Little Cyber Skills Bonfires Across Canada

 It’s been one of those months when possibilities for the future keep going in and out of focus. My secondment ends in August. There might be a possibility of an extension, but there are questions around whether or not I’m allowed to do it contractually. There are also questions around whether or not I want to go back into the classroom at all. Here are some of the things that have happened in the past few weeks that have me up at 5am after a14+ hour work day that should have knocked me out for a full night of sleep…

I did a ten day run across the Maritimes a couple of weeks ago. This involved a teacher PD day in Nova Scotia on a Saturday and then in class enhanced technology training days in schools across New Brunswick which mainly focused on trying to leverage the national CyberTitan cyber range competition images from previous years with students with varying backgrounds in cybersecurity. This isn’t edtech as you know it, it’s leading edge technology being leveraged to teach complex, interdisciplinary ideas that we can’t usually get anywhere near in the classroom.

The first day in Fredericton was frustrating due to technical difficulties and pedagogical challenges. Using state of the art cloud based cyber range simulations is always going to be a stretch in classrooms. Doing it on the IT infrastructure in schools is like trying to drive a Formula One car on a dirt road. The range of student skill made it impossible to sufficiently differentiate in order to land everyone in Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development and technical issues only complicated matters further. I finished the day exhausted and frustrated.

Day two completely restored my faith in this experiment. Oromocto High School has a brilliant computer technology instructor who has built a strong community of CyberTitans and the computer lab we were in was fit for purpose. We had a great day on the range where I got to see students grasp concepts that even CyberPatriot can’t address due to it’s old-school desktop virtual machine approach. On top of that I learned I am not alone! Blair, who runs the program at OHS is also Cyber Operations qualified, making us the only two I know of in Canada. Teachers like to invent their own certifications (and degrees) for education technology rather than explore relevance with what everyone else is doing, so it was nice to meet another willing to take on the challenge of a globally recognized industry cert.

Over the week I got to iterate with schools with little to no CyberTitan experience and even a middle school. There are edge cases around exceptional teachers where this kind of enhanced learning is not only possible but essential if we’re to develop students capable of surviving the very technologically disruptive future we all face. One of my key takeaways in that week was to emphasize the importance of tending to these unicorns, they are few and far between.

I wrapped up the trip in Charlottetown where our local partner and I had a great chat with CBC radio about how to build genuine cyber-fluency. This is like starting a fire with wet wood. It takes skill, determination and collaboration to make it work, and none of these things are easily found in Canadian education. Having now taught in classrooms from BC to Newfoundland, I’ve been fortunate enough to experience the wildly inconsistent landscape of Canadian education (there is no such thing, we are the only developed country in the world without a national educaiton strategy), but there are commonalities, like the staggering lack of digital skills we graduate students with. Nurturing local expertise is a way to scale this up. I hope administrators from coast to coast recognize and focus on that.

I finally cracked the TV egg and found myself on CBC Compass. The final question there was a big one, but I stand by my answer: we need to be teaching meaningful digital literacy so that our students can operate safely and effectively in an increasingly technology dependant world. We indeed face global challenges that threaten our future. If we don’t start learning the tools at our disposal effectively, we’re not going to solve them.

The frozen sea on an empty PEI shore…

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International Cyber Cooperation: Reflections on the GFCE & GC3B

I first experienced the frustration inherent in Canada’s approach to cybersecurity education last year at the University of Waterloo’s CPI conference. There Charles Finlay from the CyberCatalyst talked about how other smaller countries focus on a collaborative approach to cybersecurity that creates a coherent ecosystem of partners who support rather than compete against each other. In the asymmetrical world of cybersecurity where attackers have every advantage in terms of anonymity, it isn’t just criminal organizations working the dark end of the internet in 2023, it’s authoritarian nation states with fully developed offensive cyber operations. Without collaboration, democracies will dissolve in the chaos of our networked world.


We have the resources,
cooperation is what’s missing.

In the year since I’ve been working to establish connections between the many entities in Canada’s cybersecurity industry intent on education and career pathways illumination, but what I’ve found are siloed organizations (private, public and NFP) fixated on IP and market share whose idea of collaboration is creating partnerships to defeat what they perceive as competition. This isn’t collaboration so much as it’s about combining resources to compete more effectively.


This monopolistic approach is partly the result of how Canada funds cyber-education and industry awareness. By creating competition for funding, potential collaborators are turned into competitors and the possibility of mutual support becomes impossible. A great example are all the competing networks, alliancesconsortiums, catalysts and councils – all of whom claim to be creating a collaborative ecosystem under their leadership. Finding funding and piling onto this chaos seems to be the way in Canada. This has been a great frustration and a repeating theme on Dusty World over the past year:

Creating A Canadian Cybersecurity Ecosystem (Oct ’22)

How Cybersecurity Might Become More Diverse, Equitable and Inclusive (Dec ’22)

You Want to Teach WHAT?!? Reconfiguring Technology in Schools to Empower Pedagogy (Oct ’23)

Cyber Education in Canada is Broken, Here’s How to Fix It (Nov ’23)


***


The majority of attacks are US focused, but if
you consider Canada has 1/10th the people, we
actually face similar numbers of attacks per capita.

One of the ways I’ve escaped Canada’s siloed approach to, well, pretty much everything, is to look internationally for organizations interested in working collaboratively on the cyber-problem. That would be the one where we put all our critical infrastructure onto a global network that was never designed to be secure and then struggle with wave after wave of increasingly automated cyber-attacks in an environment where the attack surface has become impossibly complicated post COVID.

I started by looking at the World Economic Forum’s review of the new US Cyber-Strategy, which is focusing on protecting critical infrastructure and improving collaboration both domestically and internationally to create more effective cyber-defences. Canada’s strategy is designed to encourage competition rather than collaboration and has resulted in our being one of the most targeted countries globally

The US strategy seems to be aware of this North American predilection for relentless market dominance fixated competition and is attempting to put resources into a collaborative mindset. That approach became apparent to me when I attended the Global Conference on Cyber Capacity Building this fall.


***


Through looking into WEF and the UN I came across the Global Forum for Cybersecurity Excellence (GFCE). In June I pitched this proposal on helping cybersecurity practitioners become aware of the coming threats to encryption that quantum computing brings: GFCE Proposal – Cybersecurity in the Age of Quantum Advantage.docx. The elevator pitch is: quantum computing will break most of the encryption standards we depend on for everything from our online financial systems to military communications in the next decade, and likely much sooner.

The GFCE got back to me and said they felt that quantum awareness was an important piece of the puzzle and a good fit with their Global Conference on Cyber Capacity Building (GC3B) happening in Accra, Ghana at the end of November. They invited me to develop the research and present it at the event.. I’m currently seconded with both ICTC working on cyber-education outreach and the Quantum Algorithms Institute developing education for quantum readiness. QAI supported this research and I got in touch with Louise Turner, a former student now in the inaugural cohort of cybersecurity at Queens University, and she and I put the paper together.




While doing two jobs I beavered away on the paper in the background and Louise (who was juggling her third year course load) and I managed to get the paper in on time. While all that was going on we were both jumping through the hoops in terms of visas and medical requirements to take what would be both of our first trips to Africa.


It all came together at the end of November and we found ourselves at Pearson Airport in Toronto getting on a plane to Washington and then across the Atlantic to Accra. The entire process felt insurmountable, but I’ve found that if you chip away at seemingly monumental projects like this you get the pieces in place – just don’t expect it to happen all at once and pace yourself.

A particular frustration was all the dead ends I chased in terms of finding support for both the research and going to the event itself. I was disappointed to not get support from organizations I have long relationships with who claim to champion just this sort of digital engagement. I went out of my way to attend academic events, but when I asked any of my contacts in those organizations about support, I found the doors firmly closed. Every form of federal support is safely locked to academic partnerships in a way that makes it impossible for anyone but an internal PhD to claim them; those Canadian silos are exceptionally good at taking care of themselves. I talked to many professors in a multitude of schools but they all disappeared back into their funded, tenured worlds after making noises about how important this kind of work is. That’s ok, we did it ourselves.

***


It was snaining in Toronto when we left, but on the ground in Ghana after 12 hours of misery in a middle seat next to the only guy bigger than me on the plane (why don’t airlines use smart tech to arrange seating better?), we found ourselves on the ground in Africa! The VISA support by the Ghanese government had been spectacular in Canada and the hospitality was just as special at the Accra Airport. A senior military officer ushered us through customs in seconds and out to the GC3B desk where we got connected to our hotel and suddenly found ourselves tearing through Accra traffic, stunned by the sights and sounds… and heat (Accra is only 600kms north of the equator)!

 
The conference flags were all around the city. From our anonymity in Canada, we suddenly found ourselves at a very welcoming international event.


The Accra City Hotel was where we’d been put up for the conference and was only a ten minute drive from the very fancy Kempinski Hotel where the conference was taking place. We had lunch and then collapsed in our rooms for the afternoon after over 24 hours on the road.


