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Learning to Go Unplugged by Jamie McKenzie About the Author

Some of us sail, drive or hike away on summer holidays designed to spare us from the pressures of e-mail and other digital influences. We turn off cell phones and listen to gulls calling to each other. But new sailboats come equipped with GPS and computer screens that sit in front of the ship's wheel. We may find ourselves glued to the screen watching digital islands moving on a chart as the real islands glide by to port and starboard. Can we keep the technology where it belongs?

Discerning use of digital technologies should appear high on the list of 21st Century Skills - knowing when to unplug, when to go natural, and when to turn to print and hard copy materials.

Schools may already suffer from too little intimacy, so we should be cautious about pressures to embrace distance learning, virtual learning or virtual schools. There are many times when digital comes up short despite the lavish claims and promises of companies who wish to sell us digital adventures, rain forests, lessons and meetings.

Afraid of flying since 9/11? Technology companies quickly suggested video-conferencing as a substitute for face-to-face. But chemistry, eye contact and proximity all play major roles in effective bargaining, problem-solving and negotiating.

Reach out and touch someone? Digitally?

As the next section illustrates by reviewing the treatment of important thinkers by the Net, digital is not always best.

The HotBot Top 40 Revisited

In 1996, just as the Internet was becoming a major new source of information for schools and the general public, I conducted a review of the Net coverage afforded to major figures. Using Hotbot as a search engine, I looked at and reported the number of Web pages devoted to each of 300 people or religious figures.

Does the Internet provide solid information about the great thinkers and leaders of our times? Who gets the most attention? Heroes? Sports figures? Entertainers? Celebrities? Leaders? Thinkers?

Back in 1996, celebrities won the major share of Web attention. Thinkers and important leaders took a back row seat to film stars, singers, sports figures and those with recent scandals on their list of credits. (see Net Worth - Hotbot Top 40 in the November 1996 issue of FNO.)

In October of 1999, the same trend was reported as Madonna, Elvis, Bill Gates and Michael Jordan scored right near the top along with Buddha, Kennedy and Lincoln. Both Frank Sinatra and Princess Diana, who had passed away shortly before the list was compiled rose dramatically in the rankings. (see Respecting Heritage and the Classics while Mining the Millennium in the October 1999 issue of FNO.) Important thinkers such as Rollo May, Julian Huxley, Indira Ghandi and L. S. Vygotsky were virtually ignored.

In October of 2001, the Net continues to lavish attention on celebrities and headline grabbers. The full listing of results can be found below by clicking here.

Madonna has jumped ahead of Jesus to the Number Two spot. George W. Bush and Pamela Anderson each improved their rankings by more than 50 slots. Much of the list is unchanged.

Those who work quietly and seriously out of the limelight creating the best ideas and the intellectual capital for this knowledge-based society are rarely recognized. As a library substitute, the Net is sadly lacking. Its collection development is often driven by ratings and popularity.

How did Edna St. Vincent Millay Really Die?

Especially in categories such as biography, the most reliable and carefully researched information often still resides in printed books such as Nancy Milford's biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Savage Beauty.

McKenzie speaking at LA County Digital High School conference in October, 2001

Ms. Milford began her research on Millay in 1972. Twenty-nine years later, after carefully combing through original documents and letters and after interviewing dozens of Millay contemporaries, her research emerged as a printed biography. This work was not something to be posted and given away freely on the Internet. If you want to know about Millay, you will want to buy this book or borrow this book from your library. It works the same way with most serious biographies of important people. - Hardcover - 550 pages (September 4, 2001) Random House; ISBN: 039457589X

The Net casts little light on Millay's life. The pickings are slim - 16,500 Web pages - some well intended sites, but little illumination or professional scholarship. In many cases, the authors of these sites never reveal their identities, their background or their education. The Net is generous is serving up her poetry, now past the protection of copyright (?), but biographical sketches are generally thin, usually brief, and often amateurish. Worse, they are frequently mistaken as to some basic facts such as the circumstances (and spelling) of Millay's death.

