The Bigger Impact of Technology

This week, we had our guest speaker Dr. Rennie Redekopp zoomed into our classroom. This was the week I had been waiting for! Redekopp taught my high school business class when I was in Grade 10... almost 10 years ago! It was neat to have to opportunity to work with him again.

Presentation

Dr. Redekopp began his presentation with a quote: "You can't have the benefits of globalization without some of the responsibilities" by Bono. He began talking about how our smartphones and devices affect others in the world by their design, materials, manufacturing and shipping, and energy use. 

By their design, cellphone companies almost ensure that we need to replace our phones every few years. Many designs do not allow the user to remove the battery of their phone, which is typically the first thing to go in a cellphone. Though the phone is in otherwise perfect condition, consumers will be likely to throw their phone away because the battery life doesn't last as long as one needs it to. This way consumers will keep consuming and business will keep booming for these cellphone companies.

Redekopp told us about a company called Fairphone, where many parts are interchangeable. If you don't like the camera quality of your phone, it is easy to buy a new camera to change out with your old one. Unfortunately this phone is only available in Europe, but their website says they are "researching the market and logistic possibilities to sell outside of Europe", so maybe one day soon! 

The manufacturing of cellphones requires a material called tantalum, which has become a type of "blood diamond" material in Africa. According to this article from The Sydney Morning Herald (be aware, it is from 2009...) rebel groups are able to mine for tantalum and sell them for cheap to fund warfare. Workers are paid minimal to mine this resource, and the first world gets to benefit from their desolate working conditions. Tantalum is available in other places in the world (including Manitoba), but these places have things called "living wages", "unions", and "safety standards". When factoring in living wages into the cost of tantalum, the material becomes much more expensive than its African counterpart.

Cellphone gold, aka tantalum

The manufacturing and shipping of cellphones is yet another problem in the smartphone industry. Consumer industries in general, actually. Think fast fashion for example. Unsafe working conditions, cheap (severely underpaid) labour, et cetera. There are many problems surrounding the manufacturing plants that cellphones are made in. Redekopp told us about this scandal with Apple and their manufacturing facility in Longhua, China. Workers began committing suicide in 2010, by jumping out of the building. Eighteen people attempted, fourteen died, and another twenty were talked out of jumping. Suicide notes left behind speak of the stress, long hours, and harsh management who ridiculed workers. It wasn't a pleasant appearance for Apple, that's for sure. Being aware of these subjects are important, though it is difficult subject matter to digest.


If you're anything like me, you'll run your life on "the cloud". I almost never save files to my computer hard drive anymore - I want all my files accessible on any device I'm on, whether that is my laptop, my cellphone, the school computer's, or my fiancé's computer. I'm past the time of USB sticks and emailing documents! Having all my files on "the cloud" is so convenient! But at what cost? Redekopp showed us what "the cloud" really looked like. Rather than a light, fluffy bundle of condensed rain droplets, "the cloud" is actually made of concrete and steel with thousands of computers linked up together. Imagine the energy it takes to power up those giant storage units! I couldn't imagine. On a side note, I thought it was so ironic that when I googled 'cloud', to confirm what clouds were actually made of, the first thing that popped up was Google Cloud, and a Wikipedia article for "cloud computing". Interesting.

What I thought the cloud looked like

What the cloud ACTUALLY looks like

Work Session

At the end of the presentation, we took time to brainstorm some project ideas that we could do with students to raise awareness. Ideally, awareness will also increase action, but this action doesn't have to be anything drastic.

As a music educator, I wasn't sure how to tie in these concepts into my classroom. I could think of the ways to incorporate technology, but learning about the impact it has? I couldn't justify using my limited amount of time with students to teach about the impact of technology. Typically, I would see students for 25-30 minutes at a time, maybe every other day (assuming my class doesn't land on an early dismissal date, day off, etc.) and I have all my own curricular goals to reach. But, after some brainstorming, I came up with an idea!

My idea is for students (I'm thinking Grade 5-6, if not 5-8) to create musical instruments out of recycled materials, after we explore the Recycled Orchestra of Cateura. The Recycled Orchestra is a orchestra comprised of instruments made from garbage materials from the Cateura landfill. This project idea connects with Redekopp's presentation in the sense that the landfill was created from waste, and this waste was reused by children to make something wonderful. The children were resourceful in making a not so great situation into a better one. I think seeing children similar to the age of my students will help create empathy and make the subject matter more relatable. It can be hard for students, or anyone to imagine that people live in such close proximity to a landfill.

As a way to keep the children of Cateura out of gangs and drugs, music lessons were being offered but there were not enough instruments for everyone to play one. Since a real instrument would be unaffordable for children and their families, and it would be a target of theft, they decided to create instruments from the garbage just outside their homes.


I would likely begin the project by showing them a performance clip of the orchestra. In some videos, you cannot tell that the instruments are made of garbage. It's not until the camera zooms in that you may see that the violin is not made of wood. After all, the orchestra sounds almost like a real orchestra! The sounds produced from the recycled instruments are strikingly comparable to wooden, professional grade instruments. After students recognize that the instruments are not the instruments they expected, I would read the book Ada's Violin. The book provides students with more context as to why children (likely similar to their age) would be playing instruments made of garbage.

Several curricular goals are being met with this project, in the Manitoba K-8 music curriculum alone, in three out of four essential learning areas. Students are being creative by experimenting with music in sound while creating their instruments (5-8 M.C1.1). Students are understanding music in context by learning about music from a group with a different socio-economic status than our own (5-8 M-U1.1), and by learning about the role that music had in the lives of the children of Cateura (5-8 M-U3.1). Students can also discuss the impact that the instruments have in their performance - knowing the hard work they put into their own instruments, and seeing the work of their peers, does that increase the value of the music that they can perform? Did seeing the children from Cateura play on homemade, recycled instruments make the performance more engaging and exciting (5-8 M-V2.3)?



Thanks for reading!