​There are two major things with which humans aren’t great. Change and uncertainty. Unfortunately, for those who struggle with both of these things, modern life is becoming increasingly challenging, as they’re now a huge reality of the fast-paced digital world.
 
I don’t want to delve too much into the impact of change, as it’s a whole thing unto itself. However, what I’ve noticed is that avoidance of uncertainty in teenagers appears to becoming worse and worse and somewhat detrimental to their experience of life. However, I don’t want to blame teens for this. I want to blame their parents as they’re the ones predominantly responsible for bringing them up and providing a world view that either helps or hinders their ability to deal with uncertainty.
 
I’ve noticed this trend over the past few years on camps and expeditions. The desire for instant answers on everything caused by search engine education and a sense of every moment of the day being carefully scheduled without deviation, presents a massive problem when things don’t go to plan. The problem is that life isn’t always straight forward, nor is it predictable. In fact, quite the opposite is true and life can often be a chaotic mess of which at times, is hard to make sense. Yet, we find ourselves increasingly teaching students who are quite incapable of dealing with uncertainty.
 
This is a problem on many levels. Gone are the days in which someone could live their life with little to no change or variance in what they did. In times past, people could go to school, leave, get a job and stay in that job until they retired. For many people, leaving their own town or village would have been unheard of and travel wasn’t something that many people did to find work or simply move around. However, this has not only changed, but dramatically shifted to another extreme. Employment is becoming increasingly casualised in many parts of the world, with tech companies saying how wonderful the ‘gig’ economy is, which for the record it’s not! It’s forcing many people into serious underemployment and a constant need to change and re-invent what they’re doing.
 
Whilst the change of the workforce is a whole massive issue unto itself, it’s just part of the overall continuous change that is happening in our world. Change is constant and change can be taxing on the most dynamic and resilient of us.
 
What does this mean for students who want to avoid uncertainty? Unfortunately, it means they’re going to seriously struggle in life. Much of the resistance I’m seeing today for students to get involved in something, involves higher-order thinking. Problem solving and adaptability. Whenever they’re forced into taking a longer amount of time to work out an answer, they can’t do it, or more to the point, don’t even try. Instead, they give up because they can’t search for or quickly come to an answer.
 
It’s therefore important for us to help the avoider face uncertainty. The only way for them to develop the skills needed to cope in the modern world is for them to face uncertainty. In outdoor ed, we can do it by standing back and watching students figure things out for themselves and only step in if there’s a safety issue. This forces action and decision-making processes in students which aren’t being used on a day to day basis. No longer can they have the answer searched for them, nor will every minute of their day be scheduled so they know what’s happening next and at what time.
 
The spoon-feeding for exams approach that I’ve seen so many schools take, has only reinforced this practice of uncertainty avoidance and for us to adequately prepare students for an ever-changing world, then we need to do more to expose them to uncertainty and give them opportunities to work with that uncertainty, try something new and achieve an outcome that is not scripted in anyway. When we can be doing this for all education, then we might just be able to train the next generation to not only cope with change, but thrive in a very different environment that will continue to change and evolve in 5, 10, 20 and 50 years time. The ability to embrace and deal with uncertainty, is a far greater skill to have than simply knowing the answer to an exam, or where to find it. This is a huge challenge, but one that outdoor and experiential educators are well-equiped to not only meet, but exceed expectations for how well they can do this and ultimately equip students with the right skills for the new digital age. 

Recently, our new team went on a  bit of a shopping adventure to IKEA and Bunnings. Sadly, there was no sausage sizzle on at that point in time, so no chance to drop onion all over the ground, but it was fun all the same. It’s always great to get the perspective of new staff as they look upon what you’re doing with a set of fresh eyes that haven’t necessarily been tainted by time, repetition and entrenched ways of doing things. As a result, from their input you can discover something new and different without changing much at all.
 
Back to the shopping trip. The new team had arrived on campus a few days earlier. To say it was a stark expression of 1970s flat roof architecture, would be generous. The campus buildings were tired looking and have been well-loved, but starting to show their age. The rooms of each of the buildings,  I’ve spent a lot of time in and had some wonderful moments teaching and socialising in these spaces. This time, however, we’d added in a new wall and converted an old space into a ‘sick bay.’
 
