Disconnected

Romeo and Juliet would have made out just fine if they’d only had a pair of iPhones between ‘em.

“Yo, Julie, what’s up?”

“You are totally not going to believe this, but I’ve got this poison that’ll make it look like I’m dead. So don’t like freak out and kill yourself or anything when you see me, because that would just totally blow.”

I don’t know that we’d be fine had the kids been connected, but they would have made out a tad better.

Thinking about this not because I seek to undermine all the tragedy in that Shake-scene, but because I’ve been thinking about a current tragedy-in-the-works: the tragedy of a generation of students growing up to think that school has nothing to do with real life.

Heard a few weeks back from a colleague at a big public high school in what I’ll leave as an undisclosed district. At the recent National Educational Computing Conference in Washington, DC, a bigwig from that district was getting an award having to do with being a pioneer in educational technology. The irony I gleamed as I watched all this go down was that the teacher a few weeks back had confided to me that students in his high school weren’t even allowed to use email.

That’s a disconnect: accepting awards for ed tech leadership whilst your students aren’t trusted enough to use email in school.

Heard from another teacher a while back about the great things her students were doing combining text and video with social media. And then, suddenly,  YouTube was blocked. Totally off limits in school. Well, YouTube and Twitter and various social bookmarking sites and most blogs and etc… and she wasn’t the only one. I hear this time and time and time again.

That’s a disconnect: Time magazine says Twitter is changing the world, yet we’re afraid of letting our students use it. Wouldn’t want our kids to change the world, you know. There are bubble tests to study for.

Heard from a high school student a ways back. Said in his career at a 1:1 computing school, only two teachers ever brought social media into the classroom. He said he asked the tech guy what Web 2.0 meant and the tech guy didn’t know.

That’s a disconnect: We’re wasting valuable education dollars on obsolete technologies whilst a paradigm shift towards open source and shared social media is happening all around us.

I’ve been teaching in a paperless classroom for the last couple years. I’ve watched students engage with their world in ways most of us teachers could never have imagined based upon our own experience as students. And whether it’s using Twitter hashtags to create shared cross-curricular reference bibliographies; or lobbying Web 2.0 developers to redesign parts of their apps to work better in the classroom; or using Skype, YouTube, and social bookmarking as a way to engage parents, mentors, and professionals to take part in the students’ learning, the kids these days demonstrate a day-to-day ease of use with and expectation of use of the immediate global connections the 21st century Web has to offer.

This isn’t your father’s Internet.

If you are reading this, you probably get most of your news online. You also likely have a few online profiles and think nothing about saving your information on the Cloud. Perhaps you blog. Hopefully you Tweet. Surely you must Hulu and Blip. You haven’t bought a CD in years. You don’t quite remember the last time you rented a video from a store. You’d rather play an MMOG than go to the movies. You think MySpace is old-school and kinda lame.

Okay. Maybe you don’t. But your students do.

And they know whether you ‘get it’ or not. And despite your best protestations why none of that matters, it matters. Because we as teachers need to be the role-model in our classrooms for the responsible and beneficial use of the Internet and social technology. Because we as teachers need to model to our students what it means to be a citizen with rights and responsibilities in a global system. Because we as teachers can’t take the chance of missing this generation. Not this one. Not now.

Because we are living in the transition period into the next stage of civilization.

You thought ed tech was silly in 1983? You were partly right. You thought ed tech was silly in 1996? You were partly right. You think ed tech is silly now? You are out of touch.

And what’s changed?

What’s changed is that the ed tech of yesteryear was always about finding ways of bringing technology into the classroom. The reality of today is that your kids are bringing more technological sophistication into the classroom in their pockets than your school has likely managed to accomplish over the last thirty years. What's changed is that our students are living in an immediately connected world where it takes 10 seconds to connect to the whole of human knowledge as well as the billions of people creating it.

The kids don’t expect to be taught ‘better’ because of technology; rather it’s a matter of mindset and authenticity. Schools trivialize their value by at best reflecting a completely inauthentic and misunderstanding view of how technology and social media is so naturally integrated into all of the other aspects of our students’ lives.

Students should expect at the very least that their schools are as socially viable and aware of the times as a burger joint offering free Wi-Fi.

As for the digital divide? Consider the fact that you can now buy a netbook for around $200 and with Wi-Fi access have the world at your fingertips within seconds. Heck, you spend more than that on textbooks. It's really a crime that every student in this country, let alone this continent, hemisphere, and world is not currently guaranteed free universal Internet access and a device for connecting.

A matter of priorities, I guess. A matter of disconnect.

So we gotta face down this disconnect. We need to get those smartphones and netbooks in the hands of Romeo and Juliet. And not for our sake, but for theirs. We need to open schools to the global community. We can’t let fear get in the way. And we can’t keep educating kids as if they aren’t living in the Digital Age.

We have a responsibility to get out of our comfort zone and take an active part in the worldwide dialogue of social media. No one ever said that the first task of the profession of teaching was to make the teacher as comfortable as possible. We need to get into the digital realm, because our students are already living there and they aren’t coming back.

We have to be the models of what we want our students to be out there in the binary plane.

Our students are waiting.

We’re holding the truth.

We can’t afford to let this message not go through.

Because the star-crossed lovers can’t afford a crossed connection. And we are the ones responsible for that connection. In that classroom, we teachers are the only thing that stands between the twin vices of tragedy and disconnect.

Photo by Agelakis cc 2.0.