Author: Tim

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Is It Over?

 

No, it hasn’t.  Prepare to get maytagged by quadmesters for the foreseeable future


I’m staggering to the end of this absurd quadmester. When it started I wondered if less was all we could manage, and it turns out that it is.  From administration dismissing concerns about masks that don’t fit (or really matter when you can catch COVID through your eyes) and are so far beyond of Health Canada and local health unit expectations that they end up being more restrictive than needed and not at all designed for all-day use (especially while performing instruction), to a schedule that seems explicitly designed to download an abusive amount of work on classroom teachers with the highest class caps, this quadmester has been a disaster.

The lack of focus on what we’re supposed to be doing (providing effective and differentiated instruction that maximizes student learning, remember?) suggests that these things never really mattered in the first place.  Got special learning needs?  Too bad, special education support is cancelled.  Find keeping up with school difficult?  Too bad, we’re going to fire you through courses at record pace even though everyone is reeling from a pandemic.  Don’t worry though, it doesn’t really matter if you keep up or not because you’re getting credits regardless.

I’m able to provide interactive, relevant online learning opportunities for my students and even I still struggled with between 20-40% disengagement in remote learning this quadmester.  I’ve heard of other classes that just did nothing online.  If you talk to admin about it they’d rather pretend it’s happening than do anything to ensure it is with anything like quality in mind.  I had a class drop down to twenty students which means it could have become a single cohort and I could be their online instructor, but making a change for pedagogical effectiveness that would have alleviated a staff member’s medically supported issues with the provided face masks wasn’t something anyone had any time for.

https://twitter.com/tk1ng/status/1324470383496564736

I recently learned that students can opt out of remote learning entirely if they want.  This has resulted in kids who have attended less than fifty hours of instruction earning Ontario high school credits this quadmester (Ontario high school courses are supposed to be 110 hours of instruction).  Remote learning with a teacher unqualified or even knowledgeable about the subject (as was my case with both of my online support teachers) can’t be called instructional time anyway.  ‘Quadmester’ should be changed to ‘freemester’ or ‘fakemester’. 


This kind of inflation is exactly what the current government has been trying to do over the past two years by pushing massive class sizes (even during a pandemic) and devaluing complex pedagogical practice in order to cheapen public education.  They couldn’t stuff more students into classes, so they reduced expectations and lowered the efficacy of the system to the point of absurdity while handing out credits like candy, and the people making it happen are getting bonuses for devaluing our education system!  They must be very proud.  Fear not though, PC party backers are ready to step in with private for-profit options that are likely to perform worse and cost more.

***

As I wrap things up from my double cohort/teaching continuously all day/double class/teaching continuously every week quadmester one I’m struck with how this drink-from-the-firehose schedule that doesn’t remotely meet Ontario standards not only injures already traumatized students and staff but also removes the most challenging work I do in class.

We got to the culminating projects (exams are cancelled – as is all safety paperwork because why not) and I found that my grade 9s have not had the opportunity to develop a rigorous and resilient engineering process in the way that they would in any other year, though considering the class is half as long as it should be I shouldn’t be surprised.  I’ve been able to cover the basic material, though the speed at which that came at students was overwhelming even to the stronger ones.  Neurologically speaking, you need time to reflect and internalize new learning, but best pedagogical practices have long since been flushed down the toilet.

I keep hoping that we’ll make adjustments toward making Ontario education more equitable and fair to everyone as this slow burn pandemic grinds on, but the powers that be appear to believe that they are finished and are ready to fire us through quadmester after quadmester rather than responding in a best practices-continuous evolution.  I’ve suggested previously that the week-on week-off is already problematic, so why not just go back to week on week off semesters?  If we did that with a Friday fully remote review day we could also give teachers and students the headspace they need to consume new learning, but the new normal is too waterboard everyone with a pedagogically bankrupt schedule that only has the appearance of credibility.

As we lurch into quadmester two with no quadmester ending in sight I’m looking forward to not being waterboarded any more, but I’ve still been handed another technology course with two cohorts and a teacher who has no background in my speciality ‘covering’ the remote part of the course, so I can expect another poorly engineered schedule designed to hand out cheap credits.  I got handed the same thing (a course I’m not qualified to teach) to provide remote support in even while I’m still providing technical support to people across the school and beyond.  There is evidently no way to differentiate teacher schedules to give them time to provide system support either.

I’ll do what I can to mitigate this poor scheduling (again), but since the system has downloaded all guidance and special education expectations on me as well I’ll be stretched (once again) to the breaking point trying to protect students from a schedule designed by people who don’t seem to care for their personal circumstances and well being… while struggling through a pandemic with my own health concerns.

Even evidence that the system think types are evolving this in the right direction would be helpful, but communications are nearly non-existent and there is no sense of vision or even an acknowledgement that what we’re doing isn’t kind, let alone working.  The new normal is a cruel, undifferentiated and ultimately meaningless place.  With a complete lack of leadership from the Ministry or Minister, we’re likely to see Ontario plunge in years of darkness as a result of this overwhelming and cruel schedule.


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A Cure for Double Doubling

The following is relevant to what’s happening in my board, but since there appears to be no central plan from a ‘ministry’ of education, every board is doing their own thing, so this might not apply to you.  In my world the double-double is now an overwhelming truth that combines all the difficulties of remote learning with the challenges of providing face to face instruction in a medical emergency simultaneously all day every day.  I have two classes like that so I’m prepping for two different lessons and instructing in two places at once (online and f2f) all day every day every week, no breaks.

I have some ideas on how to fix that:

I’m able to cover the basic hands on and theory learning in my face to face technology classes, but the more pedagogically complex work like developing an adaptive and agile engineering process by working out how to solve problems in non-linear, failure heavy learning situations simply isn’t happening in our drink-from-the-firehose quadmestered schedule.  There is no time or the space you need in order to iterate past problems and internalize this deeper learning, and there is no time as a teacher to generate this prodigious amount of material.  How could we make moves to fix that?

TIMETABLING SUGGESTION #1:  NO MORE QUADMESTERS!  A good old fashioned semester with one class each week has its own problems (like 3 weeks between each subject), but would also mean no more double/doubling because we’d never have an always on quadmester.

A weekend break between crossovers between subjects along with our current cleaning regimens (which seem to do a better job at stopping COVID19 than the general public) suggest that we could return to a semestered system safely.  Rather than waiting months to take a breath, teachers would have a rotating prep each month where they could plan for the next onslaught.  Senior students would have a breath too if they have a spare.

Double cohorts of simultaneous face to face and remote students mean teachers are producing learning content at high speed (a week of intensive class equals almost a month of regular class) while also having to produce online and face to face lessons.  The marking obviously comes at an accelerated rate too.  This is absurd.  I wish we had a union.  Breaking up the quadmester system back into semesters means everyone would cycle through all their classes every four weeks, and while there will be retention problems, there are anyway.  At the very least getting semesters back would mean that students with spares would get to experience them and teachers would actually be given time to prep what they’re teaching.  It also means that we’re not dragging kids through rapid fire quadmesters and they would have time to digest what’s coming at them.  Best of all it means we’d never have to use the term ‘quadmester’ again.

