Timothy King – Page 53 – Mechanical Sympathy

Influence Without Affluence

After a Social Media gathering a couple of weeks ago and a rewatch of We Are Legion I’ve been pondering what social expectations we’re developing in our new digital society. Why would I do this? Since our students are immersed in this radical, unprecedented counter culture it might behoove us as educators to have some idea of what cultural norms are coming out of it. Recognizing what is normative online behavior goes some distance toward explaining the seemingly bizarre responses teachers are seeing in class.

If you think the buttoned down 1950s era teacher had trouble understanding the hippy counter culture student of the sixties, you ain’t seen nothing yet. What technology is offering students today is nothing short of an entirely new social medium to inhabit, and what that is doing to early adopters (like teens) is nothing short of a paradigm shift in social behavior.

A number of years ago (2006!) WIRED did a quick piece on GENERATION XBOX, in which they talked about the expectations of gamer culture and how different they are from preceding (non digital) generations. This short list hit the gaming ethos precisely: arrogant, hacking (competitive, results focused regardless of rules), insubordinate… sound like anyone in your classroom? That gaming ethos has done a great deal to influence online presence. The egalitarian nature of the gamer is clearly seen in internet cultures like Anonymous where there is a strong emphasis on your contribution rather than your social standing in the ‘real’ world. What matters is what you say and how well you say it, not how much money your parents had or who you’re the boss of.

You might think this is socialist, but it really isn’t, it can be crushingly cruel and direct and has no patience for bullshit or spin. Everyone isn’t equal, though everyone does have equal access and ability to contribute. This ties organizations, especially politically powerful ones, in knots, especially when they expect the same kind of submission they can force in traditional media in an open digitized space. I suspect it’s hitting a lot of people who are used to the benefits of their social circumstances hard.

If suddenly all of the benefits you had (race, socio-economic status, education, family) are ignored, how do you establish yourself as an alpha? Especially when you’re used to having it handed to you. In the last post I tried to push privacy and ownership of information as far as I logically could considering the near friction-less information we find online.

If you can’t own information because trying to hold it is impossible when it can be copied and spread with no real effort, and privacy is irrelevant because anyone can copy and paste your information, and almost everyone has a media recording device unimaginable 20 years ago and can capture you at any time regardless of whether you want to be seen or not, regardless of whether you yourself are online or not; how do we understand what is ours? Ownership is at the foundation of how we relate to other people in society. With no ability to own material and with information being so slippery we can’t regulate who sees it online, how do we establish social dominance? If we can’t flash the car, the house, our jobs, or even our educations at people and expect benefits, what value do these things have?

The tendency would be to fall back on existing power structures, to try and exercise the same protections that advantage us in society in an online milieu, but this has been shown to fail again and again. Digital information does not work in a personal context the way that social status does. The only thing that makes you special is what you’re doing right now. Your interaction is your credibility online. If you try to game the system and people can find that data, they can make you look the fool. If you are able to maintain an honest and insightful digital footprint, you come as close as you’re ever going to get to being untouchable in the Wild West of the internet.

Someone who puts Ph.D. after their name online is as likely to be made fun of as they are to be respected. If that same person does not advertise their traditional social standing, but produces excellent ideas clearly and accessibly through an understanding of the tools available, then they will gain online currency. If the approach is one of indirect, politically motivated self interest, then the proliferation of digital information makes it very difficult to game the truth, or play people. That email or DM where you instruct other people to do something that you wouldn’t want everyone to know? It’ll end up buried in your back. You can’t stop the signal. If you’ve done it online, it’s obtainable.

I still maintain that radical transparency is what will evolve out of this startling social evolution. Say what you mean and do what you say, be consistent and don’t be afraid. If you make a mistake own it, and if you can’t handle what’s happening don’t advertise it by leaving a permanent record. Lurking is a perfectly reasonable place to back away to online.

I suspect that many of our students lurk online because they are trying to parse the wild west that they see out there. They don’t want to make fools of themselves, but they are also wrestling with what they know happens in the real world (you can get away with lying, deceit and social/political games quite easily in a world where information is ownable – especially if you’re the beneficiary of racial, social or cultural advantage). Online the powers aren’t powers and the socially weak can suddenly become something else if they have the voice and the will to do it.

