Can information technology ever really reduce workload? Of course not.
I don't claim any originality for this thought, but I was thinking today of my own workload, and how we do students a disservice by not addressing the disadvantages of technology on a personal level.
And why don't we? Because the curriculum does not explicitly require us to.
Take the ICT Programme of Study in England, for example. At Key Stage 3, under the heading of "Impact of technology", it states:
"Exploring how ICT changes the way we live our lives and has significant social, ethical and cultural implications."
Well, you could interpret that on a personal level, but I have never seen that. The treatment it gets is always in terms of broad social issues like (un)employment, new industries, changes in medical practice and so on.
The NETS standards are no better. Apart from a requirement to:
"select and use applications effectively and productively",
there is nothing. And even the criterion cited carries the implication that it has more to do with achieving the task in hand than preserving one's sanity.
The Functional Skills in ICT, which are supposed to be a set of skills that are what you need to master in order to be a fully-functional member of society, has nothing to say on the subject either.
Without personal discipline and skills, computer technology creates more work rather than reduces your workload. It does so in a number of ways:
Firstly, it is so easy to try to perfect the resources we create, there is no natural end point of our endeavours. Now, I speak as someone who would spend hours creating wonderful worksheets, in colour, using different coloured Banda sheets. But changing something always involved a cost-benefit analysis:
"Given the amount of hassle I will have to go through in order to change this question, is the proposed change really that important?"
Sometimes the answer would be "yes", and sometimes "no", but that isn't the point. The point is that the question was actually asked, whereas nowadays you would only ask it once you had already printed off lots of copies, or you were about to fall asleep at the keyboard. Changing something now is, in effect, costless. As any school child studying Economics will tell you, the law of supply and demand predicts that as the price of something gets lower, the demand for it will expand. That is exactly what happens when doing work on a computer.
Secondly, I feel like the "baby" in the song "29 Ways":
"I got 29 ways to make it to my baby's door
I got 29 ways to make it to my baby's door
And if she needs me bad
I can find about two or three more"
I was reading a book on etiquette written in 1834. In it, the author states that when communicating with someone, you should either send your card if the person lives close by, or a letter if they don't. That's just two ways. I can be contacted by:
- Landline phone;
- Landline fax;
- Mobile phone;
- Skype IM;
- Skype phone;
- Twitter;
- Yahoo!;
- Internet voicemail;
- Internet fax;
- Email;
- Comments on my blog;
- Facebook;
- Assorted Ning and other communities and services;
- Snail mail.
Now, don't get me wrong: I'm not complaining. After all, I set these up out of choice, for the most part. Well, actually, it was Hobson's Choice in many cases: if I wasn't contactable quickly and easily, I wouldn't get half the work opportunities I do. Personally, I like it most of the time. In a connected world, you have to be easily connectable to. The challenge is to make sure that we are in charge of our lives, and not victims of it.
My point is this: we need to help students to "wise up" to the sort of world we live in, and help them deal with it.
I know what you're going to say: that with their cell phones, mp3 players, multitasking on Skype, Facebook, MSN and the internet, all whilst watching TV and doing their homework, they can cope with it all better than we can!
Well, I think that is a different issue. It's one thing being able to multitask, and quite another thing knowing how to turn off the deluge and how to prioritise it. In any case, we don't know how their frenetic multitasking will affect young people in the longer term.
It seems to me that the issues are as follows:
- There are more ways to communicate with people, as indicated in my list above.
- People tend to use multiple ways of communicating the same thing. For example, I will often receive a phone call asking me if I received an email. That is using up extra time and energy for no discernible benefit.
- Instant communication methods have made us expect instant responses.
- Being able to always be contactable means that people tend to make themselves more contactable -- even when it ought to be quite acceptable not to be. There have been various studies over the last few years showing that people tend to have their work mobiles on 24/7, even when on holiday.
- Because of the ease with which documents can be changed, there is no natural ceiling on how often or how much they will be changed. It's not just the documents in terms of the physical text, but what they represent: action plans can be changed at the drop of a hat, because it so easy to do so with a few keystrokes.
There are, therefore, things we need to discuss with our students -- and colleagues. For instance:
- What is an acceptable response time for emails?
- Is it physically and mentally healthy to be "always on"?
- Is it even efficient, in terms of the quality of decision-making, to be "always on"?
- What technological ways are there to reduce the communication flow? For example, Friendfeed enables me to keep track of what people I know are doing without bombarding me with data all the time.
- What non-technological options are open to us? For example, one of my bosses had a policy of checking her email only at set times in the day. The rest of the time she turned it off, to avoid being tempted to check it every five minutes.
It may be that our students think it's all fine, and that they all have coping strategies anyway. I just feel that by not even raising these issues we are in some respects not being entirely honest with them.
Or do you think I worry too much? I'd love to hear your opinion on all this.
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