Category Archives: Digital Zombie
A Scary Story From A Not-Too-Distant Future Classroom
As Ms. Shannon entered her learning studio with the familiar ‘whoosh’ sound of the automatic doors opening, she noticed something different about her students.
It wasn’t the dried blood pouring from their ears or the vampire-like teeth they seemed to all be sporting. Being a teacher for 20-plus years, she had become accustomed to kids not following along with the school rules banning any type of costumes or “Halloween attire” from the school. Having fought (and lost) many a battle with parents, she had given up hope in some ways that the kids (or better yet, their parents) would actually honor any type of school rule.
No, what was different was that they all seemed to be actually sitting quietly waiting for some direction.
She dreaded this day.
From her first day as a teacher in 2020, to the present year 2041, she always hated dealing with typical rowdy behaviors from her 3rd/4th grade mixed class on October 31. It became a huge pain to try to keep them engaged in any type of lesson. She tried to have them create their own virtual haunted houses and even used augmented reality to zombify their “Facetagram” profiles. Nothing seemed to work.
They were obedient kids, but their boredom tolerance was almost non-existent. She felt as if she had to always entertain them and on Halloween, when they had visions of ‘safe-for-school’ candy dancing in their heads, she knew it would be particularly difficult to keep them engaged in any task.
So, this year, she decided to try something different. Something that would TRULY scare them.
“Class, today we are going to take a surprise field trip,” Ms. Shannon said.
“What? Where? Today? Our parents didn’t get a note, how can we do this?” the students questioned.
“Will it be a virtual field trip?” some pondered as the teacher liked to integrate virtual reality into her lessons regularly.
“No, it will be an ACTUAL field trip,” the teacher responded.
Following some moans and groans, the students slowing rose from their flexible furniture and ambled in zombie-like fashion past the interactive wallpaper at the front of the class (which was currently displaying a misty cemetery setting with headstones that had each of their names).
“Should we take our tablets?” one student asked.
“No, for this you will only need your eyes, your feet, and a snack,” replied the teacher.
As the self-driving bus landed in front of the school, the students filed in with a murmur. There was a mixture of excitement and fear. Usually all field trips had to be approved by parents, and most of these students had never gone anywhere without their parents careful planning. From pre-planned “play dates” when they were 3 and 4 years old, to the cavalcade of TaeKwonDo lessons, Oboe Practice, and Drone Racing League meets, they had all lived extremely scheduled and pre-approved lives.
After a quick flight out of the city, the bus came to rest in the middle of a forest.
“Alright class, everyone out!” the teacher exclaimed.
The students noticed her demeanor had shifted from grumpy to cheerful, which put them all at ease, albeit she seemed to be overly cheerful.
“Students, today you are going to be a part of something you have never experienced. In a few moments, I’m going to leave you alone here in these woods.”
The students shifted uncomfortably in their self-lacing shoes. Some began to look nervously to each of their classmates as if to say, “Do you think this is real?”
“Somewhere, there is a note giving you directions that you’ll have to uncover, but until then, good luck.”
And with that she stepped onto the bus which quickly flew up into low-hanging grey clouds and disappeared.
For what seemed like a lifetime, the students stood still, mouths agape.
“How could she leave us here?” one boy with an interactive t-shirt displaying a 38-year old dancing Billie Ellish commented.
“She’ll be back. I’m sure of it,” a girl with three pig-tails reassured.
After a few minutes, when they realized she wouldn’t be coming back, many of the students began to gather in small groups trying to decide what to do next. One group elected to stay right where they were until their parents came and got them. Another group started to cry and scream from the stress. A third group immediately began looking for the note the teacher had mentioned.
One of the girls in the third group, Sheri, had been a part of “the Scouts” as they had now been named. (Boy and Girl Scouts had been merged in 2036) Sheri had some knowledge of survival skills and immediately took up a leadership position in the group.
“Listen, we can’t wait here for someone to come get us. This is a challenge that we must overcome together. Our teacher is always talking about how we need to collaborate more, think critically, and problem-solve. I think this is a test to see if we can do that,” she stated.