***

The remote part is happening simultaneously and I’m supposed to be designing and running that too… while I’m teaching f2f at the same time.  Parents are wondering why I’m not responding to questions online in a timely fashion while I’m teaching the other cohort in the classroom.   In the meantime I’ve given a ‘remote learning support teacher’ to help me with that, except they’ve yet to be able to provide anyone who has the faintest clue what we’re doing in computer engineering.

I’m seeing make-work for teachers instead of them focusing on teaching, let’s stop that.

TIMETABLING SUGGESTION #2:  CAP ALL SPECIALTY CLASSES THAT YOU CAN’T FIND A QUALIFIED TEACHER TO REMOTELY SUPPORT AT 20 AND MAKE THEM SINGLE COHORT CLASSES.

Rather than inventing make-work that has people making teacher salaries to babysit students online (no marking or any other responsibilities), let’s let subject specialists remotely support their own classes.

The myth is that we’re providing 2.5 hours of face to face instruction and 2.5 hours of remote instruction each day adding up to enough instructional time to equal a credit, but if we can’t provide a qualified, knowledgeable teacher to manage the learning then we’re not providing the instruction time the Ministry of Education claims is required to earn a credit.  A split f2f/remote cohorted system does good things in reducing face to face class sizes (though when students are coming off buses with 38+ students on them you have to wonder how effective it is), but f2f/remote quadmesters are a shell game when it comes to actual instructional time.

I’ve got 15-20% of my grade 9s (the ones with IEPs who need support – but that’s been cancelled in school) not doing any remote learning at all.  Since the remote learning support teachers aren’t qualified to speak to the material and don’t have any clearly defined responsibilities anyway, these kids are falling through the cracks.  This academically driven rapid-fire quadmestered system is predicated on privilege and aimed at student success for the successful.  Kids who struggle in the system are being run over by it (as usual).

We’ve been given ‘remote support teachers’ who are supposed to oversee the elearning half, but they’ve yet to provide me with one who is qualified in my subject area and both have said that they have no idea what we’re doing in class.  I’m unable to put them as teachers in the Cisco Netacademy LMS because they aren’t qualified to teach it, which is kinda the point.  Guess who gets all the content question emails?  Except I’m kinda face to face all day too.

This could be fixed at next to no cost.  Tech classes have smaller caps anyway, so setting them to the cohort limit (or changing the cohort limit to tech caps)  wouldn’t change class sizes or displace students at all while ensuring that qualified teachers are teaching specialist subjects.  Tech numbers have remained strong because they are hands-on classes that don’t translate to a remote learning platform well.  In the spring we were told students can’t do any tech work at home even if they had the tools at home for liability reasons, so there is another reason to protect this specialized learning in face to face situations.  Any class that focuses on tactile hands on learning should be prioritized in face to face classes.  Those classes (tech, art, etc) shouldn’t be lumped in with academic classes that work online.

We’re frequently told this situation is flexing, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of flexibility in planning once it’s in place.  I only hope the people responsible for arranging the deck chairs on our ship aren’t nailing them into place, because they’re placed poorly.

***

I’m watching my grade 9s struggling to wrap up this overwhelming rapid fire quadmester now.  I’m crawling to the end of the damned thing wondering how things have gone so wrong.  In the first couple of weeks I didn’t know how I’d get to the end.  It turns out the answer is:  do less less well, which I’m not satisfied with.  I’m not sure that the people running things who haven’t been in a classroom in the 21st Century are as frustrated by that as I am though.

The nines struggle to adapt to a semestered system when they end in January in normal scheduling.  In this pandemic scheduled school year they are getting buried even while being overwhelmed emotionally by the limitations inflicted upon us by this virus.  There was a lot of talk about mental health and care before we launched this waterboarding schedule.  It’d be nice if that focus returned when people were thinking about how the second semester might go down in February.

If not a weekly/semestered schedule, how about a four day week with one day as a fully remote working day where teachers who are teaching their students rather than babysitting them could interact meaningfully with them in that online environment in real time (hard to do when face to face at the same time)?  Doing that instead of inventing make-work ‘remote support teachers’ would be a much more functional use of time.  If prep times were integrated into that remote learning day we’d also be able to cut the dozens of ‘teachers’ who are covering (or not if they aren’t qualified) teachers in order to provide them with prep time.  I haven’t had any prep time since this quadmester started because they’ve yet to be able to provide me with a tech qualified teacher to cover my class, and I’m not going to pull my students out of hands-on work even if I desperately need the prep time because the whole point of face to face classes it to restore tactile hands-on learning that was lost in remote teaching in the spring.

We could even vary classes based on what they are instead of lock-stepping everyone through the same always on quad-mestered system, but locking all classes to academically focused approaches is the education system’s knee jerk response to everything.  Wouldn’t it be something if this pandemic emergency actually produced better pedagogy through creative and differentiated scheduling rather than overwhelming everyone with the same, simplistic and unsustainable quadmestered plan?

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Perth County Moto

Last weekend I was in Stratford to see Mother’s Daughters – a modern feminist take on Mary and Elizabeth’s battle to become queen after their father (Henry VIII) kicked the bucket way back in 1550s England – it was brilliant!


Before the play we were about town having dinner when I stumbled upon Perth County Moto.  Jeff O’Neill, the co-owner, was in there and we had a nice chat about vintage German police leathers and my Triumph Tiger.


Looking over PCM’s website, Jeff and his wife Lindsay seem to be focused on a side of motorcycling that you don’t often see:  vintage and DIY.  Everything motorcycle related near me is pretty much a box store or dealer (which is like a box store but with higher prices).  Looking into PCM’s approach makes me wish I lived closer to Stratford.  The Englander in me finds himself a stranger in a strange land when it comes to DIY; it’s not generally a North American mindset.


There is a younger side to motorcycling culture that embraces DIY and gets excited about customizing older machines.  Some turn their noses up at this new approach and call it hipster, but I dig it.  Perth County Moto seems to be all in on the custom DIY scene.  They even have a custom build going on on their blog and look like they support spannering nights.


PCM has a variety of Biltwell new gear, Bell Helmets and some other less common manufacturers for sale.  I tried on Biltwell gloves but wasn’t thrilled with the feel, but they’re a pretty budget item and I’m getting pickier with gloves (Speed & Strength aren’t cheap, but that’s the new standard).  I wish I’d had more time to look around, but I was on a dinner and show schedule.


One thing that did stand out was the used leathers on a rack at the back.  The green German Police leathers immediately jumped out at me, but alas, they were designed for a very small German police officer.


