Dusty World – Page 27 – Mechanical Sympathy

I’m a Sponge

One of my strengths as a teacher is my overdeveloped sense of empathy. It’s also why I’m often exhausted at the end of a day. The recent state of affairs in Ontario education has gotten to the point where I have to time my exposure to this negativity as it infects my thinking elsewhere. I’m trying to balance the need to make political noise to stop the sociopaths in government with my own mental health.

The end of semester one happened and I came home one day hanging on by my fingernails. As is typical in most Ontario classrooms, I have a staggeringly wide range of students. My recent grade 9 class contained students who were functionally illiterate with others who are already operating two grades ahead of where they should be. I’m somehow supposed to deliver meaningful, differentiated instruction to all twenty five of them. This reaches peak pressure as the semester ends and these grade 9s, who have never learned in a semestered system before, struggled to understand that the course is ending and I won’t be their teacher any more. When my wife saw the state of me she said, “you’re a sponge” soaking up all of this stress and negativity.

Chasing the strays and getting marks in is exhausting, and often simply an exercise in damage control rather than a learning opportunity. Marking exams was also interesting. I share all the theory tests we did throughout the semester online and can see when students make use of them in studying. The vast majority of my grade 9s, 10s and 11s spent less than 20 minutes reviewing for exams. Our class averages typically landed at about 60% with 1/4 of each class failing. Even when you hand the actual exam questions over to students, a frustrating large number of them can’t be bothered to lift a finger to review it, though they all expect a good mark for it.

This is partly to do with the fact that we’re forced to do academic style exams to protect the academic style exam schedule, even though we’re an applied, skills driven course, but it also has to do with how modern students accept responsibility for their learning. They are repeatedly conditioned not to take on this responsibility. Attendance has become entirely optional – I have two students away on extended vacations at the beginning of semester two and I had many students with more than three weeks of absences in semester one. In addition to lax attendance expectations, students know that wherever possible their learning is done for them, often in line with standardized testing. This learning is neither individualized nor differentiated and does little to foster the life long learning that would genuinely assist students in the world beyond our classrooms.

I don’t usually look at the grades students are getting in other classes and without knowing I’m usually grading them similarly to their other grades in the building, but this semester I did look. Grades are up across the board. You’d be hard pressed to find a teacher that fails a student because they tend to get passed anyway in promotions meetings or given absurdly reduced expectations in a credit recovery class, so why pick the fight? That sense of helplessness is becoming an epidemic in Ontario education as a remorseless political group with dwindling popularity continues to attack a system most of them never participated in. I’m still ruminating on the connection between teacher efficacy and student learning outcomes. I suspect countries like Finland (and Canada before this neo-conservative press) offer a high level of teacher efficacy which leads to higher standards and stronger students. When the system thumps efficacy out of teachers, as it is right now, standards drop. It’ll be interesting to see if the data supports this in the coming years.

The crushing weight of all of this squeezes the life out of me at semester’s end. When it’s happening between intermittent strike days and the guy in charge of education (who was never in public education himself) repeatedly saying that we’re greedy and selfish, it all knocks me down yet another peg.

When I’m pressed under this kind of emotional weight, it colours my ability to assess the world around me. Things that probably aren’t that bad appear to be, but it’s hard to see that.

Last month I wrote a piece trying to work out teacher pay. I’m usually happy if a Dusty World post hits a thousand page views. For a specialist blog on education, I think that’s a good result. Easy Money is currently at just over thirty thousand page views and speaks to the curiosity that people have around the misinformation being spread in this political climate. That our Ministry of Education produced these misleading numbers is yet another layer of frustration. Teachers are still teachers if they are part time, on short term contract or away on sick leave, but our Ministry ignored all that and gave their political masters what they asked for – a misleading statistic that promotes their politics. I wrote Easy Money to wrap my head around a more nuanced and detailed understanding of the subject. That moment of over-attention chased me off blogging, which I’ve never done for views. Some of the things people say to you if you dare to challenge their politics is truly nasty. Dusty World has always been a place I can come and work out my thinking. If others benefit from that then great, but its function is to help me reflect on my own practice, not generate page views. Maybe in taking that back Dusty World can keep the darkness at bay in an Ontario drowning in deep blue rhetoric.

Being quiet while mad men try to burn down your profession and a vital public resource shouldn’t be an option for any Ontario educator.
Speak up, there are lots of ways to do it, but also look after yourself too.

