Less power, more control: why typewriters still matter

Many, maybe most, of our young adults here are not very happy. While there may be a correlation between screen time and our younguns' restlessness, causation is a big leap.

Lifted off the net and originally from "Decreases in Psychological Well-Being Among American Adolescents After 2012 and Links to Screen Time During the Rise of Smartphone Technology," Emotion, Jan 22 , 2018

My lambs are fascinated by the classroom typewriter, a machine I picked up off a street in our neighborhood, tossed out after its owner died, along with a case holding her bowling ball and bowling shoes. A copy of her scores from one of her last matches was still in the case.

It's personal. And it still works.

When a child first sees it, she is often mystified. How does it work?

It's fun to watch a child touch a typewriter key--typewriting is an act of force, you do the work, and the keys are designed to let your finger do what fingers do. Touch, feel, react.

The first push of the key is too soft. Typing requires work, force times distance. Children are used to the machine doing the work--a simple touch, the machine negotiates the rest. A typewriter requires more, and the more it requires reminds us we're mammals.

 A type bar rises from the orderly phalanx the to the paper, hesitates, then falls back into the ranks.

She did not push far enough.

She tries again, pushing the key gently, watches the type bar arc gracefully towards the paper, barely kissing the page, leaving, maybe, a hint of a shadow.

Frustrated, she hits the key a bit harder next time, and the type bar flies towards the paper. *Clack* The sound both startles and pleases her.

And there it is, an imperfect letter, a thought transiently incarnate, now permanently etched on paper.

Hers.

Found on the class typewriter, written by one of my students.

Less power--no one can see it unless she shares it.
More control--no one can see it unless she shares it.

***

Dear child,
Google has read every love letter you sent to the boy.
Google has saved every word worthy enough for her.
Your machine breaks down, the letter remains.

***

When you write on a typewriter, you choose the paper. You choose the force of each letter, its place on the paper, but not much else.

You cannot choose the font, the pica, the colors.
You cannot add photos or gifs or links to cute memes.
You cannot make thousands of copies, or even just a few.
You cannot share it with millions of people you do not know.

But you can draw a doodle on it, a doodle never seen before. You can scent it with vanilla (or citrus or madeleines, if you are clever.)

And you can hold it for a lifetime, or give it to someone else who cares enough to do the same, tucked in a shoe box in an attic somewhere, to be found long after both of you are dead.

No doubt our words carry more power now, thanks to our techno-universes.

Craving the power, we cede the control.

This started out as a letter to Jonathan Rochelle, who I got to see talk last week at IgniteSTEM2018. He gets it, even when immersed in it.

 I haven't finished the letter.

High tech clamming, or why it's OK to reject the latest edugadgets

I went clamming yesterday, a dreary mid-April day, wearing shorts and sandals, while bundled up above the waist in multiple layers, anchored by an Irish sweater knit on the Aran Islands, made for weather like this.

I used a simple clam rake that has worked well for years, designed to scritch the bay's muck, allowing me to get enough clams to feed a few folks for a day or two.

A bit after I started, soon after the tide had turned, another clammer showed up in a full neoprene wetsuit, sporting a commercial bull rake.

"How many you'd get," amiably asked.
"Enough."

He wasn't satisfied with that, and ambled over to my bucket to see. He let me know he got five in the short time he was there. His bull rake did work faster. It requires a bit more strength, and does a bit more damage. If "enough" is your goal, the bull will get you there faster, but since my goal is clamming, something I love to do, I have no need to save time.

"Aren't you cold?"
"No--a bit warmer than February."

He looked at me askew, looked down at his full neoprene wetsuit, then looked back at me and unzipped the top. "Come to think of it, I'm a bit too warm."

Now there have been days when I would have envied his fancy clamming clothes, but today was not one of them. My old wool sweater was made for days like this.

I wished him luck, put back the smallest and the largest clams I had  back into the mud at the edge of the bay (a practice I started years ago--that way I know there will always be clams), and walked away.

***

"i" in iPad does not stand for "infant."
Image by Steve Paine via Flickr

Before I adopt any new technology (and clam rakes and neoprene both count), I want to know if adopting it will, in any way, reduce increase overall happiness or well-being, for me, and perhaps even more importantly, everybody else.

Not my efficiency.
Not my net worth.
Not my students' test scores.
Not my attractiveness.
Not my credit score.

Not anything beyond a very basic question first:

Will this tool improve joy?

The question is a difficult one for many of us, not so much because our limited imaginations do not foresee the consequences to both us and others down the line, though that is an issue--rather, too many of us no longer allow ourselves to live for joy.

Or even know what joy means anymore.

If you know what you want, you're a lot more likely to find it.

The connected child

An essential quality of technology, from the spear to Skype, is action at a distance. Technology enables us to have an effect on people and things far away. In general, the more advanced the technology, the further away it is able to impose an effect. 

Doug Hill, author of Not So Fast: Thinking Twice About Technology

Our lives cost the lives of others. That's always been true, and will be so long as we breathe. Technology allows us to forget this.

