A critical examination of the technology in our lives - Kevin Shindel

Today I'd like to talk to you about what I believe is a critical need, uh, that's not being addressed in our classrooms. And that's the need to fundamentally and critically explore the role of technology and the role that technology plays in our lives.

So let's begin with looking at Google Glass. Just last week, Google announced that Google Glass will be available to everybody next year, and I think this raises fundamental questions about anonymity and privacy. You can imagine if, if not today, very soon in the future, where Google, uh, Glass could interface with uh, Google's face recognition software and image recognition software.

Would we be able to zoom into conversations from long distances? Could we interface that conversation, uh, that we zoom in with, uh, with lip reading software? So what mechanism exists to fundamentally ask, uh, these questions about, uh, is Google Glass a valuable uh, product? How will it change our sensory perception and our cognitive function?

You could ask the question: will it enhance those things, or could it replace them altogether? So we have fundamental questions that we must ask, and for that, we may look at a guy by the name of Ray Kurzweil, famous uh, futurist, author, and inventor, and his uh, development of the law of accelerating returns. What he says is that technological growth is exponential: one invention does not lead to two inventions, which does not lead to four inventions. One invention leads to five, which leads to thirty, which leads to one hundred.

And along the lines, the next hundred years of technological growth and change will be not 100 years of progress, but more along the lines of 20,000 years of human progress. Now let's say Mr. Kurzweil is 100% wrong, and it's only 10,000 years of scientific progress. Does that mean that we also have 10,000 years of social change, economic change, political change?

And where is the mechanism in our schools to fundamentally question these changes and what these changes can bring? Let's take a quick look at 3D printing, what's being called The Second Industrial Revolution. What does it mean when I can take my neighbor's shoes that I like and throw them in a 3D printer that I can currently buy for less than $2,000, and I can replicate those shoes?

What effect does that have on copyright and patent law in the United States? There's a website called defcad.org, and on defcad.org, you can literally download dozens of plans for guns, and since December, defcad.org has had 250,000 downloads. They currently have 3,000 new hits every single hour.

So we have people in our, in the halls of Congress debating gun control. Gun control could be a mute issue, um, simply because of 3D printing. We're currently being told that the first person to live to 150 years old is alive today, and the premier scientist who's working in anti-aging and immortality says with near certainty that the first person to live to 1,000 will be born in the next two decades.

Now this raises incredible questions, and you can obviously see, uh, what this might do to population growth on the planet. Can we sustain longer lives and greater numbers of people? What does retirement mean when you're living to 150 or 200 years old? What about family life? If I live to 150, does my 120 year old son come to me and ask me for fatherly advice?

There’s been a major push across all levels for STEM: science, technology, engineering, and math. And I'm not denigrating that, and I'm not saying that there's nothing intrinsically uh, wrong about a STEM push. We need scientifically literate students, but the way that has traditionally happened in the schools is we've given them more time.

We've given them more quantity and not necessarily better quality, and that's an issue. Science should be about doing, but we don't do that in our classroom. So what we say is, uh, let's give them more time to learn science and technology and engineering and math. And when you do that without unlimited time, you marginalize the other aspects of school that make school enriching.

And that's what this is really all about: value. The science classrooms, uh, that we currently have, they're not interested necessarily in value; they're interested in fact. What do we know, and what do we don't know? Technology is interested in what can we do, and what can we not do?

And to get to a different set of questions, the critical inquiry into technology, you have to rely on social studies. Just because you can do something does not mean that you should do something, and just because you can't do something does not mean that you should try. There are critical questions that we must ask of technology: critical questions of ethics, morality, society, political questions.

And these are best served in a social studies classroom. For the last three years, uh, my students have engaged in a digital downtime project. Phase one requires those students to, uh, record and describe the nature of all of their communication and all the time that they spend online—all their text messaging, all their talking, all their video gaming—and they get a really nice picture of how much time they actually spend with these technologies.

And I can't tell you how many times I hear this come up: "Chandel, you know, I got on Facebook last night, and I only wanted to get on there for five minutes, and I looked up, and it was 45 minutes later." And I say, "Yeah, that happens. I said, 'No, that happened to me yesterday three different times.'"

So these kids, they understand, uh, that they need to take a look at their use of technology, uh, the role that technology plays in their lives. And there's literally too many things to talk about in class, so they go home and they talk about these at the dinner table.

And I often get parents who email me, and some parents will say, "You know what? This is a great project, and our whole house is going to do it. We're all going to look at the usage of our technology and analyze it." And then you get to phase two of the project, and phase two of the project requires the students to unplug.

There is no cell phone texting, there is no cell phone talking, there's no social networking, there's no video gaming, uh, and they really have to live, uh, as best they can without technology. And then you go to the final part of the project, and this is where students can organize themselves—self-organization into groups or individually—and they create authentic assessment opportunities.

And they can apply what they've learned in all of our discussions and in all of their notes to some kind of overall goal. One of those things could be, uh, joining an organization; they could partner with civic or local and political organizations and people to develop strategies to, uh, take a look at the use of technology and technological policies.

Creative students, poets—I've seen some great poetry written about the use of technology and the impact that it has on ourselves or on our society. This is bigger than a test; it's more powerful than a test. To take a test, you would reduce what we've done in this unit and homogenize it as a simple fact-finding endeavor.

That's not what we're looking for. We're not looking to regurgitate facts; we're looking to find value in life, and the only way to do that is through a passionate commitment and engagement of the questions that make life beautiful, meaningful, and valuable.

Thank you.