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Tech Notes: Imagine!
By Jason Stone
While at last week’s Macworld Expo & Conference at the Moscone Center, I took a little time off from the "serious stuff" and attended a presentation by David Pogue. New York Times web site users will recognize Pogue as a technology reviewer and critic, well known for his humor and parodies of technology and its users. Towards the end of his presentation, and after a five minute break while the on-site IT department worked to fix a non-functioning synthesizer, Pogue performed a new tongue-in-cheek song to the tune of John Lennon’s “Imagine.” It shouldn’t surprise me that you can view a version of the song on YouTube or read about it on his blog.
Pogue serenades us with the challenge to imagine a world without many of the technology tools and gadgets that we assume are an integral and unavoidable part of our daily lives. After the session, I tried to do exactly that. At the ripe old age of 38, I’ve actually lived in a world without cell phones, the Internet, and a GPS on the dash, so I don’t have to try too hard. I find it easy to slip into the Good Old Days mentality of remembering the simplicity of the pre-wired world and to yearn for a return to that life. I then imagine the difficulty of finding directions to the San Jose Art Museum without Google Maps, the online reviews I would miss reading, the time it would take to correspond with all of my college friends without email, or the loss of being able to store, edit, and share photos from a recent Outdoor Education trip on smugmug.com.
I’m sure you could easily add hundreds of other things that we, and our children, do successfully with current technologies. Are these two views completely at odds with each another? Of course not. I believe the wise choice, simply, is to always approach our use of technology with a bit of a skeptical eye. We shouldn’t assume that simply because we can involve a computer in meeting some need that we should necessarily do so. Take a step back and think about how that need may have been filled a few years ago, and you may perhaps see that the old way is still perfectly acceptable and, indeed, less likely to cause you even more problems in the long run.
This attitude drives the decisions that Chris Corrigan and I face as we continually strive to make technology a valid and useful part of the Day School experience for both students and adults. If a given technological tool won’t offer students and teachers something that they couldn’t achieve without its use, then we shouldn’t use it. Although tech tools and gadgets can be great, there is nothing to be gained from trying to use current technology when it isn’t truly the right tool for the job. We try to impart this mantra to our students at every opportunity. Feel free to use this at home the next time your Day Schooler claims that he just has to have the latest version of Photoshop to make a cover page for his report!
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