Category: Social Change

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Wrapped in Cotton Wool

As a parent, it’s a fine line we walk sometimes in knowing where the boundaries are for your kids. We want to protect them from danger and shield them from hurt. At the same time, we need to allow them to experience the world and learn to interact with it in meaningful ways. This paradox of safety versus experience is a tricky balance to get right, but I’m convinced that we are probably the most overprotective generation of parents in history. A recent post here listed a number of tongue-in-cheek example of how much we seem to overreact to things that would have been much less of a drama a few years ago. How many of you went out playing all day when you were a kid, and the only rule was to be home by dark? No “Call me when you get there to let me know you arrived ok”… just “Bye dear, have fun playing!”

This video from the TED Talks series, called “5 Dangerous Things you should let your Children do” makes a similar observation that maybe we need to just lighten up a bit on our kids. Take a look…


In our schools I find we are developing the same, if not worse, overprotective behaviours. My last school insisted on having staff members walking the children across the road after school (it’s a high school!) – I found this laughable… we have them in class all day teaching them to be mature and independent thinkers and then we won’t let them cross a street without assistance. Our excursion (field trip) program became impossibly hard to work with over the past few years due to all the excessive safety regulations and the need to “guarantee” a safe environment outside the school. You can never get a total guarantee that a situation will be 100% safe – of course you want it to be as safe as possible – but when you start to compromise the creation of situations and environments in which to learn because there may be a small risk involved… I don’t know, that just seems silly to me. Life has sharp edges. Deal with it.

No one wants to see children get hurt, that’s for certain. Regardless of whether your role is that of teacher or parent, I’m sure we all want to see our children stay safe. My own daughter was bitten on the face by a dog a few years ago and the feeling of sheer panic and distress I felt as a parent as I looked down as the blood streaming out of the huge gash torn in her cheek was an indescribable anguish. But would I say to her to now stay away from all dogs? No way. She loves dogs. She’s fallen off a bike and skinned her leg a few times, but that doesn’t mean she should never ride a bike again. In the process of living, sometimes you’ll get a bit knocked around. That, quite literally, is life.

Kids – just like adults – need to occasionally go through some of the painful parts of life if they are to experience the wonder of what it means to live.

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Coming soon to a classroom near you

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/Dp4qe3Ishhw#" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Coming soon. This little girl. And millions more like her. Curious. Smart. And not afraid of technology.

Let me rephrase that… Not only is she just “not afraid” of technology, she will expect to grow up in a world where technology comes in the form of easy-to-use devices that just work seamlessly to let her do things. She represents a generation of children for whom access to such technology is as basic as access to air, food and water. Look at her as she plays with this device… she didn’t read an instruction manual, she isn’t waiting for a training session in how to use it. As she grows up she won’t necessarily know or care how these things works, only that they lets her do the things she wants to do. She interacts with technology but probably doesn’t even think of it as interacting with technology.

When this little girl gets to school in just a few short years will she walk into a classroom where technology devices like this are an accepted tool in the learning process, or a classroom where they are banned? Will she be working in an environment where technologies are used as seamless and transparent tools for learning, or an environment where she has to go to the computer lab for her one hour of computers each week? Will her teachers start teaching her about technology by getting her to “do a PowerPoint” or type a letter using Word, or will they give her tasks that can be solved using collaborative communication technologies in innovative and creative ways. Will school for this little girl be an interesting and vibrant place which she is excited to attend, or will she become a student for whom school is a boring and unavoidable interruption to her day?

Perhaps the bigger question is, will you be excited or intimidated to have this little girl in your class? Because she is coming whether we are ready for her or not…

Thanks to Kim Cofino for twittering about this video.

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Privacy or Openness. A shift in values?

While catching up on my Tweets tonight I noticed one from @shareski (and swooned over by @speters!) pointing out that Twitter made a cameo appearance on CSI, as shown in the video below…

It’s always interesting to see a less mainstream technology such as Twitter showing up in a very mainstream place like a top rating TV show… it’s sort of like being a teenager and seeing your dad wearing the same brand of clothing as you… You just sort of get the feeling that he’s only doing it to appear cool…

It seems to me that seeing Twitter on CSI signals a recognition of that technology, sort of the two ends of the long tail coming face to face for a moment. It’s like reading a novel where the main character is a webdesigner or a podcaster, rather than a lawyer or an accountant.

I’ve never watched CSI so I don’t know who they two characters are, but I really liked the exchange between them in this scene where they are looking through the victim’s Twitter page for clues. As they browse the page, one guys comments that because the victim was a blogger she may have left a clue amongst her tweets, and with a slightly sarcastic tone he says “Some people just don’t value privacy.”

His partner retorts that “They don’t expect privacy. They VALUE openness.”

His colleague snorts back… “Whatever.”

Listening to this exchange made me think about why some people are maybe less enthusiastic about embracing web 2.0 technologies. Whether they realise it on a conscious level or not, perhaps for many it really is about an idealogical struggle between two world views. Between valuing privacy or valuing openness. Many of our kids today seem to value openness more than they value privacy. Perhaps this gives an insight into why they are so willing to connect and share, so ready to engage in social networking practices, so willing to make connections online… perhaps they are growing up with a completely different mindset about the value of openness versus the importance of privacy.

As society’s values change it can create a shift in our ability to see things from a new perspective. My parents generation generally valued things like thrift, savings, hard work, stability, personal sacrifice, and yes, probably privacy. That’s quite a different picture I get of many kids today, where they seem to value things that are almost antithetical – living for the now, spending and materialism, flexibility, what’s-in-it-for-me, community and openness.

As an educator I have to keep reminding myself that there has been some fundamental changes in what my kids value compared to what my parents taught me to value. While I don’t want to put a blanket statement around this and make silly sweeping statement about “all kids today”, I think there is certainly some truth to the idea that there HAS been an underlying shift in values that cause our kids to see the world through a sightly different lens than we do.

And even more importantly, we need to make sure our response to this difference is not just “Whatever.”

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