Dusty World – Page 14 – Mechanical Sympathy

Is It Over?

No, it hasn’t. Prepare to get maytagged by quadmesters for the foreseeable future

I’m staggering to the end of this absurd quadmester. When it started I wondered if less was all we could manage, and it turns out that it is. From administration dismissing concerns about masks that don’t fit (or really matter when you can catch COVID through your eyes) and are so far beyond of Health Canada and local health unit expectations that they end up being more restrictive than needed and not at all designed for all-day use (especially while performing instruction), to a schedule that seems explicitly designed to download an abusive amount of work on classroom teachers with the highest class caps, this quadmester has been a disaster.

The lack of focus on what we’re supposed to be doing (providing effective and differentiated instruction that maximizes student learning, remember?) suggests that these things never really mattered in the first place. Got special learning needs? Too bad, special education support is cancelled. Find keeping up with school difficult? Too bad, we’re going to fire you through courses at record pace even though everyone is reeling from a pandemic. Don’t worry though, it doesn’t really matter if you keep up or not because you’re getting credits regardless.

I’m able to provide interactive, relevant online learning opportunities for my students and even I still struggled with between 20-40% disengagement in remote learning this quadmester. I’ve heard of other classes that just did nothing online. If you talk to admin about it they’d rather pretend it’s happening than do anything to ensure it is with anything like quality in mind. I had a class drop down to twenty students which means it could have become a single cohort and I could be their online instructor, but making a change for pedagogical effectiveness that would have alleviated a staff member’s medically supported issues with the provided face masks wasn’t something anyone had any time for.

https://twitter.com/tk1ng/status/1324470383496564736

I recently learned that students can opt out of remote learning entirely if they want. This has resulted in kids who have attended less than fifty hours of instruction earning Ontario high school credits this quadmester (Ontario high school courses are supposed to be 110 hours of instruction). Remote learning with a teacher unqualified or even knowledgeable about the subject (as was my case with both of my online support teachers) can’t be called instructional time anyway. ‘Quadmester’ should be changed to ‘freemester’ or ‘fakemester’.

This kind of inflation is exactly what the current government has been trying to do over the past two years by pushing massive class sizes (even during a pandemic) and devaluing complex pedagogical practice in order to cheapen public education. They couldn’t stuff more students into classes, so they reduced expectations and lowered the efficacy of the system to the point of absurdity while handing out credits like candy, and the people making it happen are getting bonuses for devaluing our education system! They must be very proud. Fear not though, PC party backers are ready to step in with private for-profit options that are likely to perform worse and cost more.

***

As I wrap things up from my double cohort/teaching continuously all day/double class/teaching continuously every week quadmester one I’m struck with how this drink-from-the-firehose schedule that doesn’t remotely meet Ontario standards not only injures already traumatized students and staff but also removes the most challenging work I do in class.

We got to the culminating projects (exams are cancelled – as is all safety paperwork because why not) and I found that my grade 9s have not had the opportunity to develop a rigorous and resilient engineering process in the way that they would in any other year, though considering the class is half as long as it should be I shouldn’t be surprised. I’ve been able to cover the basic material, though the speed at which that came at students was overwhelming even to the stronger ones. Neurologically speaking, you need time to reflect and internalize new learning, but best pedagogical practices have long since been flushed down the toilet.

I keep hoping that we’ll make adjustments toward making Ontario education more equitable and fair to everyone as this slow burn pandemic grinds on, but the powers that be appear to believe that they are finished and are ready to fire us through quadmester after quadmester rather than responding in a best practices-continuous evolution. I’ve suggested previously that the week-on week-off is already problematic, so why not just go back to week on week off semesters? If we did that with a Friday fully remote review day we could also give teachers and students the headspace they need to consume new learning, but the new normal is too waterboard everyone with a pedagogically bankrupt schedule that only has the appearance of credibility.

As we lurch into quadmester two with no quadmester ending in sight I’m looking forward to not being waterboarded any more, but I’ve still been handed another technology course with two cohorts and a teacher who has no background in my speciality ‘covering’ the remote part of the course, so I can expect another poorly engineered schedule designed to hand out cheap credits. I got handed the same thing (a course I’m not qualified to teach) to provide remote support in even while I’m still providing technical support to people across the school and beyond. There is evidently no way to differentiate teacher schedules to give them time to provide system support either.

I’ll do what I can to mitigate this poor scheduling (again), but since the system has downloaded all guidance and special education expectations on me as well I’ll be stretched (once again) to the breaking point trying to protect students from a schedule designed by people who don’t seem to care for their personal circumstances and well being… while struggling through a pandemic with my own health concerns.

Even evidence that the system think types are evolving this in the right direction would be helpful, but communications are nearly non-existent and there is no sense of vision or even an acknowledgement that what we’re doing isn’t kind, let alone working. The new normal is a cruel, undifferentiated and ultimately meaningless place. With a complete lack of leadership from the Ministry or Minister, we’re likely to see Ontario plunge in years of darkness as a result of this overwhelming and cruel schedule.

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Game Mastery

I misspent an awful lot of my youth Dungeon Mastering. We often spent whole days, ten-twelve hour stretches in a row, playing Dungeons and Dragons in various basements. During the summer it wasn’t uncommon for us to do whole weeks of days (or nights) like that.

If you’ve never played the game before, it’s basically a combination of story telling, creative writing, map making, art and random dice rolls. You create a character with a set of statistics and you go out and adventure with them. As you gain experience, you get to improve your statistics and get better chances to survive battles and face greater challenges. The characters develop based on their experiences (and their luck). Over time people get mighty attached to them. The players control themselves, the DM is the story teller, the one who controls the world in which they find themselves. When it’s done well, it feels a lot like you’re all creating a fantastic narrative together, and none of you knows how it’s going to end.

I ended up falling into the role of the DM because I could story tell well, and I learned to roll with the dice, I didn’t try to force the story when a lucky dice roll would change my expectations. Early on I’d over-script adventures and then have trouble when the dice allowed characters to do things I didn’t expect (or shouldn’t have had a statistical chance of happening). It took a bit of practice (and developing confidence) to trust that the story would unfold before us.