If you’re looking for out of the ordinary gear, Perth County Moto is worth a stop.  In my brief time in there I managed to find a nice Triumph patch (they have a big selection of classic badges along with a pile of sticker options).  I’m sure I’d have bought something else had I the time.  Fortunately, we’re back in Stratford for shows several more times this summer.


How best to get out to Perth County Moto?  Well, load up for a lovely ride through Southern Ontario countryside, get into Stratford early and have a look around PCM, then go out for dinner at one of the many nice pubs or eateries within walking distance.  Once you park up downtown, it’s all easily walkable.  I’d also suggest having a look at the Black Swan Brewery (they make a wonderful English Pale Ale) before you catch a show and then ride back home under the Milky Way while working in some funky new gear.  Perth County Moto gives any motorcyclist a reason to ride out to Stratford this summer.


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Icelandic Motorcycle Culture

I’m sitting in England thinking about our 9 days in Iceland.  We covered over two thousand kilometres in the land of fire and ice, alas, none of it on two wheels, but I was always on the lookout for motorcycle culture and there is no shortage of it on Iceland.  In a future post I’m going to hammer out all the advice I’ve garnered from our Icelandic reconnaissance.

 You see a lot of BMW GSes on Iceland.  Viking Biking rents them out of Reykjavik and a ferry delivers them from mainland Europe on the east coast.  The adventure bike is the perfect motorcycle genre for Iceland as the roads vary from smooth tarmac to potholed hard dirt, and everything in between.





On our second day I discovered another side of Icelandic motorcycling culture.  The big-twin cruiser rider can also be found here, albeit in much reduced numbers.  The Norse Riders Iceland Chapter are a mashup of your North American patch club with viking imagery.  Like every other biker I’ve talked to, they look rough but are the nicest people when you chat with them.

 Later that day we were making tracks back to Keflavik Airport to return the rental car when we came across some massive lava fields in the south west of the island.  We’d been driving 20 minutes at a time without seeing traffic either way, and this was during the height of tourist season when a number of people had asked me if we should be going there then.  If you like empty roads, you’ll love Iceland.  Through the lava fields eventually came two GSes making time on the empty, winding roads.  I can only imagine the smiles on those riders’ faces.

 Even in the capital of Reykjavik you’re looking at something the size of a small North American town.  Traffic moves all the time and there are seldom any backups.  Out in the country you’re making tracks all the time with sporadic traffic at worst.

 You’re driving on the right, so you’ve got none of the headaches involved in riding in the UK or Australia/NZ, and the drivers themselves are polite and efficient.  If you pull up behind a slower moving vehicle they’ll turn on their right indicator when it’s safe for you to pass.  We made good time in a hatchback and then a mini-van with six people and luggage; on a bike it’d be heaven.

This left me wondering what I’d most enjoy riding in Iceland.  The Tiger I’ve got sitting in a garage back home would be the ideal weapon – able to make good use of tarmac but able to manage gravel and packed dirt/potholes.  Iceland is adventure bike nirvana.

 A couple of days later we were out near Lake Myvatn and came across a couple of Germans on KTMs.  With their light weight soft panniers and nimble bikes capable of handing any rough stuff, these enduros would be another good choice for riding Iceland.

Those KTMs slice down the valley of the Krefla Geo-thermal power plant (Iceland’s main source of electricity and heating is green/geo-thermal energy).  

On our first day with two families, 3 kids and a minivan, we did what all Canadians do and covered a lot of miles, all while repeatedly ignoring the satnav.

The vast majority of this drive was on tarmac, but the satnav kept telling us to turn back on the north shore of the peninsula and we soon found out why.  There were over 100kms of gravel roads that soon devolved into hard parked pot-holed earth roads.  While battling those roads you’re also wrapping around fjords and experiencing blind corners at fifteen degree inclines.  It’s beautiful, but it’s a tough road, especially if you’re still hundreds of kilometres from where you’re going to lay your head that night.  We saw a number of campers just pull up in a fjiord for the night to enjoy the quiet and the view.

It’d be a challenging ride on an adventure bike, but you’d never forget the scenery.  Based on how exhausting the car ride was, I’d suggest 2 full riding days to do this on a bike, and be ready for some technically challenging roads on day two.

 

Snaesfellsyokel: a stratovolcano in a land of rift built shield volcanoes.  There is a road across the back of it, if you dare. Rental cars are restricted from using F roads, and considering how rough some of the ‘main’ roads where, F roads must be quite technical.

 

Your typical busy Icelandic summer road – if you like the view you’ll get a new one like this every ten minutes.

 

Lava fields

 

1st day in Iceland: driving Canadian style (huge distances, various road surfaces)…

 

Taken five minutes past midnight – that’s pretty much as dark as it gets – dusky.

Riding in Iceland isn’t an oddity.  You’ll meet people from all across Europe exploring the continent’s last real frontier.  Whether you’re a cruiser, a sport or an adventure rider, you’ll find your people here on two wheels enjoying some Jurassic Park quality landscapes and empty, sinuous roads.


If you’re into exploration of any kind, Iceland delivers.

A 4×4 off-road ready camper van?  Yep, saw that (parked on black lava sand at the base of a cinder volcano!)

 

This couple were pros.  Their packing was exceptionally organized and the next morning they were up in a light rain in full waterproofs and gone before 8am.








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A Single Decision Could Save Our Future

I watched the first episode of BBC’s Victorian Bakers the other day and it’s still resonating with me.  They kick it off by taking modern bakers and putting them in an early Victorian bakery.  Like one of the guys in this, I have a family history of baking.  The Kings I’m named after were bakers on Drayton high street near Norwich for generations.

My uncle John has a great story of heading out for bread deliveries on a horse and cart with my great grandfather Eddie.  They left before sunrise and were dropping off loaves for miles and miles before coincidently ending up doing their last drop right next to a public house around lunch time.  Eddie went in, had two pints on an empty stomach and then got back on the cart.  The horse walked the ten miles home without direction while Eddie had a nap.  My then six year old uncle just sat next to him with his mouth hanging open.

The BBC show does a good job of situating those early Victorian bakers in a time period that is very unfamiliar to modern people.  They were performing a truly sustainable industry that had been done in much the same way since before the middle ages.  For millenia local bakeries in villages and towns across the country had made bread that provided the majority of caloric intake for everyone around them using technology and processes that were passed down from generation to generation.  Every time I take out a bag of garbage or a box of recycling and wait for a diesel monster to take them away, I’m aware that what I’m doing isn’t remotely as sustainable.  It’s a lot of hard graft, but between our fixations on ease of living and short term gain, the idea that we could hand down an industry to our children without it destroying the world is foreign to us, hard work or not.

