I’m depressed now. I just read an article about electronic voting machines and concerns about their security. This particular article concerned the security of companies that hire themselves out to test the security of electronic voting machines. Where does it end?
I see a huge collision coming, and it frightens me. We are ushering in new technologies that are enriching our lives in amazing ways. But they also have the affect of breaking down many of the walls that we have relied on for millenniums that protect us from our wildness. Our children go forth into a world, exposed and accessible to people we do not know. Our democratic way of government is in jeopardy. Our very identities are threatened.
I’m not being a luddite. I believe that these connecting and enriching technologies are essential to us as thriving and progressing societies. But as connective / wall-shattering technologies continue to advance, our wildness continues to be a part of who we are and how we think.
Mobile phones are giving us access to that which is almost unspeakable, as evidenced by the recent release of video from Saddam Hussein’s execution — and I have to admit my on morbid fascination. I watched it — and became nearly sick. But I watched it.
I worry about a world without walls with people who continue to fear, hate, and want pain — and to be fascinated by fear, hate, and pain. I fear an enormous collision between a connected world and a world that is so afraid. I guess this is why I keep ranting that ethics must be a part of what we consider basic literacy skills. But this is not nearly enough.
How do we heal a wild world — in time?
Sorry, just venting. I may remove this blog entry at any moment!
You are welcome to comment. But, please, no criticism!
Oh no…please don’t remove it! I’m a total geek and readily embrace almost every move forward in the use of technology. But those changes can only be viewed as ‘progress’ if we use them wisely. Now I don’t hold myself up as the person to determine what is ‘wise’. And yet, your stress on ethical uses of technology seem broad enough that we can all embrace them, while still providing some guidelines about how to do this tech thing with some integrity.
Please keep this post. This is a side of the technology conversation that’s not happening, but needs to be. I also believe that technology (in itself) is wonderful, and that the current read/write web offers powerful ways for students to learn and develop. Nevertheless, there is a ruthlessness that swims in humanity. I see it daily in the halls of my school and in the morbid obsessions of the evening news, and this ruthlessness can also learn to use technology … for its own destructive ends. Fear of that is wisdom–the kind that often comes too late. I don’t think it’s too late yet … but I can hear the clock ticking.
I agree with Em, and “integrity” is a good choice. Those of us who are using the technology and pushing forward with it are the ones who must also take responsibility for thinking about ways to preserve (and further develop?) integrity in its use.
I agree, but with a disclaimer. I see the primary responsibility for instilling integrity falling with the family, not the software developers, consultants, or teachers. A pair of scissors is one of the greatest, most useful inventions of all time. Put it in the hands of a small, however, and it becomes a dangerous object. Too many kids are like that small child–they lack the maturity and experience to use the tools. Virtually every tool out there on the Web is instantly a target of folks wanting to misuse it or use it without regards to safety, integrity, honesty, etc. Happens in schools, too, every time a class goes to a lab to use the Internet. Teachers have to be on constant alert. Families must do the job that far too many have abdicated–raise their children. As Time described it a couple of years back, too many parents treat schools as dry cleaners–drop off the dirty kids and expect them to be clean and pressed when they are picked up. As a teacher, I can encourage, educate, even threaten with consequences, but I’ve got a few months with a child–moral values need longer than that to become deeply imbedded and permanent. I can and do teach basic technology ethics to teachers and students, and I hold them to those standards. What they do when they leave the building is dependent on a morality instilled by their most important teachers–their parents.
This reminds me of Friedman’s last chapter in ‘The World is Flat’… the difference in imagination when focused on Hope rather than History. In a connected world we need new ‘pillars of education’. Doctors’ Hippocratic Oath is “First do no harm”, if teachers had one it would encompass a lot more. It would need to guide us to teach with compassion and tell us to value/celebrate diversity… it would have to be moral, ethical, even philosophical.
Technology amplifies the dichotomy between good and evil, right and wrong, write-no-wrong. Discourse on-line can be healthy, as it always is in your blog, or it can lead to cyber-bullying on MySpace. There is malicious intent in the world, and teachers cannot just ‘do no harm’ they must actively promote kindness, caring and compassion. To cheer you up, technology can help educators reach further with their message.
