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Manifest
By audhill | July 6, 2008
People who spend most of their non-working hours online surfing and chatting to no really useful end forego exercise, activity, time in nature, time with friends and family. Studies show that kids who spend all their time playing video games (on and offline) tend to do more poorly in school and, at the extreme ends, erode their offline relationships and become increasingly more reclusive.
I love to use technology to educate children. However, in context of this conversation… is there a limit I should be looking to? A fairly well known edublogger once told me that technology should accompany a child everywhere… even on a walk in the wilderness, they should have their handhelds or their cell phones to document what they observe.
My thought at the time was that this view was in contradiction to my sense that there is a need for people to become more quiet inside. To do one thing at a time rather than multi-task their whole lives away. To be more meditative as a way to be more meaningfully engaged in their lives. To reach into the self rather than always extending outward to the other. To learn how to hold their own attention. And yes, even children should learn how to spend time with themselves, how to vividly experience the ordinary and pay heed to the deceptively simple. Where to learn this very essential task in a world that wants only to stay as plugged in as much as possible?
We talk about using video games to educate children who spend all their time playing video games. We create online blogs to educate children who spend all their time in Facebook or MySpace. Our rationale? Find them where they live. And… of course, it makes some sense to reach them where they are and to educate them about other applications for their social media tools. I like my social media tools. I love the internet and all the creativity I find there. But, are children disadvantaged by cruising the net all day in school, after school and all night long instead of being involved in activities that use or, better yet, still their bodies, minds and emotions? Do we provide them with too many distractions? We want them to interact with a broad variety of people, but is the gain the same when it’s online as when it’s off? We use video games and other tools to “reach” them, but how often are we actually substituting our creativity for theirs by giving them so many predigested images and storylines?
Creativity is most fertile in a mind that is flexible and learning from a variety of experiences (plugged in and unplugged) Being in nature doesn’t require any intermediary. A conversation with people from distant places is meaningful and wonderful, but so is knowing how to have a conversation with the person in front of you. While we’re all loving technology with slavish devotion and almost born again zeal… let us remember to remember that it’s good to turn off the computer and go outside… every day.
And psst… don’t forget to tell the kids.
Topics: edtech, education, personal |