As technophiles spew on about a global community, where your value is measured by the number of hits your words register, their hands never touch the blood and feces of the life around them.

You want every child "connected"? So do I. It's what's at the other end of the connection that matters.

All children, every child, should know where the stuff that makes up their bodies comes from, all the way back to the living organisms that fill up, unrecognizable, wrapped in plastic.

All children, every child, should know where their waste goes, through hidden pipes and trucks that rumble before dawn through the neighborhood once or twice a week.

We can do both, I suppose--just make sure you cover up the machines when I bring in a calf (or whatever the cafeteria is serving this week) to slaughter in the classroom.

I could live without my computer a lot easier than living without my knife.

Digital natives are neither

"If it don't fit, don't force it.
Turn it over and try again."

Cliff, a dockworker at MJ Rudolpf, ca. 1977

Photo by Debbie Egan-Chin, Daily News

I can drive a car reasonably well. I know its basic functions, can dive under its hood with a reasonable idea of what does what (and even fix things occasionally), and I'm cognizant of what a car can (and cannot) do.

I grew up with cars, they were around long before I was born. I am an automotive native.

Still, when faced with driving a new model, I invariably struggle to find the defrost function. I stil struggle with it in our latest car, and we've had it for over two years. No one worries about this, though, because we are all automobile natives, and we all know that I can figure this out on my own.

Henry Ford was not an automotive native. Neither were the many, many folks who drove his Model T's, cantankerous beasts that needed a lot of loving and logic to keep chugging along. Chokes needed pulling, engines needed cranking, and tires (over and over again) needed replacing.

Yet just about anyone who owned a Model T could finagle their way through the myriad maddening Model T problems.

Not because they were natives, but because they were problem-solvers.

Miss Ramey, a school teacher, 1924, via Shorpy

Maybe the myth that a child can figure out a piece of software faster than her teacher says more about the teacher than the child.

Commercial software is made to be sold. "Intuitive" software sells better than clunky code, and pretty much all commercial programs and hardware meant for mass consumption start up in similar ways.

There is nothing amazing about a reasonably bright child picking up a device and figuring how to power it up, no more than a reasonably bright teacher starting and driving a car they've never used before. Praising your two year old using an iPad is like praising him for pooping in a toilet. I'm all for praising toddlers. But pooping and iPadding are both "user friendly" activities.

Problem solving is a an old, generic skill,  It requires reasoning, experimenting, patience, and (in some cases) chutzpah. Humans are (generally) pretty good at it.

Let's not fetishize the machine, nor the child's relationship to it.
Crows can solve problems. Humans can, too.

We should be able to do it better.

My Dad would say that you should not use a machine until you know how it worked.

長崎

On August 9, 1945, just over 2 1/2 pounds of plutonium was converted to energy 1650 feet over Nagasaki.

Two and a half pounds--about the weight of a 28 week premature newborn baby.

長崎

Yosuke Yamahata, A Japanese army photographer, took this picture the day after the Fat Man fell over Nagasaki.

More of Mr. Yamahata's photography can be seen here.

The photo and the quote are from © The Exploratorium, www.exploratorium.edu

Yes, this is a repeat, and will be repeated every year that I maintain the blog.
We must never forget what we are capable of doing. Never.

"Greatest achievement of organized science"

Hiroshima was destroyed on August 5th, 7:16 PM, our time--just under an hour before our sunset.

 

広島

Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese army base. ... It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. . . . What has been done is the greatest achievement of organized science in history.

Harry S. Truman

It happened on this date, this "greatest achievement."




New technology used to "solve" an old problem. We cannot help ourselves.

Wes Jackson, founder of the Land Institute, suggested "we ought to stay out of the nuclei." Until we have a clue what we want, sounds like good advice.

You cannot separate tools from the critters who use them. Teaching science as some compartmentalized thought process without cultural context is a dangerous game.

What is our responsibility as teachers of science?
As citizens of the United States?
As human beings?

***

We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, "Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." I suppose we all thought that one way or another.

-J. Robert Oppenheimer

And now I teach science to (very) young adults. I have a responsibility to them, to the state, to myself.

Harry S. Truman called the bombing of Hiroshima "the greatest achievement of organized science." If that does not give you pause, you should not be teaching science.

You should not be teaching anything at all.

This is posted every year, as a reminder to me.

Computers harm science education

The foundation of science is the natural world. If you minimize a child's exposure to the natural world, you diminish her capacity to grasp science.

We are doing our best to do just that.

The digital world is not the natural world, not even close. An economy based on extraction and manufactured desires depends on children becoming disconnected from what we are, mammals dependent on the natural cycles of the physical world.

If you hope to teach a child anything at all about time, about months, about seasons, about years, she needs to spend her young days under the sun and the moon, not on an iPad playing with a simulator.

***

In 1978, Jerry Mander, an advertising executive with a background in economics, wrote Four Arguments For The Elimination of Television. While some of it is dated, Mander's extensive second argument, "the colonization of experience", extends to much of what we do with children today, both in and out of the classroom. He shows how this colonization supports our extractive economy, and the costs it entails on our sense of well-being.