Being hacked may not be a bad thing if it keeps everyone honest. The threat of hacking is what prevents many of the ‘real’ world powers from abusing the internet (that and it has insinuated itself into business and society to such a degree that pulling the plug would be a disaster). Marx may not have taken down capitalism, but online society offers the kind of radical egalitarianism that wraps monopolistic capitalists in knots.

The other thing about this radically flat mediascape is that hierarchies that force group think tend to fail. Rather than being threatened into following the crowd, you are free to disappear online. You aren’t beholden to social context in the same way you are in the real world. This means you can do things online you’d never do in ‘real’ life. Like the guy who screams obscenities and gives the finger to others while driving who would never do the same thing while walking down the sidewalk; the person online is removed and empowered in an interesting way by the machines that isolate them from their social context.

I’ve enjoyed watching the dismantling of these assumptions in a number of large organizations. I’ve been frustrated by others that claim democracy while really wanting to enforce an existing hierarchy. Online society is the most radically democratic ideal we’ve ever created. Access is cheaper and more available than citizenship in the first world (arguably the previous means of access to political control). As we miniaturize and mobilize computing and billions more people come online and realize that they are not powerless in their societies (and that they belong to a larger, more pervasive and more powerful online society), the world will change, and the ones who will suffer are those that have benefited from history the most.

Privacy Never Existed & Ownership of Information Is Dead

What you do when you try to privatize,
own or control digital content in the C21st

When #ontsm considered how to introduce social media to students there was a lot of talk about walled gardens and safe places. By creating private digital spaces students could become used to the nuances of online life in a tidal pool before they wandered out into the ocean. It’s a nice idea. It’s predicated on a myth.

The flaw in this thinking is that privacy exists, that it ever existed. Anonymity is very difficult to maintain, it always has been. This isn’t a digital issue. A hundred years ago, people weren’t able to move about as easily as they do now. You tended to exist in a much more colloquial and static social group. Your town or village knew who you were because you were contextualized in it by your family, job, religion, culture and friends. Modern cities barely existed at that point. Industrialization and the machinery it produced gave us the ability to migrate individually in the 20th Century, but even that came with a lot of social baggage. If you were out alone on a motorcycle, you were socially classified, even if people didn’t know you personally. We do this all the time with race, socio-economic status, even accent; every time we stereotype we do it. Privacy has always been a myth. If anyone lays eyes on you who doesn’t know you, their impression of you is what you are socially. Digital information makes a greater mockery of that myth by spreading us across the web, ignoring our geography.

Digital information is so fluid, so easy to create and share, that it is frictionless. You don’t have to physically share a book to share text any more, you don’t have to physically share a DVD to share a video any more. When information is a stream of data constantly flowing, ownership and privacy become impossible to manage in any traditional sense.

If you put student data into a digital format, your ‘privacy settings’ (an ode to the myth to make you feel better) are set to whomever is the viewer of your content with the least goodwill toward you and the least respect for your privacy. This goes beyond the people you shared it with to anyone at all who can view your information. Any attempts to ‘lock down’ (another backward looking term designed to make you feel better) digital information is easily bypassed by a screen capture or a cut and paste.

The digital is leaking into the physical world too. If anyone sees or hears you doing anything, anywhere, at any time, and they have a smart phone on them, you are the push of a button away from being published. Stupidity has never been so readily documented; see youtube for a billion examples. If you think you’re ‘safe’ because you’re not doing something digitally, the ability to record and publish digitally makes your point moot. Want to go back to report cards on paper? It’s one photo away from being on Facebook. Think you’re in private because you’ve closed the door to your classroom? The kid videoing you without your knowing will have you on youtube in thirty seconds, and then copies of copies of copies spread across the web.

The idea of privacy might be a byproduct of industrialization – that machines can insulate us from our social context and offer us a kind of freedom people have never really had before. We leapt into digital machines thinking they would further isolate us from each other and preserve the myth of privacy, but the slippery nature of digital information makes a mockery of the myths of privacy and ownership of information.

Revolutions and Dataspheres

When you can propagate information this easily and quickly, and exponentially like a virus, who owns it? When we stumbleupon material intentionally author intent quickly becomes a secondary influence in media. The viral nature of social media sharing pushes information in a way that used to be the job of publication. It’s hard to even introduce traditional publishing into this environment. This is such a chaotic, crowdsourced, place, the idea of a professional publisher (itself based on an industrialized limitation around the costs of printing to paper) becomes almost impossible to justify. Editors give way to crowd wisdom and the results are often indistinguishable. An argument might be made for professional publishing, but if crowd sourced material finds ways to approach the quality of traditional media, and ends up forcing it out of the market, what is left for the professional publisher?

