All taken between May and July using a Canon T6i Rebel DSLR…
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2019 Summer Nature Photography
ECOO 2016 Reflections: maker spaces and iteration
| The maker movement isn’t a fad to engage students. The people who believe in it live it. |
Back from the 2016 ECOO Conference, I’ve let things mull over for a couple of days before reflecting:
On maker spaces…
Last year’s conference was very excited about Maker Spaces, and that focus seems to have died down. To develop meaningful maker spaces means believing in and adopting the thinking behind it. The people behind the maker movement believe in it passionately, they live it. Education’s ADD means that making was never going to go that far in the classroom. The moment I heard teachers complaining about the extra work makerspaces created I knew it was doomed. Most teachers aren’t curious about how things work and don’t want to play with reality, they’re concerned about delivering curriculum.
I suspect many maker spaces in classrooms have become either dusty corners or play areas. It was nice to see the monolithic educational system flirt with something as energetic and anarchistic as the maker movement though, even if it was only for a short while.
On Iteration…
This came up a several times in the conference. A couple of years ago Jaime Cassup gave an impassioned keynote on the value of iteration. His argument, based on the software industry’s approach to building code, was to fail early and fail often.
This time around Jesse Brown brought it up again, citing Edison’s, I didn’t fail a thousand times, I found a thousand ways that didn’t work quote. He then (strangely) went on to compare his being let go as a radio broadcaster and lucking in to a tech startup as an example of iteration, which it isn’t. Doing one thing and then stumbling into something completely unrelated when it ends isn’t iteration.
In education this misunderstanding is rampant. Good students learn to do what they’re told as efficiently as possible in order to succeed in the classroom (‘lower level’ students are much more willing to take risks – they’re not as invested in the system). A misunderstanding of iteration is what we use to justify and even encourage failure. It has become another way to let digital natives’ video-game driven process of learning have its way, but it isn’t very efficient.
| There is iteration in the engineering process, but it’s never a fail early, fail often approach. If you don’t know why you failed then you shouldn’t be rushing off to fail again. |
The other week I gave my grade 12 computer engineers detailed explanations of how to build a network cable, a video showing it being done and then posted wiring diagrams showing the proper order. The most capable students followed engineering process (a directed iterative process, rather than a random one) and produced working network cables more and more quickly. The end result was no real cost for me (all my ends and wires were made into functional cables).
The majority of the students, perhaps because they live in our brave new Google world of fail often and fail early, or because people keep misquoting Edison at them, didn’t read the instructions (who does any more, right?) and just started throwing ends on cables, crimping them badly and producing failure after failure. This is great though because they’re engaged, right?
When I got angry at them they were belligerent in return. How dare I stifle their creativity! Unfortunately, I’m not assessing their creativity. They are trying and that’s all I should be asking for! I’m not grading them on engagement either. I have been brandishing the engineering process throughout their careers in computer technology, but these video-game driven iterators think their die early, die often approach in games is perfectly transferable to the real world. Bafflelingly, many educators are gee-whizzing themselves into this mindset as well. You’ll quickly find that you run out of budget if you do.
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Autumn Colours Motorcycle Photography
On bike photos courtesy of a Ricoh Theta V on a flexible tripod attached to the rear view mirror of my trusty Triumph Tiger 955i. The route was from my home in Elora up through Beaver Valley to the shores of Georgian Bay before coming back through Duntroon and up the Noisy River out of Creemore before heading back down the Grand River home. The interesting bits were tracing the Niagara Escarpment, the only vaguely interesting roads anywhere near me.
If you want a primer on how to take on-bike photos like this, you can find it here. It has also been published on Adventure Motorcycle Rider here.
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| That time I got stuck behind a blockade of Polaris Slingshots on the Noisy River Road… |
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Thanksgiving Moments
Thanksgiving Weekend in Canada is early (winter is coming), but this one was pretty rideable. The Honda is calling from a mechanical perspective, but that can wait until the Canadian motorcyclist’s hibernation.
In the meantime, I’m getting the rides in where I can find them…
Some digital art…
… and some on-bike 360 photos…
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Motorcycle Lift Table Instructions
A friend and colleague retired but kindly left his DIY motorcycle stand with me when he moved to the West Coast. Here’s the construction of it back in 2016:
HERE are the plans he worked from in PDF format. Now that I’ve got the plans I can find a properly spec’d lift to use on it. My old lift is leaky and over two decades old, so the replacement will work the motorcycle lift as well as the odd car tire change.
