What Has Changed?

We all struggle with mobile technology and what it means to teachers and students. Is the ability to be connected at all times a good or bad thing? Personally, I don’t want to be connected 24/7. I don’t want to be able to talk to my microwave with my phone.  I don’t want everyone (particularly the NSA) to geo-locate me. But that’s me. You, on the other hand, might want that.

As a teacher I get depressed when, right from the start, students fire up and monitor their smart phones all through class. But I’ve come to realize, thanks to a recent book by Dana Boyd titled It’s Complicated: the social lives of networked teens, that the parenting skills of my generation – the boomers – have caused the tech-reliance I’ve come to dislike.

Way back when – here comes the old fogey bit – our parents would kick us outside to play with just one rule; be back before the streetlights come on. We had plenty of opportunities to interact with friends. Today’s kids have less and less of the wild abandon that I enjoyed because parents are scheduling their kids’ time too much; school, sports practice, clubs, music lessons, homework, bed. Part of it is the real fear that danger sometimes lurks around every corner. Part of it, also, is parents’ misguided view that unstructured time is wasteful time. Whatever the reasons, kids still crave time with a peer group. And the connectedness of social media allows them to grab time with friends whenever they can, wherever they are.

I still don’t like it…but I get it.