Disruption is defined as a disturbance or problem that interrupts an event, activity, or process. This can sound negative.  The driving question for this unit was “How has technology acted as a disruption throughout history?” This is more of a disruptive innovation which is an innovation that creates a new value or market network and disrupts the existing one.  This is more of a positive disruption.  That is one of the things I learned in this unit was that disruption can have positive outcomes and not always negative.  There were two major projects in this unit.  The first project was to do a podcast and the second was to do a synthesis essay about disruption.

The first project was based on California for the people who went on the PLP trip but unfortunately I had other commitments like basketball so I couldn’t participate this year.  If you would like to read what I did during the week the majority of the PLP cohort were away Click Here. The post talks about what was done at school but more interestingly what my trip was like to the famous Brentwood College for a basketball tournament.

The Disruption Podcast 

I was assigned a podcast to explain and further elaborate on a disruption within Seycove. I thought long and hard about what I wanted my topic to be. I ended up choosing the North Vancouver Basketball Academy. This year I joined the Competitive stream of the Academy and I played on the Jr and Sr  Seycove Basketball teams. I remember my older sister attending the Academy when it started a few years ago and her team won the Provincials last year so I wanted to learn more about it.

The North Vancouver Basketball Aademy was started at Seycove secondary by teachers and basketball coaches Mr. Darcy Grant and Mr. Geoff Russell. The two teachers noticed that there were a lot kids who loved to play basketball but there was no school that offered a program like this one.  They also wanted an attraction that would draw students to Seycove as well as stop them from leaving Seycove to pursue basketball somewhere else. I also interviewed Mr. Chris Ross who is a star on the Seycove senior boys basketball team and plays on the Provincial team for BC. Chris talked about how playing basketball in the Academy made him a better player by having the consistency that the Academy gave him.

Starting the Academy at Seycove was a disruption to the way a phys-ed sport was traditionally taught but it has gone well and been very popular.  I learned that if you have people interested in trying something and experts interested in offering it, things can work out well.  Basketball is a sport that has a lot of disruptions in it and everything can change in a minute depending on skills, strategies and fouls.

Here is a photo of Chris (bottom right)  and the rest of the Seycove Senior Basketball team after winning the Howe Sound Championship and defeating Collingwood.  Now it’s off to Provincials. Here is the podcast on the Basketball Academy.

The Essay

Another project in the Disruption Unit was the synthesis essay on the question ‘How has technology acted as a disruption through history’?  What is a synthesis Essay?  It is defined as an essay that explains a viewpoint about an idea, theme, or topic, and backs it up with several sources. The catch was that it was an in-class Essay and you could only write the essay in two separate blocks that were chosen by our teacher Ms. Emily Maxwell. The only thing that you could bring into these two classes was a single piece of paper with a bunch of quotes on them.  Before we tackled this, our teacher taught us the parts of a synthesis essay.  It has an introduction with a hook to catch the reader’s attention and the thesis which is my theory that I explain.  Then there are three paragraphs with a transition, topic sentence, supporting points and concluding sentence.  Then at the end there is the conclusion that restates the thesis.

I find it hard to write an essay in a short time so I tried to get well prepared.  I prepared a thesis which was ‘Technology has acted as a disruption throughout history by impacting education, business and communication.  I researched my points and found some quotes and practiced writing.  The quotes helped guide me a lot. We also had to tie in the book we read called Little Brother and I decided to tie it into my writing about how technology has disrupted business because businesses track customer data like  internet searches, loyalty points and social media.  This helps businesses but some people think it is a privacy issue.   The main character in Cory Doctorow’s book is worried about privacy with the Dept of Homeland Security so he and his friends communicate on an xnet instead of the internet.  Other people like his Dad think it’s good to monitor people if it finds terrorists.  There are two sides to every coin.

Here is the in-class essay on  technology disruption through history.  I learned a lot about earlier inventions before I was born like the railroad and it seems like they brought big changes just like the internet in the recent years.  I thought all my examples outside the book were positive but I guess some have negative impacts like transportation and pollution.

Disruption throughout history – in class Essay

Overall I really liked the SoCal project when I read about it in iTunes U and when the teachers told me right before I left for Brentwood that I wouldn’t be doing the same project, I was disappointed. But I made the best of it and found that there were some parts about the Silicon Valley and technology in the book we did.  In the end I got to practice my research, interviewing and essay skills for the podcast and essay. Thank you for reading my blog.