Tag Archives: technology

Around the global campfire

When I think about sitting around a campfire, I think of camping in the summer with family and friends. No matter the plans for the day, the evening brings everyone together, adults and kids, sitting around a crackling fire, with marshmallows, s’mores, and poking sticks stirring the flames. The fire is a communal event, with laughter and storytelling weaved into light conversations, in a common shared experience.

I came across this quote recently:

Technology is the campfire around which we tell our stories. –Laurie Anderson

Think about how technology has changed our storytelling! Books and movies have captivated our imaginations, and the internet allows us all to share our ideas around a global campfire. We have this amazing ability to communicate with each other now, and how is it being used?

Since we are truly at a stage where we can sit around a global campfire, what stories are we choosing to tell?

How long until we are all cyborgs?

We already have cyborgs living among us. Glasses and contact lenses are not built into us, but they allow those with poor sight to do more than if they didn’t have them. My uncle had a mechanical heart. My friend’s dad has had a pacemaker for decades now. Some diabetics have sensors embedded in them, either fixed or temporarily. These are not enhancements as much as accommodations to aid a deficiency, but how long will it be until we are all cyborgs in some way?

Imagine sensors in your eyes identifying someone from 150 feet away and letting you know their name before they come into focus. Imagine hearing a phone message from within your ear. Imagine a sensor telling you that you are having a mild heart attack before your body gives you any sensory indication of the oncoming issue.

There are apps that exist that can already tell you when people you know are nearby. Bluetooth let’s you have voices go privately to your ears without your phone being close to your head. Fitbits and Apple watches monitor your health regularly and more closely than we’ve ever been able to be monitored before. Apple watches are already saving lives.

How long until these external tools are embedded in us? Part of us? Enhancing us? We will be cyborgs in the future, because to choose not to be will be to choose to have a deficiency compared to those around us.

Tool agnostic

One of the most influential posts I’ve written on my educational blog was Transformative or just flashy educational tools (written 9 years ago). It led to multiple presentations, including this one: Transforming Our Classrooms – Ignite

In the original post I said,

A tool is just a tool! I can use a hammer to build a house and I can use the same hammer on a human skull. It’s not the tool, but how you use it that matters.

The tools we use and what we use them for matter. But more than ever we should be agnostic about the tools being used… as long as they are being used well! For example: We are a Microsoft school district and so we use Teams, OneNote, Word, PowerPoint, and MS Forms among other tools in the suite. This is an excellent set of tools that allow us to know that if a student wants to collaborate on a document or create a presentation, then they have what they need to do the job well, with a great tool intended for that purpose. That said, we are also a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) district and students come with other tools, or like to use other tools that they prefer.

Should we make a group of student collaborate on OneNote or Teams, if they all want to use Google Docs?

Should we make a student present in a PowerPoint if they want to use Apple Keynote?

Should we tell students Microsoft Forms are the only forms they can use?

No.

We should ensure every student has a good tool available to them, and we should ensure we use these tools when it benefits to have the whole class on the same tool. However we should also give students choice when we can, and be tool agnostic… as long as the tool they use does not hinder their ability to accomplish the tasks they want or need to do.

 It’s not the tool, but how you use it that matters.

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* Related to this, at Inquiry Hub we’ve had a couple students at the school create their own presentation software, which has been used at school functions like our Open House presentations!

Luxuries Become Essential

What starts out as a luxury often becomes essential… something we struggle to live without. Think of indoor plumbing. Water when you want it, for drinking, cleaning, and flushing waste. At one point these were things you couldn’t do, later they were luxuries reserved for the rich. Now in a ‘developed’ country indoor plumbing is essential.

Phones used to be a luxury item. Then, like running water, they became essential. Our (personal) phones used to be tied to a single location, our homes. At first the chord was 3 feet long, and we were tied to the room it was in. Then the chords got longer and/or the line to the phone was extended, and suddenly my sisters could make private calls from their bedroom or the bathroom. Then came cordless phones and we could even make calls from the back yard or the garage. Then came the cellphone.

The first mobile phone call happened in 1973. The first commercial mobile phone arrived in 1983 and cost close to $4,000. IBM came out with the first smart phone in 1993. In 2005 the first Blackberry came out. In 2007 there were about 295 million people using 3G around the world. And in 2008 the first iPhone came out.

