Category: Mechanical Sympathy

The other night Alanna noted that I seem much more intent on presenting my best work during my computer engineering qualification than I have in others.  This stirred up a whole pile of history for me.

I completed my honours BA in English and philosophy from the University of Guelph in 1995.  I staggered out of my four year program elated, dissolussioned and fairly determined not to wade back into academics again.  I found a subset of professors (the young up and coming type usually) close minded, aggressive and cliquey.  Many of the post grads I met were intellectually cannibalistic, competitive and cruel.  That feeling kept me away from Teacher’s College for many years, and still has me firmly refusing to consider a Master’s program.  The arbitrary, cliquey nature of academics was alienating.

In university I approached liberal arts liberally, trying one of each subject area in my first year.  One of the reasons I cottoned on to English was that I was good at it.  Being drilled in reading and writing let me resolve a skill; I improved in noticeable ways.  My profs were hard but the skills continuum was pretty clear.

Where I got into muddy water was in philosophy.  The vast majority of my profs were older and tended to approach it in a friendly hands-off manner; I remember those profs fondly.  The younger ones, as mentioned above, seemed intent on discouraging interrogative learning and appeared constantly in a state of dismissive negativity, unless undergrads were fawning idiots.   Philosophy seemed to be about collecting disciples rather than understanding some of the greatest thinking in history.  Being an older student, I tended to be of an age with many of these life long academics, though having come from a school of sweaty warehouses and machine shops.

Ironically, many of the best teachers I had growing up weren’t teachers at all, but rather senior mechanics who were willing to take time to help along a young apprentice.  It was a learn fast or get caught on fire kind of environment, but learn I did, and the power structure was never arbitrary.  You either knew what you were doing, or your work spoke for you.  It was never a matter of how much money my parents had spent on tuition or what your academic pedigree was that dictated relationships.

Taking my first tech-qualification this year as a teacher feels like coming home.  I’m going to miss teaching English, but I’m not going to miss the sweatshop approach to English and literacy in high school where every class is at cap and the rooms are filled with students being forced into a mandatory subject.  I love English.  The reading, the writing, Shakespeare…  Watching how it’s made into work, overfilled and underfunded is depressing, I won’t miss that.

So here I go into the tech classroom where I think I’m going to channel my apprenticeship experiences over my academic experiences.  What we’re learning isn’t easily politicized, or easily based on classism or culty academia.  Teaching tech includes an element of objective quality, it works or it doesn’t, you know how to do it or you don’t.  I’m looking forward to that solid ground.

I just finished reading Matthew Crawford’s “Shop Class for Soulcraft”, a philosophical look at the value of skilled, physical labour.  Having come from a mechanical background into an academic one, a philosopher-mechanic’s critical examination of the ‘creative economy’ we’re all dying to jump into was refreshing.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12108000

I’ve often missed the clarity and satisfaction I found in repairing machines, and now I have a philosophical explanation of that sense of loss.  Crawford delineates meaningful work in terms of objective standards, a sense of community and individual agency.  He then goes on to disembowel the MBA speak found in the otherworldly knowledge economy that can only exist in an entirely abstract sense of work, one I fear that has been applied to the skilled trade of teaching courtesy of lawyers and politicians.

It’s been a few weeks now since I finished the book.  I’m finding that the lasting impression is one of embracing my smart hands again.  The idea that mind work is somehow superior to hand work is nonsense, though our school is streamed according to that logic (academic/applied, university/college).  The argument that we discover the truest aspect of human intelligence when we work our minds through our hands continues to ring true for me.

The other, unintentional side effect has been a re-awakening of my love of motorcycles.  I’d originally gone after one when I was 16, but my parents offered to up what I’d saved to get me into a car.  It’s probably one of the reasons I’m here today, it was a smart move.  At 43 I’m not interested in wrapping myself around a pole.  Riding is a way to be alone with your thoughts, no obtrusive media, and the development of a constant awareness; you can’t let your mind wander on a bike, they are ruthlessly observant of incompetence. Riding also offers an intimate familiarity with a machine in a very minimalist way that is appealing.

