The Way Things Used to Be

Photo courtesy of brandon king on Flickr.com

My husband and I had an interesting conversation the other day.  We had just bought a new net book and were talking about how we "needed" it so that everyone in the house had a laptop (in addition to our desktop computer and 2 smartphones).  The conversation then shifted to our children and how their technological lives are different than our own were.  We realized that some of the skills that we held to importance had been compromised in our children because of technology.  The dialogue continued as we thought of things that may become extinct in our lifetimes because of technology:

1. Phone books.  Everyone has a smartphone.  It's much easier to look up a phone number on your phone than it is to thumb through a phone book.  My younger children would have no idea how to use a phone book.
2. Land lines.  Everyone has a cell phone.  6-year-old children have cell phones.  Who pays extra money to have a land line if they don't need one?  And cell phone numbers aren't published, leading to an even faster demise of the phone book (see #1). 
3. Encyclopedias.  Do they even print those anymore?  Encyclopedia Britannica has recently stopped printing their encyclopedias after publishing them for over 200 years.  I think that the internet has pretty much destroyed the need for printing these cumbersome volumes of information. 
4. Paper dictionaries.  With dictionary apps and Google, who would need to own a dictionary?  One certainly doesn't need a dictionary to find the proper way to spell a word.  With spell check and T9 it's useless.  And without the need for a dictionary why even learn alphabetization?  Other than learning to read, learning the ABC's does little more than help someone find words in a dictionary (or names in a phone book).  Alphabetization is of little use to someone who is just typing a word into a search engine.
5. Books.  The Kindle, Nook, etc. will make paper books seem antiquated.  Why have hundreds of books cluttering shelves and lug around a heavy book when a slim tablet will suffice?
6. Libraries.  Libraries as we know them will be replaced with technology.  The rows of shelved volumes will become rows of computers and other technological aids. 
7. Newspapers.  They are already on the way out.  Readership across the board for newspapers is way down.  It's hard to find a newspaper in America that is actually making money distributing paper copies of the news.  Here is an interesting article about how Online News Readership Overtakes Newspapers from Technolog on msnbc.com.
8. The United States Postal Service.  Email has already tightened the belt on the USPS.  But why wait for something to be sent to you when you can have it RIGHT NOW?  Along with this will be the loss of legible penmanship.  When it is faster and more convenient to type something, why would you ever sit down with a pen and paper to communicate with someone?

There are so many more things that I could list that will meet their demise, but I think you get the point.  With that said, I would like to inform you that I love technology.  I get very excited about the opportunities that it opens for all of humanity.  I also am very nostalgic about things, so I meet this with bittersweet feelings.  I learned to type on an old clackety-clack typewriter, played music on a record player, watched movies on VHS, and called my friends on a rotary phone.  My bubbling excitement for all these new technological advancements is weighted with my sadness for "the ways things used to be."

How will these advancements and opportunities through technology affect my children and the students in my classroom?  I have to stay versed on new technology in order to keep up with them.  I also have open my mind to these things so that I can further understand how the younger generations learn.  I have to remember that they were raised amidst instantaneous information, the knowledge of the world at their fingertips.  They are tuned into a "community in the cloud".  They need to multitask and be entertained.  If I can't keep up with that I surely will not be the most effective teacher that I can be.

This YouTube video is a short discussion about some of the skills that kids are losing and gaining because of technology.  I touched on some of them, and added additional ones in this post. I think that both sides have some interesting points about how children are changing.  I initially thought that it is terrible that kids are losing some of these skills.  The more I thought about it, though, I realized that children these days may not have the skills that older generations held to importance, but they have so many other skills that we never had the opportunity to develop.  With technology children are allowed to do things so much more efficiently than we ever did.  The possibilities for these younger generations are endless because of the tools they have available to them.

 

Video courtesy of YouTube