Now, carrying a phone with you is no longer a luxury, it is almost as essential as indoor plumbing. But is it truly a luxury?

I love having Google at my fingertips. I don’t love the access to work email when I’m home with my family. I love being connected to family on a group Snapchat we share. I don’t love telemarketing phone calls interrupting me. I love having an audio book with me at all times. I don’t love talking to people who interrupt our conversation for a phone call, or an alert. I especially don’t love when it’s my phone doing the interrupting… because I can be just as guilty at times.

In the move from a luxury item to an essential item, our phones have changed our behaviour, our communication, and our relationships to one another in significant ways. We are always connected, always available, and always reactive to a device we take everywhere we go. A cellphone is no longer a luxury. It is convenient but can be inconvenient too. It is definitely a distraction.

Here is a parting question: If cellphones were a species, would this be a symbiotic relationship or would we would be the hosts in a parasitic relationship where the phones benefited more from us than we benefit from them?

Pocket Watches

My wife owns an Apple Watch. She loves it. I won’t get one because I already feel too tied to my phone, and I don’t want the added distraction. Before getting one, my wife would carry her phone and wear a watch, now they are one and the same.

I have reverted back to the era of pocket watches. No, I don’t own an old-style pocket watch, I just have my phone. But, I haven’t worn a watch in years, and I tell the time by my phone… which I keep in my pocket. I store my ‘timekeeper’ in my pocket.

I’m sure there is still a market for wrist (and even pocket) watches, but excluding phones and phone accessories, that has to be a dying market compared to sales in the last century.

What about in the next century? Surely we won’t be keeping our phones in our pockets, and we won’t be using these phones to tell time. There won’t be any pocket watches of any kind but for novelty. So what will we have in place of these tools?

Will the technology be embedded into us? Will we be wearing contacts that display the time with a simple motion of our eyes, or even by a thought? Will we look at our bare wrist or open palm and ‘see’ data there? And if we achieve this, what other things will become trivially redundant like the pocket watch?

I don’t feel nostalgia when I think of these things. I’m excited about the possibilities, but I do wonder how these tools will adjust our behaviour? After all, I’m not one of those people that just jumped at the idea of putting my phone on my wrist. As we adopt and accept technology into our lives, we do need to think about the unintended consequences. A person only took their pocket watch out of their pocket to tell the time. People looked at their wrists only to tell time. That’s no longer the case. People look at their phones far more than to make phone calls And tell time.

I’m writing this on my phone now. I’m blogging from my phone. I’ve also got headphones on, listening to music from the same phone. Will this glorified phone and pocket watch be something people use 20, 40 or 100 years from now? I don’t think so. It will likely not be a tool we put in our pocket. How will this change our behaviour? I’m sure it will be more convenient, but what unintended consequences will come with these new tools?

Campfire time

Think of the changes in our world over the past 150 years. Compare that to the changes that would have happened over 150 years, if we were thinking about 1,500 years ago. In other words, think of how insignificant the changes would be then, compared to recent history, if we compared 1500 to 1650AD. Although Galileo’s Science expanded the universe beyond an earth-centric view, his views were hardly ‘universal’, and technological advancements in all the 1500’s would be shadowed in comparison to any decade of the 1900’s.

But when I look at a campfire, time and technology fade away. The flames dance around the wood exactly as it would have danced 1,500, 15,000, and even 150,000 years ago. Ancient man was as mesmerized by the flames as I am today. The desire to stare, to feed the flames, and to stand close enough to feel the heat are likely similar for millions of humans that came before me.

Campfire time is timeless; a bond of humankind through the ages… a chance to connect with our primitive ancestors and see a world that they shared with us.

‘Watching’ you

Here is an interesting article I read a few months ago:

Apple CEO: Watch is saving lives – Business Insider

Apple COO Jeff Williams:

Apple has gotten “a ton of emails where people say the Watch actually saved their life,” he says.

“The only thing on the Apple Watch from a medical standpoint is the heart rate sensor,” he says.

And while anyone can talk their own wrist pulse anytime, “having the information readily available and passively tracked in the background has proved to be profound, in a way we didn’t anticipate,” he adds.

“We’ve gotten so many emails where people or their cardiologist have written us and said, ‘This person detected something on their Watch and came in and they had a life threatening situation. If we had not intervened, they probably would have died.”

