By show of hands, who else is exhausted by the ping-pong-like opinions on tech use whizzing by?
One side: “We’re disconnected, we’re not missing anything when we cut screen time, our children aren’t getting enough exercise, we don’t carry on proper conversations anymore.”
And the other: “We’re more connected than ever on a global scale, accessibility is growing, we are finding new ways to connect with our loved ones, we are building new literacies.”
Author Alison Gopnik recently said in an Edutopia interview,
“We tend to panic too much about technological change. Maybe this time the technology is, in fact, going to have all these disastrous effects that everyone’s worried about. But children have always been the first adopters of new technologies, and the previous generation has always been terrified when the new technology was introduced…
But school-age children have been gossiping and interacting with one another and trying to figure out peer relationships for as long as we’ve been human. And the way that they’ve done that might have been just whispering and talking in that hunter-gatherer culture, or passing notes in the culture that I grew up in, or texting in the culture that children are growing up in now. I don’t think there’s any particular reason to believe that the technology is going to make that worse or more problematic than it was before.”
So, this week’s provocation is to let those children consider both sides of this tech issue themselves. The first resource is a photo series by Eric Pickersgill entitled “Removed.”
The second is a video I’ve shared before, but that I think would pair well with the above resource for this provocation. The Millennial Rebuttal by Welzoo:
Provocation Questions:
- Why do people have different perspectives about technology use?
- How does tech use impact your life?
- How does tech use impact your family’s life?
- How does tech use impact your school/community function?
- How do you see tech use impacting your future?
featured image: DeathToTheStockPhoto