Using brewer’s yeast from local breweries and grain from local fields, the bakery, attached to a water powered mill, would feed everyone within walking or riding distance.  In the process of mimicking this time period the modern bakers made a number of surprising observations, such as how effectively the locally sourced and unmodified brewer’s yeast raised the bread.  Modern yeast has been bred to grow as rapidly as possible in order to be distributed industrially on a massive scale.  It’s not made for taste or even health, it’s made for ease of productivity.  Most of what we do in the 21st Century is designed to feed industry.  The modern bakers who are used to this GMO’d yeast were surprised at how well the traditional brewer’s yeast worked, as well as how much taste it retained; modern yeast is bland by comparison.  One of them said that he could make this bread in his current bakery and it would sell no problem – people miss the details lost in industrialization.
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Another naturally rather than industrially sourced ingredient were the local, ancient grains used in this traditional bread making.  An archeologist turned farmer in the area was farming using traditional methods.  So, rather than industry driven monocultural crops that erode soil, he had a variety of grains that naturally grew in the region.  He couldn’t slot that in to modern expectations designed to maximize profit at the expense of everything else, but it did enable the TV production to make a surprisingly accurate traditional bread.  Those traditional grains changed from region to region depending on the local biome, so if you travelled more than two centuries ago, the bread and beer would have tasted different depending on where you were.  Modern grain is bred for rapid growth and tends to be monocultural (and trademarked) in order to maximize short term yields, so they lack that variety and the sustainability that ancient grains had.  Another surprise was the reduced amount of gluten in the ancient grains bread.  Modern monocultures are selected for maximum gluten in order to produce the biggest, fluffiest bread possible.  We genetically engineer grains so they are gluten overloaded then wonder why we’re having a reaction to gluten.
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GMOs aren’t the issue here other than how trademarked, selective breeding also fits into the industrial farming disaster.  We’ve been selectively breeding crops and animals for thousands of years to good effect.  The issue is how industrially driven economics force agriculture into unsustainable, damaging, repetitive high-yield, mono-cultural crops that are inherently dependent on diesel powered heavy machinery and heavy chemical use.  All of this is done to produce as much cheap food or fuel as possible.  The quality of that food and the fact that we can’t keep doing it this way aren’t in the equation when farmers are forced to look at short term gain year after year.  When we mess around with agriculture in order to increase profitability at the cost of our health or the health of our environment, we’re ultimately destroying the world for the short term gain of only a few people, and leaving the wreckage for the people who come after us.


The economic system that drives our industrial economy goes well beyond a lack of sustainability.  It demands sacrifices to our health and safety in order to drive short term profit.    Thanks to this myopia we have turned a staple food that we’ve eaten for thousands of years into something unsustainable and unhealthy in order to make more of it for less.  The following episode of Victorian Bakers showed how industrialization and the profit driven wealth that comes from it not only made a traditional, sustainable industry nearly impossible, but also produced products that were happy to trade health for profit.  The bakers in the show were never as unhappy as they were in the early industrial bakery.  The next time someone tells you that we need to deregulate industry, show them this:


***

The red countries are already upside down. The green coutries are all trending toward red. We aren’t remotely aimed toward a viable end.


This series has me thinking about larger questions around sustainability.  Pretty much everything we do on an industrial scale is driving us toward extinction or at least a drastic correction.  We’re too selfish to make these changes ourselves, but it doesn’t matter because nature will eventually make them for us.  We think we’re forced into making these decisions because of our population, but our population is also a choice.

Current estimates have us at three times the sustainable number of people the Earth can manage.  We could resolve overpopulation in only a few generations, but it would mean radically altering an economic system designed to ignore sustainability in favour of selfishness and short term gain, as well as acting in a way that we as animals aren’t evolved to do.  Procreation is an instinctive force that most people are unwilling or unable to consider modifying.  Asking humans to voluntarily consider modifying the number of children they have raises all sorts of superstition and involuntary anger.  The vast majority of us are not able to worry about how our great grandchildren will survive no matter what horrible things we’re doing to them.

 

Pledge to look after your great grandchildren by signing here

If, over the next four generations, we volunteered to follow a one child per family policy, we’d have corrected human overpopulation by 2100.  By 2200 we could stabilize the human population under that two billion mark while still being able to develop our science and technology towards less invasive and more sustainable goals.  What we wouldn’t be able to do is continue our short sighted economic system that really only works to convert future misery into today’s profits for a decreasing number of people.  Our economic system is only considered successful if it’s always growing.  The only other thing in nature that works that way is cancer, and a cancer is exactly what free-market driven human beings who think they can procreate at will and ignore the natural consequences are.

It’s possible for us to resolve the mess we’re in.  There is a way forward, but I fear it’ll never happen voluntarily.  I’ll never meet my son’s grandchildren, but I hope he can leave them a world where they don’t find humanity to be a selfish, ignorant, overpowering cancer on the biosphere.  It would be a world where human beings take responsibility for the science and technology that have allowed them to medicine themselves past many of the natural mechanisms that would have otherwise limited their growth.  If we’re going to spend billions ensuring children aren’t dying of disease, then we need to produce less children, or forgo the benefits of that medical science.  The choice is one made by a technologically mature species, but that’s not us.

There could be a future where the reduced human population load on Earth would allow us to continue to develop our science and technology and eventually move our heavy industry out of the only habitable ecosystem we have.  The solar system would be able to provide raw materials for our off-world heavy industry while our home world would became a carefully managed, bio-diverse and sustainable home.  It won’t be groaning under the weight of unsustainable agricultural monocultures we developed to feed an overpopulated planet.  Our biodiverse world would contain self sustaining settlements.  Cities would evaporate and small towns and villages would proliferate, though they would all be able to communicate with each other.  We would benefit from that biodiversity both in terms of sustainability and research.  We can’t make ground breaking discoveries from the massive variety of life around us if we reduce that variety to monocultures designed to feed as many humans as we can stuff onto the planet.

 

Power generation would be regional, small scale and renewable and consumption would be efficient and light.  Settlement size would be dictated by the biome it was located in and how much food and energy could be produced to look after the people in it.  Cellular regional governments would make decisions for their local needs and larger decisions would be made by combined groups on whatever scale was required, right up to world wide decisions on world wide consequences.  High power production for heavy industry would still happen, off world.  The people who wanted to work in heavy industry would work in space and come back to a green and blue home when they wished.  Imagine a world like that pre-Victorian bakery where the benefits of local life are emphasized and enhanced, but with the efficiencies of advanced communications and micro-manufacturing available to improve health, wellness and quality of life.

Space based energy production could be microwaved to the surface when needed.  Heavy equipment built on the Moon from mines throughout the inner solar system would mean access to raw materials without having to upset the Earth’s biosphere.  Saturn is a near infinite source of Helium3 energy.  Once we build the processes to mine the helium there, we have an energy rich, sustainable civilization for the indefinite future.  Advances in nano-technology, gene editing, chemistry and micro-manufacturing would make our current technology look as inefficient and awkward as steam trains do to us.

From that energy rich space based industry we could eventually drop space ladders down to the surface, making the transfer of people and materials to and from space even more ecologically viable and efficient.  There would come a time where there are more people scattered through the solar system than there are on Earth, but it would always be there ready to welcome us home.  Maybe at some point we would build generational ships and head to the stars, looking for other homes.

