Dusty World – Page 21 – Mechanical Sympathy

Temporal Prejudices

Recently a friend on Facebook shared this Washington Post article about Winston Churchill. I tend to shy away from hero worship, it isn’t really in me to do, but I am motivated to try and address one of our last blind spots when it comes to prejudice.

I’ve seen people time and again criticize those who lived before them as being immoral and somehow answerable to the laughable ethics of our own time. That article on Churchill, a man who lived at the end of the British Empire and spent much of his career trying to hold the tattered pieces of it together, often using the same kind of bombastic rhetoric you still see today, is no doubt accurate, but the re-defining of statements made over a century ago based on modern values is neither fair nor particularly useful, unless you’re a politician trying to win a point.

There is a real danger in interpreting historical people from a modern perspective. We are all creatures of our time – it dictates our thinking more than our culture, language or economic status does. To criticize someone for a lack of understanding at a time when it didn’t exist is itself a kind of prejudice. A fairer way to judge them would be to consider if they helped move us toward the clarity of thought we think we enjoy today.

This first became obvious to me when a history professor told us the story of his father coming back to university as a retiree. The man was well into his eighties and he thought it would be fun to take early Twentieth Century history since he’d lived through it. He quickly became so despondent with the course that he dropped it. The young students in the class ripped into what they called the rampant racism of the time. He tried to explain to them that racism wasn’t rampant, it was how society functioned back then, but they didn’t want to hear it. It’s hard to understand his point unless you’re aware of just how blinkered you are in your own time. Most people are happily ignorant of these prejudices.

Everyone, as they get older, must experience this strange kind of temporal emigration. We all move away from the values we grew up in. I suspect it’s one of the things that wears out seniors the most, society moves on without you. Newer people change the rules and things change (hopefully for the better, but there is certainly no guarantee of that). I imagine most aging people feel like the world has become a foreign place to them.

Based on the myths Western society is founded on, you’d assume that this is a case of continual improvement with us becoming the shining zenith of civilization, but human history suggests otherwise. We have moments of rationality that become eclipsed by our own darker nature. When that happens you’d better hope there is a Winston Churchill to fend off the Nazis of the world. There are racist imperialists and there are racist imperialists – had the other guy won, the definition of racist imperialist would have ascended to new heights. Starving people in India to feed soldiers during a war is a very different thing to active genocide, which is what you’d have had with Axis occupied India.

There are a number of points made in that article that, while true, ignore the circumstances they were made in. Dresden fire bombings are described as an unmitigated act of terror. In retrospect the Allies won World War 2, but this was by no means a certain outcome. In an all-out war with both sides intent on the complete subjugation of the other, the Allied firebombings not only severely affected the German war machine’s means of production, but it also struck fear into an enemy drunk on its own sense of superiority. You don’t win wars by pulling punches. Was Churchill an imperialist? No doubt, and he shared the racist views of his culture and time period, but to rewrite history to suit your own values without recognizing that cultural influence is itself a kind of prejudice.

We go to great lengths to acknowledge history these days, and I think that’s an admirable thing, but we are still blind to so many circumstances. The recent Oscar ceremony was doing back-flips to acknowledge the rampant racism and sexism implicit in the business, but then proceeded to give a standing ovation to an American soldier who proudly stated that he went to a country half way around the world (Vietnam) to kill the people there for not capitulating with his government. Imperialism is alive and well and we dress up celebrities in fancy dress to give it standing ovations and world wide TV coverage. I wonder what the people of Vietnam thought of that magical Oscar moment. Perhaps all we’ve done in our post-colonial world is hide it behind rhetoric and politics better than we did in the past.

There is something to be said for the clarity of purpose and honesty with which people used to go about the business of empire. At least back then you knew what people stood for. In Canada this looked like outright oppression, religious indoctrination in residential schools and overt colonization. Today all that is hidden behind a quiet racism and just enough prosaic government support to make the people it’s supposed to be helping helpless. In 150 years it might be said that all we’ve gotten better at is the management of colonialism. While all that’s going on we’re removing John A. MacDonald from that embarrassing historical record. At this rate we’ll have history scrubbed clean with our revisionism in no time. Don’t worry though – the racism and cultural inequalities will stay safe and warm under that revisionist blanket.

