Timothy King – Page 49 – Mechanical Sympathy

Dogmatic Digitization

Digital technology thrives on a covenant of radical democracy that promises information for all. The giants of technology market themselves on this egalitarian ideal. From Google’s corporate counter culture to Apple’s fixation on design to empower the user, technology companies are founded and thrive on the idea of a future of individual empowerment. People love them for it and self identify with digital technology companies in a personal way that is quite foreign to other consumer relationships.

Social norms have changed over the past five years. Where once pulling out a smartphone demonstrated your importance and wealth, it is now a common gesture for pretty much everyone in North America. We’ve passed a tipping point, the majority of people are on a computer connected to the internet all the time. If you don’t believe me go for a walk in any public place and see how many people are operating handheld computing devices.

As the majority adopts digital platforms I’ve seen a consistent dumbing down of digital tools and content in order to reach as wide an audience as possible. This is probably a complaint form many early adopters, but when I see simplicity and limitation rather than functionality and access begin to infect how we use technology in education I have to question the pedagogical value of our educational technology.

In order to cater to as many people as possible educational technology has created systems that hide much of what happens behind simplistic interfaces. Can the promise of radical democratization of information survive when most people want to be spoon fed in the most limited manner possible? Free access to material doesn’t matter when most people only want to use the internet in the same, simplistic way.

Digital technology still presents itself with those early ideals of democratic information access and transparency, but like everything else as it matures it begins to develop a more pragmatic approach. My feeling now is that these egalitarian, transparent technology companies are actually anything but. No one that wealthy feels the need to be transparent, or to educate others. When you are worth billions your goal becomes market share and monopoly.

Educational technology, as an offspring of the digital technology giants, suffers from this dogmatic stiffening of its intent. Rather than focusing on individual empowerment and the promise of de-industrializing the education system they are happy to embrace dehumanizing, data-driven testing, especially if it offers ease of implementation. If education technology isn’t interested in offering users diverse, personally nuanced, highly adaptive, open ended digital learning tools in a transparent and universal access to information, then what hope have the rest of us in a consumer driven digital world? We’re preparing the next generation of drones.

Tweets from the ASU/GSV Summit in Phoenix

We’re in a position as educators and educational technologists to try and direct digitization away from closed systems with limited access to tools and information but the money infects our good intent. Rather than focusing on diversity and acclimatizing students to the radical openness of the internet (something that, like the Wild West, may soon disappear), we preach walled gardens and monopolistic access. We teach students to value limited access in order to train them for a future internet controlled by the rich and we do it because it’s easier, not because it’s better.

For some new tools empower,
but for far too many they create
habitually driven repetiton

That this is all done under the guise of freer information for all is laughable. How can education claim to support the ideals of the early information revolution if it is in bed with pragmatic companies pushing for tiered access to information based on wealth? If the information revolution was ever about ideals it has long since been replaced by moneyed interest.

Between datamining users to support wrong headed standardized testing policies to simply fleecing student data to generate sellable marketing information, the flipside to education technology is complex and not particularly flattering. As a teacher of technology I hope to empower my students with knowledge of how information technology works in order for them to remain independent entities in the brave new world we’re creating. For the other 95% who take no computer studies and yet live on this technology all day every day, I see a future every bit as dogmatic and limited as the industrial one we are now shedding. In fact, it may be much worse because, unlike the punch card factory worker of the Twentieth Century who was reduced to a number for eight hours a day, dogmatic, digitized information demands your undying attention and submission 24/7/365.

If you can’t hack it, it owns you.

Who Owns Your Data?

Tweets from the #edinnovation Summit

There was much hand-wringing over privacy and data ownership at the recent ASU/GSV conference. Serious people in designer suits explained that security is expensive, must be shrouded in secrecy and is never full-proof. Sounds like a great fear-sell for cash infused education systems (sic). Fortunately you can’t really oversee it either because that would be a breach of security; it’s a brilliant piece of hard-salesmanship with minimal oversight.

Listening to the urgency and paranoia in these discussions had me thinking about how privacy and data ownership are framed in digital environments. I’m the first to suggest we be cautious with how student data is shared, but the idea that anything digital can somehow be locked down and owned is ridiculous. I’ve heard ed-tech ‘experts’ go on about walled gardens at length. You can leap over any of those walled gardens with a simple screen capture or text grab, and then it can go viral on the wild internet. Trying to keep data in check is like trying to hold back Niagara Falls with a door, digital data is incredibly fluid, that’s why we can do so much with it.

