting point for further learning.

Next Steps

Leading a mindful life, like being a life-long learner, has always been a noble goal for all of us to aspire to in our culture.  However, both paths have become essential 21st-century skills. Conversations on mindfulness need to continue. All of us need to know how to think before we click. We need to learn how to own new media, instead of having the media own us.  

Another Day, Another Discovery

This afternoon, Susan Davis and I were putting the finishing touches on a presentation for the Association of Independent Maryland Schools Technology Retreat. We had been collaborating using a Google Docs Presentation and had planned on downloading the finished presentation to a PowerPoint, because once can never be certain of Internet connectivity at a conference.

While trying to open up the presenter's notes feature we stumbled upon the fact that the presentation software in Google Apps has a feature that allows viewers of a presentation to have backchannel discussions automatically displayed while the presentation is flowing. What a wonderful concept! To access this feature, you click on "View together" after you click on "Start Presentation".

Playing with this feature for a few minutes, we discovered that while a presentation is being displayed, a backchannel can be viewed to the right. I love it!

However, this feature also seems to allow any participant to take control of the presentation and see the presenter's notes. Uh-oh, that could be dangerous.

So, from our quick test, we believe that this feature will be great when working in a small, trusted environment. I look forward to playing with this feature more.

If you have any experience working with this feature, please share your experiences.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Conversation

My background, to condense many years into one sentence, is in music and information technology. When I transitioned in 1999 from working in the corporate IT world to working as a technology director for an independent school, schools at that time primarily saw technology as a tool to support their infrastructure (email, grading, school store, library, cafeteria, business office, etc). To enhance learning, the school where I worked employed computer labs, used a few laptops in carts, and became an extremely early adapter of wireless technology.

In 1999, both within the school and outside the school, professional networking took place primarily in the form of emails. These one-way or two-way conversations may have been read by groups of people, sent to grouped email folders, or shared on listserves, but email was the primary means of communicating. For the most part, both adults and students worked on computers in isolation from one another. Collaboration took the form of emailing a document to a colleague for feedback.

I first learned about the revolution in social networking by being instructed to stop it. We learned that students were using a new form of technology as the means to converse with strangers. This new form of technology involved the establishment of virtual communities of young people. These communities were growing exponentially and attracting young people to them like moths to the flame. The perception at that time was that no good could possibly come from these communities.

A word about school technology directors. Like most teachers, we tend to be quite conservative about what we do. By nature we are quite protective and cautious. We wish to protect our networks, protect the kids on our networks, etc.

Frankly, the first student pages I visited on MySpace (remember MySpace?) were quite unnerving. In addition to being off-putting simply because this type of media was so new, most of the pages I visited at that time had a horrid sense of design, their authors were revealing far too much information about themselves, and students were seemingly connecting with anyone and everyone. It was about that time that my first thoughts relating to teaching students about “media literacy” came into being, although at that time those words would have never entered my head. I began thinking that we needed to teach students how to navigate these spaces safely. Unfortunately, at the time, I had no clue about how to do this, nor did most of my colleagues. So, in order to better guide our seemingly reckless students, I set about the task of learning about these new social networking media. Four years ago, I brought Alan November to my school, and we learned that young people networking didn’t have to be all bad -- some students were doing amazing things at school by connecting. Three years ago, I enrolled a team of 5 teachers into the Powerful Learning Practice program. While I was enrolled in that program, a shift took place in my thinking. Two of the top educational technology leaders in the country, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and Will Richardson, were extolling the virtues of leveraging these new social tools in schools. Still skeptical, I decided to lean into my discomfort. I forced my self to start a Facebook page, signup for Twitter, enroll in and take part in Ning communities, and create a Second Life avatar. In no time at all, I started making connections and having meaningful conversations online about educational technology. And, via a contact I made in Second Life, I had my first experience connecting students at my school with an expert from another country. This led to experiences and conversations that enhanced both their learning and mine.

Now, via my personal learning network, I connect with hundreds of people around the world who share my interest in learning and technology. I started a music blog that I now co-author with a friend, an it has attracted close to 1,000 readers from around the world. I’m currently enrolled in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) at the University of Manitoba where I’m learning about Connectivism as a learning theory. The course’s leaders, George Siemens and Stephen Downes, brilliant as they are, are not my only teachers. In addition to participating in the synchronous semi-weekly online sessions, I’m learning from the community we have created, a community comprised of the universe of people who are extending this course to our Facebook group, on Twitter, and in Diigo. And they are learning from me, which is, in fact, the point. We are all learning from each other 24x7x365.

Learning together -- that is the shift.

I encourage you to join the conversation.