A future where we are able to hand down our way of life to our descendents without it killing them is only a single personal choice away.  It’s a shame the vast majority of humanity don’t have it in them to do it.  What my son will be telling his grandchildren is that he’s sorry it has all gone so wrong.  As vital resources like water become scarce under the crushing weight of billions we’ll do what we’ve always done when resources get scarce and go to war with each other.  At that point our science and technology will actually be put to the task of reducing human populations radically quickly.  Perhaps in the aftermath of that we’ll find a way forward, but we’re too stupid and self-righteous to make a decision that will avoid that misery now.

I’m a big fan of artificial intelligence.  As I get older I’m starting to think it’s one of the only places I’m seeing any kind of intelligence.  We seem to be regressing politically and culturally.  Given an opportunity to light up a SkyNet that would manage us better than we’re willing to manage ourselves, I wouldn’t hesitate to flip the switch.  It might be the only way we have a future.

 

***

 

Research Links:

The other thing that got me thinking in this direction was Starfarers by Poul Anderson.  The characters in the novel are travelling between stars at relativistic rates, so when they return to Earth over ten thousand years have passed.  Anderson uses that as an opportunity to look at how human society could become a long term, sustainable process.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080428120658.htm

https://databank.worldbank.org/data/reports.aspx?source=2&series=EN.ATM.CO2E.PC&country=#

https://phys.org/news/2012-08-earth-absorbing-carbon-dioxide-emissions.html

https://www.worldpopulationbalance.org/3_times_sustainable
“If we allow overpopulation and overconsumption to continue, the evidence is mounting that billions will suffer and that we will leave future generations a much harder, bleaker life.”
“Taking these non-renewable resources into account suggests 2 billion people living at a European standard of living may be the upper limit of a sustainable global population”

https://www.footprintnetwork.org/our-work/ecological-footprint/#worldfootprint 

http://data.footprintnetwork.org/#/

https://youtu.be/ANPaAHhfNck

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/nature-destruction-climate-change-world-biodiversity_n_5c49e78ce4b06ba6d3bb2d44

The rapid decline of the natural world.

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Planes Trains & Automobiles




As I sit here I’m in the middle of a twelve hour odyssey to get back to Canada from the UK. From this cramped seat where I’m constantly being jostled by people, babies burst into full throated song and planes sit on tarmac for forty minutes waiting to unload luggage from two people who checked in then didn’t board, I’m reminded of how much I fucking hate flying. My sinuses are in a vice and I spent ten of the short 90 minutes we had on the ground in Reykjavik trying to clear them of blood and mucus.

At 6’3” and 17 stone, I’m not built for air travel. These seats were designed for people half my size and the leg room varies from barely sufficient to chronically painful. The only reason I’d subject myself to this hell is to visit somewhere spectacular like Iceland or go home to England for a few short weeks to make any kind of connection with my family and memories from childhood.

It has been over a month since I’ve ridden the Tiger with its infinite headroom, divine wind and singular sense of freedom. The freedom of riding a motorcycle has never felt so far away as it does when you’re human cattle on an airliner.

As a younger man I studied flight and once dreamed of doing it myself, but and older post sinus surgery me finds the pressure changes painful and the increasingly OCD/socially anxious me would rather be walking across the Sahara than sitting on this aeroplane right now. There is no kind of tired like the kind of tired you get from the pressure changes and dehydration of flying. The resting 150 heart rate from the social anxiety is a nice bonus.

I love to travel. Going to new places and seeing all the different ways the world can be beautiful is one of my favourite things, but the emotional cost of doing it this way is extreme. The difference between going somewhere on a motorbike and going somewhere in a plane is like the difference between creating a piece of art and looking at a picture online.  One is Travel with a capital T, the other is utilitarian transportation.

We did nine days and covered over two thousand kilometres in some truly beaten up rental cars in Iceland, and the country begs for another go. It’s a beautiful, expensive, unique place that makes you feel like you’re on the edge of the world. Iceland wasn’t born yet when the Canadian Shield I live on was already ancient. That newness comes through around every corner, and it’s blessedly free of people. The ones you do meet are happy to see you (because seeing you is a rarity) and their sense of humour is so honest and piercing that it’s practically glacial in its purity. If you can afford it, there isn’t much to dislike about Iceland though more than a night in Reykjavik is enough though – head out of the capital for the real thing.  If you want a less touristy city, Akureyri on the north coast is a lovely alternative.

We wandered Iceland in a rental hatchback that looked like it had fought a ground battle

in Afghanistan and then a diesel minivan with no springs left and almost a hundred thousand kilometres on the clock. They did the job, but they did it with no joy. When I returned the black and blue Vauxhall Corsa to the impossible to find rental agency (they are called Flizzr, but you have to go to SixT to get it and they don’t say they’re Flizzr anywhere), it was with minutes to spare. I came screaming in from miles of lava fields in a never ending dusk with whisps of smoke streaming off the car, drove it into the side of the building where it burst into flames, mic-dropped the keys at the feet of the stunned attendant and skipped off into the never-to-happen darkness – at least that’s how I remember it. The car had over 80 known dents and scratches on it (life is tough in the land of fire and ice), yet the attendant still went over it with a floor mirror on a stick and took ten minutes to OK it so I could go. Whatever.  

The best car I’ve ever driven was a 9/10.  The worst car I’ve ever driven was a 1/10.  It got a 1 because it actually moved.  I’ve sat in zeroes.  This Corsa was a 3/10 car because it didn’t strand us anywhere, but the car pulled constantly and sounded like an asthmatic runner.  I’ve seldom driven a car so beaten and tired and so minimally engineered in the first place as to make driving it so tiresome… and don’t rent with Flizzr, it’s a headache.


The worst bike I’ve ever ridden was a 9/10 (bikes go up to 15/10, though I suspect an H2 is a 17/10).

The next day we picked up the diesel Citroen C4 Picasso – a six passenger minivan that was supposed to carry 3 adults, 3 teens and all their luggage for a week. Somehow it managed it, which says great things about Citroen’s ability to package a people carrier. It had three times the mileage of the poor, old, beaten Corsa but looked five years newer which says great things about Citroen’s ability to produce a tough vehicle. Other than the shock-less suspension that wallowed over bumps, the C4 was useful, but never enjoyable. It pulled well enough with all that weight, and got impressive gas mileage; it was the best vehicle on this trip, 7 out of 10.   Who rents vans with blown suspension, a broken windshield and almost 100k on them?  Icelandic car rental agencies, that’s who.

We drifted out of Iceland on a bus, which was easy enough, only to get stranded at the airport for five hours because Air Canada can’t be bothered to change the tires on their planes often enough. An Air Canada Jazz flight out of Gatwick, where we were headed, blew a tire on take off. A close scan of the runway showed nothing.  Even when we don’t take Air Canada they manage to delay us.