We often sit up here in the 21st Century criticizing the shortsightedness of the people before us. I wonder what our descendants, looking at us sitting on our high horses while appearing blissfully ignorant about our hypocrisy, will say about us.

We’re burning a hole in the world with fossil fuels, industrial farming the earth into a desert to feed a never ending population explosion, wearing clothes made by third world workers in economic slavery (itself based on the remnants of colonialism), creating the worst economic disparity in human history and proudly supporting martial force when it suits us, which usually means when we need what they have. The only difference between imperialism a century ago and imperialism now is the marketing we put on it. We used to be honest about our imperialist intentions, now we tell everyone we’re exporting freedom.

We’re all blind to the things our time period is unwilling or unable to address. This is as true for Churchill as it is for Mr Tharoor. A good dose of humility is what we need here, not more rhetoric by a politician. A bit more awareness of circumstance and compassion for historical circumstance might also translate into a less judgmental view of our own elderly. Trying to understand someone from a different culture is something we say we value. Recognizing that people from other time periods are essentially from a different culture as well might make us a bit more aware of our own hypocrisy.

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Biological Education & Hot Groups

I’ve been to two Minds On Media events, at ECOO in October and the OELC Conference this past February. Both times I’ve been surprised by the response from teachers regardless of their technical prowess. Tech skills weren’t the arbitrating force, curiosity was. The people who were involved in it found themselves working in their ZPD, and felt supercharged by the experience. So much of schooling involves crowd control rather than trying to get students into that zone of proximal development. So much teaching revolves around control, rather than encouraging self directed learning.

When I first attended MoM, the event reminded me of a gardener creating fertile ground, but having the sense not to micromanage the growing/learning. I suspect there is a truth in this that applies to all education. Whether you want to call it student centred or skills based or what have you, education isn’t a mechanical/mathematical process, it’s a biological one. Events like Minds On Media recognize this by empowering the learners (and the instructors) and giving them the freedom to move within a rich learning environment to where they think they need to be.

Most of the PD I experience exists in a mechanical process that alienates teachers and makes them resentful. This approach is used because administration is more concerned with a disciplined environment (that crowd control mentioned above) that ensures full participation even if it is entirely passive, than it is with presenting memorable content. When the learning takes a back seat to crowd control, you know the results aren’t going to be pretty. In fact, they’re going to look at lot like…

The other thing that’s been bouncing around in my head is the idea of hot groups. I know many educators shy away from business approaches, calling them corporate and such, but this one is anything but corporate. Hot Groups recognize a fundamental truth about how people work together. In a hot group members will do work well beyond what is expected or required, simply for the joy of having it received as valuable within the group. In my own case, I recently did a hot group thing for our little cloud working group, I made a group logo and people dug it. It’s an insider thing, only a few will appreciate it, but it builds team and even surprised me with a level of commitment (the fact that everyone wanted a t-shirt was what gave me the biggest buzz about it).

I’ve seen this happen time and again with students. As I type this I have my grade 12s putting together a network of computers using many different OSes. Some of them haven’t done it before, others have, but are unfamiliar with the OSes I’ve provided them with (Red Hat Linux Server, Ubuntu Server, Windows Home Server, Ubuntu Desktop, Win7, XP and Vista). Listening to them talk, they are telling anecdotal stories of failed OS installs, upgrades that led to game failures due to compatibility issues and all sorts of other OS related experiences, all while working through multiple installs. This may look disorganized and inefficient, I’d argue that it’s the opposite. Those students are creating context that I would not have imagined trying in a top down lesson on OS installs, and they’re doing it while creating a sense of group coherence (made even more amazing when you realize that three of the ten of them in there are usually sequestered away in the autism learning class). Those guys came out of there, having installed half a dozen OSes during the period, and they’d also made this (a classic example of a hot group surprise – they were very keen to give me a copy when the class ended).

If you think that has nothing to do with what they were supposed to be doing, you’re determined to force human relationships, and the learning the goes on within them into a linear, mechanical process. Those guys did many things that period that I hadn’t intended, as well as most of the things I had. On aggregate, I’d suggest that they weren’t limited by their teacher’s knowledge of them, their own risk aversion to failure (installing unknown OSes), or a need to overly control the learning. The result is a non-judgmental, rich learning environment that encouraged creativity and constructive peer support. The team building that happened in there today will be something I can continue to develop for the rest of the semester.

