Our Remembrance Day assembly was last Friday, and, as last year, it was a pretty slick affair. It had PowerPoint, spot lights fading in and fading out on various speakers, solemn music, a choir, bagpipes, and even a trumpet blowing The Last Post.

Yet for all the slickness of the affair, I was struck by how my students responded to it and how they responded to my class on Remembrance. I had only two pictures in class and a good handful of stories to illustrate why the Canadians fought in the Second World War and who they fought to help. Aside from the light illuminating the room, I used no technology at all.

I think they were a little jaded by the school’s official Remembrance ceremony. They’d been there and done that. Yet in class a simple story still gets the kids’ attention. No glitz, no glamor, just a few stories. It didn’t hurt that one of them was the story of my dad remembering the Canadian soldiers arriving in his village when he was five years old. The personal, and especially the immediately personal, will win out over glitz and glamor every time.

Technology in the class is a wonderful thing, and I’m completely hooked on it, but sometime I have to force myself to remember that less is really more.

I often ask myself why I bother to work on this blog. I have ideas on how technology can be put to use in the class, but does anybody really care?

Michele Martin summarized it neatly (along with help from Tom Peters and Seth Godin): Blogging helps you organize your thoughts in a succinct way and then gives you the opportunity to present those same thoughts to the world. If you get good at it some people may actually read what you have to say. If people aren’t yet reading you, then the exercise of blogging helps you to learn how to think intelligently and present your case clearly.

In a world where vacuous T.V., empty election slogans and promises, and mindless video games occupy much of the mental power of even some of the most intelligent people I know, it’s hard to come up with a better reason to blog.

With thanks to Rob Jacobs for pointing this video out in a post, Nokia has a fascinating little video/commercial out called “The Fourth Screen.”

The video show the previous three “screens,” – movies, T.V., and computers – and shows how they revolutionized things but often put us into our own little individual worlds. Nokia’s latest T.V./video screen, apparently built into a phone, is, naturally, a product they’re billing as one that will build community and allow us to be with people and share things with each other anytime and all the time.

Personally, I’m skeptical. MP3 players, cell phones and the like have not brought us together but allowed us to escape whatever the current reality is. How often have you seen someone walking down the street listening to his iPod yet oblivious to whatever was going on around him? How often have you been in a store and heard someone yelling into their cell phone, busily engaged with someone somewhere else, yet totally unaware of how much he was annoying those around him with his obnoxious behavior?

This is not to say that those tools don’t have their purpose, nor that a video phone can’t be useful, but if you want to market it as something that will build up a sense of community, well, I think you’re fooling yourself.