We touched down near London at about 1am only to walk into a massive line at customs. The five hour closure had created a huge backlog, but rather than prepare for the backlog the UK had its customs agents sit there all day doing nothing and then left the night time skeleton crew unsupported. We got a bit lucky and only had a 45 minute wait in line, but the planes coming in behind us filled the massive waiting room with snaking lines. It must have been hours before the backlog was cleared by that exhausted night shift.

We were car-less for nearly a week and made do with commuter trains and the tube in and around London. We finally made our way up to Norfolk on British Rail First Class. It only cost a few pounds more to upgrade and it was the nicest single public transport experience of the trip. Comfortable seats, a quiet, modern train, complimentary tea and big windows were a joy. That the drooling masses weren’t on that car was also nice. Our seatmate was a transport engineer on his way back from interviewing a job prospect in London. We arrived in Norwich feeling ready for the next leg.  I still love trains, I’m not sure why.

My cousin’s car (another ancient Corsa in similar shape to the one in Iceland, but 100%

A week living in my home town? Priceless.

less expensive) got us all over Norfolk. It took a few days for us to acclimatize to no shoulders (ever), roads that often disappeared into a driveway sized single lane and drivers who seemed almost psychotically intent on over driving every blind corner. We were told later that as we drove away from Norfolk things would get more sane, and they did. You have to treat driving in Norfolk like lion taming – show no weakness, never break eye contact and establish dominance immediately. Any sign of weakness is seen as an opportunity to try and kill you. We learned the term ‘normal for Norfolk’ and in fifteen days of living there came to appreciate the intensity of their driving culture. Doing it in an old teal Corsa with Norwich City Football Club stickers on it made us look a bit less touristy. By the end of two weeks we could blend.

We cabbed it over to Enterprise Rental Car in Norwich for the next leg. We were getting a Skoda something or other mid-sized (compact in Canada), but it turned into a diesel Toyota Avensis station wagon (estate in the UK). This car was relatively new (12k miles on the odo), with massive, fancy alloy rims and a powerband about an inch wide. It pulled like a V6 from idle, but if you went over two thousand RPM it would start to wheeze, and by 2500rpm it was like accelerating in reverse.

It had a six speed manual transmission and I couldn’t imagine a car that needed that less.

One of the most perverse things about UK driving is that for a people doomed to sit in traffic most of the time, they are all determined to drive a manual transmission. I love manuals, but there is a time and a place, and a big diesel station wagon isn’t that time or place. The Toyota felt under-powered and guzzled diesel. Conservatively I’d guess that the Citroen with six people and their luggage got at least 40% better mileage than the newer Toyota that would turn off if left in neutral and stopped at a light – which caused quite a panic the first time it happened. That the Citroen managed to feel more lively with an automatic transmission, twice as many people and over four times the miles on it doesn’t say great things about Toyota’s state of the art when it comes to diesel motoring, but that wasn’t the worst part of the car.

I’m a sceptic of integrated sat-nav/GPS systems in cars. I understand how Google Maps and apps like Wazer crowdsource information and generate their map data, but the corporate systems built into cars have always seemed like half-assed, cheaper attempts at doing the same thing. They steer me wrong often enough that I usually take their directions as a suggestion at best. Toyota’s 2017 model GPS/sat-nav was the most half assed I’ve ever seen. A number of times in Dartmoor park we were led onto roads that were more an idea of a road than a passable thing, but it really let us down on our way to one of the biggest tourist attractions in the UK.
 

The Eden Project is a massive greenhouse science experiment in an abandoned quarry in Cornwall. As one of the largest tourist attractions in the country you’d think Toyota’s sat-nav could get us there. Instead of walking us in the front gate it turned us away into a town nearby and then directed us up a single lane track that almost had us damaging the rental car (with £1000 detectable) while we tried to avoid other lost new Toyotas and eventually do a 15 point turn to get back around and follow the phone instead. This kind of psychotic behaviour came up so often that I started questioning everything it suggested (“what are you talking about you psychotic bitch?”) We eventually retired the Toyota sat-nav (all we’d need according to the kid at Enterprise in Norwich) and used Wazer, which worked a treat on the heavily travelled roads of the UK.

Our last day with the car had us driving from Dartmoor in Devon to Epsom near London…

during the summer holidays. We spent nearly as much time sitting in traffic as we did trying to get the car back in time. That the on-board GPS kept wanting to drive us through the middle of towns during rush hour (it’s always rush hour in England) didn’t help.

After lining up to get in, lining up to park, lining up to pay, lining up to get into the castle and then lining up to leave again, we ended up with about 20 minutes at Corfe Castle. That’s what driving in the UK is like. You start on a trip and the GPS tells you you’ll get there at 5:00pm and you watch that slip away over the day until you’re frantically trying to navigate roundabout on top of roundabout in London suburb rush hour traffic ten minutes before they close and charge you for another day with the car. Our saving grace was my cousin leading us over there after we dropped off the luggage at his house – you’ll never get lost with a native guide.  I’d give the Avensis station wagon a 4/10 – it’s more like a six or seven as it’s a big car that carries a lot and is smooth and modern, but that guzzling diesel and murderous GPS mean I wouldn’t even give it a pass.

 

The stress of driving at best meh rental cars in UK traffic meant I didn’t find the energy to go looking for my Morgan3 fix. Perhaps that would have reinvigorated my love of motoring after the diesel miasma.  Dartmoor is a driver’s playground with twisty medieval paths paved over and stunning countryside. As I watched everything from MG-As to E Types and a plethora of motorcycles ride the roads from behind the bars of my soulless diesel prison, I longed to be there, but wasn’t.


So here I am, writing this on a flight back to Toronto. The My Tiger has been sitting under a gentle accumulation of dust for weeks in the middle of the too-short Canadian motorcycle season.  I can’t wait to go for a ride again, I just wish I could wormhole my way to Dartmoor to do it.

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DIY Garage Expansion Plans

I’ve always been tight for space in the the < 1 car garage I’ve currently converted into a bike hole:


It’s a good size as a workshop, but when I’m trying to store two bikes in there it gets awkward.  The easiest fix would be some alternative storage for bikes.   Using shipping containers to build a garage is a thing.  There is a company nearby that sells them, though the prices aren’t public.  They seem to go for two to four grand, which seems a lot for a metal box, but I’ve heard lower prices about.

A ten foot container next to the garage would look something like this:

With some driveway expansion and levelling I could connect it through the currently useless back door while making it a drive out storage shed.  With the garage no longer having to hold bikes it could become what it’s a great size for:  a workshop.

Another alternative is to just build an extension off the side of the existing garage wall:

The long, cold Canadian winter has me thinking about ways to make my limited space more usable.

