Category: Mechanical Sympathy

Originally published April, 2012 on Dusty World (and the precursor to many more Skills Ontario posts)…

Friday I chaired the video creation Skills Canada regional competition in Guelph.  Ours was a competitive division with five teams who had to film, edit and post-produce a pre-planned thirty second ad in four hours.  Only three teams could place and only the top team could move on to the provincial competition.

Some observations stood out:

• The hard deadlines came as a shock to many of the students, who aren’t used to them any more (we don’t really require hard deadlines in class any more)
• The competitive nature of the competition concerned a number of the teams, who couldn’t comprehend being allowed to lose in school (we don’t really integrate competitive winning and losing in class any more)
• The sense of satisfaction that resulted from getting a quality piece of work done in the time given surprised many of the students (we don’t really allow students to develop a sense of satisfaction from completing work on time – on the contrary, a number of students recently told me at parent teacher interviews that they are sick and tired of knocking themselves out to complete work by deadlines only to see slack and idle students hand in the same thing whenever they get around to it).
• At the rewards ceremony many of the students were at a loss as to how to act when they’d won (stony faced and blankly indifferent were the norm, broken up by the odd grin).  They were also unable to recognize what losing gracefully looked like.
• In the automotive technology section the announcer said, “congratulations gentlemen” only to realize that one of the gold medallist was female (from our school!) and back pedal.   If we’re going to break the gender assumptions around skilled trades, it starts here (and is).
• Skills Canada has reinforced for me (yet again) that media arts isn’t an arts course so much as it’s a technical skills course that includes artistic input (like carpentry).  We just got rather brutally cut for new students while being administered by the fine arts department, I think in great part because what we’re teaching is being administered by a department that doesn’t know how to present us or what to do with us.

I just read @banana29‘s “Emergence of Web3.0” blog on the immediate future of the web.  Web3.0, if Alanna is on her game (and I know she is), looks like the next step in managing our data meltdown.

Last year ended with me in a dark and questioning place about the effects of digital media on how people think.  I’ve done my due diligence, and read The Shallows by Nick Carr.   Carr puts forward a compelling, well researched and accurate account of just what the internet is doing to people in the early 21st Century.  I see it in school every day with the digital zombies.  What is to become of the poor human too stupid to pass the are-you-human capcha?  The Shallows points us to our failure to manage the digital revolution we’ve begun.

I’ve decided to start off the new year by going to the opposite side of the digital Armageddon/digital paradise debate; I’ve just started Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near on the advice of a Quora member who describes The Singularity as the opposite of The Shallows.  Kurzweil begins the book with some math and an explanation of how exponential growth works.  In the process he suggests a different growth pattern than the one most people would intuitively follow.

If Kurzweil is right, and I suspect he is closer than many futurist speculators, then we are about to hit a period of accelerated growth similar to that of the industrial revolution.  Our floundering in data is much the same as the mid-nineteenth century’s floundering in early industrialization.  Like Dickins, Carr points to the perils of new technology and how it’s making us worse, and there is no doubt that, for the vast majority, it is making them worse at this early stage digitization.

Just as children were pressed into dangerous factory work and pollution killed millions in early industrialization, so our first steps into digitization have zombified much of the populace, making them less than what they were before.  Our heavy-handed, pre-digital habits have been hugely amplified by networked efficiencies and have hurt many digital natives in the process.  What used to be slow moving, linear marketing in the pre-digital age has become an unending avalanche of brain numbing, tedious attention grabbing on the nascent world wide web.

Sharing music on a mixed tape used to be a benign bit of theft between friends, of no real damage.  Take that idea of sharing music and digitize it, and suddenly you’ve crippled a major industry that only existed in the first place because live music was industrialized into sell-able media.  Digitization creates efficiencies that would seem completely foreign and unbelievable in previous contexts.

Having friends over to watch a movie, or going out to a movie together that happened before home video, suddenly turns into video sharing online, and stuns another media empire.  They struggled against VCRs, then got knocked flat by torrents, but at no point did they think it wasn’t OK to charge me $6 to see Star Wars in the theatre each of nine times, then $40 for the VHS, then another $40 for the DVD, then another $40 for the bluray (it’s not done yet, they’re going to resell it to me in 3D next).