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Decompartmentalizing

I know teachers get edgy when considering business theory for use in the classroom, but gamestorming in class seems like a sure thing. The problem with it is the breaking down of conventions around learning. We structure our classes on this stuff. Would a good gamestorm be acceptable in English class, or is it too artsy? Would it be acceptable in art class, or is it too text driven? Would it be ok in a music class if it wasn’t entirely musical? That these questions get asked gives you an idea about how far we have come from playing with our ideas. We’ve cut thinking into arbitrarily compartmented piece work.

I love looking at Leonardo’s sketch books. Write about it when it fits, sketch when it doesn’t. When I look at those, I wonder what a modern Leonardo would do with modern media. Where we used to be limited by word and graphic on paper, we can now create virtual 3d spaces and plaster them with images, sounds, text, video, some, none or all of it interactive. I wonder how well a universal mind like that would operate in such a rich media environment and then finding itself in our school system with it’s little buckets of knowledge, none of which should ever mix.

I know this is beginning to change. Being able to differentiate instruction and accept multiple paths to proof of broader understanding is happening, but slowly, in school. I still see (usually) older teachers resisting the mash up, saying it doesn’t respect the discipline of the… um, discipline.

In the meantime, I keep asking myself; how can I see that they know what they’re doing without falling back into the same old habits? The text trap is the worst of all, it carries with it a patina of academia. If it’s in text, it must be academically rigorous and appropriately difficult. Anyone who still thinks this hasn’t seem the time, energy and creativity my students have put into a media project.

Here is a copy of one of my favorite audio assignments from the beginning of the grade 10 media course. The instructions were loose (1-2 mins, tell an audio story, multiple sound tracks, original content only – no internet pilfering). This is only sound, yet what a story unfolds. This medium is all but ignored in typical school. Imagine being able to read an essay while hearing student spoken comments at various times – or accepting a sound/graphic mashup of brainstorming, instead of just text. The software exists for this to happen now, but the urge isn’t there because we keep retreating to our buckets.

Instead of having the technology push us out of bad habits, why not let some new habits push the technology? We keep seeing tentative steps towards mixed media (I’m thinking Prezi, Ning and Googledocs), but no bold changes in how we think. The ultimate change would be to forget what 200 years of scientific compartmentalizing has done and kick open possibility in thinking.

Special Education

Near the end of my teacher’s college program, Nipissing put on an assistive learning tools workshop. We were all duly wowed by the latest version of Dragonspeak, the latest in PDAs and how they could be used in learning, and a surprising array of speech, numeracy, literacy and subject specific learning tools. It was an all day seminar, and it really had an impact on me. It also made me question the intent of all of this fantastic equipment.

Over and over, it was targeted at at-risk/below grade students who struggled with whatever the technology was supposed to help them overcome. Dragonspeak, there is no doubt, helps students see language in terms of the written word, but why does it need to be so carefully guarded from the general population? If a student struggling with literacy could use Dragonspeak to gain a foothold on something beyond their reach, couldn’t it just as easily help a group of media students get their ideas down in solid form while they were storyboarding a video? Couldn’t it assist a gifted writer who wants to try a different way of getting over writer’s block? These people aren’t anywhere near failing, but if we’re only using assistive tech to help those failing expectations, I think we’re wasting a valuable opportunity.

Those many learning tools we saw that day impressed upon me just how helpful technology could be in learning, I just didn’t understand why it all had to be so Special focused. Any one of those tools could help anyone learn. Learning isn’t easy, for anyone, it’s a challenge to stay focused, it’s a challenge to make the time and space to write, even if you think of yourself as a writer. It’s a challenge to get work in on time, even if you’re a top student. I watch excellent students in the form of teachers doing their Masters struggling with this very issue all the time.

In my senior year of high school, my grandfather died, our family pet died and shortly thereafter my father was involved in a near-fatal traffic accident. Always a B student (why draw unnecessary attention to yourself), my grades slipped, assignments weren’t handed in and things went from mediocre to worse. My teachers berated me for time management, I was not working “to expectations”. I didn’t tell anyone about what was going on at home, I was trying to hold it (and a shaky family) together as the oldest son. I’d never been special enough to get a special education, and the standard one wasn’t fitting now. I squeaked out of high school and it took me 3 years to get my self together and take another run at it in order to get grade 13 and go to university.

