reading response 3

Digital Nation, produced and directed by Rachel Dretzin, is a documentary about life in the digital age. It traverses the wide range of influences that technology plays in our current culture, and grapples with whether these influences are positive or negative. These issues include the socially unrecognized phenomenon of technology addiction, how people live increasingly vicariously in virtual reality, and the military and business sectors taking advantage of virtual reality for conducting war and business. The documentary begins at MIT, the cradle of technology, where professors note that students there have changed significantly over the past 25 years. The average MIT student of today’s generation, they say, thinks that a multitasking lifestyle is conducive to the learning environment. These students believe, because of their talent for multitasking, that they are more efficient students than yester-years. However, on a midterm conducted by a professor, designed to test the general level of his students’ attentiveness to the instructor and the course material, students performed poorly. This might suggest that the students were too distracted, and uninterested, or simply unable to focus on in-depth material. Professor Sherry Turkle of MIT exhorts, “There really are important things you cannot think about, unless it’s still, and you’re only thinking about one thing at a time. There are just some things that are not amenable to being thought about in conjunction with 15 other things.” Furthermore, a study conducted at Stanford, showed that students who multitasked a lot were not only impressively worse at multitasking than the normal population, they exhibited attention deficiency and disorganized memory, critical features of analytical thinking. The documentary also covered the other side of the coin of technology’s influence on education, traveling to a public city school that was on the verge of collapse. It was there that they discovered that technology had brought a failing city school back to life, and transformed it into a stunning success, simply by embedding the curriculum through and through with technology. In doing this, they tapped into the natural inclinations of its students, and enabled the teachers to engage the students in the material.

My personal experience with technology has been one that has caused me to be a little skeptical of its influence on education. To quote Jean-Jacques Rousseau, an 18th century education reformist and philosopher, “Reading, solitude, idleness, a soft and sedentary life, these are perilous paths for a young man, and these lead him constantly into danger.” This might seem quixotic to most students today, but I think it does well to illuminate the situation of our youth who are increasingly attached to machines and detached from the real world. Personally, I didn‘t use technology too much during school, but the few years where I did my connection with the larger web always influenced the way I connected with education, giving me the impression that knowledge is easily accessible, and something that is a commodity instead of a privilege that requires stewardship. During the few years I used the net very frequently in school, I became more indifferent about responsibilities and did significantly less well in school. I became accustomed to habitually preventing the character-molding influence of boredom. If I had instead made my mind more used to the slower pace of life without technology, I maybe could have been paying more attention to developing talents instead of distractions. Regarding the school where technology helped drag it out of academic stagnation, in my own experiences, technology would do little to influence my interest because something is interesting in itself and not because of the medium it’s expressed through. If students today are so ADD they can’t learn except through by being stimulated by technology, using this method to get students to pay attention is doing less for the educational system and more for the underlying problem, I think. Which is that the students’ lifestyle is making them unable to perform academically, and it is ignoring the parents’ responsibility to take initiative on this issue. I cringe to think of changing the education system every time the environment becomes “inconvenient” for the student or the mindset of the day. I don’t think education is intended to be convenient, it’s supposed to be challenging and perplexing, and yes, even boring at times. The goal is to learn how to engage yourself and become interested in it, making it your own. Resorting to mediating these features, and thus depriving the student of responsibility, probably isn’t doing education a service, so we should hesitate to evaluate this mode of education based on test scores that are merely affirming that fast-paced education can pull up students scores to state mandated levels. Instead, we should slow things down more and try and evaluate why the younger generation is so distracted by the virtual world that they’re uninterested in anything about the real world, and what we can do about this.