“There are 20 of us here. If we work together, I’m sure we can find the note the teacher mentioned and get out of here.”
“LOOK!!” one of the boys shouted. “There’s an old cabin over there!”
The students gathered closely together as the dilapidated cabin seemed to leer at them behind spider webs and dead vines climbing along the sides of its walls.
“What are you crazy?!? Go into that place? NO WAY” one of the kids commented.
Sheri reassured them,”You don’t really think our teacher would leave us out here with something dangerous? She’d get in so much trouble from our parents. I think this is all an elaborate trick.”
As the words escaped her mouth though, Sheri began to wonder. She had noticed a change lately with Ms. Shannon. She seemed to be getting more and more pail as the year wore on. Her hair, normally perfectly placed, had become disheveled. She seemed stressed. And not just the normal stress that teaching 60 hours a week for a small paycheck had brought upon her life. No, this was different.
Secretly, Sheri thought that Ms. Shannon had finally cracked.
As the students huddled together and slowly approached the cabin, a deep fear had crept into all of their brains. They had never done anything without first checking for consent from an adult. A large group of kids decided to stay in the very spot where they had been left by the bus, opting to collect their snacks in a pile and await for their parents or the teacher to come back for them.
The smaller group, led by Sheri, progressed into the cabin. Inside, it was musty. There were strange all-in-one desk looking torture devices set in rows in the room. An old interactive whiteboard from yesteryear hung tilted off one of the walls. What was this place?
One boy named Leo chimed in, “This almost looks like a learning studio. I think they used to call it a ‘classroom’.”
Other students nodded. There were old, sun-bleached bulletin boards on the walls and alphabet letters strung up across the top of the wall (although four letters E,H,L, and P were missing).
At the front of the room was an extremely large desk. The students had never seen a desk of this size. One of them commented, “It almost looks like it could be a teacher’s desk, but teachers don’t have desks anymore so I’m confused.”
On the middle of the desk laid a single sheet of paper.
Sheri, with hands shaking, picked up the note.
It read:
You have all lived very scheduled lives. You have amazing skills when it comes to using technology, however, none of you have ever learned how to think or entertain yourselves. So today, I’m going to challenge you.
The note continued:
You have no directions. You can do whatever you want. There are no devices to help guide you out of these woods. You are miles from any resources or Wifi. There is only one way out.
Once you have figured out how to think for yourself, you will be freed from the forest.
A loud SCREAM came from the cabin. The group of kids outside sprawled and ran in all directions.
I wish this tale had a happy ending, but it doesn’t.
The students would never leave those woods.
And to this day, if you ever hover near the old school house planted in the middle of woods, you might hear their confused cries for help and direction as they sadly never figured out how to think for themselves.
School for the UnDead
As I approached the my new school, I had some serious apprehension. Why did mom make me transfer to Zed Middle School? None of my friends were here and the stories about this school were unreal. Scary stories. Stories I really don’t want to believe.
There were rumors of vampires living in the attic and strange creatures living in the basement. Stories about detention being one of those spike-enclosed coffins where you couldn’t move without fear of losing a limb. As I walked into the front doors a loud creeeeeeak echoed down the dusty and cobweb-filled hallways. Were the stories true? Or were they worse?
The front office secretary was a witch. I’m not sure if this was because today was October 31st or if she was an actual witch, but after speaking with her, I supposed it was the latter.
“Where’s your transfer slip?!?” she screeched.
“My…wh…what?”
“YOUR TRANSFER SLIP!” she bellowed.
“Oh, you mean this?” and I handed her the slip of paper that had come with me from Viva Middle School, along with my tattered backpack and my Ghostbusters trapper keeper.
“Go down the hall. Room 666. You are late for Mr. Stein’s class. And he HATES it when kids are late.”
