Dusty World – Page 18 – Mechanical Sympathy

#ECOOcampON 2020 Virtual Conference Reflections

ECOOcamp Ontario happened in Peterborough last year and was the usual mix of keen people getting together to improve their technical skills and launch another year of teaching in an avant garde style. Had you asked anyone there what the summer of 2020’s ECOOcamp would look like, a virtual online conference during a pandemic wouldn’t have been the obvious guess, but ECOO managed to pull off #ECOOcampON, a virtual conference using tech most people hadn’t used before, with astonishing fidelity.

As you’d expect there were technical issues, but what ECOO does a good job of spreading is the idea that teachers can become digitally fluent enough to resolve these problems themselves. Early on link issues stopped the conference in its tracks, but the tech-savvy educators running the event iterated at high speed through troubleshooting and within twenty minutes everything was back on track again.

Digital fluency has been cast in a stark light this year with Ontario’s sudden move to emergency remote learning, so you’d think that more educators have technical proficiency at front of mind as the first school year in a century kicks off in an ongoing pandemic. ECOOcampON managed over 500 registrations this summer, which goes to show you just how resilient some Ontario educators can be in trying to get literate teaching in a still new(ish) digital medium, though only 0.3% of teachers attended in Ontario and I’d guess that 70% of them need it. In a better world this conference would have drawn over one hundred thousand educators looking to raise their digital fluency in order to prepare for the inevitable next round of remote teaching.

What follows are some personal reflections prompted by the event.

Krista Sarginson and I presented on CyberTitan, the Canadian Student Cybersecurity Competition on the first day of the conference. Krista’s CyberLions rocked a 2nd place finish in the middle school division in her first year coaching in 2019. I’d been looking for a brave teacher to leap into this and help me advocate for it. Krista is fierce and fearless and did a great job encouraging other elementary panelists to consider giving it a try.

Secondary teachers tend to be more reticent about participating in things they can’t show intellectual dominance in. I’m hoping that Krista’s influence engages more elementary Ontario teachers in participating in this competition. It’s a great way to raise awareness around information security and opens up an entire industry to students who might otherwise have no idea it exists. It’s a tough year to encourage extracurriculars, but something like CyberTitan could become the basis for a cybersecurity course, which is something Ontario is way behind the curve on. Here’s our presentation if you’re curious:

The round table discussion that night talked about resilience and how we frame challenges. This past year seems like almost infinite challenges. From a vindictive government intent on attacking our profession and diminishing public education to a worldwide pandemic, it’s been a burning dumpster fire of a year for educators in Ontario, with no end in site. The new mix is the vindictive government using the pandemic to physically threaten staff and students. It’s not understatement to say that I’ve never seen colleagues so scared and uncertain about teaching in a few weeks. How can we be in poorly ventilated classrooms that ignore the rules we’ve been told to follow for the past six months and feel safe? Our doughty premier is frustrated at the response (usually framed as an attack on unions), but no other front line workers are being forced to ignore public health rules in their workplaces.

In this context I found the roundtable discussion difficult to navigate, though they gave it a good try. One of the speakers was a big fan of nature, but it was a romanticized view of nature where people should just find themselves at their ease in natural surroundings. That park-setting idea of nature is very much dependent on a manicured and managed environment. I love being out in nature, but I enjoy it because it’s relentless in its expectations of competence. Being happy in nature is as simple as not being hungry or cold, or avoiding being eaten. Few people have been face to face with that kind of nature.

Disney’s romanticized version of nature,
in reality this is a great way to get rabies.

Austin Vince has a documentary on riding into the Sahara Desert called Mondo Sahara. In it he talks to an off-road expert who has spent a lot of time in the deep desert. He makes a clear distinction on what your focus should be: always make sure you’re dictating what is happening because the moment the desert is in charge things fall apart quickly.

Survival training was like that too, especially the winter stuff. Our instructors were insistent on the exhausting job of managing cold and wet to ward off the ever present fear of hypothermia. Nature isn’t only beautiful, it’s also so immersive and demanding that you can quite easily drown in it. Most people have never been in a survival situation like that. Society does everything it can to ensure you don’t have to keep yourself alive in nature, it’ll do it for you – usually while killing nature in the process. If most people got driven into the wilderness and dropped off they’d be dead in a week. That is terribly beautiful, but that isn’t how nature was presented. Being demanding is what makes nature teach resilience, but we try and weed harsh lessons like that out of education wherever we can.

I’ve recently had trouble with how our return to face to face classrooms was being framed. We were initially told that relationships are all that matter and that we shouldn’t even worry about curriculum. There is a place where that is the case, it’s a daycare centre, but I didn’t go through the long and difficult task of becoming a teacher so I could provide daycare. Yet in the greatest social crisis we’ve seen in recent years, instead of focusing on being resilient and holding everyone to higher standards, the reflex is to do whatever it takes to make people more comfortable. You can learn a lot by being uncomfortable. A good place to realize that is in nature.

The other side of the roundtable focused on happiness, which is much more complicated because we’re more than happy to destroy nature just to ensure our own short-term comfort, future generations be damned. If we want to consider nature it’s as a form of entertainment. Living in nature is nasty, brutish and short, to paraphrase Hobbes, and too much like hard work unless you think nature is pulling your RV into a campground. Look no further than our response to COVID19 (which is nature at work). We’ve actually slew footed our own self-serving, cancerous economic system just to keep as many humans alive as we can, yet even during a world wide health emergency we’re still adding the populations of Guelph AND North Bay to the planet every single day, while stopping economies to keep everyone alive for as long as we can. Everything we do with technology, economics and society are contrary to nature, so holding it up as a solution seems a bit disingenuous. It doesn’t matter though, nature will sort things out soon enough. If we’re too stupid and selfish to be on the right side of that it won’t matter because ultimately what we think doesn’t matter.

