Timothy King – Page 41 – Mechanical Sympathy

The 1, 2, 3s of why Tigers are Awesome

I’ve been putting miles on the Tiger and have a developed some ideas about why it’s awesome in comparison to what I’ve come from. Here they are in no particular order:

1… The tiger growls. The Ninja had a nice snarl to it with its 270° twin, and the Concours’ massive inline four thundered like a Norse god, but the tearing silk growl of the Tiger can be virtually silent (less noisy than the wind) when I’m cruising, or growl like its namesake when you twist the throttle. It has enough presence to make people jump when you give it some revs – maybe because it’s so quiet otherwise.

The 955i Triple (an epic engine) has that same lopsided warble that the Ninja had, but amplified by a third cylinder. I’ve had a twin and a four, but now that I’ve gone triple I don’t think I’ll ever go back, it feels like the best of both worlds.

2… Lithe tigers are fun tigers. At 50 kilos (almost 110lbs!) less than my last bike, the Tiger does everything better even though it’s taller. From backing it out of the garage to winding it through corners, I don’t miss an ounce of that chubby Concours. While the Connie hid its weight well in motion, it was always lurking in the background. There is no substitute for a lighter bike.

3… Hot tigers aren’t so hot. The cowling was nice on the Concours, but the volcanic heat that came off that engine cooked my man parts. I might be hanging more out in the wind on the Tiger, but that’s kind of the point of motorcycling.

The engine barely seems to produce any heat at all and what there is is so well managed that I only occasionally feel a breath of warm air. Time spent in the saddle is cool and comfortable, and much less like meatballs in hot sauce.

The one place I’m warmer are my hands. Between the hand guards and heated grips I’ve been able to ride the Tiger in near zero temperatures with no issues and without winter gloves. My legs went from getting cooked to being one of the coolest parts of me when I’m out on the bike.

4… It’s not wise to upset a tiger. Between that radical weight loss and an engine that puts out 7 more ft/lbs of torque 2000rpm lower than the Concours, the first time I wound out the Tiger it almost wookie-ed my arms off. It’s amazing what a small bump in engine grunt and massive weight loss can do to a bike’s forward velocity. The Tiger will comfortably lift a wheel in the first three gears, and it isn’t a little bike.

5… Suspension that soaks up lousy Ontario roads. Kawasakis have a rep for budget suspensions. Between that and the barely paved roads of Ontario, I’d often hit bumps that would lift me out of the seat and rattle my bones. This led to constantly worrying about knocking something loose on the bike. The long, pliant suspension of the Tiger makes Ontario’s wonderful roads ride-able without any such worries. Another benefit is that I’m able to corner and brake more effectively because the bike is never juddering over potholes, it just soaks them up.

6… Lucifer Orange is magical. I’ve yet to own a bike that a coat of spray paint didn’t radically improve, but there is only so far you can go with a can of spray paint. The clear coated, metallic, red-orange on the Triumph is mind-bendingly brilliant. Sure, the tiger stripes are a bit over the top, but that paint can manage it. When my eleven year old first saw it he said, ‘oh yeah!’. Pulling up behind a school bus creates an avalanche of kids in the back window giving me thumbs up. It’s the opposite of the too-cool-to-care leather clad biker pirate, but I’d rather give an enthusiastic thumbs up back than sit there trying to look indifferent about everything.

I picked up my first ROOF helmet last summer, and it has quickly become my go to lid. The combination of an open face or fully safetied close faced lid (most flip up helmets only pass open face standards, the chin guard is ornamental) makes this a brilliant all-rounder. I got it in orange because I liked the design, but it happens to look splendid and intentional with Triumph’s Lucifer orange. It’s a happy accident, but I’ll take it.

7… It fits. Less bend in the knees, my feet just go flat on the floor, less bent forward riding position with no weight on the wrists with a comfortable, upright stance, the Tiger fits like nothing I’ve ridden before.

Those wide bars mean I can leverage corners easily and with precision. Other than keeping you tight to the bike aerodynamically, I’m not really sure why sportier bars are considered better, the wider geometry encourages finer control.