The second tweet at the top sheds some light on how we are misframing data as an ownable entity. Like your appearance or your reputation, the data you give off is information you emit socially; you can’t own your data any more than you can own your appearance or your reputation. In all three cases you can, of course, influence the social outputs you’re giving, but you can’t own them. Realizing this would stop us from trying to control the uncontrollable and instead let us begin teaching students (and everyone else for that matter) best practices for creating desirable data emissions (there has to be a better word for that, digital reputation? digirep? virtual scent? vBO?).

If we begin to see digital data emissions as a natural byproduct of online interaction (and make no mistake, they are), then the idea that if we throw enough money at it we can make everyone safe gets questioned. You’re never going to hear education technology companies that market based on security suggesting this mindset, there’s no money in it.

The other side of this is privacy. The idea that we can suddenly have privacy now when we’ve never had it before is baffling to me. Before we became industrialized we were mostly geographically locked to where we were born. Without the ease of fossil fuel powered vehicles most of us never travelled more than a dozen miles from where we were born. Do you think anyone had privacy in those circumstances? You were a well established element in a fairly static society. The idea that you could shield your actions from the public eye only really began in the twentieth century. Industrialized anonymity was as much curse as it was something desirable. It was only in the conformity forced on us by industrialization that the illusion of privacy existed.

If the NSA and CIA can’t stop it, do you think that edtech companies can?

We are emerging from that drab, industrial anonymity caused by cookie cutter conformity. The digital world doesn’t expect us to be passive eyeballs counted as ratings in front of a TV screen, it demands interaction and individuality and it restores our voices. As we emerge into an individually empowered, digitally driven world of shared information, expecting privacy is a wish for a poisonous illusion that never really existed.

Privacy isn’t dead, it never existed. Prior to industrialization we had no social privacy at all and during industrialization we were dehumanized into bricks in the wall and given the illusion of privacy because we barely mattered as individuals.

When you’re online nothing you do is private, nothing you do is owned by you. Just as you can influence your appearance by good hygiene or your reputation by performing right action, you can affect your data-appearance by presenting yourself well, but ultimately any data you give off is out there and can spread easily, just like gossip.

The nascent study of digital citizenship addresses a lot of this, but like other digital skills it is an afterthought, never integrated into core curriculum. No wonder men in expensive suits can make lots of money preaching fear and convincing educators to spend their budgets on myth and innuendo. Perhaps one day educators will take the job of understanding and teaching digital skills seriously and ignore the snake oil.

Mechanical Sympathy

At the end of a twisty road, deep in the hills, the shop of my dreams…

courtesy of www.floorplanner.com, it’s easy to play with, give it a whirl!

Since doing bodywork on my first bike, I’ve remembered how much I enjoy doing it. The new shop will be a working paint shop with a booth and an oven capable of power coating parts.

PAINT

Open faced paint booth: Paint-booths.com

Price: $2599

PAASCHE HSSB-30-16 30″ Paint Spray booth

Price: $525

MECHANICS

DSA800SE-GL2 30L (8gal) 1600W dual 20/40KHz Ultrasonic parts cleaner
$850

20 Gallon Heavy Duty solvent parts cleaner
$115

Anderson Motorcycle Stand
http://andersonstands.com/workshop_stands.htm
700x2100mm
$2900

Industrial Air
60 Gallon Electric Air Compressor
24x27in footprint
$710

accessories (hoses, connectors)
$50

High Volume Low Pressure paint gun
California Air Tools SP-324 HVLP paint gun
http://www.californiaairtools.com/spray-guns/sp-324/
$107
http://www.homedepot.ca/product/sp-324-hvlp-gravity-feed-spray-gun-with-air-regulator/998799

Lincoln Electric Handy Mig Welder Kit
$450

Lincoln Electric Cutwelder
$330+tanks $300

It’s a work in progress. Wouldn’t this be a nice thing to retire into?

Learning Curves

Following up on the ‘just tell me the answer‘ post last week, I’ve been trying to find ways to articulate what I’m attempting to do with students so that they don’t become frustrated. It’s said that familiarity breeds contempt, but what I’m hoping is that familiarity breeds confidence and a willingness to experiment and push the boundaries of student knowledge.

