Friday, October 7, 2011

Take 5! Integration Update - October 7, 2011 (Vol.3/#4)


Issue #4
“Take 5” is a weekly update containing information related to teaching and learning for today and beyond...

Take just 5 minutes (or less) to look over these resources and see what might be helpful for your and/or your students. Better yet, set aside at least 15-30 minutes a week to focus on finding resources and ideas that will improve student learning and prepare them for their future!

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 This Week... 

Alone Together (webinar highlights from author Sherry Turkle)
Learn more about how people (we) are interacting via technology these days!

Plan Ahead for a Free & Clear Weekend!
Here are some tips to shift your work away from the weekend or reduce it all together. 

Tools 4 Tuesday:
Microsoft Lesson Plans & Speakaboos
 

 Upcoming Learning Opportunities
(Email me if you know of other opportunities!)
  • 3. NWOET Fall 2011 Conference (Educational Technology) at BGSU on LAST CHANCE... Monday, October 10th ($69 for early bird registration)
  • 5. In the right margin of this blog, enter your email to receive future postings into your email Inbox (Take 5s and more!) -- expect 1-3 posts per week.
a NEW format for this year... 
Scroll through the blog below or click these links to see what has been posted already in these areas:


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Thursday, October 6, 2011

Thinking Thursday: Alone Together by Sherry Turkle (webinar)

Image from: http://book.4kindle.us/buy/alone-together-expect-technology-ebook-QjAwNERMMEtXMA!!.html

Note: this post is filed under "Digital Citizenship" and "Information Literacy" to point out that sometimes knowing what we SHOULDN'T do is just as important as what we SHOULD do. Moderation AND true human connections are two keys that should help unlock a promising future.
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From the Wed, Sept 28, 2011 webinar hosted by HSM... 
Sherry Turkle on her book: Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

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From her session: (either quotes or paraphrasing) 
Main quote (and sums up her book):
“We’re too busy to think and too busy to connect… we’re in continual contact, but we end up alone together” 
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Many people now have an “I share, therefore I am” mentality, which is “not good for collaboration and not good for innovation.” Meaning… the “Old way was: I have a feeling, I now want to share it; the New way is I want to have a feeling; therefore, I need to send a text” (or post something online, etc — to get feedback, validation, etc.) 
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In other words, “we need ‘them’ to make ourselves real.”
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“Social media is a performance."
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"(Their device) is the place for hope in their life... where something new will come to them, the place where loneliness can be defeated." 
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“We’ve moved from conversation to communication."
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 Hyper connection is NOT collaboration!
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“Even the happiest/most satisfied users of these technologies are paying a price” (somewhere).
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“We’ve moved from multitasking to multi-lifing”... (where people have on-screen lives and/or realities, sometimes several). 
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 (Technologies today) “make it easy to hide” - we can choose who to reply to or contact. 
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When you text, you have time to think about what you’re writing... (which is a pro); but people become phobic about real-time interaction due to a fear of showing our (real) selves (con).
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“Younger people don’t know how to apologize face to face.” 
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“We are less willing to give each other our full attention.” 
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Ironically, in our more complex world, there is "decreased time available to us to sit and think uninterrupted"... and due to the shear amount of (emails), we "begin to expect or even demand fast answers, and in order to get them, we are asking each other simpler and simpler questions. So we're dumbing down our questions to get the simpler answers, even on the most important matters. We’ve (essentially) "put ourselves on cable news," which is "not a good climate for innovation."
 
“People of all ages admit they would rather send a text than talk.” (which is sometimes a good, thing, but not always) 
On Solitude – “If we don’t learn (how) to be alone, we will only know how to be lonely... Loneliness is failed solitude, just as connection is failed conversation.” 
Benefits & Costs - “There are MANY bounties of our ‘always on’ culture.”To make it better, Our “always on” culture -- we must face it’s costs — knowing how to be alone; solitude is needed to energize and restore, which can lead to innovation and even collaboration. 
We should avoid the notion or analogy of these technology behaviors as an addiction, since that implies the solution is to completely rid it (technology) from our lives, which is not possible. Now is a time of opportunity to develop practices that help us use technology effectively... for connections and collaboration, which lead to innovation. 
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Favorite sentence in book - "Just because we grew up w/ the internet, we assume the internet is all grown up" (that it won’t change in the future). It can and will, as will how we work with it. But the time to make corrections is NOW! 
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People are in "performance mode on the network" where so many put a false self online or only share good news – people don’t want to leave a digital trace online of those types of things. 
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Schools and businesses should be teaching uni-tasking! 
In workplace, try the email reply “I’m thinking” -- and "model an approach to business life" to create that time to think (rather than react right away).
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How can you help teach or model appropriate tech behaviors for your students (and/or your peers!)?
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Monday, October 3, 2011

Plan Ahead for Free & Clear Weekend!

Although all of these Time Saving Tips may not work for you, some might save you a little time this weekend so you can re-energize and be ready for next Monday! Wheeeee! (FYI -- the woman above tried some tips!)

Some of their suggestions include: Grade less, Email proactively, not reactively, and Schedule your fun (which is what Neil Fiore similarly suggests in his book The Now Habit -- he refers to it as scheduling "guilt-free play" FIRST before other tasks).

Scholastic has more ideas available at their Managing Your Time page.

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