I also look like I fit on the Tiger. I looked like a circus bear on a tricycle on the Ninja. On the Concours I still looked like I was too tall for the bike, but the Tiger fits my 6’3″ frame like it was made for me.

Ready for my first night ride –
those lights work great.

8… the bad things aren’t. The first owner seems to have addressed every shortcoming on this Tiger. Last night was my first time out with it after dark and the supposedly anemic headlights were as good as the Concours’ lights ever were, and when I hit the highbeams it was like having a football stadium light up in front of me.

The fueling is smooth and perfect, and I haven’t even fine tuned the Power Commander on it yet. The front fork does dive a bit under heavy breaking, but some adjustment seems to have resolved that and made the bike respond to my weight perfectly. I have no trouble getting the Tiger to chase its own tail around corners.

With the second wing on the windshield adjusted I have at least as much upper body wind protection as I did from the fully faired Connie, so I’m not missing all the plastic of my last bike either.

9… a made in the U.K. success story. Riding a British bike fills me with pride. Riding such a good British bike makes it even better. Triumph’s rise from bankruptcy in the 1980s to a multi-million dollar, international success story suggests that British manufacturing is anything but history, and that British habits around manufacturing can change and become competitive in a global economy. It’s nice to ride such a fine machine made in the same place I was.

10… brilliant panniers. I’ve enjoyed built in luggage since the Concours, but the Tiger panniers are totally next level. Unlike the finicky attachments on the Connie, the Triumph panniers slip on and off effortlessly and lock into place as well as locking closed. They are a good size and look right on the bike. That they’re colour matched is just another bonus.

As you might have gathered, I’m enjoying Triumph ownership so far.

You Say You Want A Revolution?

… well you know, we all wanna save the world.

Thoughts from ECOO 2011:

You say you want a digital revolution in education? Is your perfect classroom a one screen per child? Do you rage against the bureaucracy and hate that this isn’t happening fast enough?

There is a lot of excitement and optimism around this, much of it centered on the idea that technology will somehow make our jobs as teachers easier. If you honestly believe that then your optimism is blind.

Technology will give you access to information, and offer you opportunities to differentiate learning and even assess student abilities in much more minute and specific ways, but it won’t make your job easier, it will make it much more challenging, especially if teaching for you is a matter of working out a lesson and then repeating it for twenty years until you retire.

If you knew how to direct a plough team of horses in the field, did you really think that a modern machine makes things simpler? Easier to operate? Do you have to know less to operate the machine than you did the horse?

At the Ecoo Conference this year, many people focused on specific apps that would replace a specific classroom related paper based piece of work. This is the equivalent of creating a steam powered horse, rather than designing a train that more appropriately uses the new technology. Using google docs to replace individual writing is this kind of thinking. Using prezi to replace a poster presentation is this kind of thinking. Using Diigo to replace making notes out of an encyclopedia is this kind of thinking. The real power of these tools lies in how they are different, not in how the replace an existing process, and especially in how they create collaborative opportunities.

We are trapped by our preconceptions…

Those preconceptions also feed into fears.

The collaborative nature of online tools freaked out many people at ECOO. The heel digging around using social media (twitter and others) to expand personal learning networks was consistent across many of the seminars I attended. Many educators still accept group work in class, but believe online collaboration is a form of plagiarism and cheating, or even worse, it somehow causes children to be preyed on by making them public.

If the classroom is really going to bleed out of the factory inspired buildings we call schools and infect a student’s life in a more permanent way (ultimately creating curious life long learners), then we need to continue to develop access to collaborative online tools that don’t frighten people, and act assertively to clarify new media and calm down the analogue population.

I had a knee jerk response from an invite I sent out on school email this weekend asking if anyone who hadn’t PLN built before might be interested. The teacher (a self described dinosaur) said, “I don’t want to be tweeting or any of that other social media stuff. If I want PD, I’ll read a book.” I pointed out to her that most of the discussion online revolves around books we’ve read. The key difference between her enriching her own teaching and the PLN doing it online is that more than one person benefits; collaboration is what super charges it.

