Hand Me The Right Man (I meant to type ‘tool’; was that a Freudian slip? Are they interchangeable?)

In our current information economy — and particularly as the educational landscape explodes with people sharing online resources — the thing that is going to distinguish the next type of influencer and educator is their ability to curate. To curate for a particular function, focus, purpose, mindset, a student type, an achievement level. To understand that, in the truest possible sense, the way they’re teaching right now was unfathomable at the time they went to school.

We are preparing students for jobs we don’t know how they work, whether they’ll exist, or what they’ll be called. Spend any amount of time with AI and you’ll feel the specific vertigo of that in your own former coursework. It’s a striking difference. We’re not just living in a changed world. We’re living in a new one.

Tomorrow belongs to the screen-shotters

Know what I think is going to matter as much or more than content knowledge for tomorrow’s students and workers? Being able to keep track of a huge variety of sources and marshal information with correct attribution. Do you know what you typed in that search bar? How can your colleague tweak it, improve it, refine it, narrow it — if you can’t quite trace how you got to this amazing site?

Tomorrow belongs to the screen-shotters. The Terms-of-Service-weighers. Someone who knows which apps notify your recipient when you snap a pic. Keeping receipts — the digital embodiment of the physical tracking record, the paper trail, the proof. Just like writing originated. Which seems horribly unromantic somehow.

Since I’m a journal writer, an original 1990s fan of Harriet the Spy, and grew up in the scrapbooking mecca of Utah: I have receipts. I’m all middle class paper. (Reference to Ruby Payne, who will make more sense if you know her work and a lot of sense if you don’t.)

Never odd or even

I don’t think we’re at a point to pick one or the other — digital reading or physical paper. The message is to use both, in concert, for intentional purposes. Take some notes on that Chemistry unit. List the characters in Macbeth to glance at while the speaker reads lines across your screen. The act of pen to paper — or pencil, something grippy and move-ish and different from your phone — matters in ways that typing doesn’t replicate.

Here’s what we lose when everything stays digital: the processing time. The physical limitation of how quickly someone can write slows them down to the right pace for thinking, for producing coherent and meaningful statements. You can rush through typing. You can have something read to you at 1.5x speed. You can have Elmo narrate it. All of these are legitimate ways to access information — and none of them replace the particular cognitive work that happens when your hand is moving slower than your thoughts and has to catch up.

The truth is we still need to ask: what physical activities would take place for students in this learning context, and what would their purpose be? That question is what separates a deliberately designed online course from one where someone just uploaded their slides and called it asynchronous.

The right tool is the one that matches the task. The right person is the one who knows the difference.

Whether those are interchangeable is, I’ll admit, still an open question.