Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

My 2023 “Tech Cleanse” Has Begun

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Goodbye Twitter. Goodbye Chrome.

Neither was easy.

I was there for early-Twitter, and it was love-hate from the beginning. I loved the ease, the networking, the linking, and, yes, the learning. I hated the fact that I knew blogging in the way that I’d been practicing it for about a decade at that point was done for. “Micro-blogging” didn’t leave space for deep thought, complex ideas, and extended attention. I really regret that I didn’t keep up with my longer-form writing, something I’m trying hard to recapture now.

My break with Twitter has been coming for a while. My Twitter politics addiction in 2016 nearly drove me to therapy. While eduTwitter was always pretty respectful, it’s been feeling lately like metaTwitter is just too much of a toxic stew to remain a part of. Elon didn’t help. So, I’m choosing not to feed that beast any longer, mostly because I don’t see it actually making any of us better. And Mastodon as a replacement? Meh, for how.

On the flip side, my replacement for Chrome, that privacy-killing, tracking and data-collecting browser monster from Big Tech is making me regret not getting off that train much sooner. Arc (arc.net) is a wonderful new browser. Private. Innovative. Pretty intuitive. From a company that has better intents. It has absolutely changed the way I browse and write and interact with the web. I’ve been committing a few minutes a day to diving into its intricacies, and I’m pleasantly surprised on a regular basis. If you have a Mac, give it a shot.

All of this is a part of a path I’m on to step away from technologies that aren’t serving the greater good and my individual wellness and ethics. This year will be one where I really interrogate how I’m contributing to the challenges we’re facing and how I can help mitigate them. So much of my tech life doesn’t feel like it squares with what the world needs right now. So…

My phone is next. (Ugh…)

Is anyone else out there thinking about their tech use through a lens or making themselves and the world a bit healthier?

The Digital Ordinary

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As much as I agree with my friend Chris Lehmann that “technology should be like oxygen: ubiquitous, necessary, and invisible,” we’re still a ways off from all of that. But if I forced you to choose the one of those three adjectives that we’re struggling with the most in schools, which would you select?

I think I might go with “necessary.” Seriously, how much of our practice in classrooms to we absolutely need technology to accomplish? Looking stuff up on the Google has pretty much replaced traditional research, no doubt. But beyond that? Is technology necessary to create the things we ask kids to create? (It might be more so if we dealt with things kids asked to create.) We could still do grades, take attendance, all the stuff the typical LMS stuff serves up. (We did all that before the LMS, remember.) And it’s nice to collaborate on Google Docs, but we did that before the Internet as well. Digital textbooks? To me, that’s all pretty ordinary stuff.

6844396458_38ef8c8e50_bTechnology should allow us to do the extraordinary, right? To connect live or asynchronously with people from all over the world. To publish stuff to a global audience. To make things, programs, artifacts, inventions that can’t be made in the analog world. To write in multimedia. To remix and create in new ways. To do “extra” stuff that you can’t do without the technology. That should be the bar.

I’m reminded of that when people start talking about Chromebooks and one to one programs. The price of Chromebooks can make the technology ubiquitous. And the low maintenance part can make it nearly invisible (though that has more to do with culture than technology.) And those are good steps.

What’s interesting is when I ask people who currently have MacBooks or full-fledged Windows laptops whether they would swap that device for a Chromebook, no one ever volunteers. That suggests that we know what we’re giving kids isn’t extraordinary. We’re pretty much making the ordinary digital.

Seriously, would love people to prove me wrong about that.

(Image credit: Ant Standring)