"We have been removed from the environment within which we evolved and with which we are uniquely designed to interact. Now we interact and coevolve with only the grosser, more monolithic, human-made commercial forms which remain available within our new laboratory-space station. Because we live inside the new environment, we are not aware that any tradeoff has been made."

Fisher-Price Apptivity Seat, photo via Amazon.com

It is very difficult, maybe impossible, to love science, to be truly curious about the world, if you spend most of your awake hours in front of screens. (I am not talking about the Aspergerish behavior of some children who cling to science "facts" like security blankets, garnering adult praise for their trouble.)


It is also very difficult to teach children science if they spend their first decade of schooling in a system geared to game "standardized" tests they face every spring. Every time a district pares down recess, or fine arts, or physical education, or music, or school trips to a local natural landmark, a child's chances of grasping the natural world diminishes.

The eye of a horseshoe crab, from inside the shell.

I'm taking my kids to Sandy Hook in a few weeks to watch horseshoe crabs mate--one of their assignments will be to watch the tide rise. Despite living within 50 miles of the Atlantic, more than a handful of my students have never seen the ocean.

But all of them can dash off a five paragraph essay on nothing.

How can you even pretend to know the ocean if you have never stood at its edge?

広島

広島

Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese army base. ... It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. . . . What has been done is the greatest achievement of organized science in history.

Harry S. Truman

It happened on this date, this "greatest achievement."




New technology used to "solve" an old problem. We cannot help ourselves.

Wes Jackson, founder of the Land Institute, suggested "we ought to stay out of the nuclei." Until we have a clue what we want, sounds like good advice.

You cannot separate tools from the critters who use them. Teaching science as some compartmentalized thought process without cultural context is a dangerous game.

What is our responsibility as teachers of science?
As citizens of the United States?
As human beings?

***

This morning I saw a cicada wasp drag a paralyzed cricket along the edge of the driveway. The wasp was not much bigger than the cricket, and the wasp struggled. At one point she let go, stepped back a few inches, stroked her head a few times (much like a human facing a big task), and eventually dragged it down a hole by the driveway garden. The cricket was still alive, but paralyzed.

I did not intervene.

The wasp will lay her eggs in the cricket, and they will hatch in the cricket, still alive, and the cricket will, of course, suffer.

I did not intervene.

The larva wasp will use the the cricket, still alive, for food.

And still, I did not intervene.

Photo by Bruce Holderbaum

***

We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, "Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." I suppose we all thought that one way or another.

-J. Robert Oppenheimer

Ken Allan is a blogger on the other side of the Earth. ( Kia ora e Ken.) He's quirky, bright, thoughtful, and well worth reading.

He sent me the this video:

And now I teach science to (very) young adults. I have a responsibility to them, to the state, to myself.

Harry S. Truman called the bombing of Hiroshima "the greatest achievement of organized science." If that does not give you pause, you should not be teaching science.

You should not be teaching anything at all.

(Yes, this is from older posts, timeless ones.)
The photo is by Bruce Holderbaum and can be found here--used with permission.


This is posted every year, as a reminder to me.

Which apple will your child hold?

I agreed to review an iPad education app this week, which led me to thinking,
which led to all kinds of problems--the review will have to wait.

To learn something requires physical changes in the brain--this is not metaphorical. If your neurons don't get more spiky growing more dendrites, then not a whole lot is happening. This costs materials and free energy. Learning, at some level, hurts, much as athletic training does, and both lead to observable physical changes.

Every organism alive today exists because its ancestors were clever enough to conserve their energy for things that mattered, Algebra II be damned.

A carrot from our classroom.

Saying learning should be enjoyable is like saying wind sprints with full pads on should be fun--there are good reasons to do either, but both require bucking a few eons' worth of evolution. Wouldn't know it from some of the nonsense floating around the ed world, though.

***

Turns out that the physical changes that occur appear to only occur on the relatively few neurons needed to master the task at hand.

"I think it’s fair to say that in the past it was generally believed that a whole cortical region would change when learning occurred in that region, that a large group of neurons would show a fairly modest change in overall structure.

Our findings show that this is not the case. Instead, a very small number of neurons specifically activated by learning show an expansion of structure that’s both surprisingly extensive – there’s a dramatic increase in the size and complexity of the affected neurons – and yet highly restricted to a small subset of cells."

Mark H. Tuszynski, MD, PhD, Professor of Neurosciences
University of California, San Diego School of Medicine

This has profound consequences. Staring at a screen will create plenty of dendritic spikes, but, I suspect, in a very narrow range of cells.

What can a toddler learn from a screen? Which causes more wide-spread dendritic development, staring at a picture of a leaf, or holding one?

No one ever got rich packaging maple leaves for classrooms, though plenty of teachers, to their credit, continue to bring them into classrooms.

You want children to learn about the natural world? Toss the computers until they get to a place in abstract thinking when they can distinguish what's real from the tools that shape their world.

Steve Jobs and his cult of human design be damned.

Technology encourages scientific illiteracy

 A year old, but still waiting for a plausible counterargument.