In one case I planned to kill off all the characters in the first five minutes, and then have them adventure in the after-life trying to get their lives back. As I mentioned, people get mighty attached to their characters. Dying freaked them out, they fought and fought. Finally, a tiny little hobbit-thief was the last one standing, facing the Grim Reaper himself. I had to give him a chance, otherwise the dice (and game) are pointless, so I said he had to roll a natural 20 (a 20 on a 20 sided dice) to successfully attack death. He actually did it. Right then I had to throw away my plan and go in a new direction. It wasn’t as nuanced as what I had prepared, but it mattered more to the players because they were authoring it, rather than having it read to them. Giving players no authorship in the game made it empty, pointless. That game became infamous, as did the Halfling who foot swept Death.

After a while, DMing all came down to world building (those are two of dozens) for me. I didn’t worry so much about what they would be facing on a situation by situation basis, as long as I knew where we were and when we were. The more richly we’d develop the world, its politics, religion, history, geography, the easier it was to create a rich, interactive experience around my players (this was a very collaborative thing, players would bring maps, histories, heraldry, costumes and all sorts of other surprises to games).

Our first road trip at 17 years old was an adventure in a rickety Chevette from Toronto to Milwaukee for GenCon, the gaming fair put on by the makers of Dungeons and Dragons. In the ’80s, this place was the Mecca for gaming. Tens of thousands of attendees in the largest conference centre in town. We attended lectures on ethics in gaming, integrating history and geology into world creation, and we played tournaments with thousands of others. We met the artists and authors that we loved; a professional conference for geeky seventeen year olds!

We took that richness and turned it over into our game play. Our stories evolved from dungeon crawls for loot, to archetypal quests to modern day parables about the evils people do. At its leading edge one of our games could speak to our own alienation and sense of desperation, while simultaneously giving us a means to exorcise it.

All of this made me aware of how a game works on a fundamental level. If you apply certainty and destroy choice (and chance), you kill it stone dead. If you place one participant in a position of absolute power so that they become a teller, rather than a participant, you’ve killed it again. You play a game best when you play it within its own context. Any game that breaks the forth wall falls to pieces. Game coherency requires consistency, not to a person’s will, but to the circumstances of the game. The best games are flexible enough to become richer as players add their own content (experiences, objects, ideas) to the game.

I’ve seen players cry when their character dies, but not only in sadness, also with respect. A good death is a good story, it honours the player’s efforts, the character’s beliefs and the game itself. The nice thing about a game is that sometimes Valkyries can then bring that dead hero to Valhalla, and you never know what can happen from there… good games give you a chance to maximize people’s involvement in them using the full spectrum of human emotion and intellect.

This has been percolating since I met another former DnDer (@liamodonnell) at OTF21C a few weeks ago and said, “everything I know about teaching, I learned from DMing.” It’s the truth.

I wanted to turn this into a rant on gamification in education, but in looking back on this, I realize that these ideas are very important to me. I’ve always had a great deal of trouble believing, but my years spent as an acolyte of gaming have made me just that, a believer.

I’m going to leave the other bits below, but feel free to stop reading here. I’m happy with clarifying a good idea rather than attacking a bad one.

Notes that didn’t make the cut:

Games aren’t ephemeral, if you want them to work, you have to nurture coherency within the game context

Not knowing what was going to happen also, ultimately, made it easier for me as a game master. I got to share in the story instead of telling it. I wasn’t a transmitter, I was part of a cast, bringing a story to life.

Any of this sound familiar from a teaching perspective?

If you deliver your teaching with cardboard certainty and inflexible perfection, your students have no authorship in that experience, it means nothing to them. If you teach as a participant, the interaction has life, and everyone involved is authoring it. It might not be as efficient or technically perfect as you’d like, but then I think perfection is entirely overrated.

The real danger is when those cardboard teachers try to use games as if they were a sugar coating you can apply to make something edible. Gamification tries to use game play as a way of getting people to do things, but that is a disaster.

Gold stars aren’t a new idea, but they sound like one if you throw fancy terms like gamification on them.

A good game needs to work within its own limits, but those limits should be deeply embedded within the game dynamics, and they should be designed to be adjustable, games should evolve meaningfully as their players do.

Architectural Responses to Virtual Mindspaces

I’ve been watching home reno shows over Alanna’s shoulder and noticed that in almost all cases everyone is knocking out walls and creating ‘open concept’ living spaces. I can’t help but think this is a side effect of personalized media.

Once you had a ‘TV room’ but it’s no longer needed. We still share media, but we don’t sit in a room staring at a cathode ray tube in groups. Without the need for shared broadcast media viewing spaces we open up our living spaces. Any time we want some privacy, we simply dive into a screen.

One of the unique features of digital technology is that it creates a self-directed, private virtual space for your interests. If you want to drop out of your surroundings you can do it in a moment on a smartphone or tablet. You can see people doing this in public spaces all the time, but it also works at home. We used to do this with watching TV, but the broadcast nature of that media meant not everyone watching wanted to. Even the ones who chose the show were passive consumers. In a world where some people wanted to watch TV and others wanted to read, we built up walls as the two aren’t mutually conducive. With personal devices and media you can have ten people all doing exactly what they want in media rich ways, all in the same space.

Digital media is much stickier and attention grabbing than broadcast media because it’s self directed and participatory instead of passive and consumptive. Digital immersion can happen in much busier places because we are active participants. It can also thrive in those places because digital media offers a richer variety of media. It effectively amalgamates all previous forms of media as well as spawning new ones.

Architecture reflects our communication habits: this space
is designed for the telling of information. Self directed
information gathering and collaboration are not what
this room is about.

Architecture adapts to changes in how we communicate. Classrooms in school are an architectural response to a model of teaching based on the verbal transmission of information. You couldn’t have twenty teachers all talking to their students in an open concept space, it wouldn’t work, so walls went up. Now that we’re evolving into personalized virtual spaces that offer access to information, communication and collaboration on a level unimaginable twenty years ago, what will physical classrooms evolve into? If you don’t have to wait for someone to verbally communicate information, what will schools look like?

We lament digital distraction as a scourge on society, but it is also an information rich immersive experience that offers us a new dimension of mental privacy. We are increasingly able to collaborate and communicate in complex, geographically irrelevant ways. Watching how architecture responds to this change in behaviour is one of the surest ways to see how influential this digital revolution has become.

