Something that I’ve been reflecting on more and more over the past couple years is the work that I did early in my career which was, in hindsight, misguided.
This video finally spurred me to take a moment to get these thoughts out of my head and into this blog post.
I’ve made a number of mistakes over the course of my life, and one of the ones that is the most complicated to understand and yet has had the most impact on other people is the work I did in the early 2010s to try and push for more technology use in classrooms.
When I was a senior in high school I had an opportunity to go before the county commissioners and make an impassioned plea in support of adopting a 1:1 technology deployment in our local school system, which would impact every single student across the county, from Kindergarten all the way through Grade 12.
At the time I was in love with technology and with computing in general. Who am I kidding — I still am! But at that point in my life I was guilty of a certain naivete. I was naive in part because I was still a teenager, and had years of development and life experience ahead of me. (I still do.) I was naive further, in ways that many of us were, in that I failed to see the political, social, and pedagogical implications of what it might do.
I was really in love with the idea of information freedom, and what access to the collective sum of human knowledge could open up for people who, like me, were living in a rural area and didn’t have access to or exposure with the rest of the world. I also made assumptions about how other people would use technology based on how I was using technology, and I failed to consider that others’ lived experiences were substantially different than my own.
In high school I had my own laptop, and I used it every chance I had. Through most of high school I had a little blue ASUS netbook that I carried around. I wrote every essay and paper on it. I did all my research with it. It had all my MP3s and was my music player that I would listen to after school. I even plugged it into my pickup truck’s aux jack whenever the opportunity arose! I joke that my laptop made it into my senior yearbook more than I did, but that’s a genuine fact.
I also remember what it was like having to lug around three of four giant textbooks in my backpack all day long, and wishing for a future where those could exist in a digital form, and I could spare my back and my sanity by not having to haul those around to every class and every room.
The bottom line is, having that laptop exposed me to knowledge I wouldn’t otherwise have been able to obtain, and opened my horizons and gave me opportunities that someone in my position could hardly dream of. I wanted to give those opportunities to everyone, and I really believed that more access to technology was the solution.
Ultimately, the 1:1 initiative was approved, I got a summer job with the school system helping to roll it out (focusing especially on the Mac systems admin side), and ended up working there for a decade in a mixed capacity of support / sysadmin / teaching work. It was one of the funnest, happiest times in my life.
But right away, some of the sheen began to wear off. I heard complaints from teachers that students were distracted, misbehaving, and addicted to their screens. I saw the financial impact that was passed on to families when students damaged the technology. I saw how so many students needed help and guidance, and turned to their computers to research sensitive topics, only to get flagged on our content monitoring software and punished for it. Looking back, I’m not sure that it was a net benefit.
And now, fifteen years later, although I’m not directly involved in that line of work anymore, I still see news stories and hear about the experiences that students are having. They’re being bullied for things on social media. They’re using ChatGPT to bypass learning how to research, or sharpen their writing skills. They’re losing their attention spans and ability to focus. Their privacy is being eroded. They can’t spot misinformation or falsehoods. Their test scores are dropping year after year.
In the end, my influence was just a small part in a much bigger ecosystem, and the only people directly affected were the students in my local school district. With or without me, the ed tech market was going to explode, and more technology was going to enter the classrooms. Without me these changes may or may not have happened as quickly, but it was a matter of time. This was going to happen either way. I know this because it has happened in every district and in every state across the country.
But still, I feel like we let these kids down. And even though I was just a kid at the time myself, I bear some of that blame. I hope that some of the work I did really did open doors and expand horizons for students. I hope there are others who genuinely benefited and are in a better place because of it. For all the others, I’m sorry for my part in all this.