The week before we’d built a powerpoint: QAI GFCE cyber in the age of quantum research presentation.pptx that was designed to gently introduce cybersecurity policy and technical practitioners to quantum computing. We went over it after our afternoon naps on the pool deck in the sweltering heat and humidity of an Accra evening. Louise helped pioneer women in cybersecurity in our school back in 2018/19 when she was in grade 10 and I’ve known her ever since, so we knew each other’s strengths and felt ready to go with the presentation the next morning. That night we had a fantastic Ghanan buffet and then hit the hay.


Since we were presenting on the periphery of the main conference we got to meet the Global Forum for Cyber Excellence working groups who were the organizers of the research presentations. This gave us ‘behind the scenes’ access to the conference before the main event kicked off the next day. It quickly became apparent that the research presentations needed more time to do them justice. We heard from researchers from all over the world studying everything from regionally specific cyber challenges to international projects on how cyber is presented in the media – to call it fascinating would be an understatement.


Louise and I stepped up for our presentation and knocked it out of the park. We’d de-tuned the technical details in it (Louise was happy to get into explaining how lattice based mathematical encryption actually works), but the GFCE was keen to focus on making it an introduction to quantum computing and how it will change cyber practices in the next few years. My being a teacher was considered a benefit in introducing this technology that is often obscured by academics fixating on its technical complexities. To ensure equitable access we focused on ensuring everyone had access to publicly available research that would assist them in further exploring the technology. This is an area where Canada excels – putting publicly available material online for anyone in the world to access, so we made good use of the many Canadian cyber and quantum resources available.

We must have done well because we were the only presentation who was asked questions by the reviewer running the event and we ended up late to lunch because we had a line of attendees wanting to ask further questions. There is a lot of curiosity out there around quantum technologies but not a lot of people developing accessible education for the public; it tends to be an academically isolated industry.


Our reviewer kept referring to me as Doctor King during her analysis of our paper, but I’ve always been interested in how technology becomes applied rather than working on the academic/theoretical side of things. Applied technology use has been my focus since I migrated decades old paper based engineering paperwork onto Lotus123 back in 1991. I was happy to use my blue collar technician’s approach to putting a pin in the idea that you need a PhD to understand quantum computing. When it comes to the technologies that so influence our lives (as quantum certainly will), I think everyone deserves to understand how they work.

The rest of that first day at the Global Conference on Cyber Capacity Building was fascinating because it wasn’t really about the conference, but instead about the mechanics of the GFCE. By the time we were heading back to the hotel I felt like I’d found my tribe and was determined to see what else I could do with them. This was the collaboration and mutually supportive approach to cyber that I’d been missing.


We wrapped up day one feeling the burn. I’ve never felt so good jumping into a pool after a day of sweating through a suit. While in the water I bumped into one of Nigeria’s cybersecurity leaders and we had a nice chat while watching the sun go down.

The next morning we were up again at midnight our time for a 6am start, and on our way to the Kempinski for the opening of the main event. The conference had swollen in size since we’d seen early setup the day before. Instead of a hundred of so people, over 800 were coming in from over 100 different countries, all intent on seeing how we might work together to make digital transformation more equitable and accessible to all.

I use Twitter as a way to bookmark ideas and resources so I can find them later when I’m building one of these blog posts. My feed from the conference probably tells the story better than a summary here, but to say it was engaging and eye opening would be underselling it. The GC3B worked every angle from policy and diplomacy to technical cooperation and regional partnerships all the way through to international collaboration. It changed the way I see cybersecurity because it moved me beyond the veiled, siloed and somewhat paranoid world of Canadian cyber.


On the second day we were bused over to the park where Ghana’s first president is interred for an end of conference dinner. Like everything else that week, it fundamentally challenged my preconceptions. If indigenous people had overthrown European colonization and established their own representative democracy in the wake of that oppression in Canada, that’s where Ghana is today. The story of Kwame Nkrumah and his efforts to awaken a pan-African culture were fascinating, especially from the perspective of someone living in a resource consumption focused culture where we continue to struggle with our colonial past.

Kwame Nkrumah Mausoleum in Accra – well worth a visit.


On the bus ride over (which was an adventure in itself – African commuter buses have drop down seats so the bus is shoulder to shoulder in every row without an exit aisle), I was at a loss to understand how we appeared to be the only Canadians at an international conference where over 100 countries were in attendance. The US State Department had helped fund the event, as had the EU, and we’d met Australians and many other Commonwealth nationalities, but not a single Canadian. The Australian told us about how her government’s local office had picked her up at the airport, taken her out for lunch and made sure she was OK at her hotel. Ours sent us a PDF of things to do in Accra.


All of this prompted me ask the Swede sitting next to me how Canada is seen in the international community. I’d honestly expected to hear nice things and assumed we’d simply not been involved in all the clandestine activities of our government at this event, but that’s not what came out. The Swede described Canadian participation in world cyber cooperation to be ‘selfish and minimalist’, which came as a shock despite what I’d observed (it’s a teacher survival mechanism to ignore the worst and assume it’s my misunderstanding). The Estonian in front of us chipped in with, “I think Canada asks what the minimum is to look like they are involved in a project, give it and then that’s the last we hear from them.” Attendees from a dozen other countries all nodded in agreement. I did the most Canadian thing imaginable and apologized for my government and all the organizations that are funded by it – even though they’d all ignored my own requests for support prior to the event.

***


As I floated into the pool later that night pondering how I’m going to dress for the final day of the conference with a suit jacket soaked through with sweat (I went with just a shirt for the final day), I found that I wasn’t cowed by what seems to be an insurmountable cultural problem we face as a country. Internally we have the resources and education to make cybersecurity a viable pathway. Canada should be poised to help solve the world’s cyber-skills shortage, but instead our plan is to (as it has been in so many other cases) take that talent from other places that need it for our own ends, and do as little as possible to support international cyber development to ensure an equitable digital transformation for all.

I’m a fan of Paul Theroux’s travel books. His trip across Oceania ends in Hawaii where he stays at one of the top resorts that is staggeringly expensive. Over the week he finds it coddling and restful, but he comes to the conclusion that when people have money, they mainly use it to keep other people away. The fancy resort provided privacy and a lack of bother from others – that was its main purpose and where the money got spent. Canada is a wealthy country and it seems we use our wealth in much the same way, to isolate ourselves from others. It’s not very flattering.

Over 100 countries in attendance. Didn’t see a single Canadian in any of the dozens of presentations and none were presenting. I know for a fact that Canada has some of the top cybersecurity practitioners on the planet, but they don’t like to share?




***

I arrived at the last day of the conference with a head full of thoughts. This lack of engagement by my country (at least in person, evidently Canada was one of the first to endorse the Accra Call) suggested that the lack of cooperation I see domestically is reflected in our international engagement too. My background and interest is in educational engagement with cybersecurity and other emerging technologies that I feel are essential to students making smart decisions about their futures, so to end the conference I attended Session 4.26: Thinking out of the box to inspire a new generation of cybersecurity talent:
  

You might not have watched that video, but this sort of brainstorming and mutual support is just what we need if we’re going to produce a cybersecure future. This doesn’t happen behind closed doors or at a distance. I hear a lot of Canadians talking about the Canadian government as though it’s distinct from them. This cool distance creates problems with how Canadians understand their own country and their role in it, but this distance also freezes out possibilities for international collaboration, which must be about more than sending money.


I had a great chat in that session on developing cyber talent with a young man from Ghana who had started off as a hacker before coming over to the defenders. He described that journey, especially in a place where you can’t drink the water and social services are often non-existent, as difficult because the payouts for being a bad guy are always going to be better. To hear people who are living in what Canadians would consider poverty talking about how they can work together to create equitable digital transformation that will improve standards of living for all was inspiring. You’d have to be the worst kid of self-serving bureaucratic robot to think otherwise.

***

On the final morning we reconvened at the Kempinski and ended the conference with many promises of future work together. It was inspiring and I couldn’t help but get a bit teary, especially when they included the presentation awards for Ghana’s Student National Cybersecurity Competition


An all-female team won Ghana’s student cybersecurity challenge
Having been deeply involved in Canada’s student cybersecurity competition since its inception, I was interested to see this presentation. Some stats for comparison:
Ghana has 475 high schools, 50 participated in the national student cybersecurity competition, that’s an 11% participation rate. You might think that low but Canada is currently at 0.6% of high schools participating nationally in CyberTitan has been running for six years (the Ghanan CCS is in its third year). The siloed nature of Canada’s regionalized education system (we are the only developed country in the world without a national education strategy) has a lot to do with that.
An all-girl team won the 2023 edition of their SCC. No all-girl team in Canada has ever come close, which makes for an interesting comparison on access to STEM education opportunities between the two countries. If money is used to keep people at a distance, male dominance in cybersecurity is certainly operating along similar lines in Canada. There is much to do in terms of gender equity in the Canadian tech ecosystem.
There were two ministers and other members of parliament at the awards celebration for these students. No member of Canadian parliament, minister or not, has ever attended CyberTitan nationals. Another example of our remote/arms-length governing? At the very least it highlighted the lack of value we seem to place on securing our critical infrastructure in a digital future that will increasingly depend upon it.
***
On the long plane ride home I was reflective. Was it easy doing this thing? Not at all. I spent a lot of time talking myself out of it for various reasons, and burned a lot of cycles trying (unsuccessfully) to find support to do it. Without Louise coming on and helping carry the research load, I think I may well have talked myself out of going, and what a shame that would have been.
Winnie knows how it feels. Whoever is doing Xmas
decorating at Dulles is a bit… chaotic in their approach,
but I like it!