I come by my urges honestly.  Here is a picture of my Grand-dad Bill in the late nineteen forties… I need to get myself some white riding shoes!

I hope to be licensed and riding in the spring.

I’m trying out some introductory ideas for computer studies in the Fall…

Your tech cloud is the digital equivalent of ‘who are you wearing?’ on the red carpet at the Oscars, except for geeks.  And like high fashion, we fetishize the the personal electronics we surround ourselves with, identify with them, identify ourselves through them.  Your digital persona is an increasingly important means of self expression.  The tools you use to create your digital self have a lot to do with how you present yourself.

From a meta-cognitive point of view, this might be a handy way to start a discussion, do a tech-introduction and get to know my classes of computer-interested students.  Having said that, it would work in any class where you’re considering media or technology and how we use it to express ourselves.

HERE is my tech cloud:

The (4yr) old laptop, the Rogers trapped smartphone situation, the even older (5 yrs old) desktop.  I’ve got kit, but it isn’t what I wish I had.  About the only things I’d keep are my awesome new Olympus EPL-3 (though I desperately need to lens up), and the brilliant HAF case (which I’d gut and put a new i7 system in).  I’m hooked on Androids though, and after trying ipads and Android tablets, I think I’d just give the whole tablet thing a pass and get a phablet.  A phone/tablet combo is as far as I’m willing to go with tablets.

If I had the means, I’d get the ultrabook I think is so pretty it works in a high fashion shoot (and has a battery that lasts me all day at a conference), lens up the Olympus, and drop the tablets and the string of broken Rogers Sony phones, and the lousy service.  I’d then phablet up with the Samsung Galaxy Note with Telus.  The desktop would get a much needed upgrade from the old AMD to an i7 Intel system with a spanking new video card and SSD.  The whole thing would be a quad-booting monster, getting me into Win7, Win8 beta, Linux and OSx all on the same machine.  I’d want my tech cloud to demonstrate my Jedi tech skills!

Feel free to grab the blank tech cloud prezi and make a copy.  Show what you’ve got and what you wish you had!

http://prezi.com/rvbysmjms-qb/your-tech-cloud/

Share away!

One of those fun things about Twitter is that you can end up communicating with unexpected people.  The other day I got a response from the Press Secretary for the Ontario Liberal party.

We’re in a bit of a mess in Ontario.  Economically we’re on the wrong end of history.  Once Canada’s manufacturing heartland, now that North Americans don’t make anything and just wait for shipping containers to arrive, Ontario has fallen on rough times.

To resolve these economic issues, and perhaps to catch some soft righties in the next election, our liberal minority government has decided that they don’t have to negotiate contracts, can mandate teachers, doctors, firemen and other unions back to work, and will drastically scale back our agreements to balance a budget that got blown to pieces by a financial crisis the public sector had absolutely nothing to do with (bankers aren’t being looked at to chip in on the deficit).

From the twitter feed:

Personalizing of technology will one day reach education (hope, hope)

I went to my principal last year and suggested we try the mini-lab idea, wherein a technology curious/experienced teacher collects a class set of digital tools around themselves in order to develop some digitized pedagogy.  Alas, we couldn’t go all in.  The idea of a teacher directly selecting diverse technology and then going off the school/board controlled and organized IT system was more than even our forward thinking principal could take.

The end result was a laptop cart of netbooks, one for each of our three floors.  The idea of the mini-lab is a constellation of differentiated technology orbiting a specific teacher. The variation in technology encourages wider digital fluency, and the single teacher focus produces a strong sense of ownership that helps reduce neglect and misuse.

Acer Netbook  http://www.acer.ca/ac/en/CA/content/model/LU.SGA0D.064   :

It was great to get these machines unhobbled by board IT.  The last time the board issued a cart of netbooks, they’d erased the manufacturer’s fresh Windows 7 and installed the board’s ten year old Windows XP package complete with numerous driver problems (companies don’t make a new laptop then spend a lot of time building drivers for an operating system no one has used in three years).  The results were disastrous.  These new netbooks are no slouches (dual processor, decent memory, the latest software), they worked right out of the box, but they didn’t have anything to do with the antiquated board network.

