Before using any technology in your work ask what benefits it will bring. Will it:
- Reduce unnecessary cognitive load
- Support a range of learning styles and modes such as asynchrony
- Expand learning beyond the classroom
- Encourage independent learning, self reflection and critique
- Allow persistence, indexing and retrieving of personal progress
Luckily we have such a technology. It is called the book.
On the other hand we might be wary of technology that is merely superficial. Might it:
- Allow only a simulation of understanding
- Damage valued capabilities such as memory, internal dialogue
- Encourage dependence on unreliable, unverifiable source
- Make people insufferable
That is what Socrates imagined to be the effect of another turbulent innovation, writing.
“this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.” Plato
So also the pocket calculator and the search engine. We can guess Socrates’ thoughts on the Antikythera Mechanism. Or perhaps not. There might be an appearance of omniscience from scanning the first page of Google hits but everyone can see how you got there.
Moveable-type books were revolutionary. They shook the authority of the Church. They helped vernacular tongues push Latin aside, leading to renewed national identities and national politics. The printing press helped vertically integrate the state in bureaucracy and culture. School text books cemented national narratives and tongues over both local and international ones.
I like to go back to go forward, meaning humanity is constantly grappling with the same dilemmas in different form. Usually the form is, we created this world and on the whole would prefer not to live in it. Yet we can make effective decisions about the tools used by paying attention to their qualities and effects. A horror of Socrates is lock-in or path dependance. You cannot un-invent writing. That’s probably a good trade given that is why we know of him at all. Other dependent qualities can be worrying like corporate lock in or software and hardware reliance on geopolitical rivals. Tell Socrates all writing will now be done by Sparta. Social media platforms can be more present where students are, growing networks and access but make learning part of the attention economy. There, student attention is sliced, diced and commodified. An echo chamber eliminates internal and external dialogue.
You might think self hosting fixes it, and it helps in some areas, at the cost of significant investment of time on maintenance. I took a few years shifting my stack and it is fun and maddening, an ever evolving challenge. I have my own linux server with among other services, vaultwarden (password), audiobookshelf (podcasts /audiobooks), nextcloud (files), immich (photos), ollama (ai), restic (backup). I like challenges and then sometimes I like Spotify curated playlists.
We can though recreate some of these qualities in class, such as by sandbox learning. Socrates worried that writing destroyed memory. We worry social media destroys the attention needed for reading. Do they? Maybe reading need not be passive and we can encourage practices like annotation to make it active. A Zotero shared pdf would make it a shared practice.
Tech changes how we exist and present in physical and virtual space. Reading a book is a different physical experience than an ebook. Writing and typing inscribe differently. Funny side-quest – since becoming disabled I cannot do either and now have to hold more of my mental map in my head. Socrates would appreciate it. Humanity has always been at war with, and too in love with, its tools. Cool evaluation and reflection will get us through.
Plato. Phaedrus. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. Internet Archive, 2005.