Doing the research outside of my regular working hours wasn’t easy, and managing the many logistical requirements both medical and paperwork wise was also a heavy load to carry, but it’s these extras that I always get the most out of in my work. If you look at my LinkedIn you won’t see me bragging about the work I’m paid to do, but rather the projects I chase beyond those expectations. At the end of the day I’m mission driven. After twenty-years in the classroom and building one of the most successful digital skilling programs in Canada in the most unlikely of places, I want to take what I’ve learned and spark opportunities like that nationally, so more Canadian students can access emerging technologies and make informed decisions about where to go next. That this is a struggle continues to baffle me, but I’m committed to climbing that mountain.

Regrets? None. This wasn’t easy but that’s exactly why we need people to put the work in and make this sort of connection happen. Am I frustrated by Canada’s approach? Yes, but that too is a challenge rather than a loss, and one that we will overcome with vision and determination.
With a renewed commitment we will see a meaningful Canadian presence at the next Global Conference on Cyber Capacity Building taking place in Geneva in two years. I intend to be working with the GFCE by then in their education working group if not elsewhere in the organization. I hope I can bring more Canadians into it too.

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What You Need To Work in Cybersecurity: the secret sauce

I see a lot of rules based ‘quick fix’ learning opportunities in cybersecurity, and by that I mean short, intensive courses that claim to make you ready for a cyber job by taking a couple of courses. These are usually boot camp style condensed programs that promise to turn an accounting or science student into a cybersecurity practitioner in a single semester by showing you how to use tools x, y and z. They treat cybersecurity as though it’s an office job: we show you the cybersecurity rules and you follow them. You can see how well this is working by the ongoing shortage Canada faces in finding cybersecurity professionals.
I got into cybersecurity with my students in 2017 when we started chasing CyberTitan, but I brought something with us that isn’t typical in the world of STEM: a relationship with technology that is based on a willingness to hack. I don’t like the word hack, it has negative connotations to it in English that have been encouraged by the self appointed masters of STEM (the S&M part), but that willingness to iterate and work outside the expected outcomes is the secret sauce in cybersecurity that many ignore, and a major reason for why I’ve taken to it like I have.
‘Necessity is the mother of invention’ has been the motivating factor in my relationship with technology since the beginning. I moved quickly from off-the-shelf to customized solutions based on experimentation and need. WIthin six months of owning my first home computer (a VIC20), I’d figured out how to copy software using a sufficiently low noise audio deck. My first x86 Windows PC was purchased but quickly modified as I came to need more memory and processing power. By the mid-90s I was building my own computers at a time when many people didn’t own one.
This process was initially powered by curiosity, which many training programs eclipse with the promise of ‘we provide the initiative and knowledge so you don’t have to’ approach – something that has never appealed to me and a major reason why I didn’t start collecting certifications until 2001 (I’d been working in IT for a decade at that point). Schools are bad at this too. Many educators feel that it is their job to impart knowledge in a regimented format (that’s why we call them disciplines!) and assess student understanding with examples of rote learning that emphasize compliance rather than their own understanding of a subject. Many in education call this approach rigorous and disciplined – it’s how they demonstrate credibility.
The Indians have a term for austere innovation: jugaad (non-conventional, frugal innovation) which doesn’t have the pejorative connotations of the English ‘hack’. Jugaad celebrates common sense with a solutions focused approach to creative problem solving without needless bureaucracy. It emphasizes an applied approach to making technology works that is especially needed in an industry like cybersecurity where practitioners are often facing out of the box problems. WIRED recently did an article on a Ukrainian technologist who demonstrated this start-up like approach in the war with Russia. There is even an event in cyber that highlights this out-of-the-box rapid response to an unknown problem: the dreaded zero day vulnerability. Jugaad will get you much further than any amount of rote learning during a zero day attack.
Kintsugi has played a part in
my motorcycling.

There is another term in Japanese that takes the derision found in English out of making old things work. I’ve long enjoyed the concept of ‘kintsugi‘ or ‘golden joinery’, which is the repairing of old things using gold to embellish the fix rather than trying to hide it. In typical Japanese fashion it raises what is seen as banal work in the West to an artform. A concept that combines jugaad’s celebration of a fix beyond rules based approaches with kintsugi’s raising of that fix to an artform is where a good candidate for work in cybersecurity should find themselves inspired. When I started in cyber I found my  IT background helped in terms of understanding the mechanics of what was happening, but my kintsugi powered jugaad approach is what has allowed me to thrive.

This ‘secret sauce’ is often ignored in education and especially in cybersecurity adult retraining. There are some disciplines that tend to attract rules focused types, but that fixation on systemic order blinds them in the edge cases where cybersecurity often operates. Rather than retraining an accountant or rigorously compliant STEM student, I suspect that those exploring subjects like detective work in policing or creatives in the arts would find the skills they’ve honed more effective, but that doesn’t stop everyone from demanding a computer science degree for any job in the industry.
In 2019 after the Terabytches went to CyberTitan nationals we got invited on the local radio station to talk about the experience. The interviewer asked me a good question about our DIY approach to computer tech. I was annoyed at the lack of resources, but he suggested it might be what gave us an edge. He was right, we’d been jugaading and it made us mighty!

There are many jobs in cybersecurity. People who lean toward the jugaad end where they can problem solve without restrictions can find a comfortable fit in operational cybersecurity where they are monitoring real time threats, penetration testing where they are attempting to exploit a client’s system to highlight vulnerabilities, or threat intelligence which focuses on gathering reconnaissance data on threat actors. But even in the policy and compliance work, a willingness to consider and understand threats and solutions that are outside the box is a necessity.
This map of cybersecurity domains gives you an idea of the many specializations that the field offers, though I would argue that in all of them (even those up the compliance end) an ability to work from your own initiative and experience rather a rule book is essential.
Sam Sheepdog & Ralph Wolf know the score.

I sometimes describe cybersecurity types as sheepdogs. I think many in law enforcement also fit this description. You can’t send a goat to fend of wolves, but having a wolf of your own will do the trick. Early on in my transition from IT into cybersecurity I found myself leaning on IT administrative habits that don’t work in cyber, and came to realize that the jobs are very different, though the technology is the same. If you have an IT person running your cybersecurity you’re likely to be constantly surprised by the attacks you face because they tend to see systems in an architectural way rather than as an opportunity to be compromised.

It would be easy to say something silly like, ‘there are no rules in cybersecurity!’ but that’s pointlessly reductive. It would also be easy to describe all the people in it as hackers, but this isn’t true either, though a mentality that tackles problems from a place of curiosity and jugaad is far better than a rules compliant myopic who can’t see beyond the framework they maintain. At the end of all this I firmly believe that you need a bit of the wolf in you if you want to consider a career in cybersecurity. I wish more cybersecurity training and especially adult retraining would emphasize that when looking for candidates rather than demanding STEM grads often missing these skills. If it’s a formulaic job that you’re looking for, cyber isn’t it.
STEM students are often missing skills which “include teamwork, collaboration, leadership, problem-solving, critical thinking, work ethic, persistence, emotional intelligence, organizational skills, creativity, interpersonal communication, and conflict resolution.” Adding an ‘A” to STEM doesn’t fix this, incorporating an iterative, resilient, team-based problem solving mindset into STEM subjects would, but that doesn’t tend to be how we teach them.

Another piece of Canada’s cybersecurity puzzle came into focus from the last post on how our cybereducation system is broken. In response to that, Francois Guay from the Canadian Cybersecurity Network followed up with the observation that the cybersecurity talent pipeline in Canada is also in tatters.

