Teaching to the Touch Screens

I came into teaching at a pretty exciting time. The century had just turned, we were comfortably into a full

Who teaches who here?

assimilation of the Internet into daily life, and students were readily using Google and Yahoo to conduct research online. But early Internet nannies weren’t allowing them to view Mars Explorer because the domain name spelled “SEX” in the middle. Still some figuring.

Teachers were seeing that the kids already knew as much or more than they did, and many were resisting all of this “technology”—the term we still use for anything that, y’know, beeps and boops and crashes and freezes and we aren’t quite sure we fully understand and threatens EVERY ASPECT OF DECENT HUMAN EXISTENCE!

                At the time, us fresh-faced educators were being strongly encouraged to embrace these new tools, to learn them because they had awesome potential. The kids were adapting anyway, so may as well stay ahead of the curve. Most of us did. By the late 90s, being tech-savvy was a sure-fire way to get hired in everything from garbage collection to piano tuning.

                Flash forward a bit more than a decade and I’m an educator in the age of smartphones and tablets. High speed this, miniature that. Apps that unlock your car and set the seat warmer to “I just want to have a bottle of wine and cry.” The devices are small and powerful, they stun us with how quickly—daily it feels—the rules change, and there’s no longer a little paperclip to tell you how to do what it looks like you’re doing. Just a cold, greedy, soulless once-bitten apple, and a robot who looks scarily like a psychopathic extra from The Black Hole.

                We the teachers are still being encouraged to embrace, and we try. We are shown methods of bringing every form of device and application into the learning process. Much of this is wonderful and often useful rather than just trendy. Learning and its delivery are changing. I can text my students a reminder of their homework, I can create a website or blog of my lessons, I can chat in online rooms that are dedicated to me communicating with my kids and their parents all day and all night and all week and all year.

                We do it, we do it. We’re such great teachers because we’re teaching on the kids’ terms.

                BUT.

                There are cameras everywhere. In the locker-rooms, in the hallways. Kids are Snapchatting every time I turn my back to refresh my Activeboard. Altercations between staff and students are filmed and posted, out of context and out of control. Two kids can bait a teacher into losing her cool in class and a third can film, edit, and post the ensuing rant to the delight of millions. Zoiks! I didn’t sign up for this. How do we monitor every way we can be viewed and assessed and especially judged?

                Worse, the teachers who are the least savvy of social networks tend to suffer its backlash the most.

                I try to stay current. I Facebook, I Instagram, I blog. I’ve got like three clouds going, two sets of online documents, and a good half-dozen online personas. I don’t Snapchat, I don’t Vine, I don’t tweet. A student told me recently that she was tweeting about my classes—she sort of overblew how much it was all “trending”—and even though she meant it as a compliment to my teaching, I got a little uneasy. When you put it out there, it’s out there, and open to the world.  One of the biggest generational differences is how we view the Internet. I see it as the ocean: huge, sprawling, endlessly flowing. Awesome but potentially dangerous. The kids see it as a glass of water: sure there’s more out there, but I’m only worried about this little bit I have here.  

                We have entered an age where Millennials are now teachers. They are pretty darn good at keeping up with the kids, but they also appear to have the greatest issues with seeing the lines of the public and the personal. That’s the double-edged sword. The person who uses all these advancements in how we can interact with our learners appears to be the most susceptible to having issues removing the public from the private.

                Take Facebook. Let us just for a moment ignore the fact that this website has the most porous security system in the world, subject to retroactive and inane changes at the drop of a hat. Most teachers I know have a Facebook identity. Some of them are friends with students: former, current or both. Perhaps you can see the issues.

                -Make friends with a kid, you are communicating with a minor on a website where that kid will post and say anything, no matter how inappropriate. Even if you’re not being inappropriate, you’re still linked to that.

                -If you have a policy of only adding kids as friends once they’re adults, they are friends with minors still, and you’re connected to those minors via that newly-minted adult.

                -You don’t add any kids or their parents or their family dog as friends, but then a friend of yours takes a photo of you sucking the hose from a keg, tags you, and because you are—forgivably—unaware of the latest change of Facebook’s infamous opt-out security re-do (the one from five minutes ago), everyone with a pair of fingers and a search engine can see that friendship-ending Instagram share.