The foundation of all this anxiety is the spectacular example our digital native students make of social media, which is usually displayed as the most asinine waste of time ever devised. Older teachers who are techno-phobic find the idea of using digital tools for productivity as foreign as clueless fourteen year olds do. The blind leading the blind.

I keep trying to shed some light on this, but people get very cranky about it.

Technology As Distraction

Tech In Ed link

We have more computer access now than we’ve ever had before, both in and out of school. We have more internet access now than ever before, both in and out of school. This is all simple fact…

The full non-twitterized quote was, “Great, I couldn’t find a computer lab to book, now I won’t get my marking done.” Implication? You book a computer lab so the kids have something to do while you catch up on work. You don’t teach using computers, they are a way to keep students amused, distracted.

Anecdotally speaking, the vast majority of labs I walk by on any given day contain a teacher studiously ignoring their students, either on a computer themselves or frantically marking, while their students wander the internet looking for entertainment, the room aglow with the moderate cobalt blue of Facebook.

Last week we had a teacher angrily emailing because the labs he’d booked while he was absent had been double booked. Implication? I can book a lab while I’m away so the students have something to do. Presumably there was work attached to the lab booking, but once again there was no teaching involved in it. You book a lab so a supply teacher doesn’t have to teach either.

This does a couple of damaging things. First of all, it reinforces in student’s minds that computers are only for entertainment. If the teacher isn’t actively involved in the use of computers in the class, if computer access isn’t intrinsic to what students are learning, then we only reinforce the idea of technology as an entertainment/time waster.

I teach media arts in an Apple lab. It seems like a dream technical teaching situation, but the difficulty in trying to get students cultured to vegetate in front of a screen to recognize all that they don’t know, and use a computer for productive and/or creative purposes is agonizing. It’s like trying to get a morphine addict to recognize how small measured doses can actually help someone manage pain; they don’t care, they just want to keep overusing it for their own amusement.

I want to thank all those teachers who use school computer labs as a distraction that encourages these bad habits.

Another problem is teacher computer literacy. This is a major problem in the general public, and in teachers as well; people generally know how to do only a few things, and have no idea how what they use works, they certainly aren’t experimental with their usage. Teacher lack of familiarity with computer and internet use makes them poor facilitators in digital learning environments, and they aren’t going to get much better at it if they treat computer lab time as an excuse to do work irrelevant to what students are doing.

If we’re going to develop digital pedagogy, we need to be recognizing how digital tools can become vital components in learning and not merely a replacement for analogue options (ie: poster board/PowerPoint, pen & paper/word processor) that you can leave students with in a lab while you catch up on marking.

Left to their own devices (and they almost always are), students on a computer revert to simplistic habits: Facebook lurking, Youtube staring or the dreaded pointless online game/time-waster. This disconnect also produces the vast majority of school computer vandalism, something that actively prevents us from buying more computers (because we have to keep repairing the under supervised labs we have instead of having cash on hand to develop diverse educational technology).

These are usually the first teachers who complain about lack of access, because they can’t find themselves a period off. As a teacher that has technology baked into their curriculum, these people make my job that much harder than it already is.

Collectables

Costello’s BMW is a thing of beauty.

Digging out an old BMW from the woods the other day was an emotional roller coaster. What we ended up finding wasn’t what we thought it was though. Jeff’s original plan was to find an old air head BMW and convert it into a cafe racer. Bill Costello’s wonderful example was what motivated him aesthetically. BMW turned out a lot of air cooled boxers before recently adopting an air/water cooled combo. You think it’d be easy to pick one out to strip apart back to basics.

Turns out that isn’t the case. As we wheeled the old R100RT out of the shed we were struck with a custom paint job and some interesting looking badges. It turns out that in 1983 BMW Motorrad was celebrating its 60th anniversary and produced 300 special edition machines, and we were looking at one of them that had been sitting in a shed for eleven years.

It took a few hours to get back with the bike, but once in the driveway we were looking it over by flashlight, trying to get a handle on what it was that we’d recovered from the grips of time.

The next morning over coffee a discussion started around just how special this anniversary model might be. It took Jim showing up with a cell phone that actually worked at the cottage (thanks Bell) to get online and begin filling in the gaps.