Whenever I have a student, regardless of what their Individual Education Plan does or doesn’t say, suddenly miss work, or class, I don’t start grading them in terms of expectations, I ask myself what’s going on in the other 99% of their lives that has little or nothing to do with my classroom. Sometimes I ask, sometimes they tell me, often they don’t, but I don’t take that as license to grade them to Ministry expectations.

Dealing with the system now as a parent for the first time has only enforced my understanding of how streaming generally works. My son is lucky in having 2 educated, very motivated and able parents who advocate for him strenuously. His challenges at school aren’t overwhelming, but many students face much worse obstacles, and don’t have the support at home to take on the system effectively. On a purely experiential basis, we could as easily stream academic/applied and essential into stable family/broken family/no-visible family, and you’d find a startling correlation between our current “academic” system of measurement and an often ignored key indicator of school success.

Differentiating, student centred learning and assistive technology all aim to produce an education that helps a student on as much of an individual basis as we can manage in a system that often has too many people and not enough money. In a perfect world, we wouldn’t have Special Education, it would all be special education, in the meantime, you have to ask yourself, how often have you had grades dictated by a lack of access to assistive technology or poor student performance due to their circumstances beyond school?

Maybe one day education will just be special, but I don’t see that happening as long as we set up static, specific expectations and expect students to achieve them like automatons. An education has surprisingly little to do with building a better person. It’s a biological process, deeply tied to our physical development, circumstances and opportunities, but we still want to assess it as though it were a Victorian industrial process.

Refresh 1

Computer refreshes approach! An ideal opportunity to reconsider all the bad habits we have in educational technology! @banana29 had the following questions for her admin which might help frame a discussion around where we might go with our edtech:

• What are the conditions under which students in 2013 learn best?

• How will these conditions change by 2033?

• How does the way we organize our school computers resemble/support those learning conditions?

• What are the competencies/values that we want our students to learn?

• How does the way we organize our school computers affect those competencies/values?

Some interesting ideas there. What can we do to present relevant learning situations to our students (how can we begin to join the disparities between the information rich world in which they live outside with the information poor one we present them with in class? What trends are we following into the future? How to we develop useful learning habits in digitally swamped students? How can we organize our digital tools to that optimize learning?

These questions lead to some other questions around digitized pedagogy: how can digitization assist in learning? How can it hurt learning? What does good pedagogy look like in a digitally enhanced learning environment? Between the ‘gee-wiz ipad’ crowd and the ‘it’s paper and lectures or nothing’ crowd, there has been precious little consideration of how the digital revolution we’re in the middle of is affecting learning. The forces trying to monetize the process further muddy these waters.

These big questions lead to some awkward realizations. What occurs to me first is that we have adopted educational technology following a business I.T. model rather than pushing for an educational focus. The private businesses that circle education hoping for a quick sale are quick to fill educational CTO positions in school boards. Put another way, find a CTO in Ontario who was ever a teacher. Education has different goals than business. Modelling our I.T. on a business model has created foundations that lead educational technology as a whole in the wrong direction.

A good place to start would be to introduce Chief Technology Officers in school boards who are actually educators. Another good place to start is to begin building educational technology in terms of skills development in a broad sense across many platforms with a focus on general literacy and responsibility of access rather than the paranoid, closed model that has been adopted from private business I.T.. Without a continuum of digital learning that produces students familiar with a variety of tools and responsible for their own access to and presentation of information baked into curriculum, we’ll continue to graduate digital serfs instead of citizens capable of working effectively in digitally networked workplaces.

Alanna asks some good questions that need serious consideration by edtech managers. I consider my side of things in Refresh 2.

Is Simple Better?

Once again Twitter teacher chat raises some interesting educational technology questions. Chromebooks or ipads? Louise’s question had me asking questions about the question. Why have we come to a place where we’re asking which incomplete but branded and popular technology should we buy for schools? Google and Apple have spent a lot of money locking in educators to their brand. To me, that question signals a marketing victory for both of them.