Does the author’s intended audience matter? That information takes on a life of its own. Its audience is dictated by its accessibility and how effectively it hooks a viewer’s attention. In a medium where people are buried in information, caprice replaces intent, information that captures curiosity is gold.

The shear volume of data in this wild-west is so overwhelming that it couldn’t possibly be managed by traditional (industrially designed, limited paper media driven) editorial systems. Machines can try to self organize the data they present, and they are getting better and better at it, but crowd sourcing offers a way to keep a human touch in information flow. It lacks the clarity of purpose of professional editorial work, but given enough time it often produces surprisingly similar results. In fact, it often bypasses the political spin and self interest that traditional hierarchies have always put on the limited industrially defined information they claimed ownership over. Democratization of information means it becomes free from manipulation by the former gatekeepers of it.

If you’re making content in this brave new world, don’t expect to own or even direct it, once it’s out, it may end up in unexpected places. If you’re not making content, don’t worry, everyone one around you is, and it will end up where you don’t want it as well. How do companies and individuals survive in this madness? No one is really sure (I have a guess), but one thing is sure, it won’t be boring.

FOLLOW UP:
I was listening to CBC’s The Current today as they had Jared Cohen, the head of Google Ideas on talking about what is about to happen to the world. Two billion people are online, another five billion are about to join them. We’ve already seen the internet bypass governments and ferment revolution in the Middle East, and we’ve seen Western governments struggling with trying to keep control of information with wikileaks and other hactivism. If you have a few minutes, listen to Cohen on The Current. His ideas about where the world is going are radically transformative. The only part I’d question is his assertion that Google is a force of nature in this process, rather than just the most successful parasite.

Corporate Shills

This is one hot potato on a Sunday morning. #ontsm trended nationally yesterday and attracted a lot of attention, which I suspect was the point. The fact that the attention has a life of its own is probably a concern to people who are used to controlling the message. Ironically, it’s trending again today, driven in large part by people who objected to it for various reasons.

I heard the term shill a couple of times this weekend. It’s not a commonly used piece of language. My favorite moment was when another one of the attendees (and one of the smartest guys I know) said, “yeah Tim, you gotta be careful we don’t turn into corporate shills.” He said it with a glint in his eye, knowing that we were all at a paid for event the week after I’d been criticizing another corporate event; nothing like some tasty irony.

If you want an idea of the conversation around what some are calling a controversy, me writing at you won’t present it well. Go over to the twitter feed and enjoy the diversity of opinion. Some are worried that this is dividing the PLN. The PLN isn’t a single group with a single approach. What you’ll see on the twitter feed (and in other blog posts) are what complex discussion and disagreement could look like online. It doesn’t have to be modeled on a fifteen year old’s idea of flaming. I’ve disagreed with a number of colleagues on there, and that is fine. I still respect them as professionals, and even if we end up agreeing to disagree, I’m still OK with that. Online communication can be deep, nuanced and even contrary without becoming personally inflammatory It’s all good, and I’d much rather the disagreements get aired in public than kept in, or hidden.

This will be resolved, as it was started, transparently and publicly online; the best kind of modelling for a new communication medium I can think of.

Gitchigoomie Go-Around

another tour, this one a bit more plausible…

Circumnavigating Lake Superior (and Huron)

Google Map

Stage 1: Southern Ontario to Michigan: 135 Miles / 217kms

Stage 2: Southern Michigan: 288 Miles / 463 kms

Stage 3: Northern Michigan: 603 Miles / 907 kms

Stage 4: Ontario North: 502 Miles / 808 kms

Stage 5: Bruce Peninsula: 140 Miles / 225 kms

———————————————————————————–
Total Mileage: 1668 Miles / 2685 kms

At 400 kms/day, about a week (just under 7 days) of riding. If we pushed one day, we could have a light day the next. The green pins indicate population areas at around 400 kilometre intervals where a stop would be possible.

Ideal travel time would be late summer, as the nights are getting cooler and the bugs are dying down. One of the last two weeks of August would be good. September would be spectacular, though cooler, especially if the colours were starting to turn.