If I can create that environment, I do. If a hot group grows out of it, I’m over the moon. You’ll seldom experience a better teacher rush than the one you do when a hot group wows you with what you weren’t expecting.

Sand in the Sahara

The other day I was trying to work out how experiential and academic learning interact. In the process I also found myself assuming things about fundamental learning skills that don’t necessarily exist in many modern classrooms:

Foundational skills are changing now that information is no longer scarce

It used to be that literacy and numeracy were the student skills we felt they needed to succeed. Information fluency was less important because the gatekeepers of knowledge (teachers) and the limited nature of published paper meant you didn’t have access to what you needed to know so you needed an expert to direct you. In a world with limited information having a guide direct you to a scarce resource is invaluable.

When I was in high school information was hard to come by. You needed access to a limited number of books and if you had a question a teacher would provide you access to that information. Because of scarcity, verbal transmission of information (teacher’s mouth to student’s ear) made sense. Many teachers still cling to that model because it’s the only one they’ve ever known and they identify their profession through that process. In 2014 they they are trying to sell sand in what has become the Sahara.

Information is abundant and accessible with only a basic understanding of the technology that provides it. A modern student who looks to a teacher to give them facts has been conditioned by teachers to be helpless. Teachers who jealously guard and distribute knowledge in predigital ways are the ones crying about how technology lets students plagiarize or collaborate with each other, or share information – it’s really all the same thing. Students who are able to find, critically assess and organize information are the ones modelling 21st Century skills. The ones who have been taught to be passive receivers in a sea of information are a failure in an education system set on maintaining traditional habits.

Considering how information fluency has changed from a passive to an active pursuit (in much the same way that passive TV watching has evolved into active video game participation), it would behoove the education system to recognize the need to integrate information fluency into early education in order to produce self-directed, empowered learners who are able to leverage the ocean of information that surrounds them. Ignoring this new fundamental skill is producing whole generations of digital serfs.

There is no doubt that literacy, numeracy and the basic socialization of early school is still the foundation, but upon that foundation we should be building information fluency in order to produce people who are not overwhelmed or habituated into a dangerously simplistic relationship with information technology. By the time a student reaches secondary school they should be sufficiently skilled in literacy, numeracy and information fluency to be able to self direct many aspects of their learning. In that environment a classroom teacher would very much be a facilitator rather than a traditional teacher, but it’s never going to happen if we don’t take information fluency as seriously as we do literacy and numeracy.

Building foundational learning skills should result in empowered, self-directed learners who can
survive and thrive in an information rich world.

#edtech I.T. Management

Welcome to 2010, kindof…

We’re back in school again and it’s been a bit of a #edtech mess. Over the summer our board upgraded to Windows 7 (so now we’re only one iteration behind the most current operating system). In the process the entire network was rejigged to fit this new desktop O.S..

Because doing a massive O.S. install wasn’t enough, we also had a major hardware update, moving both models and manufacturers from several years old MDG Intel core two duos to Dell Intel i3s. If you don’t know the nomenclature don’t sweat it, the long and the short is that our school technology is basically completely different from what we were running last year; and it isn’t working very well.

Managing I.T. is tricky at the best of times. Managing it in an education environment is more so due to the privacy concerns and complexity of trying to serve people ranging in age from five to sixty five and in computer skill from caveman to cyborg. To top it off they are all going after radically different uses from physical education to theoretical physics and from pre-university to kindegarten. Pitching to the middle of this group causes frustration at either end, it’s not like running an office where everyone has similar backgrounds, ages and a common focus.

With that much difficulty it’s not surprising that our board I.T. seems to often lose sight of what their function is. Supporting effective use of technology in learning shouldn’t be far from anyone’s mind, but it often feels like the reason for being there gets lost in the complexity. On top of that, board I.T. often seems strongly coloured by business thinking, which it isn’t. One of our networks is called UGDSBcorp. I’m not sure at what point our public school board became a corporation, but the naming says a lot about the thinking.