As the rain thundered down outside we discovered that these bikes often sell for three times what Jeff had bought it for. On top of that a lot of BMW aficionados are against pulling apart and cafe-ing older BMWs, especially anniversary specials. This left us in an awkward place. Do you cut it to pieces and build the cafe racer you’ve been dreaming of building, or do you restore what might be a valuable piece of history?

If you’re going to run into problems buying an old bike, this is a good one to have.

Putting air in the tires for the first time in a long time, they held it too!

A CRV, the perfect off road towing vehicle!

It took a lot of pushing to get it that far.

Ever wondered what eleven years of dirt looks like? Like that.

Lots of nice details on this old BMW

Bike Hole 2.0

With some shed-age, I’ve been able to move the gardening stuff out of the bike hole. With a bit of re-arrangement I’ve got plenty of space for the Connie and the Ninja. Being able to park bikes wall to wall means I have more space for more bikes!

Fat Guys On Bikes

Even my leaner summer weight is still
overweight / borderline obese.

I got called in for a checkup at my local MDs last week. I’m not a little fellow, at 6’3″ I usually tip the scales at about 110 kilos (~240lbs). At that weight I don’t carry much extra weight anywhere, though my BMI tells me that I’m on the verge of obesity there, which doesn’t make it a very effective tool for encouraging reduction. According to the BMI I should weigh 175lbs, which is astonishing. I think I’d look emaciated at that weight on my frame. Even as a lean teen I was about 200lbs.

The checkup was a followup for blood pressure, which I’m in a healthy range on. The shock came when I got weighed. The middle of winter isn’t the best time to weigh yourself, especially when we’re in the middle of the coldest winter on record. When going outside hurts you tend to turtle by the fireplace.

At 262lbs, I’m well into obesity now, though I still consider myself active and can get out of a chair without making strange noises. I’ve been doing yoga once a week, but dropped hockey because of the driving involved and the general level of jerkiness I experience playing with frustrated middle aged men.

The nurse asked what goals I’d like to set considering the good blood pressure but surprising fat-guy score. I’d been thinking about exercising more, but when you don’t tell anyone about it you’re not held to anything. I told the nurse I wanted to get back to 240lbs, so now I’ve told someone and I’m on the hook.

I’ve been hitting the elliptical twice a week for half an hour each time in addition to the yoga. Between that and not eating everything that comes my way, I’m hoping to get back down under the 75th percentile for my gender and height.

Hopefully I can avoid the specialty
leathers when I finally get kitted out.

I’ve always tended to approach getting in shape backwards, I wait for the opportunity before preparing for it. When I was preparing to join the police force, I was working out regularly while aiming for that physical exam. With no reason to get into shape, why bother?

This time round I’ve set a reward for getting in shape. If I can hit the weight goal I’ll sign myself up for the weekend racing school. Those little 125cc Hondas don’t need a fat guy sitting on them, and the other riders don’t need to see a 260+ lb guy trying to squeeze into race leathers. Bruce Willis once said he can’t be bothered to exercise at all, the only thing that motivates him is vanity. If he knows he’s going to be filmed with his shirt off he hits the gym. I’ve got vanity and physics encouraging me.

As the nurse said, it’s not a matter of binge exercise or diet, it’s about habit changing. I don’t need to get all monk like and have only cabbage and water. If I can get into a comfortably doable new normal, I won’t worry about the numbers and just see where I end up. Be active at least 3 times a week (with a heart rate above 130), be reasonable with food consumption, and see where that gets me. Enjoy my exercise (I have been so far, I’ve been watching Closer to the Edge while I get sweaty), and see how it affects my mood (positively so far, I look forward to it).

One of the tough things about getting older is staying active. Life is busy, and the whole, ‘if you stay fit you’ll live longer!’ argument doesn’t do much for me. If that means I’m sitting in an old-age home drooling on myself in forty years, I’d just as soon not be. What is motivating is setting reachable goals, feeling better and rewarding myself for it with a bucket list experience. With any luck I’ll be blogging about that race weekend in June (and looking good in the pictures).