Superior Foliage Report

Lake Superior Motorbike Touring

Ride Lake Superior

Is The Digital World A Branded World?

Who Is Paying For This?

I’m at the Google Apps for Educators Summit in Kitchener on a Saturday morning. I’m a Google fan. I Android, I use UGcloud for school work, I use Google+. I’m aware that all of these services require a means of income or they’ll evaporate, hence the Google ads I see on them; I’m OK with that. In a field that can get grabby and greedy, I think Google is more balanced in how it performs its business than most.

As a teacher I’m a bit more cautious about how online tools are framed in terms of learning. This morning’s keynote with Jim Sill asked what kind of world do we live in. I suspect the desired answer is a giddy, Silicon Valley logo filled blurt: I live in an Instagram world! I live in a Google world! I live in a Facebook world! When the question turned to how you access this magical world, it revolved around brand names for apps. Tying brands to information offers you a unique way to infect unrelated material (and learning itself) with your logo and corporate image. Google has done this perhaps better than anyone (though Facebook takes a pretty good run at owning friendship).

Hactivism

Is the 21st Century really an information revolution, or a branding revolution? I watched We Are Legion: The Story of Hactivists last night and I’m feeling the dissonance this morning at a conference that is all about companies branding information and funneling it to eager teachers who want to be relevant to their students. I’m not saying yea or nay to this kind of business, I’m just wrestling with the chaotic freedom the information revolution inspired in hactivists last night and the business of information this morning.

If the information revolution really is about a radical change in how information moves (and I think it is), then talking about apps and brands is akin to focusing on the make of hammer you purchased when you’re learning carpentry. It would seem strange if, in learning carpentry, the master carpenter went on and on about the brand of hammer they are using. They might mention why they like it briefly, but they wouldn’t start calling carpentry “Mastercraft hammer”, that would be odd.

Google: a great tool, but be careful not to brand
learning and information with it

People identify with brands, it gives them a sense of belonging, it offers them a ready-made identity in a field where they might not know much else. Excessive brand loyalty is usually the result of ignorance. I’m less interested in the kind of hammer you’re selling and more focused on how the wood is being fitted together. I happen to enjoy using my Google hammer when online, I just don’t know that I identify an important revolution in human development with their peppy logo, and I’d hope they’d be OK with that.

That Guy…

I’m that guy! I always wanted to be that guy!

It’s been spring-ish in Ontario for the past couple of days (after the ice storm). I’ve had the bike out a few times. I still get a charge out of waving to another rider.

Yesterday I went out for almost an hour. The front end felt a bit soft, but now the bike feels balanced on a knife’s edge with the right pressure in the tyres (the front was at 20psi after a winter in storage). That was the first fifteen minutes of the ride, trying to find a gas station with a working air pump and then paying a buck… for air. Once that was sorted I was south on the small highway out of town. I’d never gotten the bike properly warmed up before, it’s an eager, responsive creature, even at low RPMs, but it seems happiest between 3500 and 4500 rpm for cruising.. I’d also never gotten it up to highway speed before, wind noise is surprising, though it shouldn’t be; a 100km/hr wind wouldn’t be quiet, would it?

I’m getting better at remembering the indicators. The stuff drilled into me on the course has stayed. I’m always in neutral and on the clutch when I start it, and I don’t get on until I’m completely suited up; good habits to have. Had the bikes we practiced on had indicators, I would have probably internalized those too. I don’t want to look like a (dangerous) n00b riding down the street with a forgotten signal flashing.

I took a left turn off the highway onto a back road and made one of my few control errors. I thought I was in 3rd, but I was in 1st. I dropped the clutch too hard and was thrown forward. As I reacted I accidently pulled on the throttle… my first wheelie! On Highway 6! Fortunately I was sitting close (as an instructor had told me during the course). I let go of the throttle, and with my weight forward got back on 2 wheels. As I rounded the corner the kid sitting at the stop sign was all worked up by my wheelie, so he smoked the tires on his Cavalier. Had he known how freaked out I was, he wouldn`t have been so excited by the whole display.

You get cold on a bike, even in good gear when it`s cool out. I got home with cold hands and a big smile on my face. I got to know my Ninja a bit better, and have an appreciation of just how athletic she actually is.

