Getting Technoskeptical with Dan Krutka

In which Dan discusses the nature of technology with Dan Krutka, an associate professor at the University of North Texas, a prolific academic writer, and one of the founders of Civics of Technology, a project and online community founded on something Dan calls technoskepticism. 

Whether you're an educator or just someone who enjoys thinking about how technology impacts our lives, this conversation is for you. After exploring the question of phones in schools, Dan and Dan unpack technoskepticism and why and how we (and our students) can think more deeply about our interaction with technology.

Mentioned:
Civics of Technology
"What Relationships Do We Want with Technology?", Harvard Educational Review by Pleasants, Krutka, Nichols
"Anti-Social Media: Teaching Slow Responses to Fast Media", Social Education by Krutka
The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt
The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
The works of Ruha Benjamin
A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload by Cal Newport
The Social Dilemma

Music by Lights in LA

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Um, would you rather go to your CD store and look at their curation of CDs, right? So this is my youth, um, what the way I listen to music, um, and maybe talk to your go with your friends, talk about different things, look through it. There's a little serendipity in that you come across artists you didn't know or that you'd heard someone else mention. Or would you rather have an algorithm recommend stuff to you, right? Um, and I'm not saying there's not potential benefits and drawbacks, but usually there's there's always something lost in this. And the question we have to ask ourselves is are we sure it's better?

SPEAKER_00 0:47

Welcome to What's the Big Idea? I'm your host, Dan Carney. My head's been spinning recently with thoughts of technology. Most of those thoughts have been on two things phones and AI. Phones are again top of my mind after reading Jonathan Haidt's new book, The Anxious Generation. As a parent and a teacher, I'm struck by Haidt's firm position that phones and the medias that phones can access need to be kept away from young people for as long as possible. Meanwhile, we educators are in the very, very early stages of grappling with the implications of AI on our work, from the use and misuse of ChatGPT and its competitors to the deluge of AI for education platforms like Magic School, which are just dying to sell us their products. This episode I kind of stumbled into as I was thinking about these issues. This episode is more broadly about technology. We teach about tech, we teach how to use tech, we teach with tech, but how often do we teach students how to think about technology? I mean, hell, how often do we think about technology? Considering the moral, societal, and human implications of technology has long been the work of Dan Krutka. He's an associate professor at the University of North Texas, a prolific academic writer, and one of the founders of Civics of Technology, a project and online community founded on something Dan calls technoskepticism. His work and this conversation got me considering the very nature of what we teach in a way that I haven't in a long time. It goes way beyond phones and AI and honestly, even digital technology. This conversation and the incredible resources you'll hear us discuss are about human development and the cost of progress. Be sure to check out the show notes for links. I hope you enjoy.

SPEAKER_01 2:58

So I was a social studies teacher, taught, you know, like many social studies teachers, all the subjects, right? I taught uh um US history, government, uh psychology, sociology. So I taught it all at that time, but I've been in um teacher ed at the university level um for you know a little over 10 years now. And um, so you know, I would get to work with uh you know uh teacher candidates coming through their program and then also graduate students who are coming back to education for different purposes. So um that that's kind of the on the surface biography.

SPEAKER_00 3:31

Excellent. And uh want to thank you for taking the time to join me. Originally I had reached out to you because I've been fascinated by the debate over uh phones in schools. Um and I saw your commentary on it somewhere and reached out, but it became pretty clear as I kind of dug into your work, your extensive writing and your uh projects and podcasting, that we have a lot of other things we can talk about. So I thought maybe we could start with phones in schools as a portal into um what you call technoskepticism and the way technology is taught in schools today. How's that sound?

SPEAKER_01 4:11

Yeah, that sounds great. Um in short, I think we're very reactive to technology in US schools, right? We don't often have like a very um proactive approach to teaching about technology. So each new thing that pops up, whenever a problem pops up, it's like it's we're always responding, right? And so one of our um we have a our Civics of technology project is something, it's a grassroots organization. We don't have any funding or anything. It's just um a bunch of um education academics and educators who just feel like we're not doing enough to teach about technology issues in a highly technological society. It's just like this thing that's kind of like missing from our curriculum in a lot of ways. And of course, we see all the ramifications of this, right? We see news stories about the fate, the, you know, Wall Street Journal's Facebook files come out, and we see that, for example, young adolescent girls in particular are suffering from depression and anxiety. But what are we doing about it in our curriculum? And so our approach in our civics of tech community among scholars is we've been advocating for this idea of technoskepticism that students should have kind of a disposition and a knowledge base that helps them be skeptical of technological claims and intended purposes. Just the idea that, you know, technologies do incredible things for us, but they don't just do what the intended benefits are, right? They have other effects on our life that are actually a little harder to uncover. And so we think giving students reflective time in schools to investigate those issues and think about them can really be helpful in them making, you know, decisions that help them live, you know, both as individuals and as communities more wisely with technology. So, you know, we have futures and lives that are enriching and democratic and just. So I think phones fit into that.