Millay, a smoker in an age of smokers, succumbed to hear failure in 1950 at her home, Steepletop, in Austerlitz New York.

http://members.aol.com/MillayGirl/bio.htm

One learns several versions of her death . . .

After her husbands death, she went on living in their isolated house in Austerlitz and died* there alone of a heart attack in 1950.

*Millay died of a broken neck suffered in a suspicious fall down the stairs at Steepletop. As a founding member of the Millay Society, I have had the pleasure to not only meet with Norma Millay (her sister, who passed on in 1986) but with her biographer Nancy Milford, whose book on Millay is 20+ years in the making and probably being withheld pending the death of a possible accomplice to her suspicious death. Nancy actually interviewed the doctor who wrote Millay's death certificate after she found that it said, Suspicious fall down stairs, broken neck. I have performed a one-woman show on Millay all over the country and my master's thesis was about her relationship with Edmund Wilson, so I am well-versed in her life and work. Thanks for a fun bio on her. Hope this helps. All the best, JKH

http://www.geocities.com/Paris/LeftBank/6865/millaybio.html

Nancy Milford's printed, full length biography does confirm that Millay died by falling down the stairs and quotes the doctor's note. But the majority of the biographical sketches available on the Net pass along the heart attack story as if it were factual.

Millay, who with her husband had drunk to excess since the 1930s, evidently grew more dependent on alcohol during her brief, inconsolable widowhood. She died sitting at the foot of her staircase, alone, at Steepletop.

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/millay/millay_life.htm

The were together until his death in 1949. Millay died the following year of heart failure.

http://www.theglassceiling.com/biographies/bio44.htm

The Web's coverage of the best thinkers and artists from the last century leaves much to be desired. For the most part, the important, thoughtful, serious scholarship about these people still resides in libraries and printed books. Much of their work and thinking is found in the same location.

The New Economy, The Virtual Library and Other Myths

The New York Times has reported that the corporate push to replace printed books with electronic books has stalled and fallen well short of predictions.

Forecasts of an E-Book Era Were, It Seems, Premature

By David D. Kirkpatrick (from the August 28, 2001 New York Times, )

Laurence Kirshbaum, chairman of the books division of AOL Time Warner (news/quote ), pledged to lead the charge: We want to see electronic publishing blow the covers off of books. Andersen Consulting had recently estimated that by 2005 digital books could account for 10 percent of all book sales. A year later, however, the main advantage of electronic books appears to be that they gather no dust. Almost no one is buying. Publishers and online bookstores say only the very few best-selling electronic editions have sold more than a thousand copies, and most sell far fewer. Only a handful have generated enough revenue to cover the few hundred dollars it costs to convert their texts to digital formats.

Along with the demise of the so-called New Economy, the proponents of which spoke sneeringly of the Old Economy, it may be timely to reconsider the bombastic predictions of electronic libraries and the Net replacing the need for school and public libraries.

Some who pose as futurists are little more than salespeople and cheerleaders for a digital product line that has severe limitations, shortcomings and weaknesses. The attempt to create peer pressure for this product line surfaces as lifestyle advertising equating digital connectivity with freedom and joy, yet evidence accumulates that not all things digital are healthy, reliable or worth buying.

These days it is fashionable for some to push 21st Century Skills on schools that seem tilted toward digital living and high levels of technology penetration, but many of these messages are based on unexamined assumptions about the impact of these tools and experiences upon the quality of life and the quality of classrooms.

The skill of unplugging digital tools should rank highly on the list of 21st Century skills when other tools and experiences prove superior.

There are times to turn off the equipment, shut down the covers of the laptops and focus on the dialogue and exchange of ideas.

We should help students learn to turn off their cell phones, their DVD drives and their handheld personal assistants when they might interfere with a walk along a river, a dinner with a friend or the chance to curl up with a good book about Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Discerning use of new technologies and classical technologies is a skill whose time has come.