Bad Habits: these tools are not toys

The other week we had a PD on differentiated instruction. Before this long, undifferentiated lecture, I tried to get netbooks into as many interested teacher’s hands as possible. We set up a Google doc, opened up Twitter and began back channeling. It went well, most of the teachers trying it had never back channeled before. In a one way lecture with virtually no two way communication between the audience and the lecturer, we had ourselves a bracing and critical discussion about the material being covered.

That’s not how the vast majority of our colleagues saw it though. The cut-eye from people began the moment I opened my netbook; the assumption is that if you’re on a computer you’re wasting time, not paying attention, screwing around. Admittedly, the vast majority of the angry (embarrassed even) stares came from older teachers, but not exclusively. The passive, talked at audience thought we’d found a way out of the lecture using technology, rather than a way to make it engaging. The highlight came when the lecturer began standing next to one of the back channelers in an attempt to use proximity to get her back on task; even the instructor assumed technology use was time wasting.

One of the most powerful aspects of back channelling, even in the most non participatory lectures, is that it can create a responsive, audience involved activity that allows viewers to engage in learning actively. That many people in the room didn’t recognize what active learning looks like in a world of Twitter and shared documents tells you something about where they see their classes from.

The assumption I’m most interested in is that technology allows the user to screw around, not do what they are supposed to be doing. This makes me wonder what these teachers think their students are doing when they book them into a computer lab, is it a free period in their minds? Or does this have more to do with how people pay attention to a lesson or lecture? If that’s the case, do they assume students aren’t listening when they are taking notes? or not staring at the speaker?

There are some interesting questions around multi-tasking here, but I’ll leave them for another time. What I suspect is that this all comes back to a fear of technology in learning; it’s still assumed by many that internet access is a complete waste of time. They think that the web is Youtube, Farmville, Facebook and meaningless, puerile and unproductive navel gazing. For many students (and teachers I guess) it is, but then, isn’t it up to us as teachers to show students how to make productive use of what may be one of the pinnacles of human engineering?

As old fashioned as this sounds, this may all boil down to what we think about note taking, a skill that is all but ignored in education. Learning how to take notes is vital, and back channelling, shared documents and a plethora of online services (Google docs, Prezi, Twitter, Adobe Connect and other video sharing tools, wall wisher, Todaysmeet, Backnoise, and many others; this is constantly evolving) have created new opportunities for note taking and interactivity with learning interaction and recording that didn’t exist previously. These new skills need to be integrated into basic note taking. We need to stop ignoring technology competency in the learning process.

However you care to illustrate the process of learning, recording your learning in some way is a vital part of the process. It allows you to clarify ideas, isolate material, review it at a later date and summarize your knowledge. Note taking works as a fluid process that integrates the learner into what can be an alienating, passive situation, making them an active participant. I don’t think anyone would suggest that students shouldn’t take notes, but passive lectures (unless you’re at PD) have become a thing of the past. Differentiated instruction and student centered learning have tended to de-emphasize note taking (often replaced with handouts). This seems to cause students new to university a great deal of difficulty.

Perhaps the best thing technology can bring to this are new ways to collaborate, participate and communicate a learner’s response to new material, but not if we’re assuming that the tools used are really just toys.

Raging: how empowered learners respond to being outside the Zone

Getting a student into the zone of proximal development is a tricky business. If students don’t have sufficient background knowledge and skill in what they’re learning, they tend to switch off. This often shows as distraction, disengagement and disinterest. In extreme cases students become disruptive, knocking others who might be on the cusp of their ZPD out of a learning opportunity. This seems to be happening more often in classrooms, I have an idea why…

That disruptive approach is common in online gaming. It might be useful to look at how raging, trolling and ‘Umad‘ online interaction points to a foreign set of values that many students are familiar and comfortable with. The vast majority of educators have no experience or knowledge of gaming culture. When a student in the class room acts on values they’ve learned while gaming, shock ensues.

Teabaggging is one of many tactics designed to belittle an opponent

In a player versus player game, game balance and the opportunity for everyone to participate in a maximal way (in their ZPD) depends on the players all having sufficient skill to make a game of it. In a randomly generated game, it’s common for a team of n00bs to get pwned by a more skilled team. This is often accompanied by flaming with the intent to anger your opponents to such a degree that they quit (ideally vocally angry, allowing you to throw in a umad? before they storm off). In gaming, ‘schooling‘ your opponents is a vital part of the learning process. It’s the clearest way to state your superiority in skill over an opponent. The goal is to make it so clear to a weaker player that they are out of their league (way outside their ZPD) that they give up in anger. This is going to sound very foreign to the overly compassionate, no-bullying, we’re all to be treated as equals approach found in education, but this is where many students spend hours of their time when not in the manufactured environment of their school.

A gamer who is forced out of a game in this fashion is very angry in the moment, and quits the game, usually to pick up another game immediately. In this game, if they are within their ZPD in terms of their gaming skills (which involves knowledge of the game environment, hand eye coordination, strategy and cooperative play, among others), they are immediately re-engaged. Their recent failure does not hurt them or follow them in any way, and the adrenaline burst of anger has prompted them to intensively refocus on the game. I suspect the stats for a player in a post-rage situation improve due to the residual anger and energy released. They increase their skill with this hyper focus and rage less often.

When you meet a master player, they tend to shy away from the trash talk and simply demonstrate their skill, rather than yapping about it. This kind of mastery is every player’s goal. When they get there, they often adopt the degree of awesomeness Jane McGonigal talks about in her TEDtalk. As nice as it is to see someone recognizing gaming awesomeness, it’s also important to recognize that gaming intensity requires accessing a full range of emotional response in players. These responses can often seem cruel or unusual to non-gamers.

Gaming’s all-in philosophy is completely counter to the risk-averse, failure-follows you approach of education. Rather than being allow to epically fail, suffer and re-engage, education does everything it can to ensure that epic failures (or failures of any kind) never occur. Failure is increasingly impossible to achieve in the class room, and the result moves students further and further away from the culture of one of their richest learning environments.