SPEAKER_00 6:03

Yeah, I'm curious. Uh so I mean, I as a teacher, I've been into this for a while, thinking about independent schools with different policies and recently thinking more about it because of Jonathan Heidt's new book, The Anxious Generation. And, you know, he's definitely staking out this position that phones just need to be completely removed from schools. You know, and he and he talks about um, you know, schools kind of kind of play around the edges with improving student mental health and academics, but actually one big thing they could do is eliminate phones and and they'll see improvement in all types of areas. And, you know, there's a lot of teachers I know that think this as well that would agree with that. What do you make of his claim that this is actually one concrete thing schools could do that would improve student mental health and academics?

SPEAKER_01 6:52

I don't I don't think he's totally wrong on the you know the evidence base that's there for thinking that removing phones could have positive effects. I don't think he has thought through the realities of what this would look like in schools, right? Um so there's a there's several different things. The first is for a lot of schools that have adopted all kinds of policies, and all of a sudden what you're doing is you're putting teachers in the position to police and enforce these policies that are devices that are very like integral parts of young people's lives, right? Um, a lot of young people recognize the problems with phones, they feel it, but it's just at that age, right? When you're in when you're in middle school, when you're in high school, like if that's where your friends are, that's gonna be of of primary importance. And um, unless we get everybody off of phones, it's difficult. So I do understand, and he's certainly not the only one that's providing this evidence. Um, uh Jean Twang, who's written a lot on generations, her work has kind of been saying this for a little while, right? That we notice these um kind of problems in society that came about right when smartphone adoption rose, and there's hardly it's hard to find other explanations. Um so my my perspective is that um we need to be educational about how we do this. I'm not against his his proposal. I think a school could do this, but if you're not accompanying that with thoughtful curriculum and discussions, then I think you're missing the opportunity because if the students just feel like it's this punitive policy, my phones aren't allowed, then are they really developing the habits of mind to translate those benefits of taking breaks from your phone from technology outside of school?

SPEAKER_00 8:34

That's interesting because I have been at and seen schools that have the old when you show up, you turn the phone in and it lives in a little locker for the day. And you know, there's still students that will kind of try to get around. Bring a bring a burner phone. I think that yeah, exactly, or just you know, hide it in their back. Oh, it's at home. But but I think you're right though, that that second piece is largely, if not completely absent, um, having thoughtful discussions. And I think what what I was so struck by in in looking at your work, you know, I was reading a uh a piece that you wrote about called What Relationships Do We Want with Technology Towards Skepticism in Schools. And you make this case that schools largely talk about how technology works or how to use technology. And and I and I think there's also maybe a component where we talk about general media literacy, how do you sort of evaluate sources that you see? But you're calling for something actually even deeper and how technology changes the way we interact with the world. And I know you've kind of already touched on this, but just in sort of stark terms, what does technoskepticism mean to you?

