There Is Some Acceptable Logic with Screen Bans That Needs to Be Considered

Devices that have become common in our classrooms have a design problem that Ed Tech does not acknowledge. 

These screen devices and their apps have been in some instances engineered to be habit-forming. In other words, addictive characteristics have been designed into these applications and devices.

Technology companies have become experts at designing and engineering for habit-forming and addiction in their products. Big Tech companies like Meta and Tic Tok, just to start with a few, are experts in “hooking” users on their products.

I am currently re-reading Nir Eyal’s book, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. This book is a textbook for addiction engineers. It describes how tech companies have pulled off engineered addiction with their screen-based products.

In fact, Eyal’s book, Hooked, is a how to book on how to make products addictive.

Once engineers have users “hooked” like drug pushers, they have customers who have been mind-manipulated to being endless users. Like drug users, they find it difficult to put down the drug. They will fight to protect both the product and the habit.

Eyal promotes what he calls “the Hooked Model” to addict users to products. 

This involves using four steps to achieve addiction:

1) Triggering initial user behavior;

2) Engaging user in an action;

3) Dispensing a variable reward to keep users coming back;

4) Getting the user to invest time, data, effort, social capital and money.

According to Eyal, subjecting potential customers to this “Hooked” strategy works. You have users addicted to your product. While this model might be simplified, it does capture  features in screen products we encounter on our devices.

He also calls his method of engineering addiction “a Superpower.”

I call it malicious manipulation of humanity for profit. Is there no consideration that such tactics at mind-manipulation are unethical?

Tech companies and others engage relentlessly in engineered addiction because it works. But there is something extremely immoral about the whole thing. The idea that you can design a habit-forming, engineered addictive product and celebrate it as a superpower is problematic. 

Teaching students and all educators how to recognize when such tactics are employed is vital. This is clearly a subject for any digital literacy efforts.

Is it any wonder why tech companies and Ed Tech are so upset about screen bans?

Screen bans nuke this engineered addiction model before it gets its talons into users’ minds.

If users regain control over when and how a device is used, then the game is up.

Using AI Is a Choice Not an Imperative: Knowing Why One Uses It or Not Is Important

If you examine closely any of the AI promotional posts here on LinkedIn or elsewhere, and the avalanche of AI educational books out of bookstores, one thing about AI and all this promotional hype becomes clear:

They are using AI to search for a problem to solve.

Why else do so many AI-promotional posts on LinkedIn begin with the words, “AI is not he problem, (Insert whatever is the problem) is the problem”? That is a dead give-away that the search is underway for a problem that Silicon Valley’s latest shiny toy can solve.

But, what if in my role as teacher, I am perfectly able to resolve my problems with tools already in my toolbox, or with cheap, non-technological solutions? 

Why should I use AI  when asking a friend for feedback on an email works? Do I use AI just to be able to say I used AI? That sounds like I am being faddish, not economical.

Why do I need to turn to technology for solutions as all of Ed Tech does?

Take writing. It can be done very effectively without technology at all. This writing, like all my writing, begins its existence as handwriting done with a pen on a page of paper. The pen and paper are perfect tools for writing. That’s what they were made for. Simple, useful tools for writing.

Writer Wendell Berry once wrote:

“If you are already solving your problem with the equipment  you have—a pencil, say—why solve it with something more expensive and more damaging? If you don’t have a problem, why pay for a solution? If you love the freedom and elegance of simple tools, why encumber yourself with something complicated?”

That’s it. That is the question at the heart about why I choose not to use AI tools. I already have tools to solve my problems. I choose not to use AI which is damaging the environment, a strain on natural resources, and has been created through human exploitation. It is clearly complicated.

I also love the “freedom and elegance of simple tools” that do not “encumber” me with the “complicated.” I can write anywhere with pen and paper. No need to connect to the internet or a power source. 

I write, I teach, I work fine with the tools I have. I have no need for an anthropomorphized, word-prediction algorithm to assist in what I do. I do not want to complicate what I do with technology just because it exists.

Right now, there are an awful lot of people whose future is staked on AI trying to convince the world that it can solve problems. They desperately search for problems it can solve. Their golden ticket demands it. Their every word is an exercise in searching for a solution for AI to solve.

Like Berry though, I relish the freedom and elegance of the simple tools. Perhaps that really should be the guiding force in Ed Tech: Look to the simple tools first. Instead of trying to justify the existence of a technology, really look for any solutions to solve problems.

As I live and work, why should I choose to enchain myself with the chains of complication wrought through using AI? There’s a reason why the old adage, “Keep it simple stupid!” is so well-worn.

What Is It with App and Software Developers? Offer a Garbage Product and Make Users Pay a Ransom to Get a Better Product? What Nonsense!