The room was basic with two beds a cupboard, a filing cabinet and a desk. Nothing special or even remotely interesting about that. In fact, it looked pretty crap and a Stazi hospital may have been slightly more luxurious and aesthetic in comparison. If you were sick, the new room would probably make you feel sicker. For many people, the simple fact that it was a practical room that served a function would be enough. However, thankfully a couple of fresh sets of eyes thought differently. They suggested we go shopping.
 
A trip to IKEA is not for the faint hearted. It’s enormous and if you want to get your daily steps up, it’s a great place to do that. Although if you eat the ice cream at the end, it kinda defeats the purpose. But anyway, we started wandering through and there’s so much cool stuff, I could get lost in there for days. Despite the risk of going in and never coming out, we wandered around the various sections of the store and I left the new guys to select whatever they needed for the room. I had no idea what they were going to come up with, but excited to find out.
 
We ended up leaving with a trolly full or stuff and about $1,000 later, I still had no idea how it was going to turn out. I left them to toil away in the room and after a couple of hours it was time for the big revelation! Stepping inside, it couldn’t have been more different. The room was remarkably changed. The horrible cupboard had gone. There was pleasing soft lighting, the doona covers were fresh and attractive and the soft plush puppy dog, made the room feel so much more homely than before. A scented defuser with a soft green glow sat on the desk and finally the peace lily had brought life to a once desolate and uninviting space.
 
The difference this small transition made in this room was remarkable. The space had changed in its tone and now was a pleasant, calming room in which someone could get some rest if needed, rather than the horrible bed and cupboard of before.
 
The clever use of space and application of thoughtfulness to something like this is so important for education, home life and business alike. It changes the mood and through this, changes the dynamics of behaviour and attitude. The more thought we put into something such as this, the more respect and use a space will have.
 
A friend of mine has been doing a similar thing with school playgrounds, taking ‘wasted’ empty or disused spaces and transforming them with low ropes courses, bouldering walls and nature play elements. Play Grounded has explored the outside play area dynamics in the same way that my wonderful team members did inside.
 
Is there somewhere in your school or campus that’s just a waste dump that even political dissidents would shun in favour of a KGB cell? If so, get thinking creatively and go shopping!
 
Transforming spaces in a similar way, will have a proud impact on that space and those using it. For us, it has changed the tone and made it such a relaxing and friendly place to visit.

Social media is something that, as we all know, is relatively new. However, we don’t really know the extent to which it will harm and damage our current generation – the children, teens and young adults. With the drive and desire for so many likes and so many followers, this can build people up to a false sense of security and to be perfectly honest, those who need thousands of followers or thousands of likes or that feeling of social rapport with other people that they don’t even know, are most likely going to be vulnerable people anyway. Whilst they exude confidence online in photos and posts and comments, and everything they do looks happy and wonderful, it’s merely a filtered view of the world and a very filtered approach that they’re projecting. Yet what’s behind that?

If you look at some of the classic meltdowns of many of the most successful singers, songwriters and performers as well as actors who are vulnerable, ego driven people, you can find a whole stack of them hanging out in rehab. Many of them form drug habits. Many of them get overweight very quickly and this happens when their fame starts to wane. It happens when people stop liking things. People stop liking their work. People stop following their fan clubs. Whilst this has been going on for years and years in the entertainment industry, it often happened reasonably slowly for many actors as the success of their movies or music faded or the success and people’s interests changed.

However, for many teens and young adults today, the fame or infamy that they gain through social media very quickly with that meteoric rise, will conversely result in a meteoric crash back down to earth. This is a real danger, because this increases people’s risk of mental health problems if vulnerable anyway.

Often people with a stack of followers end up being targeted by marketing companies to then put product placements in their posts to ensure that they’re selling more and more. So, they’re making money out of this now, based upon the fact a lot of people click a post and they like it. But you can be guaranteed that as soon as the numbers start dropping, the money dries up. This will only serve to compound the problem for people like this. So whilst these people seem to have money coming in and think that they’re actually building something that’s going to last, it’s a completely false sense of security, a false hope and a huge problem that’s being driven by social media and marketing companies.