SPEAKER_01 9:45

Yeah, well, first I'll say we're we're all cyborgs, right? Like, I mean, look at us doing this call, right? We've got little amplifiers in our ears, you know, you've got glasses that are amplifying your eyesight. Of course, we have technologies that change our cognition, right? Our ability to see microscopic things or to see um, you know, uh stars far away from us. So we have all these technologies that really change not just our ability to do things, but they often can change our thinking. Um, you know, if you want to get into this kind of line of scholarship, I think the most accessible book that I really always recommend is Nicholas Carr's The Shallows. Um, and the subtitle of that book is What the Internet, What Is the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains? Um, and he starts off the book talking about how he used to be a deep reader and he noticed he couldn't concentrate anymore, right? And I think a lot of people have felt that. And so the point is, is it's not like it's not like the internet came around and just gave us more information. Well, first, it it, you know, the the instrumental view is it here's more information, that's good, right? The other, what we've realized is, oh, wait, there's also a lot of misinformation and a lot of junk and actually getting to the stuff that's worthwhile and meaningful. Um, the internet doesn't actually make that any easier. We have a lot to sort through. But the other thing is it actually can change our our cognitive, our habits can change our the way we perceive things and the way we actually think about things. And so for him, he realized that he became a very shallow reader. He was worried he became a shallower thinker. And that makes sense when you think about the way that the internet is structured with nodes and hyperlinks and all these things that just send you from you know from one Wikipedia page to another one, to a YouTube video to another one. And so you're just always bouncing around instead of staying in this kind of deeper focus. Um, and so, but that can then be the way you think about things. It can change things more, but it's hard to realize that, right? Like it's like a fish in water. You you don't realize it's happening to you. Um, and this is the same thing that happens with language. We don't even realize how much language shapes the way we think, right? The words, the word options we have, um, for example, just make it so that we think about things in certain ways. Um, and so so technoskepticism really is about um slowing down, you know, it's I I always want to say it's not just reducing it to a cost-benefit analysis. That's a little bit of it, right? But there's also deeper stuff that like technology changes like really integral aspects of our lives, the flow of our lives, right? Um, I for I'll give you an example. I'm very much uh um, you know, have taken a kind of a stand against cars. I haven't had a car since 2017, it's just not which is not easy, whether you're in Los Angeles or whether you're in North Texas. Um and I've tried, I've run across Los Angeles in many parts of it without sidewalks, you know, the infrastructure for walking. But the car doesn't just um help us go from point A to point B. We've many ways built our society around cars, right? It is sprawled out our society, so it's not walkable.

SPEAKER_00 12:44

This is this is perfect segue here because you're talking about technoskepticism and the listener might be tempted to think that the techno in that word is internet, phones, computers, but you're talking about all technology. And in your work, in your project, you have some great lesson plan examples. This is the Civics of technology project that I want to get into, but but one of them is about cars, deconstructing or unraveling, unspooling what a car means with how we interact with the world. And maybe you could talk, you could talk more about that. Uh, how a car is a perfect example of technoskepticism about something that we've just kind of accepted. We don't really think about it in that way.

SPEAKER_01 13:25

Yeah, and I I point out here because a lot of people they hear technoskepticism and they they actually like hear what they hear is techno pessimism, which I we all live with technology. Like we are technological beings, right? That is like one of actually the things that makes us the most human in many ways. The point is, is like making sure that we're still running things, right? That that the actually the thing we're not getting caught up in systems where we no longer are doing the things that that make human lives better. And so with so I I do a lot of lessons on older technologies. Um I do it, I have an elementary lesson I teach to our pre-service teachers uh that focuses on the electric light, right? It's again, seemingly very mundane for most people. If you if you know about it, you may know that there's you know arguments in cities about light pollution and other things. But I I challenge them to kind of just think about, you know, how does what are the possible you know downsides of electric lighting? Of course the the benefits are obvious, but they quickly realize, oh my gosh, it like without electric lighting and electricity, I maybe would get a full night's sleep more regularly because I would maybe live within the rhythm of you know, of the sunrise and the daylight and the nighttime. Um and so they realized electric lighting and electricity had a huge effect on on like you know human health and mental health because sleep is so integral to that. They also realized like when you can light everywhere, it it pushes humans away from each other, even in a household, right? If you have lights in every room, everyone can go to every room. The same thing with like heating and cooling systems, right? If you have that around your house, you can go to every room. Back in the day, you have to have to sit by the light with your family. You just have to sit by the fire or the stove, like with your family. So it's not to say I want to go back to those things, but to recognize what's important to me. You know what I mean? Um, and you know, think just think about my relationship with those. So again, I I use cars as a common example. And I've kind of touched on it, but it builds with other technologies. You think of web mapping technologies, cars and web mapping, and I mean by that Google Maps and Apple Maps and things like that. They're about getting you to the destination. And they really are good at bypassing everything in between. You know, now you don't even need to know the names of streets, you can drive past communities, right? Like it's this, it's a different way of thinking about travel. And I tell people when I got rid of my car and I started biking and walking everywhere, you see so much more. You experience it. I highly recommend if you're a regular car driver, one route you do regularly, go walk it and notice all the little things you don't you don't see, right? Um, and it's a different experience. You feel a sense of connection to the place, feel connection to people. And so that's why that's one of the reasons I started doing that. That's not to say you have to get rid of your car, but let's take some time to think about it and make sure we're consciously making decisions about how we want our transportation technologies to support our lives.