I’ve been thinking about that post and believe all of the responses from both new cybersecurity practitioners and veterans are valid. It would appear that when you try to fix a talent shortage with rushed retraining no one trusts the results. Problems such as absurd requirements for entry level positions like asking for 5 years of experience on a tool that only came out last year or demands for that vaunted yet irrelevant computer science degree continue to strangle entry level workers coming into the field, even though they have hacked (cough) their way through our broken cyber education system to do it.
Not to sound hopelessly jugaad, but the simple solution would be to introduce cybersecurity apprenticeships that give everyone a chance to find those with the right combination of fearless curiosity, critical thinking and tenacity needed to do the job. Students with a background in science and technology might find that they are familiar with the medium that cybersecurity operates in, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be able to handle the demanding stochastic message that working in cyber demands.
I’ve always told my students that if they can bring a willingness to explore, experiment and possibly break things in the process of figuring them out, they don’t need to sweat the technicalities, I can teach them those by harnessing the curiosity they bring with them. I’ve had strong technical students fail in cyber because they lean on systemic approaches to do less. Another favourite adage of mine in the classroom is, ‘if you’re looking for a way to do less, you’ll usually find it.’ Those that want to work in a framework often do it so that they can delineate where they can stop; in other words it’s used as a way to limit their involvement. That’s no way to approach cybersecurity. If solving a problem is a nine to five gig for you, go find work elsewhere.

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Cyber Education in Canada is Broken, Here’s How to Fix It

I’ve been sitting on this one for some time. What’s below is more like brainstorming than a clear solution, but I feel like it’s moving in the right direction…

The Problem: Canada’s Cyber-education system is broken – or doesn’t exist at all

I’ve been ruminating on this since virtually attending the “How to protect our children in an increasingly digital and online world” meeting by Economic Development Ontario and the Canadian Trade commission a couple of weeks ago. James Hayes from Cyber Legends is a man on a mission. His keynote was both insightful and frustrating – the main point being that Ontario (and by extension Canada)’s cyber-education ecosystem is broken. I’d go so far as to say that in most places it doesn’t exist at all; broken implies that there was something there to begin with.


This observation speaks to a cultural challenge that Canada faces. Other countries are able to leverage a collaborative approach to the asymmetrical global threat cyberattacks pose, but Canada’s history and the loose confederation it has produced creates many gaps between levels of government. Those gaps are where cybercriminals operate.


The Problem: cybersecurity, cybersafety and online privacy are barely mentioned in Canadian school curriculum and educators are some of the least digitally experienced professionals able to resolve this skills crisis

In Ontario we’ve mandated mandatory eLearning for all students, but cybersecurity only just got into the computer studies curriculum in this year’s rewrite, and what’s there is thin (it immediately devolves into personal online data awareness and ignores the many interesting technical specialities in cybersecurity). This optional course doesn’t run in most high schools (it was cancelled locally in mine), so this one mention isn’t seen by most students.

Many other provinces don’t mention cybersecurity at all even as they all depend on it every day with networked education technology delivering material in every classroom. Cyberskills are now essential skills if we want to keep the learning happening, but aren’t treated that way in our education systems. New Brunswick is the exception with a full cyber-learning pathway for students interested in heading into the field professionally. Why does that matter? There is a global shortage of cybersecurity professionals, so Canada’s usual approach of immigrating in solutions to its education failings won’t work in this case.

James mentioned teacher cyber-illiteracy in his keynote as well.

Our oblivious response to cybersecurity awareness is part of a larger problem in public education. When I first came into teaching in 2003 I was surprised to see the education system rocking early 90s information and communication technology. Throughout my career education has dragged its feet at every opportunity in terms of adopting digital transformation and the benefits it delivers. The result of this decades long drag is that people in education tend to be less digitally literate than the general population, even as they are expected to teach students essential digital skills like cyber awareness. Teachers are precisely who you want to be raising general cyberawareness and the skills needed to safely navigate our online world, but decades of status quo leadership means educators are missing the digital media literacy necessary to do it.

The Problem: we’re happy to make online edtech solutions mandatory (usually as a cost cutting measure) but a surprising percentage of the people doing it don’t think they should be held legally responsible for its safe delivery

I spoke on a panel about cybersecurity at the Canadian Edtech Summit the week before. The event had an online component so I started a poll aimed at the education administration and technology companies in attendance. Recently the SEC in the US sued a company for their failure to respond to cybersecurity problems that they were very much aware of that resulted in many clients’ data being spilled onto the darkweb. This raises an interesting policy question: should school boards and provincial education ministries be held legally responsible for cybersecurity in Canadian classrooms? Canadian educational ministries and their school boards have increasingly adopted cloud based solutions to reduces costs on what used to be locally managed technology integration, but with internet based ‘cloud’ solutions come cybersecurity responsibilities. This US decision will likely influence our lax cyber responsibility policies in Canada and I was curious what the people implementing these technologies (often poorly) thought of the potential for liability penalties for failing to protect student data (which often also includes staff and family personal data too).

I expected the people delivering online edtech (school boards, ministries, not-for-profits and private edtech companies) to recognize that cybersecurity is very much their responsibility if their technology is vulnerable online. Especially if they are going to demand that students use online learning tools. This should be especially obvious when our ‘clients’ are vulnerable sector children whose safety should be a primary concern.

Most did recognize the importance of taking responsibility for their technology delivery, but I’d love to have a chat with the quarter or so who thought they should be putting student learning online while bearing no legal responsibility for it. One of those people could well be managing your local school board‘s technology department.

If we’ve got a problem with the people delivering online edtech understanding that they are responsible for cybersecurity, we need to back the bus up and clarify those responsibilities with policy – legally binding policy.  I recently saw a memo which said data privacy wasn’t even a paid job in the school board and is done outside of regular work responsibilities by IT staff, most of whom have no cybersecurity experience. Until we begin taking public sector cybersecurity seriously we will continue to see our public services being disrupted by breaches and system failures.

NIST’s cybersecurity framework offers a technical policy approach to cybersecurity that clarifies what organizations need to do to provide viable online security. ISED has a Canadian version called ITSG-33 which is more policy focused.  This isn’t an all or nothing thing with a solution for every problem. Any time you put data online you risk being hacked, but by following these best practices you can at least know you’ve taken reasonable steps towards preventing abuse. What you want to do is get up to Tier 4 of the NIST framework where you’re proactively defending against threats, but public education in Canada can’t get out of tier two because “implementation is still piecemeal”, and no one has “the proper resources needed to protect themselves.” Our cyber failures in Canadian education are the result of both policy and a subsequent lack of funding. I’d hope that we’d follow best practices in protecting student data, but that ship sailed years ago. If that carrot isn’t available, then a legal policy stick might be the only thing left that prompts ministries and schools to make data privacy a priority.

The Problem: Public services in Canada are siloed bureaucracies that are difficult to work with

This isn’t just an education problem, it’s a
CANADA problem. Canada’s history hasn’t
produced a culture that can collaborate
against asymmetrical global threats.

During the panel talk at the EdTech summit one of the speakers said, “working with public school boards is very difficult. It can take years just to find the right person to talk to. Even if you can find that person, they’ll tell you there are no resources.” I talked to Kyle Bokyo, another of the panelists, after the event and we commiserated on this point.

There are not for profits and businesses in Canada who are attempting to provide solutions to Canada’s ongoing cyber-education failures, but attempting to engage with any public service in Canada is a a difficult prospect. If you talk to the ministries they hold up their hands and say they only manage the funding and not the implementation of cybersecurity solutions. If you talk to the regional school boards they say that they aren’t provided resources to do it.

In Canada’s uncoordinated cyber policy landscape I suspect it’s easier to play victim even as you assume greater cyber risk pushing user data into the cloud than it is to develop a coordinated response to this very asymmetrical problem. These gaps in responsibility make it easy for the people being paid to be responsible for the safety of online student data to point the finger at each other, even as breach after breach occurs.

Canada’s failure to
coordinate cyber response
is recognized as an
problem globally
.

What I learned through COVID as a classroom teacher is that the people running public education will ask all manner or ridiculousness just to maintain the illusion of a functional system. It’s what got them into their offices and they aren’t about to jeopardize that. Public education, along with other public services, are insular industries with generational employees and tightly knit networks of political operatives managing them. This might sound like immigrant complaining (and it is), but the best way to get into education ‘leadership’ is to have had family who did it, or marry into one. The next best way is to be willing to maintain the status quo at all costs. Agility and responsiveness aren’t words often applied to this sector.

Cybersecurity in the public education is dangerously under-prioritized even as we continue the rush to cloud based edtech solutions in an attempt to save money. On top of that a surprising percentage of the people delivering these solutions don’t think they should be held legally responsible for its safe delivery. This deadlock suggests that we need policy that not only enforces best cybersecurity practices in education, but also makes resources for it a requirement rather than a politically motivated failure.

But the fix needs to go further in education because we also have a responsibility for providing graduates with opportunities to learn the skills they need to survive in a rapidly changing world; something we’re not doing as many jurisdictions continue to studiously ignore cyber education. The key piece to this puzzle is policy that creates a responsive, responsible Canadian cybereducation system.

