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Educators explore ubiquitous digital presence in society
The word colloquium is derived from a Latin word meaning to come together to talk. This is exactly what happened on April 25 in Edmonton at Promise and Peril: the Impact of Technology on Children, Schools and Communities, a research colloquium cosponsored by the Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA) and the Alberta Centre for Child, Family and Community Research.
Part of the day involved a lively panel of three distinguished educators, who shared their research, opinions and, in the case of one presenter, acting ability with the capacity audience.
“Every sensible person acknowledges that there are both benefits and dangers to technology,” said the first speaker, Michele Jacobsen, an associate professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Calgary. Jacobsen’s research focuses on designing, using, managing and evaluating technological processes and systems to facilitate learning; exploring innovations in learning made possible by media and technology; and documenting the shift from passive to participatory learning. For Jacobsen, when used properly, technology can help children understand their relationship with the world and with each other.
Valerie Steeves, assistant professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Ottawa, is the author of “Sense and NonSense,” an online game that won an award of excellence from the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, and an interactive cyberplay about online privacy being used by the Girl Guides. In her presentation, Steeves outlined the evolution of parental attitudes about the Internet—in 2000, parents were enthusiastic about it. By 2004, they were starting to get irritated by how much time their kids were spending online. And by 2011, with the rise of cyberbullying and Internet stalkers, they were terrified, and this terror has led many of them to obsessively monitor every mouse clicks their child makes. As for today’s children, technology and privacy are central in identity creation, and, as a group, they are deeply irritated by parents’ paranoid desires to monitor their every move.
For Steeves, this constant surveillance has eroded the trust that should exist at the heart of healthy parenting—and teaching, too. In her field research she met kids who expressed disdain for the many anti-cyberbullying programs that schools foist on them. This is because most of them (though not all, of course) have figured out their own strategies for dealing with bullies and because school interventions usually make problems worse. Steeves added that zero-tolerance policies tend to make it harder for kids to trust teachers, principals and police, and that surveillance is a notoriously bad strategy to use with kids online, but—and the parents among you will be happy to read this—kids need to know that parents and perhaps a trusted teacher are there if needed. For the kids of the digital generation, “privacy is essential to growing up.” And to much audience delight, Steeves gave a realistic, breathy, heartfelt, and energetic “like”-filled reading of a transcript of her interviews with teenaged girls. It was like being teleported to junior high.
Jane O’Dea is a professor and former dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Lethbridge. Her spirited presentation touched upon such apparently disparate reference points as the heavy metal band Metallica, the French philosopher Jean Beaudrillard and the 19th-century American Transcendentalist writer Ralph Waldo Emerson. She injected a philosophical feel to the panel by suggesting that digital technologies lead us to question the very notion of reality. According to Beaudrillard, modern media images have become “sites of the disappearance of meaning … a fatal degeneration of the real.” In other words, images no longer are representations—they are simulations. They are no longer signs of reality—they are reality. And digital technology has become so lifelike and convincing that in many cases we prefer it over reality. Past generations were motivated by the Golden Rule—do unto others what you would have them do unto you. But the contemporary self seeks visibility, recognition and a constant connection to the electronic hive. And just like one of Gene Roddenberry’s Borgs, we have begun to fear solitude. In doing so, we lose an ability to be introspective; our capacity for sustained reading; our appreciation of many forms of artistic, philosophical and scientific excellence; and the ability to think for ourselves.
More than food for thought, Promise and Peril was a veritable cornucopia of provocative and stimulating ideas.
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