SPEAKER_00 16:15

Yeah, you write that technoskepticism is not anti-technology in the same way that an art critic is not anti-art. And more on that technology, like even the technologies of the past that we just don't even think about in those ways. You write, at its core, technoskeptical thinking requires individuals to regard technologies as more than value neutral tools.

SPEAKER_01 16:39

We have a way of thinking about technology, we can just use it for good or bad. And if you want to go to the current technologies, right, you'll always hear this from the Silicon Valley bros who are who are pitching their products, right? When people bring up, hey, I'm concerned that your open AI is causing this problem in society, they'll be like, I trust humans to make good decisions. And the reality is we know technology nudges towards certain directions, right? Um if if if you give me a technology that does something, um it's I'm and it's very usable, it's likely it's gonna make me more likely to do it. So it's not saying people don't have agency, we do, but there can be profound changes. And so technologies, you have to think of them as having their own biases, right? I like to even like ask students to think, pretend like technologies do have agency. What are they trying to get you to do? What do they value, right? Cars value speed, they value space. They need a lot of space so they can always get a spot um, you know, to park or sleep, you know, take a nap or sleep wherever they need to. Um they need little, they need little car hotels, also known as parking garages, right? To like store them. So they take up a lot of space that makes it harder to have like, you know, human sense, human walkable communities, right, that are been on a human scale. So that's what we mean. And by the way, I also should give credit. Um, all of these ideas have been developed in community, right? With the Civics of Tech Project, Marie Heath is my is a core partner, and with the technoskeptical article that you mentioned, um, Jacob Pleasance at the University of Oklahoma and um Phil Nichols at Baylor University both were really integral in us helping work through these ideas together.

SPEAKER_00 18:13

And one of the technologies I was really tripping out on this, one of the technologies you break down on the civics of tech is the clock. And it you know, one of the one of the best parts about having this podcast is just like getting to discover new things, you know, like oh I'm gonna interview this person, let me dig into their work, and then wow, okay. But I have to say though, like civic technology, just for the listener right now, they need to go check this out. Like, this is definitely like on my informal pyramid of cool shit I've discovered doing this podcast. This website is really like in up at the top. How did you and your team develop this? What what's what's the goal, the purpose? The link will be in the show notes for the listener because there is just so much great thinking and resources to unpack there. But if you could kind of give us the the skinny on this project.

SPEAKER_01 19:03

Yeah, and there's a lot on the website. It's also a community. Um, we have monthly tech talks you can join on Zoom where we with no agenda, we just get on and talk about things. We're we're thinking about technology. You can come in and just say, I'd love to hear what other people think. We have book clubs. Um, I actually our next book club is the first time we've had a throwback. We're actually reading Frankenstein by Mary Shelley as our next one. We usually, our last, our last book, for example. Yeah, our last book, for example, was um we read uh You Could Actually Pick Any Book by Ruha Benjamin, who's a really great thinker out of Princeton. Um we had we read Joy Bollamweini's book, Unmasking AI, which is really cool. So we read a lot of books um and stuff like that. So there's a lot of things to do. We do have a conference also in August. We're accepting proposals. It's all online, all free. But um, so this really the whole organization came from um Marie Heath and I. Marie's at uh um Loyola University in in Baltimore, Maryland, and we've been working together on stuff and we were going to ed tech conferences. And honestly, we were just a little dissatisfied with the discussions around technology. I mean, we were just going to sessions where there's like, it's like gamify, you know, education and do this about it and use Google in your classrooms, and no one was bringing up like critical perspectives about anything, right? Like Google invented this whole economic model called surveillance capitalism and has been sued by states for not respecting youth data, right? We at least have to talk about it. We I'm not saying you shouldn't use Google. I do still use some of Google's tools, but like that has to be part of like our discussion. And it was just absent at these conferences. So we felt there was a uh, you know, kind of a void that was was missing. And so we've we basically founded Civics of Tech to fill that.

