Category: Mechanical Sympathy

I’ve had an opportunity to use a Motorola Xoom tablet this week and respond to my board about how it might be used in class rooms. I’ve been crushing on the idea of getting a tablet for a while now. After using netbooks in class last semester, I love the idea of a rotatable screen that lets you read without over-scrolling, the super battery life, instant on functionality and the super small form factor.

This is another go at the Tyranny of Paper, with a sprinkling of teacher psychology…

Ecology

Trying to balance photocopy budgets.

I recently got my photocopying costs for the computer department for the first half of the spring semester.  Every class we teach in computers has a 1:1 student:computer ratio.  You’d think there wouldn’t be any photocopying costs.

The one teacher we have teaching computers full time did $273 in photocopying from February to April this semester.  I happen to be teaching an English so I get to see their copying costs too.  The most expansive copier in English where they have to kill to get computer access and have to actually teach letters on paper?  $217.  Most of the others were less than  half that.

This made me angry.  If you have computers in front of every student, why in heaven’s name wouldn’t you use them to communicate with your students?  How would teaching computer programming be easier on paper?  With a limited budget that requires very specific (and expensive) hardware and software, why would I want to spend 1/5 of my budget so a single teacher can produce thousands of sheets of paper?

A recent analysis of photocopying costs (one of the single largest costs in our school and I imagine most others), was that a typical student collects an entire tree worth of handouts in their k-12 career…
each…
student…

The ecological costs are staggering.  Billions a year and entire forests are consumed so students around the world can get handouts.  I’m not convinced the return on investment balances the educational advantages with the ecological costs, but education is a conservative beast, and getting it to change industrial era habits isn’t easy.

Psychology

Teacher preparing for class

The ecological disaster aside, I’ve always been curious about this photocopying habit in teachers.  In teacher’s college I asked myself why I was lining up for photocopiers all the time.  When you’re new, you are terrified that what you’re doing will not take the whole period, so you structure it on a photocopy to slow students from tearing through the work.  It also takes the attention off you and puts it on the desk, so you don’t feel like you’re madly tap dancing for the whole lesson.  It also means you’ve done much of the organization for students who seem increasingly incapable of organizing themselves.  Lastly, it allows you face the students while giving them information, something a new teacher is conscious of every time they turn their back to write on the board.

After using the photocopier crutch for the first couple of years I put an end to it.  I use the board if I need to display visually or help students organize information.  I trust in my ears and the relationship I’ve developed with my class (which can often involve a Snape like, direct approach to inappropriate action early in the semester) when it comes to helping them learn with my back turned.  Watching some of our senior teachers, I get the sense that they never put the photocopying crutch away, in fact, they’ve developed their entire career around it.

I also had the benefit of not being particularly beholden to 20th Century habits around institutional teaching, and leapt at the opportunity to get into elearning and digitally based education early on, further removing me from the pulp and paper teachers.  One of the big cultural divides in our school is between the paper teacher and the digital teacher.

Media Arts Course webpage (NING)

I still occasionally have to make copies, typically for tests and such, but I try and minimize that too.  When compared to department averages, I typically produce about 1/10th the copies.  When I’m given a computer lab, I typically produce no copies at all.  Course webpages, wikis and shared documents are the means of information transmission.  In media arts I’ve had students submitting shared docs (google or skydrive) and prezis when they need to show a presentation.  The entire course takes place on a private social network (Ning).

The past couple of months we’ve had a Canadian copyright foundation watchdog asking people to write down what they’re copying to ensure fair distribution of copyright funds.  How very 20th Century of them, but I guess a modern high school is just the place to monitor people still doing what they were doing twenty years ago.

The digital house of mirrors we all live in.

It’s early days, ECOO isn’t until next October, and I’m reticent to say what I’m going to present on months ahead of time.  The digital learning landscape can change quite significantly in eight months.

My previous ECOO presentations have followed an interesting arc, from philosophy to specific action.  My first go with Dancing in the Datasphere talked about fundamental changes happening to us as we transition to a data driven world.  The mini-lab followed a year later, the idea there being that we diversify technology in order to develop true digital fluency in students.  Last year the final step was to work toward a digital skills continuum.  Only by integrating a developing skill set into curriculum will we begin producing students who have the technical skills necessary to survive and thrive in the digital age.