Suddenly police states (like Egypt, Libya or San Francisco) can’t create silence and obedience out of fear, and dictators around the world are faced with a slippery new medium for communication that is not centrally administrated and controlled.  Dictators around the world (from media companies to Gaddafi) fear their loss of control over the signal.

We’ve always shared media, we’re a social species and love to share art that represents our stories and culture.  Digitization brought that back after a century of industrialized, centralization of culture that trivialized and often eradicated memes that weren’t attractive to enough people.  This subtle and persistent destruction of variation culturally bankrupted us by the end of the 20th Century.  To many, watching that monster die doesn’t bring on any waves of despair, and will usher in a renaissance of creativity.

Web2.0 pushed social media, allowing common interests and individual ideas to flourish regardless of geography.  No matter how trivial or insignificant your interest, you are always able to find a critical mass of people online who you can share your fascination with.  This has corrosively weakened the century of industrialized, forced shared interests we’ve all been required to live with.

Digitization is re-animating the idea of a more unique sense of the self.  You no longer have to be a brand name junkie based on massive, global industrial interests telling you what you should like.  Advertising is agonizing over this now, as are those massive, global interests.

Into this maelstrom of early digitization comes Carr, accurately describing how the early internet is a new medium, infected by the old industrial interests whose heavy handed marketing has created whole generations of attention deficit zombies.  When you combine the heavy handed tactics of pre-digital business with the near frictionless and always on nature of digital media, you get a recipe for Ritalin.

Like the soot covered, pollution infected children of the industrial revolution, the screen caged digital child is being treated roughly, but to expect that the early days of a revolution will be like the later days is not historically reasonable; though that shouldn’t stop us from fighting against the dehumanization of children caused by our current mistakes.

Those soot covered child-laborers prompted society to develop public education systems that eventually produced stunning break-throughs in all eras of human endeavor.  In fact, that initial failure of industrialization eventually produced a more educated and capable population thanks to the public education it caused.  We won’t see soot covered digital children forever.

The digital world we will eventually develop will have as much in common with 2012, as 1970 did with 1870.  And if you believe Kurzweil, the exponential growth curve will develop information technology and artificial intelligence so advanced that it begins self-recursion, drastically increasing capabilities.  No longer limited to biological evolution, Kurzweil forsees a  rate of growth that makes the industrial revolution look positively anemic.  It won’t take one hundred years for us to see as much change as industrialization did in a century.

This will happen less soon but more quickly than people suspect, such is the nature of exponential growth.  In the process we will  be abused by old habits on new technology less and less as more of us become more  capable.  Web2.0 and social media are a huge step in this direction.  We’ll beat back the manipulators and make the technology serve us rather than having economic interests overpowering us with their own heavy handedness.

If this seems like a lost cause, it isn’t; you can’t let something like The Shallows scare you off inevitable change.  You’re living in a transformative time, and these are the moments when the people who can see the truth of things to come become architects of the future.

What is Learning?

Thrown out casually during a teacher conference and then immediately forgotten, but it lingered with me.

I heard the initial “transmission of information” definitions around me and shook my head. Saying that learning is simply information transmission is like saying killing is a physical effort that ends a life; a very simplistic definition designed to make a complex idea manageable.

I caught a National Geographic special a few years ago in which a team studying the differences between great apes and humans made the sweeping statement that teaching and learning are the key difference between humans and apes. There is little else to distinguish us from our close cousins.

If it is so pivotal to the definition of our species, it deserves a better definition than “the transmission of knowledge.”

Learning (def’n): the enrichment of our mental facilities that ultimately gives us power over the physical world. We are able to know truth in a broader and deeper way because we can experience the world indirectly and abstract the world in order to understand it beyond our own senses. Learning allows us to preserve and enhance this discipline independent of our individual existences. We are the only species that does not have to relearn how to master our physical environment in every generation; more than that, we are able to amplify previous learning and build on it at an astonishingly proliferate rate. We are dangerous animals indeed.

