Inside View: Repurposing Old Phones FTW

by Bernie Goldbach in Clonmel

I HAVE SUCCESSFULLY extended the upgrade cycle for our mobile phones and now expect the handsets to work at least five years before being refreshed. Today, I've started pushing the functionality of an iPhone we bought in 2018 by using it as a daily transcription device.

I hope to spend the next two weeks working with Dylan (12) as he documents happy moments and as he explores some of my most memorable blog posts and photographs. We're starting with Dylan recalling a story he heard told about a local shop by our friend Simon. Here is how the conversation appears on Otter.ai.

This is Dylan talking to Bernie. Dylan is going to explain something funny that happened in Questum. So did anything funny happen in a story in Questum that you heard from Simon?

Yeah.

What was the funny thing? TK Maxx? Simon works in TK Maxx. Where does he work in TK Maxx?

Cash Register.

What else does he have to do? And how does he go upstairs in TK Maxx?

The lift.

What happened in the lift one day with Simon and TK Maxx?

An old lady was in the lift and didn't press any of the buttons just sitting there. He asked her, "Oh, how long were you sitting here and did you press any of buttons?" and then she didn't and then then she clicked the button and then he put the button on. And it went up.

What happened? Do did she think the store is really big?

Yeah. So she kept going up. And she didn't realize she had gone up before.

We should make stories about Simon. Let's see if this makes a story that we can see online. Okay, stories from Simon.

I want to refine a process where we create four topics for discussion in a written outline form. Then use the cracked iPhone to talk about the outlined points. And as Otter.ai renders our conversation, we edit the transcript and share the result as a blog post.

I think there's value to this workflow and believe I should encapsulate it as part of a Digital Literacy workshop in one of my Notion databases.