I attended an interesting event yesterday, which I’ll write about shortly, but I thought I’d share this video with you. It was shown at the event, and is a nice, humorous illustration of how technology has influenced our language.
I think that cartoonists often are among the most perspicacious of us when it comes to reflecting on the (side) effects of technology. I particularly liked today’s Alex cartoon in the Daily Telegraph about the effects of the iPad on people’s expectations whilst travelling on trains. Take a look, and bring a smile to your face.
How might you use this as a starting point for discussion with students about how technology changes our expectations in a whole variety of contexts?
The original link in the above post was changed by the Daily Telegraph -- good job I spotted it! All corrected now!
Julia Skinner gives her opinion on the importance of having -- and expressing -- an opinion.
Teachers looking for material with which to furnish their lessons on how technology affects society need look no further than email. This form of communication has affected in at least three ways what might be called “disposable time” – the time one has left after the essentials like eating and sleeping have been taken care of.
I love the Livescribe Pulse Pen, which allows me to take notes in the traditional way but still have them digitized, and therefore easily searchable. However, it has two “features” which really do need to be addressed...
We do take things too seriously sometimes. Occasionally it can be good to relax a bit, especially in these austere times.
There's a rule for everything in life, and technology has spawned quite a few "laws" in its own right. Here are some to start reflecting on, in 21 rules for computer users.
Enjoy!
Monthly data allowance 100 mb, demand for apps 95mb; result: happiness.
Monthly data allowance 100mb, demand for apps 105 mb; result: misery.
Adapted from The Micawber Principle.
I’d just like to wish readers of this blog and the Computers in Classrooms newsletter a happy and peaceful break over the next couple of weeks.
This is not (hopefully) the last post this side of the new year, but I wanted to make sure I caught people before they all disappeared! I still intend to write for this blog, as well as Writers’ Know-how and Technology & Learning. In fact, the weather is such (worst winter since 1962 apparently) that I may have no other choice: it’s hard to get out and do shopping and stuff in this weather. (I’m heartbroken).
But my most pressing piece of writing right now is my e-Christmas cards!
Why does everything have to be so interesting all the time? Here is my attempt to balance the scales by producing something incredibly boring.
The technology I crave has yet to be invented. A fairly frequent conversation in our household runs thus:
Me: I wrote an article on the way home today.
Mrs F: Ooh. Let’s read it.
Me: It’s all in my head at the moment.
Mrs F. It’s a pity we can’t print your head.
The BT Tower in London is being opened again for the first time in thirty years.
I spent the day clearing out paper related to educational technology. Erm, exactly. So how many black sacks do you think I managed to fill?It is almost a truism that we have become too reliant on technology. You only have to step into a place where the computer system has 'gone down' to see that. Like the restaurant I wandered into a few days ago in which there was, to quote one of the staff, 'anarchy' because the computerised booking set-up had, as it were, downed tools.
But in a funny kind of way that sort of situation is copable with if you're reasonably intelligent, have a contingency plan and possess a spark of creativity. The thing is, a system which is off is, by definition, not on. Like the binary system on which it's based, the computer system's state leaves no room for doubt, no room for ambiguity. at the risk of sounding a little Monty Pythonish, it's off, not working, finished, kaput – at least for the time being.
What is far worse, in my opinion, is when something goes wrong but in such a quiet sort of way that you don't even notice at first. Thus it was that when my spell-checker stopped checking my spelling, it did so without warning, without fanfare and, crucially, without any wavy red lines. Unfortunately, the first glimmer I had of something being amiss was when I read an article I'd just posted that mentioned my being resposible.
Now there are a couple of things that come to mind about this. Firstly, it's very apparent what a shoddy job of proofreading I did. That was partly because I had implicitly assumed that the spell checker would pick up any neologism I'd 'penned'. But it was also partly because, like most people, I subconsciously substituted the correct word for the incorrect one when I was reading through my article.