The happiness side of the discussion was enlightening. The question of what is happiness is a surprisingly complicated one. I was chasing it in an online psych course from Yale earlier this year called The Science of Well Being. For many people happiness is doing as little as possible, but I’m all about agency (your ability to act). When that is cut away from me I become very frustrated. The best leaders I’ve had recognise that I’m a self starter who wants to act and provide a framework that directs me into doing what they need to get done. The vast majority of leaders I’ve had are frustrated by my inability to stand in line waiting to be handed the same work as someone who doesn’t want to do anything at all. During the pandemic this everyone-do-less approach has been strangling me. Most of the managers I’ve had in Ontario education are of the lesser variety who want to cookie cutter everyone into undifferentiated jobs. I’d hoped being a professional in a recognized field would bypass that, but Ontario education is remarkably juvenile in how it directs its employees.

If you’ve ever seen Saving Private Ryan, I’m a Tom Hanks kinda guy: I don’t care if the work’s difficult, but I need the people in charge to recognize that with a bit of latitude I can get things done that others cannot. Most organizations’ inability to differentiate their duties for employees is why I often have problems with organizational structure. The people who maintain that structure very much identify their own self worth through it, and I frequently come into conflict with them as a result. Give me a big, difficult job and the latitude to attack it and that’s happiness for me. It’s why I’ve never been on a cruise or to an all-inclusive resort, it’s my idea of hell. That understanding was a great metacognitive reflection that ECOOcampON provided for me at the end of day one.

I attended a number of sessions ranging from equity to media literacy around the credibility of sources, and found them rich and helpful in framing this year’s difficulties, but it was the closing keynote that closed the circle for me. Daniel Lewis is a successful entrepreneur who struggled in the education system and overcame a number of personal hardships to find success. He is inspirational by nature, and I enjoyed his relentless positivity, though I’m often cautious with optimism because it can be used to overly simplify a difficult situation. When someone says, “you got this” in terms of going back to school it feels an attempt to ignore the difficulties.

Daniel didn’t take that approach though. He emphasized the power of your own thinking; self determination was the underlying message. Even if you’re in a broken, leaderless system staggering under absurd political machinations, you are still free to think what you want to think. There is power in that kind of stoicism, especially in tough times.

There was a lot of talk about getting out of the box in terms of thinking without being restricted by the people and systems around you, which aligned well with the keynote’s theme (though it contrasted with the resiliency and happiness roundtable from the beginning).

I’m always cautious around entrepreneurial pep talks. Business has a way of turning that optimism and relentless enthusiasm into sales. In this case it was the idea that once you free yourself of the boxes other people have put your thinking in, YOU then get to make the boxes. I took that to mean for other people. Why would you want to make a box to limit your own thinking?

Perhaps I’m odd in that I educate to empower, so breaking out of the box aligns with that, but the last thing I’d want people to do with that freedom is start boxing in other people, but that’s society. I was troubled by the idea that the moment we free our minds we look to use that freedom to enslave others, but maybe that’s just how people work. Freeing people doesn’t guarantee happiness in any case.

Boxes aside, it was an engaging and uplifting closing keynote to a remarkably resonant ECOO Conference. We are free in our own minds regardless of how tightly our struggling school system ties us, and there is comfort in that. If you’re able to free your mind from the fear and uncertainty you can grasp your own agency and get things done. The pandemic has deeply wounded everyone’s agency, so Daniel’s stoic message resonated well, though I’m still troubled by the reflexive need to box people.

If you bounce over to the ECOOcampON webpage, you’ll find links to all the presentations. I think they’re also wrangling the recordings of all the presentations together so you can view what you might have missed. I’ve always found ECOO’s model of teachers directing their own PD to be both engaging and effective. When I compare it to professional development that’s mandated and thrown at me, this feels much more valuable, but that’s probably because I use my own agency to create and participate in it. There is a distinctinction in there somewhere around passive and active learning that anyone interested in pedagogy should be considering, especially in a world where a passive-do-nothing approach is now a governmental demand.

***

I”ve been reading a lot of Tao Te Ching this week. It offers me some perspective when the walls feel like they’re closing in.

Tao is empty (like a bowl). It may be used but its capacity is never exhausted

It is bottomless, perhaps the ancestor of all things.

It blunts its sharpness. It unties its tangles. It softens its light. It becomes one with the dusty world.

Deep and still, it appears to exist forever.

I do not know whose son it is. It seems to have existed before the Lord.

Heaven is eternal and Earth everlasting.

They can be eternal and everlasting because they do not exist for themselves, And for this reason can exist forever.

Therefore the sage places himself in the background but finds himself in the foreground.

He puts himself away, and yet he always remains.

Is it not because he has no personal interests? This is the reason why his personal interests are fulfilled.

To hold and fill a cup to overflowing Is not as good as to stop in time.

Sharpen a sword edge to its very sharpest, And the (edge) will not last long.

When gold and jade fill your hall, You will not be able to keep them.

To be proud with honour and wealth Is to cause one’s own downfall.

withdraw as soon as your work is done. Such is Heaven’s Way.

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3d modelling for everyone!

Unboxing the Structure Sensor

This week, thanks to our forward thinking student council, we received a Structure 3d scanner. Unboxing created a lot of curiosity. In about five minutes we had the sensor mounted on the front of our ipad mini and we were off to the races.

3d modelling is a tricky business. It typically takes a fairly comprehensive knowledge of software to get yourself a decent 3d model. Thanks to the Structure sensor, anyone with an ipad (grade 3 and up?) could quickly and easily create a 3d model of pretty much anything they can walk around.

It takes a bit of practice, but once you see how the laser sensor paints the object (it looks like it’s covering it with clay on the ipad display), you get the hang of it and you’re producing remarkably accurate 3d models.

In about 15 minutes I had it figured out and took a detailed model of my partially dismantled Kawasaki Concours in the garage.

Our principal!

The files are obj format – an open source format that a lot of software can easily read. I’ve found that sketchfab.com is a handy way to share the models and offers a fair bit of customization in how the models present as well.