This is a destructive force of which we really haven’t seen the impact yet. It’s only through education, building up strength of character and building up confidence in young people that we can help them avoid what can be a totally destructive experience to their lives. Some people will still grow huge audiences, have thousands or tens of thousands of people following them. But how shallow and pointless is their filtered life? What’s behind the lens is often just a toxic waste dump of sadness, depression and self loathing, with an increasing worry that the next post might not bring in the same number or more likes than the last. How fickle and pointless this is.
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Therefore, it’s important when working with students to help them understand that some parts of social media can be fun. Some of it can be a good game but other parts can be dark, destructive and can absolutely destroy their lives. It’s an important message of not complete abstinence or outright banning social media, but being mindful of just how shallow and short lived this kind of experience can and will be. Just as the burnt out lives of child actors of the 80s and 90s are, it’s important to help the next generation to avoid this terrible fate that in moments can turn a successful ‘public figure’ into a forgotten nobody without any rhyme or reason. 

Right now, I’m sitting in an airport lounge waiting for a flight to London. Ok! I know when you’re reading this, I probably won’t be still sitting in the airport, unless the flight is massively delayed, which if that’s the case, please come and save me!!!
 
Regardless of where I am right now, basically as I write this, I’m at the airport having lunch. On a table opposite me, there’s a lady working away on her laptop and her son who is about 5, sitting there eating lunch, with headphones on and stuffing food in his mouth whilst watching something on his iPad. Mum seems oblivious to what he’s up to and he appear transfixed on the screen.
 
Having worked countless hours in airport lounges, on planes and any random place I can, I understand deadlines and the need to get things done. But why can’t it wait until after lunch? The disturbing picture for me, is that this appears so ‘normal’ to the mother and son, which it shouldn’t be! The dining table, regardless of whether at home or about to travel, shouldn’t be about work. Now you might object and say that I’m working by writing this, but actually I have finished lunch and now I’m having coffee… so yeah…
 
Anyway, back to the point of all of this. When you look at some of the problems facing education today, this highlights the disconnect between social anchors such as family dinners and the reality of life. The problems this causes years down the track is already being felt as the current generation of school aged students have been “baby sat” by devices, which manipulate behaviours and undermine the ability for them to relate to others and have normal conversations and experiences.
 
The toxicity of the effect of technology on children is vastly underrated and a new ‘normal’ which increasingly disconnects them from other people, is a massive social and emotional problem just waiting to happen. Next time you’re travelling with the kids, don’t give them an iPad at lunch so they won’t bother you for a bit. Enjoy the moment for what it is. Talk with them. Talk about the trip, what they’re looking forward to and what’s going to be something new, interesting and challenging. Otherwise, the alternative of the babysitting mobile device, is just like Cat Steven’s cats in the cradle on steroids. What you’re gaining in ‘productivity,’ you’re simply losing at the cost of your family and their own well-being.
 
Now if you’re reading this, you’re probably not in that category at all, but the reality is that we’re teaching students like this every day and understanding the crippling upbringing they’ve had, can help us to understand on what we need to be able to focus and try to help our students recover. At the end of the day, humans desire real relationships with real people and it’s often up to us as educators to show other people how this can be done.
 
Ok supplemental… I’m still in the lounge. The lady just walked past me with her headphones on and looking down at her phone whilst her son is trying to ask her questions and talk to her. If only they could see the damage they’re doing… very sad indeed.

​If you’ve ever worked with someone who lacks or has lost their passion for what they’re doing, it’s often an unpleasant experience to say the least. Now I’m not here to say that long relentless hours equate to passion. In fact, it can be quite the opposite having worked with some people who equated hours at work to the measure of their work. Sadly, no matter how long some of them spent at work, it was never going to add up to anything more than a wasted car space in the car park.
 