                Many teachers avoid Facebook, and then are told by tech-loving administration that it’s good to keep up with the kids. Others (guilty) create two Facebook profiles: public and private, but that doesn’t allow you to break the law, nor does it give you complete anonymity. Especially if you have the same friend on both.

                Point: we, your kids’ educators, are trying really hard to keep up with the world Steve Jobs put in fast forward. Our bosses and professional counsellors encourage us to learn about the newest website or networking site or whatever that sounds like it’s been named by a two year old. I’m really keen on it.

                BUT #2. A teacher has to be extremely careful about keeping private and public separate. This is difficult when you are “out there” in so many rapidly-changing ways. It’s worse when you’re being drawn, blinking and scared, from your deep, dark cave in which you have sworn you will remain forever oblivious, forever lost in a time when Christian Slater was a bankable actor.       

                Who we are and what we do are becoming one, and there are few professions where that may have as resounding an effect. 

I Guess I'm Old

This weekend, I spent a total of ten hours in my car with four people younger than me by at least seven years. It was illuminating. I have an eighteen-year-old sister-in-law whose text addiction borders on the pathetic. I say that with nothing but love. I have just been around her in the desperate wee hours of battery life when her world was pulling a true 2012.

Okay, the car ride. I spent the entirety of the last five hours listening--no matter how loud I turned my music--to the thappety thappety thappety of all four of these individuals texting. Constantly. Freely admitting that the conversations mostly involved "Haha" and LOL and "What are you . . ." Sad, sez he born in the 1970s.

One of them tried to defend it to me, to tell me it was cheaper than calling, and more convenient than calling, and easier when your friends live in different time zones. No sale. It was an alarming look at just how lame our communication has become.

But the most disturbed I was came when I hooked up my iPod and set it in the middle of the vehicle and said, "Have at 'er." When it was my turn, I put on an album. If we made it through eight songs, I was happy. When one of the kids took over, though, we'd hear a song or two by an artist, followed by another song or two by another. Not so bad. What drove me INSANE was the stopping of songs after less than two minutes for a new search.

That was my muffugging breaking point. Text away, lazy communicators. Facebook and Tweet to your heart's delight, you quintessential narcissists. Play only singles from the new Black Keys and I'm cool. But, DAMMIT, seriously. Let the whole song finish! It's a song, a lyrical rhythmic narrative. Am I such a dinosaur that getting on the other side of a guitar solo and bridge dates me? Chaysis!

TV Enters the Museum of Irrelevance.

The same week that the CRTC announces that TV providers should be able to gouge Canadians, I read a report that says your average adult is watching far less of the boob-tube than in decades past. Funny. We're not watching less because we've rediscovered the world outside our doors or because there's been a resurgence in burying ourselves in the wonders of bound text (I was at a very depressing department meeting recently where we were shown some numbers of declining reading-rates in young people, and the repercussions).

No, indeed, we're watching less TV--that is, less of the actual machine called a television--because we're doing so much more of what you're doing right now: surfing and interacting with the Internet. No surprise there, I'm sure. The second article--the one reporting the decline in TV viewership was dubious in tone (strange, as it was print media mourning the decline of television) for it made out as if this transition is regrettable, a decline--like the loss wasn't so much of ratings but of that valued family interaction time where everybody gathers around to watch he who loses the biggest.

Oh, relax, my soapbox will remain stowed.

When I was in my early twenties, my TV consumption involved The Simpsons (I am a child of the 90s), some sports--chiefly hockey, token doses of Muchmusic, the channels Discovery, History and National Geography, and then bits and pieces of "what's on." I was not above mindless remote-flicking.

Then I moved to Taiwan, and though I still had some access to English-language television, it was often dated, always American, and usually out of sync with my teaching schedule. I just lost touch. I didn't even bother following anything online, and after a decade and a half, even my diligent Sunday-night pursuits of the yellow-skinned animated tomfoolery fell by the wayside.