Currently it’s home to the Honda Fireblade project:
The garage is a nice place to work (though small) for 10 months of the year, but during Ontario’s deep freeze in January/February, as outdoor temperatures often dip to -30°C and beyond, the cold emanating, even through the rubber lined floor, makes it torturous. Even with a propane heater running, working on the floor isn’t any fun for my fifty year old bones. The stand, even when lowered, has been nice to work on. Now that I’ve got access to the specs, I can source the right kind of hydraulic lift and have everything at an even more ergonomic height.
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Mid-November Last Gasps
| The Tiger’s still purring to the edge of winter! |
Mid November and I’m still commuting in to work! It was -2°C while riding past frost covered grass on the way in, but a comfortable 12°C and sunny on the way home.
I should be able to two wheel it in and back for the rest of the week, but come the weekend things take a turn for the worse. If there’s salt down and icy roads this may finally be the end. Still, riding from the end of March (it would have been sooner but for a carb-dead Concours) until Mid-November is no bad thing.
In a perfect world I’ll be back in the saddle in March some time, and might even steal a ride or two in between,weather permitting. That’s four months of waiting… unless I can convince my lovely wife to let me get… THE VAN (it’s still for sale). If that happened there’s no telling where we might get to over the cold months.
That don’t look good, but it was inevitable.
In the meantime, there was a super moon!
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Ongoing 360° On-Bike Photography
With some second generation parts I’ve got the on-bike portrait down to a fine art. The Lammcou durable flexible tripod is a solid, dependable thing compared to the cheap and terrible flexible tripod I used before that I had to keep gluing back together. The light, inexpensive and easy to use Ricoh Theta is still my favourite go to camera. I’d like to try the higher resolution ThetaV but they aren’t cheap.
Here are the latest round of photos and video from the ThetaSC. On the afternoon of the longest day of the year my wife and I went for a romantic ride over to where we got married almost twenty years ago. On a rainy Saturday I put the waterproof cover on the camera and tried to get rained on. I didn’t get wet, but I did see a ghost on the covered bridge in West Montrose. That was a weird, atmospheric ride.
Solstice Romantic Ride:
Creepy, Atmospheric, Rainy Saturday Ride:
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| OK, so it’s not a ghost. A young old-school mennonite woman was walking across the bridge complete with bonnet and black dress. This is the covered bridge they used in the Stephen King movie, IT. Creepy, right? |
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| Staying ahead of the end of the world. |
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| Dark and sinister… |
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Cybersecurity and the AI Arms Race
We had a very productive field trip to the University of Waterloo for their Cybersecurity and Privacy Conference last week. From a teacher point of view, I had to do a mad dance trying to work out how to be absent from the classroom since our school needs days got cut and suddenly any enrichment I’m looking for seemingly isn’t possible. I managed to find some board support from our Specialist High Skills Major program and pathways and was able not only arrange getting thirty students and two teachers out to this event, but also to do it without touching the school’s diminished cache of teacher out of the classroom days.
We arrived at the conference after the opening keynote had started. The only tables were the ones up front (adults are the same as students when it comes to where you sit in a room). Sarah Tatsis, the VP, Advanced Technology Development Labs at BlackBerry, kindly stopped things and got the students seated. The students were nervous about being there, but the academic and industry professionals were nothing but approachable and interested in their presence.
What followed was an insightful keynote into Blackberry’s work in developing secure systems in an industry famous for fail fast and early. Companies that take a more measured approach to digital technology can sometimes seem out of step with the rock-star Silicon Valley crowd, but after a day of listening to software engineers from various companies lamenting ‘some companies’ (no one said the G-word), who tend to throw unfinished software out and then iterate (and consider that a virtue), the hard work of securing a sustainable digital ecosystem seems further and further out of reach. The frustration in the air was palpable and many expressed a wish for more stringent engineering in online applications.
From Sarah Tatsis I learned about Cylance, Blackberry’s AI driven cybersecurity system. This reminded me of an article I read in WIRED recently about Mike Beck, a (very) experienced cybersec analyst who has been working on a system called Darktrace, that uses artificial intelligence to mimic his skills and experience as a cybersecurity analyst in tracking down incursions.
