Summer: A Good time for Slow Coffee and Deep Thinking about Ed Tech

I am in that part of summer where I am sleeping so soundly that waking up feels like emerging from a dark cave.  This spring I was teacher tired on a new feral-cat-like level, but now that it’s June, my brain is buzzing again, thinking about what’s next, while still taking things slower where I can.

That said, a number of things about ed tech have me thinking.  I don’t know that any of this is formed thoughts as much as wondering.  I’ve been an ed tech gal since 2006, so I’ve lived through some shifts and know more will come.  The shifts lately feel more shifty and leave me wondering how I use my voice in the mix.  My favorite teacher question is, “So what?  What do we do now?”  And as I explore these questions, I don’t know that I have answers, but I wonder what you’re wondering alongside these things I’m grappling with:

1. AI Ethics… A friend suggested I read Culpability.  This Oprah’s Book Club Pick brings up some of the deeper, existential questions that AI brings to the fore as a teen dies from a self-driving car. Who’s fault is it?  And how do we navigate these new questions?  How do we help our students navigate?  What does it mean for big AI data centers to encroach on rural places like Nebraska?
2. Screen Time… There’s a screen time reckoning happening with some districts moving toward analog, and I just read a NYT article that claimed some teens are on YouTube almost constantly, even during the school day.  It’s easy to read these articles when you’ve never been in a classroom. How do we continue to manage devices that have real benefit?  When do we need to make no-tech spaces?  Just this morning I was writing on a good ole’ black and white composition notebook (with a good pen of course), and that felt good.  What’s the balance?  How does it come together for us and our students with more thoughtfulness and less dopamine doom scrolls of Italian Brainrot?
3. Joy in creating… An English teacher friend just used the word eucharistic to describe writing in a discussion about AI.  I can’t quit thinking about it, not so much in a religious sense, but in a human one.  Even back when we were teaching six traits of writing, we had that one trait, voice, that felt beyond the concreteness of scoring.  You knew it when you heard it.  How do we keep our humanity and the writing juice for young writers even as we learn new processes for writing with AI.  Should we?  When should we?  How do we balance it?  What does all this mean for me as someone who has spent her life learning about writing and teaching others to write?

Well, there it is, the existential tailspin.  It only took me to number three to get there.  #hah!  I don’t have answers, but good questions matter for us as educators.  In a grad class this summer (#nerdalert) our professor had us read an old article that felt worth revisiting.  Is Google Making us Stupid by Nicholas Carr from 2008 looks at the history of technology up until that time. Admittedly, he’s a critic, but he talked about how the internet “produces something altogether different” than the printing press. The same can be said with AI today… What’s different? How is it different? He also talked about the value of building a “complex inner density.” That language sticks for me. When I am using tech and when I’m not, how am I enriching my inner life? How am I enriching that of my students in ways that matter? 

Well… thanks for your grace with my messy thoughts. I like a good creative mess. I actually think if you don’t feel messy right now when it comes to ed tech, you might not be paying attention. In all of it, I’ve been finding a landing space with a word a new friend that I met in class used. He said, “deliberately.” He was quoting Thoreau, but he paused when he said it so much that I took notice. No matter what I do, what I teach, or how I move fast and slow this summer, I want it to be deliberate, more on purpose with a pace that the school year sometimes just won’t allow. But for now, I’m going to sit with these questions and eat a fudge pop on the deck. Maybe I can, as Mary Oliver says, find my way this year to live into some answers.