Tech-Ed Collisions

In the first post related to this topic, I started to think about the impact that lifestreaming may be having on our lives. I was particularly interested in some of the psychological aspects of what might be occuring. For example, are we ’stepping out of the now’ and simply becoming observers of our own lives and not experiencing them to their full potential? Is the way we want to be perceived by others having an impact on what we do and how we would like to be observed behaving?

That post was primarily concerned with the broader aspects of our lives and lifestreaming. Now I would like to look at the impact on our education, our lifelong learning journey. How many of us are on Twitter and regularly receive tweets from others who are pushing out little snippets and highly abbreviated quotes from lectures, conferences, seminars etc that they are attending? Do you do it yourself? I have tried but when I think about it, how was it really helping my development since that was what I was there for?
How much of an impact is tweeting from a lecture theatre really having on other people’s development? After all, those followers are getting mere snippets from an ‘observer’ in a lecture theatre somewhere who is living a different context to them with different understandings - terms, ideas etc may be clarified in the lecture that aren’t passed on by our avid twitterers.

The term ‘deep learning’ often comes up in discussions I hear on the benefits of collaborative learning and ‘constructivist’ approaches to teaching and learning with avid Web 2.0 colleagues but really how much deep learning is taking place by our twitter friends sitting in a lecture theatre tweeting away on their mobile or laptop. Are they absolutely engaged in a (collaborative) learning process or acting as some sort of heavily filtered conduit to a broader audience that itself, is more than likely only passively and intermittently engaged as those tweets briefly flash across their Twitter client along with all manner of inane observations of other partiallly experienced events?
As Professor Barry Schwartz, professor of social action and social theory at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania is quoted as saying in the CNN post ‘Do digital diaries mess up your brain?‘,

…Constant documenting may make people less thoughtful about and engaged in what they’re doing because they are focused on the recording process…

OK, so you’ve attended a lecture or series of lectures and at some point in the future you need to review it - supposedly you really do want to understand some of the important concepts ‘delivered’. What do you do? Rather than taking notes you had posted a bunch of tweets but that was sometime ago in your prolific lifestream, which by its nature is in chronological order - not necessarily the best for what you need to do. If you were lucky you may have used some hashtags but were they related to a concept you are interested in, the subject, the course, the conference hashtag?

Not trying to bag Twitter here but just trying to point out that possibly we are not as immersed as we could be when we are trying to learn. Twitter is after all just one example and there are many others that take us ‘out’ (to an extent) of our learning experiences. We maybe recording it using any number of devices - cameras, phones etc. First-person point-of-view (POV) devices may be an exception here as they interfere less with the experience (ie you don’t have to be consciously engaged in the act of recording as well as learning/experiencing) and a number of educators are experimenting with these devices to support learning and assessment. They do seem quite well suited to supporting some forms of assessment - but that is demonstrating competence or prior learning rather than the learning itself.

As we, as either educators or learners (not that educators are not learners themselves) become more embroiled in technology, it is important that we consider and understand the impact of how we are using that technology and its effect on our learning. We do not want to become mere observers and/or recorders of learning experiences. I am not saying that this sort of thing is a bad thing - merely that we need to be aware of the impact of what we are doing and whether we are really achieving all that we want to. As John Sutter found, it is important not to take on too much and he advises ‘tracking one thing at a time’.
If we are careful about how we go about it, understanding the implications of what we are doing, then ‘lifestreaming’ parts of our education could turn out to be a very useful part of our lifelong learning journey.