Do you believe your own press?

Do you fake it till you make it?

Do you talk the walk?

It’s all about the narrative.

So, sure, when new management comes in, or a flavour of the month trend emerges, or maybe it’s the sudden (and exhausting) over-use of new buzz-words, it’s easy to become jaded.  You hear the words, but you refuse to buy in unless you believe the words. But… there’s the thing… if you believed the words,  you would already have bought in, right?

Not so fast, Sparky.  You can outsmart some of them, but not all of them, and especially not yourself.

I see it all the time in technology.  Watch this video:

There are at least a dozen easier ways to open a fortune cookie, but what a great metaphor for how the real technophile thinks.  “Easier” “more expensive” “ridiculously time consuming” have nothing to do with it: “Yeah, but look at what I made work!”.

If I divide computer users into two groups, at the far end of the spectrum is the “I don’t care how hard, expensive, time-consuming or just generally silly it is, if I can do in on a machine, I will” gang, diametrically opposed to the steadfast, dyed-in-wool “You can TRY to make me use technology, but you’d have more success teaching this sheep whose wool I dyed” group.

You can’t change the people, and it takes considerable effort to adjust their attitudes, but you can change the narrative.

It looks like this: I walk into a school that has traditionally had power users on staff who are happy to mentor others, the staff is flexible and has a very low stress response to using technology.  They tend to use it as a tool, when it’s the best one for the job, and not as a separate area of study (“Today kids, we are doing TECHNOLOGY!!!”). If I ask this staff how things are, they will generally tell me things are fine, they would like more/newer equipment, and if they had connection problems, they waited it out or worked around it.

The Schools where the Eeyore’s of technology are the majority, the same question  will result in a very different answer, even if the two sites are very similar, with similar challenges. “Nothing ever works.” “I’d like to use it, but every time I try, either the wifi is out or the batteries are dead”. And my personal favourite: “The kids are better at it than I am, so I can’t teach them anything anyway”.

The danger in repeating statements like these is that it becomes increasingly difficult to ever make a shift, because of the line you’ve held for so long. Faced with a barrage of the negative, I ask for clarification: “What does work, sometimes? Or does literally NOTHING work EVER?” (knowing of course that that is just not true); “Certainly a power failure or service interruption can be super annoying– but can you try again when there is someone here to help you with a Plan B?”  (usually, it is fear of the unknown that stops them, or fear of their own failure); and finally “The kids know it all, already?  Sweet– then you can turn the table and ask them to teach you something, or teach each other. You’d be surprised how much they don’t know… and it’s ok to say you don’t either, but that you are willing to help them find out”.

Change “It never works” to “I’m frustrated when I can’t make it do what I want”

Change “I’ll never know as much as my kids”  to “I’ll learn and with them… they might know some things, but I still know how to make sense of the learning”

Change “I’m afraid” to “I’ll try”