When I came back to the land of Rick Mercer, Hannah Gartner and Don Cherry, I wasn't interested anymore. See, I had discovered what could be done with that time that's wasted at the TV. Still no soapbox: my wife has her shows and she's welcome to them, I mean that I simply can't sit still for an hour-long CSI. I still love my hockey, but often I'm doing something else while it's on. 'Cause let's face it, even the best games have some serious amounts of lettuce on the bun. Fortunately, when I returned to Canada, reality TV had really taken off and stupid was the order of the day. For the first six months I didn't even own a TV, and for at least a year after that I only had rabbit ears. I probably would still have the same 19-inch box my parents bought me in university if I didn't like taking in the odd movie--why can I stand movies? Enclosed narrative, no commercials, nobody addresses the foibles of other characters to the camera on Day 12.

I like that we have to interact with everything we access online, rather than just receive it. Oh yes, you're saying, "How much interacting is there in watching a Youtube montage of Family Guy fart gags set to 'Never Gonna Give You Up'?" But, c'mon, I don't want to beat up too much on the ugly stepchildren that are reality TV and professional sports, instead consider the drivel spewed out by your average sitcom or E-talk tripe. Interacting nothing--are you remembering to blink?

Yes, endless hours of anything is bad for you. "My name is Paul and I have a Wikipedia problem." I'm one of those guys who ends up reading about the South-Saharan tiger lily's pollination evolution and wondering how I got there from reading about the Quebec Act. But, the CRTC has basically approved price-gouging as what I see as a bailout technique. Sounds to me like the soon-to-be obsolete scratching at the walls as they slide.

Welcome, Television, to the Museum of Irrelevance. This display is entitled Media Crushed by the Internet, you'll find your spot between the Music Industry and the Newspaper.

Books are So Dead

How many times has the death knell been rung for books? Well, this time it really sounds like it, but then it's sounded like it before.

I'm reading a book called The Case for Books: Past, Present, Future by Robert Darnton, a Harvard librarian. I like reading books like that, books that have a touch of irony when people see you reading them on the bus. I read Harold Bloom's How to Read and Why and I always delighted in what people must have been thinking when they saw that.

"How can you read a book about it if you don't know how to read?"

Danton's book is interesting because he's telling us why books are important now, when they may be done for good. There must be thousands of books written every year telling us that books are dead. Irony again.

In university, I attended a conference called The Future of the Page. Pretty self-explanatory. There was fear in some parties that books were being killed slowly by the Internet. That was almost ten years ago. I mean, they were worried that books were obsolete and we were still using Windows '98 for God's sake! Barbaric.

Darnton addresses these neat little devices, one made by those dastardly Sony folks--no, constant reader, I'm not banging that drum again--upon which you can read an entire book. Google is uploading books by the thousands now, though there are still some lawsuits pending.

They're getting close to the convenience of a book in device form.

Now, people can say these things will never take the place of real books. Bill Gates himself says he can't read more than three pages of text on a screen before he feels he's got to print it off.

Great, we're using more paper since digitization. My word, that's more irony, that is.

Darnton was recently interviewed on CBC Radio and besides Mr. Gates' inability to stare at computers too long, the professor described a study that had revealed that some French students found smell to be a really huge part of their reading experience. I knew a girl once who said the smell of the stacks in the library was an aphrodisiac. . . . Digression. Anyway, an enterprising company provided the French students with those handy dandy book-readin' gadgets, which had been affixed with a sticker that gave off the smell of books.

They're creating long-lasting batteries and water/weather-proof cases so you can read in the forest or by the seaside for almost the same duration you can with a regular book.

So much work being done to make something like a book, seems to me a book might still be the way to go.

But maybe Bill Gates has an issue because he's from an older generation, a generation raised on the printed word. Maybe kids who grow up reading books on hand-held doohickeys will be accustomed to the experience, especially as Gates' underlings continue to play with screen resolution and fonts and electronic ink (no idea, I heard about it somewhere) which'll make the whole thing much easier on our poor peepers.

So, yeah, I think this time, for real, just maybe, the end of the book might, eventually, probably be coming . . . soonish. SHOUT IT FROM THE MOUNTAIN-TOPS!