I deleted another app that has been on my Mac for well over 10 years. It is increasingly the story from software and app developers: They are arrogant and often could care less about what their customers actually want.

They start by offering a basically limited functional product and make customers pay for the features they need through additional costs in subscriptions. And in those subscriptions, they also make them pay for bloated features they did not want in the first place.

This arrogance is absolutely amazing! They really think they know better what their users want than their users.

What's more, they offer an initial garbage product, and force RANSOM PAYMENTS for those features the users want in the first place.

You can bet if the app offers a subscription model, they are probably engaging in this practice.

I have deleted two apps that I used for over ten years in recent days for this very reason. 

It seems Tech companies aren't about offering customers solutions anymore: They are about focusing on squeezing as much money out of customers possible through crappy products that can only be less crappy with more money.

When It Comes to AI and Screen Ban Arguments, School Leaders Shouldn't Accept the "It's-Just-a-Tool Argument": You Owe Your Students Much More

What should a school leader think about the brouhaha about screens and screen bans? One thing for sure, they should not allow Ed Tech and tech advocates justify them by using the “it’s just a tool argument.” That is just not true.

In education, the screen/device/app can be the problem. This is because it is much, much more than simply a “tool.” It is designed also for the purposes of those peddling it. 

Tech companies first and foremost have to have users, so in their design, they have to maximize user engagement. Once they have users, they want the users using their product. That’s attention capture.

None of this is a problem, except when getting users always engaged with your product is the main goal and other purposes take a back seat. Then, all design choices are not about utility; they become more about how eyeballs can be captured. That’s where addiction becomes the goal.

The metric becomes the amount of time the user is using the screen/device/app.

That’s where addictive tech design happens, and the screen/device/app becomes more than “just a tool.” It then becomes a distraction from other important aspects of life. Users spend inordinate amounts of time as users, and their behavior starts resembling drug addiction.

That’s what school leaders should be concerned about: the addictive design of screens/devices/apps and banning products or limiting student access to them becomes justified.

The school leaders responsibility lies, not with providing users for companies and eyeballs for their products, but with advocating and protecting their students from device purposes and designs that are not in their students’ best interests.

School leaders should not just dismiss the screen ban as something harmful for their students. They should embrace its discussion as a means to critically question all Ed Tech currently being used in their schools.

Perhaps school leaders should even engage in a Ed Tech audit in their schools by carefully and critically examining each and every screen/device/app in the building. 

-Look at the costs. 

-Assess the results and outcomes of use. 

-Examine each for addictive design features. 

-Carefully study how teachers, students, and staff are using them.

In the end, what school leaders should want to “ban” from their schools are two things: 

1) Uncritical acceptance of all technological solutions. Do extensive homework on your own and do not always rely on what Ed Tech vendors tell you.

2) Screens/Devices/Apps that are more interested in capturing users and attention instead of providing a product that works.

School leaders are in a position to take control of the screen ban efforts by using it to critically purge tech that is not in the interests of their students, and they can make sure companies are more interested in providing learning and teaching tools than addiction machines.

When a School Leader and Teacher Is Guilty of Delivering Student Eyeballs to Ed Tech Companies, That Is a Problem

As an educational leader who eagerly supported bring-your-own-device policies, one-to-one programs, and cell phones in the classroom, I am experiencing guilt.

Why? Because I am afraid that I was part of the Ed Tech trend that mistook the qualities of “engineered addiction” in these devices for “engagement.”

Like many educators, I witnessed the eagerness with which students took up these devices and appeared to use them in the classroom. In fact, they did do some amazing things. I remember many student-created videos that were phenomenal.

Yet, after 2010, I was not aware that one of the big reasons for that eagerness was due to Big Tech purposefully engineering these devices and their apps to capture attention.

In the mid 1990s, when I was the first teacher in my school building to use the internet in instruction, things were quite different. Those were pre-Big Tech days, before the Great Transformation of the web into the commercial garbage dump it is today.

In those days, the internet was not yet a place where the race to capture eyeballs was the goal. No engineered addiction, no commerce-driven sites, and no social media division existed. It was truly a place where information was shared. Connections could be made.

There seemed to be true promise with this internet. My students could use it to connect with the world outside the small town where their school was located. The technology at that time was unmediated by tech companies whose purpose was capture attention for profit.

That web was truly a tool for connection to information and the wider world.

Over time, you know the story. Things changed. But, into the 2000s I still believed in the promise of technology and that the more we got it into the hands of students, the more they could learn and accomplish. With our educational guidance, they could do wonders.

I started to be wrong, because gradually, tech companies began engineering addiction into their platforms. Their goals to provide information and connect became secondary to making money, so attention capture was most important. The products they designed were at odds with how we wanted students to use these technologies.

More and more of my students were starting to show symptoms of “screen-glaze” and it became more and more of a battle to pry their eyeballs loose from the devices.

