Bullies are cruel, but demanding respect
from everyone is the worst kind of bullying
According to our newly created mission statement we’re supposed to be producing students who are respectful. I was advocating for responsible but respect got the nod. Respectful students serve order. Their docility allows a system to exist beyond reproach. If students are respectful they obey authority without questioning it. Respectful students are easy to manage. Any adult in the building doesn’t have to be respectable, they are automatically entitled to it. It’s a good way to ensure that students do what they’re told while the system can do what it likes. Misuse of respect doesn’t end in organizations, it has also crept out into society as a whole. We’re all supposed to give it to everyone all the time, but you earn respect don’t you? I’ve been told, and it’s printed on the wall of the school to be seen every time I walk in the door, that everyone deserves respect. I find this not only untrue but pathologically wrong headed. The temptation is to go straight to serial killers and death camp commandants in proving that not everyone deserves respect, but respect isn’t easy to earn even for the mediocre. Anyone who respects mediocrity is probably simple minded, or so desperate to not offend anyone that they appear simple minded. The motivation behind respecting everyone is to not offend anyone, but in the process of putting everyone up on a pedestal, individual effort and excellence is rendered meaningless. There is a confusion of language around the word respect. People use it to mean being civil or polite, but that isn’t what being respectful means. Being respectful arises from you holding something in high regard. Using respect as a demand instead of a recognition of excellence is manipulative, usually done by an organization that doesn’t want to be held accountable. Respecting a person comes from you holding their thoughts and actions in high esteem. It doesn’t come from valuing everything they do because they do it Blind fandom or faith is dangerous. Any organization that enshrines respect as a demand should do some soul searching. I can respect a system that strives for respectability. I can’t respect a system that demands it… it’s disrespectful!
The idea that everyone’s opinion matters is at the root of the
vapid everyone deserves respect belief.
People toss around statements like ‘respect your elders’, perhaps this is where schools get the idea to enshrine it in their mission statements. Respecting someone because they are old strikes me as quite irrational. The eighty year old draft dodger who ran away is hardly as respectable as the twenty year old who did his duty. One of the first realizations I had as an adult was that age is a poor indicator of respectability. We demand it in children to make them manageable, but that kind of ageism is little different than racism. We should value people based upon their thoughts and deeds, not on their social status. Everyone deserves to be treated civilly. Everyone deserves compassion, but everyone does not deserve respect. We like to enshrine it in school language in order to subjugate children into an unquestioning relationship with authority, but that isn’t particularly flattering. Teachers do not deserve respect. They deserve to be treated civilly, and compassionately, but they don’t deserve respect, no one does. I would hope that they earn it with their students, but many don’t, and then issues of classroom management arise. We might try to stamp out the individual assessment of respect, but it’s always there between people regardless of their age or job. Respect plays an important role in how human beings interact with each other. We should all strive to be respectable and earn the admiration of our fellows, but making respect an expectation belittles us all and encourages, at best, mediocrity. When everyone is automatically assigned respect individual effort becomes pointless. We should be aiming for more than misdirection and ease of control as educators. We should be encouraging individual excellence in our students, not hammering them all down with false demands of universal respect.
30:1 student to computer ratios? It’s too expensive to have a 1:1 student to computer ratio?
This is a load of nonsense. While the business world has moved on to individualized computing devices and cloud based software solutions, school boards still doggedly hang on to 20th Century thinking about centralized IT with massive, complex software images, difficult to manage intranetworks and remote maintenance of shared machines.
I’ve been on the ground, at class-level watching this fail again and again. Equipment is vandalized and left inoperable for weeks at a time because no one local bears any responsibility for it. Technicians are stretched thin between many schools, often not returning for weeks on end. The already dismal student access to technology becomes even worse.
Labs that contain over-priced, years old hardware are kept under contracted repair long after they have given up every ounce of their residual value and are little more than landfill (and a heavy weight on network efficiency). Those same labs contain the same, tedious software on the same, tedious hardware; a monotony of labs that offer nothing of the variety and opportunity available in the world beyond school.
The networks are overburdened with file sharing intranets that grind to a halt when many users begin to copy large files to network servers, or overfill limited on-site storage, causing the whole thing to simply stop. So much focus is placed on intranet software and file sharing that access to the internet itself is through a tiny bit of bandwidth, making access to the largest collection of human knowledge ever assembled jerky, slow or utterly useless.
A modern business office uses task specific equipment to enable users continuous access to their data and their colleagues. Phones are used when appropriate, but phones are never appropriate in school. Tablets and ultralight laptops serve the mobile employee, allowing them to input information and communicate as though they are in the office when thousands of miles away.