At school we’ve had a good time making busts, while at home I’ve tried modelling complex mechanical items.

I’ve been using Obj Viewer to see the 3d models on the desktop (they’re all saved as model.obj, so very quickly you’ll find yourself buried in model.obj files not knowing which one is which). I quickly got into the habit of renaming them as I opened them.

As an avenue into more complex 3d modelling software (like Blender, which imports obj files with no problems), the Structure scanner is a great starting point. You can quickly create 3d models and then clean them up or embellish them in something like Blender (also an open source, astonishingly good piece of freeware).

You can view your model once you’ve painted it on the ipad screen (the pictures here are screen captures from the ipad). If you like the model you can email the obj file. The largest (an attempt at scanning our computer lab) was about 4 megabytes. A smaller object, like a head, is usually under two.

Hammer Model by tking on Sketchfab

Being able to quickly and easily model 3d objects offers all sorts of interesting educational opportunities. Because you’re accurately measuring volume, the immediate uses as a measuring tool in mathematics and the sciences are obvious. Using this scanner you could quickly and accurately measure the growth by volume of a very complex shape like a plant. If you’re creating clothing, you would be able to scan your prototype and then see what it looks like in a wide variety of textures from all angles. As a prototyping and measurement tool, the Structure Scanner takes some beating.

Our focus is on creating 3d models for our software engineering project. 3d models are often too perfect, looking rather plastic. The Structure sensor is going to allow us to model clothing and other complex textures and organic shapes much more realistically and quickly.

At less than the price of a game console, this little sensor opens up what used to be the inaccessible world of 3d modelling to everyone.

Cultivating Genius & the Zen Teacher

A recent issue of WIRED has an article on student directed learning called: The Next Steve Jobs, which asks some hard questions about teaching and learning during an information revolution.

The idea of regimented learning in rows in classrooms is so obviously indicative of 19th Century factory thinking that it begs for change, but many traditional education organizations have so much invested in the status quo that they will spend all our time and money hammering people into system-serving standardized thinking. Instead of developing the skills vital for learning in an information revolution, we cling to politics and habits. Nowhere was this more obvious than in a poor Mexican school that wasn’t serving a genius in their mix.

You have to wonder how many of our students are marginalized and never see their own potential because we are wringing our hands about how not-average they are and how they don’t respond appropriately to being indoctrinated by an archaic education system.

The article leans on technology, brain science and student centred and directed learning to bring out real genius in a student who was otherwise disengaged. The brain research is fairly straightforward (though ignored by most education systems):

“The bottom line is, if you’re not the one who’s controlling your learning, you’re not going to learn as well,” says lead researcher Joel Voss, now a neuroscientist at Northwestern University.

Neuroscience has proven this again and again, but education stubbornly holds to an information limited, rigidly programmed learning system because these traditions support the political makeup of that education system.

“If you put a computer in front of children and remove all other adult restrictions, they will self-organize around it,” Mitra says, “like bees around a flower.”

Mitra’s research still assumes a teaching presence that will bump students along when they run into repetitive habitual patterns. The key is a good leading question and then that dogged support as students find their own way to an answer. The urge to interfere in this process in order to make learning clinical and exact is great, and many teachers do this with the best possible intentions, but what they are actually doing is taking away the student’s opportunity to internalize learning.

Learning is a messy process, at its best teaching is a subtle presence focused on producing a fecund environment for fearless experimentation and research. An idea is only learned when it is internalized by the learner and that can only happen experientially. Any time you see a teacher talking at students there isn’t any learning happening.

Faith in the self direction of a learner is something we’ve tried to remove from every aspect of the education system. The system becomes the intent rather than the learner’s learning. Words like curriculum, assessment and standardized data become watchwords for how effective the system is as a system, it all has nothing to do with learning.

Many of the fads we embrace in education around self-directed learning are little more than smoke and mirrors – the appearance of self-direction in order to fool the student into engagement with otherwise rigid systemic need. This is exactly why a genius in a poor Mexican school couldn’t engage enough to show her talents until her teacher threw away the paradigm.

Stretched Thin

Originally published pre-pandemic in March of 2019 on Dusty World: https://temkblog.blogspot.com/2019/03/stretched-thin.html

I need to reflect my way out of a dark corner. Yesterday I got some surprise PD on students I have with profound hearing loss. The PD was quality. The person presenting it was not only very knowledgeable, but she was also wearing two cochlear implants, so could speak from experience. By the end of it we had a very tangible idea of just how difficult and exhausting it is for hearing impaired students to function in a standard classroom, and yet a standard classroom is where we expect them to thrive.

How do we expect them to thrive? By depending on the teacher to differentiate instruction, use technology and modify their lesson delivery to reach those students. Why that? Because any other alternative is much more expensive and downloading onto teachers is the default approach to any problem from a cost-effectiveness point of view (that’s the dark corner talking).

Empathy is my superpower when it comes to teaching. It’s a reflex I can’t stop, but it’s also exhausting me. By the end of that PD I was emotional about the difficulties these HH students experience all day every day and wanted to do all I could to help, but I’m not sure how much of me there is left to do it.

In a capped-at-27 students open technology class where we are working hands on with 400° soldering irons, sharp edges and live electricity, I have two students who are hard of hearing to such a degree that we are legally required to address it. I have 9 students, or a third of the class, who have learning impairments ranging from autism to ADHD that I’m legally required to address individually. The entire class is also in the throes of puberty. As an open class it contains students who range from gifted/academic and on track to becoming engineers to essential students who are functionally illiterate. Some students are living in luxury and are about to take a three week March Break on holiday (I’m supposed to plan for that too), while others aren’t getting fed before coming to school in the morning. I’m supposed to engage all 27 of them equally and consistently no matter where they are using differentiation while also ensuring their safety. Feel overwhelmed yet? I do. And that’s just one class of three. The other two have similar expectations around size and diversity.