I spent a good chunk of this past summer becoming the first high school teacher in Canada qualified to teach Cisco’s CCNA Cyber Operations course which, as you can gather from the name, is focused on the operational nature of cybersecurity. After spending that time learning about the cyber-threatscape, I was more and more conscious of how attackers have automated the attack process. Did you know criminals with little or no skill or experience can buy an exploit kit that gives them a software dashboard? From that easy to use dashboard, complex attacks on networks are a button push away.
So, bad actors can perform automated attacks on networks with little or no visibility, or experience. On the other side of the fence you’ve got people in a SOC (so much of this is the acronyms – that’s a Security Operations Centre), picking through anomalies in the system and then analyzing them as potential threats. That threat analysis is based on intuition, itself developed from years of experience. Automating the response to automated attacks only makes sense.
In the WIRED article they make a lot of hay about how AI driven systems like Darktrace or Cylance could reduce the massive shortage of cybersecurity professionals (because education seems singularly disinterested in helping), but I don’t think that will happen. In an inflationary technology race like this, when everyone ups their technology it amplifies the complexity and importance of jobs, but doesn’t make them go away. I think a better way to look at this might be with an analogy to one of my other favourite things.
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| Automating our tech doesn’t reduce our effort. If anything it amplifies it. The genius of Marc Marquez can only be really understood in slow motion as he drifts a 280hp bike at over 100mph. That’s what an AI arms race in cybersec will look like too – you’ll only be able to watch it played back in slow motion to understand what is happening. |
What’s been happening to date is that bad actors have automated much of their work, sort of like how a bicycle automated the pedaling by turning into a motorcycle. If you’re trying to race a bicycle (human based cyber-defence) against a motorcycle (bad actors using automated systems) you’re going to quickly find yourself dropping behind – much like cybersecurity has. As the defensive side of things automates, it will amplify the importance of an experienced cybersec operator, not make it irrelevant. The engines will take on the engines, but the humans at the controls become even more important and have to be even more skilled since the crashes are worse. Ironically, charging cyber defence with artificial intelligence will mean fewer clueless script kiddies running automated attack software and more crafty cybercriminals who can ride around the AI. I’ve also been spending a bit of time working with AI in my classroom and can appreciate the value of machine learning, but it’s a data driven thing, and when it’s working with something it has never seen before you quickly come to see its limitations. AI is going to struggle, especially with things like zero day threats. There’s another vocab piece for you – zero day threats are attacks that have never been seen before, so there is no established defence!
Once a vulnerability is found in software it’s often held back and sold to the highest bidder. If you discovered a backdoor into banking software, imagine what that might sell for. Did you know that there is a huge market for zero day threats online? Between zero day attacks, nation-state cyberwar on a level never seen before and increasingly complex cybercriminals (some of whom were trained in those nation state cyber war operations), the digital space we spend so much of our time in and more and more of our critical infrastructure relies on is only going to get more fraught. If you feel like our networked world and all this cybersecurity stuff is coming out of nowhere, you ain’t seen nothing yet. AI may very well help shore up the weakest parts of our cyber-defence, but the need for people going into this underserved field isn’t going away any time soon.***
Where did the Cybersecurity & Privacy Conference turn next? To privacy! Which is (like most things) more complicated than you think. The experts on stage ranged from legal experts to sociologists and tackled the concept from many sides, with an eye on trying to expose how our digitally networked world is eroding expectations of private information.
I found the discussion fascinating, as did my business colleague, but many of the students were finding this lecture style information delivery to be exhausting. When I asked who wanted to stick around in the afternoon for the industry panel on ‘can we fix the internet’, only a handful had the will and interest. We had an interesting discussion after about whether or not university is a good fit for most students. Based on our time at the conference, I’d say it isn’t – or they just haven’t grown into the brain they need to manage it yet. What’s worrying is that in our increasingly student centred, digital classrooms we’re not graduating students who can handle this kind of information delivery. That kind of metacognitive awareness is gold if you can find it in high school, and field trips like this one are a great way to highlight it.