We’re in a transitional time in information technology. What used to be closed systems meant to connect employees internally are migrating to web based services that are meant to offer greater communication, efficiency and utility. Clinging to the old way of delivering I.T. results in a lot of unnecessary overhead. An example is our email. We cling to Firstclass as an internal client but are also running UGcloud (google apps for education which includes gmail). We’re told to check our email each day. Which one? Both? I know which one I can connect to more consistently, and it isn’t the internal board one.

With the migration of apps and systems to the cloud it might be wise to push aside the intranet 1990s thinking and consider a resilient network that simply allows easy access to the internet. Privacy can still be protected on secure web-servers. If you can do your banking on them, you can certainly store student records on them. But our board clings to intranet thinking, keeping the vast majority of functionality on local servers and increasing their management work load to such a degree that they can’t keep up with basic operations.

I’ve long held that students (and staff) don’t learn responsible use of technology if you hand them hobbled technology. No one ever got on the tour de France with training wheels. The internet they see at home or on their phones isn’t the training-wheels internet they see at school, and this isn’t helpful. Instead of using the internet as a babysitter in class, teachers need to be in the middle of it, calling attention to misuse and showing best practices. A school system with less fetters would aid this and make management easier for the people who are constantly short staffed and given too little time to keep it running.

Until we have internet and technology access that rivals the up-time of what we see outside of school we have an uphill struggle convincing reticent educators and poorly trained students to learn best practices, which is supposed to be the whole point.

Blended Learning and Relevant Classrooms

I’m feeling the synchronicity of two educational situations at the moment. I’m presenting this on Monday next at our Board’s learning fair, and I just went in for an interview for a curriculum leader position in technology/elearning.

The topic of the learning fair is ‘student engagement’ but I think this is the answer to the wrong question. Engagement implies trying to tailor your teaching to make it palatable for students. Engagement is what you get when you look at the bigger picture and become relevant, it isn’t a goal in itself.

I was asked today in the interview what the future is for blended learning. In this case, blended learning implies a hybrid of elearning/in-class learning and technology. I don’t think there is a future in it, I believe it is the future, at least if we want to get an increasingly irrelevant (due to the pace of change) school system to recognize the scope of the changes happening in the world around us, and make a meaningful attempt to prepare our students for the deluge ahead.

Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google had a rather profound quote, I use it in the prezi:

“Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003. I spend most of my time assuming the world is not ready for the technology revolution that will be happening to them soon,”

If the world isn’t ready, education is even less so.

In the interview I described students’ out-of-school life as a torrent of data, like standing under Niagara Falls; it’s a stimulating, multi-directional, multi-disciplinary stream of information on many topics delivered in many different formats in rapid succession. We then get them into a class room and dribble information at them, out of a teacher’s mouth, out of a text book, all of it stale, uni-directional and non-interactive; then we wonder how to engage them.

In the meantime I’m seeing students mismanage and drop information and connections they should be making because they can’t manage the information being streamed at them. They don’t know how to make most effective use of their technology, often using smart phones in the dumbest possible ways. They don’t know how to effectively vet and prioritize data and find ways to make useful, actionable connections from it.

We certainly don’t teach effective data management and analysis in our in-class information dribble of chalk boards, rows of desks and one-person-speak-at-a-time last century classes.

Blended learning, where teachers make use of the sea of data swirling around us and teach students to swim, not sink is the first step towards a relevant education system that actually prepares students for what they are likely to face. But preparing them for the data storm requires that we use the technology being developed to manage it, and the friction is great from a conservative educational standpoint.

When I was a kid, I was big into Astronomy. I memorized the nine planets, and even the big moons. Since August 2011, we’ve discovered almost 600 planets (even including Pluto’s demotion) and average about twelve new discoveries a week. The whole time I was growing up, there were only nine planets, we’re on the verge of discovering multitudes. Astronomy is just one of EVERY FIELD OF STUDY that is facing this data onslaught.

Information isn’t the limited, simple, permanent, sacred collection of knowledge it was once perceived to be. We have to stop teaching to the book and start teaching to the evolving datasphere.

Simple Remote Learning Fixes

I was asked what our spec-ed teachers can do to help students with IEPs who are struggling with technology at home. This might not be the answer they expected, but here’s 30 years of IT experience at work, and it follows the screensaver I always ran when I was a full time IT technician: SIMPLIFY!