As I’m a strong believer in delivering good, effective programs for students, hours spent don’t always come into this mix. Instead, it’s the ability of staff to engage with students, inspire and be effective that are the most important components of this.
 
Anyone can sit at a desk or in a classroom and use up lots of hours. It literally takes no talent at all to do this. A former colleague of mine was just amazed at this. He could be at work for 12-16 hours and do nothing. In fact, it was worse than that. Many days, it was less than nothing and that created more problems for everyone else to fix. However, thankfully people like this usually get moved on quickly, or should be.
 
Tired, exhausted teachers no matter how passionate they might be, can never be truly effective. Therefore, there needs to be that mystical balance that everyone seems to talk about, but like Eldorado and Saadam’s WMDs, nobody can find.
 
Most people go into careers because they’re passionate about it. However, many work places manage to smash that enthusiasm right out of them, which at the end of the day is a wasted opportunity. I’d rather have passionate staff who keep throwing ideas at me for how we can do things better or how we can build things up, rather than staff who like the status quo and you have to drag them kicking and screaming through any modicum of change.
 
Consequently, the real challenge is often not the development of passion in staff, but creating an environment in which passion is valued. Too often, I’ve seen passion and enthusiasm destroyed by hopeless organisations that think that doing the same thing over and over again is the only way to do it. The world changes, people change and if you don’t like change, then perhaps education is not the right place for you.
 
This doesn’t mean you have to take on every crazy new idea that staff come up with, but what it does mean is that developing a culture in which new ideas are welcomed and valued, is a vital basis to build and retain staff who have a great passion for what they do and are motivated by what will produce the best educational outcomes for students. If this means trying something new, then try something new! It’s better to listen to twenty crazy ideas, three of which could be brilliant and the other seventeen pointless, but those three ideas could have a massive and lasting impact on the lives of countless staff and students and flow on to the community and generations to come. However, stamping out ideas has the opposite effect and an organisation can become so stale and ineffective that it loses staff, it loses new fresh ideas and just becomes as standardised factor for processing students.
 
You don’t want a scenario like this, because trying to deal with unmotivated staff is hard work!! It’s much harder, in my experience, than encouraging new ideas to be shared, trialed and implemented in a process of continuous improvement. In this scenario, it’s the lazy and dispassionate staff that self-select their way out of the organisation to go and do something less challenging or to find another school that’s going nowhere fast.
 
The only way we can face the rapidly changing world is through embracing new ideas and encouraging those around us to share their passion. Through this, we can build cultures that value how fluid and dynamic education can and should be to ensure we’re producing the best results for everyone. 

With the world flooded with toxic, attention-grabbing software that is specifically designed to divert your attention and emotions, it’s easy to become very cynical about the place mobile devices and software play in people’s lives. However, as with everything, there are good sides and bad sides to things such as technology and software.
 
The challenge is not just to ignore what’s going on around us or decide that we should smash it all. That didn’t end well for the luddites and nor will it end well for a rejection of technology. This is just disconnected from the reality of the digital world, and whilst it might be a lot of fun to smash a few servers with a sledgehammer every now and then, it doesn’t really help much over the long-term.
 
Instead, the challenge is to build a more human element into technology. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ I hear your cry! ‘We don’t want human robots!’ No, actually I agree with you on that too. We definitely don’t want human looking robots. That just opens up so many questionable moral issues that falsely suggests human-like characteristics. Whilst it can be fun to imagine a sentient being created out of digital circuit boards, this is still just a computer with as many real human qualities as Kermit the Frog has and every other talking animal on TV.
 
What do we need and want? As a software developer, I believe we have a moral obligation to develop software that improves our ability to be human and build relationships, not disconnect and filter them, which seems to be the fashion of the tech world right now. Therefore, it’s important than any new platform or feature should consider the human impact. What will the end result be for the users? Is it going to help, hinder, or completely manipulate them?
 
We should be looking for cool ways in which we can leverage technology to benefit others and not to just benefit marketing companies or venture capitalists. At the end of the day, digital technologies allow us to create massive advantages for humanity as a whole. They bring people out of poverty, eliminate pointless repetitive tasks and enable a whole new level of attention to detail and personalised service. Why not focus our energies on looking for ways to improve experiences through software? Time, which is everyone’s most expensive and limited resource, can be better spent with friends, family and being part of a real community with real people, which has kept our societies going for thousands of years.
 
