Frontline's digital_nation

The other night I found myself watching Frontline's digital_nation: life on the virtual frontier.  All I can say is, "Wow!"  The program gave me a lot to think about, from the effects of technology on my two-year-old, who can incidentally use my iPad almost better than I can, to the effects of technology on my students, both inside and outside of the classroom.  I even tried to talk to my husband about some of the insights I had gained from viewing this piece, but he was too busy playing Candy Crush and updating Facebook on his iPhone.  No, really.

Some of the issues raised in the program were really outrageous: people dying in South Korean Internet cafes because they had forgotten to eat or drink while playing video games, brilliant students at MIT and Stanford who seemed to had a seriously inflated sense of how well they could multi-task (their notions stood in stark contrast to the brain research or even to their professor's impressions), children who were sent away to fresh air camps so that they could learn how to live outside of the box (so to speak), individuals who claimed that their closest relationships were forged via the interweb (yes, I found that a little troubling even despite the fact that I met my husband on eHarmony), and schools that were struggling to get technology into the hands of students and then struggling to make sure that same technology was used effectively.

I think we all like to think about the promise of technology, how it has the capacity to connect us in ways that were previously impossible, how it allows us to connect and share our thoughts and ideas with people in half a second, how it has put vast amounts of knowledge and information at our fingertips.  But, as Peter Parker's uncle told him, "With great power comes great responsibility."

I think my favorite part of the program was a short clip of South Korean elementary students singing in unison to a catchy tune about netiquette.  Their school was plastered with signs and banners about being respectful in the digital world.  It's hard, sometimes, to be nice to someone you can't see and may never meet.

However, the part I connected with the most was the MIT professor who said her students have "done themselves a disservice by drinking the Kool-Aid and believing that a multitasking learning environment will serve their best purposes. There are just some things that are not amenable to being thought about in conjunction with 15 other things."

I guess the question that echoed over the course of this program related to people's inability to think or focus for sustained periods of time.  One educator on the program even spoke about his inability to assign a novel longer than 200 pages because students could not sustain their attention as readers.  That clip was followed by the student who admitted to not ever even reading thanks to the plethora of online summaries available at SparkNotes, Classic Notes, Pink Monkey, Shmoop, etc.

So how, as educators, can we make the technology work for us?  Do we read the online summaries and quiz students on the information they get wrong or leave out as a way of punishing the denizens of the Internet who couldn't even be bothered to crack the book?  Or do we just start assigning the summaries, since that's all many of them are going to read anyway?  Do we allow students to text and Facebook in class, or do we diligently take their phones away and send them to the assistant principal?  Or do we let them have their phones and laptops in class, even if that means they're only paying attention to a quarter of what's going on?  And what about the digital divide?  In a school where 50% of the students qualify for free and reduced lunch, can we expect students to use technology to complete assignments, or is that completely unfair to some?  Can we expect students to focus on only one thing, or is that a holdover from a time that has passed?  I'm not sure there are easy answers to these questions, and probably by the time we figure out the answers to some of them, the technology will have changed to such an extent that a whole new set of questions will have emerged.

Maybe if I Google it, though, I'll come up with something....