Later in the conversation Julie asked what Chromebooks can’t do. At three hundred bucks a pop I’d hope they can do everything a comparably priced netbook could, but they can’t. They can’t print, they can’t connect to a projector to share a presentation, they can’t install drivers so you can’t use any peripherals on them (one wonders why they have usb ports at all). Want to plug a scanner in to your chromebook? No. Want to plug in an Arduino? No. Want to install a decent graphics editor? Sorry. Want to install a fully fledged word processor instead of frustrating yourself with what g-docs still can’t do? Sorry. Want to install an IDE and do some programming? Nope. Want to try a different operating system, or even dual boot into multiple environments? Definitely not, that is the whole reason ipads and Chromebooks exist, to keep you in a closed ecosystem; you give away usefulness for simplicity’s sake.

It was suggested that Chromebooks are much cheaper than laptops, but this isn’t true either. The much maligned netbook has grown up. What used to be a single core, stodgy little laptop is now a dual core machine that starts with much more memory than it used to. Taking the $300 per Chromebook cost I went looking for a comparable netbook in the fall and found the ruggedized, student ready Lenovo X131 retailing for about $250. For $300 I’d add another 4 gigs of RAM to it and have an 8gb of RAM multicore netbook for the same price as a glorified browser. It’ll run the Windows version of your choice, and any Linux distro you could throw at it all off the same hard drive… oh, and you can install Chrome and still do everything a Chromebook can.

OK, it might be a bit unfair to call iOS a pointy stick,
but calling Linux needlessly complicated isn’t.

I find the limited OSes in tablets and Chromebooks very frustrating. I’ll put up with it in a phone for mobility’s sake, but in a day to day device for learning? I’ll admit, Linux is daunting, but Windows & OSx offer full operating systems with many uses. If we’re evolving into simpler and simpler OSes, what does that say about how we are using (and teaching) our technology?

Code.org is doing their hour of coding this week. I got my nine year old doing it last night. After we gave up on his ipad not being able to run the site we went to… yep, a regular old Windows machine. You can’t even expect an ipad to display a website properly. Won’t that be fun in a class of thirty kids? At least it would have worked on a Chromebook.

During the conversation it was suggested that expecting teachers to understand the basic limitations of technology is exclusionary and doesn’t allow them to focus on teaching. I’d argue the opposite: selecting minimally functional technology to begin with is the problem, especially when we do it through the brand moderated ecosystems offered by Google and Apple. Teachers don’t all need to edit their own kernel in Linux, but they should have an understanding of how various technologies enable and limit their ability to perform basic functions (like opening a website properly), especially in a learning space. Asking for basic digital fluency in teachers isn’t asking too much in 2014. We can then ask for it (by extension) in our students.

This may all sound anti-Google, but I assure you it isn’t. I’ve had a gmail account since it came out and I’ve got gigs of data in various Google drives (Dusty World is written in Blogger!). I own an Android phone because it offers the most open ecosystem. I value the tools Google offers, but I feel like the Chromebook is a tool designed to close off digital opportunities and drive everyone into a Google-centric cloud. It follows ipad down the same closed-system dead-end that Windows is flirting with now.

When I’m using peripherals I need a computer, not a glorified web browser. When I am setting up a complex document I need a proper word processor. I can’t do graphics and video editing in the cloud, I need a general purpose computer, and your students will too, even if that does mean teaching them how to maintain a more administratively complicated machine.

I’d argue for as big a tool-kit that offers as many digital opportunities as you can afford, something the question, “ipads or Chromebooks” doesn’t begin to consider.

Dreaming Of A Representative Salary Grid

One of the reasons I became a teacher is because it seemed like a particularly credible profession. The process of becoming a teacher appeared to have more in common with an apprenticeship than an abstract degree. My teacher’s college in particular was focused on getting us as much in-class time with a working, mentor teacher as possible. Once in the profession, it takes a teacher twelve years to earn full pay, once again implying that this is an apprenticeship that takes a great deal of time to come to fruition.

I’m in year eight of teaching and life on the ground has been somewhat less affirming. The vast majority of teachers I’ve met do little to expand their teaching skills, unless they are new and so desperate for a position that they spend thousands of dollars collecting additional qualifications. Many older teachers I know still have the two teachables they started with, and in some cases aren’t even actually qualified to teach the subjects they are teaching. A surprising number have never updated to honours specialist so they could top out on the salary grid (though that would be hard to do if you don’t actually have a degree or any background in what you’re teaching).

Having found an online community of teachers who are actually interested in improving their craft (and recognizing the changes digitization is having on education and society in general) has been a saving grace, but I still face comments like, “why in God’s name would I want to talk about teaching when I’m not at work?” or “oh great, another pointless PD day” when I’m on the ground in school.