If you want intense engagement then you need to offer access to a full spectrum of emotion, and a real and meaningful opportunity for failure, but you can’t be an ass about it and hang that failure around a learner’s neck forever. Until we grasp this simple truth found in the forge of intense gaming, we’re going to appear increasingly foreign to our students, and they are going to keep learning more from World of Warcraft than they ever will from a teacher.

http://www.pbs.org/kcts/videogamerevolution/impact/myths.html (lies debunked about gaming)
http://janemcgonigal.com/: a great look at the positive power gaming can produce (I’m arguing here about how it’s negative aspects still offer useful truths too)
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.04/genX.html: an interesting summary of the gamer generation
http://www.avantgame.com/: recognizing the power of gaming

A Cure for Double Doubling

The following is relevant to what’s happening in my board, but since there appears to be no central plan from a ‘ministry’ of education, every board is doing their own thing, so this might not apply to you. In my world the double-double is now an overwhelming truth that combines all the difficulties of remote learning with the challenges of providing face to face instruction in a medical emergency simultaneously all day every day. I have two classes like that so I’m prepping for two different lessons and instructing in two places at once (online and f2f) all day every day every week, no breaks.

I have some ideas on how to fix that:

I’m able to cover the basic hands on and theory learning in my face to face technology classes, but the more pedagogically complex work like developing an adaptive and agile engineering process by working out how to solve problems in non-linear, failure heavy learning situations simply isn’t happening in our drink-from-the-firehose quadmestered schedule. There is no time or the space you need in order to iterate past problems and internalize this deeper learning, and there is no time as a teacher to generate this prodigious amount of material. How could we make moves to fix that?

TIMETABLING SUGGESTION #1: NO MORE QUADMESTERS! A good old fashioned semester with one class each week has its own problems (like 3 weeks between each subject), but would also mean no more double/doubling because we’d never have an always on quadmester.

A weekend break between crossovers between subjects along with our current cleaning regimens (which seem to do a better job at stopping COVID19 than the general public) suggest that we could return to a semestered system safely. Rather than waiting months to take a breath, teachers would have a rotating prep each month where they could plan for the next onslaught. Senior students would have a breath too if they have a spare.

Double cohorts of simultaneous face to face and remote students mean teachers are producing learning content at high speed (a week of intensive class equals almost a month of regular class) while also having to produce online and face to face lessons. The marking obviously comes at an accelerated rate too. This is absurd. I wish we had a union. Breaking up the quadmester system back into semesters means everyone would cycle through all their classes every four weeks, and while there will be retention problems, there are anyway. At the very least getting semesters back would mean that students with spares would get to experience them and teachers would actually be given time to prep what they’re teaching. It also means that we’re not dragging kids through rapid fire quadmesters and they would have time to digest what’s coming at them. Best of all it means we’d never have to use the term ‘quadmester’ again.

***

The remote part is happening simultaneously and I’m supposed to be designing and running that too… while I’m teaching f2f at the same time. Parents are wondering why I’m not responding to questions online in a timely fashion while I’m teaching the other cohort in the classroom. In the meantime I’ve given a ‘remote learning support teacher’ to help me with that, except they’ve yet to be able to provide anyone who has the faintest clue what we’re doing in computer engineering.

I’m seeing make-work for teachers instead of them focusing on teaching, let’s stop that.

TIMETABLING SUGGESTION #2: CAP ALL SPECIALTY CLASSES THAT YOU CAN’T FIND A QUALIFIED TEACHER TO REMOTELY SUPPORT AT 20 AND MAKE THEM SINGLE COHORT CLASSES.

Rather than inventing make-work that has people making teacher salaries to babysit students online (no marking or any other responsibilities), let’s let subject specialists remotely support their own classes.

The myth is that we’re providing 2.5 hours of face to face instruction and 2.5 hours of remote instruction each day adding up to enough instructional time to equal a credit, but if we can’t provide a qualified, knowledgeable teacher to manage the learning then we’re not providing the instruction time the Ministry of Education claims is required to earn a credit. A split f2f/remote cohorted system does good things in reducing face to face class sizes (though when students are coming off buses with 38+ students on them you have to wonder how effective it is), but f2f/remote quadmesters are a shell game when it comes to actual instructional time.

I’ve got 15-20% of my grade 9s (the ones with IEPs who need support – but that’s been cancelled in school) not doing any remote learning at all. Since the remote learning support teachers aren’t qualified to speak to the material and don’t have any clearly defined responsibilities anyway, these kids are falling through the cracks. This academically driven rapid-fire quadmestered system is predicated on privilege and aimed at student success for the successful. Kids who struggle in the system are being run over by it (as usual).

We’ve been given ‘remote support teachers’ who are supposed to oversee the elearning half, but they’ve yet to provide me with one who is qualified in my subject area and both have said that they have no idea what we’re doing in class. I’m unable to put them as teachers in the Cisco Netacademy LMS because they aren’t qualified to teach it, which is kinda the point. Guess who gets all the content question emails? Except I’m kinda face to face all day too.

This could be fixed at next to no cost. Tech classes have smaller caps anyway, so setting them to the cohort limit (or changing the cohort limit to tech caps) wouldn’t change class sizes or displace students at all while ensuring that qualified teachers are teaching specialist subjects. Tech numbers have remained strong because they are hands-on classes that don’t translate to a remote learning platform well. In the spring we were told students can’t do any tech work at home even if they had the tools at home for liability reasons, so there is another reason to protect this specialized learning in face to face situations. Any class that focuses on tactile hands on learning should be prioritized in face to face classes. Those classes (tech, art, etc) shouldn’t be lumped in with academic classes that work online.

We’re frequently told this situation is flexing, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of flexibility in planning once it’s in place. I only hope the people responsible for arranging the deck chairs on our ship aren’t nailing them into place, because they’re placed poorly.

***

I’m watching my grade 9s struggling to wrap up this overwhelming rapid fire quadmester now. I’m crawling to the end of the damned thing wondering how things have gone so wrong. In the first couple of weeks I didn’t know how I’d get to the end. It turns out the answer is: do less less well, which I’m not satisfied with. I’m not sure that the people running things who haven’t been in a classroom in the 21st Century are as frustrated by that as I am though.

The nines struggle to adapt to a semestered system when they end in January in normal scheduling. In this pandemic scheduled school year they are getting buried even while being overwhelmed emotionally by the limitations inflicted upon us by this virus. There was a lot of talk about mental health and care before we launched this waterboarding schedule. It’d be nice if that focus returned when people were thinking about how the second semester might go down in February.