I thought for a while that kids were kids and it was a simple matter of redirecting students as teachers often had to do with baseball cards, books, and toys. 

But this started to be different when I began to notice an increased hostility and anger when trying to redirect a student from their devices. They fought, and some even accepted suspension for a day or two instead of giving up their device. It was like asking an addict to give up a drug.

Today, Big Tech and Ed Tech has only improved their eyeball capture and addictive technologies. Their goals and incentives are engaging students in USING THEIR PRODUCT first and foremost. That is at the heart of the issue with ed tech in the classroom. That is one reason why there is starting to be demands for screen-time limits.

This is nostalgic and impossible, but if the internet were somehow back in the business of information provider and connector, it would be a better place. The early internet was limited and did not have all the bells and whistles of today, but the problem just might be the bells and whistles in the first place.

When the race to add features and eyeglaze to tech products becomes the goal instead of the original purpose, the tech companies are part of the problem.

In Your Work, Your Leadership, Are You an Exploiter or Nurturer? Your Life, Livelihood Makes It Clear

When it comes to your leadership, your livelihood activity, are you an “exploiter” or a “nurturer”?

In his essay “The Unsettling of America” Wendell Berry writes about these two “kinds of mind” and thinking about them in terms of our current culture of technological and economic obsession is interesting. According to Berry:

Exploiters are specialists, experts. The nurturer is not. They acknowledge their limited knowing.

The exploiter’s standard is efficiency. The nurturer’s standard is care.

The exploiter’s goal is money, profit. The nurturer’s goal is health—the land’s, his own, his family’s, his community’s, his country’s.

Exploiters ask how quickly and how much can the land be made to produce; nurturers ask what is the land’s capacity? How much can it be asked to do without diminishing it?

Exploiters want to earn as much as possible by as little work as possible; the nurturer wants to work as well as possible. For them, efficiency can be sacrificed for good.

The exploiter believes in organization, establishment; the nurturer has faith in human order.

The exploiter serves institutions, organization; the nurturer serves the land, household, community, place.

The exploiter thinks of numbers, quantities, hard facts; the nurturer in terms of character, condition, quality, kind.

Which describes the current EdTech industry and consulting industry? Which captures Big Tech today?

I think it is clear where the AI industry falls here, especially in light of their Data Center projects and the obsession with efficiency. Big tech is more exploiter than nurturer.

Exploiters care more about things and worship efficiency at all costs. Sound familiar? Nurturers care more about life, humanity, people, and well-being.

Your “kind of mind” is betrayed by you you engage in your livelihood and that which you do and advocate for. 

School Leadership Mistake in the 2000s? Evaluating Teachers in Teaching with Technology

The mistake made in 2000s was a school leadership-driven imposition of technology on teachers. 

The mistake was requiring teachers to “demonstrate that they were teaching with technology” in the doctrinally-dictated manner prescribed by EdTech and their so-called experts.

Technology should never have been imposed upon teachers.

It should have never appeared any where in standards for teacher evaluations.

School administrators should have never engaged in so-called policing operations called “classroom walk-throughs” in order to ensure compliance with so-called “teaching with technology.”

This is because technology is simply a tool. The teacher and students should be in charge of whether or not that tool is used.

Technology use by teachers or students should never be a standard or an outcome; it simply should be there if the teacher chooses to use it, and if it is needed.

By imposing technology on teachers and students, perhaps that is why we are now in the era of screen-bans. This is because the emphasis in the 2000s was not teaching and learning or even curriculum, even though the EdTech boosters said it was. It was technology.

The emphasis in the 2000s by EdTech and over-enthusiastic school leaders was THE TECHNOLOGY. It was placed central to learning, and now we know that was the mistake. That’s why there are pressures to take away the tech toys.

Now, AI boosters and educators trying to make a living and careers on a new technology are making the EXACT SAME MISTAKE.

They are putting their shiny new toy, artificial intelligence, ahead of students, ahead of teachers, ahead of curriculum.

These individuals are dumping curriculum and sacrificing everything just to get this new technology an exalted place in the educational institutions.

The end result will be that in 10 to 20 years, we once again will have sacrificed everything in education to exalt another technology.

The sensible thing for school leaders at this point is not to jump on the AI bandwagon fad with both feet. The sensible thing is demand all these individuals to back off.

There is no place in teaching standards, learning standards, or any educational standards for anything AI. Teaching AI is shortsighted and plain educational malpractice.

It is just a tool, that’s it. If it has a legitimate use in education, educators will use it.

If we impose AI on educators, on students, and on curriculum, it will simply be a checkbox, a hoop to jump through, and any use of the technology will be inauthentic and bizarre.

For school leaders, there’s no need to elevate a technology to a place beyond an item in the teaching and learning tool list.