A Crooke's radiometer measures sunlight intensity, which sounds all scary and scientificy, until you see one in action. It's simpler than a Talking Elmo.




The more intense the light, the faster the radiometer's vanes spin inside its glass bulb. It looks like a toy.

I keep one on the windowsill in our classroom. On sunny days in September, it spun so hard it rattled. In December's dying light, it moves like an elderly statesman--steadily, slowly, with a hint of what once was.



Sunlight is not abstract. The spinning radiometer is not abstract. Telling my lambs that the sun barely rose 25 degrees above the horizon is abstract. I can show them fancy solar data charts on the internet, teach them algorithms for interpreting the data, and get them to bark like trained seals.

We need the abstract. I get that. Focusing on the imaginary before children grasp the real, however, will create a generation of idiot savants.

***

Our children live in an abstract world. They bop along life with personalized song sets, immerse themselves in virtual worlds with personalized avatars.

We used to worry when kids held on to imaginary friends a bit too long. A toddler talking to a giant imaginary squid is cute; a 13 year old doing the same thing is disturbing.

Constructing the abstract is a special kind of imaginary thinking, but the abstract is still imaginary. If I describe my Christmas tree, a lovely balsam afflicted with minor scoliosis now covered with ornaments, some made by hand by my children years ago, I am talking about something real.

If I tell you that the average balsam sold in Bloomfield this year is 2.11 meters tall, weighs 20.3 kg, and has 533.7 branches, you might be able to imagine it in your head, but it does not exist. Anywhere.

Yet when we teach science, we focus on the imaginary average, often at the exclusion of looking at the bent-over balsam sitting in the room.

Using a machine that helps a child grasp the abstract version of a Christmas tree may improve test scores (though there's evidence that it won't); it cannot, however, help a child see the real tree.

***

There is a huge push to use "technology" in classrooms. By technology, I am assuming most folks mean the digitized high-tech expensive stuff, or else the discussion is just silly. All of us use some sort of technology in class, even if it's just paper and pencil.

The Innovative Educator blog is a fun read, with lots of good ideas. It has almost 1800 followers. It carries clout. A few days ago, Lisa Nielsen, The Innovative Educator, headlined her post:

Tech Doesn’t Make Us Illiterate.
Not Embedding it Into Instruction Does.

In it, she discusses reactions to The New York Times article discussing the failure of 1:1 computing in some schools, then reconstructs the false dichotomy tossed about in the ed tech world: tried-and-true old skool ("readin', ritin', rithmetic") vs. the visionary new big thing.

What gave me pause, however, is her suggestion that we turn classrooms into video games:

What would happen if rather than lament what our kids loved to do, we re-envisioned school. They love games. What if we stopped fighting it and the adults changed and started looking at School as Video Game?

Ms. Nielsen does not stand alone. I read similar words every few days, hers just happened to be the latest I stumbled upon.

What would happen?
Science in the classroom would die. Science requires contact with the physical, with the real. Until children know the ground under their feet, they cannot hope to grasp models.

I use plenty of technology in class: our Crooke's radiometer, our Drinky Bird, our Newton's Cradle, our classroom garden (hey, we even use fluorescent lights!), our prism, our aquaria filters...and on and on.

I agree with Ms. Nielsen that tech doesn't make us illiterate. Embedding digital technology into science too early, before our children get a decent handle on the physical world, does make our children scientifically illiterate.

It's why my class has an analog clock. It's why I threaten to smash calculators in class.

Do I use a computer? Yep. Sometimes I sip a good Oirish whiskey as I do so. Neither belongs in the hands of a child.

Radiometer pic by Nevit Dilmen, used under CC.

The cost of one laptop buys a lot of tangible science gadgets.
Bet a young student learns more science from a bag of magnets than from a puter. .

Why I do not own a cell phone

I do not own a cell phone, and do not plan on getting one.
Here are my reasons; I think they are good ones:

*I worked as a pediatrician for many years, essentially on-call at least 80% of the time. It's nice not to be tethered to the human bustle. It distracts me from the infinite hum of life around me.

*I cannot be two places at once. When I am walking, I am walking under a sky of infinite variation. I feel the twigs beneath my feet. I see the faces of those who walk by, though many cannot see me. If I cannot be two places at once, I have a choice to make--which place matters more to me? Surprises me how few folks realize they have a choice.

*I do not like being tracked by anything farther than my voice can carry. That a grackle eyes me before going back to rustling through leaves, looking for bugs, makes me feel more whole. That a cell phone system can do the same unnerves me. I do not like it, and have liked it less since the Patriot Act.

No, I am not a criminal, I am a school teacher who knows a little history. If I cannot use a cell phone without a perpetual electronic collar, I have a choice to make. Surprises me how few folks realize they have a choice.

*But what if someone needs to call you about this calamity or that? I do not spend my waking hours worrying about catastrophes. Bad things will happen even if I carry a cell phone, and knowing them a few minutes earlier than I otherwise would is not going to change a thing.