Technology in education studiously ignores the needs of the student who must travel from home to school and class to class, carrying bags of massive, out of date textbooks. Student to student communication is discouraged in most learning situations in favour of discipline and order. If students do communicate in school (and I assure you, they do), they have to do it in underhanded, devious ways that violate whatever the latest technology-banishing rules dictate.
Information Technology in school is anything but. Perhaps Lack of Information Technology would be a better title.
The mini-lab idea returns technical literacy to teachers from the star chamber of board based IT. It places local people in charge of local equipment and drastically reduces the costs of educational technology while dramatically boosting the student to digital tool ratio. Instead of the monotony of labs of out of date, inefficient, over-priced desktops, staff and students would gain access to an eclectic mix of digital tools and begin to develop meaningful digital fluency in both hardware familiarity and data management. It’s a first, small step in a diaspora away from centralized board IT and toward differentiated technology access that truly serves our teacher’s and student’s needs in the evolving datasphere.
COVID19 school early in the pandemic – all that infrastructure not doing anything. We can do better.
I’ve been reading the never ending speculation driven by an increasing panic on the part of educators as this school year approaches and this Ontario government seems incapable of planning for it. When the panic rises too high people start making demands for things that we’ve never had, like a guaranteed safe school. Teachers have been getting ill at schools since schools began, but this isn’t about that, it’s about managing COVID19 to the best of our scientific knowledge. The point isn’t to aim at the impossible, it’s to put as many reasonable processes in place as possible to protect the people in the system.
This is about secondary (high) school, which might sound odd because no one is talking about high school COVID19 planning, so I thought I’d give it a shot since no one else appears to be.
From my admittedly layman’s point of view there are two sides to COVID19 management. One is the social responsibility side, which is something people seem to be struggling with. The other is monitoring and response. For me, if the system were to spin up in September following these rules, I think we could get things working as well as possible under the circumstances.
INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY COVID19 MANAGEMENT
If your child had been in contact with anyone infected they should be withdrawn from school for two weeks in quarantine. During this time they are expected to keep up with class work remotely unless they have severe symptoms, in which case a doctor’s note can release them from school work
Any child who is screened and discovered to have COVID19 is isolated at school and sent home at the earliest possible opportunity with minimal contact with others. All schools have an isolated space reserved for this possibility
Testing will focus on students and staff who were in contact with any infected person
If an outbreak occurs (an outbreak is any traced transmission occurring at a school), the building is to quarantine/close for a period of 1 week during which time instruction will go online
Staff and students are to wear PPE when in close proximity to each other. When social distancing is possible it is the preferred method of management.
Any staff or student who does not follow PPE protocols is to be removed from interaction and re-trained
All staff are trained in PPE expectations prior to the beginning of school
All students are to be trained in PPE usage prior to beginning instruction
Heightened cleaning regimes are to be followed in all classrooms, especially focusing on shared work spaces and technology. All will be sanitized at the end of each period
Classes will be quad-mestered to reduce traffic, but secondary schools will be open all day on a regular schedule
Lunches are to take place in quad-mestered classes
Strict hall-pass protocols are to be in place to minimize wandering and out of class interaction
No student has locker access during pandemic protocols
Students will be required to wear masks while bussing, but normal bussing loads will occur
Students will be trained to minimize physical contact while bussing or transitioning between classes
Any student who does not comply with COVID19 safety training will be re-trained
Students or families unwilling to comply with pandemic safety requirements are to be withdrawn from physical schooling if re-training proves ineffective and offered remote learning options with credible expectations and work required or credits will not be granted
SYSTEM MONITORING & RESPONSE
All staff and students will be subject to random temperature tests
Any staff or student who show fever will be spot tested for COVID19
If COVID19 is found to be present, the staff or student with it are to be immediately isolated from the school population and sent home for a minimum of 2 weeks quarantine (remote learning is expected to continue unless symptoms are severe)
If COVID19 is found through tracing to be transmitting between people in a school then an outbreak shall be declared and the school shall be closed and quarantined for one week and all shared surfaces disinfected. During a school quarantine class work is expected to continue remotely
Upon return all staff and students will be tested for fever and any found will be tested for COVID19
Random spot checks for COVID19 testing will continue
School boards are responsible for putting testing procedures in place at every location that ensure a minimum of 10% of the school population will be tested for COVID19 each term
Any classroom which is so over full that it causes repeated closures is to be reassessed (and really should never happened in the first place because learning in such terrible conditions should never have happened to begin with), and reorganized to be more medically and pedagogically sound
TEACHING PRACTICE MODIFICATION
Teachers are to provide all in-class material online
Where possible teachers are not to provide material on physical mediums (like paper) which can transmit the virus
All teachers are provided with technology that allows them to video any instruction which are then to be shared in online classrooms for any students unable to attend
Teachers are encouraged to use blended learning strategies that leverage remote learning systems even when face to face
Any shared workspaces or technology must be cleaned at the end of each class
Remote learning outcomes are to be assessed using the same criteria as in-class learning outcomes
There are countries in the world who have proven that with appropriate individual responsibility, access to cleaning and personal protective equipment and with regular monitoring and rapid response, COVID19 can be managed effectively. If we’re going to argue that education is a vital service to society then we need to provide access to schooling to as many students as possible in as safe and transparently monitored an environment as possible. This suggestion emphasizes the importance of social engineering in managing the virus individually while also making it clear what system responsibilities are in responding to an outbreak. Instead of being paralyzed by this pandemic we should be applying these practical and effective solutions to managing it.