SPEAKER_00 20:47

Can I yeah, just pause you there first for a second? Why do you think that is? I mean, I I agree that that is definitely the lane that ed tech drives in nearly all the time. Why do you think that is?

SPEAKER_01 20:58

It's a good question. Um, I don't I don't know the answer. Neil Postman wrote a famous book in 1992. Neil Postman wrote a couple books um that are well known. One was in 1985 about television called Amusing Ourselves to Death. Um, and then he wrote a book in '92 called Technopoly. And he very much makes the case that that Americans are like more technophilic than the rest of the world, right? Like that we see techno, we're very technology solutionists. Um I don't know if this is kind of the kind of inventor capitalist drive. I even see this a lot again with discussions of innovation, um, which by the way was a term that's not always had a purely positive connotation, but now it's like we just want everyone to be innovators. Um, but I worry a little bit about like the again the critical side of that. We want innovations that make the world better and better for people also who aren't like you, which is the problem with technology developed in Silicon Valley. It often reflects the people who made it too often and ignores other people.

SPEAKER_00 21:58

Yeah. I just was actually. Reading this morning, the Rand Corporation put out a report about kind of how civics has been muscled out of curriculums around the country, um, largely because of um our obsession with STEM and the related what you just talked about, the innovation, the design, create, and entrepreneurship related to technology. But I cut you off earlier, sorry. So you had gone to conferences, you had this sort of disillusionment with ed tech, and then what happened?

SPEAKER_01 22:32

Yeah. So Marie and I just got together and we thought about what would an organization that addressed this stuff look like. And so we we said, well, I think we need a website. So, you know, we start we started with a website. If you go to our site, again, civics of technology.org, you'll find we kind of tried to create a motto that like really hit on what we were trying to do. So the motto we came up with was technologies are not neutral, and neither are the societies into which they are introduced. As technology continues encroaching in our lives, how can we advance technology education for just futures? Um, and so we use technology education there a little different. You'll sometimes see that term used in VoTech um a little bit. They'll use it, but we're using it again about like making technology like part of our inquiry, right? We think about um deeply about things like how the music algorithm is like comparable. I always say that one of the best ways to think about technology is to compare it to other technologies and just think about what they brought, right? Um, would you rather go to your CD store and look at their curation of CDs, right? So this is my youth, um, what the way I listen to music. Might might as well. And um, and maybe talk to your go with your friends, talk about different things, look through it. There's a little serendipity in that you come across artists you didn't know or that you'd heard someone else mention, or would you rather have an algorithm recommend stuff to you, right? Um and I'm not saying there's not potential benefits and drawbacks, but usually there's there's always something lost in this. And the question we have to ask ourselves is are we sure it's better than than the older thing? You know, um, I've I've I like to also just rant about like just silly technologies that are not that important. I'm going, I I one of the worst inventions to me is these motion sensor um you know uh hand uh like the hand wash washers, yeah, to get like I how many people are walking to three different sinks and like airports or whatever because the first three didn't work. And I do get like there's probably the idea behind that was it was gonna reduce water, you know, waste and things like that. And you know, I'm sensitive to it, but man, they don't work a lot.

SPEAKER_00 24:32

I I've been thinking in other contexts recently about just the economic concept of opportunity cost. Technology gives us so many opportunities, so many choices. What costs, what trade-off as a result of the choices that we make, you know, in the classroom, out in our daily lives, seems to be pretty relevant to what you're doing with your project.