*They're expensive. I have to make about a grand before taxes in order to pay for a year's worth of service. If I used a cell phone, much of the money I earn teaching would go to support my phone use. I would rather spend my money on a few decent books, decent ale, another clam rake (I got a bad habit), or give it away.

*It's one more thing to worry about. I clam, I kayak, my wallet has salt stains on it. It's a rare week when at least some of me is not in the bay.

And maybe the bay is the biggest reason I do not plan to get a phone--so many evenings, as the sun settles on the bay's edge, I remember, at some deep level, that I am, and (perhaps) always will be, a part of this thing, whatever this thing is, and I  fear the phone leashes me to schedules independent of the stars, to ideas contrary to what we know is true.

 
The ancients may not have had the sophisticated grasp of what we call science, but they knew the natural world. They lived in it, of it--the abstract cannot truly represent the real. The cell phone separates me, incrementally, from what I think matters.

So I don't own one.
Thanks for asking!

This is NOT a diatribe against cell phones in general--I fond them incredibly useful for students in school.

Most of my students are walking around with phenomenal personal devices, and I encourage them to use them.

But school is already so artificial it hardly matters.

And yes, I am aware I am coming off as a sanctimonious ass here--it's just a blog.

Photo via The Blog: Spellbound by Our Own Imperfect Lives...., permission pending

Are you Sirious?

Tuesday I'll grab the clam rake for the last time this year. Late Tuesday afternoon I'll wander over to an exposed tidal flat, and pull food out of the muck.

I do not know who crafted the tines of my rake, but I know how it was done.
I do not know where the tree grew that gave me the handle, but I know how it was done.
I do know how the mead I'll drink was brewed--I watched it ferment for months.

***

Tomorrow a lot of people will get an iPhone 4S, and adopt Siri as their personal assistant. We have taken false idols to a higher level.

Our sophistication now dwarfs our humanity.

Talk to Siri as you would to a person. Say something like “Tell my wife I’m running late.”

The machine says she's not capable of love, but we are not capable of discernment. We create our own Sirens, who call us away from the world.

The world either matters, or it does not. We say that it does, but act as though it does not.

Owners of the iPhone 4S talk of how well it snuggles in the hand--perhaps it does, but I doubt it nestles quite as well as a quahog. Probably doesn't taste as good either.


Tell my wife I'm running late.

If I'm running late Tuesday, my wife will hear it directly from me. I may have to wander into the Firehouse Tavern to find a phone, but chances are pretty good she knows exactly where I am anyway. No need to wander too far on a clam bed, they don't move much.

The woman's voice I hear on the other side will be a voice I've known for 35 years. And unlike Siri, she is capable of love. We all are.   

Merry Christmas!

If you're talking to a phone, you're using it wrong.

In the you cannot make this stuff up department....

"When using and choosing technology for children teachers should let children pretend with the types of gadgets they see their parents using. Stock the dramatic play area with a non-working mouse and keyboard, cell phone and/or electronic music device."

from the New Jersey Technology Standards

Or maybe just give them a box of crayons and let them draw a picture of a bunny with a pancake on its head.

Photo from Buffet O' Blog.

A response to a technophile

This post is a mess, an amalgam of several yet-born posts swirling about.

This is a tool, made by Takeshi Yamada,  an artist who saw visions while surveying horseshoe crabs on the shores of our bay.

It is a pen crafted from the tail of a horseshoe crab. Mr. Yamada uses it almost every day, to create stunning images.

Compared to some tools, his pen may be thought inefficient. It certainly lacks the precision of a YAG laser engraver , or even a Koh-I-Noor 5611 drafting pencil, but that's not the point. That's not the point at all.

Mr. Yamada is human, with the same frailties as any of us, with the same natural curiosity. He did not learn to use his telson in an American school. There is no place for it there.

Credit: Dennis B. Smith, Leadholder.com

Unique does not guarantee better. Unique things are often unique because they are not worth reproducing. Technology thrives on precise, efficient, reproducible results. There is little room for Mr. Yamada in the industrial world.

Mr. Yamada's work, however, gives me pleasure. His work pleases others as well. Someone shared it with me, now I share it with you.

***

Gerald Aungst, "a supervisor of gifted children," writes for Connected Principals, a shared blog written by school administrators, a blog well worth visiting. His recent post "Why 'I Don’t Do Technology' Isn’t Acceptable" raises some good points, and I have no qualms with the thesis of its title. His arguments within the article, however, reveal some interesting thoughts shared by many technophiles, and I'd like to offer some views from the other side of the aisle, an aisle I straddle with my Google + account in my right hand, my Dixon Ticonderoga No. 2 pencil in my left.

Go read the post. I'll go check my sundial and pick weeds from my garden while you read.

***

"Some people argue that technology is simply a tool to be applied where and how it’s appropriate. Others say no technology is neutral and we have to be deliberate in our choices to use it."

The two are not mutually exclusive--"appropriate" covers a lot of ground. We also should consider what is lost when a newer technology is used. Reel mower vs. gas-powered rotary. Pencil vs. pixels. Chalkboard vs. IWB.