The germination of self-directed learning should be the goal of instruction in any teaching. A student who is forever dependent upon a teacher is a poor student indeed. With that goal in mind I’m working out the process of developing self directed learning in students using Prezi to map out how familiarity breeds confidence and self direction.

Some brilliant Google+ sharing by Liz Krane &
Carmelyne Thompson via Josh Kaufman

Explaining this to my senior computer engineers I tried to stress that this process is what I’m looking at, not necessarily what you know. Even though the seniors are supposed to have previous experience many don’t so the course needs to be flexible in how it approaches a wide range of abilities. If I see steady growth in familiarity through guided instruction the inevitable result should be the formation of self-directed learning demonstrated through experimentation, collaboration and troubleshooting. Looking for what a student knows is much less important than looking for where a student is in this learning process towards mastery. Mastery itself is really just another word for a person who knows enough to error correct and self direct their learning – expertise never came at a teacher’s hand, mastery is always self taught.

Josh Kaufman’s TEDtalk on how 20 hours takes you through the initial steep climb (humbling and intensely rewarding) when picking up a new skills is telling:

We fail to do a lot of these things in school. Distractions in the form of bells, announcements, lousy chairs and tables, large classes, and dozens of other interferences break focus. I like to say, “stop learning now, you have to leave” to students when the bell goes and students who were lost in what they were doing are jarred back into the present.

Kaufman’s learning curve,
seems perfectly sensible…

On top of school itself we now have digital technology which is most effective at monetizing us if we ‘surf’ rather than focus. The habits we develop while being consumers online plague educational technology as students who are used to being digitally shallow out of school bring the same lack of focus to their learning. That we ignore digital habits and corporate influence in educational technology will probably be the reason it never does what it promises it might do.

Beyond industrialized settings and digital distractions education systems fail to recognize the basic process of learning and in doing so spend a lot of time and money producing under-performing students. When 50% is a pass even a perfect pass rate isn’t saying much. If our learning happens on a curve as Kaufman suggests, then we are doing this wrong in just about every possible way.

About a year ago I took a weekend course in order to begin riding a motorcycle. Difficult and uncompromising it demanded my full attention both in the classroom and for hours in the saddle. Not paying attention resulted in possible injury (and several people were). That weekend course might seem too short but it just happens to be about twenty hours long (what Kaufman suggests you need to get over the steepest part of the learning curve). With the right kind of support (small class size with a 1:4 instructor/student ratio and everything we needed to learn the skill including bikes, space, etc) and an expectation of focused learning, that twenty hours got me over the hump and able to continue developing expertise in a complex skill set that I had no previous experience in. I’d have to say, anecdotally, that Kaufman’s 20 hours seems right on the money.

We don’t think about learning curves in school. We don’t consider how students feel when they are picking up a new skill and feel inadequate; feelings aren’t in the curriculum. Worse, we consider learning to be a twelve year long marathon in school rather than a series of short sprints. Student goals aren’t always clear or consistent, failure isn’t considered an option and learning itself is less a focus than are irrelevant personal details like your age. We’d rather bunch students by age than where they are in their learning process. We lose sight of the possibilities and challenges inherent in the first twenty hours of new learning in favour of decade long statistical growth.

Can you imagine a school guided by Kaufman’s logic? Students are given focused learning to get them into a self correcting phase and then are expected to self-direct their learning. There would be classrooms with very high student:teacher ratios where the focus is on early learning. There may be other times and spaces where students are entirely independent and producing their own directed learning. Instead of a blanket approach our classrooms and schedules would reflect our variable learning curves; our schools would be responsive to how we learn instead of the other way round.

Digital technology would lend itself to this kind of learning by offering information, collaboration and communication to students on a profoundly personalized level. If we don’t begin taking the training of digital tools seriously the consumerist habits developed by everybody (students and staff) outside of school won’t allow us to de-industrialize education and adapt it to how we learn.

Digital Motorcycle Reading

I just finished Nick Sander’s Incredible Ride on an ipad mini and really enjoyed the experience. The integrated digital media in the ebook drew a different picture of that trip compared to just a written narrative. It wasn’t always better (as deep and developed) as a well thought out narrative piece of prose but it offered an interesting reading experience in a different way.