That trajectory, no doubt pushed by my transition to computer studies from English, had me looking at developing greater student familiarity with computing tools because I see a great deal of ignorance in the ‘digital natives‘ I’m teaching every day, but that focus was technically biased.

For those of us who have lived as adults through the last twenty years of technological revolution, we sometimes forget where we’ve come from because we’re so engrossed with where we are.  For ECOO this time round I’m thinking about what technology is demanding of us as people. Our selves are being stretched and amplified in ways they never have before.  Nick Carr’s The Shallows puts us on a pretty stark trajectory towards idiocy with what is happening to us.  The digitization of the self stretches us flat, making continuity of thought impossible and turning us all into distracted, simplistic cogs in a consumerist machine designed to turn us all into the lowest common denominator; none of us any smarter than our smartphones.

With the advent of social media we suddenly find ourselves existing in multiple places at once.  Our self is no longer geographically focused.  Our influence spreads across the internet. We are able to affect change in people and places formerly unconnected to us.  The people we communicate with (albeit in a minimalist way) are far flung and many.  The people we spend deep, attentive time with are fewer and diminished.  

Our digital selves are perceived in many different ways.  The aforementioned digital native tends to not differentiate between online and real world action.  They often consider social media as just another conversation they are having, and are then shocked when something said publicly is responded to by the public.  The generation of kids (our students) growing up in this ongoing social experiment never look at privacy settings, have little idea of the differences between social networks and tend to broadcast online what is on their minds in much the same way they would while hanging out with friends.  The veil between the physical and the digital, between public and private is all but non existent to them.  

Digital Footprints & Always On Teacher Faces

A more professional approach to managing the online self is to adopt marketing theory and develop your online brand.  Companies and celebrities approach social media in this manner, often using marketing firms to manage and run their social media presence.  I can’t help but think that this lack of genuine presence games the system and ultimately fails.  It’s exhausting to maintain if  you can’t hire marketing monkeys to run it for you, and ultimately, it’s fake.  I’d much rather read my favourite author’s tweets from his own fingers than follow what someone trying to sell me something thinks I should be seeing.  Many teachers fall into this trap when tentatively stepping into online presences.  Spending your weeknights and weekends being mister or missus Teacher is nothing more than working all the time, forever.

The Cult of Done

If there is a positive future to a digitally enhanced self I’d hope it is through a genuine sense of self expression.  We should be aware of what the tools are and how they work, and then we should use them to empower our access to information, our ability to mine deeply into details, to collaborate and develop community, to share our own creativity, interests and sense of discovery.  The technology should not only allow us to do these things, it should be pushing us to maximize our effectiveness as thinkers and doers.  Any technology that produces distracted idiots will doom the people using it.  Evolution should still be eliminating the irrelevant, even in the digital realm.

It’s early days in this sea change of how we deal with a digitally enhanced self.  In the future the hybrid intelligence of a digitized human will evolve toward a higher order of effectiveness.  Those made useless by digital tools will, much like those weakened by an inability to read, become marginalized.  Those able to harness information literacy will enjoy those advantages.  Those who ignore it will find themselves increasingly unable to compete.

What that effective digital self looks like in students, in teachers, in people in general is where I’m currently thinking about pushing my research this year. How we adapt to these changes now will establish effective habits as the technology rapidly spins out of its infancy and into maturity.  There is no better time to consider what a digitally enhanced human being should look like than now, when we’re in the process of inventing the very idea.

The idea of Web3.0, or intelligent/self organizing information suggests that the future of digitized humanity will inherently push toward greater effectiveness.  The opportunity to be passive or stupid in a digital context will actually work against what the data wants to do for you; you’ll learn in spite of yourself, you’ll know what you need to know when you need to know it – the data itself will ensure this.  It would be interesting to show the evolution of digital humanity over the past three decades, and where it might be going in the next twenty years.

The era of stupid/passive information is ending. The people that it has created will have to adapt to technology that demands more of them, or risk being made irrelevant by it.

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

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

We are trapped by our preconceptions…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I somehow managed to fanangle my way into an Edtech symposium this week on the sustainable development of digital technology in education. Amidst former deputy ministers of education, board CIOs and other provincial education types I got to see the other side of the equation.