SPEAKER_01 24:55

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and if you're um, I'm not sure how it is for teachers, but at the academic level, like email is a good opera example, right? Um, I had somebody recently, I I have a very much um think that we need a lot more restraint in email, right? Uh so um when in my organization, I really advocated a lot for people like really being thoughtful about how and when to use email, when to use it, when not to, not to just use it mindlessly, so that we're all just sitting at computers, spending our lives replying to each other all day, trying to solve complex problems. But the reality is that um, you know, prior to email, there's a uh an interesting tidbit um in Cal Newport wrote a book. He's a he's really big on digital mindfulness. And he wrote a book called A World Without Email a few years ago. And he starts by talking about when I think it was IBM first uh introduced email into their office, they kind of like tried to see like how many how it affected messaging, and they realized it resulted in almost an immediate like seven times increase in the number of messages that were sent. Right. So the point being that the technology didn't just allow for you to communicate, it like it greatly increased the amount of communication and how much of that is needed, right? Like, would we be better with a little bit less? And so, you know, um, there's a lot of technology that I'm I'm again, I'm I'm a cyborg that's very used to a lot of my technology. I don't want to go back to you know 7,000 years ago without some of the modern comforts. But a lot of the other things, does it really make us happier? Right? We have these, there's a there's a famous quote, one of my favorite activities on our site is the quote activity site. You can find it on our curriculum page. Um, all kinds of, we've been collecting all kinds of good quotes from from different thinkers and people from over time. And it's a great way to get students, and I use it as a gallery walk. You put the quotes around the room, let students like write on them and um think through them. And one of the quotes that is one of the most famous quotes about technology is from Thoreau. Um, and uh he said, you know, um, our inventions are want to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end. You know, basically meaning that, yes, this is like a technological advancement, but it doesn't make our lives any better, right? Our lives aren't really improved by it. And we sometimes interlink like technological advancement with social advancement or social progress. And they're not, we need to take those two back apart and analyze it.

SPEAKER_00 27:29

Yeah, you wrote somewhere I read uh that an analysis of social studies curriculum, for example, that in an entire US history curriculum, the only time technology is ever acknowledged as possibly having a downside was the atomic bomb used in Japan. And in every other instance, technology is just said, well, that that it was better for society. It just was an improvement and improvement and improvement and improvement. And without sort of that critical lens. Do you think like the time in which we as humans come to accept the technology as inevitable is shrinking? I mean, I wonder if if we were to go back and when new technologies were introduced hundreds, decades ago, if there's a longer adjustment period, whereas now there's such a torrent of new things coming at us. I wonder if we're just accepting them as just inevitable in reality more quickly.

SPEAKER_01 28:24

Well, they're coming at us really fast. And they they yeah, they we've never had it like this, right? I mean, you used to have like generations and they still caused upheaval. Um, I was at a conference, we did our uh recently we did a presentation on our whole technoskeptical thing, and a guy came and talked to us, and he's he said, um, he's just well, they they introduced books and like you know, that was caused a little problems, and but everyone was fine. And I was like, well, I I mean, I don't think the people who died in the wars that resulted from books leading to this, you know, the the Protestant Reformation like would agree with you, right? The thing is, is a lot of people also who are into tech don't know their history very well. There's this there's this clip I use um from there if you The Social Dilemma is a documentary that that um came out. It's it's got a lot of good stuff in it. Tristan Harris did it, but Tristan Harris doesn't have like a uh like humanities background. And there's this line where he's like, it's not like everyone got upset when the bicycle came out. And I'm like, that's exactly what happened, actually. It was there were concerns about gender, there was concerns about mobility, there was concerns about race, right? There was all these things that did happen. And so the point is technologies do cause things and they end up with winners and losers. And sometimes you're just saying everyone ended up fine because you're only focusing on the winners of that technological change. And so um, so we just need to recognize that um, you know, there there's a there's a variety, it's not just always reject or accept technology. There's a lot of things, and what seems to happen recently, I've noticed, is a technology comes out, we don't think about it very hard, right? So let's see, let's take Twitter. I don't know if you remember, I remember when Twitter came out, I was like, what is this? And like people mocked it. They're like, what am I gonna do? Share my lunch with you, right? Okay, fast forward five years. Oh, Twitter actually is responsible for democracy coming to the Middle East, right? That was the narrative. Five years later, Twitter is now responsible for fascism coming to the world, right? And so the point is, is like we need to recognize when Twitter comes out that it actually can be more than what is just intended and what you imagine. We have to think more deeply so that we don't get five or 10 years down and realize we've made all these mistakes, people have been harmed. You know what I mean? And because a lot of times we do start to pull back and start to try to figure out how to live with that. And that's what you're seeing with phones now, is we the it took a while. There's a lot of kids that are not doing well because we just didn't think through having all information in your hand all the time and access to everyone, might not be like good for humans, especially adolescents. And so now we're wrestling with this and trying to figure out solutions, and um, that's I think that's what we need to do. We just need to start doing it earlier.