Coast to Coast to Coast 2.0

Originally published on Tim’s Motorcycle Diaries in June, 2014:

I just finished watching Arctic Clutch. He doesn’t go as far as I’m planning to with Coast Cubed and he does it in a more alcohol fuelled young man’s way, but he does shed some light on travelling in the far north. From the video it’s hard to tell whether 150km/day on the Dempster Highway is difficult, or difficult because he’s hungover. He does mention how expensive hotel rooms are up there though, which is helpful.

774kms of gravel before another
140 new kms up to the coast,
over 900kms all told – all gravel

The key to being able to access the arctic coast in Canada and enable a coast to coast to coast trip is the completion of the Dempster Highway up to Tuktoyaktuk. It looks like it will be completed by 2018. A summer 2018 coast to coast to coast epic adventure, sounds like a plan! I’d the first person on two wheels to complete this trip. Anyone interested in joining me?

Next to the extreme distances involved (the Earth’s circumference is just over 40,000kms, this trip is over half that, all in one country!), the hardest part of this trip is the ride north to the Arctic Ocean. I’d originally thought that since eighteen of the twenty thousand kilometres of this trip will be on pavement, I’d get a bike focused on that task. I’d stop in Dawson and prep the bike for the rocky portion of the trip with an engine guard and some dual purpose tires tough enough to handle a couple of thousand kilometres over rocks.

An argument could be made for an adventure bike for this, but unless it’s a very road focused adventure bike I wouldn’t consider it. Having to put up with a tall, wallowy, wrong-tired, road-awkward bike for just 10% of the trip still seems wrong headed. What is vital is a bike that can handle high kilometre paved road days that wouldn’t fatigue me.

Having seen Nick Sanders double Pan-America Highway run on a Super Ténéré, I’m thinking that a multi-purpose bike might work better, though with having to deal with Central and South America, Nick had a lot more unpaved road to deal with. There are, however, a number of ‘adventure’ bikes that are much more comfortable on pavement and can eat huge miles easily.

I’m still always thinking about lighter weight bikes and don’t want some litre plus monster to lug around. With that in mind I’m rethinking choices for this trip, especially if I’ve got a couple of years to get my ducks in a row.

An early favourite of mine is the Triumph Tiger. Described more as a good road bike with some off road ability, it would be putting the priorities in the right order but would still have no problems with the Dempster Highway. Being made-in-England myself, I’d enjoy doing Canada’s first coast to coast to coast ride on a compatriot.

I was all set to be a Triumph guy from the start, but my Ninja has snuck up on me, and Kawasaki offers some interesting long distance options. I’ve already thought about the Kawasaki Concourse, which would handle the big miles in an athletic but capable manner. Then there is the odd, but Cyclon-looking Kawasaki Versus (the odd cousin of my Ninja), which looks like it could handle the Dempster. Maybe Kawasaki would like to bring the Versus out of the shadows and make it the first bike to ride coast to coast to coast in Canada.

Since I’ve got a couple of years to work this out I’ll pound the pavement and see who wants to be involved. OLN Canada should probably be on the ground when someone completes the first coast to coast to coast Canada ride. Isn’t this like finishing the railroad (finally)? Canada is, at last, truly a three coast entity and we can all enjoy it. Over twenty thousand kilometres of travel without crossing an international border.

Canada really is something rare in the world, enormous and unfinished… especially to the north.

Whatcha think Kawasaki Canada?

Time to get the Versus out of the shadows and make it the first bike to ever go Coast to Coast to Coast in Canada?

Philosophy of Riding: choosing a bike

Buying that first bike has a lot of philosophical underpinning to it. Do I go with the swiss army knife of bikes, used by the Navy Seals themselves? Or do I go with a road specialist with ungodly dexterity? What I ride dictates how I ride. A dedicated road bike offers a very different experience to an enduro. To KLR or to Ninja, that is the question.