I had real trepidation about how to administer these carts.  The massive job of unpacking and setting up 70 odd netbooks seemed overwhelming, but a couple of pizzas and some helping hands later it got done over lunches; then came the putting them into operation part.

At the staff meeting I showed everyone the cart and explained that these are not board issued laptops.  This involved answering a number of questions around what that means.  No, the school server with it’s piddling 10 megs of memory per student isn’t available, but Googledocs is with 8 gigs, or Microsoft’s Skydrive is waiting for you to use for free with 25 gigs.  No, you can’t print to school printers, they’re all on a closed network, but if you had to print, you could always have students email you work, or, you know, don’t print it and just look at it on the screen.

I also stressed that these are our computer carts.  The board isn’t going to maintain them, so benign neglect isn’t an option.  If you’re booking a lab so you can ignore your students for the period while you mark, these are a poor choice.  Tech-keen teachers on each floor were given the happy job of looking after the carts.  In many cases this allowed them to make use of the carts, which they have done eagerly.  Adoption by other teachers has been slow, but it has steadily improved, which worries me.

The first problem resolved around poor student privacy habits.  When a class ends the vast majority of students simply shut the lid and walk away, leaving themselves logged into Facebook (which they are inevitably running in the background), and saving whatever they are working on to the desktop.  Soon Macbeth papers, history essays, moderns translations and other digital flotsam, all named document1, document2, etc, bloomed on the desktops.  The inevitable Facebook spamming ensued, which greatly upset the students too lazy or clueless (or both) to bother logging off before putting the machines away.

Concern has arisen around plagiarism (taking essays found on a laptop and handing them in because an essay left by someone on a desktop called document3 HAS to be worth copying), and the opportunity for digital bullying with the not logging off the social network they’re not supposed to be on anyway.

Today I got my first broken hardware issue.  Apparently a key ‘popped off’ the keyboard.  Those things are like popcorn, sometimes they just come flying off by themselves.

We’re getting out of the initial roll-out phase of the off board IT netbook experiment.  The novelty is wearing off and teachers who wouldn’t otherwise use them are starting to book them for periods they aren’t actually in the school so the kids can play online (yes, we made a rule about that, but some teachers can be remarkably lackadaisical about rules when it means they have to be there to enforce them).

The digital coaches I’d envisioned in the mini-lab are still competently using the carts regularly, but as the carts find their way into the hinterlands of our school, teachers who don’t understand (or care to understand) how to use digital devices in class to actually, you know, teach, will book out the carts and return them in a steadily deteriorating state.

We’ve done well with the initial portion of the roll out, putting the laptops together and having digital coach types making good use of them early, now comes the mediocrity.  One of the things we strive for is equal access to technology in education.  Unfortunately, we don’t encourage development of digital competency in teachers and the end result is a lot of extra work for the few educators who are interested in making education meaningful and relevant to a new, digital millennium.

I’ve been a RPG (role playing game) player since I wandered into the original Dungeons & Dragons at eleven years old.  My adolescence revolved around marathon games when I wasn’t working.  My first non-family road trip was a drive from Toronto to Milwaukee in 1988 for GENCON, the original D&D and RPG convention.  For the next four years that trip became a staple of our August holiday, though the first time in a barely functioning Chevy Chevette stuffed with four of us was by far the most epic (and least likely to succeed).

I quickly found myself in the Dungeon Master’s chair when playing.  I had a talent for creating consistent, exciting worlds that balanced on a knife edge, often determined by the roll of a dice.  I was a  natural at paracosmic world building without realizing it.  When others took the chair they tried to force the story back on to their planned narrative if the dice didn’t cooperate, which made the entire experience fall apart.  Random influences were vital for the game to become alive, a bad DM would break the forth wall when they tried to force the story back onto a planned track.

I recall one game where I’d planned out the evening in more detail than normal.  The beginning of the game was supposed to start with the players mocking Death (as in the grim reaper), and getting killed as a result.  The story would then continue in the after life.  But telling players they are just dead goes against everything the game is about, the dice have to decide, so I gave the last standing player a 1 in 20 chance of successfully assassinating death, assuming it would never happen, but it did.  I had to change direction and start laying track down in front of them in a new an unexpected direction.  I’ve seen a lot of classroom teachers stubbornly try to force a class not in the right mental space in the same fashion.