Do As I Say

Reading Shopclass as Soulcraft a second time has me thinking about the similarities between Crawford’s and my work histories. I walked out of high school before I finished. I wasn’t failing anything, I was just sick of the officious and arbitrary nature of the place. I wanted to learn how to do *things*, but I was being taught how to sit in rows and do what I was told. I’m not very good at that.

“Teaching takes a back seat to the more socially salient task of sorting, and grading becomes more important for its social consequences than for its pedagogical uses.” p 146 Shopclass as Soulcraft

From there I bounced around your typical low income jobs (night time security, Canadian Tire) before finding myself an apprenticeship. This I did for a couple of years before finishing up high school and going to university. It only took me until second year to get into trouble at university, brashly questioning the veracity of my professors. The younger profs tended to want to change your life. I have a great deal of trouble buying in to systems, especially when the people advocating them put themselves in the centre of this marvelous new way of thinking. I’ve always felt that these Rasputiny types aren’t in it for mastery, they are in it to be masters. My skepticism in this has been born out in politics as well.

“The master has no need for the psychology of persuasion that will make the apprentice compliant to whatever purposes the master might dream up; those purposes are given and determinate. He does the same work as the apprentice, only better… for the apprentice there is a progressive revelation of the reasonableness of the master’s actions.” p. 159

When I worked as a Millwright, I had a number of senior mechanics who taught me the ropes. They taught me by doing the job, showing me the job, letting me do the job while they berated me for doing it badly, letting me do it on my own and if it worked, it worked. It was messy, but at no point did any of the senior guys have to tell me they were the experts and I should do what they say, they let the work demonstrate their expertise. I seldom saw that kind of do as I do, not as I say demonstration of expertise in formal education.

Students are always looking for credible teachers.

Many teachers I know don’t practice what they teach. Many business teachers teach business, they’ve never run one. Many art teachers teach art, but don’t make any themselves. Many English teachers teach writing, but don’t write themselves. You might make the argument that they teach, and that is what they are good at. I’d argue that this is an abstraction of an abstraction, and whatever it is they are teaching, credibility is in question; student engagement necessarily follows (they subconsciously pick up on a teacher’s own doubts). If you’ve ever shown students your own work, they look like meerkats; they long for credible learning, and showing mastery does that.

Last summer I took my additional qualification for computer studies. I worked in I.T. after university, mainly because objective skill sets pay a lot better than abstract ones. Ask anyone with a Masters Degree in the arts or humanities how the job search is going for proof of that. While in university I worked as an auto mechanic because it paid way better than the knowledge economy job my arts degree was preparing me for. I’ve always migrated back to those objective skill sets because it feels like credible work. You don’t have arbitrary managers downsizing you based on abstraction, personal dynamics or their own towering sense of self importance.

I love seeing those MBA types on the side of the road, their BMW SUV’s tire flat, waiting for someone who can *do* something to come and move them back into the clouds they live in.

Crawford makes a compelling argument for respecting those skills that we tend to diminish. Objective, experientially gained mastery is often looked down upon by the academic class which itself rules education with a university-clad fist. Objective mastery isn’t up for debate, or the charismatic manipulation of office politics by experts in “human management”. If you know what you’re doing, reality responds, and no amount of talking is going to change that. I miss that kind of traction in education.

Objective Learning, Humility and Real Achievement

I’m re-reading Shopclass as Soulcraft, which begins with Matt Crawford asking what value hands-on work offers. He questions the abstractions in which we all traffic (consumerism, academics, politics) in the information age.

There is value in learning about something external from ourselves, something with absolute requirements unlike the everyone’s a genius in their own way/student success means everyone passes/let students direct their own learning so they aren’t bored mantras you see whirling around edu-speak these days. Crawford is focusing on trade skills in the book, but he’s arguing for any skill that has needs beyond whatever criteria we choose to apply to it. This would apply to languages (you either understand and can communicate in it or not), technical skill (you can rebuild that carburetor so that it works, or not), or even sports (you can ski down the hill, or you can’t). These kinds of skills get short shrift in schools these days because we can’t bend the requirements sufficiently to pass everyone and claim success.

Conestoga’s Motorcycle Training

This past weekend I took a motorbike training course. It was exhausting, and very rewarding, and it had a six and a half percent failure rate. Those people paid four hundred and fifty dollars and were unable to complete the requirements of the course in a road test. They left frustrated, and in some cases angry, but in a very real way they demonstrated that they could not control and place the bike. The instructors were transparent and explained the failed components in detail, but people still left early with high emotions. It’s hard for people who are used to paying and passing to suddenly find themselves having paid and failed. Doesn’t payment equal success? Doesn’t consumerism replace competence? It does in many situations, and increasingly in education. Students become clients (especially in post secondary where they are paying directly for it), but even in k-12 tax payers are the clients and success for all is what they are paying for.