To that end, I’d like to consider revisions to the much maligned ‘grid’ that determines teacher salaries in Ontario. Ranging from just over forty thousand a year (which isn’t an awful lot when you’ve just spent over one hundred thousands dollars on five years of university), to just over ninety thousand a year more than a decade into working, the grid relies mainly on years in the classroom as a justification for pay raises. The difference between an honours specialist in a subject and a teacher who has never lifted a finger to try and improve is less than 5% of pay at the top of the grid.*

I would suggest that there is a lot more to the craft of teaching than years in the classroom, especially if you’re not one of those very special teachers who like to trot out the same old lesson, year in, year out (one you probably photocopied from someone else in the first place). In the great scheme of becoming a master teacher, your activity both in and beyond the classroom are vital to your understanding of how your profession works as a whole.

Teachers who are active in their professional organizations (ECOO, OHASSTA, OLA, OAME, ELAN, OCTE, and others), are working to enhance their craft by working with colleagues in their various disciplines. How this isn’t a consideration in a salary grid is beyond me.

Teachers who are active in school leadership roles (such as department heads, directions teams members, etc) are currently offered a rather silly little stipend to do what is essentially another part time job. They do this with no time given from regular teacher duties, and for a couple of bucks a day. Why these ‘positions of additional responsibility’ aren’t considered in the salary grid is beyond me.

Teachers who take on student teachers and do one of the most important jobs in our profession? Nothing on the grid.

Teachers who spend time developing school teams and clubs over the long term? Nothing on the grid.

Teachers who spend time developing school events like graduation or grade nine introductory programs? Nothing on the grid.

Teachers who spend their own time and money away from home attending professional conferences to enhance their practice? You got it, nothing on the grid.

I’m not advocating for a pay per-extracurricular approach here, but I am asking for a grid that works from something other than how long you’ve been doing the job. If we graded students the same way we salary teachers, they’d get higher and higher grades the longer they are in school, regardless of what they are doing.

Talk of extending the grid from 11 to 15 years is as myopic as basing the grid primarily on years of teaching in the first place. Seniority has its place in teaching, there is no doubt. How long a teacher has been teaching is an important metric in determining their quality, but it certainly shouldn’t be the key factor in calculating their pay.

If we’re going to overhaul the salary grid, let’s really examine what determines a teacher who is trying to perfect their imperfectable craft, and then make a grid that isn’t solely based on how old you are as a teacher. That grid would be fluid and flexible, with people moving up and down in various elements of it. You’d still enjoy seniority bumps, but a senior teacher who does nothing other than show up and go home, offering no mentor-ship to younger teachers, no direction for their school, no enrichment for their students, and who has no specialization in the subject they teach, wouldn’t be able to make within 5% of the trained specialist who offers up their time to lead departments, train new teachers, or lead subject enrichment.

This kind of grid would encourage the kind of meta-cognition we expect to see in our students, and encourage senior teachers to mentor and improve the craft, rather than closing the door to their classroom five years early while they glide to retirement. It would also support teachers who recognize how changeable the world is at the moment and who take steps to try and prepare students for a future that will be quite unlike the past.

If we’re going to fix the grid, let’s fix it. Seniority is only one (relatively minor) metric in considering how hard a teacher is working at becoming a better teacher.

Note: teacher pay based on student test scores are another American myth that are designed to diminish the profession while cloaking justifications (usually financial) in fictional, statistical validity. Standardized tests are inherently limited, and teachers who teach well to them are probably such compliant, mechanical creatures that they are actually poor teachers. US world rankings would suggest that trying to standardize teaching around this kind of testing is a disaster. A well designed salary grid would recognize the many individual ways that a teacher could improve their craft, without grossly simplifying the metrics for excellence (such as basing the grid almost entirely on seniority).

Dancing in the Datasphere

From the Prezi brainstorming graphical interface: http://prezi.com/mlmks5pq65dz/dancing-in-the-datasphere/

If we live in an increasingly data-rich, but resource poor world, what do we need to do as teachers to give our students a fighting chance?

There is no reason to assume that Eric Schmidt is blowing smoke. If we really are generating this much information, and now have a means of saving, reviewing, organizing, and learning from it, we need to radically re-think how we educate our children. Knowledge itself is now plentiful and accessible, teachers are no longer the font of knowledge.