SPEAKER_00 31:05

It does feel like there was that brief uh, I don't know, golden age. It was like 2010-ish, when it was the iPad came out and and Khan Academy, and you know, pretty soon you had things like Duolingo. And there just was this moment when it seemed like technology was truly going to transform education, right? Personalized learning. And I think I don't know, I feel like looking back now, we can safely say that did not happen. Uh we got some cool tools out of it, but that didn't happen. But but in the in the education space, you mentioned on in in the project specifics of technology, there's curriculum, and there's some really cool curriculum. How did you approach that in developing really thoughtful, practical um lessons, more like units, really? They're pretty they're deep for educators.

SPEAKER_01 31:57

Yeah, it was just um it was organic. Some of the stuff were lessons we'd already started to develop before the project started, and so we now had a place to put them. Um, and so we we have a couple frameworks on there. One is we have critical questions you can ask about technologies past and present, and those um are derived from a Neil Postman 1998 talk that he gave to religious leaders, and you can find the talk on there. And it's great. So, like with that, my suggestion is if you really want to think deeply about technology and say, and I'm a social studies, I was a social studies teacher, I think I mentioned earlier. So, so if you like have a social studies curriculum and you're like, okay, there's not much about technology, I want to go deeper. You can, the first kind of big technology that comes up in your curriculum, you could use those questions with it. Of course, there's gonna be some learning how to use them in scaffolding. They work really well with like small groups, give everyone one of the questions and then talk about it. Uh well, guess what? Once they learn those questions and understand them, then you can do use them repeatedly throughout the course. So um, you know, when railroads pop up or when the telegraph pops up or whatever it is, you can like come back to those questions to have students think deeply. Um, so we have that. We have the what we call the technoskeptical iceberg, which is like looking at just different ways to think about technology, like political level, who makes decisions about technology, uh, uh an individual and social level, and then also um like a tech technical level, right? And so we we have those kind of frameworks, and then the rest of the curriculum are just things we've come up with. Um, you know, some of it has been developed by doc students, some of it just interested partners in our project. And so it's just happened. Um, one new thing we just got up on the site that we haven't really advertised yet is uh there's a doctoral student, um, Ali Thrall at Baylor, who read uh this this famous 1983 book, More Work for Mother. It was really kind of like this first feminist uh look at like the effects of technology. And the thesis of the book is that um these labor-saving devices that were developed, um, they didn't actually reduce the labor that women had to do. Oftentimes, what it did is a couple things. Historically, actually, the family had all at children and then you know, men and women had taken on all the responsibilities of the household. What it did is technology tended to take away the responsibilities of kids and men and left the responsibilities of women. And then later, what it did is technology started shifting expectations for life, right? So, for example, notions of cleanliness really shifted post civil, post-uh-World War II to where your house is supposed to be spotless. This is kind of a new way of thinking about cleanliness. Um, and uh, and so Ali Thrall read that book and developed a um a unit that that like helps to translate it to middle school students. And so we'll be having that one of our blog posts, which I should mention that's the best way to keep up with everything is that we have a weekly um our news, you can sign up for our newsletter. We do a weekly, every Sunday we send out uh new blog posts on different things, and we always have our updates about things coming up.

SPEAKER_00 34:47

I I I love the approach to the curriculum you've developed. It's it's it enriches already existing curriculum. I think so often I can speak for social studies, you know, it it topics are presented very flatly, two-dimensionally in our curriculum, and this is a great way of enhancing and getting students to think critically about these technologies. Just to kind of segue here in our last few minutes here to classroom practices. You've written about slow responses that can sort of help us combat the fast world that we all live in. What are some of those ways that teachers can approach teaching and learning in our insanely uh vast technological world?