For many ‘tech’ is something out of their comfort zone which means you’re battling a confidence issue as well as the tech problem. For others, especially younger people who have been told they’re digital natives who intuitively understand technology (which is hooey) you get the Dunning-Kruger Effect in full blossom and have have to back them out of the assumptions they jump into too quickly.

Here are the simple how-tos for tech support which will resolve the vast majority of technical problems you’ll face in our bizarre new world of COVID19 bubble remote learning (you’ll be building digital fluency in your users too!):

THE BASICS FOR TECH SUPPORTING REMOTE LEARNING

1. Have you tried turning it off and on again? You’d be amazed how often that solves things. There is a lot of data moving around in a computer and the person using it may very well have interrupted some of those processes. Rebooting a computer lets it sort itself out and undo those interruptions.

2. SLOW DOWN! (it’s a theme) Actually read the error – the computer is trying to tell you something, slow down and read and understand it. Many people tend to make assumptions and then start mashing buttons and messing with settings. This makes it even harder to fix the probably simple issue that kicked this off.

3. Get good at searching online for a solution. Don’t paraphrase, put the specific message you’re getting in the search and you’ll get specific how-tos, you’ll also get a sense of how common what’s happened is. Include details. What operating system are you running? Windows 10? Windows 8? Windows 7 even though it is no longer supported by Microsoft but your school board won’t update? Mac OSx? ChromeOS? What model of computer are you using – it’s stamped on it somewhere. Get details and use them in your online search.

4. Having said number 3, the internet is populated with idiots, so don’t believe everything you read on the interwebs – be criticial! Look for quality answers from a good source (it’s NEVER reddit – see the brilliant commentary on the right).
A Chrome answer from a Google page? A Windows answer from a Microsoft page? A Mac answer from an Apple page? That’s where you want to look – and then SLOW DOWN (theme, remember?) read and understand what they’re saying.

5. Make one change and test it. As Charles from MASH once famously said, do one thing at a time, do it very well, and then move on.
Running off half cocked is what too many people do. They end up making things worse by digging into settings and mashing buttons. If it worked before, it’s probably a single thing that changed. Slow down, read and understand what’s happening, isolate the problem, solve it – then reboot to let the computer sort itself out!

The technical side of things is only one part of the technical support equation. Dealing with user psychology is the unspoken, secret side of the business. User resilience plays a big part in how many technical issues you’re tasked with solving. It’s a lack of confidence that prevents people from solving many of these issues themselves, not the technical complexity of the issue itself. As my Dad once said, if a person built it, I can fix it. Until we’re facing alien technology, you got this.

If we can build confidence and encourage everyone to take on responsibility for using the tech, everything tends to work better, the user included. Don’t ignore the psychology – make a point of congratulating yourself or your user for resolving their own technical challenges – it helps bridge that confidence deficit.

6. BONUS: it’s usually something simpler than you think it is. When I was looking at blade server failure that had just knocked over 600 employees off the network for no reason everyone else in the department wanted to dive into software settings. I went and looked at the thing and realized it had been plugged in to the wrong breaker (plug), and it kept popping when over 400 connected at time. Others wanted to get into settings, I checked to see if it was plugged in properly.

Mike Meyers has a similar story in his CompTIA A+ Study manual: a colleague was bragging about how great his security firewalls were on a new server. Mike bet him he could get into it and the guy took the bet. Mike put on overalls, walked into the office saying he was there to do some maintenance and the receptionist waved him in. He walked into the server room, unplugged it and walked out of the office with it under his arm. The receptionist didn’t notice because her internet was down (he’d just walked out with the thing that served it).

7. SUPER BONUS!!! PUSH YOUR UPDATES! If you’re on Windows type in update in the search bar and it’ll walk you through them – being out of date can stop your machine from working properly, especially in our interconnected techosystem (see what I did there/). Being out of date also opens you up to all sorts of cybersecurity headaches. If you’re on an Apple product, the process is similar. Chromebooks need updating love too, don’t forget it!

There is nothing magical about digital technology, or any technology really. Our inability to manage it usually comes down to either a confidence problem around a lack of familiarity or an over falsity of confidence based on the same thing.