A long time ago now in Teacher’s College we did a day on assistive technology and I couldn’t help but think that this technology would help everyone learn more effectively regardless of where they were. One of the reasons I enjoy teaching technology is for how it can functionally improve us. People who use technology to waste time and distract have missed a golden opportunity in my eyes.

At our HH PD the instructor ended with this cartoon. It speaks to that feeling I had years ago at the assistive tech day. The sound-field system that I now have not only assists my HH students, but also my students who have signal processing problems with background noise. If everyone can hear better, everyone will learn better. It also saves my battered vocal cords, which is no bad thing. It begs the question, why we don’t have sound field systems in every classroom? But we all know the answer to that, don’t we.

In the PD it was also suggested that we have acoustically effective rooms by covering walls and floors with soft surfaces that don’t create hard, echoey soundscapes. It was suggested that we bring in carpets and wall hangings, but based on health and safety responses to other brought in furniture, I doubt that would be allowed. Having soft materials on the concrete blocks and industrial linoleum floors of our classroom would be great, but I doubt money exists for any of that. It sure would be nice to work in a typical office environment, but we’re not that lucky. Plastic floors, plastic chairs and cinder block walls are where learning happens in Ontario.

We were also encouraged to remove ambient noise as it has a deleterious effect on signal processing and requires everyone to be louder to overcome it. That increased volume wears out voices and ears and makes for a less effective learning environment. That’s why lawyers, bankers and politicians all have nice carpets and soft walls in their offices.

There is a lot of ambient noise in our computer technology shop. We happen to be next to the heat exchanger in my relatively new school,, so when the HVAC system spins up background noise thrumming out of the ceiling jumps by 15 decibels. The 30+ fan cooled PCs in our lab add to the din, as to the dozens of adolescents sitting at them. A typical student needs a 5-10 decibel volume bump to clearly understand instruction. Hard of hearing students need even more. How do we make quieter learning environments? By not building schools as cheaply as we can, but that isn’t going to stop. Well it is, because we’re just going to stop building schools.

So, rather than provide technology and acoustically healthy environments in reasonably sized classes for everyone, including HH students, to more effectively learn, the answer is to download the problem on teachers. At least then it can be said that we’re doing something about it. That’s assuming things stay as they are, but they won’t.

All this is happening in an environment of anxious uncertainty. The general feeling is that Ontario education will be cut to the bone and what we’re expected to do will only become more absurd in the next few months. It isn’t just in education either. As the new Ontario cuts programs to support children with special needs, guess who will pick up the slack on that? Yep, the education system, and it’ll be expected to do it with less. Fortunately they have a free escape valve, just ask teachers to do more with less, probably for less.

There are numerous places we could find efficiencies in education in Ontario, but thanks to trickle down economics you can bet that the majority of those cuts will land on frontline classroom teachers and negatively impact student experience. Those higher up the food chain will make sure their jobs are secure. The Heinlein Starship Troopers part of me wishes we ran things like the mobile infantry: everyone drops, everyone is on the front line. Too many people find ways out of teaching and yet get paid more for it. In my efficient Ontario education system everyone keeps a toe in the classroom and teaches. No one gets to opt out into a support role with zero instructional responsibility.

I get a lot of satisfaction out of my job and have no wish to leave the classroom. Launching my students into meaningful careers in much-needed ICT roles from workplace to university streams isn’t easy but it is a real thrill. It’s important work for Canada’s future and I want to keep doing it. All I ask is that we be supported in that effort and not have the system punish us for its own shortcomings. What got me down about this PD was that it boiled down to yet another level of differentiation I’m expected to deliver with little or no support. That the system thinks this somehow resolves the problem is really aggravating; these kids deserve better.

I don’t only cater to easy to teach academics (though my classroom is capped the same way) and want to see my full spectrum of students find success, that includes special needs students like my HH kids. My goal is to maximize their learning and help them find their best selves. Because we’re working in ICT I hope this means they will find satisfying and challenging careers that will enable them to support themselves and their families in a very changeable future.

With all that in mind, I’m already stretched thin trying to teach with and around various special needs in a hands-on technology environment that is designed around thrift and the biggest caps in the province rather than effective learning. That we’re as good as we are now (and that’s in national competition) in spite of all that is great, but the thought of things only getting worse is wearing me down. If we’re going to up the ante to 35+ students and cut budgets so that we can pay for increased housing allowances and make new jobs at EQAO, I’m going to have to start putting the things down that I don’t get paid for in order to manage a punishing work load designed with generic production lines in mind.

Lowering my efficiency and not pushing us all to be our best in an emerging industry is the last thing I want to do, but needs must. That HH PD on Friday only underlined for me how complex and multifaceted what I do is. All I want to do is try and fulfill that difficult role as well as I possibly can, but I can’t do it if the system is intent on being less for less.

If what’s got me down are the dark headlines and ominous future of Ontario education, then I’m falling into the old trap that J.K. warns of. What I should be doing is what I’ve always done, make best use of what I’ve got and try and reach as many students as I can. Thanks to Friday’s PD I now have some tech in my room that should help me do that. On Monday I’ll be speaking a bit softer but being heard better. I’ll deal with what happens later this year when it happens.

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The Mediocrity Virus

So I’m sitting there with a room full of people who have just won the bronze medal world-wide in the most recent round of ‘who’s got the best education system’. After years of diligent effort and insightful leadership, Canada is ranked third worldwide in educational performance, and is very close to toppling the two leaders. In every metric you care to apply, we are awesome.

We’ve applied differentiated instruction, we push technology as far as our budgets will let us, we professionally consider every angle that we can to improve student achievement, from student centred learning to expanding non-academic stream programming in order to meaningfully serve our entire student base.

Are there still problems? Certainly. We still have to work to get every member of our team to produce a peak performance, but this too is happening. Our professionalism, our dedication and our society’s values allow us to compete at the highest level.