One of the things we built into our software platform was reminders to check on students who have been sick or injured. Sure, it’s another notification on your phone, of which there are many. However, what’s the impact of this? On a busy day, you get a reminder to check up on a student. You go and check up on the student, see how he or she is feeling and if there’s anything else you can do to help that student. What impact have you just had on the student’s day? What positive feelings are left about your care and concern for the student?
 
This is something I believe is critically important to the design of all systems. What is the end result going to be? What positive human impact have we helped to facilitate? I also noticed this on a flight recently. It was a long-haul flight from Sydney to the UK. One of the stewards came up to me to chat. He knew my name, but called me Mr Gregory, which was nice, but completely unnecessary. He asked how the flight was going and if he could get anything else for me before we landed. Again, this is clever use of software to help facilitate the positive experience for someone on a 23 hour flight. This makes flying from A to B a slightly less stressful and far better experience as the human touch of relationship-building and individual care and management was leveraged through smart and appropriate use of technology.
 
The more we can build systems like these to assist us in being better humans and remind us to take the time to talk with others and help them out, the better the situation. I should also highlight at this point that it’s not just about ticking a box. The person using the technology must also have the skills and demeanour to genuinely care and about those being helped. Technology is just a useful means through which what people do is able to be improved and enhanced.
 
Before we take the sledgehammer to the server room to try and recapture life as we knew it, it’s worth considering the benefit of responsible and ethical software development. The digital world is here to stay. At least it is until someone blows everything up and the planet gets over-run by apes who somehow learn how to speak English and enslave humanity. Anyway, until that happens, how can we develop better use technology that enables us to leverage all the positive traits of humanity to support us in being part of a real community and allow us to spend less time ‘online’ and more time thoughtfully engaged in real human activities with real people? What is it in your job, your workplace or industry that could leverage such an approach and embrace the use of technology to help improve the human connections? This is the challenge and the responsibility of software developers. Build something that’s useful and helps people in their lives to better connect with others. Spend time saved by technology with others and not just drowning in a bottomless sea of shallow likes.
 
Let’s build something useful and real. If nothing else, at least it’ll keep the apes at bay for a few more years.

​Schools love to market themselves these days as being not only a place to gain an academic education, but also a place in which they can get every other bit of education possible.
 
From breakfast club to late afternoon care, you could off load your child somewhere for at least twelve hours a day!! But wait there’s more! You could then fill that twelve hours with so much stuff that your child is always exhausted from the relentless schedule of non-stop ‘compulsory fun’ activities that can even extend into the weekend! This will give you the time away from your children, so you don’t have to listen to them endlessly talk about making the world a better place and also a great chance to get to the gym or that great bar you used to frequent before ‘they’ came along.
 
This might be a bit over the top, but there really is an increasing danger that more and more schools are enabling in their parent and student body and that’s too much involvement at school through way too many offerings and the over scheduling of children’s lives.
 
Don’t get me wrong! I love co-curricular programs and I learnt more about life and the world from them than I ever did in the classroom. I think that a good co-curricular program is, in fact, vitally important to provide real experiential education opportunities to build relationships, work together, show leadership and give back to the community. The problem is that we have increasingly seen the value in activities other than the regular classroom, but instead of building them into a school curriculum and the standard school day, we’re stuffing them on top as ‘added extras.’
 
However, the ‘added extras’ approach doesn’t give anytime for kids to be kids. In the pursuit of value adding, we’re risking becoming detrimental to the health and welfare of students by expecting too much of them all the time. I’ve seen this over the years in outdoor education. As soon as you take a group away, where days have been so over scheduled they haven’t had the time to think, when you give them the time to think, they struggle with it.
 
Rather than cut back on these programs at school, we instead need a curriculum which enables them to be part of the regular day. This way, we can continue to provide the great value of experiential education, but also give our students the time to reflect upon and learn from these experiences. Thus students can get more value out of less time spent on something and as a result, can find themselves growing faster than ever before. 