As a writer and a book-collector, I should be worried. As a writer who values ideas more than money, I'm not. Sure, I'll miss looking at my bookshelves and daydreaming about the joys of past summer reads, but this won't be the end of the book. It just might be the end of the paper book . . . in a while.

I like trees. S'okay.

If I write a book. If I have a good idea, I put it down, and you read it, and one of the purest forms of communication transpires, does it matter how? Not to me.

Oh, but what will writers sign? Publishers may find you less viable to promote without the pretty front cover. Blah, blah, blah. Has anyone considered that the publishing industry is long overdue for the same digital kick in the ass that Big Music suffered? Gets us back down to the basics of what it's about--the art, not the package.

Just as an aside, Google is doing some pretty ambitious work in digitizing books, but I'm not so sure I like where it's headed. See, you'd pay to access their database, and that isn't the noble goal a library has: enlightenment to the masses. No, Google wants to charge you an access fee, which they say'll be cheap for now. But it's being done for dollars, and anything that is done to make money first is soulless, and I despise it.

Print newspaper ain't dead, but it's waiting to be unplugged from life-support. But that isn't the end of journalism. Hell, it isn't even the end of newspapers.

Books are going, yeah, but it's hardly the end of books.

Consumable

Stuff. It’s built to break.

The world is full of used cell phones and mp3 players, iPods and electronic picture frames, televisions and laptops, vacuums, vehicles, freaking toasters and washing machines. There is no longer any quality.

Sony. Quality electronics. The Walkman. The more expensive VCRs and then DVD players. This quality was always derived from the fact that Sony was, well, Japanese. If you lived through the latter part of the twentieth century you understood that Sony meant Japan and Japan meant two things: fine electronics and rubber-suit monster movies.

A few years ago when my wife and I bought a Sony Cybershot digital camera, we thought we were laying our cash down on a sure thing. Then, after three years, the camera up and died for some reason. No beep, no crunch, no smoke even. It just wouldn’t turn on, even with the freshest of fresh batteries. Weird.

So we took it to our local big box electronics store and seeing that the warranty (a paltry year) had expired, the repairs to fix the camera—which no one guaranteed would work because no one knew any better than we did what the hell was actually wrong—would cost more than just buying a new camera. My “But what do we do with the old one?” was answered with a shrug and a mumbled something that may have been “You could find a place that recycles” or may have been “Throw it in the garbage like an old bicycle.”

Anyway, turned out that digital camera technology had shed water a dozen or so times in the three years since our last purchase and we bought a newer, smaller, vastly superior camera for a much cheaper price than our original. Swell. Once again the best model (price + quality) was a Sony Cybershot.

We loved this new camera. We documented our son’s first year of life with it. We were really pleased with some of its funky new options, including superior video.

Then the dang thing died too. In exactly the same freaking way as the first. It just stopped working. Change batteries, shake it, smash it against the wall—nothing would do the trick. Sucker was deader than teenage telephone etiquette.

Guess what? It died one day after the warranty expired. I found this so ludicrously coincidental that I suspected a plot of Dickensian proportions.

What could we do? Back to the same dang store to hear the same dang speeches.

“Sorry. I guess it could be the motherboard.”

I was suspicious. Had Sony doctored its motherboards? Perhaps a timing chip clipped onto the motherboard to kill it just after your warranty expires thus guaranteeing perpetual camera purchases? I mean, call me crazy, but as a consumer I think that things I consume should be food and beer and things I don’t intend to keep around long term. I buy cameras, preferably not in the plural—I don’t wanna consume them.

“We could try to fix it, but it’s cheaper to buy a new one.”

Seriously? That old chestnut? Not even any remorse? I became agitated. I near made a scene. I mean, two straight Sony cameras had died on us, the same stinking way! And Mr. New-and-Improved had lasted two fewer years than his predecessor. Didn’t anybody besides me see this as odd?

“It’s just a reality you’ll have to face, sir. These cameras only last a couple of years.”

There it was, the impossible truth. Stated with a complete calm that belied the madness of the statement.

Built to break.