The Solution: A Viable 21st Century Canadian Education Ecosystem

As both James and Kyle mentioned in their talks, technology moves so quickly that large public services are always going to struggle to keep up, but an agile edtech sector could help with that. Startups and small businesses can pivot to keep up with technology emergence in a way that larger organizations struggle with – that’s why Google and the rest buy agility rather than trying to produce it in-house. The problem has been Canada’s pigeon hole approach which doesn’t aim to produce a coherent ecosystem of interrelated programs that provide a comprehensive Canadian shield.

As mentioned, the issue of regional school boards and provincial ministries making it difficult for anyone outside of these insular systems from collaborating with them is a key problem. We can’t leverage digitally literate industry partners if they have no way to effectively communicate with education delivery systems.

The solution is to connect the federal government with the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada and The Insurance Bureau of Canada and design a centralized approval process that connects Canadian not for profits and industry edtech expertise with provincial ministries and clears the way for access to credible cybereducation materials and best practices through internal communications with education systems across the country. Instead of individual boards doing cyber badly, a national partnership with a wide range of technology specializations and strengths would work together to build solutions at scale while also ensuring that these solutions are prioritized. This relationship would also prompt meaningful updates to curriculum instead of the current ‘in a bubble’ approach that produces material well short of what is needed to prepare graduates for our technically challenging future.

I made this graphic after last year’s CPI conference
at University of Waterloo
, where I first met James,
Cheryl and Cyber Legends.

In such an environment a startup like James’ Cyber Legends, or an internationally partnered and long running national competition like CyberTitan would pass NIST levels of cyber-review nationally and then be welcomed into a Canada-wide edtech ecosystem that works through each provincial and territorial education ministry directly into school boards. Any edtech company working outside of this framework would find itself where we all do now: on the outside unable to make any significant change. But those who meet this national standard would be considered trusted internal partners with access to federal funding and direct internal access to provincial education at both the ministry and district levels. No more trying for years to find a person who may (or most likely doesn’t) exist in a local school board who is in charge of cybereducation.

This ecosystem would reward collaboration. Members that don’t want to collaborate would find themselves removed. Those that want to do want to partner to build a more secure and digitally literate Canada would work with other members to produce complementary resources that allow teachers from all corners of the country to develop meaningful digital skills, including the difficult ones to deliver like cybersecurity.  These members would find funding and partners who ensure that their programs are successful and always ready to keep up with the impressive rate of technological change we’re all dealing with. This would also give those providing federal funding clear guidelines for who they should be supporting.

The stick would come through policy changes that are both legal and regulatory. Any school board (and by association ministry) not making use of these secure, partner provided resources for improving student data protection would find themselves both liable for any breaches, and also uninsured. Educational cybersecurity would no longer be a political blame game. Local implementation would still very much remain the purview of school districts, and ministries would remain very much in charge of funding their province or territory, but with focused federal support many of the associated expenses would be reduced through the centralization of resources. These savings would also be a carrot. With national cyber standards and partnerships that leverage the strengths of all members of Canada’s education ecosystem (federal government, private industry, national not for profit, education ministries, and local school boards), Canadian students would enjoy access to more Canadian made digital learning opportunities that raise digital fluency in a meaningful way, and they could do this while also exploring cybersecurity in a way that creates a more secure Canada. Imagine what all these cyber-aware students could do for our national security.

We have a habit of regionalizing our approaches to government in Canada, but in the face of wildly asymmetrical threats like cybercrime and (increasingly) international cyber espionage, we need to push back against this culture and build a collaborative defence. In doing so we would also create much richer digital learning opportunities in our schools that make Canada more secure and competitive in the networked, global economy.


The Solution: collaboration doesn’t end locally, regionally or even nationally in Canada

I’m attending The Global Forum for Cyber Excellence’s inaugural Global Conference on Cyber Capacity Building in Accra, Ghana at the end of November. 

“It is paramount for all nations to have the expertise, knowledge and skills to strengthen their cyber-resilience”

I’m presenting a research paper a former student and CyberTitan (Louise Turner) and I have written about the disruption quantum computing will cause to cybersecurity encryption in the coming years. Doing this research with Louise has been both eye opening and very intellectually satisfying, but after 20+ years in the classroom I’m still very much a cyber-educator first and a cyber researcher second. It’s why I invited one of the next generation of cyber professionals to write the paper with me.

Looking at the program for the conference, the lack of talent and focus on developing cyberskills both in the population and in those interested in pursuing work in the industry isn’t a Canada only problem, it’s a global one. If we can repair Canada’s internal cyber-education system, we can then work with international partners to help them do the same. The cyber battlefield inherently favours the anonymity of hackers damaging our systems with impunity for their own gain, but through collaboration the defenders could become mighty.

As the GFCE so eloquently puts it: Nations should work together and support each other with these capabilities, so that no country is left behind in their digital evolution. After all, a chain is only as strong as the weakest link.”  Look for the Accra Call: a global action framework that supports countries in strengthening their cyber resilience being announced during the conference.

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A.I. Isn’t What You Think It Is

 I’ve been in a series of presentations over the past couple of months where organizations are getting frantic about catching the ‘AI Wave’. This urgent need to feel like they aren’t missing out on a fad is understandable, but like so many emerging technologies, getting ‘into it’ won’t be effective if you ignore the foundations its built on, and the foundations of AI and the technology itself are… problematic.

You can’t have ‘generative’ AI without massive data sets to train it on. This data is scraped from the internet and then fed into systems that can eventually give users “a statistically likely configuration of words” that look like an answer. That’s right, the brilliant answer you just got on a generative AI platform isn’t really an answer, it’s a cloud computer cluster giving you its best guess based on crowdsourced data. None of that stops people from thinking it’s intelligent (it isn’t), and being in a panic about missing out.

Putting the fact that AI isn’t nearly as smart as the marketing portrays it aside for a moment, large data and the cloud infrastructure that stores and delivers it are a house of cards teetering on the edge of collapse. You can’t have AI without climbing to the stop of this wobbly infrastructure. How precarious is it? Data growth worldwide is in an explosive phase of growth (partially driven by the AI fad). Our overloaded storage infrastructure is under pressure because AI uses it much more aggressively that simply storing information. AI demands fast data retrieval and constant interaction making the rise in AI particularly problematic for our stressed storage systems.

We’re facing data storage shortages in the next couple of years because of our belief that the cloud is an infinite resource. It isn’t, it’s an artfully hidden technological sleight of hand. The irony is that our digital storage infrastructure limitations will also end up limiting our current crop of AIs as well.

The staggering environmental costs that underlie our myth of an infinite digital cloud haven’t  been mentioned yet, but like many of our other ecological marketing myths (electric vehicles) pushing the messy business of how it works out of sight of the consumer is a great way to market a green future while doing the opposite. Data centres in the US consumer over 2% of all electricity in the country. There are benefits to scaling large data centres, but the trend into the foreseeable future is that the cloud will continue consuming more energy out here in the real world. That we’re increasingly throwing limited resources at building AI guessing machines tells you something about our priorities.

One of the first posts on Dusty World was about dancing in this datasphere twelve years ago. Back then I’d found a quote by Google CEO Eric Schmidt talking about the coming information revolution:

I’d make a distinction between information and data. One is useful, the other is raw binary numbers and storing the majority of it is a complete waste of time and resources. Sussing out information from data is an ongoing challenge. That doesn’t change the fact that the amount of data being generated back then wouldn’t even register on the graph below, which looks like a runaway growth curve – you can make good money from all that data.

So, we live in a world that is well into an aggressive phase of digital growth, though very few people understand how any of that works. Even as we compile more content than we have in the entirety of human history to feed the attention economy, we also decide to play a sleight of hand game with machine learning on massive datasets just to see if it’ll work.

From an educational perspective, AI is in the wild now and ignoring it will only get you and your students in trouble. If we’re going to make functional use of this progenitor of true artificial intelligence, we need to teach the media literacy around it so that people understand what it is, how it works and how best to use it to amplify rather than replace their humanity.

I’ve seen a lot of people panicking about AI taking their jobs away, but if your work output is a statistically likely configuration of words, then you’re not applying much of your vaunted human intellect to the task at hand and probably should be replaced by one of these meh AIs. But if you’re one of those humans who actually thinks, even this stunted AI can be a powerful ally. In a fight for intellectual supremacy who would you think would win?

  1. just machines
  2. just people
  3. an empowered hybrid of the two

The move here during this awkward adolescence of artificial intelligence where we’re faking it until we make it is to leverage the tool to best effect. If effective use of AI speeds up our ability to gain actionable information in the chaos of data that surrounds us, then we can more quickly move on to the next real steps in technology evolution.

The other day I described AI as we currently define it as a hack to keep classical computing ahead of the data tsunami we’re living in. At the time I was surprised by how I described it, but classical computing is reaching the limit of what it can do. For the past few years we’ve been finding speed in parallel processing such as adding computing cores to CPUs rather than making faster CPUs. We’ve also been finding efficiencies in how we manage data such as creating more organized memory caches to better feed our processors. Ultimately, I feel like generative AI in 2023 is another one of these patches. It’s a way to make our overwhelming data cloud more functional to us.