This definition has a couple of challenges:

Firstly, the idea that knowledge and learning it is very powerful makes people uncomfortable. If you’re teaching and you just want to transmit information, you can simplify your practice to that simple goal. Accepting that learning and knowledge are powerful and potentially dangerous (giving the learner power over the physical world), a teacher would have to also accept some moral responsibility for imparting information, and many teachers don’t want to take that on.

Secondly, since our brains (hardware) became sophisticated enough to develop this viral learning (software), we have developed well beyond the constraints of our immediate physical environment. We have mostly deferred the costs of overcoming our immediate physical space to a macro/planetary level that we haven’t had to deal with directly yet. When I look at all the teachers who drive into my school alone in large SUVs in the morning, I get the sense that most teachers aren’t any more aware of these challenges than the general public; they are either unwilling or unable to consider a larger picture. The viral nature of our learning means the people teaching and the people learning are not learning hard truths with any real discipline. Learning how to overcome nature taught the first learners some hard truths, truths we forget when we are the billionth person to learn a hard won truth as a fact in a text book.

Calling learning the dissemination of information is a very dangerous thing indeed. This is the viral core of learning; when learning becomes knowledge transmission with no real context. The dangers appear thick and fast. Teaching becomes indoctrination and learning devolves into belief generation rather than a coherent, candid body of knowledge. Standardized learning does this in spades. Standardized tests force it, curriculum defines it, cutting knowledge into independent disciplines clouds it and grading validates it. Instead of developing a student’s body of knowledge in a coherent, interconnected, meaningful manner, the industrialized education system creates information overloaded human beings with limited (or no) understanding of what their knowledge is capable of.

This is disastrous for us as a society and a species, especially if you want human beings to live in democratic circumstances with relative economic and civic freedom. The fact that we don’t want to appreciate complexity will result in simple solutions, like simplified education, dictatorial government and poor economic choices. In those circumstances the urge to control the herds of the ignorant would become overwhelming for those in power.

Making learning easy is a disaster, it should be challenging, not pointlessly so, but contextually it has to be, ignorance is preferable to a passing on knowledge that empowers a human being beyond the confines of their natural world.

If learning devolves into knowledge transmission, we populate the world with dangerous fools.

How do you think a student would reply to these?

You are legally required to stay in school until you’re 18 (this is law in Ontario). At the age of 18 you can choose any number of work or learning opportunities and self-direct your education/life. Prior to that, you MUST be in this building at set times following a schedule that rings bells at you. Think that age limit is a coincidence?

You are held in large groups, in passive environments where you are expected to cooperate at all times. You are identified by numbers and held in rooms that are arranged so that you must all sit facing your immediate supervisor (a franchised citizen). If you attempt to electronically communicate out of this room you are summarily punished.

At the age of 18 you are legally able to vote and become a franchised citizen, and you aren’t required to attend this state run at the lowest possible cost facility any more.

Still think there is no connection between being able to vote and being legally required to stay in school?

Think there is no connection between the class sizes and accessibility to technology because the people being served have no say in their government?

As disenfranchised people, you have no say over a system that mandates your daily activities closely. Are you citizens of a democracy, or are you underpaid, disenfranchised workers, held under tight limitations until you’re arbitrarily given the right to vote at eighteen?

If they changed the voting age to 16, or to any age where you could demonstrate a basic understanding of the voting process and basic public affairs (something many adult voters fail to do), what do you think would happen to schools?

It’s a pejorative question designed to raise some difficult questions. But ask yourself, how would education be different if the students in it were voting citizens? Having come back from the post secondary wonderland recently, I was prompted to ask myself this very question after seeing their fantastic student-teacher ratios and access to technology.

It’s been one heck of a year. Personal tragedies aside (and they were quite epic in scale), my year in teaching has been difficult to say the least.

My second EdCamp in the past six months, I guess I’m hooked.  EdCamp Waterloo Region was, like EdCamp Toronto, a chance to break the mold on how PD is done to us.