Wise Europeans have begun enacting legislation to protect people from the relentless onslaught of digital noise. Coincidentally, I’ve recently had a number people lamenting the digital ties that bind them. An article on how students can’t hold a conversation any more and a moody French art film on digital alienation followed:
LOST MEMORIES (French, English Subtitles) from Francois Ferracci on Vimeo. This past weekend I had an elearning student send an email Friday afternoon and then shrilly demand, Monday morning, a response. I haven’t heard back from them yet, but I did point out they were getting a detailed response to their email the next school day. Ironically, that student has never logged in on a weekend and has frequently been weeks late handing in work, but perhaps we aren’t all held to the same standards of immediate access. That people can yank on that digital leash and demand our attention regardless of their own competence is an irritation. Another teacher mentioned how his smartphone is spoiling his hunting. He used to get himself up into his hide and then settle down for some meditative and quiet hours communing with nature. The last couple of times, deep in the woods, he’s been so busy keeping up with texts and social media that he forgot to commune with anything. The same teacher also mentioned that he has called students out for answering texts while in the middle of a working machine shop. They often tell him that it’s their parents texting them. He takes the phone and texts the parents saying that the student is busy and should be paying attention to what is happening (it is a machine shop). It seems parental expectations have piggybacked on invasive digital practices. One of the reasons I enjoy me motorbike so much is that I can’t be doing anything else while I’m on it, though apparently others have found a way. The operation of the bike occupies my mind and body completely, it’s very therapeutic living completely in the moment like that. That the information technology around us constantly pulls us out of the present is a problem we need to resolve. Maybe the French aren’t out to lunch in trying to protect people from this expectation of being permanently leashed to our information stream. From the frustration of sitting behind a car at a green light because the driver is distracted (thought they aren’t supposed to be), to helicopter parents being constantly in touch with students, perhaps it’s time for educators to start charting a more socially responsible approach to digital intrusion. Note: In case you think it ends there, here is another sad ode to social media, it’s becoming a meme!
A couple of months ago Alanna did a podcast with Albert Fong and myself on seminal books from our adolescence. I was all about Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers when I was a teen. It felt somewhat biographical (I joined cadets because my friend did – like Juan, the main character in the novel), but in retrospect the philosophy in the novel is what really struck home because it emphasized a clarity of purpose that I’ve always found elusive. At various points in the novel Heinlein goes to great lengths analyzing the failures of Twentieth Century thinking. When Juan is in officer training he gets to the bottom of why the robotically armoured mobile infantry of the 23rd Century are willing to have themselves launched out of an orbiting spaceship and ‘dropped’ into a terrifying war zone:
“The root of our morale is: “Everybody works, everybody fights.” An M.I. doesn’t pull strings to get a soft, safe job; there aren’t any – all “soft, safe” jobs are filled by civilians; that goldbricking private climbs into his capsule certain that everybody, from general to private, is doing it with him. Light-years away and on a different day, or maybe an hour or so later—no matter. What does matter is that everybody drops.
…many armies in the past commissioned 10 per cent of their number, or even 15 per cent—and sometimes a preposterous 20 per cent! This sounds like a fairy tale but it was a fact, especially during the XXth century. What kind of an army has more “officers” than corporals? (And more non-coms than privates!)