This is from a presentation I’ve been giving that attempts to bring people into a better understanding of the hype. AI (even this meh one) will replace you if you let it, so don’t!

Digital technologies aren’t going to go anywhere, but they are a ‘low resolution’ way to compute. There is also the problem of reducing the complexity of reality to ones and zeroes. Mathematical concepts can help us understand relationships, but they will always be inherently reductive; they’re never the thing itself but a simplified abstraction of it. Digital reduces the world to ones and zeroes and at some point we’ll realize that this isn’t the way.

When we run out of nanometres like we have with electronics, the next step is a big one, but it’s one we’re working on globally as a species right now. In the next decade we’re gong to figure out how to use the building blocks of nature itself to compute at speeds that classical computers can’t imagine. What will this do for our data clogged world? One of my hopes is that it will process much of that data into usable information, information that we can then use to solve this mess we’ve gotten ourselves into.

I’ll weather the current AI hype storm, but if you ask me what I’m really excited about it’s artificial intelligence realized on a faultless quantum computer. The future beyond that moves in directions I can’t begin to guess, and that is exciting. imminent and absolutely necessary if we’re going to prevent a global collapse of human civilization. Some people might get panicky about that, but they’re the same ones who think a cloud based statistical guessing machine will replace them.

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You Want to Teach WHAT?!? Reconfiguring Technology in Schools to Empower Pedagogy

Cybersecurity is one of the more challenging subjects to try and bring into classrooms, even though every one of them depends on it every day to function; everything from attendance to lesson content happens via networked computers in 2023.


Few people have advanced digital media fluency when it comes to using software and hardware, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg with cybersecurity. It also depends on skills from many other technical subjects that don’t get much attention in K-12 classrooms, such as software development, networking, information technology, IoT and programming, but not just high level stuff, you also need to be comfortable looking at firmware and low level coding.


Cyber skills aren’t just about leveraging these interdisciplinary technologies though, they’re also about discovering, understanding and resolving the many points of failure inherent in them. This is something most people feel very uncomfortable doing. For the vast majority of users, when technology goes wrong it’s someone else’s problem. Even for the people who build and maintain networks, the dark arts of cybersecurity cause great unease.

One of my hobbies is restoring old motorbikes. There is a strange parallel to cybersecurity in this. Many mechanics won’t touch old machines because they don’t lend themselves to modular parts swap fixes, which is how all modern shops work – technicians don’t fix things, they replace them. Diagnosing an old machine takes patience and sensitivity that many mechanics haven’t learned in our digital world of part numbers, modular engineering and timed repairs to maximize profit. I’ve talked about this before in relation to Matt Crawford’s books and I think there is a corollary with IT and cybersecurity. Many of the people who build and maintain our systems aren’t interested in how they might break, they are only interested in keeping them running as cheaply as possible. That’s good for running your enterprise system as long as there are no surprises, but not so good if you want to build something bespoke or prepare for the many nasty surprises out there.

I was thinking about this challenging situation after attempting to convince school board IT departments from coast to coast about the technical requirements of the CyberTitan/CyberPatriot competition. I’ve been told again and again by people struggling to provide IT support in schools that they won’t run VMWare or Cisco’s Packet Tracer simulator because they:

1) are viruses (they aren’t, though they are a great tool for safely examining them)

2) pose a threat to their systems. They don’t – they actually do the opposite, but training people in the arcane cyber arts scares many of the people managing IT in education.

Virtual machines are used in cybersecurity (and network building) to test software and network environments. By examining a virtual machine cyber operators can explore how a machine has been compromised and what they might try to repair it in a safe (virtual) environment. VMWare is one of the biggest players in this field, and cleaned up at last year’s cybersecurity awards, yet many board IT departments declared it a hazard. I suspect the hazard is in teaching ICT and cybersecurity best practices, and isn’t that a tragedy?

I sympathize with the IT departments I’ve communicated with. They are responsible for running complex enterprise systems that support hundreds or even thousands of users with varying levels of system access (administrators, office staff, teaching staff, building maintenance, and more). That’s more than many IT departments manage in other industries, but educational IT also has to serve tens of thousands of vulnerable sector clients (students), all of whom are coming at them with a staggering array of hardware and software without any real training on it. To make it even worse, most of them will be connecting to these systems using out of date and possibly compromised machines.

An attack surface is a concept that helps cybersecurity types better understand how a bad actor might exploit their network. The software you’re using, the hardware it runs on, the network you’re logging in from, other software installed on your device, the operating systems you’re using, and the systems that connect it all together along with all the cloud based stuff you depend on are all components of a modern attack surface, and the education one is particularly complicated.  

One of the last big network installs I did before I went into teaching was at Glaxosmithkline in the early zeroes. This was a network of hundreds of desktops, hard wired via ethernet into an onsite server that provided all the ‘cloud’ they needed. The desktops all ran the same operating system and software on identical hardware. No one on this network had internet access, closing down a massive headache in terms of attack surface (internet access in a world experiencing a digital skills crisis is a nightmare!). This kind of simplicity is a distant memory in 2023. With our rush to the cloud, attack surfaces now include all the online managed systems we so gleefully replaced our secure networks with. BYOD and off-site work only pile more complexity on.

Comparing that GSK network to any modern education network is an apples to fruit salad comparison. On any day at dozens of school and administrative sites across a board you’ve got a nearly infinite number of different devices logging in, from phones with varying software packages (most of which are probably out of date and may well contain malware) to other personal technology (tablets, laptops, etc) all peppering your network with requests that may be school related or (more often) not.

To try and mitigate this complexity inflation, many boards have dumped computers that do onsite computing (like desktops and laptops) in favour of an easier to manage (because it can’t do much) chromebooks. These simple machines can’t get infected like a fully interactive operating system can, but you’re still susceptible to fake browser extensions and compromised websites. This is usually solved by preventing users from customizing their chromebooks with extensions, further reducing what they can do.

With all this in mind, I was struck the other day by the idea that educational IT departments are missing a key component: a department focused on enabling technology empowered pedagogy (the reason we have schools… remember?). Early on in the edtech revolution we had OSAPAC in Ontario, which vetted software and created a provincial bank of safe to use software for learning digital skills in classrooms. With the rush to cloud based systems, OSAPAC evaporated and most school systems fell in with multi-nationals offering ‘walled gardens’ such as GAFE (Google Apps for Education) or the Microsoft equivalent. As this migration happened, teachers and students lost access to essential digital media literacy opportunities, especially when it comes to advanced digital skills such as 3d modelling, game design or cybersecurity.

A way to combat this skills deflation would be to create local IT support units dedicated to providing teachers with digitally enhanced student learning opportunities instead of starving us of them. I’d go a step further and suggest that the messy enterprise side of things that is such a headache should become the responsibility of the Ministry. Many cost savings and security enhancements could occur from centralizing these systems. It would also mean that students and staff moving between boards would be able to migrate more easily because everyone would be on the same systems. There would also be opportunities to collect provincial data more easily that would support better education policy, not that we like to collect data before making education policies in Ontario.

This does not mean the end of regional school board IT departments. Instead of chasing the tail of impossible enterprise expectations with insufficient funding, they would be provided by a central provincial authority with the secure standards and proper support. Imagine how much we might save if every board in Ontario isn’t reinventing the wheel over and over again with varying degrees of success.

Local school board IT departments would be entirely focused on working with their teachers to find the best hardware, software and cloud based learning opportunities based on the needs of the programs they are running. Instead of saying no and reducing technology access to enhanced pedagogical learning opportunities in our classrooms, our local IT departments would become sources of local technical expertise focused on helping public education close an ongoing digital skills crisis.

I’m writing this in a hotel room in the north end of Toronto the night before attending the Ontario Public Sector Cybersecurity conference. I want to believe that the people at this event are taking the challenges of technology enhanced education, including the tremendously difficult task of engaging with cybersecurity learning, seriously in 2023, but I fear it’s going to be all cartoons and platitudes. Here’s hoping.



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EdTech Hockey Sticks

I’ve been lucky enough to find myself in Canadian classrooms from St John’s to Vancouver over the past year. Canada is the only developed country in the world without a national education strategy, so this isn’t something many educators get to experience. The only people who do span our country are the edtech companies that have surged into being to resolve a digital skills gap that doesn’t look to be going anywhere any time soon.

At its heart the widening digital divide is a inclusion and equity problem. Students who can’t afford tech at home lack familiarity and fall behind when schools bring it in with no training for staff or students. It would be more productive if education in Canada did more than talk about DEI, but that would require vision which we lack.