When you’re trying to get students connected during an emergency situation don’t over-complicate things and look for the easiest fix first. I’ve seen ‘experts’ diving into Chrome settings and spending an hour messing with settings and still coming up short. The IT tech in me always wonders why they don’t spend five minutes uninstalling and reinstalling it. The point isn’t to show off your prowess (though I’m not sure that wandering through settings randomly trying things for an hour would do that), it’s to make things work.

In short, be humble, be helpful and be solutions focused which includes addressing where your user is in terms of psychology. That’ll get 99% of your technical challenges sorted in our bizarre COVID remote learning bubbles. For the other 1%, that’s why we have IT departments.

from DUSTY WORLD on Blogger https://ift.tt/2Xpg8jY published in the middle of the spring 2020 COVID19 emergency remote learning situation as I found myself buried under dozens of requests for help from frantic teachers and students.
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Can You Run a Game Development Studio in a Senior Highschool Class?

Yes, you can!

Over the past four years we have built a high school grade 11 and 12 software engineering program focused on video game design. The course uses the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge – a freely available document from the IEEE, that clarifies and develops the organizational and engineering best practices needed to build a modern video game. Using SWEBOK as a guide to project management and with the support of Unity, who gave us professional licenses for their game design software and Blender, a non-profit software company who offers professional grade 3d modelling software for free, we build our games.

This semester our three student led groups conceptualized, planned and managed to completion three very different projects:

Slimecing: slime fencing game: Slimecing (@slimecing_) | Twitter

Nuclear Fist VR boxing simulator: Spook Box Games (@box_spook) | Twitter

Knockback Knights: physics driven FPS: Knockback Knights (@BackKnights) | Twitter

Nuclear Fist is our third VR title and like Gravedug from last year (whose lead went on to Sheridan College for Game Design), we have been able to pass on the experiences and knowledge from semester to semester as the class is always a combined grade 11 / 12 split class. The juniors learn from the seniors who learned from the previous seniors. In this way we’ve been able to build up a body of knowledge within the school that has produced stronger and stronger finished projects each year, even in challenging development environments like virtual reality.

Management is the most challenging part of the process. It’s hard enough to manage people to begin with, but when you’re a teen trying to manage other teens it becomes monumental. Setting high standards, encouraging collaboration, communication and goal setting to produce a transparent, adaptive and ultimately effective engineering processes is the real goal. Once again these students can’t believe what they’ve achieved in only 12 short weeks. Being an M level technology credit we have a full range of academic streams in the room, but the collaborative approach means everyone is working towards those higher standards.

This semester we worked cross curricularly with our arts department to build up our visual design consistency:

Concept Art Knockback Knights – Google Drive

Concept Art Slimecing – Google Drive

Concept Art Nuclear Fist – Google Drive

We’re thinking about working with business marketing students next year to expand our outreach. The cross curricular opportunities in this are continually expanding. Eventually we hope to have arts students helping us build a consistent and complex visual style, drama helping us creating realistic movement in our animations and business helping us market the results.

I just finished marking the exams. With a class average over 80% you’d think this is considered an easy course, but all the wishy washy types were shaken out in the first few weeks and replaced by keen students fighting to get into the course. Even those with exceptional final grades commented on how challenging and ‘real’ the course feels. One noted, “there is no where else where we’re trusted to work on a project this large and complicated.” It can’t happen if standards aren’t high, but the reputation of the course and the exceptional output it produces have done more to stream this course than academic streaming ever could.

We’ve never run this course in semester one before. We’re over subscribed every year but not enough to spawn a second section. If we had multiple sections working on this we could hand off projects between semesters and run the course all year. We come incredibly close to making a viable game title in only eleven to twelve weeks in a single semester. If we can leverage the word of mouth from semester one, perhaps we can bump sign ups to about 50 students and warrant a second section. Were that to happen, both sections would still be 11/12 splits in order to encourage the handing on of hard won knowledge to new students.

***

You can download and play Slimecing from here: Slimecing by Q

…and here is their engineering review:
Slimecing Project Wrap Up Presentation – Google Slides

Knockback Knights and Nuclear Fist both intend to continue to develop their games but don’t have a release ready yet. Below are their engineering reviews.