An army organized to lose wars—if history means anything. An army that is mostly organization, red tape, and overhead, most of whose “soldiers” never fight.”(Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers)
I don’t know where we are in Ontario education when it comes to teachers who are teaching versus teachers who are getting paid as teachers but aren’t, but if you factor in all the support positions across the system I suspect that 20% is optimistic. For every teacher earning a teacher’s salary that doesn’t teach, classroom teachers carry the burden. When classroom average sizes increase (as they seem to every contract these days), you seldom see support positions disappear. The education system is much more hierarchical than you might think.
At the school level we’ve already got a number of teachers working in non-instructional roles, but, like the 20th Century military that Heinlein criticizes, the fairy tale of a system with too much support and not enough boots on the ground continues at the board level where you find people earning teacher salaries doing administrative jobs ranging from shuffling health and safety paperwork to managing budgets. In addition to making teacher pay without teaching, each of these support roles has to be supported by a multitude of larger classes in order to keep a 23 students to each ‘teacher’ average ratio.
The only place the education system ever seems to want to make cuts or create harsh, standardized testing to assess effectiveness is in the classroom. Meanwhile, there is a hidden bureaucracy that remains untouched by cuts that hurt how children learn.
I’ve had a go at this before on Dusty World, but what kicked it off this time was a writing gig that came up recently. I took a swing at it and was surprised to get a call back. Why was I surprised? These kinds of jobs tend to get passed around in that insular group of educational bourgeoisie who operate beyond the classroom. Unsurprisingly, I appeared to be the only classroom teacher in the meeting. I was then stunned when I was told that instead of actually creating subject specific material for this subject council we were going to create material that supported the specialty programming that everyone else in the group ran as their day job. A guidance councillor who isn’t even qualified in this subject area then stated that we’d be writing support material for other subjects as well. This got me quite angry. I thought the purpose of subject councils was to support their subjects. The long and the short of this very frustrating interaction is that I seem to have been removed from the program.
I’m still boiling about this as I look at my upcoming dangerously over-full, under equipped classes. Instead of helping me and thousands of other teachers protect our programs, this subject council is busy feeding the educational bourgeoisie a second pay-cheque to support what they’re already doing in their day jobs at a board office.
I’m feeling very much a part of educational proletariat right now, but then all I do is actually teach. Heinlein was right, your morale takes a real kick in the head when you realize you’re doing the job others found their way out of as soon as they possibly could.
Were it the 23rd Century and humanity were united in an intergalactic war against insects intent on destroying us, I’d be proud to call myself a mobile infantryman doing a difficult job while knowing the organization I work with and the society it is serving recognizes and supports that difficult effort organizationally. Instead I work in Ontario public education.
Originally published November, 2016 on Dusty World: https://temkblog.blogspot.com/2016/11/vr-visualizing-data-and-realizing.html
I spent Saturday morning in the next town over demonstrating virtual reality systems at our board’s Digital Saturday. We had a line up the whole time and put dozens of kids through their first VR experience. You get to see their first moments when they realize just how immersive this technology is, and then you get the follow up when they start thinking through the implications of what they just tried. The next ten years aren’t going to be like the last ten years.
Our choice for first VR experience has always been Google’s Tilt Brush. Users get used to the 3d experience in virtual space by sculpting with light. This time I launched the Vive using Google Earth VR, which just came out last week. If you’re looking for shock and awe Google Earth in VR will do it for you.
There was a moment last week when I was looking for Machu Picchu in Google Earth VR. I was hovering over the Andes about ten miles up looking at various peaks, trying to isolate the ruins. I looked up to my right and could see across the curve of the Earth into the Amazon basin. To my left the Pacific receded into the distance. Looking up I could see the Andes like a bumpy spine up the back of South America. I was in this huge space looking to distant horizons in all directions. People often talk about how intimate it feels being inside a headset but in this case I felt more like an ISS astronaut. This kind of visualization is thought provoking. It changes how you conceive and manage complex data. It changes how you interact with digital information.
The first thing many people do when they first enter Google’s virtual Earth is to go somewhere they long for. One of our business teachers went to her Grandmother’s house in northern Italy. I went home to the north Norfolk shore. We both got quite emotional about getting to go home even if it’s only virtually. Our sense of place is really just immersion in the literal sense. Virtual reality mimics that feeling remarkably well. Don’t underestimate VR’s ability to provoke an emotional response with immersion. How we manage that emotionally powerful response is important, especially if it’s being used for educational purposes.