If not a weekly/semestered schedule, how about a four day week with one day as a fully remote working day where teachers who are teaching their students rather than babysitting them could interact meaningfully with them in that online environment in real time (hard to do when face to face at the same time)? Doing that instead of inventing make-work ‘remote support teachers’ would be a much more functional use of time. If prep times were integrated into that remote learning day we’d also be able to cut the dozens of ‘teachers’ who are covering (or not if they aren’t qualified) teachers in order to provide them with prep time. I haven’t had any prep time since this quadmester started because they’ve yet to be able to provide me with a tech qualified teacher to cover my class, and I’m not going to pull my students out of hands-on work even if I desperately need the prep time because the whole point of face to face classes it to restore tactile hands-on learning that was lost in remote teaching in the spring.

We could even vary classes based on what they are instead of lock-stepping everyone through the same always on quad-mestered system, but locking all classes to academically focused approaches is the education system’s knee jerk response to everything. Wouldn’t it be something if this pandemic emergency actually produced better pedagogy through creative and differentiated scheduling rather than overwhelming everyone with the same, simplistic and unsustainable quadmestered plan?

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BYOD: Build Your Own Device

Proof of mastery: you build your own tools.

Perhaps we can work this Jedi logic into education?

Want to make use of educational technology? Unless you’ve built it yourself you don’t get free access, you haven’t demonstrated competence! Access to technology based on demonstrated understanding rather than the net income of a student’s parents? That sounds like a more sound pedagogical model than current BYOD policies we have. It’s time for education to take technology fluency seriously.

I’ve already argued for a pedagogical model for technology access…

http://prezi.com/bjmmmgc3aka5/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy&rc=ex0share

I think I rushed into mastery too soon there, it’s commonly overused in education anyway. Unless the digital wizard can produce their own wand they haven’t demonstrated real mastery. Recognizing all elements in your discipline is a vital element to mastery, including the tools that you need to demonstrate your mastery!

The hunter who hunts with the bow they made? The rider who rides a bike they built? The artist who stretches their own canvases? No one could argue that their understanding of their craft isn’t deeper than a consumer who purchased off the shelf, yet we’ve modeled educational technology on consumerist ideals rather than pedagogical imperatives.

From board provided technology to a mini-lab to bring-your-own-device to build-your-own-device, there is the new continuum. Until you’ve built your device from the components up and mounted software on it, you haven’t demonstrated mastery of technology, you’re still just a user.

Until we begin to do this in education we’ll continue to produce technologically incapable students who are slaves to their habitual technology use.

A Vision of Elearning Focused on Pedgagogy

I’ve been a student and then a teacher through the earliest iterations of online learning. At university I took one of the last mailed correspondence courses in the mid-nineties and I’ve been online since BBSes and user-groups in the early 90s. That whole time I was working summers and holidays in IT jobs, though they weren’t called ‘IT jobs’ yet. For two summers I helped Unitel Engineering digitize their paper based parts ordering system at their electronics shop in Scarborough by moving everything in their decades old paper based system from filing cabinets to Lotus123 on DOS/early Windows.

After graduation I got my first full time gig at Ontario Store Fixtures where I was attached to the programming team that was converting their old DOS based manufacturing system to JDEdwards OneWorld integrated management process. This was a very early server based system that was the step between desktops and the cloud based systems we use today. Two years teaching overseas in Japan showed me the technology that was soon to arrive in North America, such as digital cameras and high speed home internet. I played Diablo with a friend in Mississauga from my apartment in Akita City and watched Y2K pass over us at a thousand year old temple. When I wasn’t doing that I was helping engineers and doctors translate their work for international consumption, working on everything from electronic/robotics systems that helped parallelised people move their limbs to the latest in LCD technology coming out of the NEC factory near where we lived.

By the early naughties we were back in Ontario and I was a certified IT and network technician and working full time in the field. I changed directions into teaching in 2003/4 and my first teaching job in Peel Region had me setting up the first wireless router in the board in our library so students with their newfangled Blackberries and wireless laptops could get online – it would be years before board IT caught up with us. The next summer I got a job in their new elearning summer program. We were using the Angel online system which was a rudimentary webpage with such basic media that you had to hand code the html if you wanted it to be anything other than text.

One of my favourite elearning experiences came in those early days. Peel didn’t run elearning as a credit factory. They focused on strong students with digital experience and then pushed for advanced course delivery. In our Grade 12 academic class we had students from across Ontario as well as international students from Bangkok, Tokyo and Shanghai who were taking the course to prove they had the English language skills necessary to attend university in Canada. Working with this international group felt like what the future of teaching could be.

A good example of the above and beyond nature of these students was the final exam, which happened in a live two hour window. The students overseas were up in the middle of the night and when the internet went down in part of Mississauga my student who was in that blackout called around, found a friend with working internet and rode her bike over there to complete the exam on time. Back then elearning wasn’t an excuse to do less, it was a reason to do more.

I continued to teach elearning in summer school for the next five years as I moved to my current school board and they started up their own elearning program (I volunteered to be in the inaugural group and was the only one in it who had actually taught any). This branched out into blended face to face and elearning classes ranging from career studies to a specialized locally developed media arts program for at risk students as well as the usual online English courses. Early versions of video conference like Adobe Connect came up and I always seized this emerging technology to develop better learning relationships and bandwidth with my students. One day we were all on a live video conference working independently when one of the student’s moms came in and asked if he wanted takeout hamburgers for lunch. She laughed when we all replied that hamburgers sounded great. That was in 2008 before unions and school boards conspired to take video conferencing off limits. It took the education minister in a pandemic emergency this past spring to get Ontario’s education system to begin using this technology again… twelve years later. Sabotage by political interests in Ontario education are a big reason why we are still so bad at elearning.

Rather than focus on students who needed access to courses and had highly developed digital skills and resilience, elearning devolved into a way of offering credits for at risk students that didn’t want to attend school. It was then decided to give elearning sections to teachers in smaller schools that were losing population instead of giving those sections to teachers who had the experience, skills and interest in making this challenging emerging learning situation work. The end result was students and teachers who didn’t want to be in elearning. As that all happened I found myself removed from teaching it and by 2012 I was no longer doing any elearning at all.

In the meantime I’ve developed a very successful computer technology program, so my journey into digitally enabled pedagogy has not stopped. My students and I built some of the first virtual reality systems used by students in the province and we’ve tackled all sorts of IT challenges including Skills Ontario and then CyberTitan and cybersecurity. We’ve created a unique software engineering/video game development program that has already launched a number of careers and we have grads working everywhere from Tesla and Google to Electronic Arts while others have started their own companies. In aid of that I’ve become a Cisco Netacademy Instructor which offers my students one of the most advanced elearning management systems in the world, and I’m constantly exploring online coding LMSes such as code.org and codehs.com for my students. If anything, stepping away from elearning, especially after what it had become, gave me the flexibility to explore digital pedagogy more than staying in it would have.