I should add, that I have always loved Suzukis, the GSX-R 750 was my dream bike when I was younger, and the Gladius is exactly the kind of naked bike that I like. I’d been kinda hoping my first bike would be a Suzi, perhaps a Vstrom, but they are hard to find used! I was originally going to get a new KLR (only $6300+taxes brand new 2012), but I’m just getting out of five years of car payments and would like a break, so I’m going all in on a used bike.

The KLR?

A big bike with a comfortable driving position for me (a big, six foot+ guy)
Can go just about anywhere – handy for a guy who lives in the country (dirt roads)
This particular one has only 1200kms on it
Lets me practice many different riding environments.
as sensible as a bike choice can be

The Ninja?

road specialist bike with a wide range of performance (won’t outgrow it quickly)
an emotional choice that feels fantastic
dexterity (ungodly braking and acceleration) would get me out of trouble
able to handle all aspects of road driving well (KLR isn’t highway/high speed friendly)

Ups and Downs

The KLR is far away in Milton – meaning I’m spending a couple of hours just to go see it, and it might not be as nice as the pictures suggest (which obviously weren’t taken recently). The Ninja is five minutes away in Fergus.

The Ninja has low miles (only 8000 miles), but the KLR has fantastically low miles and is 2 years newer.

The Ninja has been repainted and has been dropped at least once. The KLR has been dropped too, but they aren’t trying to hide it. The Ninja appears to be in good working order, but it’s also had a long list of owners in its short life (I’d be #6 or 7?). This is a Ninja with a shady past.

The KLR owners aren’t responding to communications and are far away. The Ninja owner was immediately available, has been completely upfront with the bike (even pointing out blemishes) and lives around the corner (I taught his cousin English). He has put half of the 8000 miles on the bike.

The KLR is a bit more expensive, and obvious (nothing hidden). I don’t know what its history is.

The Ninja has charisma… and I’ve had a habit of wanting to save orphaned machines (my long and storied car history is full of examples). I sympathize with the Ninja, I want to give it a good home.

The KLR would let me learn on and off road riding, all in one bike, though it wouldn’t do either thing as well as a purpose built bike would do – it’s a swiss army knife. The Ninja is a scalpel, very good at what it’s designed for, but it isn’t going off road.

Any used vehicle has secrets, the KLR might be the lemon, the Ninja the safe buy, but the Ninja’s history, paint job (which is peeling and showing the much nicer blue underneath) and history suggest that it might have been abused. That just makes me want to save it more.

Either bike would let me get my hands dirty maintaining and modifying it. Both Ninja and KLR appear to be easy to work on. They insure for the same amount (it’s all about engine size and they are within 2cc of each other – though they couldn’t be more different bikes).

If there’s a sure choice, it’s lost on me. I’m looking for an emotional relationship with my first bike. The come hither looks, lovely sound and mysterious history of the American Ninja suggest she’s trouble; I just don’t know how much trouble I’m looking for.

Coolness

When the Navy Seals want a bike, they go to the KLR! The Navy Seals!

The Ninja can do this!!

… and if not that, then at least this:

Wow…

We worked out $3800 safetied – it needed a new rear tire and some reflectors. It also needs fluids changed, some TLC and the fairings taken off and painted so that the bike doesn’t look like a stunned sixteen year old’s idea of exciting.

Nexx MaxiJet X40 Modular Helmet

The new Ninja 650 has a nice white option. High visibility and going with the Star Wars Imperial pilot theme I’ve been going for. It’d nicely match up with my dream helmet and the black and white gear I’m going for. I suspect my juvenile, flat black ninja will become ivory white shortly.

I’m hoping to have it in the garage in a couple of days. In the meantime, I found the manual online and hopefully will know my way around the bike when it gets here.

Do you ride the horse, or does the horse ride you?

The idea that technology will somehow make teaching easier (or superfluous) makes me sad… and angry. The idea that it might be making us inferior to previous generations drives me right over the edge.

I’ve been reading Nick Carr’s The Shallows. If you’re a techie-educator, you might disagree with him, but the Pulitzer prize panel didn’t. Neither did the Laptops & Learning research which demonstrated that students retain less information about a lecture when they have a digital distraction on their laps. Carr’s argument that digital tools teach a plastic brain to reorganize in simplistic ways has resonated with many people, usually people that didn’t like digital options in the first place.

