Digital learning

Gardening as a radical act.

I wandered barefoot out to the garden at dawn, picked a few dried bean pods, heard them crackle as my hand felt for the seam, then slid my finger down through the velvety crease and stripped bean after bean from the pod into my open hand.

Back inside, I dropped the beans in with the others I collected last week, then plugged into the electronic "world," doing my weekly due diligence on #satchat, a fine group of edu-folk trying to improve our classroom practices.

The conversation went as these conversations tend to go, but the dichotomy of the life I live and the life we push in the classroom shook me this morning, so I'm tossing out these words mostly as a reminder (and a warning) to myself.

Blindness comes in many forms, but rarely voluntary. We are blinding our children to the dirt beneath their feet, to the air they breathe, to the sun and stars above. To the sensuous. To the world.

Digital divide?

The Pew Internet & American Life Project just released "Digital differences"--another look at who uses the internet, and who does not. While there remains a digital divide for economic reasons, a good number of folks could use it but do not "because they don’t think the internet is relevant to them."

This bothers some of the digiterati.

But I think the unconnected my be less disconnected than we think.

***

A few years ago, I spent a few Sunday (First Day) mornings at Quaker meetings. You sit, waiting in silence, to be moved by God, or if that makes you uncomfortable, call it wisdom.

 

Your brain fires too rapidly, too many thoughts and images of the week of the year blazing past.

After a time, you lose time, and, rarely, you lose self. (If you become aware you've lost self, you've lost your lost self and you're back in the walls of your ego. Those Quaker folk know what they're doing.)

The first few minutes, as I sunk away from my verbal universe,I'd stare through a large window at a large tree. A telephone line ran through it. I would try to guess how many bits of information could travel through that line in a second.

On a good day the question became nonsensical.

***

 

Everything you glean through a computer must be blown to bits first, then reconstructed. Everything is filtered by humans. Any sense of mystery, anything at all that cannot be reduced to bits, has been removed.

 

We're pretty good at it, this digitizing thing, because we've gone done fooled ourselves into what we think matters. Our visual cortex, our language centers, rule our world. We like to be stimulated.

Or so we think.

When we sense a threat, we need to do something.  It's this need, this desire, that kept your clan alive this far along in the game. (We're talking billions of years.) When we do something, we feel relief.

We spend much of our day seeking relief--buying tchotchkes, popping zits, taking that first sip of wine at the end of a "long day."

Very few things we seek on the internet add to our wisdom--someone has already done the thinking for us.

If you're on the internet for information, you've come to the right place. Just remember that every piece gleaned passed through a human filter.

The computer is the Eniac at U Penn, back in 1946. I think it's PD.