Bringing Machshavah to Machshevim: A Mindful Approach to Technology in Jewish Education

There are also no such things as “digital natives.” Just because many of today’s youth are growing up in a society
dripping with technology does not mean that they inherently know how to use it.... Understanding technology
requires learning.

danah boyd, “It is easy to fall in love with technology…” http://wp.nmc.org/future/ideas/danah-boyd/

For the first time in history, the human mind is a direct productive force, not just a decisive element of the
production system… Thus, computers (and) communications systems… are all amplifiers and extensions of the
human mind. What we think, and how we think, become expressed in goods, services, material and intellectual
output…

Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, p.31

The more we learn to conform to the available choices, the more predictable and machine-like we become ourselves.
We train ourselves to stay between the lines, like an image dragged onto a “snap-to" grid: it never stays quite
where we put it, but jerks up and over to the closest available place on the predetermined map. Likewise, through
our series of choices about the news we read, feeds to which we subscribe, and websites we visit, we create a choice
filter around ourselves. Friends and feeds we may have chosen arbitrarily or because we were forced in the past,
soon become the markers through which our programs and search engines choose what to show us next. Our
choices narrow our world, as the infinity of possibility is lost in the translation to binary code.

Douglas Rushkoff, Program or be Programmed, http://www.boingboing.net/2010/09/27/program-or-be-progra.html

The just-so account supposes that change has to happen in just a certain way, each step leading implacably to the
next; the maker could do and think no other… This just-so explanation is entirely retrospective in character.
Looking back in time… it appears perfectly logical that the free-spinning wheel would cause a change from rope
coiling to drawing up a pot, but how could the person who first replaced his or her gourd with a stone know what we
know? Perhaps the potter was puzzled, perhaps exhilarated—which are more engaged states of consciousness than
“it had to happen just like this.”

Richard Sennett, The Craftsman, p. 122

Rejecting technological determinism should be a mantra in our professional conversations. It’s really easy to get in
the habit of seeing a new shiny piece of technology and just assume that we can dump it into an educational setting
and !voila! miracles will happen. Yet, we also know that the field of dreams is merely that, a dream. Dumping
laptops into a classroom does no good if a teacher doesn’t know how to leverage the technology for educational
purposes. Building virtual worlds serves no educational purpose without curricula that connects a lesson plan with
the affordances of the technology.

danah boyd, “It is easy to fall in love with technology…” http://wp.nmc.org/future/ideas/danah-boyd/

 Bringing Machshavah to Machshevim: A Mindful Approach to Technology in Jewish Education

Websites and services noted in the presentation:

- Webquests and Zunal (http://www.zunal.com/)

- MuseumBox (http://museumbox.e2bn.org/)
- VoiceThread (http://www.voicethread.com/)
- The Presentation (http://scr.bi/nate-jfp-presentation)
- Resource List (http://bit.ly/nate-jfp)

Jeremy Price
Doctoral Candidate, Lynch School of Education, Boston College
jeremy.price@bc.edu