So, continuous heart rate monitoring can be very valuable, and the article also mentions a Fitbit detecting a woman’s sleep apnea… What’s next?

I can remember my mom having a health issue and she had to carry around a heart monitor for several days. It was bulky, strapped on to her, and needed to be unplugged from her when she showered. It was an inconvenient interruption to her life, but it provided important information for her doctor.

Imagine a few years from now when you go to your doctor and say, I’ve noticed an issue where my heart starts racing even though I’m not exercising… and your doctor says, that’s interesting, will you please download your last month’s data onto my tablet? A couple clicks later your doctor knows when this happened, your step count for the day, the last time you exercised, your blood pressure, your heart rate, your sugar levels, the oxygen levels of your blood, and a whole host of other data that she has at her finger tips.

She won’t have to say, I think I need to run some tests, but rather she will have a plethora of historical data that actually extends beyond what she might have tested for. She might have advice to share that she would not have known to share if you hadn’t provided her with this data. Maybe she injects a small sensor under your skin so that your watch can provide her with more information. And then you can set your watch to ping your doctor the next time you have an issue.

And then the next time the health issue does happen, your phone actually warns you before you feel your heart racing. As the sensation hits you, you get a text message from your doctor saying, “Don’t worry, it will pass, set an appointment with me next week, we will work to settle this down”… or, “Are you with someone that can drive you to the hospital? I’ll meet you there.” This might be a bit scary, but not as scary as the text message not happening and you having a medical issue that is much better or far worse than you think.

Yes, there are some worrisome questions like ‘who owns this data’, and privacy is a concern, but this is really exciting and can become something that saves your life more than once. The issue of private data being shared is something we will all have to figure out. People are already working on this, listen to CBC Spark with Nora Young to learn more: How to empower patients with medical data.

On a lighter side, maybe this watch that you wear (or maybe it’s a cyborg-like addition to your body rather than something you wear) can actually help you maintain a better lifestyle. Maybe it knows you are on a diet and locks the fridge when you try to get into it after 8pm, or it beeps incessantly and annoyingly when you are eating something unhealthy. Or it reminds you that you have missed your scheduled workout and prompts you to set up a ‘make-up’ time.

We are entering an interesting time of wearable technology and some time soon, accessories like watches might be watching us far more than we are watching them!

Luke Skywalker's Hand - May The 4th Be With You! :)

Luke Skywalker’s Hand – May The 4th Be With You! 🙂

Luddite Doctors? Luddite Teachers?

Imagine if a doctor’s first instinct was to ban new technology from hospitals…

Imagine if a educator’s first instinct was to ban new technology from schools…

Miss_management
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See the full gallery on Posterous

Ellyn Schaffner said, on twitter, about this Warning poster: 
“http://flic.kr/p/7HxNsv @datruss Read your poster again this morn and thought about how it needs revamping to include handheld web devices”

I think filtering and a ban on handheld devices are two separate ideas, but the cartoon above shows my thoughts on banning technology. I would love to see someone put both ideas together into one cohesive poster or cartoon, but my creative juices just aren’t flowing at 4:30am this morning. 🙂

This cartoon by RRMurry on bitstrips makes an insightful comment related to both ideas:

Related posts: 
• Is the tool an obstacle or an opportunity? (older version of the Miss Management cartoon)
• The POD’s are Coming! BLC09 (POD’s – Personally Owned Devices)

 

Alan November: “Do learning”

Alan-november-tweet

Forgot that I had made a screen shot of this until I decided to clean up my desktop, (which at the time looked very much like Alan’s when he presents:-)

This goes well with my recent pairadimes post: 

We aren’t in the ‘teaching business’, rather we are in the ‘learning business’.

…and yes, Alan, we aren’t in the technology business either! 

Subject-Verb Agreement

2010-12-02_09

I think posters like this… student generated, are great!

There is something to be said about it being a hand-crafted project as well… It is easy enough to share it digitally after-the-fact, as I have.

I shared this: http://pairadimes.davidtruss.com/great-things-in-the-classroom/ which has all kinds of student work posted. I think much of it can be then shared with each other and with the world after-the-fact… after putting ‘pencil to paper’.

We need to stop seeing technology as an either/or thing and start seeing it as useful tools on a spectrum of tools that includes pencil & paper, Skype, blogs and wikis, and everything in between!