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Motorcycle Haiku and Autumn Photography


motorcyclists blown
in the wind with fallen leaves
clinging to summer


On-bike photos using a Ricoh ThetaV 360 camera attached to the windscreen with a flexible tripod auto-firing a shot every few seconds…

 

Soon enough TMD will go back into Canadian Winter Hibernation Mode and it’ll be all mechanical repairs from under a foot of snow in here…
Over 20°C and very windy on Friday.  Everyone was out, bikes blowing in the wind like leaves, clinging to the last breath of summer before the long dark swallows us for months.  This year is particularly sinister with pandemics and second waves breaking over us.  Canadian winters are inherently isolating, but this year doubly so.  Look after yourselves.

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A Vision of Elearning Focused on Pedgagogy

I’ve been a student and then a teacher through the earliest iterations of online learning.  At university I took one of the last mailed correspondence courses in the mid-nineties and I’ve been online since BBSes and user-groups in the early 90s.  That whole time I was working summers and holidays in IT jobs, though they weren’t called ‘IT jobs’ yet.  For two summers I helped Unitel Engineering digitize their paper based parts ordering system at their electronics shop in Scarborough by moving everything in their decades old paper based system from filing cabinets to Lotus123 on DOS/early Windows.

After graduation I got my first full time gig at Ontario Store Fixtures where I was attached to the programming team that was converting their old DOS based manufacturing system to JDEdwards OneWorld integrated management process.  This was a very early server based system that was the step between desktops and the cloud based systems we use today.  Two years teaching overseas in Japan showed me the technology that was soon to arrive in North America, such as digital cameras and high speed home internet.  I played Diablo with a friend in Mississauga from my apartment in Akita City and watched Y2K pass over us at a thousand year old temple.  When I wasn’t doing that I was helping engineers and doctors translate their work for international consumption, working on everything from electronic/robotics systems that helped parallelised people move their limbs to the latest in LCD technology coming out of the NEC factory near where we lived.

By the early naughties we were back in Ontario and I was a certified IT and network technician and working full time in the field.  I changed directions into teaching in 2003/4 and my first teaching job in Peel Region had me setting up the first wireless router in the board in our library so students with their newfangled Blackberries and wireless laptops could get online – it would be years before board IT caught up with us.  The next summer I got a job in their new elearning summer program.  We were using the Angel online system which was a rudimentary webpage with such basic media that you had to hand code the html if you wanted it to be anything other than text.

One of my favourite elearning experiences came in those early days.  Peel didn’t run elearning as a credit factory.  They focused on strong students with digital experience and then pushed for advanced course delivery.  In our Grade 12 academic class we had students from across Ontario as well as international students from Bangkok, Tokyo and Shanghai who were taking the course to prove they had the English language skills necessary to attend university in Canada.  Working with this international group felt like what the future of teaching could be.

A good example of the above and beyond nature of these students was the final exam, which happened in a live two hour window.  The students overseas were up in the middle of the night and when the internet went down in part of Mississauga my student who was in that blackout called around, found a friend with working internet and rode her bike over there to complete the exam on time.  Back then elearning wasn’t an excuse to do less, it was a reason to do more.

I continued to teach elearning in summer school for the next five years as I moved to my current school board and they started up their own elearning program (I volunteered to be in the inaugural group and was the only one in it who had actually taught any).  This branched out into blended face to face and elearning classes ranging from career studies to a specialized locally developed media arts program for at risk students as well as the usual online English courses.  Early versions of video conference like Adobe Connect came up and I always seized this emerging technology to develop better learning relationships and bandwidth with my students.  One day we were all on a live video conference working independently when one of the student’s moms came in and asked if he wanted takeout hamburgers for lunch.  She laughed when we all replied that hamburgers sounded great.  That was in 2008 before unions and school boards conspired to take video conferencing off limits.  It took the education minister in a pandemic emergency this past spring to get Ontario’s education system to begin using this technology again… twelve years later.  Sabotage by political interests in Ontario education are a big reason why we are still so bad at elearning.

Rather than focus on students who needed access to courses and had highly developed digital skills and resilience, elearning devolved into a way of offering credits for at risk students that didn’t want to attend school.  It was then decided to give elearning sections to teachers in smaller schools that were losing population instead of giving those sections to teachers who had the experience, skills and interest in making this challenging emerging learning situation work.  The end result was students and teachers who didn’t want to be in elearning.  As that all happened I found myself removed from teaching it and by 2012 I was no longer doing any elearning at all.

In the meantime I’ve developed a very successful computer technology program, so my journey into digitally enabled pedagogy has not stopped.  My students and I built some of the first virtual reality systems used by students in the province and we’ve tackled all sorts of IT challenges including Skills Ontario and then CyberTitan and cybersecurity.  We’ve created a unique software engineering/video game development program that has already launched a number of careers and we have grads working everywhere from Tesla and Google to Electronic Arts while others have started their own companies.  In aid of that I’ve become a Cisco Netacademy Instructor which offers my students one of the most advanced elearning management systems in the world, and I’m constantly exploring online coding LMSes such as code.org and codehs.com for my students.  If anything, stepping away from elearning, especially after what it had become, gave me the flexibility to explore digital pedagogy more than staying in it would have.


***

Elearning implementation has always suffered from a lack of vision.  It stumbled into existence as a substitute for mail order courses in the late 90s and early Zeroes because it was cheaper and faster than all those stamps.  In the early days it was tentatively adopted by programs like Peel’s independent summer school but it has never been adopted into specialized virtual schools and was still struggling for acceptance up until this year when suddenly everyone was an elearning/remote teacher.

Even in 2019 unions were attacking elearning as a ‘lesser than form’ of teaching in an attempt to stop government attacks on public education.  That Ontario’s anti-education government was suggesting stuffing 40-50 students into elearning classes shows how this scalable system is prone to abuse and pedagogical deflation.  Those union attacks annoyed many members like myself who have been working on developing this emerging medium of learning for most   of our careers.

There is nothing education does better than look backwards and poorly handle change.  If it does adopt technology it’s usually to try and redo what it has been doing for decades as a cost saver.  Google Docs instead of photocopies, online forms instead of quizzes, worksheets on screen instead of paper; educational adoption of digital tools is all about the Substitution in SAMR; use it while keeping things as much the same as possible.  As I said earlier, elearning implementation has shown a startling lack of vision and leadership.


***

There was a time when you had a choice…

I recently didn’t get an elearning job, but that’s OK because the last thing I want to be doing is middle managing to the status quo, What I want to do is explore and expand our best digital pedagogical practices; seeing how cheaply we can do the minimum doesn’t do anything for me (or anyone else not in management).  There still seems to be a lot of pressure to overload elearning classes with students and then using limited corporate walled-garden systems from attention merchants like Google.  This is baffling from a f2f teacher perspective where I’m seeing people getting paid teacher salaries while not actually doing any teaching.  We could leverage the influx of teachers into the system much more effectively than we are to quickly create smaller remote classes that would involve teachers actually teaching and supporting learning instead of babysitting.

