Technology - For Us or To Us?

At the recent Campus Tech conference in Boston, keynote speaker Sherry Turkle from MIT discussed not only what technology does for us, but what it has done to us. As a proponent of moving quickly in adding available technology to teachers' toolboxes, her thoughts gave me pause to consider some of the unintended negative consequences of our ever increasing reliance on technologies to teach and communicate.

A few years ago, our district provided administrators with Blackberry phones. I have often viewed this as both a blessing and a curse. During the school year, I average almost 100 received emails a day, and now all of those emails come directly to me via my Blackberry. While not compulsive about a "clean desk", I don't like clutter either, and I definitely do not like hundreds of emails cluttering my inbox. As a result, I frequently clear emails from remote locations via my Blackberry, as do my colleagues. The end result is that in addition to some increased efficiency, I have inadvertently trained those who email me to expect a rapid response. That is, after all, today's digital age. If it takes me more than a couple of hours to respond to certain emails I will get "what's wrong" emails, or even worse, re-sent emails as senders assume the original was lost somewhere in cyber space. As one of my colleagues says, we teach people how to treat us, and I've taught people to expect rapid response to most emails.

As Dr. Turkle pointed out, one of the negative consequences of our increasingly quick communication is the sacrifice of thoughtful responses and exchanges. I can think of numerous instances where I have responded in haste to an email, only to later regret some or all of the response. Without immediate access to email, and means to respond, I would likely have given more thoughtful and measured responses. Another byproduct of rapid communication is that questions that cannot be answered quickly are ignored. I am sometimes guilty of this, and have been frustrated by being on both sides of this issue. I have sent complex email questions only to hear the proverbial crickets in response.

Dr. Turkle's point was that while we make our technologies, they often shape us. She pointed to research that concluded that while teens (and adults) who multi-task often view themselves as more efficient for having done so, studies demonstrate an exponential loss of productivity during multi-tasking. Teens are more and more often eschewing face to face communication for digital communication. In fact, emailing is already too tedious for most teens. Our students communicate most often via social media such as Facebook and Twitter, or via text messages. These communications are faster and even more brief than email, and have the added benefit of the capacity to reach multitudes in an instant.

As we rush to explore new technologies, and implement the use of social media and other communication platforms in the classroom, Dr. Turkle's address was a good reminder that we need to also examine what those advents do to the personal relationships that are critical to education. Further, student writing is certainly impacted by reliance on communication that requires short-hand and "blurb" style structure. It is now incumbent upon educators to fight to teach and retain some formal, thoughtful forms of expression.

While the exciting world of technology brings to us many wonders, it's a good reminder that with each adoption of new hardware, software or web application we need to think carefully about not only what that technology will do for us, but what it could potentially do to us, and plan accordingly.