I’ve tried reading digitally before with older ipads and other tablets but have been unsatisfied with the quality. The Retina display on this Mini is a revelation though, it has better screen resolution than my 15″ laptop; it’s so sharp and clear that it’s shocking! I also find my eyes don’t get tired reading off it (perhaps as a result of that clarity). With all that in mind I started thinking about alternative ways to read my motorcycle media.

My Cycle Canada subscription is coming to an end and I want to renew, but I think I might go digital. I’m also keen to get into Bike magazine and Adventure Bike Rider magazine, both UK titles that cost me $13+taxes a pop when I find them in a local store. Rather than get stuck into another year of dead trees I tried reading digital samples on the ipad Mini.

Bike Magazine showed the multi-media possibilities of a digital magazine. The embedded video and layers of information available in the digital copy were fantastic. The high resolution images on that Retina display were jaw dropping. There is no doubt the digital copy is the way to go, and at £48 for a year (£4/$7.40CAN per issue) it’s a much better deal than the $15 with taxes I’m paying at Chapters for a paper copy.

ABR is an even better deal. Instead of $15 an issue in Chapters I’m looking at £20 ($37CAN) for a year with access to all back issues. I’m going to check out its digital content, but if it comes anywhere close to what Bike is doing then it too will be a no-brainer.

Cycle Canada was a bit more basic. The online sample said it wasn’t at full resolution, so it expects me to commit to digital without knowing what it will look like, which seems a bit weak.

The only downside to the digital copy is that I can’t settle into a hot bath with an ipad. Maybe I’ll re-up Cycle Canada on dead trees for a while longer so I have an amphibious option.

If you’ve tried digital and not liked it give it a go with Apple’s Retina display, it might surprise you. The additional depth and media you get from the digital copy only seals the deal.

MotoGP And The Dragon’s Tail

I noticed that the US MotoGP race is in August at Indianapolis this year. I’ve never attended a MotoGP race before, but it makes a great excuse for a road trip!

Mapping it out in Google, I immediately extended the trip to hit the GP first and then continue on to the Tail of the Dragon before riding up the Blue Ridge Parkway and returning into Canada at the Thousand Islands.

The round trip would be just over thirty-five hundred kilometres. The race happens over the weekend of August 8th to 10th, so leaving on the Thursday morning would get us there Friday afternoon, we could catch Saturday qualifying and then Sunday’s race and leave Monday morning. But rather than head back north we’d be heading south east for The Tail of the Dragon!

Working our way up the Appalachian Mountains, we’d go from the Tail to the Blue Ridge Parkway to the Skyline Parkway before pushing back north to re-cross into Canada at The Thousand Islands.

The trip consists of three high speed sections (Ontario to Indianapolis, Indianapolis to Knoxville and Front Royal VA to Thousand Islands), and some slow sections (Tale of the Dragon, Blue Ridge and Skyline Parkways).

With a three night stopover for the Indie race, the schedule falls into about a ten or eleven day trip:

Leave on the Thursday, get to Indianapolis on Friday afternoon, Saturday qualifying, Sunday races, Monday morning departure and cover some ground, Tail of the Dragon on Tuesday, Blue Ridge Parkway Wednesday & Thursday, Skyline on Friday and then the run north for the border, we’d be back in Canada on Sunday, August 17th.

Tail of the Dragon in Tennessee.

Blue Ridge Parkway in the Appalachians.

This would be a MotoGP event at a legendary venue followed by some epic rides in mountains that we simply don’t have in Ontario. The start is by my place, the finish is by my buddy Jason’s place. He didn’t take his bike out at all last year, I’m hoping this changes his mind.

Putting The Ninja Back Together

We had our first above zero day this week and I giddily began rebuilding the Ninja thinking that I’d have a chance to take it out soon. It’s been snowing all day today and all hope it lost, but when the sun was out I could finally get to the paint touch ups needed. The insulated garage isn’t ideal for painting if the outside temperature is under minus ten Celsius which it has been for most of the winter.

On my first day of spring I popped open the garage door and touched up the headlight cover and fuel tank, both of which had imperfections in my initial paint application. Now that they’re clean and perfect, I can rebuild the front end.