Into our victory celebration comes a guy from a team that didn’t even make the olympics. They’ve suffered a precipitous drop in performance, dropping from the mid-teens (the highest they’ve ever been) to thirty-third over all in terms of student performance. Their teaching profession is in shambles, and their society generally views educators as over paid loafers who take summers off. Their public education system (like their prison system or their military) is being taken over by private contractors who are more focused on simplistic metrics, like their own profitability.

He tells us that we have to drastically simplify what we’re doing, go back to drilling students on facts, strictly limit teachers to curriculum and install discipline back into education; this is the only way we will get them all back on a college track. He exemplified teachers who drill their students and run their classes with a simple, military efficiency. He floated odd statistics like, students who already know a lesson will learn 400% better if they are made to repeat what they already know over again, rather than differentiating and enriching their specific learning.

He was statistics driven and awash in his country’s educational expertise (almost exclusively driven from privatized schools). He suggested that we might be ‘a bit ahead’.

The coach in me suggests that if your team is performing well, you keep doing what you’re doing. Certainly you tweak it here or there, but when you turn in a world class performance, you don’t bring in a coach from a team that didn’t even make the show to give suggestions, but we did, because we’re Canadian, and the one thing we have even more than an awesome education system is a giant inferiority complex with our big cousins to the south.

Pandemic Reflections: F2F Has Way Better Bandwidth

I’m a teacher with a lot of technical expertise. I don’t just teach effectively with digital technology, I teach the subject itself. Fifteen years working in information technology in roles ranging from systems implementation to technical support and training are what led me into teaching the subject. When I began teaching in 2004 elearning was beginning to evolve out of distance (ie: mail order paper based) material. I jumped on it the summer after I started teaching at Peel DSB. At that point elearning was a very loose HTML webpage where you had to write code to display the content properly. I had some very interesting experiences teaching senior, university bound English on that system. When I moved to my current board I volunteered for their pilot elearning program and taught a variety of elearning courses purely online, and then did a blended face to face introduction to elearning while teaching the mandatory career studies course. One of the best things to come out of that project was that all of those students had a very clear idea of whether or not elearning would work for them. A third of the class never wanted to see it again, and the correlation between students with IEPs and students who had trouble with elearning was nearly 100%.

All that to say, I’ve spent a great deal of my career exploring how digital technologies might augment our teaching, but I’m also well aware of the shortfalls.

The recent pandemic shutdown has driven a lot of teachers and students online, and the framing by our Ministry early on was very elearning focused, but a colleague in our first ever staff video conference said something that resonated for me: this isn’t elearning, it’s isn’t business as usual, this is emergency response remote learning – we’re not ‘going online’ we doing everything we can to keep education alive at a time when it’s too easily dismissed. This might sound like an arbitrary distinction, but it isn’t. Not everyone needs to go online, and in many cases (as in the 2011 career studies experiment above), we have a sizable portion of our student population who cannot learn effectively in that space. When you also toss in the inequity of online learning, it leaves option looking like a very poor go-to. As educators, whenever we see the system roll out an undifferentiated, blanket response to an issue (like EQAO), we should take a hard pedagogical look at it. Uniform responses that don’t honour our student (and teacher’s) individual approaches to learning and teaching are, by definition, unresponsive and ineffective.

Since the school closures happened, I’ve been very conscious of the economically disadvantaged students who have been cut off at home. This may very well be a home that isn’t safe, isn’t providing adequate care and isn’t where the student wants to spend their time. The “stay at home” message that started this off is couched in privilege. For many students home isn’t a nice word. I’ve been frustrated by the lack of initiative shown in this crisis, but the digital divide many of our students face was something we could have addressed before, but didn’t. Some leaders are now using that lack of equity as an excuse to do nothing, which strikes me as the worst kind of hypocrisy. If we messed it up before, we’re messing it up now for even more people because what we didn’t do before is an excuse to do nothing now? Wow.

I’m also staggered that there is evidently no one in the largest school system in the country who is responsible for emergency response planning. We seem to be making it up as we go and delivering planning by press conference, and we’ve already lost three weeks to plan something that should have been in place from the go. You know what’s harder than teaching remotely? Teaching remotely using constantly changing expectations.

So here we are, in a pandemic situation that people have been warning is coming for years. Our solution is to throw elearning at it, and (so far, 3 weeks in) do nothing to address the fact that thousands of Ontario students don’t have the devices at home and/or the internet connectivity to access it – and those are the students who most needed education to support them from the beginning.

There is a reason why we truck in students on diesel fume spewing school buses each day to a face to face learning environment; public education is the great equalizer. More than anything else it helps us find the best in our population and enable them to achieve beyond the socio-economic situation they find themselves in. For wealthy students school can feel like a step down from a life of choice and excess, but for others it is a bastion of reliability; the only time in their day when they’re talking to dependable, capable adults. For some it’s the only time when they aren’t hungry, and our solution in an emergency situation that demands isolation is to ignore them?

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/

Level 3 means you can take a time and date out of an email
and put it in an online calendar, this isn’t rocket science,
and yet most people aren’t even there.

Let’s say we get the digital divide under control and manage to get everyone connected (we haven’t and we wont’, but let’s imagine we did). Now that we have everyone online and using an appropriate device, we need the majority to leverage digital skills they haven’t developed and get them learning remotely. Ontario doesn’t have a digital skills continuum, other than some vague language dropped into other subjects here and there, yet we were increasingly expecting students and teachers to use digital tools in school and now they have suddenly become a necessity. I teach computer technology and have a well developed program, but I only reach about 100 students out of the 1300 in our school. If you count the business tech courses and media arts that also build digital fluency, all together we’d be lucky to reach a quarter of our student population, the rest have basic, habitual digital experience – like most of the population. What we’re doing with elearning is akin to handing out books to illiterate people so they can learn at home with them.