Traditional classrooms work on a data-drip of information, out of the teacher’s mouth. Many of these teachers are willfully ignorant of the radical revolutions going on in their disciplines as information is no longer confined to the limits of human specialists. Interdisciplinary studies are prompting radical changes in how we understand just about everything. Teaching your twenty year out of date university experience out of a ten year out of date text book makes you about as pertinent as a dodo. Many of our current teaching habits assume nothing is changing, but it is, radically, quickly, meaningfully, everywhere but in the classroom.

When I was a kid I was an astronomy nut. I memorized the nine planets, the meaningful moons, I knew distances, sizes; the universe was a (relatively) small solar system with stars beyond. We currently know of over 600 planets, and discover an average of a dozen a week, every week. We are discovering solar systems so bizarre in nature that they beggar belief; but none of that is in the text book, and most teachers won’t bother with it because accessing the datasphere is too difficult with limited technology access in school (fixable with this).

We are discovering these things with drastically improved sensing technology that has been accelerated by the information revolution. We record this data in abundance using storage technology that has been accelerated by the information revolution. We often fail to access it for years after the fact because we have not yet caught up with our ability to observe and record the universe around us. Fortunately we’re now developing systems that sort their own data, and make connections without human oversight – the data itself is beginning to self organize. The future will be smarter than we can imagine as individuals.

This acceleration is happening in all fields of human endeavor. We are teasing free nuances in archaeology, history, and science. We understand in greater detail how the masters painted five centuries ago, we have seen to the edge of reality and felt the remnants of the explosive expansion that started everything. What we haven’t done is evolved education to prepare our students for this deluge of data. We still mete out information because we define ourselves as holders of knowledge. We’re holding a cup of water as the dam breaks around us.

We drip feed students information in class and then complain that they are unfocused, disinterested. We then agonize over how to make our lessons more engaging. We wring our hands over outright lies and insinuations instead of letting the datasphere show the truth; we cater to myth, habit and tradition of paper based learning.

In the meantime a steady stream of data overwhelms our students from social networks that dwarf in size any their parents or grandparents had. We belittle their circumstance by demeaning their means of communication, and overvaluing our traditional modes of contact. Because they don’t ‘pick up a phone’, they don’t demonstrate meaningful relationships like people of a certain age do (oddly similar to what the phone-people’s parents said about them when they couldn’t be bothered to go and visit people face to face any more). Kids nowadays, their social networks are empty things devoid of real meaning.

Worst of all, we don’t teach them how to manage the avalanche of data that threatens to bury them; then we criticize them for not managing it well. Many teachers manage it by ignoring it entirely

We spoon feed them vetted data in tiny amounts because we think that is credible, safe and real, but that isn’t the world they are going to graduate into. Being able to manage multiple, often conflicting data, organize information out of the noise and critically analyze material is far more relevant than memorizing the right answers to the same questions we’ve been asking for years.

Until we take our responsibility to prepare our students for the 21st Century seriously, we will continue to think that slowing them down, unplugging them and ignoring the datasphere that continues to grow around us at a prodigious rate is not only the easier (cheaper) thing to do, but it is the right thing to do too.

What we aren’t doing is making them familiar with their likely future circumstances, and we do it because it’s easier to ignore a revolution than recognize it, even if it’s happening all around us.

Literacy, Engagement and Marketing

The latest WIRED has an editorial by Clive Thompson about Minecraft and literacy. In the article it is suggested that Minecraft (and other video games) have engaged reluctant readers to the point where they are able to overcome their reading problems and devour challenging texts with near perfect accuracy.

I usually enjoy Thompson’s reach, he tends to push back assumptions, but in this case it feels hyperbolic. “Minecraft is the hot new videogame among teachers and parents”. It was three years ago, but then it hasn’t just been sold to Microsoft for billions (with a “B”) of dollars. Sometimes I can’t tell if it’s hyperbole or marketing.

Thompson goes on to state: “Minecraft is surrounded by a culture of literacy.” So is any hobby, video games are not magical because of this. Motor vehicles are surrounded by a ‘culture of literacy’ – look in any magazine rack. Back in the day Dungeons and Dragons was surrounded by a ‘culture of literacy’ with books and magazines galore. Movies are surrounded by a ‘culture of literacy’ (IMDB, Entertainment Weekly etc), so is technology in general (WIRED). That we read and write about the things that interest us is hardly a shock. Why should video games be any different? Many reluctant readers are willing to read material about a subject that interests them. That this is newsworthy is a bit baffling, what is more surprising are the assumptions further on in the article.

