One of my students is an aspiring hip hop producer. He can SoundCloud with the best of them and loves the mumble rap. When we discuss the hip hop he listens to well ... the artists he mentions, I have to look up. He played me some ‘lit’ tracks but I didn’t get it. The staccato lyrics hit me like a snare drum to the face. I didn’t get it. Where was the message, or the rhythm and flow? Give me P.E., Gang Starr, Blue Scholars, some Beasties, J5, or Tribe any day. So like many aging music lovers I had to ask myself the painful question, “Can I still kick it?”
Now I could go full, grumpy old white man (and maybe I did at first), but that doesn’t really help us bridge our two worlds. The thing is, I do get it. He occupies one musical space within the hip hop realm and I operate in another space. If we can bridge our two realms perhaps we can build a new understanding. So I try to find the flow and message in the music he shares with me. Although my understanding has evolved, the struggle is real. I bring this up not to demonstrate my hip hop bonafides, but to discuss a similar situation with technology and learning that perplexes me.
How do we teach a generation of students who rely on technology to store the majority of the knowledge they construct? I used a computer to type a paper for the first time in the Spring of 1988. Some years later a student told me that if I don’t with technology I’ll stay lost in the technological boondocks. I’m old and migrated into the technological universe largely against my will, but I did commute to computers. My students have all grown up with technology as an appendage. Again, maybe I could get grouchy about their addiction or over-reliance on technology. That wouldn’t help. So really I have to adapt to the shifting landscape of technology.
How many phone numbers do you know off the top of your head? No, 911 doesn’t count. I think I can recite three or four from memory. What happened, where did the knowledge go? I used to be able to dial with the best on the rotor or various iterations of glorious touch tone technology. Once we no longer needed to hold on to that knowledge, it vanished from our brain over time. These days our phone takes care of remembering our contact information. Our brain is off the hook. What happens now when you don’t know something or don’t remember something… get out your phone and google it. After you look it up, that information generally slips back into the shadows of your brain. Most of us don’t bother remembering it or knowing it for the future.
My point is that we have entered an age in which our phones, tablets, and laptops have begun to replace our brains as the primary storage facility for knowledge. This has significant implications for teaching and learning (and is kind of freaking me out). Let me present this idea from the perspective that your brain is an internal hard drive and that your phone, etc. represents an external hard drive. Forgive my rudimentary descriptions, but to me an external hard drive eases storage concerns for my laptop. This frees up space on my computer for other things. Doing this is super helpful. Unfortunately, my brain and laptop are not interchangeable. Outsourcing knowledge to a device may not be helpful to me in the long run. And of course, these changes impact teaching and learning.
When your phone becomes the primary storage facility, your brain suffers some. If you don’t actively engage and use info or if it isn’t committed to ‘muscle memory’ your brain discards that information. More accurately, the brain prunes or shuts down the chemical/electrical circuits that store unused knowledge. Thus once the layers of dust settles on those pathways it becomes much harder, if possible at all, to access that knowledge.
NOTE: First, technology is not a silver bullet for education. Second, I fully recognize that this focus on technology does not address the have/have not issues (and ever widening gap) involved. Last, I will not be jumping into a discussion of what knowledge is important for students.
Where do I begin… do we abandon the brain altogether and teach to the technology… do we ignore the technology and focus only on internalizing knowledge…? While the rise of technology does remind me of a chapter from The Illustrated Man, it may be possible to link technology with students’ brains and use technology to filter out the clutter or unnecessary knowledge so that students can prioritize what is most meaningful.
If the external HD acts as a filter that allows the internal HD to strengthen its grasp on pertinent knowledge, then teachers (and teaching) would have to serve as a bridge between the two domains. Maybe that’s what teaching and learning has to become. This is where I have become stuck in my unpacking of this issue. This iteration of technological development presents teachers with new questions about how to teach, what to teach, and how to infuse this technology into education. It dawned on me, and this may get me unstuck some, that this development is not unique to me or those currently teaching. As the world of students develops and changes in leaps and bounds the various developments have a big impact on education. Yet, this isn’t new, just a new change. Perhaps the problem isn’t the technology but how we change or adapt with that technology.
Teaching students to declutter their focus will enable them to comprehend, organize, and store knowledge for later use is the name of the new game. I realize that the words declutter and focus are not often associated with middle or high schoolers but that’s the rock I push up the hill each day. Technology can’t replace teachers. The role of teachers and teaching just has to adapt and shift as we move into a new future.
I guess the real answer to my soul searching is...Can I kick it?