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Elearning implementation has always suffered from a lack of vision. It stumbled into existence as a substitute for mail order courses in the late 90s and early Zeroes because it was cheaper and faster than all those stamps. In the early days it was tentatively adopted by programs like Peel’s independent summer school but it has never been adopted into specialized virtual schools and was still struggling for acceptance up until this year when suddenly everyone was an elearning/remote teacher.

Even in 2019 unions were attacking elearning as a ‘lesser than form’ of teaching in an attempt to stop government attacks on public education. That Ontario’s anti-education government was suggesting stuffing 40-50 students into elearning classes shows how this scalable system is prone to abuse and pedagogical deflation. Those union attacks annoyed many members like myself who have been working on developing this emerging medium of learning for most of our careers.

There is nothing education does better than look backwards and poorly handle change. If it does adopt technology it’s usually to try and redo what it has been doing for decades as a cost saver. Google Docs instead of photocopies, online forms instead of quizzes, worksheets on screen instead of paper; educational adoption of digital tools is all about the Substitution in SAMR; use it while keeping things as much the same as possible. As I said earlier, elearning implementation has shown a startling lack of vision and leadership.

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There was a time when you had a choice…

I recently didn’t get an elearning job, but that’s OK because the last thing I want to be doing is middle managing to the status quo, What I want to do is explore and expand our best digital pedagogical practices; seeing how cheaply we can do the minimum doesn’t do anything for me (or anyone else not in management). There still seems to be a lot of pressure to overload elearning classes with students and then using limited corporate walled-garden systems from attention merchants like Google. This is baffling from a f2f teacher perspective where I’m seeing people getting paid teacher salaries while not actually doing any teaching. We could leverage the influx of teachers into the system much more effectively than we are to quickly create smaller remote classes that would involve teachers actually teaching and supporting learning instead of babysitting.

I’d want to advocate for smaller class sizes in elearning, especially in higher needs classes where remote teachers are also doing the jobs of guidance counsellors and special education support in a dangerous time. I’d also want to advocate for an efficient system for vetting alternative online systems that offer greater bandwidth with our remote students, but most boards have equated student privacy and cybersecurity with exclusive deals with tax dodging advertising/technology giants rather than looking to create a diverse yet secure ecosystem of online digital tools for learning. Signing an agreement with an attention merchant to indoctrinate the students in your care in their advertising systems so you can hand them graduates familiar with their products is an easier box to check.

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What would my dream elearning job be? Let me take my digitally expert senior students in software engineering/game development and computer engineering, give us leading edge tools and let us see what digital learning is capable of in 2020. By exploring emerging technology we could not only make elearning more effective, but also ease the social distance anxiety many people are feeling.

Just before school started this year in its masked, socially distanced, quadmestered and frankly diminished capacity, I saw this tweet from Jon Resendez. It stayed on my mind as we launched this uneven and unsustainable (for the people doing double cohort, double classes remotely and f2f all day every day simultaneously) quadmester. More pedagogically sound elearning processes wouldn’t just help remote teachers at the moment, they’d help everyone since we’re all remote teaching in one way or another, it’s just that some of us are trying to do it while face to face with students at the same time.

There are two sides of elearning I’d want to explore with my digitally skilled students. My computer engineers could focus on the physical hardware that might improve remote learning outcomes and my senior software engineers would be able to explore and even write the software we need to explore and expand communications between remote teachers and their students.

One of the exciting evolutions happening right now is in virtual reality. We’ve been exploring this through our board’s forward thinking SHSM program since 2015. As the technology has matured prices have tumbled. The Oculus Quest 2 runs at a resolution that would have required a $1000 VR system connected to a $2000 high speed PC back in 2015, but it now costs less than $500 (very close to what a Chromebook costs). What might a class equiped with immersive, fully interactive virtual and augmented reality look like?

Experiential learning takes a huge leap forward in VR. Giving students a chance to virtually explore Anne Frank’s house instead of talking about it or passively watching a video makes the benefits of immersive experiential learning obvious.

If you’re more future thinking how about a detailed 3d model of the ISS that you and students could explore:

… or a universe simulator that lets you create gravitationally accurate solar systems? You can explore the deep ocean or amaze yourself in Google Earth VR, which is so engaging that you often forget you have the headset on while you’re in it. It was a lifesaver for me during lockdown when travel wasn’t happening. Seeing parks on the south tip of Africa closed for COVID also brought home for me the world wide nature of what’s happening.

The benefits of experiential learning in VR can even extend to giving everyone a feeling of what it’s like to be autistic. Students who experience VR tend to feel that they’ve actually experienced it. This is a big step away from passively reading a webpage or watching a video, which is about as far as elearning goes these days. Bringing experiential and immersive experiences to elearning will revolutionize the process and radically change what our ideas of a field trip is (elearning students don’t currently have field trips).

Beyond the experiential benefits of elearning, what I’d really like to go after is using virtual and augmented reality as a work around for social distancing. This is leading edge stuff – labs are looking into it now, but from a business perspective. Education won’t stumble into it for years, but wouldn’t it be something if we could leverage this current technology in time to help us all manage the social isolation we’re all feeling?

In 2018 Nick (our national finalist CyberTitan) led a team that developed a VR title they called a ‘virtual classroom’. The idea was to let students use 3d avatars to meet in virtual reality. All VR headsets have microphones, speakers and cameras build in, so they’re already inherently designed to be communications tools… and that was more than two years ago…

Our kung-fu in the software engineering class has only improved since. Not only could we explore existing virtual and augmented software opportunities for educational use, we’d also be capable of developing our own VR classroom 2.0. We just need the room and support to make it happen. What would room and support look like? I’m currently looking at 31 students with a waiting list in software engineering next semester. If we’re still waterboarding everyone with quadmesters in semester 2 then splitting that massive class into two sections of 20 each would mean we could all meet face to face in the morning to resolve problems and take aim at new ones and then go virtual in the afternoon to test what we’re working on instead of the current schedule that would have me trying to be in two places at once while depending on another teacher who has no idea what we’re doing to ‘support’ the remote learning. In short, it would mean arranging the class around pedagogical effectiveness rather than seeing how many students we can stuff into one section.

