Mindfully Digital

I’ve been thinking about footprints…digital footprints.

Footprint—it’s an interesting metaphor for the traces of our lives online. As a metaphor, it speaks to me of the trail we leave behind as we move across and through the networks. It’s looking back at where we’ve been.

Perhaps a more future-looking metaphor might be storytelling. How do we tell our personal and family stories online, and what are our kids learning from us about how to tell their own stories?

I have one friend who started a WordPress blog when his child was born. [Read more…] about Footprints in the digital sand…

Walking on walking,

under foot earth turns.

Streams and mountains never stay the same.

—Gary Snyder, from Mountains and Rivers Without End

In 2017, I tested something I called the TimeDesign Challenge with a small group. It was an 8-week exploration into our relationship with time—and in particular, how technology impacts our time. We noticed our stories about time, mapped our days, and reflected on how effective we felt in getting stuff done—things we really cared about and the day-to-day necessities. We got more designerly in how we approached time, technology, and our intentions. We ran experiments, we assessed, we iterated.

How are you experiencing time these days?  [Read more…] about Streams and mountains never stay the same

We have a great technology…but something is amiss. We need to get it more aligned with the lives we want to live.

—Sherry Turkle

I write a lot about conversation as the vehicle for connection with ourselves, each other, and our world. Holidays and vacations can present an opportunity for deeper conversation and authentic connection. Our usual day-to-day patterns are disrupted a bit, presenting openings for something new to emerge. Often, family members or friends we haven’t seen for a while are visiting, bringing with them the welcomed (and sometimes not-so-welcomed) chance for face-to-face talk. Spontaneous. Unscripted. Surprising. What qualities contribute to deeper conversation?

In her book Reclaiming Conversation, Sherry Turkle presents some compelling research on our use of phones and the impacts on in-person conversation and empathy. [Read more…] about Always on, always on you

I have a strong bias towards conversation as a practice. I believe conversation is at the heart of creating a mindful digital life—conversations with ourselves, with our loved ones, with our world.

You might recall the sentences above from my welcome emails. I write a lot about conversation…

More of us today are having conversations with our world in interactions with “voice assistants” or “intelligent agents”—Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Bixby, Google Assistant, to name a few. In this July, 2017 New York Times article, the writer Penelope Green tells us: “This year, over 25 million Americans will use an Alexa device at least once a month, according to eMarketer…[another] market research company has predicted that by the year 2021, there will be more Alexa-like digital assistants on the planet than humans.”

The Amazon Echo (Alexa) entered my home last year during the December gift-giving season. As an iPhone user for several years, Siri is in my life as well. If not already, I imagine you and your children may be inviting voice assistants into your home. They’re probably already in your car if you have one.

I’m going to crawl out onto a limb here and suggest that we might want to have conversations with each other about how we choose to interact with voice assistants in our environment. [Read more…] about Alexa, can I have a hug?

Let’s move beyond the fake news meme. Here’s why…

…we sought to establish a reasonable bar, a level of performance we hoped was within reach of most middle school, high school, and college students. For example, we would hope that middle school students could distinguish an ad from a news story. By high school, we would hope that students reading about gun laws would notice that a chart came from a gun owners’ political action committee. And, in 2016, we would hope college students, who spend hours each day online, would look beyond a .org URL and ask who’s behind a site that presents only one side of a contentious issue. But in every case and at every level, we were taken aback by students’ lack of preparation.

These words are from the opening paragraphs of the Executive Summary of a report by the Stanford History Education Group, “Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning.” [Read more…] about From Digital Literacy to Critical Digital Literacy

Think about one of the best conversations you’ve had…with yourself.

My best conversations with myself have been intentional—I made the time, chose the space and form, and showed up. But more important, I prepared. I invested a lot of energy in studying and practicing the qualities of creative conversation, beginning with listening.

My last semester in college I did an apprenticeship at a remarkable school. It was a full-day Montessori preschool and an elementary program inspired by the educational philosophies of A. S. Neill and John Holt. This was the early ’70s. The school was founded by parents and had a very active parents community. School decisions were made in a monthly gathering of all the teachers and all the parents called the Committee of the Whole. When you make decisions by consensus, it becomes clear very quickly that listening is a basic conversational skill. [Read more…] about Is that me talking to myself?

The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change, until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.

—R. D. Laing, 1990

I’m noticing in my own life that I don’t have enough time for reflection. I’m talking about a very purposeful type of reflection…I call these purposeful, scheduled “time-withins” Learning Conversations (after the work of a few of my mentors who did breakthrough work in meta-learning or learning how to learn).

What happens when I don’t create the time to reflect? Stress levels go up, worry takes the lead, will power goes out the window, and I’m looking for any old escape button to relieve the pressure (think Facebook scrolling, think media consumption, think ADHD on steroids). Can you relate? Do you think your kids appreciate the need for reflection? Where do they learn that today? When and how do they see you reflecting? [Read more…] about I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date…

Some of you are aware that I started what I’ve called a News-Out on Aug 20 as an exercise in doing a major reset in how I interact with media. On one level it was a survival strategy to manage the volume of news media coming at me in a way that doesn’t sink me. I was definitely capsized on the Info Ocean and was blowing up my flotation vest. Initially I shaped the experiment as a weekend media “retreat” which I extended to two weeks, then eight weeks, then twelve. It became clear very quickly that I’d need a lot more time than a few weeks for a reset. Today I am wrapping up week 12. [Read more…] about Capsized on the Info Ocean—where’s my flotation vest when I need it?