While at the recent ECOO conference I gave the Microsoft Hololens a try and was surprised at how effective it was for an engineering sample. It isn’t a full virtual device like the Vive or the Oculus, instead it inserts digital information into the world in front of you as augmented reality. Only the user could see a ballerina dancing on the conference floor or digital information like distance and size overlaid on real objects. The resolution is surprisingly good and the fact that it’s wireless (battery powered and wifi) is totally next level. This experience suggests that fully immersive virtual reality and augmented reality might start to move off in separate directions in the future. The Hololens doesn’t send you elsewhere like the Vive and Oculus do.
What’s next for VR? I’m not sure, but software is constantly probing the limits of what this new display technology can do. Having data all around you in resolutions you haven’t seen outside of a 4k display means we’re going to be forging new relationships with the digital world. The days of accessing digital information through a window (screen) are numbered.
The other week I was sitting in a local movie theatre before the latest round of The Hobbit when an advertisement came on for our local Catholic board. It strikes me as odd that they allot money for advertising, but I guess that’s what you have to do in a publicly funded system that competes against itself. The idea that we have to market our educational choices might seem mercantile to academics, but it’s not always a bad idea. The poor appearance of our departments on our school webpage came up at a recent heads meeting which tailed into a big discussion about how we lose a number of students in grade 9 to our (marketing focused) catholic competitors. Evidently most are back by the senior grades because spending ten hours a week on a bus for what turns out to be a better advertised, if not necessarily better education, doesn’t add up. Our poor showing in marketing our public school for local consumption raised questions of what we should be focusing on, advertising, or, you know, education. I might not understand the benefits of funding two redundant public systems that then pay to advertise against each other, but the need to market your subject area in a high school is vital for a successful program. If we don’t get students signing up, we don’t get sections, so any teacher, especially one in a non-mandatory subject area, should probably spend some time ensuring that students know they are out there. *** Tonight is grade 8 parent’s night. We have a large group of excited, nervous parents and students touring the school. Each department is expected to set up a booth and ply their wares, encouraging next year’s new grade 9s into taking what they teach. I’ve been spending the semester beating the bushes to put computer studies in its best light. You’d think that computer studies would be an easy sell in 2014, but not so much in rural Ontario. I used to treat grade 8 night as just another time grab, but it’s silly to ignore marketing your subject area, especially if it can help you get sections and run a more complete program. In the case of computer studies I’m straddling the need for school-wide fundamental computer literacy as well as offering specialized courses that will prepare students for post secondary and beyond in programming and engineering. I’m beginning to think Ontario should split its focus on computer studies and offer general technology fluency as well as specializations. As many of the celebs mention below, a working knowledge of computers is vital to life in the 21st Century, whether you’re looking to be a career computer nerd or not. Grade 8 night was a successful evening. With robots, quad-copters and other technology on hand, I put the department on the map. With any luck we’ll get an uptick in computer studies sign ups next year and be able to run a more complete program as a result. You’d think a healthy computer department in any high school in 2014 is addressing an important 21st Century fluency, but if students and parents aren’t aware, they won’t sign up. Here are some of the pieces I put together (thanks to code.org for the quotes):
Taken from the code.org quotes & Will.I.Am’s webpage
Everyone should know the basics of a technology if they are going to live submersed in it every day.
Just one of the smartest guys in the world, feel free to ignore the opinion.
I did a number of posters for the department.
Extra-curriculars are a good way to support student interest in your subject.
Even if you’re not headed for a career in computers, they are becoming a vital soft skill. If you work anywhere and can provide your own tech-support, or can problem solve even basic coding, you have made yourself vital to the 21st Century workplace. Computer studies: not just for nerds any more!
@banana29 is currently taking her Master’s degree. We’re already 500 sheets of paper and a lot of toner and electricity into printouts. All of that paper immediately becomes less accessible once she’s read it and made notes on it; it disappears into a stack of unsearchable ideas. Obviously not ideal for keeping your ideas accessible and developing them. Paper is so 20th Century.
The master’s course is online, but the text book isn’t available electronically. Does this strike you as inconsistent? Why would this university make a course available online and then not offer the text digitally? Money!
I’d love to move her to a digital format, where her content creation and her content consumption is entirely electronic, but text book publishers won’t release their content digitally because they can only respect the money they’ve put into paper publication and refuse to see the digital wave happening all around them. Very similar to what music companies did a decade ago, and we all know how that turned out. Burying their heads in sand is exactly what they shouldn’t do, but it’s what they are doing.
The other side of the problem is a good educationally friendly digital window. Ipads are nice, but they aren’t designed to show text books in their original format. With low resolution and limited screen real estate, ipads work very well as quick digital windows, but long term content contact means lots of page turning through a small 1024×768 window.