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Beyond the hardware and software research, I’d also like to address the massive gap we’re experiencing in our current elearning charge. The digital divide is deeper and wider than you think because it’s not just about a lack of connectivity and available technology at home, it’s also about technological illiteracy because Ontario education assumes that students and staff all know how to use digital tools rather than training and teaching them in it.

We hand students digital technology in the early grades and just assume they understand what it is from home use, but that home use, if it exists at all, is usually habitual and very limited. Just because students aren’t afraid of technology doesn’t mean they understand how it works. Every year I see grade 9s who think they’re digital experts because they’ve owned a series of game consoles since they could walk. Their parents’ choice to digitally impoverish them by only ever handing them toys instead of tools makes it even more difficult to teach them computer engineering because they think they know everything when they don’t even know how to share a document, or unzip a compressed file.

It would be a satisfying thing to develop a hands on mandatory technology curriculum that makes all students literate in technology use in the same way we expect them to be literate and numerate in languages and mathematics. Like those other foundational literacies, digital/media literacy is a foundational skill if we’re using this technology in every class (as we are).

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There is much to do in remote elearning in order to make it a viable learning strategy both during the COVID19 pandemic and beyond, but we need vision and the will to explore where this is going instead of just waiting for business to hand us down their leftovers or an uncaring government to use it as an excuse to Walmart education into pedagogical irrelevance.

I was once talking to an administrator who said, “I hate the word pedagogy, what does that even mean anyway?” The complexity in the concept is exactly what we should be protecting as we continue to evolve learning in our digital age. Pedagogy is not a concept that plays well with a management approach that is looking for cheap and easy solutions. Perhaps that’s why I always feel like I’m the one fighting for it when I’m talking to educational management, but we should always be working toward it even if it’s difficult.

Developing a more pedagogically powerful elearning system won’t just help us manage this pandemic crisis, it would also help us manage the looming environmental crisis of which this pandemic is just a symptom. If we could get elearning to begin approaching the pedagogical complexity and interpersonal bandwidth of in-class learning we could be restructuring education so it isn’t pumping millions of tons of carbon emissions into the air from bussing students to remote locations every day. A truly digitally empowered local school could be a k-12, walk-in experience for all but a few students because engaging, high bandwidth virtual communications and connectivity would mean we’d no longer have to burn the world to keep education looking like it did in the 1950s.

https://temkblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/emergency-memo-post-peak-nov-2014.html

There are so many reasons why we need to develop vision and stop reflexively supporting status quo thinking in Ontario education. Leveraging experts in the system for their expertise rather than populating the system with middle managers intent on maintaining the status quo would be a great place to start.

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Competition Trumps Participation

“Among richer families, youth sports participation is actually rising. Among the poorest households, it’s trending down. Just 34 percent of children from families earning less than $25,000 played a team sport at least one day in 2017, versus 69 percent from homes earning more than $100,000. In 2011, those numbers were roughly 42 percent and 66 percent, respectively.”

This isn’t a story about childhood; it’s about inequality.”

I used to love playing sports. Refereeing and coaching at summer hockey camps helped me feed myself in university and I’ve coached, time kept and ref’d soccer and hockey since I was 10 years old.

As I’ve gotten older I’ve found men’s leagues echo the pointlessly competitive nature of kid’s sports with ex-Junior players playing in D division men’s hockey just so they can score half a dozen goals each week and run up the score. It’s nearly impossible to find a men’s hockey league that isn’t populate by assholes.

Max used to love gymnastics, but he ended up getting chased out of it in his pre-teens because the only way to do it was competitively (being female was also increasingly a prerequisite because the entire sport, like all sports these days, orientates itself on the most likely competitive success).

Coaching at school was a way to stay in touch with sports, but that too went sour with student athletes (only the wealthy ones who could afford the time and money to play games and practice after school nearly every day) not showing up to practices and playing with that same pointless competitiveness even when they didn’t rate against the opposition.

I’m currently on a hiatus with sports, but I still miss them. I wish I could find a hockey league that wasn’t an excuse for men to work out their frustrations on each other. I wish my son could participate in sports for the shear joy of it rather than turning every physical activity into a competition. We’d all be much healthier and happier if we had access to financially accessible and for-the-joy-of-the-game sports.

It’s a shame how we’ve turned sports into an excuse for competitiveness – usually along with the pipe-dream that your kid will one day be made a millionaire for playing a game. Having coached at a competitive hockey camp, it’s a tragedy to watch those all or nothing kids not make the cut into professional sports – statistically speaking almost no one does.

Norway sounds like they’ve got this, like so many other things (they also nationalized their oil reserves and used them to pay off their national debt and offer free education to all its citizens), right.

“Norway’s youth-sports policies are deliberately egalitarian. The national lottery, which is run by a government-owned company called Norsk Tipping, spends most of its profit on national sports and funnels hundreds of millions of dollars to youth athletic clubs every year. Parents don’t need to shell out thousands to make sure their kids get to play. And play is an operative word: Norwegian leagues value participation over competition so much that clubs with athletes below the age of 13 cannot even publish game scores.”

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The One That Got Away

I got into elearning early on, before there were Learning Management Systems or plug and play anything. My first elearning class required that I code HTML in order for students to see the material. I’d just come out of over a decade working in IT so I was one of the few people in the system who could engage with elearning early on. I was deeply involved in virtual learning until I attempted to apply for an elearning management position. After not getting it I was also suddenly also not an elearning teacher any more. I moved in other directions and have developed a successful and competitive computer engineering program instead. In the process I’ve won a couple of awards for integrating technology into teaching and my students have won all sorts of things, so I’m happy with where I’m at.

These days everyone is an elearning teacher. Thanks to a virus dictating pedagogy we’re leveraging digital communications in education like never before. This unique situation has even led to strange advancements like Stephen Lecce actually improving Ontario education by demanding the use of video conferencing when all the other partners had done everything in their power to make it a career ender. That it took a government intent on dismantling public education to move the powers that be in education forward says all sorts of things about how the system works.

I enjoy teaching and I’m proud of what my students and I have achieved in the past seven years. That much of it has been despite the system rather than because of it makes what I do more difficult than it needs to be, but then something came up last week that messed with my pride and I couldn’t not do it.

