Connections are Habits

Connections are habits: habitual repetitions, which transform all other interactions.

From Updating to Remain the Same

It’s the start of the term, so I’m mentioning “habits” constantly to my new students with the hope of getting them thinking about habits, bringing them to their foreground, making them explicit.

Recently I think that maybe habits are especially important for skills that are slow change – language, health, movement – yet can reach high levels of fluency and automaticity.

More on Habits: https://www.quietrev.com/change-your-habits-change-your-life/

 

 

Technology for Friction

From Evgeny Morozov’s “To Save Everything, Click Here“, a description of a certain type of technology that aims to create friction:

This seems to me a blueprint for education. EdTech spends a lot of effort on making technology seamless, easy to use, and never technology for the sake of itself. What if educators tried using edtech more for itself, to create friction and perplexity? I wonder if such a strategy cold become mainstream.

Dewey was big on perplexity:

We may recapitulate by saying that the origin of thinking is some perplexity, confusion, or doubt. Thinking is not a case of spontaneous combustion; it does not occur just on ” general principles.” There is something specific which occasions and evokes it.

Why bother using technology to create perplexity?  Many of our habits are established though technology (machines, and devices) – Through habit, we become our machines (Says Wendy Chun). Perhaps a little friction caused by these habit forming machines may encourage thinking and reflection about such habits, which often lie under the touch-screen surface of daily life.