Those DMing experiences greatly influence how I teach in the classroom.  I keep the big ideas in mind, but try and lay down track in which ever direction students in the class seem intent on going.  One of the ways to feel like I’m not standing there with no pants on is to put them in a transparent simulation.

Simulation is an edu-speak friendly word for what many of these students spend vast amounts of their free time doing.  World of Warcraft?  A massively-multi-player simulation (it often feels like a D&D table with a hundred people sitting at it).  Even online shooters reach into the RPG bag of tricks to introduce team based game play in a consistent simulation  that people find very engaging.

A simulation in class can often work to the big ideas you’re going after, while giving students the power to get there themselves.  As I often say in class, “I could show you how to do it, but then you’d know how to ask me how to do it.  If you figure it out for yourself, you’re much less likely to forget it.”  The sim lets students know the goal (so it’s very backward planning friendly), but doesn’t goose-step them through a process to get there.  By the time you’re doing a summative, you need them to find their own way through a forest they are now familiar with.

If learning is about developing a new way of getting something done, then simulation is the ideal last step in summative assessment.  Before a sim you’d do the basics around concepts, language, skills development and make sure all students are in the ZPD.  Once the foundation is laid, it’s time for them to show what they can do, it’s time for a simulation.

Sources for this year’s ECOO:
The mini-lab: mobilizing and differentiating the school computer lab
Dreaming of a new media lab: differentiating technology to prevent passive media consumption


I just threw my hat into the ring for ECOO12 proposals.  Last year I did a philosophical look at what the digital future holds with Dancing in the Datasphere.  There was a small but interested group who were honestly curious (and more than a little worried) about where digitized humanity is going.  I enjoyed the talk and got a lot out of it.  


Having become the Computer/IT head at my school this year, I’m constantly bombarded by how inadequate the typical school model is around information technology.  While businesses have mobilized and personalized digital access, education still clings to 20th Century ideas around centralized control.  I think I’ve found my focus for this year’s ECOO: educators reclaiming educational computing for learning.

One problem with this is that many of the digital immigrants at ECOO tend to be platform dependent – they know how to do specific things on specific devices.  This is a great first step, and certainly puts them ahead of anti-tech Luddites or digital natives who barely understand what they are doing, but it shouldn’t be the end of their journey.  There are many tools, both software and hardware, that can lead you to a  technologically fluid, collaborative learning place.  Making students access digital learning through limited hardware and software is ultimately self serving to the teacher and damaging to the technical literacy of the student.


My vision for effective computer implementation in education depends on a platform agnostic approach, preferably with a strong open source component.  Information longs to be free, and it won’t be as long as you believe a single means of delivery or a single app is the only viable solution.


I write this on a Win7 laptop (that dual boots into Ubuntu too), use an Android phone and have an ipad.  At home I use a Win7/Win8/Linux multiboot PC and an imac, I’m not picky and just enjoy good design, whether it’s from Cupertino or Taiwan.  The large, full spectrum display on the Mac makes working on photos a beautiful (and colour accurate) experience.  When I’m doing heavy processor work like video editing I go to the PC with a pile of cores and twelve gigs of memory.  Using the best tool for the task at hand only makes sense.


In the past year I’ve overseen installs on a class set of Kindles, a DD class set of ipads and 3 carts of Windows 7 notebooks, I’ve also beaten up several old laptops and installed Linux on them, giving them another year or two of usefulness.  The days of static, centrally controlled, singly formatted computers in shared labs are soon to be over.  Instead of the bureaucratic organization of information technology into a department of non-teacher IT experts, education will finally gain control of its own information technology.  Pedagogy, rather than convenience, will become the focus of that new paradigm.


My goal at ECOO?  To point the way towards a freer educational computing paradigm where students and teachers are free to experiment and try a variety of technology in order to  get the tightest fit with their needs and proclivities; a truly technologically differentiated pedagogy.

Words to teach by.

