 Problems.
You could say that our entire existence revolves around fixing them once they come into our conscious awareness. Some are personal, some are not. Most of our problems affect our immediate well-being, otherwise we would not identify them as problems. Sometimes they are inconsequential: a Sudoku puzzle in a book, for example. These are the problems that we create for ourselves and love to solve. Others carry extreme consequences, but we rarely take pause for them. They never became personal.
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 If you have been following along, you'll know that our time to do tactical work on Jade has been limited lately. It is the perfect opportunity for strategic and contemplative work.
A time for a moment of Clarity.  As we go through life, we view the world through our particular lens. This view is uniquely ours and is shaped by our experiences and our perception of those experiences. Accordingly, two people may perceive the same event very differently.
What does this have to do with edtech?  A recurring theme in this blog lately has been distinguishing between what is urgent from what is important. Technology increasingly shifts our focus to the former by providing pleasurable distractions.
I would like to conclude the series of posts with a bit of audience participation. Perhaps you want to move your focus back to what is important.  Our feelings about the present are always out of context. What immediately seems good or bad does not always turn out that way in a week, month, or even a year later.
As we cannot see the future, we lack the full context for the immediate. It is a human curiosity that we shape our impressions by the page of the book we are on rather than waiting until the end of the story. There are, of course, some stories that cannot wait to be fully told before we form an impression. When an objective truth is unavailable, we must act on good faith with what we have in front of us.  There is a fundamental shift in how we interact with technology that has been progressing for a bit more than 15 years now. Shift Sight stands firmly on one side of this shift. Other companies are scrambling to get to the other side by any means possible.
This is a great divide in technology that defines how we interact with gadgets. The implications in schools (and edtech) are especially worrying.  If you follow technology news, you might catch an article or two about the benefits of open-source software. A few cavalier individuals are even on a crusade to open-source all of the software in the world.
There is no such thing as a free lunch. As with most modern technology, we have become too distracted by it to notice the burden imposed by open-source software. It is rather severe.  How we see the world is based on the world that we have experienced. The advice that we give is the advice that we would give ourselves. If someone tells you that "you can't," they are actually saying that "I can't."
We are mirrors. This is not a limitation, but by design. It is nearly impossible to summon something into our consciousness that we have never encountered. If you don't believe me, close your eyes and imagine a color that nobody has ever seen before. Good luck.  Fundamentally, people excel at doing two things. We invent games. We tell stories.
Most of our daily activity can be placed into one of these bins. Even if we are on autopilot while doing repetitive work, we may tell ourselves stories as we think about our past or future. How is technology shaping our stories and games? |
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Ty is a Founder of Shift Sight, LLC. Archives
March 2019
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