It’s fair to say the test asked us to demonstrate about 60% of what we’d been asked to do that weekend – it wasn’t brutal by any means, but controlling a motorcycle is a tricky business, and some people found the learning curve too steep. Whether it was full body coordination or keeping what you’re doing organized in your head, there was a lot to manage in doing this test. The criteria were clearly explained and had been practiced relentlessly for two full days, there were no surprises yet some people were unable to *do* what was required. Alternatives weren’t offered, differentiation was self directed – by you – while you were learning on the bike, the instructors offered advice and it was up to you to take it or not. Those that failed generally didn’t take it. Riding a bike isn’t like driving a car. You’re alone on it, you don’t have a voice in your ear making suggestions or stepping in with alternate controls, it’s all up to you.

The curriculum was demanding and had specific requirements that couldn’t be ignored. It was physically exhausting and required twenty four hours of your time over a single weekend, early wakeups and hours outside in very changeable April weather. When someone showed up late on Sunday they were dropped out of the course (and seemed utterly flabbergasted at the situation); 100% attendance was required, and in order to see success you had to be there mentally, physically and emotionally. There was a high correlation between failures and people who were always the last to show up. As Crawford mentions in his book, learning an objective skill requires a degree of submission and humility to the task at hand – something that we ironically iron out of schools in order to demonstrate success.

For the rest of us, marks were given and certificates (which include a big drop in insurance costs as well as a direct pass to the next level of licensing) were given out in a ceremony. People who got perfect scores were mentioned, and applauded. Everyone still in that room realized how much work they’d put into their success that weekend. But they’d put in more than effort, they’d also been willing to be taught, to check their pride at the door and learn something challenging and new from the ground up.

There is an important difference between submission and humility. One can be humble and it enhances self worth, and allows learning in the oldest educational context we possess. Submission is about the power of the strongest, humility is about an honest awareness of one’s circumstance. A master at a skill is honoured when their apprentice is humble before the task because they are receptive and teachable, and they are also respecting the skill that the master possesses. That humility allows you develop perhaps the most powerful learning tool available to us, self-discipline, which in turn grants the serious student the ability to master skills that would otherwise defeat a dilettante. You assume the mantle of a serious, even professional student when you are able to apply self-discipline gained through the humble acquisition of meaningful skill. In school we constantly seek ways to amateurize learning in order to satisfy a Taylorist economic logic. We try to streamline and ease student passage, forgiving absence and inattention in a misguided effort to generate successful data. Any statistic you’ve ever seen about education has nothing to do with learning.

This sounds like throw back language, especially in light of the MBA edu-babble popular today. Students teaching themselves in order to stay engaged? Best not done around a band-saw, as Crawford suggests. Students able to ‘pass’ with a 50% average? Or with weeks of absenteeism? They’ve hardly mastered anything. Students given multiple avenues to success with targets that get closer the more they miss? This learning is empty and pedantic, and students recognize that. Reward comes with real effort, and real failure. Guaranteeing success for all? The surest way to a systemic failure of learning.

I hurt all over from this past weekend, but it was profoundly satisfying. I worked hard, didn’t treat it like a joke, gave it my full attention and realized early on that the people instructing know so much more than I do that it would behoove me to be humble before their skill and experience. I think that humility is what led to my success. That success may very well save my life one day. Engagement was never an issue.

I won’t see much of that humility and openness to learning in the diploma factory I’m returning to today, though I’ll try and try to put reality’s demands in front of my students and let them be frustrated by it. It’s real success when you overcome an obstacle and figure something out, especially if you experienced failure in the process. Not so much when people systemically remove obstacles to keep nearly inert objects in motion. As self discipline erodes and humility dries up, the process of learning itself begins to break down.

Are you teaching curriculum today? Or are you teaching how students should passively pass through the Kafkaesque education factory in which they find themselves?