​I do enjoy a good dystopian fiction, from 1984 to The Hunger Games and Fahrenheit 451. They all describe a future in which society has ‘embraced’ some form of totalitarian government for their own ‘protection.’ As a result, the few in power, control everything and in the case of Fahrenheit 451, technology is one of the key tools which is employed to track and monitor citizens and help restrict the amount of information to which people have access.
 
Whilst the idea of ‘big brother’ watching is nothing new, I can imagine George Orwell being horrified by the ease with which people have given up so much of their privacy and freedom in the name of ‘safety.’
 
Why am I talking about dystopian futures in an experiential education blog? Mainly because from what I’m seeing with technology, corporations and governments today, it worries me. I don’t want to sound paranoid, but let’s not forget that it’s not even been a century since the world was brought to the brink by the Second World War and Russia is still feeling the hangover from that horrendous experience.
 
We now have a generation growing up addicted and reliant on devices, through which information can potentially be controlled. With studies showing that social media has been designed to manipulate behaviour, this isn’t a huge leap to the next step of further controls to ‘help’ teens stay ‘safe.’
 
What happens if our whole experience and existence gets taken online and then filtered back to us with only what marketing, corporations and governments want us to hear? It’s potential for disaster. Whilst I hope this sort of thing will never happen, the risk is however, that it is now far easier to listen to, track calls, monitor online behaviour and develop a profile of someone with predictive behaviour analysis than ever before. If our next generation becomes too reliant on technology for everything, their exposure to potential despotism by stealth, is not so much paranoia, but a scary possible future reality.
 
Therefore, what can we do? For one, keep pushing real experiences in the real world. Help students think critically so they can understand the difference between the fake nonsense of the internet and the reality of the world and teach them how to leverage technology and not be leveraged by technology. If they have a sense of curiosity and are always willing to ask questions and demand reasons why, we can help them to be protected from the dangers of a future in which AIs monitor everything everyone does.
 
With rapid digital change, we have a great responsibility to this next generation to help them build a world that is not controlled by soulless corporations, despotic politicians and softly spoken AIs that want to kill you. Let’s help build a world that’s more Star Trek, than 1984, because at this point in time, both are possible in the not too distant future. 

Being a teenager has always been hard. You’re no longer a kid, but not yet an adult. Suddenly, you’re thrust into a confusing world full of miss-matched messages and expectations. In the past, this wasn’t as big a deal as it is today, as the outside world crept in at a much slower pace.
 
Yet one of the enormous challenges for teenagers today is the fact that the world doesn’t creep in slowly. It’s an unmitigated, relentless attack. Children and teenagers are constantly smacked around the head with marketing, social media and masses of uninformed noise around body image, relationships and how to live life in general. Added to this, they don’t even need to leave home to be exposed to this.
 
As a society, our children are spending more time indoors than ever before. Whilst I won’t go into too much detail about this, the reality is that in previous generations, teenagers went out to discover and experience the world for themselves. Some would find suitable amounts of trouble to get into and learn from these experiences. However, now teenagers have the world, or a distorted version of it at least, come to them.
 
Teenagers spend a lot of time in their bedrooms. This has probably always been the case as part of developing a bit of independence from the family. This is nothing new nor unusual, but in the past, the most access to the outside world teenagers used to have in their bedrooms was either the window, or maybe, if they were fortunate, a TV. Apart from SBS movies and crappy late night ads, at the end of the day, most TV content remained quite filtered and so the risk of harm to a teenagers sitting in their room was pretty minimal. However, due to the seismic shift in technology, the difference now, is the fact that a teenager can sit in their room and be directly exposed to all the horrors of the world. The family home is no longer a safe haven from violence, language, sex, abuse, hatred and bullying, all of which, like Jack Nicholson in The Shining are smashing down the door.
 