I had high hopes for the Kno tablet, but it’s been cancelled…
Is the idea of an educationally focused computer/tablet that mimics text book layout and offers generous screen real estate dead? Can we get by with an Apple monopoly? It looks like we have little choice. Microsoft has cancelled its Courier 2 screen tablet as well. For the foreseeable future, 1024×768 is the only window you’re going to get into ereading.
Kno is now an ebook presentation software for ipad (ipad dominance destroys potential improvements in hardware before they can even appear). This isn’t an entire loss, a piece of software that lets students organize and access their texts on a single device is great, but I think I’d prefer something web based, so I can get at my content anywhere on anything.
The fact that they are trying to force the paper based text industry into providing etexts is also invaluable. They are forcing the change that is coming anyway. Until we can pry text content control from an industry solely focused on paper based money streams, the option to adopt an etext is very limited.
“What a student needs, according to Kno’s research, is something that faithfully reproduces a full-size textbook, without compromise. In contrast, the attempt to cram a textbook onto a smaller screen is a primary reason that previous trials with replacing textbooks with e-readers such as the Kindle DXwere abject failures.“
I love the idea of a dual screen tablet that folds like a book. The screens are protected while in a bag, it can be opened into a 2 screen or 1 screen layout (by flipping it over) and one screen could be used as a full(er) sized keyboard, the benefits of a short interface ipad like device or a longer term dual screen interaction with content (that doesn’t require all books to be reformatted).
I also love the idea of a transformable tablet, so here is my wishlist for that ideal education tablet:
a tablet that can be purchased like Lego pieces: one screen, two screen, three screen, keyboard, whatever: you can keep joining them together and configuring depending on what you need
the ipad2 has nice dimensions, but a huge bezel! And the resolution is too low.
Keep the dimensions for length and width but lets aim for 5mm thick (so 2 folded together are only slightly thicker than a current ipad), and 500g (so 2 folded together still only weigh about a pound and a half)
instead of a 9.7 inch display, an 11.8 incher would all but eliminate the MASSIVE BEZEL, making for an almost seamless dual (or more) display.
1400×1050 resolution on that bigger screen
when you link multiple screens the systems work in sync to offer you a multicore, networked machine, more screens equals better performance
yeah, it should run FLASH, and HTML5, and offer an open source, community driven OS (so I guess Apple and M$ are out)
ipad3? Not without Jobsian control. Asus, are you into this? Google? You could partner up for the OS, Honeycomb is awesome! I’d ask Blackberry but they’d take 3 years to get it finished.
In the meantime, reams of paper get printed and paper text books get delivered. Living in a hybrid time period kinda stinks. Twentieth Century, will you end already?
Pedagogy ORIGIN: late C16th: from French pédagogie, from Greek paidagōgia ,
from paidagōgos, Sometimes etymology can be wonderfully ironic.
This one is complicated. Trying to work out the relationship between pedagogy, technology and money is the trial of our times. The other day Alanna was reading a passage about how little technology has affected pedagogy. Rather than revolutionize how we teach, technology has merely become a new, more efficient medium for the same practices, it’s done nothing to advance pedagogical practice. This got me thinking about the relationship between pedagogy and technology. As I was pondering those two, money crept in, as it always does. Pedagogy is a rather terrifyingly open concept, but I’ve always found its breadth to be its saving grace. With a sweeping definition like “the method and practice of teaching“, pedagogy is applicable to the full spectrum of teaching and learning, and that range is truly staggering. Pedagogy can be found in everything from the coach who reduces their players to mush after a hard practice to the use of a chalkboard in a math class. It lives in the first turn of a wrench by a budding mechanic and the circling of a grammar error by an exhausted English teacher. That pedagogy is in everything related to teaching and learning is its greatest strength, it becomes an ideal in an education system that otherwise exists as a series of compromises. In our real world of compromise pedagogy often makes uncomfortable demands. This is where money sneaks in. When we consider sound pedagogy, we consider best teaching practices to maximize learning. But we don’t go searching for best practices in an ideal environment, instead we attempt as much effective pedagogy as the money allows. Good pedagogical practice costs money. Educational technology costs (a lot