The conference (for us anyway) wrapped up with an industry panel asking the question, “Can the Internet be saved?” In the course of the discussion big ideas, like public, secure internet for all (ie: treating our critical ICT infrastructure with the same level of intent as we do our water, electrical and gas systems) were bandied about. One of my students pointed out that people don’t pirate software or media for fun, they do it because they can’t afford it, which leads to potential hazards. There was no immediate answer for this, but many of the people up there were frustrated at the digital divide. As William Gibson so eloquently said, “the future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.” That lack of equity in entering our shared digital space and the system insecurity this desperation causes was a recurring theme. One speaker pointed out that a company only fixated on number of users has a dangerously single minded obsession that is undermining the digital infrastructure that increasingly manages our critical systems. If society is going to embrace digital, then that future better reach everyone, or there are always going to be people upsetting the boat if they aren’t afforded a seat on it. That’s also assuming the people building the boats are more interested in including everyone rather than chasing next quarter earnings.
This conversation wandered in many directions, yet it always came back to something that should be self-evident to everyone. If we had better users, most of our problems would disappear. I’ve been trying to drive this ‘education is the answer‘ approach for a while now, but interest in picking up this responsibility seems to slip off everyone from students and teachers to administration at all levels. We’re all happy to use digital tools to save money and increase efficiencies, but want to take no individual responsibility for them.
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| I’ve been banging this drum to half empty rooms for over a year now. You say the c-word (cybersecurity) and people run away, and then get on their networked devices and keep doing the same silly things they’ve always done. Our ubiquitous use of digital technology is like everyone getting a new car that’s half finished and full of safety hazards and then driving it on roads where no one can be bothered to learn the rules. We could do so much better. How digital skills isn’t a mandatory course in Ontario high schools is a mystery, especially when every class uses the technology. |
I was surprised to bump into Diana Barbosa, ICTC’s Director of Education and Standards at the conference. She was thrilled to see a troop of CyberTitans walk in and interrupt the opening keynote. The students themselves, including a number of Terabytches from last year’s national finalist team who met Diana in Ottawa, were excited to have a chat and catch up. This kind of networking is yet another advantage of getting out of the classroom on field trips like this. If our pathways lead at the board hadn’t helped us out, all of that would have been lost.
We left the conference early to get everyone back in time for the end of the school day. When I told them we’d been invited back on the bus ride home they all gave out a cheer. Being told you belong in a foreign environment like an industry and academic conference full of expert adults is going to change even more student trajectories. If our goal is to open up new possibilities to students, this opportunity hit the mark.
From a professional point of view, I’m frustrated with the lack of cohesion and will in government and industry to repair the fractured digital infrastructure they’ve made. Lots of people have made a lot of money driving our society onto the internet. The least they could do is ensure that the technology we’re using is as safe as it can be, but there seems to be no short term gain in it.
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| The US hacked a drone out of the sky this summer. |
Some governments have militarized their cyber-capabilities and are building weapons grade hacks that will trickle down into civilian and criminal organizations. In this inflationary threat-scape, cybersecurity is gearing up with AI and operational improvements to better face these threats, but it’s still a very asymmetrical situation. The bad actors have a lot more going for them than the too few who stand trying to protect our critical digital infrastructure.
Western governments have stood by and let this happen with little oversight, and the result has been a wild west of fake news, election tampering, destabilizing hacks and hackneyed software. There are organizations in this that are playing a long game. If this digital revolution is to become a permanent part of our social structure, a part that runs our critical infrastructure, then we all need to start taking networked infrastructure as something more than an entertaining diversion.
One of the most poignant moments for me was when one of the speakers asked the audience full of cybersecurity experts who they should call, police wise, if their company has been hacked. There was silence. In a room full of experts no one could answer because there is no answer. That tells you something about just how asymetrical the threat-scape is these days. Criminals and foreign powers can hack at will and know there are no repercussions, because there are none.
Feel safer now? Reading this? Online? I didn’t even tell you about how many exploit kits drop hidden iframe links into web pages without their owners even knowing and then infect any machine that looks at the page anonymously. Or the explosion of tracking cookies designed to sell your browsing habits to any interested party.
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I’m beating this drum again at ECOO’s #BIT19 #edtech Conference in Niagara Falls on November 6, 7 and 8…
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Cape Breton’s Cabot Trail: an ultimate ride?