Nuclear Fist Wrap Up Presentation – Google Slides

Knockback Knights Final Presentation – Google Slides

The Slimecing lead asked if we might start a GameDev club to continue working on these projects in semester two. That tells you something about how engaging our approach to tackling very complicated software engineering processes can be.

Two of our digital artists are taking a run at Skills Ontario’s 3d character modelling competition this year. We have grads from this course who have started their own game development studio with over a million downloads. We have graduates who have attended top programs at Waterloo University, Sheridan College and other post secondary locations who are now working in the industry. If you think it video games aren’t a big deal, you haven’t looked at the opportunities there lately.

Between this software course, one of the strongest grade 11 computer engineering classes ever, qualifying two teams for CyberTitan national semi-finals, and some very promising new grade 9s, what a satisfying semester it has been!

Follow these student software engineering projects on Twitter if you want to keep up with what happens next.

CWDHS Computer Tech (@CWcomptech) | Twitter

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Taylorism In Edtech

I’ve just taken over as the tech-support teacher for my high school after a brief absence. I don’t generate technical problems, so I was right out of this jet stream until I came back in to manage it again.

Our first issue involved our student database system (Maplewood) being programmed to drop inactive students after 90 days of not logging in to the network. Why 90 days? No apparent reason.

In semester one you might be taking shop, phys-ed, co-op or food school (amongst many), and find that you are never asked to log in to a school machine in the course of your studies. Or you might simply have followed the board’s new BYO-device policy and use your own machine. Semester 2 rolls around and suddenly you don’t exist and are unable to login, and neither do hundreds of your colleagues. On the first day of class you fall behind.

The emails started on the first day back and didn’t get resolved until three days later.

The purpose of automation is to reduce repetitive, pointless work and make us more efficient. This particular piece of automation created pointless work and reduced efficiency in teachers and students across the building, not to mention my time and our technician’s time.

Why not set the shut down to six months, safely moving you into semester 2 before doing the automatic account shut-down? Because the people who set up this system are not educators, they have little or no idea how the schools they service are scheduled. If you don’t know (or care) how something works, you’re not likely to support it very effectively.

It’s a kind of interdepartmental blindness that results in the left hand having no idea (and no patience) with what the right hand is doing. This kind of systematization might seem cheap on the surface and satisfy an accountant’s spreadsheet, but it’s hardly efficient or effective.

In order to support a system, the person operating it should have lived with it. There are plenty of teachers who understand school needs that don’t necessarily want to teach in the classroom. I’d rather see them managing our network than someone with no ED background who has little or no idea of even simple needs.

Efficiency isn’t always about hiring the least educated (and cheap) person possible. You can actually save money with quality.

Facebook vs Twitter: the epic showdown

Like everyone else, I got into Facebook. Never the pointless flash games, but as a place to share photos with family and friends, it worked for me. It also allowed me to stay in touch with family and friends who are far away. Recently though, with the constant addition of new ‘friends’ many of whom aren’t, I find myself staring at news-feeds of people I couldn’t care less about, and, in some cases, I wouldn’t recognize if I passed them on the street. One day, after spending ten minutes trying to find a comment from someone I genuinely thought about often, I simply switched it off.

A couple of months ago I started using Twitter at a computers in education conference (ecoo.org). I’d tried Twitter a couple of times and it hadn’t caught – I couldn’t see the point in it, but this conference turbocharged the tweets. Following flash mobs to prizes, getting well researched links and ideas from other teachers, backchanneling in presentations… I got hooked.

Twitter is like facebook in that it’s a social networking tool, but without the social dead-weight. Follow who you want and lurk, or twit away. If people enjoy it, word spreads and you get a posse. Keep grooming who you follow. After a while it’s a steady stream of people you really enjoy reading. Twitter’s not about you in the herd, it’s about customizing a herd FOR you.

The teacher angle has let me build a PLN, personal learning network. Recently, at another conference, I ran into people I’d been tweeting with over several months. It felt like we already knew each other, but only in a certain way. Filling in the blanks was a wonderful experience, and a great opportunity to pick and choose new people to follow.