In my travels I’ve come across many edtech ‘solutions’. These often involve off-the-shelf technology that has has been branded to meet a specific need in a ‘turn-key’ way so learning essential digital skills doesn’t actually require any on the part of the instructor. Of course, this all comes with a huge bump in price. I love seeing $15 open source Arduino microcontrollers paired with $10 in sensors and called a ‘climate change’ edtech kit, yours for $80! In many cases a hard sell accompanies these kits that are guaranteed to teach the STEM skills you don’t have. UNESCO has something to say about this global phenomenon:

UNESCO’s 2023 Technology in Education, a tool on who’s terms? is well worth a read. With Canada’s lack of a national education strategy, we have to find vision elsewhere. 


The frustration around this has been gnawing at me and when I woke up this morning I had the edtech hockey stick floating in my mind, so I made some marketing for it:

It’s satire, it’s supposed to be over the top or it won’t land the satire.

The hockey metaphor (I hope) brings home the absurd nature of the edtech dance we’re in. Anyone who actually plays hockey will take one look at it and laugh. It looks like it might work like a player goalie stick, but it will actually do neither job – it’s the product catering to ignorance.

The actual solution is to learn digital technologies and media from the ground up instead of implementing patches like Chromebooks, the edtech hockey stickest of them all. This is a one trick pony that ties learning to a single multi-national’s browser and cannot provide any locally processed content. The cloud is where edtech solutions thrive because you can easily monetize access. The hard sell for strapped school IT departments is that Chromebooks don’t give you network headaches because they can barely do anything. Like the edtech hockey stick they look like they can do it all.


NOTES

There is no such thing as “Canadian Education”. The PISA results everyone waves the flag about happen on the back of the four largest provinces. If you’re elsewhere in the country you may be below the world average.

https://www.fraserinstitute.org/blogs/pisa-results-a-breakdown-by-province

PISA results show each of the Big Four provinces of Ontario, Quebec, Alberta and British Columbia achieving significantly higher average reading scores than all G7 member countries except, of course, Canada. The Big Four also outperformed five of these six G7 countries in math and science (the exception being Japan, which scores below Quebec in math and below Alberta in science).”

“… if we only consider PISA results for the remaining smaller six provinces, Canada fares much worse, placing 17th in reading (below the United States, the United Kingdom and Japan), 18th in science (again, below Japan, the U.K. and U.S.) and 30th in math, just below the OECD average.”

That edtech companies are feeding off this siloed inequity is part of a larger problem. Next round of PISA is looking at digital skills (because we’re in a global shortage). I’m curious to see how that gets politicized. Wouldn’t it be something if we actually did something about it?

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Stories of Innovation Are Never About One Person

I’ve been involved with Cisco’s Networking Academy since we joined the CyberTitan national student cybersecurity competition in its inaugural year in 2018. It’s the 25th anniversary of Netacad and this summer they asked alumni to tell them stories that arose from their association with the platform. I told the tale of the Terabytches and bringing the first all-female team to CyberTitan national finals along with my own journey of taking my first technical qualification in almost two decades. It was a story of perseverance in the face of prejudice and a love of life long learning.

To my surprise I made the finalists list out of hundreds of applications from across the globe (Netacademy runs in almost every country in dozens of languages – it’s a truly global platform). When I read about some of the other finalists I was thrilled just to be included with them.

On August 15th I was driving through the countryside to the University of Waterloo, listening to the awards being announced on spotty cell phone coverage. It cut out just as the innovation architect award was announced and then came back for the next award, so I didn’t hear I’d won when it happened.

At CEMC at UWaterloo I took a room full of computer studies teachers through cyber-range activities and while that was going on we heard that I didn’t just win the Innovation Architect Award, but also the Shooting Star grand prize which has me in NYC in mid-September for the Global Citizen Festival

.As part of the prize Cisco gave me some communications and asked for shoutouts, and there are many. Innovating can often feel like a lonely exercise where most of what you’re doing seems to aggravate management, but it’s really a collaborative exercise, otherwise you’re by yourself in a room doing cool things that no one else knows about. The idea of a lone inventor hidden away working on their own is a fiction.

I could never have built the program I developed without getting my school board onside. There are two people in particular who became supporters and advocates for the unique work we were attempting. Charles Benyair was our SHSM lead and he provided the resources that my school would not to get us in motion, and Sandro Buffone in our IT department made a point of understanding what I was trying to do and helped clear away the technical bureaucracy to let it happen.

Convincing students to take on an international competition in a subject we’d never studied before was a challenge, but Cam, Cal, Nick and Justin were seniors in 2017 and bravely jumped into cybersecurity with me. We learned new concepts and got a handle on things to such a degree that we discovered we were going to the first Canadian national cybersecurity finals in Fredericton. Three of those students had never left the province or been on a plane so you can imagine the impact.

As the teams gathered for a photo I happened to be standing next to Sandra Saric, the vice-president in charge of CyberTitan at the Information & Communication Technology Council (ICTC). As the photo got taken she said under her breath, “where are all the girls?” Out of seventy odd students only a handful were girls. That observation put me on a mission. 

Sandra went back and established a program for encouraging all-female teams to sign up and I went back to my junior computer technology classes (the exacting gender expectations of our rural high school make sure that there were no girls in senior computer tech classes) and cajoled six girls to give it a try. That next year we had three full teams instead of two-thirds of one. I encouraged them to find a name that speaks to their experience and the girls came up with the Terabytches (terabyte with a twist).

Those six pioneers faced derision from our school and when they went to nationals a member of one of the other all-male teams said to one of them, “you’re lucky you’re pretty, because you suck at this.” That year emphasized for me how important it is to give girls their own space away from the often corrosive male culture that forms around technology.

In a radio interview in Ottawa at those finals Rachel said something that stuck with me. “We used this name so that it couldn’t be used against us.” 2019 was an incredible year for getting my head around diversifying access to technology learning, particularly in the hyper-male dominated field of cybersecurity. But it was also a year of finding allies. Joanne Harris at the school board enabled us to attend nationals by coming along as our female chaperone and I got to meet Diana Barbosa, Sheena Bolton and Hayley Heaslip who ran the competition.
That summer Philippe Landry from Cisco Canada got in touch and asked if I’d be interested in working toward my CCNA Cyber Operations Instructor qualification. My last I.T. certification was CompTIA’s Network+ way back in 2002, so this would be my first run at a technical certification in seventeen years, and in a subject I’d only been looking at for a couple of years. Claude Foy at FTI in Quebec was my instructor and he was patient and very giving of his time. Over the summer I became familiar with Wireshark and all sorts of other cyber-tools and in September I wrote the exam and became the first K12 teacher in Canada qualified to teach cyber operations – I think I am still the only one five years later. Yes, innovating can sometimes feel a bit lonely.
Attending Cisco Live in the fall of 2019 I was again reminded of just how cloud based (and cybersecurity dependent) things have become. I also attended my first University of Waterloo Cybersecurity & Privacy Institute conference (bringing a bus load of students with me) which opened my eyes to the current state of networked technology where we’re barely hanging on. To underline that I had my local OPP detachment asking if I could forensically analyze digital evidence for them because they weren’t resourced to do it themselves.
We ground through the pandemic but CyberTitan was one of the few events that never cancelled on us. The diverifying of our teams in 2019 led to a richer and more effective co-ed senior team. Some of the girls wanted to join the best of the boys and that mix of skillsets led to a string of top five finishes including a top defender award. The girls team also continued, missing nationals in 2020 but earning top wildcard spots in the ’21 and ’22 finals.

In 2022 I discovered that I had been seconded to ICTC for the year to advocate for and support cybersecurity education nationally. In this role I’ve been in classrooms from Newfoundland to British Columbia and many points in between. I’ve supported two new provinces in joining the competition and continue to bang my drum for recognition of essential Twenty-First Century digital skills that are so often ignored in our school systems, like cybersecurity.

This spring I joined Katina Papulkas’ Dell K-12 Education Innovation Accelerator, Part of that program was an opportunity to mentor with someone in the edtech space and I was lucky enough to be placed with Julie Foss, who helped me re-contextualize myself in my first role out of the classroom in two decades.

The experience empowered me to apply for the Cisco award. Had I remained lost at sea in terms of understanding how to do what matters in my new role, I would never have done it.

Innovation is often lonely work. It can antagonize status quo types who are intent on maintaining a system that put them in charge, but innovation is also thrilling and can empower those not privileged by that status quo. If you’re serious about diversity, equity and inclusion, innovators aren’t people you want to be labelling as troublemakers, they’re simply committed to finding a better way.

The other nice things about innovation is that you meet the most interesting people. From Ella in UBC to Kyle at Inspiretech to Eric George at the CPI, I’ve had the opportunity to meet some fascinating people who don’t status quo anything and are always looking for that better way. Cisco, both as a company and as individual employees, have been wonderful enablers of innovation, providing me with resources in a subject that everyone uses all day every day in every classroom, but almost no one teaches. Being acknowledged as an innovator by such a forward thinking organization makes me think that I’m on the right track, even if annoys some of the powers that be.

