Living the Good Life Online

The New Childhood by Dr. Jordan Shapiro continues to reveal exceptional nuggets of educational leadership wisdom. In my preparation for a talk I’m giving next month to an educational accreditation and support organization, I thought I would re-read (this is #3 for me I believe) Dr. Shapiro’s insightful work. I recommend this book often and share other key nuggets of wisdom regularly as I talk and write on the topic of modern learning and educational transformation.

Today’s nugget goes out to any educational leader whose institution has or is considering a cell phone ban. If you have one, rethink it. If you’re considering one, don’t. Rather, understand this from Dr. Shapiro:

“Realize that the technology is not inherently soul-sucking or narcissistic. Instead, the problem is that grown-ups haven’t yet figured out how to provide kids with adequate examples of living the good life online.”

The distraction factor of cell phones in classrooms is real, but it is merely a symptom of the real, underlying issue. And that issue is, no one has taught students how to properly use these amazingly powerful and creative tools appropriately. When we rolled out our first one-to-one laptop initiative back in the day, each of our educators spent time teaching our students how to use those amazing tools within the context of their own curriculum. No one has done that with cell phones.

Instead, adults have been lulled into believing that kids just “get” technology simply as a result of, as Sir Ken Robinson would say, the date of their manufacture. Don’t buy into the myth of the “digital native”. Young people do not inherently understand how digital devices work or how best to relate to them in their day-to-day lives. We have to help them…teach them. As a starting place for educators, take the initiative to understand:

• the importance of digital devices to the future of every aspect of our existence

• the value students place in these devices.

• the real world and the digital world both no longer exist. There is only one world and students navigate their environments seamlessly with no boundaries or even a thought of where one ends and the other begins.

We must all recognize that inside the bezels of students’ devices are their agoras, their hearths, their symposiums, their modern-day mall hangouts, their friends, their enemies, their mentors and their mentees. Their devices are as much a part of their lives as books, cassette tapes, TVs and two spaces between sentences were in our lives a generation ago.