of) money. Both are reaching for the same finite, decreasing pot of funding; this can’t end well. Does this mean more money always equals better pedagogy? Not at all, but pedagogy is one of the first things you see diminish in money challenged situations. Poor schools tend to lack the student to teacher ratio or basic equipment to provide strong pedagogy. Rich schools can offer smaller class sizes and better trained teachers, both of which support sound pedagogy. That these pedagogically proven concepts have to compete with the same funding that feeds ed-tech is where the equation gets more complicated. Digital technology, an expensive new medium of communication, offers unprecedented access to information and democratizes publication. There is no doubt that it is important as both a skill to learn and a tool with which to learn other things (though education seldom recognizes that distinction and just assumes digital natives magically know how to make technology an effective tool). Outside education, digital communication has revolutionized everything from manufacturing to broadcasting. Inside education it has let students type the same essay assignment they would have done on pen and paper twenty years ago, though it has made plagiarism easier. Instead of making a poster for a presentation, students can now make digital presentations. All technology has done in education is to offer a faddish means of producing the same old work we’ve always done. That faddishness appears to take care of the dreaded engagement problem, which excites many boring people. Digital technology hardly seems revolutionary in the school context. If all we’re using it for is as a replacement for paper then it’s just a new, more expensive, less environmentally friendly way of doing what we’ve always done. If technology doesn’t have an additive relationship with pedagogy it’s a lost cause, and from what I’ve seen it doesn’t. It does however take a lot of limited funding away from other, proven pedagogical strategies. The money creep goes further than stagnant pedagogical practice. It turns out you can make a lot of money convincing educational systems to buy in to technology. Even if your teachers aren’t considering digital pedagogy, someone still gets rich pushing it. There is no doubt that money and technology go hand in hand, and with limited funding, as edtech eats more everything else gets diminished by necessity. When ed-tech eats a big piece of the education pie the assumption arises that the technology itself provides the pedagogy, so you don’t need to (that appearance of engagement pushes this thinking). Giving students already overdosing on habitual, uninspired technology use technology in the classroom is a recipe for pedagogical disaster. The relationship between technology and the actual process of learning is tenuous at best. It only gets worse if we assume the use of technology will magically produce engaged, productive learners. Engaged maybe, productive? Not so much. This peaks when the teacher then throws the same assignment they’ve been doing for fifteen years on a Google-doc and calls it 21st Century learning. What we end up with is a poor learning environment ripe with distractions that encourages the same habitual use students are already mired in. The engagement we’re so excited about in educational technology is a smoke-screen. It is little more than us giving addicts access to more of what they already have too much of and don’t know how to effectively leverage. ***
What is digital pedagogy? What does digital educational technology allow us to do better in terms of the actual learning process? Until we answer this question edtech is nothing more than an expensive environmental disaster that has us producing digital dummies.
To appreciate what technology could do for education it might help to see what it’s doing for everything else. Manufacturing, once a large scale, capital driven process, is becoming accessible to smaller and smaller concerns. Where once you had to buy million dollar milling machines and the experts to maintain and run them, you can now manufacture complex parts in a small machine shop using digital tools. Not only does this free us from a production line mentality, it also frees us from production line products. We’re moving further and further away from Henry Ford’s idea of product customization. Digitization is allowing for smaller runs of customized parts in more niche workshops. As the Economist says in the link above, this really is the birth of a third industrial revolution, the re-democratization of craftsmanship and personalization in production.
Broadcasting has been staggered by digitization. From a music industry that was forced to change decades of old habits to television that has had to diversify offerings just to remain relevant in a world that can suddenly tell its own stories, digital media and the internet have fundamentally changed how we see ourselves in media.
1920s office, look familiar?