It’s an interesting phenomenon with this generation and it’s a significant risk for this generation that goes almost unnoticed until it’s far too late. Mental health problems are sky rocketing and teenage suicide in Australia remains at ridiculous levels. In my working in outdoor education, I’ve found an increasing lack of resilience of both boys and girls. As soon as something doesn’t have a quick answer or an easy solution, they go to pieces and either give up or start trying to blame others for their failures. This is a massive problem, because if they can’t do simple tasks, if they can’t complete simple challenges, what happens when they’re faced with a massive challenge with a massive problem? They’ll be unable to cope and totally and utterly fall apart.
 
This lack of resilience and mental strength all starts at home and is manifesting itself in the kid’s bedroom. To help avoid this, ask yourself a few simple questions. How are your kid’s bedroom setup? Do they have a smart device? Do they have a laptop, or desktop computer in their room? Are you running a content filter? Do you know how your content filter works? Do your kids know how a content filter works and how to bypass it? What supervision do you provide around devices? Do you set limits to time spent on devices and social media? Do you even allow them to be on social media? Can you have open and honest discussions about these issues?
 
The problem is, with too much screen time and no filters or supervision, children and teenagers can be exposed to a brutal soulless adult world that can cause long-lasting harm. Software on mobile devices is intentionally designed to be addictive and manipulate behaviour. Would you let one of these 20-something internet CEOs into your house to hang out with your kids? No! That would be creepy, but that’s basically what is being allowed when kids are able to spend endless time on addictive devices. This messes with the natural chemical balance in the brain and can ultimately result in long-term behaviour and emotional problems.
 
In the past, for a teenager to be exposed to the outside adult world, they’d have to physically leave home, go downtown, possibly to a shady less than reputable place to be exposed to all sorts of things to which you don’t want your teenagers exposed. Now, they can be exposed to all of this from the comfort of their own room and you might have no idea that anything is wrong.
 
There’s been this massive shift in the last fifteen years where you have gone from a society in which it was very hard to connect with people, but easy to speak with those you met, to now where it’s really easy to connect with people, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to connect with real people. That’s a massive cultural shift within a really short space of time. The result of which is that it’s exposed the next generation to a whole host of problems that weren’t there before. With any significant seismic shift, it takes a long time for people to catch up. If you look at education for example, many schools are still trying to come to terms with the fact that what you could do and call education in the 18th century, just doesn’t work these days.
 
However, despite this, with all the massive problems, there are massive opportunities. Once you’re aware of the concerns, it’s easy to start to do something about them. Unfortunately, the massive opportunities to deal with these problems aren’t being addressed and so a lot of educational institutions, a lot of parents are still struggling to catch up after they’ve finally realised the world has suddenly changed.
 
One of the big roadblocks is a parent’s fear of missing out! (FOMO) ‘My child has to have everything that everybody else has otherwise, they’ll miss out on the opportunity... Usually the idea of having everything is about material goods and nothing to do with experiences. The reality is that the more parents freely give stuff to their children, despite the short-term fix this may appear to have, the more likely their children are to really miss out in the future, because they’re socially and emotionally unable to cope with real life and the rapid change that is the reality of the world today.
 
This FOMO has led to droves of parents buying mobile phones for their children, allowing them to become hooked on a highly addictive device and potentially exposing their kids to this massive dangerous world that is totally and utterly unfiltered and soulless. It’s a world into which the teenage mind that doesn’t understand risk, can throw itself in the search of meaning and fulfillment, only to find emptiness and loneliness.
 
Teenagers will find themselves connected with hundreds if not thousands of ‘friends.’ Sadly, the reality is that most of these friends are as real as the tooth fairy, but the more friends or like you have, seems to equate to a higher status or feeling of fulfillment. However, anyone can get friends and likes. You can even buy tens of thousands of followers on Instagram from Russia. None of them are real, but I’m sure it would give you a nice ego boost for ten minutes to have that.
 
Our next generation is desperately searching for real meaning in their lives, yet the irony is that they’re doing it through one of the most shallow, hollow mechanisms possible. They’ve been programmed to need fast actions and fast reactions and, as a result, they want instant gratification. No wonder we’re facing a tidal wave of mental health issues when we have a generation growing up, getting given everything and sitting in their bedrooms exposed to a soulless digital world.
 