We face an ongoing shortage in cybersecurity skills and society faces a global digital skills crisis that is grinding on into its second decade. Women remain underrepresented in high paying STEM fields and especially in cybersecurity. Status quo thinking got us here, it’s time to innovate our way out of it. Thanks to Cisco for supporting that by acknowledging our work.

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If Your Car Was Engineered Like Your Cloud Computing Solution

 

2347: Dependency

Imagine you’re buying a car from a reputable manufacturer. That manufacturer doesn’t build all the components itself. It partners with other reputable manufacturing specialists and works with them to tight tolerances so that all the bits fit together and work properly.

In a tightly controlled supply chain like that you end up with complex systems that can take you hundreds of thousands of kilometers through extreme environments with only regularly maintenance. When engineering is taken seriously like this, amazing, resilient machines are the result.

If your car was built like the cloud infrastructure your business/school/government depends on to operate every day, your ‘manufacturer’ scours the internet looking for free bits and pieces of code that will do a job that they can’t be bothered to code themselves. This freeware, often taken without consent and seldom supported, becomes part of a stack of under engineered software that makes your magical, money saving cloud infrastructure work. Any time someone decides they want additional functionality, another piece is patched into this mess.

Imagine if your car was built like this. Every tire would come from a different manufacturer with different specs but they all got chucked onto the car because they filled a need at that particular moment. Some of the tires come from tire manufacturers, some came from a guy who thought he could build a better tire in his shed, and they’re all different makes and sizes. Some are tested for safety, some aren’t even legally tires. The other parts of your franken-car would also be sourced like that, with simplistic needs met but with little thought for integration or upkeep. Some parts of your rolling nightmare are updated regularly, others never have nor will be, meaning what fit together this week might not next.

One day your engine bolts might update themselves and suddenly the motor won’t start because nothing fits. The horn that got installed might not actually be a horn but a fire hazard waiting to burn your new car to the ground when you press the button. You might be running a 1990s transmission with a 2023 chassis that only superficially work with each other but will fly apart the first time you take a corner.

https://www.huawei.com/en/huaweitech/publication/81/open-source-powers-cloud-ecosystem
If there were any consistency in how open source software is integrated into business systems, this might work, but in most cases complex cloud based information management systems are cobbled together collections of corporate systems and under-resourced open source freeware. Why would this chaos suit some companies?


“Tech” companies seldom make the technology you’re purchasing from them. In most cases that fancy new operating system you’re buying was lifted from freeware and modified to fit the money-making paradigm – in many cases while ignoring the original intent of the freeware developer to provide functionality to those who need it while not supporting a profit mandate.

The stack of hardware and software your data passes through to use the internet is staggering. On your computer (laptop, smartphone, whatever, they’re all computers) you’re using a browser likely made by one company on an operating system made by another. The drivers that run the hardware that connects you online are a third company and in all three cases they may well have ‘grabbed’ some open source software to make their piece of the puzzle work. Once your data actually leaves your device it hits your router that is running another bunch of hardware and software before getting fired out to your internet service provider (ISP), who is running goodness knows what (but probably with ample amounts of ‘free’ open source software). From your ISP your data bounces from server to server on its way to its destination. If you’re reading this through social media connections you’ve now picked up all their bad habits (TwitterMetaGoogle, though notice that they all make monetizing free software like a community service). In many cases they throw trackers on your network traffic so they can sell to you.

This mad hack-fest is how the internet works and it’s how the cloud based programs everyone finds so convenient are built and maintained. Your ‘mission critical’ new cloud based accounting software depends on the slap dash engineering to work… all day, everyday. This approach almost begs to be abused, and it is.

How can we possibly secure this mess? Well, it’s nearly impossible, which is why you see so many criminals taking to this new frontier. The people using this technology are now decades into a digital skill crisis that shows no signs of ending, so the people who drive these terrible cars don’t have the skills to know just how bad they are. Our information and communication technology illiteracy also affects management who make ill informed decisions about how to integrate technology with resilience and best engineering practices first.

The vast majority of online systems depend on open source software that introduce all sorts of chaos into what should be a coherent and carefully engineered system. When you pile on missing user and management digital fluency, it’s amazing that the lights are on and your ATM is giving you cash at all.

Imagine that you are the under-resourced mechanic for that franken-car. When something breaks you may find that it doesn’t fit into what the car has changed into as other parts got upgraded. You might find that the intention of the part you need to replace was misunderstood and it wasn’t the right thing to use in the first place. Whenever you open the hood you’re not expecting to see branded parts that were designed to be engineered together, you’re seeing a hodgepodge of bits slapped together to work in a given moment. Your maintenance of this car becomes a panicky grab at anything that might make it work, which only makes things worse.

That under-resourced mechanic has a lot to do with cybersecurity specialists. When I read an article like this scattered piece in the Globe and Mail I get a sense of just how panicky and clueless management is. What’s particularly galling in that article is the insinuation that many cybersecurity experts are somehow untrustworthy criminals because they’re able to recognize the under resourced mess we’re sitting with. Incredible.

Cybersecurity is an uphill struggle. You can expect the systems you work on to be cobbled together messes, your operators don’t know what they’re doing and the people working against you (many with organized crime or foreign government support) only have to get it right once while you have to get it right (on a nightmare software stack) everyday. It’s no wonder we’re in a decades long shortage of cyber-talent and seeing burnout becoming a major factor.

The decision to start taking online security from software development up seriously is going to take a revolution in thinking. Perhaps the coming quantum disruption to encryption in cybersecurity will prompt this change. The hacked together mess we’re working with today is begging to be burned down and redone properly.

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Education Isn’t About Job Training and Other Privilege Based EDUMyths

In fairness, since then Ontario
has released new computer
studies curriculum that actually
includes the word ‘cybersecurity’
in it! That’d be the first time
anywhere in Canada.
It’s 2023. 

I posted a piece about the drastic ongoing shortage of cybersecurity specialists in Canada last week. Those would be the people who keep the digital communications we depend on every day running… and we don’t have enough of them


“Talking Points
– Canada was short on cybersecurity workers five years ago and the problem has only worsened
– One in six jobs goes unfilled in protecting data and critical infrastructure
– the cybersecurity workforce is older, whiter and more male than the general population”


When things get hacked in school boards, the learning stops pretty quickly as most now depend entirely on networked education technology to communicate lessons and learning. Cybersecurity also underlies the supply chains that provide the fuel and food we depend on and the financial systems that grease all those wheels. You’d think support of it would be obvious.


It’s Twitter though so self interest will always trump the collective kind – until there is no food, gas or electricity because our critical infrastructure is crippled in a cyber-attack. What struck me about this response was how insulated the thinking is.

The response that education shouldn’t chase job training is a common one in education. As a poor immigrant kid whose family struggled to make ends meet, it’s also one dripping in old settler generational comfort and privilage. If you are so sheltered that you can spend your time in public education finding yourself, then good for you; the rest of us are trying to feed ourselves.

Perhaps watching my family crash through bankruptcy while I was in high school put a unique spin on my experience. I dropped out and went to work because it’s what I had to do. A bit more time in class helping me find what I’m good at and then directing me into it would have been appreciated. It doesn’t all have to be about job preparedness, but stubbornly refusing to acknowledge it at all feels politically self serving.

When I started teaching in my mid-thirties, one of the senior guys in the department asked at lunch, ‘do you know why you never see a guidance councillor looking out the window in the morning? Because then they’d have nothing to do in the afternoon.’ I’d only just started teaching and didn’t know many guidance councillors, but my experience as a student with them wasn’t positive. What I can say after 20 years in public education is that guidance is one of those roles that you never see people leave. Classroom teaching is tough. You seldom even have time to go to the toilet. You’ll see a lot of people try it for a couple of years and then bail on the profession entirely. You’ll see others work their way into ‘support’ jobs outside of the classroom as soon as they can. Bright eyed twenty-something VPs are a fine example. My litmus test for if those jobs are easier than the classroom is how often I see people move back to teaching to get out of them. The answer is: you don’t.
A few weeks ago I found myself at dinner with a very smart person who is a leader in educational training. They said something that stuck with me. The problem with the education system is that it’s mainly populated by people who have never done anything else. The vast majority of educators attended K-12 schooling (where they felt very comfortable), went straight into university, got their undergraduate degree and then bachelor of education, and then immediately returned to K-12 education. They have never been in any other circumstance beyond the education system. They have never worked in a non-unionized environment. If we’re wondering why education has trouble evolving, this is at the core of it.
That insolated world view is where you get comments like, ‘education isn’t job training!’ Perhaps that should read, ‘education was job training for me, but it isn’t for you!’ That explains the politically self-serving piece.
A quick fix would be to require all teacher candidates to have at least one year of life experience beyond the education system they’re so comfortable in. Perhaps then the status quo wouldn’t seem quite so inevitable.

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