I’m currently crossing the Canadian Maritime provinces with my wife. She’s recovering from cancer so a bike trip wasn’t in the cards, but I’m using the trip as reconnaisance for future rides.
On our way back to our hotel after a day on the Cabot Trail in northern Nova Scotia on Cape Breton Island, a guy on a Honda Repsol race replica blitzed through a row of traffic five cars at a time and disappeared down the road. The Cabot Trail attracts that kind of rider with its hundreds of kilometres of twists and turns over the Cape Breton Highlands in the north west corner of the province.
Coincidently, while I was out here, Canada Moto Guide did a primer on how to ride the Cabot Trail. That and the steady stream of bikes making their way up to the remote, north-west corner of Nova Scotia cemented the trail as a Canadian riding icon in my mind.
We were up in Neil’s Harbour when a bunch of guys in full leathers wandered in to the Chowder House up by the lighthouse (you can write sentences like that when you’re on the Cabot Trail). The bravest of them was on a Ducati. I say brave because the road itself is indeed a roller coaster, but it’s also pretty rough in places. I asked them if they could put a knee down or would they knock their teeth out first. They laughed and said they pick their moments.
The Cabot Trail traces most of the coast of the north-west side of Cape Breton Island. This 300km loop takes you up and over the Cape Breton Highlands and through a national park; it’s stunnlingly beautiful and it’d be a shame to rush it. Actually, what would be a shame would be only doing it once while focusing on the road. The ideal way to tackle the Trail would be to get yourself into one of the many lodging opportunties on the south end of it and then do a day focusing on the road followed by a day focusing on the many stops available. If you came all the way to the end of the world in Cape Breton and didn’t bother taking side roads to things like Meat Cove and Neil’s Harbour, you’d be missing some wonderful opportunities.
There are many sections with good pavement and astonishing curves, but there are others where the road hasn’t had any attention in some time and Canadian weather has had its way with it. I was told there were some switchbacks where riders had a hand down on the ground as they came around, but trying to do that in other places would have had you bouncing out of your seat and kissing a guard rail. Rough or not, if you’re used to living on a tiny island with sixty million people on it, you’ll find the Cabot Trail frighteningly empty, even in mid-summer.
Having done a lot of miles on Canadian roads now I’d approach it as I do them all: enjoy them while you can but expect them to go to shit at any second. Something with supension travel and some athletic intention would be a good place to start, it made me miss my Tiger sitting in the garage over two thousand kilometres away in Ontario. A psychotic mix of power and suspension flexibility like the BMW S 1000 XR adventure sport would be good. Another angle would be to take one of the newest intelligently suspended bikes and see what they make of it.
This ain’t no butter smooth Spanish road, but it’s a fearsome thing. A couple of years ago Performance Bikes put their man John McAvoy on a sportsbike and pointed him at Spain, in the winter. It was a riot to read him navigating snow storms through France before finding the sweet never-ending summer of Spanish roads at a time when everyone else is huddled in their houses waiting for the snow to end. Reading Johnny in questionable riding circumstances is never dull. PB (now a part of Practical Sportsbikes) should send him out to Cape Breton for a tour of the Cabot Trial in the fall. It’d deliver demanding and stunning riding and photo opportunities that no one in mainstream motorcycle media seems to be aware of. It’d also give Johnny a chance to practice his Gaelic.
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| Instead of riding the same old Spanish roads over and over, motorcycle manufacturers should be bringing journalists out to Cape Breton. A 300km loop on varying road surfaces through stunning, Jurrasic Park quality scenery and some incredibly acrobatic roads would let them assess a bike’s real-world prowess without cheating on roads that have never felt the terrifying touch of a Canadian winter! |
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New Zealand Mid Winter Escape
Another mid-winter holiday escape daydream…
A couple of thousand kilometers riding through New Zealand’s summer.
| $5267 out and $6510 back = $11,777, but hey, I could actually sleep on the flights! |
Fly into Auckland via Vancouver with lay down seats so I might actually sleep on the plane.
Pick up the bike (they have Tigers!) at bikeroundnz.com and ride from Auckland to Wellington on the south island over a couple of weeks.
| $249 a day for 14 days = $3486 |
The flight home leaves Saturday and gets in early Sunday morning (you get a day back crossing the international date line).
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