Could elearning work? It has in my experience, and I’m seeing some of my very digitally fluent seniors doing outstanding work online now. I’ve had some very positive elearning teaching experiences where we leveraged technology and created a remote learning environment that was rich and responsive. When it’s happened it was with a digitally focused and experienced teacher and voluntary students who also had the resilience and technical expertise to make it happen. When you teach online it feels like you’re looking at your students through a wrong-way-around telescope. I described this recently in terms of bandwidth. When you’re face to face with someone you’re able to read their body language in fine detail. The tone of their voice isn’t a dimensionless thing coming out of a tiny computer speaker, but it doesn’t end there. I’ve had students with obvious (when face to face) hygiene issues that I’m able to notice and subtly address by getting our councillors involved. I’m able to leverage the fantastic food school resources our school offers to get hungry students fed when we’re face to face. I’m able to overhear student conversation in class that gives me the context I need to connect with them more effectively. I’m able to present body language and nuance of voice that develops trust and a human relationship. I’m able to differentiate instruction with students quickly and effectively while face to face. I’m able to close the digital divide for all my students when they enter my lab. There is a reason we learn best face to face, it has way better bandwidth than any digital option. Even if you and your students are digital ninjas, remote/online learning is always going to be a lower bandwidth, less effective option that face to face learning.

In a perfect world we’d develop our staff and student’s digital fluency and engage in augmented 21st Century learning using digital tools and connectivity to enhance our ability to collaborate and communicate (and be ready for bizarre emergencies like this one), but it makes for a poor replacement; educational technology for augmentation is a worthy pedagogical goal. Educational digital technology replacing face to face learning isn’t pedagogically motivated, it’s usually tied to scalability and the resultant monetization of a platform, usually with an eye to reducing costs. The elearning push by Ontario’s current government was entirely focused on this without any thought given to the digital divide, dearth of digital skills and pedagogically reductive nature of remote elearning.

This pandemic has shone a harsh light on the inadequacies of our system in terms of emergency response and digital skills training, as well as highlighting the ongoing digital divide. A good that might come of it is that we begin to address all of these issues and build a more resilient and effective education system that is able to take initiative and respond to an emergency situation without taking a month to think about it.

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Secondary Like We Mean It

We’re getting squeezed for sections this year because bankers and multi-nationals wanted to play silly buggers with the world economy. Watching my school cut English sections down to the bone is making me question the validity of requiring mandatory English throughout high school.

Academic English is very university focused with the almighty essay as the be-all and end-all of high school writing. I’m an English major, I love essays, but I recognize that the vast majority of our students, even the university bound ones, will never write another essay in their lives after high school. Asking senior academic English teachers to consider reports, or labs, or articles, or any other writing output is an uphill battle. They don’t want to water down their subject; the essay is sacred.

I get that, so perhaps it’s time to water down their population. Instead of dragging all senior students through years of mostly irrelevant English skills development, why not separate the vital from the overly specific? Literacy is a vital skill the general population needs to have, regardless of whether they major in English in university or work at a cash register.

http://prezi.com/o3bt2rpkzl5f/reconfiguring-for-21st-century-education/

One of the biggest challenges in English is facing an always packed class (never off the cap) full of an astonishing range of students. A typical academic English class will contain barely literate non-readers whose parents don’t want them to give up academic options (and who may be more than capable in numeracy, science or technology). Academic English bludgeons them with essays and Shakespeare. The solution is to pare off literacy from what is really a specific skill set needed only by advanced students of the arts and humanities.

The idea for mandatory grade 9 and 10 literacy and numeracy courses comes from this logic. The grade 10 course is a survey/review course that works to assess students literacy skills in a granular and meaningful way. The opposite of a standardized test, these courses challenge students in order to accurately assess their skills in numeracy and literacy in detail. The end result would be a certification in two important foundational skills.

Students who are able to demonstrate these foundational skills are able to continue in high school in which ever direction they choose with a clear idea of their strengths or weaknesses in fundamentally skills, or move beyond the building and into apprenticeships or the work place knowing that they have displayed an appropriate level of literacy and numeracy. Their proven ability in these two vital skill sets will resolve many of the fears surrounding letting students leave school early. Those that stay in high school are offered a plethora of courses, local, remote or a hybrid of the two, that allow them to develop interests and abilities that are flexible, encourage their strengths and change with the times.

Those interested in post-secondary can still take advanced English and mathematics courses, but these are entirely optional. They may also be specific to future needs. Science and technology students may take English that focuses on report writing and presenting analysis in clear and concise ways. Arts and humanities students may focus on more traditional English, such as literature and essays.

If we’re not going to do literacy and numeracy properly by underfunding it into oblivion, perhaps it’s time to separate the vital skills from overly specialized, academic English and mathematics and reconfigure for flexibility in our curriculum.

Forming an ECOO Presentation

Originally posted on Dusty World in October, 2012…

There were three key books I read in the past year that have clarified for me a direction we could head in educational technology. Ideas from each of those books, which at first appear to be in direct odds with each other, helped form the content of my ECOO presentation this year.

After reading The Shallows, Nick Carr’s carefully constructed argument held a lot of weight – the internet and how it is being adopted by the general public is actually making people less effective as both thinkers and doers. As educators, we should all be concerned about this result. At a conference this year a frustrated, thirty-something CEO said of the twenty-somethings she’s tried hiring recently, “I just wish they could finish a thought! I can’t even get them to close a sale because they are checking Facebook!” This problem goes well beyond education (where any teacher can tell you it’s an epidemic). Everyone involved in education should read this book, especially if they are trying to implement technology in the classroom.

From The Shallows I took a serious concern about technological illiteracy and habitual use of computers actually injuring people’s ability to think.

I read Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularlity is Near as a counterpoint to Carr’s very accurate, and very depressing Shallows. Kurzweil’s giddy optimism in our engineering skills verges on evangelism. He is a wonderfully interesting and eccentric character. His belief goes well beyond merely living in a time of transformative change. The singularity he refers to is a moment in the near future where we are able to develop a greater intelligence than a single human brain, or even a group of them. He goes into mathletic detail about exponential growth and how this is occurring in computers. Very soon we’ll understand things in finer and more complete detail than we’ve ever been able to before and our management of the world will take on omniscient proportions. Technologically enhanced humans exist beyond the technological singularity – living in a world that looks as alien to us now as ours would to someone from the middle ages.