I’m still only 6 months into twitter. I’ve dropped more people than I now follow, and I suspect that I’ll top out at about 100, and constantly be grooming out filler. I’m interested in following thoughts and developing PLN, not seeing what a celebrity thinks (rare exceptions: @naomiklien, for obvious reasons, @stephenfry because he broadcasts intelligently).

Twitter feels intimate and direct, while at the same time letting me broadcast far and wide. The idea that it’s somehow limiting in scope is inaccurate as well. Twitter and blogs go together like 3 pound lobsters and butter. You can point to deeper thinking in a blog post, or to presentations and mind maps in Prezi, or photos on any number of photo sharing sites (or mashups and collages on glogster, etc etc). Twitter gives you the sign posts, aggregated by the people you trust to follow, and allows you to reciprocate for them.

Clive Thompson at WIRED totally grocs this.

I just culled the facebook herd and I’m finding it somewhat useful again, but I’m waiting for the blowback from in-law cousin’s husbands who want to know why we’re no longer friends. We never were dude.

Archive: 1998: FPS: A Gamer’s Reply

First Person Shooter: a gamer’s reply

I‘ll come straight out and tell you that I’m an avid video game player, have been since I got hooked on Donkey Kong Jr. when I was ten years old. From dotty eight bit graphics on my first Vic 20 to the Pentium 4 powerhouses and monster video cards on my home network today, I’m a technology junkie of the highest order. A simple decision by my parents set me down the path of intelligent adoption early in my experience: I begged for an Intellivision, they got me a Vic20. Suddenly I’m programming instead of mind numbing button pushing – I’m a creator not just a user. Twenty years later I’m working as a systems trainer and technician.

From that brief biography I give you my reaction to the documentary called “First Person Shooter” I saw on CTV last Sunday (http://www.firstpersonshooter.tv/index.html), created by Robin Benger, a TV producer and film maker. Rather than simply trying to scare you while appearing to keep a semblance of veracity and professional indifference, I’ll try and unpack all of the assumptions and the real intent behind this lightly veiled propaganda. In its desperate attempts to stay on top I find the current popular media (and in this case medium of television itself) taking poorly researched, rather desperate shots at the latest distractions. In the case of “First Person Shooter” the father of a child deeply addicted to a game called “Counter Strike” uses his own medium (he is a television producer and film maker) to analyze and ultimately criticize his child’s dependency on media.

The general issue of addiction can be dealt with in fairly specific terms. Game playing, even in its most chronic form certainly can’t be quantified as a physical addiction. At best it can be described as a reinforced behaviour. What reinforces the behaviour of a chronic player, a need for control, expression, respect? Online playing is not just the wave of the future any more, it is here today. Community, interaction and team building are a huge part of the modern online gaming experience. A child addicted to this is a child addicted to a need to belong; not exactly a damning statement; and one that prompts the question: why are these things so lacking in his non-virtual existence?

What is especially laughable about Mr. Benger’s documentary is that he uses his medium of television to debunk a new and competing medium for media. I wonder if he is more upset that his child is having trouble prioritizing his life or that he isn’t supporting Mr. Benger’s own media infatuation. The question of what benefits television has in attacking a competing medium must be an integral part of this examination.

There is a small step between an addictive personality and an obsessive one and in either case they can lead to amazing, expression or discovery. The price people pay for this kind of infatuation can also lead them to depression and ultimately make them unable to support their need. In short if you’re shooting for a small target like genius you will often miss and the results aren’t pretty. If a child becomes so infatuated something that it consumes their lives, it seems to me the best way to push through it is to assist them in swallowing too much. They’ll eventually force themselves away from it and in doing so their rejection of the infatuation will surely be more meaningful.

In the meantime we’ve got something like video games, that many older people simply don’t accept. They find it threatening, difficult to understand and so place a low value on it. As a gamer (with a fine arts background and an honours degree in English and Philosophy) that gaming has been churning out exceptional pieces of art for many years now. As the technology continues to improve the media presented on it will only become more immersive and meaningful. Whereas once printing allowed for the widespread, sedentary activity of reading for the masses, and movie and television furthered the trend towards sedentary, cerebral entertainment, video gaming has reintroduced the entertainee as an active participant in the process. In doing so it promises to further enhance our ability to express and understand our selves and the reality around us; the goal of any media.

From: http://atking.ca/timothy/index.htm