Face to Face
It’s interesting, actually encouraging, that with all the modern ways we have available to us to connect with each other, we still like 
Last Tuesday a colleague and I received 10 principals from Denmark who were interested in our system of schooling and examples of educational technology. We toured three schools visiting five classrooms. They were able to have a great experience talking to teachers and students about their use of iPads to transform learning, various immersive uses of technology, technology used to support English as a subject, etc. We also visited one of our grade 9/10 gifted classes to listen to kids share stories and highlight skills that were missing. My colleague and I enjoyed swapping stories with the Denmark Principals about funding, curriculum, pedagogy, staff development, and the differences between our respective societies. This was a rewarding face to face experience. I wonder if one day this type of experience will be replicable with new, today unknown, digital environments?
On Friday a friend / colleague and I arranged to meet at a Starbucks halfway between our respective places of work. We fought some traffic, expended gasoline, used valuable time, all to meet face to face. We had a rewarding time catching up, sharing stories,
Quick sidebar… when I first got my iPad 2 almost a year ago, I Face Timed with a Principal colleague around 6 at night. He connected with his iPhone. His family had just finished up dinner so he took me on a virtual tour of his kitchen, and introduced me to his kids and wife. It was like I was there in the room… well, not really but it was pretty cool. It was my first experience with this app. One of the classrooms we took the Denmark Principals to visit, had iPads for every student. Some of the students showed us how they use Face Time to help each other at night with their homework. That’s pretty useful. Imagine that they could digitally connect face to face so that they were in essence “together” and able to directly work on their homework and learn from each other, not just chat through a video conference session?
In our schools, every school day it seems, students congregate in clusters of 18 – 30 in rooms that fit about 32 people. Our students are expected to sit in rows, around tables, or in various configurations for 40 – 80 minutes at a time. Perhaps they are listening to a scintillating lecture, watching video clips, or observing their teacher project screen after screen of valuable content. Maybe their teacher is more technically up-to-date and is touching the white board to manipulate content. The bell rings and kids 
Is face to face as we now expect it, a sacred innate human need or will there be valid alternatives in the future? Online meetings or 
learning using web tools where presenters share video clips, Powerpoints, lecture, and people vote and chat in the back channel are not what I would call relevant alternatives. I don’t know about you but when I engage in these pseudo online spaces, I often check out and work on email or something else. No, I am imaging something much more immersive. A few posts I’ve written about what I think might come in the future include:
- Welcome to your life in 2020 (read paragraph on K12)
- Stephanie’s First Day of School in 2020
- Tyler’s Loving School in 2016
What we view as SciFi has a way of coming true in our lifetime… I was at ISTE this past June and visited a booth where the vendor had a desktop 3D printer. I previously wrote about the potential of 3D printing and thinking that maybe by 2020 this would be a household tool. I also saw a 3D scanner that scans objects and renders them in 3D CAD drawings that can be sent to the 3D printer. Sound suspiciously like a precursor to the replicator of Star Trek? I was obviously not being imaginative enough! Think about augmented reality and how the world in front of you is beginning to blend in with the world of information through your mobile phones or Google Glasses. Perhaps one day a holodeck like experience will be possible. If that is true, face to face as we now know it will not require being in the same physical space and time. The Face Time we now experience on our iPads will be an enveloping experience where we actually feel like we’re there together. Digital replacement of face to face will have a profound impact on our work, our learning, on teaching, on schools, on coffee chats, on offices and office buildings. We will flock to take advantage of this efficient and engaging new way. But, will it completely replace face to face as we now experience it? Should it? I say NO! We are human and there is something wired into us to require being physically present. I think it would be psychologically unhealthy to replace this completely. I see a more balanced future where we co-exist with our technology in old and new ways. We will find that balance because our humanity will depend on being balanced. Even today we should seek balance with our technology. We should not use technology all the time for everything just because we can or it can. We need to thoughtfully choose when and where to engage digitally versus personally.
So, what do you think? Is it feasible that face to face as we now know it will be replaced by our technology? Do you think it can happen to you?
Face to face. Hmmm...an interesting concept these days given the billions of dollars not only spent on cosmetics, but now on men's products as well. When we consider the industries around botox, lyposuction, plastic surgery, fashion, dieting, body sculpting programs, and the mandatory "dressing for success" industry for administrators, it causes me to wonder if the person I'm meeting isn't more a perception than a reality. Of course these questions become more of an issue in Distributed Learning where I would suggest a significant portion of the students don't meet either the physical and/or social dynamics required for positive face to face interactions with their peers. They tend to be grateful for opportunities to interact in a virtual environment where they are freed from much of the social baggage that haunts our physical "representations." It's a well known phenonmenon in virtual communities that people tend to be "more real" there than they are in real life (RL). To the point of this becoming a two-edged sword in fact.
ReplyDeleteOne can of course argue the downside of not being able to read a person's face if it is not a perfect replication, but really, how many of us are trained experts in that field anyway. Perhaps needing to listen more closely to what is being said even more than compensates. All I know, is that I have a far more personal relationship with the students I meet virtually than the ones I met in classrooms (even though I was known for being highly relational). It's an irony that will be interesting to explore further.
I am about to launch a platform where all the teachers of Heritage Christian Online School will be able to meet with their students in virtual learning spaces on a daily basis. This can be individually, or with classes of 100 or more. The goal is to have students and staff involved in learning communities where everyone helps everyone else. Within the next few weeks we hope to have a "Crash the Net" beach party where over 300 grade 10, 11 and 12 students will meet for an assembly on a beach, and then participate in some large group activities on our new virtual island. They should be able to converse with each other but be muted when the speaker is speaking.
I think the future you speak of is upon us. Like the 3D printer you speak of, it's not a replicator (yet), but it does much of what you might want a replicator to do. There's no need to wait for the replicator to come along. Similarly, there are now virtual environments that can house entire communities of learners of up to 8000 individuals. The fact that many are finding these communities to be much more productive and personal ways of learning will not likely be overlooked for long.
P.S. Would be interested in hearing the Danish reaction when you showed them Atlantis Remixed. Did they get my information?
Hey Gord, as usual you always have something interesting and challenging to say! Although I agree with you that some ppl may prefer virtual to real life and perhaps are more "real" with each other in virtual, I'm not so sure that's entirely healthy if that's how they interact the majority of the time. Until the virtual environments can more fully replicate a human encounter, I'd say balance time in virtual with real. IE, virtual today, in my opinion, is good enough to supplement real.
DeleteInteresting your comment about listening closely. I totally agree there but... the facial expression (I actually think we are born experts in this) is important to properly interpret what is said with words. We may not be scientists in this but we are pretty intuitive in piecing together faces with words and interpreting what is said and meant.
The beach party sounds cool - let me know how it goes.
The challenge with 3D is the limited options for material input and complexity within objects. For example to print a working cell phone, there would need to be quite a granular print of a large variety of inputs. To print a T-shirt, shoes, functional calendar, an LCD monitor, a tablet, or a mug... we have a ways to go. But reality will match up with theory at some point.
I didn't share Atlantis Remixed with the Danish Principals.
As always, thanks for stopping by.