Dave:
This is the conversation that needs to take place and part of our role as educators is to push it out infront of everyone’s face. We have this great tool, with no real instruction book/manual. We need to have the conversation, because we, as teachers, become the conduit by which this makes sense to the society as a whole. We have connected teenagers and young adults, who have 24/7/365 access to more information than can be contained in any High School or College Library. Yet, we also have administrators and others in the educational profession, who see the information explosion we are experiencing like the parents of the 1950’s saw Rock and Roll music. They didn’t understand it, it brought out in youth issues and topics that most adults felt uncomfortable about and in the end they realized they couldn’t control it, but only hope to make sense of it.
We are the people within our society that become the ‘connectors.’ The one’s that facilitate the conversation between the movement forward and the status quo. In the 1950’s and onward there were certain ‘protections’ that were instituted to attempt to contain the behavior of teens. Remember dances where there was a rule about how close a boy and a girl could be to eachother? “You had to have a foot between,” or a teacher had to be able to see ‘light’ between a boy and girl. We are at the same place when talking about technology and our teens. We already have rules establishing ‘appropriate use’ and which devices can be used on school grounds. But these ‘rules’ are all reactive, they are not ‘proactive.’ This is where we come in… We are the one’s who must be ‘proactive’ in the use of technology and bridge the gap between the connected teens and disconnected adults. While this looks like more of Marc Prensky’s “Digital Native and Digital Immigrant” premise, it has a slightly different flavor since it has permeated the roots of our society.
So, as I finish this ‘rant’ and I apologize for that… I think we need to become even more vigilant and proactive in teaching ‘digital citizenship,’ since it will the digital medium by which social and political discourse will take place. It will become necessary for all to be able to communicate using these tools to function within the societies of the future.
I’ll probably blog this myself… now that you got me going….
See you next week!
This is exactly why I cringe when I read many “popular” edtech blogs. It seems our world has (almost) totally lost the sense of OBJECTIVE TRUTH. There are GREATER REALITIES than technology … you have named a few (ethics, fear, pain).
I have only been reading edtech blogs for a couple of months. However, when many of the bloggers (not you specifically) seem to think children need and deserve unlimited access to the Internet at all times, I find myself afraid of the path edtech seems to be going. Please do not take this as criticism! I will continue to lurk and pray that the movers and shakers don’t loose sight of what is ULTIMATELY important: the youth and children we teach.
I agree with you. Why do you think it scares the living daylights out of me to blog in the first place. Yet here I am. . . blogging away. . . Might as well join the 21st century.
If we tear down the walls but don’t teach those who were walled how to garden what have we created but anarchy?
Please o’ Please do not remove this post. This is the exact type of question that we as educators need to overcome to implement programs successfully!!
I like you watched with morbid curiousity the hanging of Mr. Hussein. That, I think, doesn’t make me a sick person. It was one of those moments in history that without these boundaries is broadcast almost instantaneously. Like you said, this can be a big boon or a huge disaster. I think what scares me the most about this incident is the number of children with unfettered internet access who have actually seen it and are trying to mimic it. To date from Drudge I’ve seen at least 4 to 5 kids dying worldwide by trying to copy the hanging! That’s crazy! And again, this only makes our jobs all the more difficult.
Wow, what a great thread of conversation with lots of insights added in the comments. This situation over the Saddam hanging video reminds me of the video of the Nick Berg beheading back in 2004 and what happened there. Our access to realtime content like this is only going to increase. Ultimately, more face to face as well as virtual conversations about these issues are the only solutions that are going to produce results. We see many schools trying to ban the Internet (effectively) and the interactive potential as well as content it represents. I too waver at times between frustration/depression and hope/optimisim. I love the comment about parents viewing schools as dry cleaners, but of course its validity is quite sad. We have to work on this perception together. In the context of wildness on the Internet, I am also reminded of what Robert Bork wrote many years ago in his book Slouching Towards Gomorrah. Many of the technologies around us seem to be on the side of anarchy and chaos rather than order and control. This phenomenon explains at least in part why so many schools oppose the technologies of the read/write web and the information landscape. Utlimately, through dialog we have to come to a place where we can collaboratively formulate strategies that are based on more than fear. We have to be continually striving to better understand these technologies, and regularly adapt what we are doing about and with them to keep ourselves safe, but also relevant and engaged.