I'm a retired doc--before I stopped succoring the afflicted I saw the mess high tech mania produced in medicine. Mr. Aungst's example of the CT machine is an interesting example, because of the quandaries it has created, and because of the change in skills that have resulted.

Classic appendicitis (and many subtle variants) can be diagnosed by history and physical exam alone if the practitioner has learned how to do this. CT scans are quite useful in certain situations, but are often superfluous, and can, at times, mislead. They certainly tangle up a few DNA molecules (which are usually repaired), and they are very expensive.

The obvious downsides to CT imaging is that it takes time (and time is an issue with appendicitis), and it requires tossing some radiation through a living critter. Less obvious is the erosion of skills in tech-dependent docs. By the time I left medicine, CT scans were evolving from an overused, nonessential tool to standard of care, partly because the less experienced docs felt no need to refine the clinical skills needed to accurately diagnose appendicitis--because they had CT machines....

High tech has supplanted the low tech history and physical examination--if you delve into the luverly world of Bayesian statistics, you start to grasp why this matters. I loved CT machines--but I used them judiciously. No, you do not need one just because you hit your head. But thanks for asking....

***

"Everything that we can do using digital technology can certainly be done in some other way. As I understand it, technology gives us three capabilities: to do things

• More efficiently
• More precisely
• More thoroughly"

Well, no, and no. Some things done with digital technology cannot be done any other way. I'll save that for another post. The second part, though, intrigues me because it gets a deeper question. Why the hurry?

Given the phenomenal information now (efficiently, precisely, thoroughly) available to all of us, does pedagogy require the same technical sleekness? Do our classrooms need to follow the industrial model of production? Is this even possible? The Slow School movement makes a nice counter-story to the frenzy spawned in Silicon Valley.

If you believe that our current cultural practices have had disastrous effects on our seas, our air, our children, maybe stepping back a bit to reflect on what matters, itself not a particularly efficient activity, then efficiency loses its luster. If we took the time to reflect on our practices, to appreciate the depth of consequences we make with our choices, would the shimmering cognitive dissonance awaken us enough to change? Or would it drive us back into the dull din of relentless data, back to our coffee and wine and the digital distractions of our [dis]connected lives.

 "Why you'll love a Mac. A Mac is as good as it looks."

***

"Technology advances give all of us—doctors, forensic scientists, teachers, and students—the ability to make better decisions...."

This is where our paths divide. "Better decisions" is a huge category--and "better" is as slippery as butter. The large cultural decisions we have made (or have had pressed onto us) the past few generations have had consequences, huge consequences.

Our current air of Western superiority is fueled by cheap calories pumped up from the ground, from finite sources. Our tremendous gains in growing food stem from our ability to fixate nitrogen through the Haber-Bosch process, also dependent on finite sources. We have the time to ruminate, though few of us do.

The same technology that allows us to chat with our "neighbors" half a world away allowed a British "Reaper" un-manned drone to kill civilians in Pakistan using digital communication from an airbase in Nevada. Yes, it was an accident. It wasn't the first time--two children were injured via remote control in 2009. No, it won't be the last.

High tech allows us to make quicker decisions--but if technology makes us capable of better decisions, I'd like to see the evidence.

***

At the end of each school year, I take over a hundred kids to see horseshoe crabs mating along the Sandy Hook Bay. While a few critters may end up frustrated by coitus interruptus sophomoribus, a few humans leave the tide's edge feeling a little bit more connected to the world, and, perhaps, a little bit more in love with the world.

Some of them may end up in Afghanistan, the ones least likely to find it on a map. The Japanese call the horseshoe crab kabuto-gani--"the warrior's helmet"--because of its similarity to the headgear worn by the samurai, a culture that forbid killing by stealth.

We don't dwell on these things, those of us protected by money and class here in the States. They make us uncomfortable.

Teaching science requires some cognitive dissonance, which is convenient, because allowing a child to become more aware of her universe will lead to huge doses of cognitive dissonance. If I aim for efficiency, the children in my class can hide from their dissonance.

Mr. Aungst's article and the subsequent discussion are a wonderful start to why technology matters in the classroom, and who can disagree with his assertion that "educators have accepted responsibility for the growth of the students in their care."

I think we need to discuss what "growth" needs--deeply, slowly, thoroughly, if not efficiently. We'll need some technology--comfortable chairs, maybe a glass or two of something brewed, perhaps a guitar, and artificial light if our chat extends past sunset. We mostly need ourselves and our love for what we do.

Care to join the discussion?

The Mac is from the Apple site.
The pencil is accredited above.
The telson pen is from Horseshoecrab.org.
The horseshoe crab photo is ours.

Unintended consequences: King Ludd was right

Natural science has a funny way of bumping up against high tech. While we are way past the point of  rationally discussing whether we'd be better off without automobiles, industrialized agriculture, or Auto-Tune (I'd vote against all three), not all high tech gadgets are irreversibly entrenched in our culture.