From Kurzweil I recognized how technology is evolving in increasingly personalized ways. This is an argument Carr makes from the other side too. From external machines, we are on a journey to technological integration. This integration is going to well beyond smartphones, that’s just the latest step in an inevitable trend. If education does everything it can to present technology as generic and impersonal, it is failing to notice a key direction in technology, it’s failing to produce students who will be useful in their own futures. This is perhaps the most controversial aspect of my BYOD/differentiated technology argument, but I believe it’s a fundamental part of our technological evolution. Computers want to become a part of us. We’re not going to develop a Skynet or Matrix that will take over. Our technology IS us, and it wants a more perfect union. This probably scares the shit out of most people. My argument to that is: if you’re going to amalgamate with other systems, make sure you the one directing them effectively.

Matt Crawford’s wonderful philosophical treatise on the value of skilled labour goes well beyond simply being handy. He argues that skilled labour psychically protects you from consumerism and makes management doublespeak and creative economies an obvious joke. The value he places on objective, quantifiable skills development often savages the feel-good ethos of a lot of educational theory which then sounds like management double-speak nonsense. I read the book after taking my AQ in computer engineering, and it made me re-evaluate (and recognize) the value of my skilled labour history – something I’d walked away from in becoming a teacher. I’m loving being a tech teacher this year and working with my hands again.

From Shop Class For Soul Craft I took a recognition of the importance of hands on, skill based learning. It brings real rigor to learning, and should be a vital part of developing past the poor digital literacy I see around me. One other experience kicked this up a notch. In the summer we visited the Durnin farm and Heather talked about how her husband teaches people to use the farm equipment. He gives them the tools, and expects them to figure it out and get it done. It’s a high expectation, immediate result environment that puts a great deal of expectation on the student; Crawford would approve. I tell my students, “no one ever learned how to ride a bike by watching someone else riding a bike” – it’s an experiential thing that offers real (often painful) immediate feedback… what effective learning should be.

Into that mix of big ideas of warning, optimism and rigor I also mixed in the standard PLN secret sauce. Concerns over BYOD abound with teachers online. The idea that BYOD should just be thrown into curriculum struck me as simply wrong. As Andrew Campbell suggests, it’s more about stretching a divide (or Carr would argue intellectually crippling idiots) than it is about increasing digital fluencies.

Teaching competency, flexibility and self awareness on digital tools should be a primary goal of current educational practice. We’re graduating students who are dangerously useless to employers. The idea of a continuum of digital mastery based on objectively developed skills linked to a gradual loosening of restrictions and access to increasingly diverse tools and online content was the result.

I present on Thursday, and I’m more interested in the discussion that ensues than I am in telling anyone anything. ECOO is a wonderful braintrust, and usually super-charges my educational technology awareness. I’m looking forward to the brain soup we create out of this!

Diversifying Edtech: the key to a digital skills continuum

Copyright is sticky business

I read this which led me to this, which made me want to write this: (!)

Copyright is a sticky business. More often than not it isn’t the artist that is being protected by copyright so much as the distribution company that owns the rights. The music industry is still trying to get itself out of being a manufacturing and distribution concern, which is where the copyright habits we’ve developed with music started.

When you’ve got to justify stamping millions of CDs to make music financially viable, the focus shifts from the artist to the manufacturing/distribution system (where big infrastructure costs exist). In order to protect this distribution system, a robust, aggressive and quite jackassey legal specialization developed that has nothing whatsoever to do with the art it claims to protect.

It seems we’ve arrived at an age where an artist can be stimulated by influences and then effectively prevent anyone else from evolving ideas out of them. The Beatles, perhaps one of the biggest offenders in this, freely stole ideas and even whole pieces of music from the black R&B musicians in the US that proceeded them. Later in their careers they made art by evolving influences from Indian and other world music as well. They then aggressively locked down the rights to the art they freely took from other people.

It seems that Boomers are unique in many ways, not the least of which is their self-claimed right to take everything that came before them and own it entirely forever. US copyright has led this erosion of artistic license for many years, continually expanding and pursuing the entertainment industry’s right to own a piece of music, eventually (they hope) forever.

One of my favorite cautionary tales is Sita Sings The Blues. An artist going through a breakup creates an animated piece that integrates the 1920s music she is listening to at the time with an ancient Indian myth and her own relationship disaster. It’s very thoughtfully done. Give it a look if you’ve never seen it before. The details are on the website, but here’s the summary: when she went to get the copyright for the 1920s recordings (long out of copyright) that she wanted, she discovered a copyright law firm (one of many that buy up copyright-passed, older material) contacted her back and wanted a quarter of a million dollars for songs they didn’t own by an artist they never represented.

This is the state of copyright nowadays: a savage wasteland of corporate vultures looking to pick the bones clean of any work of artistic merit. It’s a completely unsustainable system that stifles art and kills creativity. Had Shakespeare been alive now, he would not have been able to publish any of his work (almost all of which borrowed heavily from proceeding material). Corporate vultures would have swooped in and killed Romeo & Juliet, Macbeth or Hamlet stone dead.

I make no bones about artists being able to make a living from their work, I’m an artist myself. My hope is that digitization of the workflow will free us from the vultures that have been feeding (and killing) the artistic process for the past 60 years.

Many artists are beginning to push content directly to fans. Courtney Love famously once said, “I work for tips” when she was talking about how little she made from CD sales. Doing tours made more, but even live performance requires covering a lot of hangers on.

The irony in all of this is that the music industry claims to be the protector and savior of music, yet it is the very thing stifling creativity, and it’s doing it to protect an archaic manufacturing system that barely exists any more.

