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.
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