Author: Alex Edwards

The fight for attention

In our daily fight for attention of students and coworkers, we have to reflect on what is taking the attention away from us. In the Ted Talk by Tristan Harris, he states that snap chat, which is the main way that teenagers communicate, has lost real conversations over the need to maintain a streak.

The first step in addressing this loss of attention and loss of real conversations, has to be informing the students about the how they are effected by the need to communicate, and the loss of meaningful conversation.

What I propose is that students identify how they are being drawn into social media, what makes their attention being taken from in the moment, present influences, to social media and derailing focus.

To start this, I would like it if you would comment where your attention is driven and what makes you lose focus on what is going on around you?

Connectives: Our brains on technology

George Siemens writes “Technology is altering (rewiring) our brains. The tools we use define and shape our thinking.” This quote brings up several concerns, but first let me talk about how I connect with the quote.

In my 26 years of life I have seen the rise of technology from Dial up to wifi; from AOL messenger to snapchat. This changes our thinking and our way we deal with the world around us. For example until I received my own smart phone, which was not until my freshman year of college. I would care less what was going on in the greater world around me, other than what I saw in the newspaper and the nightly news. Since having a smartphone I changed to have notifications, popups and internet searches about the most recent news. This hinders the notion and ability to purely live in the present. This like everything has positive and negative effects.

Some of the more negative aspects of this constant connection to the technology we use everyday is a disconnect with the present. we focus on not only the present, but of the future and we have become impatient.

I remember a time when it would take four hours to load a map to use for classwork. This was a nature thing and relatively short for how detailed the map was back in the early 2000’s. Now with the advancement of technology we become impatient at things not loading instantly or in a shorter amount of time.

However hope is not lost, we have some control on how our brains become wired with technology, we can re-set, and press restart on aspects of how our mental processes address technology. This is not easy as we have become addicted to our technology, but being able to unplug for a couple hours everyday, and be cognizant more of the actions and movements that are around us, we can address some of the effects that technology places us in.

The balancing act: a look at 5 problems with social media

When I was in my second year of college I decide to delete my profile on Facebook, I stopped using social media for a year. It was an interesting experience mainly because it was not a relief, but a stress’er. In college the best way to get ahold of people and make plans was through facebook, it was how I was invited to parties and new about events going on around me.

We are constantly inundated with information from social media and the internet, but we have also relied on it more than when we were younger. This could be seen as a problem, in the way that we were never taunt how to balance, our parents did not have the same issues as us because of how technology has developed in the last several decades.

As a high school teacher, I see many of my students tied to their phones, it is almost an essential way to connect with their peers and to the world around them. But I have to wonder if this is creating more issues, several studies have show a connection with increased rates of depression and phone use. This is especially prevalent in teenagers. What the teachers of today need to do is not a simple task, we have to change how we teach and teach something that we have not mastered and that is a balance. The balance of our constantly global connected online presence and the physical reality of the world that surrounds us everyday.

I am not advocating to disconnect from social media, but instead learning how to be able to put it down and enjoy the world outside the LCD monitors of our phones and computers. To be able to take time away, to lean how too let go of the snapchat streaks and our instant reply mentalities, so that we can find a balance.

References:

https://www.npr.org/2017/12/17/571443683/the-call-in-teens-and-depression

High School: teacher privacy vs student privacy

As a High School teacher it can be difficult to address the issues of privacy…

As a High School teacher it can be difficult to address the issues of privacy in a school building. Especially when dealing with your own personal data.

In 2018, a student found my Instagram profile, at the time it was a open to public profile and had pictures of my trips, bad selfies and of my pets. After a student requested to follow me on Instagram I decided to make the profile private. This was for to reasons, the first was because I did not want students to use my posts for creating memes or as a way to hide their own presence. and the second reason was to help dictate who could see my pictures.

Later in that year our school was dealing with several instances with online bulling through an Instagram ‘tea’ (gossip) account. This account used a picture of me as its user profile. They took an image that was my profile pic, added eyebrows and then used it as the profile picture. This created the issue of being tied to a sight that I did not have any control over. We did not know who the account belonged to. This also means that the picture of me they used will forever link me to it.

(top the eyebrow-ed picture, bottom original picture)

In looking through this weeks videos and readings, It is clear that though we create a public to private environment, we have to address the issues of unintended usage of our data especially when others use our data to hide themselves.