That is why anyone writing for an audience on a professional basis has their work proofread by someone else. Is that done as a matter of course in schools? We harp on about writing or presenting for different audiences (in England and Wales it is stipulated in the National Curriculum). But the logical corollary of that position is having students proofread each other's work and, in special projects, splitting the task between writers and editors and proofreaders.
The second thing that strikes me, somewhat more whimsically, is that not having a spell checker is a good way of coining new words. For example, as far as I am aware the word 'resposible' does not exist (I've even looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary), yet it sounds like it ought to. Could it be, perhaps, the property of being eligible to be taken back having been disposed of?
Inventing words accidentally, and then creating meanings for them, is quite entertaining. It goes to show that life without a spell checker, whilst not ideal, is not an entirely desperate state of affairs.
This is a slightly modified version of an article first published on 20th May 2009.
In Why I Write, George Orwell suggests the following reasons that someone may wish to write:
I’d also add another two:
Educational, ie the desire to give others the benefit of the knowledge you’ve acquired – which I suppose could also come under the heading of egoism, or even political.
Record-keeping, be that as a diary, a research record, or another kind of journal.
So I am wondering if these categories might be applied to blogging? Why do people blog? I’ve set up a very simple, and no doubt simplistic, poll to find out. I know the categories are subtle and overlap and interface with each other. Nevertheless, my poll comprises just one question:
What is your number one reason for blogging?
Do take part, and feel free to add reasons of your own on the ‘Other’ category. Let’s see what transpires.
Here’s something your students may find mildly amusing. This music video from 1992 features several examples of technological changes; can you spot them?
Here’s what you might have noticed:
Procrastination, n. The action or habit of postponing or putting something off; delay, dilatoriness. Often with the sense of deferring though indecision, when early action would have been preferable. Oxford English Dictionary.
My intention was to arise from the settee and take the tea things into the kitchen. I’d managed to reach Stage two of the three stage procedure (Stage one is thinking about it, Stage two is announcing it, Stage three is doing it). Having discovered that thinking about it had no effect, I made a dynamic and bold statement that I was going to do the deed. (I think what I actually said was something along the lines of, “I suppose I ought to drag my carcass into an upright position so I can take all this detritus away”, but let’s not split hairs.)
In response, my father-in-law, whose name is Frank, came out with a statement that really ought to be immortalised as “Frank’s Law of Procrastination”. He said:
If you're slow enough, someone else will do it.
Sound advice, and so true, generally speaking. But after laughing, I started to think that there are times when procrastination is, actually, the most sensible course of action. Or inaction. And although procrastination usually has negative and unflattering connotations, if you look at the OED’s definition (above), you’ll notice that it says “Often with the sense of indecision…”. Often, not always. There is, it seems, nothing oxymoronic about the phrase “planned procrastination”.
So when would procrastination be a good strategy to adopt? I can think of a number of situations.
If you wait long enough, someone else will beta test it.
There are those of us who, whilst liking the sense of exhilaration one gets from trying out something completely new, have become rather fed up with having trashed computer systems, security holes, and other unforeseen consequences. These days, I never buy anything until it’s on at least version 3.
We all know this one, and I’m surprised that as far as I can find out, nobody else has so egotistically given their name to it (my excuse is that I needed a snappy heading to this bit). When you hammer out an email reply telling your correspondent to do something to themselves which is anatomically impossible, that’s when you hit the Send key when you meant to hit the Delete key. Having done something like that myself once, I now draft a response in my word processor, or as an email reply but with the name(s) of the recipient(s) removed, so that even if I do accidentally hit the Send key nothing will happen.
(You can tell that I’m on a roll here, can’t you?). I’m very good at taking decisions, but I’d not be the right person to have commanding you on a battlefield. I like to look at the situation from different angles, seek other people’s opinions and then sleep on it. Obviously there are exceptions to every rule (I wonder if that rule has an exception?), but I usually find that if I resist my urge to respond straight away I end up thinking of nuances and issues which had previously escaped me.