Originally published on Dusty World:  Sunday, 6 May 2012

The latest round of bankruptcy lawyers (the same ones who work with our bailed out banks) have shut down collective bargaining again in Ontario.  It looks like impending labour distress for any public service workers in Ontario because Dalton’s Liberal government, that came to power with public employee support in the last election, has decided to go after populist, right wing, inaccurate US policy around public services.  Though the private sector caused a financial crisis, it appears that nurses, doctors, teachers, and emergency service workers will be paying for it.

Being a teacher, I’m most interested in how we’re wasting money in education.  Fortunately, the UN offers all sorts of information on how Canada (led by Ontario – we have the largest population in the country) is performing world wide.

We are mid-pack on what we spend on education, but the results are world class.  We are outperforming everyone but Korea, Finland and China, and do it for less than Hong Kong, about what Finland pays and more than Korea pays.  Any country of similar background (Commonwealth, western democracy) offers an inferior, and often more expensive educational system.

The US, who Dalton seems determined to follow on educational ‘reform’, spends more and does less:

“The strongest performers among high-income countries and economies tend to invest more in teachers. For example, lower secondary teachers in Korea and the partner economy Hong Kong-china, two high-performing systems in the PisA reading tests, earn more than twice the per capita GDP in their respective countries. in general, the countries that perform well in PisA attract the best students into the teaching profession by offering them higher salaries and greater professional status.”   http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/50/9/49685503.pdf

With our government intent on gutting teacher’s contracts and diminishing both what they earn along with their status as valued members of society (those public employees are just leeches, they don’t provide value to the economy like ‘real’ jobs in the private sector do), we seem destined to lose our place as a finalist in world education rankings.

It appears that in Dalton’s Ontario, when you do your job exceptionally well for a reasonable cost, you’re a failure.  Perhaps we should have pushed the teacher pension into funding sub-prime mortgages.  When that happens federal and provincial goverments leap to the aid of the poor, ailing, private corporations that need their help.

Only when the injury is self inflicted does the government consider supporting it.  If you spend your days teaching children, saving lives or protecting society from itself, you’ve obviously been wasting everyone’s time and money, no matter how well you’ve been doing it.

Head over to OBAMA POSTER MAKER to have some fun…

Originally published: Sunday, 6 May 2012 on Dusty World

I’ve recently cut most of the ‘educational consultants’ from my twitter feed.  I found the tweets, blogs and emails I was getting from them had a funny, self interested smell.  If I have to pay for entry into their private realm of secret ideas about how to become a super teacher, then what am I really paying for?  It reminds me of other groups that want to get me on a pyramid and get themselves another believer (with cash).

Can I not do this with any PLN?  Ask a colleague, it’s cheaper, and more honest

I realize that Educational Consultants have to make a living, but the constant up-sell I’ve been getting on work email, and the secretive approach to building closed groups who will ‘show you the way’ that can only be entered through joining the club to learn insider information gives me the willies.

I don’t even feel comfortable when public educational computing leans heavily on private companies to run their computers.  Our own board has a strange affiliation with MDG, Microsoft and Wordperfect that defies logical description (as well as expensive, foreign, consultant/keynotes when we have locally relevant talent available).  When open source, free, democratically (and transparently) developed not-for-profit operating systems and software are available for educational use, why would we be in tightly worded, long term contracts with for profit companies like these?  There might be a situation where a private option is the only one, but it appears to operate the other way around; the private option is the only option.  Ed-consultants seem to work under the same logic.

Given a choice, I think I like my professional development on an open source model; freely shared with people who, you know, actually teach, instead of just talking about it (from a country that has gutted its own public education system).  I know it’s exciting to get some big money, charismatic cult-sultant up from the States (because evidently they like to export their poorly performing educational system world wide), and many senior educational administrators feel that this is real value, but after tasting the freedom of unconferences, ed-camps and keynotes from professors who are working to understand the complexities of change in 21st Century education, I’m wondering why we keep going back to the (expensive) snake oil.

It worries me to think that even educators would rather be told what to think than try and work it out for themselves.  It doesn’t bode well for a 21st Century classroom when we ourselves aren’t willing to be the experimental, freely collaborative learners we expect our students to be.