Question 83 of 365: What does it mean to be device free?

We are dependent upon our computers for our livelihoods and our entertainment. We are dependent upon our cell phones for communication and connection. We are dependent upon dozens of technologies in our daily lives but if we were more accurate with this dependency, we are dependent upon specific devices. The computer that you use is yours, it is an extension of you to a great extent. So it isn’t just a computer, but rather YOUR computer. And the cell phone, is your blackberry or iPhone or Android device. You have tricked these things out just the way you like them, and it matters that you have done this because it makes you feel ownership over them. It makes them feel like they have been watched over and cultivated for your personal use rather than just anyone who can pick them up.

If you lost those particular devices, you might feel a sense of loss that is strange and compelling. It might feel like your right arm is gone or that you have lost a part of your history because of what was on that device. It is this weird notion that we are that connected to our technology, but I would like to make the case that this type of attachment may be ending.

Even as we are heading into the world of amazingly tactile electronics and personal experiences with those devices, I believe that our goal should be to achieve total device freedom. We should stop seeing our devices as the personalized entities that are capable of bringing us joy and agony through the process of creating with those tools. It is my belief that we need to be looking for any way that we can to achieve a total lack of ownership from any given device that we may have purchased or been gifted.

I come to this conclusion out of necessity, I suppose. Yesterday, my computer crashed. It was an absolute failure, not something that could be fixed by any amount of hacking or troubleshooting. The operating system just refused to move beyond the first 30 lines of operation in the command line view. It is what you might call a dead computer.

And I felt nothing. While I wasn’t super thrilled about having to use a different machine while this one goes into the shop, I really didn’t feel that I had lost anything too important. In fact, I felt free. I felt as though anything that I could get in my hands would allow me to continue the work that I had started that morning when my computer was working just fine.

I realized in that moment that there is literally nothing I can’t do in the cloud.

My photos are on Flickr. My movies are on Youtube. My files are on Google Docs. My contacts are in Gmail and Gist. My audio and image editing are on Aviary. My ideas are in WordPress. My music is on Last.fm. My community is in Twitter. My bookmarks are on Delicious.

Hyperlinks are my hard-drive.

While some would claim that this isn’t good, that I am just asking for one of these services to go under and then I would feel the loss that I should have felt without my computer, but I believe that these services too are inconsequential. I can move from one to another without thinking twice. I can import and export. I can backup and restore. But, true freedom is in knowing that no single device holds “me” within it.

In fact, the only thing that holds all of these services together is my identity. And that isn’t wrapped up in any single device. While I like my Macbook Pro, I don’t need it to have my identity with me. While gmail is my happy home for most of my official communication, I could filter and funnel and work around any slippage of that service.

There was a time when my devices owned me, but that is no longer the case. It is thanks to the cloud, a better understanding of how to store things for better access and simply knowing myself well enough to believe recreating the world around me every day is possible.

So, I think that we should strive for this type of freedom. We should be free to have things break, free to lose huge chunks of data from those formerly important devices, and free to reimagine how we interact with those things that we interact with.

I am not my computer, and that is kind of nice.

When a phone isn’t a phone

I wrote the draft of this yesterday, so I’m pretty sure it still counts for my writing a blog post every day this year goal.

I realized something quite major for me today. I really hate picking up the phone. In fact, I have become afraid of it. It is threatening to me.

Every time I pick up my cell phone, someone needs me to work on something or to help solve an issue that could easily be worked through by simply googling the topic or with a few e-mail exchanges (or better yet, working through a forum so that the issues that we resolve can be shared out with others).

I guess I have known this for a while, but I am stating it now: Voice is inefficent.

Voice is beautiful and personal, but when all it conveys is information then it is just not worth the breath it takes to produce. We should save our voices for oratory and humor. We should save our voices for storytelling and nuanced debate. But for mere information, let’s use email or txt. Let’s use discussion forums. Let’s blog and edit wikis.

So, I guess I don’t just mean “Stop calling me.” I mean, communicate with me.

I mean choose the right tool for the right job. Becuase right now, I am just using the voice feature on my phone as a voicemail box. That’s all. Is that wrong?

The Ripe Environment: Backchannels exist.

Whether we provide students or teachers with a backchannel, one will form. So long as there is more than one voice in a learning environment, the need to be heard will be undeniable.

Students may pass notes or they may text message in their pockets.

Teachers may point to a highlighted passage or simply make a face of disgust.

These things are not meant to stay in the background. They are essential, and as such, must be elevated to their rightful place in the classroom. The backchannel must influence the front-channel and must become the front-channel if the discussion and learning going on there is more important.

But, before I get too ahead of myself, let me set my definition of a backchannel:

A backchannel is the running commentary (critiques on, questions about, distractions from, references for, resources under) the dominant information stream. This dominant stream could be a lecture, discussion, video, or any other attention getting activity that would normally occupy the majority of the learners.

This may sound like quite a distraction. Why should we bring the note passers into the discussion? Why should we encourage distraction? Because it is how we learn.

Kelly Christopherson does a really great job of highlighting how a backchannel actually functions in a Ripe Environment, but I think the hardest thing to understand about a backchannel is balencing the two things that inherently have to go on within an classroom, but are not always so center stage. He says it this way:

Watching the crowd made me realize that we have a long way to go as educators. Many people in the room seemed to be having difficulty with the two things going on at once. Maybe that is why so many educators become frustrated with the use of cellphones or laptops in their classes; they don’t see how the two things can be going on at once.

The rapid fire writing down of resources, texts, or quotations is all well and good during a class or PD session, but what about questioning those things. When does that happen? If all learning is conversational and requires relationships, when are those relationships born and when do those conversations occur? They occur during the backchannel, if and only if one is set up and is relevant to those in the audience.

The experience that Kelly describes above is one that happens far too often. Those who do not find the backchannel relevant write it off as distracting, or worse, destructive. They want the front-channel to be the only channel, even though their brains and pens are commenting non-stopped on what is being said. We need to teach the value of commentary, fact-checking and questioning. We need to construct The Ripe Environment for the backchannel.