Technolandy

Day 152 (of 2025/26) a #tEChursdAI check in on Bans

Canada is weighing a social media ban for under-16s. Here is how that experiment is playing out in the first country to try it — Toronto Star

As much of an advocate and believer I am in #edtech, I don’t disagree with scaffolded guided, gradual release of responsibility – in fact I prefer that to ‘free access because of your birthday…’. 

Even the New York Times did a recent look at how bans in general are going: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/04/us/did-school-cellphone-bans-study.html?unlocked_article_code=1.f1A.CprL.Xz-GIGLiIYSO&smid=url-share as did Scientific America: https://apple.news/ASL74b7K9RSOudD_vUxTrnw

I admit to a little personal joy with some people on edu-social-media not liking the research provided while not minding how The Anxious Generations research is VERY slanted and ‘cherry-picked’. We like behaviours that we are more familiar/experienced with… new ways of doing and distracting make some very uncomfortable.

Oddly (🙄) behaviour and academics have not flourished with the bans… almost like the same concerns that existed before screens were not actually caused by screens and AI, but the lens allowed more of a focus on the symptoms, though not enough of any work done on the root causes of the issues first identified and worked on some 20+ years ago… and why work on anxiety started with programs like Friends For Life – an Australian CBT program brought to BC in 2004 (proudly reflecting that my classroom was one of the pilot program sites) and did a great job as students were seen using strategies years afterwards in other classes and schools… I was sad when the funding of the program was discontinued (the train the trainer program was not as successful as it needed to be) and yes, this means that Haidt’s Anxious Generation has yet another flaw in its ‘research’ as this was well before personal screens…

But I still firmly believe that an education program on e/affective cell phone use (and social media) would have likewise achieved the same ‘gains’ of more ‘expected use’ of phones while at school… and I am not surprised that the ban had zero effect on test scores… though I kinda hoped there would be a decrease as educators wish that old formats of note-taking and memorizing were actually more a/effective than more personalized methods of organizing thinking… 

It also highlights a key issue that people are ‘finally’ noticing on education research too… it is hard to definitively say that ‘things work’ because learning cohorts have so many differences between them… how many birthdays are in December compared to January… neurological development… schema… it’s why I’ve never been successful rolling over units/lessons from one year to the next even if with the same grade level… thus why I see #edtech making differentiation more accessible as a key disruption of good in learning… after all, as the conclusion of the article notes:

“At lunch you will see all these kids, they’re talking to one another,” Dr. Beck said. “It’s a lot louder, but the good kind of loud.”

Bans can change conditions, but they rarely build capacity. If lunchrooms are louder because students are talking again, that’s not a problem to solve. If more books are being signed out of libraries, that’s a good thing (until they are being read in classrooms…) That’s a reminder that education has always been less about controlling behaviour and more about teaching people how to navigate the world they actually live in. And, sigh, knowing schools, we’ll probably still find a way to write “excessive socialization” into the behaviour matrix… amiright?