Interest and engagement are key elements in developing basic literacy skills, no doubt, but the article goes on to imply that engagement through video games can somehow overcome illiteracy. This is going from hyperbole to gross over-simplification. I’ve already got my doubts about gamification, but championing gaming engagement as the solution to illiteracy isn’t respecting the complexity of the skill, though it does sync well with valuations in gaming companies.

Back in 1973 when I was a three year old learning to read my grandmother would read me a bit of The Magic Faraway Tree and then say she was tired and put it down, usually at a critical part of the story. I’d struggle through the text using the light from the doorway, desperately trying to find out what happened after she left me to go to sleep. I have no doubt that she knew what I was doing.

I suppose WIRED might have written an article about that, but Enid Blyton doesn’t have the market reach of Minecraft or the magic we desperately want to believe inhabits our brave new and oh-so-very-valuable media.

I’m a strong reader. I can’t remember a time when I couldn’t read. For me it meant independence and the ability to satisfy my own curiosity. There is no doubt that my determination created intense engagement at a time when reading wasn’t easy for me, but it was just the first step on the long road of literacy. I wasn’t displaying illiteracy one day and then suddenly became a fluent reader the next because I was “really, really motivated”.

Thompson quotes Constance Steinkuehler (of whom I’m a fan) on the effects of video game focused literacy. Middle and high school struggling readers were asked:

“…to choose a game topic they were interested in, and then she picked texts from game sites for them to read—some as difficult as first-year-college language. The kids devoured them with no help and nearly perfect accuracy.”

How could they do this? “Because they’re really, really motivated,” Steinkuehler tells me. It wasn’t just that the students knew the domain well; there were plenty of unfamiliar words. But they persisted more because they cared about the task. “It’s situated knowledge. They see a piece of language, a turn of phrase, and they figure it out.”

Situated knowledge plays a key role in literacy. Scaffolded understanding and context awareness are inherent to good reading. On a micro level it assists vocabulary and parsing written conventions like punctuation and grammar. As we build our understanding of written language we’re able to comprehend more complex texts using previous experience; literacy builds on itself in this way.

Contextualization also assists a reader at the level of themes and ideas. Being conversant in a video game allows you to make assumptions about words and concepts you would otherwise have no link to through the text. No doubt many of those struggling readers were able to accurately guess vocabulary and concepts from their own experience, the text becomes a secondary resource, literacy a secondary skill. Large scale contextualization can help a strong reader parse a complex, unfamiliar text, but if it is being used to parse familiar concepts and materials I’d argue that it isn’t assessing literacy that effectively.

Literacy isn’t merely the repetition of familiar ideas, at its best it is the ability to deeply comprehend new ideas through a written medium. Video games might offer a hook that helps reluctant readers engage, but to suggest that Minecraft or any other game could act as a solution to illiteracy is more than misleading, it’s dishonest. It’s also why complex, long term skills development like literacy is best left to education, where quarterly earnings and attention grabbing don’t attempt to outsell learning.

The End of Knowledge

I’ve just wrapped up a grade 11 university level English class. I only tend to teach these classes once every couple of years now, so I see real differences in how academic students are evolving with technology use.

This time around we have a Google Apps for Educators system well established and I assumed academically focused students would be very handy with it. I shouldn’t assume these things. Once again I’m surprised at how habitual digital natives are with their technology use; they know how to do the few repetitive things they use technology for very fluently, but asking them to extend that fluency to other software or hardware results in the same kind of frustration you see in anyone. Technology use really needs to be a generally taught skill – teaching specific apps on specific hardware doesn’t create genuine understanding of information technology and what it can do for you.

Beyond the typical tech-incompetence that we prefer to ignore rather than resolve, there were some deeper implications to technology use that became apparent while marking the final exam. As a general rule, I encourage productive use of online information resources. I consider a student who can meaningfully and accurately use the internet to enhance their knowledge to be in a good place academically. I’m starting to rethink that position.

Marking these exams, I was surprised at how many of the students I thought were A+ English students couldn’t see the figurative implications of a fairly basic piece of satire. This article from The Onion was included on the exam, but a frustratingly high number of students thought it was about ants. Those that did pierce the literal barrier more often than not thought it was about the government (?) in spite of me telling them again and again that figurative meaning isn’t your opinion, it’s there in the text. Less than 1/5 of the class were able to recognize the obvious references to religion and see that article as a satire about it.

