HW#3.2 Saturday's encounters with technology

Thank God for Mobile Phones!

I was doing my Adolescent Development reading (on a laptop) in the car outside my son's soccer game, when I managed to lock myself out. Suffice to say that I managed to get back in, and stay connected to the rest of what was happening thanks to my phone (13 calls in 1 hour).

And to think that prior to 2003 I used to feel that people talking to the cauliflowers in the grocery aisle were pure batty.

What are the small advantages?

The other thing I thought about a lot today was all the assumptions about the availability of, and fluency with, computer hardware and software that are inherent in the course I am doing now. From applying to get into the program, to preparing for it, to participating in it for just over week, I doubt if I have more than 10 pieces of paper as artifacts of this process so far - it is entirely digital. But I do not recall even the briefest of mention of what one needs just to participate in this program in this (digital) regard.

As a person who was last in Graduate School at a time when people who used Gopher and Lynx thought they were cool, this feels like Rip Van Winkle waking up (although now the phrase is "Which Planet have you been on?!")

This dissection was prompted by the intersection of two strands.

The first was from Tiger Coach - who made me think of the inequalities in access to 'Technology' that we are most blind to. Of course there is a Digital Divide, and the haves and have-nots, the immigrants and natives, and all that. But there are also smaller, less noticed inequalities. There's nothing wrong with that per-se. There always will be, that is fact of life.

Which took me back to Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers. Gladwell's point, as I choose to interpret it, is that small cumulative advantages spread out over a lifetime, amount to enormous differences in where people end up. This is like the graphs that investment companies show you, of how 0.5% less in management fees end up being 10s or 100s of thousands of dollars by the time you retire.

What Gladwell says is unremarkable, on the face of it, although he is a good storyteller. (Plus he reads is work really well.) What was interesting to me is that his analyses are necessarily post-hoc. In retrospect one can trace the arc of a person's life and point to the various small but significant advantages that accumulated over the course of their life. But for each of the people/careers he profiles, they could not have been aware of the accumulation of their advantages as they happened.

The same can be said for class, community, culture, nation, or any such grouping. Due to a long series of events certain groupings accumulated outsize advantages that are very hard to break down.

Gladwell goes on to make his suggestions on how we can apply his analysis to education to make the playing field a bit more equitable. But it seems to me that he's addressing those small advantages that we are now aware of.

What about all the other inequities in access that Gladwell's successor will identify three decades from now? Should we, who are committed to Social Justice in education, even worry about them, because, by definition, we cannot know them?