I volunteered before hand to do a first round session mainly because, after seeing the nerves and reticence at EdCampTO, I thought I could bring some experience to it and help it start a bit smoother.  I started off with an excerpt from a TEDtalk looking at how future technology could become more interactive and intuitive in the class room, and how we could access and present data more seamlessly while teaching.  Everyone seemed content enough to be lectured at, so I made it difficult for them.

Being an edcamper means being a good listener too, something else we’ve learned not to do in PD.  I made a point of listening closely to comments from the audience, and tried to reply with a question that refocused the discussion on them rather than trying to get them back to what I want them to know (standard PD protocol).  It took about 20 minutes, but they started to realize that EdCamp was all about the US, not the ‘expert’.  A few of the bolder people spoke up, but by the end I think everyone in the room had said something at some point, and we went 15 minutes over.  That doesn’t happen too often in PD, but then PD doesn’t happen on Saturday mornings too often either (unless you’ve got a PLN).

About half an hour in I said, “there are no rules in EdCamp, but I’m going to make one anyway, no more hands.”  It became a running joke, but the conversation began to flow after we got that nineteenth century convention of teacher control put behind us.

***

As a survival mechanism, many of us have developed the habit of, at best, being passive in PD in order to make it end sooner, or worse, have found ways to wander off in our minds while it’s happening so the condescension, repetitiveness and/or latest poorly performing American EduFad which we have no interest in, doesn’t make us angry.

Edcamp throws all that on its ear.  It’s all about you being there.  It assumes your experiences in your profession, which are current and unique, are as valuable as an entrepreneurial guest speaker’s (who hasn’t been in a classroom in decades and when they were tried to get out of it as soon as they could to become a paid speaker and sell their latest book on a fad they’ve invented).  It assumes that teachers talking to teachers and valuing each others experiences are what professionalism and developing it are all about.

***

For me this EdCamp started with teachers showing and telling what they are doing to make the future in technology available to their students.  I then wandered into a group talk on the nature of professional development that evolved into a deeply nuanced philosophical discussion about the subtle, individually powered profession of teaching.  After lunch I watched a bit on Edmodo then finished listening to a talk on technology use across k-12 curriculum.  The last one was on how to continue EdCamp ideas beyond EdCamp.  By that point I was intellectually fried; something that doesn’t happen too often in PD.  I found the focus on how to cater to the disinterested tedious, but if you don’t get where it’s going, you can leave!

EdCamp is, by its nature, an experimental process.  After doing a couple, I still wonder at the blocking of time, like classes.  Some of the discussions still had a lot of steam, others were ready to end (or should have earlier).  A more flexible schedule might be interesting to try.  Perhaps having spill-off areas where groups that want to finish a discussion can go would offer an out there, or having enough rooms that they aren’t booked one after the other might work; built in extra time if you need it.

The other trick is to ensure that it’s easy for people to slip in and out of classes.  Regular classrooms are designed around the opposite idea (keep them contained and accountable).  There were a couple of times where rooms were full enough that getting out would have been overly disruptive.  The classroom seating arrangements of rows facing a central board also cater to the sage on the stage, something EdCamps ideals don’t seem thrilled with.

If you’ve never done an EdCamp, I highly recommend the experience.  You’ll find it personal, meaningful, intense and empowering.  You’ll have to break through many of those learned PD habits, but it’ll be nice to let your chained inner-professional out to see the sun for the first time in years.

The only PD experience I’ve ever had that came close was (is) ECOO conference, which is very teacher driven as well, and Barrie Bennett’s Beyond Monet workshop, which was career changing.  The vast majority of the rest feel like an infomercial admin demands that you sit through.

The next time I’m grinding my teeth as another professional presenter with a new book to hawk is telling me how I have to revolutionize my practice by doing exactly what they suggest (and nothing else, until the next book comes out), and who has been flown up to us (business class), and paid thousands of dollars that could have gone into classrooms instead, I’ll think back on EdCamp and wonder why administration is so afraid to trust us with our own PD.