Being taught how to actually do something with objective demands has made me proud, humble and grateful for the skillset I have as a learner. When I see opportunities to approach learning with humility and develop self-discipline missing from so much of what we do in school, it makes it seem an empty, even dangerous place.

n00b at 43

Tim’s Motorcycle Diaries

I’ve always wanted a motorcycle. The simplicity and immediacy of the relationship between rider and bike has always appealed. Finally, at the age of 43, I’m becoming a rider. A couple of weeks ago I sat in an MTO drivetest centre and wrote my M1, so I’m now licensed in the most rudimentary way. Next weekend I’m taking my training course at Conestoga College in Kitchener. Following that I hope to be on the road.

This blog will trace the process and development of my riding. I’ve dug up a couple of entries from another blog that show why I’ve gotten into riding now. They should provide some background for what is about to happen next.

A Nice, Canadian Magazine to get you into the hobby…

In the meantime, I’ve been looking through motorcycling magazines trying to find one that fits. I’m not a Canadian publications at all costs kind of guy, but Cycle Canada offers smart writing on a wide range of subjects related to the sport (hobby?). Being a rider in Canada is sort of like being a surfer in Greenland, you can do it, but you’ve really got to want to. The place itself isn’t really conducive to the activity. I feel like Cycle Canada approaches this with honesty, humour and wit, while peeling off many of the preconceptions around biking. Before I began reading it I thought most people think Harleys are the be all and end all of motorbiking. I was glad to learn that they aren’t. I like ’em so much, I just subscribed.

Getting Your Bike License in Ontario

Getting the M1 was easy enough. Ontario has a graduated licensing system for becoming a motorcycle rider now. The M1 is a sit down, multiple choice test on the basics of motorcycle operation (which you pick up from a Motorcycle Handbook you can get for about $17 from any MTO licensing office). There are also multiple choice tests on road signs and basic driving situations. There are 20 questions in each set and you can get up to four wrong and still pass (so you need an 80% on each piece). I’ve had my G class (regular car) license for 26 years, I didn’t study for either of the general quizzes and got only 2 wrong. If you pay attention to your driving, I’d suggest focusing on the motorcycling handbook. If you have no idea what is happening around you or what signs mean, it might be time to review the general stuff.

I should add, the general driving portion was very wordy. Remember those long math word problems you used to get in school? Like that. It was almost like it was designed to test your ability to parse complicated text more than it was about rules of the road. Be ready for that and take your time with it.

You have to go to a drivetest centre to write the M1. There are many scattered around Ontario but only a few open on weekends. It took me a couple of hours to get to the counter, write the test and then get the results. They tell me it isn’t always that busy. The old guy who blocked the only open gate for an hour arguing about his license didn’t help. The M1 costs you about $17 to write.

After the M1 written piece, the idea is to go out and get experience. You have 60-90 days with your M1 before you have to move on to M2. M2 you can have for up to 5 years, but if you let it lapse after that you’ve got to start over again. After your M2 road test you become an M licensed driver with full privileges. Conestoga College offers a driver training course for beginners that moves you from M1 to M2. I’m signed up to go next week. It costs about $400 and I’m told you’re at the bikes they provide a lot over the one night and two day long course; it’s very hands on. At the end of that course I’ll have done what is needed to pass the M1 driving test to move on to M2. M1 means no driving at night, or carrying passengers, or 400 series highways, and no alcohol in your system at all. M2 is still no alcohol, but you can do the other things. You usually have to wait 60 days to get your M2, but if you take the course they shrink that time. I should be able to push up to an M2 in mid-May after taking the course in early April. I plan on riding at the M2 level for at least a year or two before getting the full M license.

Insurance

I called the company that I’ve been with since I was a teen (who has made a small fortune off me) and asked for a quote on motocycles. They told me to come back in two years. They then said I should call Riders Plus. They were very helpful. Talking to a friend afterward, he’s been riding for thirteen years and has been with Rider’s Plus the whole time. He’s paying about $600 a year for a 2000 500cc Ninja. I’ll be paying about $1300 a year for a 2007 650 Ninja, to give you an idea of what the insurance looks like.

I’ll throw on a couple of older posts showing what I’ve been reading and why I’m going through this now. Over the next few days it looks like I’ll become the proud new owner of a 2007 650r Ninja that has been painted an unfortunate flat black by an adolescent male of questionable taste.. With the bike in the garage and the course next weekend, I should be insured, plated and on the road by mid-April.

More to come as it happens.