I’d want to advocate for smaller class sizes in elearning, especially in higher needs classes where remote teachers are also doing the jobs of guidance counsellors and special education support in a dangerous time.  I’d also want to advocate for an efficient system for vetting alternative online systems that offer greater bandwidth with our remote students, but most boards have equated student privacy and cybersecurity with exclusive deals with tax dodging advertising/technology giants rather than looking to create a diverse yet secure ecosystem of online digital tools for learning.  Signing an agreement with an attention merchant to indoctrinate the students in your care in their advertising systems so you can hand them graduates familiar with their products is an easier box to check.

***

What would my dream elearning job be?  Let me take my digitally expert senior students in software engineering/game development and computer engineering, give us leading edge tools and let us see what digital learning is capable of in 2020.  By exploring emerging technology we could not only make elearning more effective, but also ease the social distance anxiety many people are feeling.

Just before school started this year in its masked, socially distanced, quadmestered and frankly diminished capacity, I saw this tweet from Jon Resendez.  It stayed on my mind as we launched this uneven and unsustainable (for the people doing double cohort, double classes remotely and f2f all day every day simultaneously) quadmester.  More pedagogically sound elearning processes wouldn’t just help remote teachers at the moment, they’d help everyone since we’re all remote teaching in one way or another, it’s just that some of us are trying to do it while face to face with students at the same time.

There are two sides of elearning I’d want to explore with my digitally skilled students.  My computer engineers could focus on the physical hardware that might improve remote learning outcomes and my senior software engineers would be able to explore and even write the software we need to explore and expand communications between remote teachers and their students.

One of the exciting evolutions happening right now is in virtual reality.  We’ve been exploring this through our board’s forward thinking SHSM program since 2015.  As the technology has matured prices have tumbled.  The Oculus Quest 2 runs at a resolution that would have required a $1000 VR system connected to a $2000 high speed PC back in 2015, but it now costs less than $500 (very close to what a Chromebook costs).  What might a class equiped with immersive, fully interactive virtual and augmented reality look like?

Experiential learning takes a huge leap forward in VR.  Giving students a chance to virtually explore Anne Frank’s house instead of talking about it or passively watching a video makes the benefits of immersive experiential learning obvious. 

If you’re more future thinking how about a detailed 3d model of the ISS that you and students could explore:

… or a universe simulator that lets you create gravitationally accurate solar systems?  You can explore the deep ocean or amaze yourself in Google Earth VR, which is so engaging that you often forget you have the headset on while you’re in it.  It was a lifesaver for me during lockdown when travel wasn’t happening.  Seeing parks on the south tip of Africa closed for COVID also brought home for me the world wide nature of what’s happening.

The benefits of experiential learning in VR can even extend to giving everyone a feeling of what it’s like to be autistic.  Students who experience VR tend to feel that they’ve actually experienced it.  This is a big step away from passively reading a webpage or watching a video, which is about as far as elearning goes these days.  Bringing experiential and immersive experiences to elearning will revolutionize the process and radically change what our ideas of a field trip is (elearning students don’t currently have field trips).

Beyond the experiential benefits of elearning, what I’d really like to go after is using virtual and augmented reality as a work around for social distancing.  This is leading edge stuff – labs are looking into it now, but from a business perspective.  Education won’t stumble into it for years, but wouldn’t it be something if we could leverage this current technology in time to help us all manage the social isolation we’re all feeling?

In 2018 Nick (our national finalist CyberTitan) led a team that developed a VR title they called a ‘virtual classroom’.  The idea was to let students use 3d avatars to meet in virtual reality.  All VR headsets have microphones, speakers and cameras build in, so they’re already inherently designed to be communications tools… and that was more than two years ago…

Our kung-fu in the software engineering class has only improved since.  Not only could we explore existing virtual and augmented software opportunities for educational use, we’d also be capable of developing our own VR classroom 2.0.  We just need the room and support to make it happen.  What would room and support look like?  I’m currently looking at 31 students with a waiting list in software engineering next semester.  If we’re still waterboarding everyone with quadmesters in semester 2 then splitting that massive class into two sections of 20 each would mean we could all meet face to face in the morning to resolve problems and take aim at new ones and then go virtual in the afternoon to test what we’re working on instead of the current schedule that would have me trying to be in two places at once while depending on another teacher who has no idea what we’re doing to ‘support’ the remote learning.  In short, it would mean arranging the class around pedagogical effectiveness rather than seeing how many students we can stuff into one section.

*** 

Beyond the hardware and software research, I’d also like to address the massive gap we’re experiencing in our current elearning charge.  The digital divide is deeper and wider than you think because it’s not just about a lack of connectivity and available technology at home, it’s also about technological illiteracy because Ontario education assumes that students and staff all know how to use digital tools rather than training and teaching them in it.

We hand students digital technology in the early grades and just assume they understand what it is from home use, but that home use, if it exists at all, is usually habitual and very limited.  Just because students aren’t afraid of technology doesn’t mean they understand how it works.  Every year I see grade 9s who think they’re digital experts because they’ve owned a series of game consoles since they could walk.  Their parents’ choice to digitally impoverish them by only ever handing them toys instead of tools makes it even more difficult to teach them computer engineering because they think they know everything when they don’t even know how to share a document, or unzip a compressed file.

It would be a satisfying thing to develop a hands on mandatory technology curriculum that makes all students literate in technology use in the same way we expect them to be literate and numerate in languages and mathematics.  Like those other foundational literacies, digital/media literacy is a foundational skill if we’re using this technology in every class (as we are).


***

There is much to do in remote elearning in order to make it a viable learning strategy both during the COVID19 pandemic and beyond, but we need vision and the will to explore where this is going instead of just waiting for business to hand us down their leftovers or an uncaring government to use it as an excuse to Walmart education into pedagogical irrelevance.

I was once talking to an administrator who said, “I hate the word pedagogy, what does that even mean anyway?”  The complexity in the concept is exactly what we should be protecting as we continue to evolve learning in our digital age.  Pedagogy is not a concept that plays well with a management approach that is looking for cheap and easy solutions.  Perhaps that’s why I always feel like I’m the one fighting for it when I’m talking to educational management, but we should always be working toward it even if it’s difficult.

Developing a more pedagogically powerful elearning system won’t just help us manage this pandemic crisis, it would also help us manage the looming environmental crisis of which this pandemic is just a symptom.  If we could get elearning to begin approaching the pedagogical complexity and interpersonal bandwidth of in-class learning we could be restructuring education so it isn’t pumping millions of tons of carbon emissions into the air from bussing students to remote locations every day.  A truly digitally empowered local school could be a k-12, walk-in experience for all but a few students because engaging, high bandwidth virtual communications and connectivity would mean we’d no longer have to burn the world to keep education looking like it did in the 1950s.

https://temkblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/emergency-memo-post-peak-nov-2014.html

There are so many reasons why we need to develop vision and stop reflexively supporting status quo thinking in Ontario education.  Leveraging experts in the system for their expertise rather than populating the system with middle managers intent on maintaining the status quo would be a great place to start.

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