Digital Culture and Focus
This past summer I entitled a day I spent with our administrators using the term “Digital Culture.” It’s a loaded term, for sure, and when I used it, I meant simply to refer to a culture of doing work with digital tools. There’s a commercial that used to play on TV from Best Buy that I think best sums-up what I think of when I consider “digital culture;”
Meet Digital Dan… what do you get the guy who’s got all the gadgets and gizmos?
Of course, we go to Best Buy to get Dan (or dad, as the character later became) what he doesn’t already have. And since there are new versions of these gadgets all the time, you never have to dismiss coming back to Best Buy (I’m sure they’d reason).
Is a school culture one that should be digital? We’ve reached a point for many where I am where we’ve climbed up the rock. We’re at a very nice plateau. But gosh darn it, the mountain somehow has gotten much taller over the past, I don’t know, 5 years. Shoot, this thing called “Web 2.0″ emerged, and now there are area districts reporting their news via Twitter. If you want to keep track, there are other districts using Twitter, too.
But let me get back to that essential question. Is a digital culture a better one? It is, I think, if we’re digitized. Consider this:
Let’s say you’re Italian. I mean, born there, raised there, and a happy citizen of things Italian. You come to my school, and I announce what’s for lunch. If I tell you we’re serving pasta with fresh basil and imported parmesan cheese, you’re likely to think this lunch will be a good one. It’s what you might otherwise expect to eat. The cafeteria workers are “speaking your language.”
This is certainly the speech we’ve heard from so many folks crying out loud that we’re not “engaging” our students enough when we don’t allow all the otherwise distracting things in their lives: the iPods, the cell phones, and the video games. Come shout with Prensky now: Engage me, don’t enrage me!
I hear Prensky et al., but I also think the issue runs deeper than throwing video games on our laptops, or allowing cell phones in class. Let’s look at this another way.
You come into work (in your office, a small office of 15 folks who mostly all sit at cubicles with desktop computers), and you notice as you log in in the morning that IT has messed with your desktop. Some of your files have been moved, and large, gorgeous multi-player game icons are on your desktop. The boss is until 3 PM. How many folks do you suspect to find playing these network-enabled games in an hour?
I guess you’d find some. Compared to work, games are fun. Network games are real fun.
There’s a call for making learning more relevant to students. There’s also a call to realize life deals us both time to do things we really enjoy (which we call leisure) and things we really have to do (work). Learning is often categorized as work. It doesn’t have to be, necessarily, but I’m not sure we have any great examples in this country of where it’s not seen as work by society. “Do well in school! Get an A on that test, then we’ll go out for ice cream this weekend after your game.” Heard that before?
I failed this year in helping establish a more digital culture in my schools. I didn’t approach it right. You see, I think I had the right idea: you’ll find benefits for doing things digital when first, everyone has access to the tools (i.e., when they have achieved enough Italianness to appreciate lunch). Second, there will be skeptics. And third, models in your school – both administrators but just about anyone – can help promote this culture. If you can change culture, you can change just about anything… and the goal, ultimately, is to change pedagogy.
It was a lot to chew on in a day. But I have to say, perhaps just for myself, that establishing a digital culture in your school has little to do with putting games on the computers or starting a new game-design class. But maybe that’s the way folks were thinking.
Establishing a digital culture is something that changes the way you to business. More work is done in bits and bytes than through paper and pencil. It takes courage to change. Currently we have faction among our colleagues. We have those who wiki and those that don’t. But you know, I have trust that the change is happening. This year for our state testing, all the organization is happening (from the top, thank you very much) using digital tools and schedules (wikis, Google documents, etc.). I’m getting emails from folks to for their Google account. “I need access to the school testing schedule.” Giddy up.
The more difficult task that awaits is helping our digital workforce to take their new-found (or even old hat) culture of bits and bytes and translating that into quality educational experiences. I’m not the first to suggest that bad teachers can’t be helped with the best in new tools. So it’s not about the technology saving the ship.
It’s about sitting down for lunch and all enjoying the same meal together. It’s about everyone enjoying the productivity in bits and bytes. It’s about assessments that are finger-swipes away to guide the next stage of instruction. It’s about hacking what little time we have, what divided attention-spans we encounter to focus.
Focus is something that thwarts stress in exchange for efficiency. We can’t focus very well to learn when the tools are broken, there are distractions around us. The best thing about digital culture is that the digital tools begin to fade away. As comfort and dependence on the digital tools increases, we have finally that opportunity (once again) to focus on the skills and practices that celebrate our human-ness. Working together in groups, or telling stories, or making positive change for our peers in our community.
I’m come to realize my work on helping others establish a digital culture — ultimately help folks to use technology to find focus in their charge — will be a long journey. But the best trips start with knowing where you’re headed.