Over the course of the Twentieth Century education has been influenced by industrial methods of production even more than business itself. The classroom, the school bell, the rows of desks, it all points to a Taylorist love of systematization. It seeks to quantify and sort people in the most cost effective manner possible. In order to do that it clings to ideas of standardization because it believes this leads to credibility. It happily ignores sound pedagogy in a blind charge toward clinical efficiency, it’s the most perfect example of a production line ever developed. What if, as in broadcasting or manufacturing, education were to consider how digital technology could re-individualize education? Instead of producing modernist widget-students we could use digitization to embrace radical customization. The systemic methods we use in education – the marking, the timed classrooms, the report cards – are there to process as many students as possible as efficiently as possible. We reduce them to numbers because we don’t have the resources to treat them like people. What if educational technology solved that problem instead of replacing paper? A sufficiently complex Learning Management System would assist in assessment and maintain a current and complex analysis of student achievement. We see this in a very rudimentary way in online systems like Code Academy, where students are able to review their learning and get acknowledged for their achievements but can only proceed when they have demonstrated sufficient understanding. The immediate benefit is that each student can move at their own pace. LMSs should be driving toward this level of complexity, instead they are used as replacements for handouts. Digitization offers us an opportunity to individualize learning once again. After a couple of centuries mimicking industrial practices education has a chance to reinvent itself as a digitally empowered, personally focused system of learning, like pre-industrial apprenticeships but on a massive scale. What does a post-industrial, digitally enhanced, individualized education system look like? In that relationship, technology enhances pedagogy, it doesn’t eclipse it. In that relationship there may be monetary efficiencies, but they are a byproduct rather than the point of technology implementation. In no instance would pedagogy be financially victimized by educational technology. If you’re still ‘teaching’ information, you’ll quickly find yourself irrelevant in a post industrial education. In a world where information is abundant, the ability to access it is more important than the ability to afford a teacher to say it to you. Skills development will still be a vital piece of the education puzzle, and skills based teachers who develop understanding through experience will always have a role, but information delivery is a dying art, assuming we begin teaching effective technology use. The LMS used in future school is a constantly evolving construct that can access all facets of a student’s learning. This virtual assessment tool doesn’t just review a student’s ability to retrieve information, but instead looks at them holistically. In assessing their skills and knowledge, a future LMS would consider learning habits and then suggest individualized tactics for producing best results. A teacher would be able to see a student’s zone of proximal development before trying to assist them (I have a live graphic playing in my head of what this would look like). Your progress as a learner includes everything from demonstrated writing ability to the most complex numeracy you’re shown. It considers your patterns of absence, when you produce your best work and who you do it with. That future LMS is actually an learning management system, not a glorified webpage. It can reach across other systems to see examples of student progress in a variety of ways. When a student activates their LMS it supports their learning and aids a teacher in both teaching and assessment. Perhaps the modern, virtual equivalent of a paidagōgos. Instead of being an onerous task done poorly by time harrowed teachers through a computer system that merely mimics the paper based reporting system before it, post-industrial student assessment is detailed, accurate, holistic and personalized. The machine assists the teacher in customizing the education of each student instead of just producing neater, printed reports of letters, numbers and generic comment banks. Wouldn’t that be something, if digital technology were to amplify sound pedagogy and revolutionize our industrialized education system into something personally meaningful? Until we break the mould and begin leveraging digital technology for what it is capable of, we’re just diverting money from the task at hand: effective pedagogical practice.
Exams are in the bag and I’m wondering what the point was. Knowledgeable, capable students did well, incompetent students didn’t, but neither have the opportunity to learn from their exams. It begs the question: what is the point of an exam?
By high school most students think that education is something being done to them. The write-an-exam-get-a-mark approach only confirms this in their minds. If assessment isn’t for learning, what is it for? Beaurocracy? To maintain the teacher as the final arbiter in the classroom? Neither paperwork, nor maintaining hierarchical classroom structures hold much interest for me.
We’re currently being told that if we don’t make formal exams for all classes we’ll lose formal exam days. Good riddance I say! The end of a semester should include a debrief and a chance to review your summatives and assess the state of your own knowledge in terms of course expectations. This would provide a valuable pedagogical bridge between courses and empower students to take responsibility for their own learning.
From a teaching perspective, the debrief would mean that all the heavy, end of course summative assessment actually serves a purpose. It isn’t supposed to be punitive, and your grade in a class shouldn’t be a mystery to you. Assessment should be transparent and functional. Most importantly assessment should provide you with an opportunity to improve your learning; formal exams are none of those things, they are the black hole that learning falls into at the end of a course.
At the end of this course I’m going to get you to write a high stakes, stressful exam that is the same for all of you regardless of your learning styles. It’s going to assume you all have the same writing abilities. I’m then going to surprise you with the results!
I would love to ask the student who left half his exam blank, why did you do that? I’d like to understand where in his thought process he thought doing nothing was the way forward. I’d love to question the student who ignored obvious clues in a text and completely misunderstood its intent. I’m curious to see if, with a nudge, they are capable of seeing what was in front of them the whole time. I’d like to congratulate and confirm for the student who wrote a fantastic final that, yes, you really know this stuff. There is a time and place in learning to ask the hard question: do you know what you’re doing? The end of course summative could be this reflexive learning opportunity, but not when it’s cloaked in formal exam tradition.
Instead of considering transparent, reflexive course summatives that provide assessment as learning, we’re clinging to formal exam models from the early 1900s designed to produce secretive, teacher dominated results that serve no learning purpose. If the organizational structure of a school schedule isn’t serving learning, what is it serving?
Respect plays an important role in how human beings interact with each other. We should all strive to be respectable and earn the admiration of our fellows, but making respect an expectation belittles us all and encourages, at best, mediocrity. When everyone is automatically assigned respect individual effort becomes pointless. 