With the temperature up the paint cures on the body panels very smoothly. It needs to be well above 10° Celsius for the paint not to bead and bubble on the surface. The front fairing and fuel tank lay in the warm March sunlight and cured perfectly – it was about 20°C. The Rustoleum paint on the right covers fantastically well. If you’re looking for paint that will cover smoothly on plastic and metal, this is the stuff.

I’m going to two tone the air intakes on the fairings following a design that more current Ninjas use. Unfortunately I didn’t heed my own advice and I rushed in there yesterday morning when it was still too cold and the paint beaded. Today I’m going to be sanding it down so I can get a smooth coat on in the heat.

It was nice to have the garage open and to be finishing up the winter repairs, maintenance and body touch ups. It’s supposed to be a warm (by warm I mean above zero) day again today. With the insulated shop and the sun shining in I should be able to finish up the paint and begin to rebuilt the frame on the bike.

While casting about for a fairingless streetfighter option for the bike I came across some cheap options for replacing fairings. I’d still like to try and source some of the bodywork from the fairingless ER6N, but it wasn’t available in Canada in 2007 and I’d have to go to Europe to find the pieces. It looks like the fairingless bike has small plastic covers over the coolant tank and that’s about it.

Ebb & Flow

Originally published on Dusty World in March, 2014.

Many moons ago I found myself hiring automotive technicians for Quaker State. There were a couple of odd things I did that helped find people who could survive in our tough working environment. One was toss any résumé that was full of grammar and spelling errors. I didn’t care if a tech had perfect grammar and spelling, but I did care that if given the time they didn’t take pride in their own work. The other thing I did was invent an emergency that interrupted the interview. The whole point of this was to test their initiative and see how they would respond to a change in tempo.

These interruptions became more and more complicated as the other guys on the shop floor got involved. What started off as a, ‘could you help me move a heavy thing’ turned into faked medical emergencies or whatever else struck the fancy of the staff. The guy who just sat there while everyone else shifted into overdrive wasn’t getting the job.

You see this kind of unresponsive stuck-tempo everywhere; employees who work at a walking pace are the new normal and it’s no different with students. This kind of thinking isn’t just found in work or school, but even in sports. People who throw themselves at something with any kind of intensity are becoming vanishingly rare. I suspect this is a response to modern management tactics based around fear and control. Those tactics have also been adopted by education, and students have responded with a similar protective apathy.

This apathy is a combination of digitization, systematization and the business-think that oversees these processes. Current business leadership revolves around creating an unbalanced workplace where fear and uncertainty drive employees into blind obedience. This highly charged methodology is completely unsustainable, but then it doesn’t have to be, there are always more employees to throw on the fire. Realizing potential and maximizing efficiency are irrelevant to a modern manager, the goal is short term gain and control. Digitized, data driven workplaces (and classrooms) are designed systemically to collect data that supports the system; statistics are as opinionated as politics. This Taylorist wonderland is overseen by caffeinated managers whose only approach is to spin their employees into a panic at every turn (those managers themselves are managed in the same way). The permanent engagement approach to learning is modelled on this thinking.

Days of lower energy, contemplative work and periods of off-task behavior are perfectly normal and even beneficial to the development of complex skills, but this is considered a failure in the modern world. When working on anything you should aim for sustainability as well as intensity, but education has followed management thinking in an effort to systematize and control.

A byproduct of this shortsightedness is the inability for students to amp up their focus and overachieve because modern education wants them to be giddily engaged all the time. The only way to achieve the highly agitated state of permanent engagement is to present simplistic, short term learning that offers constant reward. Working toward anything other than immediate gratification is a sure way to turn off the hyper engaged learner.

I have this up in my classroom. Any student that thinks a flurry of activity in the final weeks can make up for weeks of absences and apathy is kidding themselves.

The issue I’m seeing in many students is a benign neglect toward developing complex expertise. I’d argue that the decline in mathematical ability in Canadian students is a result of deemphasizing foundational skills in favour of short term learning strategies. These short term strategies stress engagement and success for all at the cost of building complex expertise.

Expecting students to work towards something other than immediate skill (the kind found in most video games) is becoming a lost art. Long-term, complex skill sets fall apart when we can’t expect students to follow along for more than thirty seconds at a time without some kind of Pavlovian payoff.