King Ludd--waiting for rain to wash his hands

 
Hands-free sinks have always annoyed me--I like being able to alter the water temperature, and I have a bad habit of setting my papers down on the sink's edge, with predictable consequences. They make sense, though--less touching, more sanitary. The last thing a hand touches before turning on a bathroom sink may be a less-than-pristine orifice.

Hospitals have spent oodles of dollars installing the sinks for this reason. Nosocomial (hospital-acquired) infections are a huge expense, and despite occasional evidence to the contrary, hospitals want their patients to get better.

Alas, turns out the money may be wasted. A Johns Hopkins study shows that automatic faucets may increase risks of nosocomial infections; the fancy valves used in the high-tech sinks serve as breeding grounds for Legionella bacteria.

As a result, "hospital leadership elected to use traditional fixtures – some 1,080 of them – in all patient care areas in the new clinical buildings currently under construction at Johns Hopkins’ East Baltimore campus." Yep, they're removing the high-tech fancy doo-dad sinks and replacing them with, ahem, traditional fixtures.

How many high-tech devices in the classroom truly improve education? 

Maybe if they look at the morbidity from cars, they'll consider removing the parking lots, too.

My Google-approved, high-tech, zomgilicious overhead projector

We have interactive whiteboards in our classrooms. They are relatively expensive, and a real pain in the arse if you're left-handed, especially if there's any delay in the projection. (This may not seem obvious, go ask a southpaw...)

The Amish do not have anything in particular against technology, but they do have issues with anything that separates the community. Much of modern technology does just that.

I am not opposed to high tech in the classroom, but I am opposed to tech that is no better than what it replaces, especially if it's more expensive. There are some things I can do with a blackboard that cannot be done with a whiteboard, and the interactive whiteboard, despite its flash, is more restrictive than my whiteboard when I am helping children learn how to think.

On a recent post, I wondered aloud about the use of the word "bitch"--I think it's offensive, many young folk disagree, and a brilliant young adult who happens to work for Google sent me a chat given there by Randall Munroe, the author of xkcd. The talk is fascinating, of course, but even more interesting (to me, anyway) was how Munroe illustrated his work. He used an overhead projector.

It was a fancy camera over an oh-so-cool desktop, but still, it was, in essence, an overhead projector.

I still have an overhead projector, and I still have acetate, but I have not used it, mostly because I cannot hear anything over the fan. I have a camera I use just about every day, projecting various objects on the board as the students wander in to class.

And now I have a Google-approved, high-tech, zomgilicious overhead projector--I simply aim my camera at a piece of paper, and I write. The writing gets projected onto a whiteboard where I can scribble some more. Students can scribble on their own whiteboards, or they can scribble on mine. ("Mine" gets less obvious every day in my class.)

Phenology notes for myself: first ospreys seen diving for fish on Saturday, April 9;
the cormorants are back, the loons have yet to leave.

Randall Munroe screen shot from video cited above.

I still think the word is offensive, so I deleted the original xkcd cartoon 

Sorry, Amanda, I just found your letter--it got stuck in the spam section.

On classroom technologies

“Young students and old thrive on the tactile experience of manipulating with their fingers. And I definitely appreciate being able to interact with the content – how could teaching and learning get any more hands-on?”

Katie Morrow, Technology Integration Specialist
From SMART Board brochure

Our fry are getting bigger--some have migrated to mini-aquariums set up by students in recycled milk and soda bottles. We have a few more wheat plants forming heads, and a student announced that her sow bugs had babies.

We got a lot going on in class.

There's been a huge push to get "technology" in classrooms--I'd argue that a recycled plastic milk bottle holding two tiny fish and a strand of elodea counts as technology, but no one gets rich selling used milk cartons.

***

I am not averse to new technologies. I have a class set of netbooks (thank you Roche/BEF/Home & School!),  an interactive whiteboard, and a couple of remote devices, including a Mobi. We use them as well as pencils, paper, and cut shower boards. The students slide easily from one tool to the next, depending on the task at hand.

Most of our newer educational technologies involve recorded sight and sound--filtered views of the universe. I am inundated with catalogs that offer written words, videos, simulated labs, and models.

When a child "interacts" with a SMART Board, she is touching a flat piece of plastic, no matter what a specialist tells us.

 

The more I try to bring the world to my classroom, the more I realize the limitations of our various tools. Even words get in the way at times, especially when the words are designed to "teach." Words matter, of course, and sharing language gets us halfway there--but in science class, or in any interaction with the natural world, words fall incomplete. We forget this.

We do not live in a "knowledge economy," we live in the world. We eat other organisms, we breathe oxygen released by plants, we drink water that has passed through other critters. We need what our world provides; we are, literally, part of this world.

Our words are not.

I will continue to use our classroom tools, high tech and low, as scaffolds to the world that exists, but I will continue to remind my students, and myself, that our tools distort our views.

This past week a saw one child sticking his nose into our class bag of dirt, smelling the impossibly complex and living collection of stuff found in soil. He liked it, told another, and he took a good whiff as well.

Can't teach that. Not with words, with pictures, or even a new MacBook Pro with a 2.3GHz Core i5 dual-core processor and Thunderbolt technology. Unless, maybe, if you dunk it in mud first.