And then—the gall!—he actually tried to show me the newest model of built-to-break cameras, recommending—with dull-eyed incomprehension of the vein popping on my forehead—the newest Sony bloody Cybershot.

Whatever happened to craftsmanship? Time was a person, a group of people, took pride in making something that lasted.

My whole young life, my mother had the same camera. The thing was sold to her in the early 1980s with one extra-feature: a built-in flash that popped up on demand. Zounds! No zoom, no red-eye reduction, no light filtering, no damn video. Every Christmas, graduation, birthday, wedding, new baby, twenty-nine point cribbage hand was documented with that old black piece of work.

That camera lasted her for twenty years. It never broke. It’s probably still usable though the decline of film showed its years more than wear and tear ever could. Mom just wanted some options. She wanted to play with images a bit more. So she retired the old thing and bought a shiny silver digital camera about four years ago. She’s already on her second of those palm-size hunks of feces.

The 21st century, defined by our ever-increasing need for gadgets with insect-like lifespans. Cameras, computers, listening devices—we’re so slow to follow technology that this is the best name we can give this stupid category! If you want to remain trendy, you need to get a new one of everything every year. The makers of these plastic junk-boxes know that, so they don’t worry for a second about building quality. They just make sure it’s flashier than the last one you bought and will keep your interest and the envy of your peers for the next couple of months.

Did we all wake up one morning and decide we were six?

If my mother wanted to buy another camera to last twenty years she’d have to fork out at least a grand, and she’d also have to spend hundreds of dollars on one of those stupid service plans, that’ll maybe get her two or three years of service. That’s where those big box stores really make their money.


Now, I’m not above buying gadgets myself. I have a cell phone, a laptop and an iPod. I only get a new cell phone when my old one breaks. I’m on my third in five years which some people say is an impressive run, but it disgust me. A laptop is a great tool. I’m working at my second in eight years, bought because my first one—though it had only crashed once—couldn’t support the ever-advancing demands of the Internet.

As for my iPod, it was a birthday present from my wife three years ago. It’s an eighty gigabyte version, which holds my entire music collection. It’s also an invaluable portable hard-drive. I love it. It’s an iPod Classic. Called “classic” because it’s of the style that’s existed—in who knows how many generations—since about 2002.

2002 is classic? Where the hell is this going?

“I just bought a vintage April Mustang Convertible. Original seats and everything.”

Or: “For Sale, Samsung Phone. Last Thursday Edition. Like new.”

People look at my iPod and ask me when I’m going to trade up. What for? This one still works fine. “Ah, but it’s not the latest.”

As of this writing, the iPod Touch is the lean, mean superior to my grand-dad Classic. The Touch’s largest version is sixty-four gigs. By the time I post this, touch technology will be passé and there’ll be some new thing where they beam the songs right into a plastic receiver surgically implanted into your noggin. A plastic receiver that you’ll need to replace every six months.

I like my Classic iPod just fine, thanks. I still think the clicker is pretty fast. I mean, in my life—which hasn’t been that long—I’ve placed needles on records, fast-forwarded through cassettes and skipped tracks on CDs to find a song. I still think the clicker is pretty wicked by comparison.

A friend of mine is editor of a great magazine. One of its constant features is articles on the theme of sustainability. It decries our horrifying consumption habits. There are more people alive in the twenty-first century than if you added up every century before up until the nineteenth. Earth can’t satisfy that kind of resource-rape.

Millions and millions of these billions are using laptops, cell phones and iPods. We are discarding mountains of plastic and only some can be reclaimed from the recycling process, a process that itself gobbles up resources, energy and money.

Here’s my little plea: be satisfied. Sustain. If you have something that works, keep it. Use it until it breaks. Force quality workmanship back on Sony and all the other corporations who are gagging us with the latest geegaws and doodads constructed under their built to break philosophy.

Your life is not going to magically get better if you get the next cell-phone on the market. I promise. Complete life satisfaction is not tied directly to touch technology. Instead, squeeze every last drop of happiness from the crap you’ve already got and realize it’s just crap and the happiness comes from not needing to live to collect crap anyways.

Then go outside and throw a ball.