A good example of how planned procrastination is a useful device is when a client says they would like the bid, or case study, or vision document or whatever I’m writing for them to include X. It seems a good idea at first, until I think about it and realise that including X will mean also including Y and Z in order to explain and contextualise X, and doing all that would put us way over the word limit. But after sitting on it for a day, I realise that if I said W (do keep up at the back), it would get across the whole idea of X but without going into so much detail.
We live in an age when instantaneous responses are possible, expected and, furthermore, highly valued. But I think we need to ensure that youngsters are taught the value of waiting and thinking, in spite of all the pressures to do otherwise.
If you enjoyed reading this article, you’ll probably also like 21 rules for computer users.
It’s five a.m., and the world around my house is only just beginning to emerge from the shortest night of the year. What will, in a few hours’ time, be the distant din of traffic is presently a mere hum. Even the birds are too tired to sing. There’s no sound, no email, no phone call and no text messages. This is the time of day to be a writer, in England, in summer.
So what has prompted these mental meanderings? Although I am not one to suffer from a lack of anything to say when I metaphorically put pen to paper (some, like the one who unsubscribed from my Feedblitz notification service yesterday because of “Too many updates”, would say the reverse is true), I couldn’t resist buying “The Writer’s Block” when I saw it on offer for just a few pounds. Packed with photos, short articles and suggestions, this book is meant to kick-start your imagination in order to help you get past -- you’re ahead of me, I can tell – writer’s block.
Well, one of the entries is “Describe one of your bad habits.” After struggling for a while to think of any bad habits (only recently I had my halo polished by a team of professionals), I came up with my worst one (in my opinion at least): staying up too late. At the time I should be going to bed, I make myself a cup of tea and start reading blogs, or writing. And I read. And write. And watch videos. And quickly check my email. And read. And check my email again. And so on, until I realise with horror that it’s 1:30 am. Thus it is that the technology, which makes it easy to do all these things, and my lack of willpower, which makes it hard for me not to do them, conspire to give me late nights, when what I really ought to be doing is what I did this time: get up early, which is my best time for doing stuff anyway.
The basic law of life with technology is that there’s always one more thing, which is my generalised version of Lubarsky’s Law of Cybernetic Entomology: There’s always one more bug (see 21 Rules for Computer Users for 20 further digital insights). There’s always one more website to check, always one more blog to read, always one more email to respond to. Always one more reference to check. This is why Computers in Classrooms can sometimes be weeks overdue. I’m almost ready to publish it when I see an article and think “Perhaps I should bookmark that, as it may be relevant to this issue.” When I embarked on my seminal work, the magnum opus entitled “Managing ICT”, I polished it off in a couple of months with almost no revisions. That’s because it was back in 1998, when research was still partially done in a library (Google had just started as a beta service), and blogs hadn’t even been conceived yet. I’ve been working on another few books and they are taking forever because I keep coming across relevant articles, and people make relevant comments on my own articles and in Twitter.
Like I said, there’s always one more thing.
There’s a wider, deeper, and more important issue here, I think. I was brought up under the tyranny of the maxim “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing properly”, which is actually logically untrue (if it were true you’d be spending the maximum amount of time and effort on everything you do in order to perfect it; you’d never get any sleep.) But really the only way to deal sensibly with the world of today is to cultivate an understanding of, and putting into practice of, the “good enough” approach. There comes a time when one just has to say, “This may not be perfect, but it is good enough, and spending another hour, or day, or week, on it may improve it, but any benefits of doing so will be outweighed by the cost in terms of the other things I could be doing instead.”
In my opinion, that’s my real bad habit: not having the wisdom, the willpower and, yes, the self-confidence to know when what I’ve done is “good enough”.
See also "Efficiency? Don't Make Me Laugh!"
In these soon-to-be-even-more-straightened times, we all need a bit of light relief. Here's a nice fun thing to have a go at, if you have a Twitter account: the Twitter Parade.
The only thing wrong with it is that after a few minutes the 'music' drives you insane.
Thanks to Shelly Terrell for writing about this.
(c) Terry Freedman All Rights Reserved