Photos from classroom.

Back to the future

With all the clitter clatter of folks rushing to toss out last week's toys for the new and improved 2.0 version, here are a few things now obsolete, but well worth bringing back:



1) Chalk

You cannot draw well with markers; it's even harder to draw with an interactive whiteboard. Subtlety matters. While a 256 color Powerpoint of a beating animated heart garners plenty of woo factor,

It's cheap! A dozen chalk sticks will run you less than a dollar; the same number of erasable markers costs a magnitude more.

It's therapeutic--snapping a piece of chalk in two satisfies the amygdala. Try breaking a marker in two. If things get really bad, you can eat the chalk as an emergency substitute for TUMS.

2) Overhear projectors

Using an overhead projector well requires a strong grasp of the material you are presenting. It has the added bonus of allowing you to face your students, your visage lit up eerily like a bad scary movie.

An overhead projector is a great source of light for biology teachers--I still dig one out when I want to show that chlorophyll fluoresces, or to test light's effects on oxygen production in plants.

(I won't even get into my talent for shadow puppets....)

3) Analog clocks

I still have no idea why they left--an analog clock gives more information than the digital variety, hands down. I guess you could argue that they cost a smidgen more--I do have to invest in a new battery every 3 or 4 years--but even I can spare a dollar or so a year.

I do not hold onto the old for old times' sake. I hold onto tools that work well, until replaced by something that works at least as well, everything else being equal.

Spending a lot on an interactive whiteboard does not make you smart, only your wallet.

Don't eat the chalk. Really.
Einstein photo from Seattle Weekly here.

A response to a technophile

Whenever I post about the ludicrousness of using tools at inappropriately young ages, I get animated responses with similar themes. These replies are often anonymous, and often thoughtless.

I got one from my previous post that was neither anonymous nor thoughtless, and I thought it was worth carrying the discussion out in the open. Thank you, David!

Computers are the most powerful tool we have at our disposal and you want our kids to be ignorant of how they are used?

"Computers are the most powerful we have at our disposal" is dubious at best--I'd argue that the power of the tool depends on the task at hand (try hammering a nail with a mouse--yes, I'm an idiot).

But let's suppose for a moment that the computer is indeed the most powerful tool we have. Is its innate "power" your argument for why young children should be taught how to use them?

My car is the most powerful way for me to get around, but I'd rather the children keep away from the wheel until they can peer over the dashboard.

Do you think kids' parents, most of them anyway, have any clue how to use a computer as a tool?

Yes, I do, insofar as they need them for what parents do day to day, which is to say, live.

To be fair, they use computers every time they drive, use a microwave, an elevator, a video game, or EZ Pass, each a different task.

Maybe I am misunderstanding the thrust of your question. I do that a lot.

If you mean more esoteric stuff, like designing a database from scratch, well, maybe not. We got high school for that. I'd rather teach the kids how to bake from scratch--as in here's a bag of seeds, bake me a pie in 9 months, but I tend to be a bit extreme.

We do spend too much time in front of computers, this I agree with.

How do we fix this? I cannot control what happens in the child's home. What is the damage done by this? Are we contributing to the damage by reinforcing the activity in school?

However, what's the difference in health between sitting with a computer in front of you, or sitting with some paper to take notes? In either case, you are sitting instead of moving.

A great question--there's a couple of distinct points there, and I'll take each in turn:

Neither has great risks aside from physical inactivity that we know of--I suppose you could stab yourself in the eye and get paper cuts with the pencil and paper, and there have been case reports of children causing damage to their thighs from prolonged contact with hot laptops, and more than a few visits to the ER after tripping over wires, but I know those are not what you mean.

Some real longterm concerns may exist--two big ones in the past, monitor radiation and carpal tunnel syndrome, have been ameliorated. Longterm exposure to light may be a subtle issue not adequately explored, but again, I know these are not what you mean either.

There is a difference, though--a child pursuing an activity on paper has only the paper to deal with. Paper is mostly quiet unless you rustle it, and doesn't have flash or sizzle or anything else except sit there. It has, alas, no bling.

A child, when not doing her paper homework, will get up and do something else wrestled to the ground by an adult, both of which expend energy. A child on a computer wanders away, too, to online games, to FaceBook, to ESPN, to a whole shiny digital world that distracts her like a magpie.

The real crime is the number of physical education programs which are being cut and the lack of outdoor education programs in most schools.

Here in New Jersey, physical education remains mandatory. Getting kids outside is, indeed, important. There are only so many hours in a day. If we both agree that children are spending too much time on computers and not enough time outdoors, well, it doesn't take a computer to mesh out a rational solution to that.

I agree completely, by the way, with Stephen Downes 10 things that you really need to learn. I work in a school where those 10 things are our primary curriculum and our content is secondary to them.

Do send a link to your school--while I am blessed to work in a great department in a wonderful school, we still have the state curriculum and an annual end of course here to contend with.

And yes, I accept emails.

That's King Ludd in the picture--I assume it's old enough to be PD.