I approached my first class and looked for room 666. Frank N. Stein had been a teacher at this school for what must have seemed like hundreds of years. His style of teaching was a mash up of body parts and trendy instructional approaches of years past. Think Madeline “Vampire” Hunter-style with some SAMR (Scary Anthrax Mummified Ruins) model thrown in for good measure.
“Come in. So nice of you to join us.” Mr. Stein grunted.
My teeth were starting to chatter as I made my way towards my seat where my first of a series of horrors would begin. Unlike the nice flexible furniture at Viva Middle, the desks in these schools were akin to all-in-one torture devices. A metal arm bar dug into my ribs as I sat on the hard, flat chair. My back began to ache but I dare not move.
“I wonder what it looks like to collaborate with other students?” I asked myself inside my head. The truth is, there was no collaboration in this class. In fact, I’m not sure exactly sure there was even learning taking place in this class. I looked around at my classmates to see if there was any hope of friendship or salvation in this hostile environment.
That’s when I noticed it.
Something was off.
All the kids had their heads down, noses buried in their textbooks. I looked at the kid to my left. He had blood coming out of his ears.
“Um, excuse me,” I whispered, “you have blood coming out of your ears.”
“GRrrrraaaaachhh!” he moaned back.

Part of the Fearson textbook revealed!
His eyes seemed to have a cloudy haze over them and brownish-drool began to drop from his mouth. I looked around the room frantically for help. All the students seemed to be in a dazed stupor as they looked at their Fearson textbooks. Mr. Stein continued to speak to the class in what seemed like some sort of spell or chant. I leaned forward and tapped on the shoulder of the student in front of me. She turned to reveal greenish, torn skin and black teeth.
“Arrrrrrraaaach” she growled as her head turned and red eyes looked me up and down like a piece of meat.
What is this place? Where am I?
The next class wasn’t much better. In fact, it was worse. The teacher was some sort of banshee. You couldn’t see her face through her stringy black hair and she walked almost like in fast-forward at times. Jumping around the room from desk to desk. In her hands, she clutched a piece of paper with lots of little dots on it.
Oh no. I had heard rumors of these. The scrolls of the dead. They were called Scaretrons. Little bewitched pieces of paper that you have to fill out with blood and slowly suck away your soul.
It was at that moment that I realized where I was.
Zed was a school for the undead.
Torture-device desks in rows.
Scary, unapproachable staff.
Fearson curriculum.
And the soul-sucking high stakes assessments filled out via Scaretron.
This was not a place to learn. This was a place where brains go to die.
Sound familiar?
Digital Zombie Series: “Notifistraction” Disease

Original Image here: http://goo.gl/XNgMhR
Since the beginning of time, man has always had an innate sense of alertness. In our primitive self, that alertness was used to make us aware of dangers around us. Imagine it – you are hunting and gathering food when all the sudden, you happen upon a pond with fresh water. You bend over to quench your thirst or possibly fill a jug with water for your family, when all of the sudden you hear a twig…
SNAP!!
You turn and look for what blood-crazed beast might be approaching you. It turns out to be a smaller creature…like a squirrel (Look! Squirrel!). Following your expience with the varmint, you travel cautiously back to your cave having survived certain death. When you arrive home to your wife and kids you discover that you left your jug full of water behind. “What were you thinking?” she might ask (although back then it might be more like a series of grunts). Your response would be simply “Ah dunno” (which in modern times still sounds like a series of grunts).
The truth is, you were distracted. Your brain refocused attention and energy toward survival and alertness. In that moment, you forgot the water jug and simply returned home. To set this more in modern times, have you ever gone into a room to look for something and then something else caught your eye or someone asked you a question at which point you forget why you are in the room? You might even travel back into the original room to sort of mentally “retrace” your steps and try and figure out why you were going into a certain room.
I know I’ve probably paid hundreds of dollars in wasted electricity staring into the refrigerator pondering why I went there in the first place. By our very nature, we are victims of distraction. Distraction causes our brain to alter their original course of action whenever a new stimulus is produced. Some of us have become quite acute at managing this and claim to be multitaskers (a theory that is seemingly debunked weekly). Others have figured out ways to block out distraction when working on a task.