I didn’t volunteer for remote teaching even though there is huge demand because I didn’t have a medical reason not to and I greatly value the hands-on learning we do in my computer technology classroom. Until we were handed incorrectly fitting PPE and given a dual cohort schedule with twice the preparation, no time to do it and then simultaneous remote and face to face teaching all day every day I was looking forward to coming back to school. Like many I’ve been crushed by this absurd schedule. On top of that my classroom has a long history of HVAC issues and we were running into the thirties Celsius on the warmer days in early September. To say I’m struggling with this quadmester with its absurd lesson preparation expectations, demands of being available simultaneously virtually and face to face all day every day, lack of online and in-school support for students with special needs and ill fitting PPE is an understatement.

As if on cue a job came up for an Information Technology Support Teacher for online learning. I do this job now in our school (and beyond) voluntarily because I can’t sit by and watch my colleagues struggle with technology that I know my students and I can sort out for them. The idea that I could be given the time and space to do technology support at 100% and on a board wide scale rather than in addition to this absurd quadmestered, cohorted teaching load was appealing. I fired my resume and a cover letter at it that contained references from presidents and educational technology icons from across the province and got an interview. This caused me great anxiety. I’ve built a successful program out of a crack in the sidewalk and walking away from it would doom it (our school has just cancelled face to face computer science classes so viable 21st Century pathways aren’t high on the to-do list). On top of that I wasn’t sure how I’d get along on the other side of the curtain in a board office job.

I didn’t get the job. Based on an interview with no technical questions they went with someone else whose answers they liked more. To be honest I think I dodged a bullet there. The moment you step out of the classroom you aren’t working for students any more, you’re working for the system, and the system and I have never gotten along particularly well. As their IT support teacher I would have improved access to tools in a platform agnostic way. I would have found ways to make things work and improve our bandwidth with students instead of telling people to do less with the limited resources they’re handed.

My vision of elearning has little to do with what we can and can’t use today. If Minister Lecce has taught me anything it’s that the powers that be in education are more interested in maintaining the status quo and seeing how little they can do with digital technology than they are in exploring the possibilities to be found in virtual learning. A job holding that status quo has little interest for me and I argued with myself all weekend about what I’d do if I got it. The only part that bothered me when I asked for some clarity on why this other candidate was chosen was the sweeping statement, “all the candidates had excellent technical credentials.”

I’d be happy to go toe to toe with anyone in our school board, our IT professionals included, on technical qualifications. I’ve been an industry certified IT technician and network administrator since the early naughties and had worked in various IT roles for thirteen years before I became a teacher. Since becoming a teacher I’ve picked up two computer technology AQs and multiple Cisco networking qualifications including becoming the first high school instructor (and still maybe the only one) who is qualified to teacher Cybersecurity Operations. My qualifications also express themselves through my students’ success; we’re Skills Ontario medalists for the past four years in IT & Networking Administration and provincial champions twice, we’re also three time national finalists in CyberTitan. I’m not sure what made the other candidates ‘excellent’ in terms of their technical qualifications, but I’d love to see our qualifications and experience in IT all lined up side by side. There are a number of reasons why another choice might be better than me, but falsely levelling technical expertise and experience isn’t one of them.

I’m a keen amateur mechanic. I’ve taken motorcycles out of fields and restored them to operation multiple times. I’ve rebuilt cars and pulled engines. I’m capable enough that I trust my mechanical skills with my life (I do my own brakes and other maintenance on machines with very thin margins for error). I have built up a working garage space, have the right tools and know how to use them, but I’d never tell a qualified mechanic that I’m their equal. The difference between a professional and an amateur should be fairly obvious, yet Ontario education clings to the idea that a university degree trumps any kind of skilled trade… like information technologist. If they want to go with a status quo middle-manager who is aiming for administration then that’s their choice, but belittling my expertise in the process was annoying, though it highlighted an ongoing prejudice in the system. Ask tech teachers why they make less on average than everyone else in the building and you’ll see that academic privilege and skilled trades devaluation is a systemic prejudice.

A few years ago a colleague who is handy with computers (as everyone should be, they aren’t that complicated) casually mentioned that he should go and get his qualifications as a computer technology teacher. He has a university degree so he’s used to doing whatever he likes in the education system; it’s made by and for people like him. I told him that he might find it difficult to generate five years of industry experience on top of professional accreditation in order to qualify for the AQ. Just because you’re a keen amateur doesn’t mean you have the professional expertise to teach the subject, though we’re especially bad at recognizing technical skills in computing in both staff and students in education. It’s the main reason digital skills are a bit of a disaster in Ontario education.

Having highlighted that academic prejudice, Ontario’s absurd additional qualifications rules also railroad professional expertise from the skilled trades side of things as well. I had to almost produce a blood sacrifice to OISE to be accepted into the computer technology AQ because they wouldn’t accept my industry certifications and experience without putting me through a grinder. When I got to my AQ class most of the other people in the program had no background in computers at all. They were teachers from other technology disciplines ranging from cooking to media arts and hair dressing who were allowed to take another technology qualification because they already had one. OISE made it sound like I was going to be dropped into a program full of Grace Hoppers and Bill Gateses, instead I found I was one of the most technically proficient people in the room.

These stupid little short cuts in teacher training belittle the work people put into their professions and undermine expertise in the system, but as long as they are self serving and cheapen the costs I doubt we’ll see anything change. It’s hard to find fault with administrators belittling the hundreds of hours of training, industry qualifications and thousands of hours of work experience I’ve achieved when the system gleefully does it automatically.

I got into class the next day still of two minds about not getting that job until I started teaching again and remembered that what I’m doing here is the single most important thing I could be doing. My students love what we do, I enable them to do things they didn’t think they were capable of and I end each day feeling like I’ve done something genuinely useful and fecund. I think I only considered leaving the classroom because I’m in such physical distress from poor PPE and this absurdly scheduled school year that I grasped at it. Any other year I’d have let it pass by so a future administrator could pad their resume. I am still frustrated at not being able to explore future technology assisted pedagogy on a wider level, but that’s why I blog… that’ll be the next post because even though I’m overwhelmed in the classroom, I can’t let it keep operating at this poor status quo, especially when there is all this fantastic technology around to help us circumnavigate this lousy pandemic.

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