Ghostly Distractions & Digital Doppelgängers

Cyborgs are all around us now, and they have trouble finishing a thought

If you popped into a current classroom from any time before the last five years you’d think your students had gone mad, or were in need of an exorcist. Being unfamiliar with the rapid miniaturization and personalization of electronics, you’d be left wondering what it is they are fiddling with on their navels, why they seem to be constantly thinking about something else, and why when you walk into your next class the students there already know what happened to pretty much everyone else in the school (and the ones who skipped) last period.

I was talking to a colleague the other night about this sense of personal dislocation in students, though digital vertigo isn’t a student only issue. The teacher in question won’t even make a Facebook account because he believes (perhaps rightly) that it means the internets will know where he is all the time. He was telling me about a difficult student who was giving him a hard time in class. This teacher has a great rapport with students so many other students leapt in and argued his point for him. Afterwards the difficult student in question seemed overly despondent and would not re-engage in discussion. I suggested that the disagreement in class may not have ended in the classroom but had become virtualized. The idea that invisible forces were emanating from and reflecting back into the classroom was quite upsetting to this teacher.

The fluidity with which teens pass back and forth between physical and virtual space make them very hard to read, at many moments in their day they are literally in two places at once. That uncommunicative student may still be getting hammered on Facebook long after the physical confrontation is over; digital echoes of a verbal disagreement. The moods so common in teens anyway are amplified by these invisible, always on, invasive connections; their volatile minds are wired to always-on drama.

There was a time when you could read a class by the students you had in it. Relationships were obvious and management challenging but straightforward. If you had the nitro and the glycerin in the room you could separate them, you can’t do that any more. You can’t do that if you move them to a different class… or a different school. I’ve had students who moved up to our small town to get out of the GTA and away from a bad influence only to be intimately connected with them on Facebook the moment anyone’s back is turned. Always on, always connected, always being emotionally amplified – that is the modern, connected high school student.

This creates some interesting new psychology in the classroom. That student who used to feel isolated for their poor behavior in class might be experiencing any number of unseen influences. Instead of being able to modify poor behavior by moving a student, or placing them in classes where their bad influences are not, they are always connected. Many of those connections may very well be morally supporting or even inciting them; they never feel isolated in their bad attitude and are always supported in their beliefs, even if it is hurting them. In that sense you might argue for a lack of emotional growth because you never have a chance to get free of a clique or bad influence. In the other direction you’ve got the example above where a group of students may easily create an ad hoc digital mob and go after someone. This can happen so quickly and quietly that it’s almost impossible to consider let alone manage.

Working with the emotionality of high school students is challenging at the best of times, but with the drama-net of Facebook fully embedded in every student’s mind, administration struggles with the more obvious cyber-bullying while the subtle ghostly influences go unnoticed, thought every teacher faces them daily.

As students migrate to Twitter without realizing the very public nature of it (many think it similar to texting), coercive social media becomes even more widely broadcast than just between Facebook friends. Suddenly we have social media as means of large scale slander, creating influence well beyond the intent of the ignorant person thinking their tweets are private.

This is a new social situation that affects early adopters while others remain entirely ignorant. Many teachers don’t consider it at all because they have no experience with social media yet it increasingly influences the students in their classrooms. Kids whose minds are in many places at once, constantly being emotionally tweaked and influenced by social media inputs, not knowing how to manage this pervasive influence in an effective way.

Digital literacy considers media fluency, collaboration and critical thinking, but the extent to which digital media is influencing the minds of our students isn’t really on the table. Their inability to manage their own access (watch a student, they are Pavlovian in their use of social media, they can’t self manage) is only one part of the problem. In the emotionally charged world of high school, social media pours gasoline on that fire, making teaching a challenge in ways that it never was before.

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had to add a wee update. It’s Monday morning and the internet meme from the weekend that all the grade 10s are talking about is of a girl and her feminine hygiene product on youtube. It sets new (low) standards on what teens are willing to do to get seen online.

This race to the bottom in terms what teens are able to subject themselves to is radically changing how they approach both sexuality and social norms in general. Teens nowadays have seen things that would have been virtually impossible for them to see even a decade ago, and this is entirely a digitized influence.

You really don’t want even think about what teens do for truth or dare nowadays, they’ve seen things that will make you ill, they dare each other to. The entire nasty world is available to them and influencing them moment to moment. Yet another way that online influence creates a classroom unlike any before.