EdCamp Waterloo Region Twitter Doc

The Toyota Prius hybrid car is a series of expensive compromises.  Born at a time when we are transitioning from fossil fuels to electrical power, the Prius is a car that combines gas tanks, gas powered drive trains and engines with batteries, and electrical motors that do the same jobs more efficiently.  The result is a poor performing car that weights a thousand pounds more than the equivalent gas powered vehicle because it’s trying to live in two worlds at once.  If you’ve ever driven one, you’ve got to know that the future is grim indeed.  Fortunately, hybrid cars are a momentary blip on the automotive evolutionary scale.  As the transition from gasoline to electrical vehicles happens, and electrical infrastructure and technologies improve, the compromise of a hybrid along with all the pointless redundancy will no longer be necessary.

Our education system is in a similar situation, and it’s an expensive moment to have to live through.  The future consists of paperless, friction-less information.  The past consisted of papered, controlled, expensive, limited access to information.  In 2012 education is straddling that paper/digital divide, trying to answer to centuries of paper based tradition while also struggling to remain relevant in a rapidly digitizing world.  It’s an expensive gap to cross, and one that is full of incongruities and compromises – ask Toyota engineers, it’s an impossible position to create anything elegant in.

We struggle to produce students relevant to the increasingly digital world they are graduating into while experiencing more paper-based drag than just about any other industry.  Whereas business and research have leapt into digitization, driven by the need to find efficiencies in order to be competitive, education struggles to understand and embrace the inherent advantages of digitization.  The only urge to do so is in trying to remain relevant to our students – perhaps the least politically powerful (yet most important) members of the educational community.

I see teachers spending thousands of dollars a year on photocopying handouts (of information easily findable online which then get left behind), and no one bats an eyelash.  Thousands more are spent on text books that are already out of date when they are published, also often showing information that can as easily be found online.  At the same time we struggle to find funds to get the basic equipment needed to embrace digital advantages; the between directions is apparent.

The good news is that this is a temporary shortcoming – we won’t be building Priuses or trying to fund two parallel (analogue & digital) education systems for long.  Once the tipping point is reached and migration happens, the inherent efficiencies of digital information will transform education.  In 20 years will look back on this time of factory schools like we look back on the age of one room school houses.  In the meantime, the strain of trying to please the past and the future at the same time is causing confusion and misdirection.

We ignore what is happening digitally in society in general and risk becoming increasingly irrelevant as an education system.  We also risk producing students who are increasingly unable to perform (aren’t taught how to manage the digital)  in a world very different from the one they were presented in school.  In the meantime we’re trying to satisfy traditional academic habits in order to appear proper and correct (books on shelves, teacher at the front, tests on readily available information, streamed classes that feed the right students to the right post secondary institutions using the same old established marking paradigms).

Once again, the ECOO Conference, its feet firmly planted in the future, looked forward while getting slew footed by traditional interests.  Perhaps the best we can hope for is compromised hybridization.  Oddly, those traditional interests often include the people who run IT in education who seem more interested in ease of management than they are in our primary purpose (learning… right?).

The term guerilla-teacher came up again and again; a teacher who goes off into the digital wilderness alone in order to try and teach their students some sense of the digital world they will graduate into.  The last presentation I saw by Lisa Neale and Jared Bennett made a compelling argument for bringing the rogue digital teacher in from the cold, but as a digital commando I am reluctant to trust a system that still places perilously little importance on my hard earned digital skills.

Very little of my practice now occurs in traditional teaching paradigms.  My classes are all blended (online and live), virtually all of my students’ work happens online in a collaborative, fluid, digital medium.  I don’t spend a lot of time in board online environments.  It’s as much about my own discovery as it is my students.  Traditional teaching situations seem more about centralization, standardization, itemization and control.

If we move past a hybridized analogue/digital divide in education and digitized learning becomes standardized and systematized, I may very well lose interest.  There’s something to be said about being a cyber settler, alone on the digital frontier.  Perhaps I should be pushing the hybridized divide – it keeps this hacker/teacher beyond the reach of standardization.

Email intercept: @tk1ng to school admin, 12/9/11