There is an ebb and flow to everything we apply ourselves to. For someone seeking mastery, even the ebbs have value, creating a deeper sense of familiarity and comfort. Anyone who has soaked in their discipline without a clear sense of direction knows what I’m talking about. From the confidence that arises out of those ebbs we push beyond boundaries and surprise ourselves with new learning when we are flowing again.

Whether it’s the workplace or a classroom, being hyper-engaged all the time just isn’t that productive, especially if you’re building long-term, complex expertise. If we’re all really just edu-tainers, then I guess we don’t have to worry about that, just be sure to collect the data needed to justify how well the system is working.

2014 Toronto Motorcycle Show

A ninety minute drive down to the Direct Energy Centre at the CNE in Toronto got us to the 2014 Toronto Motorcycle Show. Having been to our first motorcycle show in January, it was interesting to note the differences here. The TMS is much more focused around manufacturers. I complained that only Harley-Davidson and Kawasaki showed up to the ‘supershow’ in January, but at this one all the major manufacturers were present.

What else was different? The Supershow at the International Centre in Mississauga meant free parking and a discount on admission, my son and I were inside for about twenty bucks. The TMS has you ante up $14 to put your car somewhere and then $17+$12 to get inside… it ain’t cheap. Once you’re inside it’s significantly more focused and dense, mainly because there are so many manufacturers present. The Supershow had many more stalls of local equipment vendors and clubs, it had the feel of a bike motorbike jumble and it was HUGE; we walked for hours and missed an entire hall.

One show wasn’t better than the other, but they feel like very different events. My son greatly enjoyed the trials bike show at the TMS, and having space out back to show bikes in motion was a nice thing we didn’t see at the Supershow which seemed more like a sales focused event.

I’d said Kawasaki and HD were outstanding for being the only manufacturers to show up at the Supershow. At the TMS it came down to who took the time. Suzuki seemed entirely disinterested, Honda was absent though with lots of bikes to sit on, as were many of the other manufacturers.

I don’t doubt they all hire people or bring them in from dealers for this sort of thing, and we were there on the morning of the last day of the show, but BMW went above and beyond. They not only took the time to talk to me but also made my son really happy with some stickers and a poster, nicely done BMW. If you’re going to put on a public face at a show like this, exhausted, disinterested staff isn’t the way to go.

As a new rider I’m still getting a feel for manufacturers. I’d add BMW to Kawasaki and Harley Davidson as manufacturers who are willing to go the extra mile to ensure that your riding experience is exceptional. This is anecdotal, but it’s still my experience. HD and Kawasaki were both at the TMS in force and were once again very customer focused.

Triumph was there and I have a soft spot for such a successful manufacturer from my homeland, but once again the people on the stand were harrowed and indifferent, at least I managed to get a poster!

I had a nice chat with the Canadian Vintage Motorcycle Group and look forward to eventually owning an old bike and becoming a member, they seem like nice people.

The Toronto Motorcycle Show isn’t cheap, but it is dense with opportunities to sit on many bikes (though not KTMs), and see some fantastic trials demonstrations. Some manufacturers are more present than others, and I’d head over to BMW, Kawasaki and Harley Davidson if you want some quality customer service.

Here are some other pictures from the event:

Hayabusa!

The Motorbike Show & Wild Camping

I’ve been consuming motorcycle media at a voracious rate while we’re buried alive in snow. You probably know about the obvious stuff like Long Way Round, but I’ve been trying to find less known (in North America) faire. Here is a quick list of some off-the-beaten track stuff that you might not have seen from Great Britain:

ITV’s The Motorbike Show: Henry Cole of World’s Greatest Motorcycle Rides fame does reviews of motorcycle culture focusing on racing, restoring and interviewing people involved in motorbiking. I’ve really enjoyed this show, I wish it got more attention here in North America.

Wild Camping by Jo Sinnott is an epic journey from Ireland to Portugal through the best parts of Europe. Jo takes you wild camping while travelling on her Triumph Bonneville. If you’re interested in long distance riding, Jo not only shows you through the rough camping ethos but also looks into the mindset you need to survive a long road trip.

ITV and Travel Channel UK represent motorcycle and travel culture on the leading edge. I only wish they were more available in North America. OLN? Speed Channel? Pick these up!