Parents who are using devices as pseudo babysitters, are only reinforcing the false expectation of a world where happiness and relationships are simply a swipe away. Whilst so many parents have been focusing on their FOMO for their kid’s materialistic possessions, they’ve totally missed out on the emotional needs of their kids.
 
Despite the amazing improvements technology has provided us, enabling everyone to have the answer to just about everything at their fingertips and watch endless movies of cats falling off tables, the downside is the fact that we’ve created an enormous social and emotional millstone for the next generation and unwittingly hung it around their necks.
 
It’s time we took stock of this, both at home and at school and look at exactly how these addictive devices are impacting on the health and well-being of a generation. The problem however, is not in the device or technology itself. The problem is the disconnect between appropriate parental supervision and real world experiences for children that can enable them to leverage technology as a tool and not let technology leverage them as a consumer.

Whilst some may think outdoor ed and technology don’t go hand in hand, I would beg to differ on this. I might be somewhat biased having developed my own app (Xcursion) for helping manage student medications, allergies, concussions, medical issues and reporting incidents. However, it’s proven to be an amazing support for when I have a group out in the field with me. It’s saved huge amounts of time, energy and effort, but has also helped me to focus on what’s needed and filter out a lot of what’s not! Consequently, for me, this is now just one of the pieces of technology I use as a force multiplier in setting up and running programs.
 
What exactly do I mean by force multiplier? This is a term I learnt at uni when I was studying defence. It’s basically a tool, communications equipment or anything that you can leverage to gain a much greater impact versus the size of your force.
 
Despite my many concerns about the use of technology today and the potential dangers it’s brought to people’s ability to adapt and problem solve, that’s by no means a reason not to use great technology. If you already possess skills which enable you to be adaptable when needed, then you’re in the ideal position to use all sorts of technology as force multipliers to help you do your job more effectively, safely and efficiently.
 
Apart from my own invention of the Xcursion app for permission notes, student medicals and pastoral needs, what else have I found useful for running outdoor ed programs?
 
For one, a solid project management system is needed. For most programs, you’re repeating expeditions and need to follow the same structured system each time to make it happen. I use Basecamp by 37 Signals for this. It’s easy to use, you don’t need a lot of project management expertise or experience to get it going. It’s great from an organisational point of view as you can run multiple projects with different people added to each project so you, as director, can see everything, but your group leaders or teachers only see what they need to see for each project to which they’re assigned. Best of all, you can create project templates, so once you’ve built a solid system, all you need to do next time is to create a new ‘camp’ or ‘expedition’ project from the template and all your tasks are loaded ready to be actioned.
 
Another system I like to use, which is more of a workflow platform, is Podio, by Citrix. You can set up all sorts of things from gear and vehicle registers, with automated reminders of when gear or vehicles needs to be checked, services or rotated. Document management systems for filing, tagging and tracking important documents as well as ordering systems, marketing and client relationship management are features. There are some pre-built systems that are available with this platform, but you can always customise this for your own needs.
 
This is again another way technology can be used to create better systems so you and your staff can focus on delivering the programs for the maximum educational benefit and not be focussed on a bunch of required, but essentially repetitive administrative tasks. Sadly, I’ve worked with many people who get needlessly bogged down in all the administrative tasks and have had no idea what’s really important.
 
The other advantage of using technology as a force multiplier, is the fact that it can draw out and highlight key information that can often get lost the mass of data that gets thrown at us. I don’t want to waste ten minutes trawling through files for a key piece of critical information when I can have a system in place so that important piece of data is always at my finger tips.
 
Things such as GPS tracking, Sat Phones and EPERBs are all part of an essential technology tool kit for running effective programs where you can respond quickly and effectively with limited resources.
 
As teachers, it’s vitally important that the focus is always on the educational experiences that can be had. Sure, there’s lots to get done in the background to safely setup and run each of the educational experiences, but through leveraging technology, setting up and running some amazing and memorable experiences is now easier than ever before. If you don’t have systems in place to do this, then it’s time to make sure you get them up and running right now.