This week’s post is the third in a series of posts reflecting on the book Instant: The Story of Polaroid by Christopher Bonanos. If you’re interested, you can find the first two posts here and here.  This third post is also about my reflections on attending a wonderful, thought-provoking “un-conference” called Edcamp Hamilton this past weekend. For those new to my blog, thanks for reading, and for my stalwart regulars, thanks for coming back! For the past three years or so I have been writing weekend posts on my adventures travelling across Canada (usually through work) and the resulting images and stories that flow out of and shape my thinking. Often, the weekly photo and its accompanying story has to do with one of three interests:  photography, education, or technology. In today’s post, all three intersect. I love it when that happens!

First, let’s start with the photo above. I took it this past Sunday on a walk through High Park in Toronto. As you can see, the cherry blossoms were at their magnificent height and I was in photographer’s nirvana. I had with me my “serious camera,” the Canon 7D. My settings were on automatic to start but I found that my lens quickly grew confused on what to focus: the tiny, perfectly formed flowers in the foreground or the sea of luscious pink-clad trees in the background? A happy predicament!  So I switched to manual focus and took the shot above, a compromise perhaps or the best of both worlds?

What does this have to do with instant gratification (thanks to Princess Leia’s quote above) and Edcamp Hamilton? I find that like most crowd-sourced “un-conferences” (I have attended several and wrote about my last experience here), many topics influence each other with common threads weaving throughout the day. The thread that I’m pulling at today is around digital distraction. Many educators are struggling with the desire to use technology effectively to support, enhance or extend classroom instruction without losing their students to the variety of ways that technology can easily distract or detract from the lesson’s desired outcome. My ever-thoughtful professional learning network on this day debated, discussed and tried to find resolution (pardon the pun) to the double-edged sword that is technology in the classroom and it’s lure of instant information at our fingertips.

Perhaps the most widely circulated debate around digital distraction started with Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, and Clay Shirky, author of Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. In back-to-back editorials in The Wall Street Journal in support of their book’s theses in June 2010, each author duked it out over whether the Internet is making us “Smarter” or “Dumber.” Carr argues that the various distractions inherent in reading on-line divides our attention and stops us from making the deeper associations needed to understand and remember what we have read or experienced. He uses a variety of published research to back up this claim that, due to our reliance on the Internet for information “we are becoming, in a word, shallower.” Recent brain research in fact does back up Carr’s claim and you can read about this research here and here. (And yes, I know it is ironic that I’m embedding the very links that Carr identifies as distractors…how long would this post be otherwise??). Shirky, on the other hand, argues that the Internet is in fact making us smarter. He argues that ideas have spread rapidly across the centuries, from Gutenberg’s printing press to today’s digital media. The only difference is that the Internet and digital publishing platforms make it easier and faster to spread ideas today, freeing our brains and energy to harness the Internet to make positive change. This extra time is what he refers to as cognitive surplus. He uses Wikipedia, Ushahidi (the Kenyan crisis mapping tool), and PatientsLikeMe as examples of social good empowered by the Internet.

I can feel my metaphorical camera lens trying to focus on the merits of each argument right now! While I do worry about the impact of our digital distractions (I stopped twice while writing this post to check Twitter…), I also feel hopeful that our thoughtful, passionate and connected educators will overcome the distractions to help our students harness the power of technology to affect positive change in an ever more complex world that needs their help.

If you would like to read more about the Shirky vs Carr debate, you can read their respective arguments here and here. I would also urge you to read the following Edcamp Hamilton blog   by Carlo Fusco, and by Andrew Campbell here. Thanks to Jane Mitchinson for also sharing this compelling video on the topic of partial attention/multi-tasking and for sharing her expertise in this field.

If you would like to learn more about how awesome Edcamps are in general, please read two more reflections from Edcamp Hamilton by David Fife here and Mark Carbone here, and this post by Emily Looser from Edcamp Boston, also held on Saturday. Thanks to the organizers of and educators who attended Edcamp Hamilton for welcoming me so warmly into such a thoughtful, respectful and engaged circle of passionate learners on a sunny Saturday in May.