There is a big backlash against this single minded approach, which I think was addressed at the recent ECOO conference. If students aren’t able to recall details from a lecture, I think I have to start with the sage and the stage. The idea of passive learning is rapidly losing traction as the most effective way to teach. Countries that cling to the idea (usually as a cost saving measure and to try and adhere to standardized tests) are tumbling down world rankings in education.

A teacher who talks at their students for an hour will view laptops in their class as an invader who fights them for their (not so) captive audience’s attention. If you want to accept digital tools into a uni-directional, passive classroom environment, they are going to disrupt the learning.

Several of my students came up to me today and asked me how to perform a function in imovie (we’re editing videos we’ve been working on for three weeks). I told them both that I wouldn’t show them. Following the sage logic, I should have given them an in-depth 20 minute lecture on how to add pictures to credits, and then chastised them if their attention ever seemed to wander to the imacs in front of them. Instead, I suggested they look at the help information, and then go out into the wild west of the internet if they were still lost. I not only wanted them to resolve their own (relatively simple) learning dilemmas, I wanted them to feel like they had solved them themselves. Within ten minutes they both had figured out what to do without being spoon fed the details; they owned that information. For the rest of the period they were showing other interested parties how to do it.

If I had saged that whole thing, digital tools would have appeared to be a detriment to thinking and learning; nothing but a distraction.

The other side of this is the idea that teachers no longer teach, they simply facilitate, like trainers on a bench. This usually plays to the ‘technology will make my life simple’ crowd, and it isn’t remotely true. To begin with, many students haven’t learned to use digital tools in productive ways. When they turn on a computer it means hours of mindless, narcissistic navel gazing on Facebook. Students in my class are expected to use the computer as a source of information, a communication tool and a vehicle for artistic expression. They aren’t going to be the players if they don’t even know the game. I have to model and learn along side them, I have to demonstrate expertise on the equipment, and more importantly, expertise as an effective, self-directed learner. If I do this well enough, I can eventually step back, but I’m more the weathered veteran on the bench good for a few more pinch shifts when I’m really needed, than I am a towel jockey.

A good teacher challenges, and then is able to recede, but even that recession is a carefully modulated choice that balances student ability with student independence. This is never going to be anything but a challenging dance that you will always be leading, even if you’re not necessarily in front. We CANNOT assume that students know how to use digital tools effectively, any more than we can assume they will intuitively grasp band-saws, or nail guns.

If you’re into tech in education because you think it’s an easy way out, it’s time to realize that there are no short cuts, and that your job will constantly change, and you better be mentally lithe enough to keep up with it, or else the digital natives will use the tech in the most simplistic, asinine ways imaginable, and Nick Carr’s Shallows will become the truth.

Motorcycle Mojo: Tim’s Birthday Edition

My great aunt and Granddad across the page from a Triumph,
I think they’d approve!

It’s been a good month for publishing. Glenn at Motorcycle Mojo ran two pieces I’d submitted.

In the Remember When section I’d sent in the family photos I’d discovered while back home in Norfolk, England in 2013.

It was a real joy to see Grand-dad and a great Aunt I’d never met in pages that I knew were being seen across Canada.

Our Vancouver Island adventure got many pages!

I was then astonished to see that Glenn had also run the article I handed in last year on our ride on Vancouver Island. Seeing my byline right behind Lawrence Hacking‘s was a real rush!

There is no greater satisfaction for an English major than seeing your writing published. I’ve managed it academically, but this was my first go at motorcycle media and it was no less satisfying.

The Motorcycle Mojo piece reads well (and I’m a tough critic with myself). After seeing myself in print I think I might be addicted. I’m so glad I brought the camera and aimed to write this up from the beginning, it’s like reliving the trip over again, and my son Max is over the moon!

I’ve already pitched another piece to Glenn.

If you’ve thought of writing out a motorbike experience but didn’t, give it a go! Glenn is a considerate editor and the joy of seeing your words publicized is powerful!

Vancouver Island?!?!? How can you not want to read that?!?