Tech Troubles

Can we ever turn off technology?

This summer, I attended the Kenyon Review Summer Writers Workshop (https://www.kenyonreview.org/workshops-wwinfo.php) and told myself I would turn my cell phone off for the week I spent in Gambier, Ohio. I lasted one day.

I arrived in Gambier -- a town so small that the center of campus and the center of town are the same place -- on a Saturday afternoon and picked up my issued staples -- one KR t-shirt, one thin towel, one small pillow -- then headed to my dorm room. By the end of the night, I had gotten back in my car and driven to the nearest Wal-Mart to buy some full-size bath towels and a cell phone charger. I didn't talk to many people on the phone that week, but the feeling of not having a cell phone turned on and with me at all times was just too strange to get used to.

I see an even greater connectedness to technology among the college undergraduates I teach. Texting, for example, is such an omnipresent form of communication in college student life that it seems normal to people in the 18- to 24-year-old generation to be texting while doing other things -- while in class, for example. I've had to come to terms with this as a teacher, to realize that when a student is texting in class, she isn't disrespectful, she is just engaging in a practice that, to her, is just as normal as doodling in the corner of a notebook was for me when I was her age.

As a teacher, I think that educating tech-connected students means meeting them halfway: Bringing technologies that students are familiar with into the classroom can make class more user-friendly for students and can also encourage students to think critically about the technologies they use. What I haven't yet discovered is how to bring technologies into a class without overwhelming students with work. I've taught a class, for example, in which students wrote private blogs on Blackboard and also posted in online class discussion forums. Both of these activities were done in addition to -- rather than instead of -- other class work such as in-class conversation and traditional paper-writing. I don't want to overload students with tasks, but I want to bring multiple modes of learning (or, in the case of my classes, of writing) into a course.

This question of how to integrate multiple technologies into a class without overloading students with work could lead to an interesting line of inquiry for research. If I were going to conduct research in this area, I would certainly want to hear from students. In a former class of mine in which students wrote a reflective blog, for example, I found that students who most needed to reflect critically on their work in the course -- such as those students who were struggling -- were the least likely to be consistent in writing on their blog. There were other students in the group who had no problem fulfilling the requirement of writing on the blog regularly, but their reflection often seemed to be more "what the teacher wants to hear" than indicative of any substantial reflective thought. Only a third or so of the class seemed to benefit from this added technology in the way I hoped they would, which I found discouraging (although a similar rate of success could happen with any new technology or assignment introduced into a class). These students' voices would be important to include in a study of reflective blogging, because only by asking them about their experience could I truly understand what such an added technology offered to the students.

But back to the Summer Writers Workshop... Although I didn't manage to turn off my cell phone, I certainly did talk on it less than I would have in a comparable week at home. I also lived for that week in a dorm room with no television, and the silence -- and the thought it bred -- was wonderful. When I returned home to Pittsburgh, I gave my t.v. away, and I've managed to not t purchase a new one in the three months since. I've discovered more time in my days that I used to waste in front of the television, but I've also filled some of that time with YouTube videos and e-mail. If I ever did decide to try to turn technology off in the way that Eric Brende did (http://www.stlouisrickshaw.com/about.html), I would need to make a considerably greater effort. I'm thinking a small cottage off Walden Pond, and lots of notebooks...