SPEAKER_01 35:32

Yeah, we all we all need to take a deep breath, right? Um I and I say this because you know, I was a kid who had ADHD in school. Um, I I think social media and and phones were they were not made for someone like me, right? Like as like I want to just check things all the time. I want to do that, and I also want to be distracted. And so um, yeah, the article you're referencing was called Anti-Social Media, Teaching Slow Responses to Fast Media. And this comes from some scholarship out of a field called Media Ecology, where they talk about anti-environments. And kind of the point is that we have things in our lives that are in the foreground and things that are in the background. And what they were really, especially regarding technology and the point of this line of research and area was bringing a lot of things from the background to the front. And so when we get used to the way our lives are structured on social media, the way that um, you know, our lives are, you know, sometimes our own validations of ourselves can be determined by the number of likes, the number of, you know, reposts on something, uh, is that thinking about those things that you do online, what does it look like to do the same things offline, right? So what is it that you're actually doing online? Um, are you trying to keep up with friends? Are you, you know, trying to learn more about your profession or something like that? And so the point is not to say that those necessarily are bad things, although you should stop and evaluate. Does this, is this making me happier? I'm I've been off, you know, all the Facebook products. Mark Zuckerberg, I finally couldn't take it at his his uh his BS press conferences for every problem where he apologized. He has this whole thing. I don't know if most people have noticed that he does a this apology and it sounds like it's that he's got it down really good, but he if you pay attention, he does the same one every time. We should have anticipated this, we're gonna do better, but then it's the exact same thing. So I finally got off of it. And there are times when I miss things about it. I wish I did see updates from some people, but the trade-offs weren't worth it. You know what I mean? Being on that every day takes me out of the present that the people I'm with. And I noticed myself that I would get distracted and not pay attention to people in my life that, you know, if they were gone tomorrow, all I'd want is more time with them. And so what am I doing like in their presence, like being distracted by my phone? For so for me, it wasn't the right fit. So I talk about in schools what teachers can do is ask students to think about things they do on social media. Or if you're a social studies teacher and you're thinking about making change, students may think about starting a social media campaign as one of their first things. Well, let's look at how people did it in the past, let's weigh those and let's kind of think about like um the quality of those experiences. So it's really getting to the core of the things you're trying to do. Uh, Marie Heath and I wrote a lesson that compared the um the 2017 Women's March to the 1950s and 60s civil rights movement. And we used primary documents to do that. And some of the big things you notice is that in the women's march um in 2017, they um the first thing that happened was the March. In the civil rights movement, one of the last things that happened, of course, the civil rights movement is ongoing right to the present. It's but that that period, one of the last things that happens, it took years and years of building up. It took years of people going to meetings with their neighborhood. And and being in person builds like strong ties to other human beings and and um you know makes it more likely that you're going to uh you know be able to make change and persist in the face of challenges. Um, whereas the the you know, the with the women's march, people could show up for a march when they were angry. Are they going to keep doing the work? And I think there's good evidence that there wasn't the same kind of resolve when when challenges came up. So I think we just need to show students what life can look like offline.

SPEAKER_00 39:20

I like that. The the women's march seems to be a uh an analogy in a lot of ways to just the technologies we have today, things that took time to build up to. There's an app now that can do that for you instantly, and and what's the trade-off, as you as you mentioned. Dan, I want to thank you so much for taking the time. I'm gonna link a bunch of your scholarly articles and of course your project in the show notes so everyone can check it out and uh love your thoughtful approach to all of this. And uh, I know a lot of teachers will greatly appreciate uh digging into these materials. Thanks so much.

SPEAKER_01 39:53

Yeah, and thanks thanks to you and thanks to all the teachers out there, right? Like you all are are doing the work every day, and I'm so appreciative and in admiration of teachers. Um it's such an it's such a beautiful job, I always think, being in a classroom. I've always said, what a gift to get a classroom and a group of students to walk in here and get to spend time with them. So I hope you're I know it doesn't always feel like that every day. That it doesn't feel magical every day. Um, but uh I hope you do find still find that joy. And if you were getting a little burnout, I hope you have a great summer.

SPEAKER_00 40:24

Big thanks to Dan Krutke for joining me on the show. Honestly, the first thing I did when I hung up with Dan or signed off with Dan, whatever we call it when we're talking online, is begin thinking about what a technology in American history uh unit might look like in my class. I teach American history and what might a broad-based conceptual unit on the impact of technology on American history look like. And the Civics of Technology projects got lots of incredible units and lessons that all work in that sort of way. What's been the impact of technology on our lives and how we interact with the natural world and with each other? Um, and as I said in the interview, you really gotta check this stuff out. And if nothing else, see how you can pull pieces into what you're already doing. And if you're listening and you're not even an educator, CivicSec Technology is worth checking out just for some thoughtful um ideas and prompts and blog posts, and uh, you know, they've got a recent blog post that is sort of like the um the book you heard Dan mention, the shallows about our attention span and the shortening of that attention span that humans are experiencing. As always, I welcome comments and questions on Twitter and threads and X at Big Idea Ed. Thanks for checking out this episode, which I think will be the uh last one until after the summer. Summer break is here. What's the big idea? It takes a break. Um thanks as always for listening, really appreciate it. See you in a few months.