For the past three years, ISB Middle School students and faculty have supported After the Wave through fundraising endeavors, particularly through a student club (Grades 6 - 8) and through an annual Grade 7 fundraiser. This year, we wanted to design a fundraiser in which the students would give of themselves.
Last year, after reading, Information Rich and Attention Poor, we had a successful Socratic Seminar with our students about the ways in which the internet has affected our ability to focus, to take our time to learn and whether our society, including its educational practices, is starting to,"value speed over depth." As one of my students wrote, "The internet especially is making us less patient because when we look something up on the internet, we get information right away, but only the part that we want to know. We don’t understand or read the whole story, so our “surrounding” knowledge, as I will call it, has gone down."
After reading Matt Richtel's article, Growing Up Digital: Wired For Distraction in the New York Times, we had an idea. We would have another Socratic Seminar based on issues of focus, distraction and learning. The students would read excerpts from both articles, only this time, instead of just using these texts as their bases for discussion, they would also perform some action research of their own.
Students would raise money for the After the Wave Foundation by going without digital communication for 24 hours (if they could). They would get sponsors to pledge money either per hour or as a lump sum for their participation. Our goal was to raise enough to sponsor 4 students (32,000 baht) for After the Wave. Our students would be making a small sacrifice and giving of themselves for someone else; they would also be documenting their own relationships with digital devices and participating in a Socratic Seminar where they used their own experiences as text and reflected upon their own histories with the internet, video games and social networking.
On December 15, at 7:20 am the After The Wave Digital Challenge began. In the end, we raised over 86,000 baht. Many students went for 24 hours and many did not. On the 16th, we had an interesting Socratic Seminar where some students confessed to video game addictions that prevented them from doing their homework and caused huge rifts between them and their parents. Some students realized how much more time they would have if they didn't always get distracted while they were trying to do something else. Some students blamed parents and said that they should make more rules (and enforce them) with their children and that, "instead of saying they care for their children, they must act, making up rules for a routine schedule, maintaining balance."
In blog posts the next day, students articulated their thoughts, opinions and feelings:
It’s probably different for other people, but my biggest challenge for the technology-free day was boredom. After sitting around reading the same book over and over again, you just feel like you want to pick something up, hurl it so it flies over the horizon, then run after it until you find it and hurl it back to where it came from. To put it shortly, you just want to actually DO something other than sit around twiddling your thumbs. To some people, I guess that doing something means to do push-ups or start jogging around the track at school, but to me, it basically means going on the computer and logging into Facebook or maybe opening up Call of Duty or some other video game that occupies your time until your mom orders you out of your room for dinner. (12 hours).
Does digital technology actually take us further from reality? Yes; people have told their experiences and some say how they became more imaginative when they didn’t use technology for a whole day. Someone said that because they were using technology so much, they hadn't even noticed their new fish. (24 hours)
It was about 8:00 when I was about to break apart, I couldn’t take it any longer; I decided to just go to sleep early. I went for 24 hours with no technology... I can’t imagine going without technology for a week I think it might destroy me. (24 hours)
They had insights about social networking:
Most of the students decided that after reading the articles, watching the video and audio slideshow, taking the Digital Challenge and participating in a Socratic Seminar that each one of us needed to learn how to moderate our time ourselves and that schools could help by teaching us how to use technology to maximize learning. Most seemed to emphasize the idea of true communication and time well spent while ALSO continuing to teach students with older, slower and less distracting communication or media such as books, discussions, and lectures/workshops/mini-lessons.
I must confess that I only made it 21 hours in the challenge. By 5 o'clock the next morning, I couldn't or didn't want to keep going. I needed my internet news, my email and my music. I learned a lot about how 'busy' I really am. With so much extra time on my hands for 24 hours, I didn't know what to do with myself.
I will let the students have the last word:
One thing I didn’t get to talk about today was about how I got my sponsors. It is interesting how I got many of my sponsors by using technology. I sent a message to all my contacts on my phone about the challenge and how I needed sponsors and I also posted a post on Facebook about it. Many of my sponsors knew about the challenge by these ways and they helped sponsor me.(24 hours)