Enter the era of smartphones and notification alerts. All the sudden, something as small and innocent as a beep or tweet causes us to lose focus on our task at hand. I’m calling this “Notifistraction” (No-tis-fah-strac-shun) Disease, or the mash up of notifications and the distraction they cause. Despite our best efforts to focus our brains still revert back to the stone age twig-snapping event whenever our devices alert us about something.
And that’s only part of it. A local cyber-psychologist here in Austin, Dr. Mike Brooks, says that we are becoming addicted to our alert notifications. He states that we get small endorphin rushes to our brain whenever we get an alert notifying us that someone has connected with us. This can be either mentioning us in a tweet, tagging us in a photo, or commenting on our YouTube video for example. That connection creates endorphins which is subconsciously associated to the sound or sight of a notification alert.
Think of this rat in B.F. Skinner’s famous rat experiment on Operant Conditioning as a simple example of this conditioning.
A more modern example might be the feeling one gets when walking through a casino and listening to the slot machine make all sorts of bells and whistles to claim we have won something. That same primitive level of satisfaction combined with our inability to control perfect focus when distracted make Notifistraction Disease another sign that the Digital Zombie Apocalypse is upon us.
Like everything else I’ve written in this series, I have had some level of personal challenges to overcome when it comes to notifistractions. Recently, I was honored to receive a new Pebble watch as a going away present from my TEC-SIG presidency. Just like any new gizmo, I love the watch. I can see my running times on it, can bring up the weather, and can even be notified when my washing machine is done with my clothes. It uses the smartphone as sort of a “main frame” and just relays alerts to the watch. Now I have notifistractions literally tethered to my body!
Now, as with Digital Yawns, the good news is there are some homeopathic cures out there for those of us suffering from Notifistraction Disease. Here are some tools I’ve deployed personally to help me get through a project or just simply enjoy time with my kids and family without my attention being drawn else where. It’s already come in handy when we went on a recent family trip and I noticed that the airport had mis-tagged our car seats which would have sent them to a totally different city. If my nose had been buried in my phone, I wouldn’t have caught that slip-up.
1. Turn Off Notification Alerts –
I have turned off all audio alerts except for text messages and phone calls. While this might not seem like much of a sacrifice, at one point I was getting Foursquare alerts about how good of mileage Greg Garner made on a recent run. Do I really need to know that? (he’s fast by the way) My next step is turning off that little alert icon that appears on my apps as I don’t need to see the 999 unread email messages I might have.
2. Don’t Respond to Everything Right Away –
I try not to respond or read alerts or social media while sitting in the car. Notice I didn’t say “while driving”. This is still a bit of a challenge, because, just like the Skinner rat, I sometimes want to know what someone is sending me. Of course, with the new watch, I can see the alert on my wrist and just choose not to respond, but that’s still a distraction.
3. Employ the “Pomodoro Technique” –
When working on a project, I employ the “Pomodoro Technique“. I have to give props to Lisa Johnson for sending this my way, but it’s a simple technique used to maintain focus throughout a project. Here’s how it works. You write down a goal or project that you need to work on. Then you basically turn off all notifications, shut down email, turn off your phone, etc for a period of 25 minutes. When the 25 minutes is up, you can take a break for 5 minutes to check email, social media, your clothes in the washing machine, etc but then you have to get back to work on the task for another 25 minute period. I even employed this technique while writing this post!
Let’s face it, we’ve been distracted creatures for thousands of years, but it’s time we started managing those distractions and not letting them rule our lives. Do we really need to know when our washing machine is done? The next time you suffer from Notifistraction Disease, ask yourself, is it really important that I get this alert on my phone? You might find yourself being distracted by more pleasant things like nature and birds and…..squirrels!
Now….what was I saying?
Note: This post is the third installment of a 5-part series on digital zombies, re-animated, if you will, from my SXSW presentation on Surviving the Digital Zombie Apocalypse.