Ok, so after all that? I think NerdyTeacher’s blog is a great opportunity for Taylor to step into a new era and develop fan based appreciation through Twitter and social networking. Those students, and the people who see the performance will know of her willingness to share her art. What I fear is that she isn’t the one to make this decision. A legal firm representing her music industrial complex will make that decision, and it won’t go well.

Thanks to @dougpete and @TheNerdyTeacher (and twitter) for the impetus to write!

National Skills Competition Reflection

We’re back from Skills Canada’s National Competition. It was my first time as a Team Ontario coach and it was a spectacular six days in New Brunswick. The sight seeing was frenetic and then the opening ceremonies astonishingly loud and boisterous. To say we were revved up would be an understatement.

After a weekend waiting for competition to start we were finally able to do what we went there for (compete), except we didn’t. I’d hoped for a top half finish. Ontario’s provincial skills are much more competitive than most other province’s simply because we have the biggest population and therefore the most contestants; we had to beat more people to get to Nationals. Aiming for a top half finish didn’t feel like a long shot, especially when we’d done so well in provincials (a gold medal and one of the highest technical scores in all competitions). I fear our good provincial results meant we didn’t drive at Nationals like we should have.

I prefer Bull Durham’s
dissonance over the pat
just be humble quote.
There is a place for
swagger in competition
as long as it doesn’t blind
you to what you need to do

You need a bit of arrogance when you walk into a competition because, despite the platitudes, everyone isn’t a winner, in fact the vast majority are losers. When you dangle yourself out there in competition you need a bit of cockiness to survive the failures. There were a steady stream of people bursting into tears and running out of the awards ceremony when they didn’t medal. Humility wasn’t helping them keep their composure when they lost. If you don’t think composure in the face of failure matters you probably haven’t competed much.

IT & Networking came up early and because of a screw up on the screen I’d realized we hadn’t medaled before they actually made the announcement. In that moment all that hope evaporated and I was struggling with disappointment. As a coach, I felt protective of my student who wasn’t happy with the result but didn’t run out of the room in tears. Since we were announced so early we had another hour and half to sit there watching others succeed. It certainly set a reflective mood.

Our approach to Skills all along has been one of the long game. Each competitor returns and brain dumps everything they can remember into a document that we can use to prepare better next time. Our current competitors are often able to get in touch with alumni (the benefits of a small town) and get additional support and advice. That’ll happen with our first go at Nationals as well, so when we get there next time we won’t be going in blind. The three who did medal in this national competition had all been there and seen the scope of competition before. Knowing what to expect is a key to success.

But there is another side to this that I need to consider beyond the long game. I was very hands off with training my competitor after our successful provincial run. He asked questions about subnetting and IPv6, and I provided him with material on it, but didn’t follow up to see if he’d looked at it. He hadn’t. I’d assumed he’d grabbed this opportunity with both hands and put his training into overdrive, but end of year distractions and a very successful provincial run had shifted him to glide. After a long, exhausting first day of competition we were both sitting there going over material that should have been second nature instead of resting up for day two. At that point hope replaced confidence for me. I hate depending on hope.

I’m a big believer in students, especially seniors and even more especially competitors, being self driven. I have no interest in hand puppeting students to a win, I want them to feel like it’s their’s because they are the prime movers in their own skills development. I don’t believe in moulding students in the likeness of my own learning, I want them to internalize it in their own most effective manner. My job is to do backflips in the background making sure they have the information and tools they need to efficiently and effectively develop their own skills.

High school seniors on the verge of post secondary work in technology should have a developed sense of professionalism as a part of their skills formation, which means not off-loading blame when you fail, and taking on responsibility for fine-tuning your own expertise (I drive this home in class constantly). Because these things didn’t happen I’m at peace with losing – we didn’t deserve the win – though it still irks me and has me wondering what I could have done differently.

Another reflective piece for me was remembering all of the curriculum I ditch in order to serve the relatively digitally illiterate students I get in computer technoology. As we were going over subnetting I remembered how doing this used to be second nature for me as a technician, but I can barely get basic IP addressing across to the majority of my students let alone binary subnetting. Dumbing down curriculum might make my program more palatable, but it didn’t help us get ready to compete at Nationals. That one’s entirely on me. If this experience means I’m not shying away from expected curriculum in the future, it might cripple my program’s ability to take in the digital dilettantes and guidance refugees I’m expected to serve, but at least we won’t get pwned again in competition.

When the lights come up and judgement begins, you don’t want
to be hoping you might squeeze out a medal after missing
questions and going in unprepared. Hope isn’t how you win.

After losing for years (see below) and putting a good face on it (I don’t like losing, I’m competitive by nature), I suddenly found myself, on only my third attempt, on Team Ontario, coaching my strongest Information Technology student yet. That we didn’t perform like we could have is the most disappointing part of this experience for me.

I don’t care if questions are repeated so students who have been there before have an advantage, I don’t care if the environment they put us in seemed intentionally designed to produce poor results (we were placed between an amplified loud speaker job presentation and millwrights hammering metal and running power tools) because everyone had to suffer through it. What I do care about is approaching Nationals with a self-driven, professional mind-set, and I think that’s what I’ll focus on next time around. Not shying away from complex material in my courses and keeping a focus on being properly prepared will help my competitors to do more than hope for a medal. The valuable information we gathered this year on how Nationals are scoped means we’re not going in blind next time either.

Losing for Years…
I stopped coaching soccer at my high school after a number of years because it was a constant hassle trying to get players out to practice (the fact that our talent pool was desperately shallow and we lost almost every game wouldn’t have shaken me off like indifference did). The time the student players decided (after losing another game) to just not show up at 7am the next day for the practice time they told me they had to have broke it for me. I’d paid for daycare, put my own child into it at 6:30 in the morning and was standing there alone on the pitch in the pre-dawn light when I decided I’m done volunteering for this kind of abuse. I’m glad I was able to find Skills Ontario/Canada as an outlet for competition that also helps improve my own program.