Halloween, Texting, Facebook and Blogging...

Last night was Halloween.  I was so bummed because as a blogger, I had a great opportunity.  A ring on the door and as I opened it, a girl was texting while holding her bag out to me. 


I regret not having that photo of the texting trick or treater to post for you today.

So, this image was fresh in my mind when I ran across a post on Facebook where was thinking about this and checked in on a friend who said their daughter texted 4,180 times last month. 

If you do the math on this it's an insane amount of texting.  Something like a text every 6 minutes throughout the entire number of waking hours - every day of the month! 

A few days ago, I took my kids to the roller rink to do some roller skating.  I remember loving my roller days way back when and everything looked exactly the same as back in the day - except for one thing.  Next to us was a table of three teens all texting vigorously.  They didn't talk to each other at all.  I should have taken a picture of that too but I know most of you have seen this phenomenon for yourselves plenty of times.

If you follow my blog at all, you know that I am a proponent of technology in the classroom and I believe that technology today offers unprecedented insight, education and inspiration.  We have an outrageous amount of helpful data, entertainment, education and reference tools all literally at our fingertips. 

Most of my focus as a fundraising guy involves paying for technology in the classroom - smart boards and computer labs, etc. and it's interesting to see a dynamic where technology can really change personal interaction.  I especially think we'll be challenged when every student has a device instead of a backpack full of papers and books.

I believe that digital technology wants to be free and thank goodness in this case.  My Facebook friend above would be paying thousands of dollars a month in her daughters texting bills if it weren't for an unlimited text plan.

So, what's the point of all this?

The first thing is I got one of those reminders you get every so often that things are different.  This was quickly followed up by the fact that living 'in the moment' may begin to mean something different to the youth.  They may consider their online and texting time to be as real as their interaction with people directly.

As children begin to put their connection with devices above being off-the-grid so to speak, things are going to get interesting.  I'm certainly no expert here but doing things a lot more things remotely seems in our future and beyond that, I'm not really sure what ramifications we will experience beyond repeating to our kids 'Uhh, Hello?  You there? Can you Hear Me?' when the kid is there in the same room.

The point is, we'll be thinking and talking a lot more about this as a society I suspect.  In the meantime, I will take better pictures for you :)