Google doesn’t know anything. The confusion between
information and knowledge is now rampant. It’s
based on misunderstanding how technology works.

I’m left wondering, as I finalize grades in this class, how many students didn’t so much understand Macbeth as spout internet revelations about it. In class, students would frequently answer questions from the smartphone Google search in their laps. I once lamented, “there is no intelligence left, just high speed internet.”

Perhaps the future of learning is the opposite of what it has always been. Instead of internalizing information and creating constellations of meaning within our own minds, we only need know how to find what someone else said about it on the interwebs. This raises some scary questions around what understanding is. Complex ideas, like being able to see into figurative meaning in a text, aren’t a matter of looking up what to say on the internet. Skills like these are based on interrelated knowledge and practice. If it isn’t internalized, no matter how tedious digital natives may find that process, you don’t know it.

That digital natives, even the really capable ones, are shying away from internalizing knowledge in favour of getting highly proficient at finding other people’s thoughts online is a real problem. General ignorance around how digital technology works allows people to say stupid things like ‘Google knows everything!’ Educational technology happily exists in that ignorance, encouraging the use of technology without understanding the hows of it. Rather than question technology use in learning using epistemology and pedagogy, we try to mimic its general use in society where it is driven by market forces. If the kids are carrying smartphones around with them everywhere, they should be in class too. BYOD, wifi everywhere, a screen for every student; these things aren’t going to necessarily increase learning. When you’ve got Google in your pocket you end up questioning nothing.

Learning has always demanded the internalization of information in order to form knowledge. This was due in part to the scarcity of information in the past, but it also developed the kind of self discipline that allowed knowledgeable people to do their own research. In our information rich world the struggle for knowledge is everything modern education is turning away from. Student centred learning, 1:1 technology, de-emphasis on traditional learning methods – all of this is the new normal. What was once a mentally rich and demanding internal process is turning into flat, generic, external fact regurgitation.

Digital natives live in a world of media at their finger tips. The information revolution is, for them, an entertainment revolution where digital delivery systems create a personalized cocoon of immediate and continuous whim satisfaction. The personalization of media has created the impression that technology is there as either distraction or, at best, a shortcut to easy answers. When all our knowledge is reduced to information we might be able to spout facts, but we understand nothing.

***

After repeatedly being told verbally and in writing that you can’t have an electronic device within reach during a formal exam, one of those grade 11s had his cell phone fall out of his jacket pocket while writing. He wasn’t cheating with it, he just thought all those warnings didn’t apply to him because asking him to leave his phone at the front of the room is the equivalent, in his mind, of asking him to pull off his ears. The digital revolution is fusing itself to our bodies and our minds, and it isn’t always an improvement.

Thoughts on how information becomes knowledge. We simplify a complex process that demands focus and self discipline
when we infect human knowledge with machine fact.

Suffering And Sacrifice in Eastern Thinking

A student used this as a graphic
text in an English Elearning course

I had an English student hand this in yesterday as an example of a graphics text. The assignment was to create three questions with answers based on the graphic text. This is a surprisingly quick way to assess a student’s understanding of a graphic text (well done Elearning Ontario).

But ya gotta be careful with the manga, it can get deep quickly, especially when you throw cultural differences into the mix. The student’s understanding of this snippet fell into a number of problems, not the least of which was the yawning gap between how a Christian middle-class, white teen in rural Ontario and the Buddhist, Japanese writer of the manga interpret suffering.

The student took “a painless lesson is one without any meaning” and focused on the lack of meaning. He suggested when random, pointless things happen to you, you should just roll with it; suffering just happens arbitrarily. I like how student’s analysis of a text often tells you more about them than it does about the text.

Incompetence: when students suddenly decide to try they
think instant success will follow because the only thing
preventing it before was their lack of effort. It turns out
that mastery requires a bit more than showing up once.

I wrote back suggesting that without fully committing to what you’re doing and suffering loss and sacrifice in the process, you never really learn anything. Only by being fully committed to your lesson, and possibly losing something valuable to you in the process, can you hope to truly learn. A painless, safe lesson is meaningless because you’ll never learn (keep) anything from it. It’s also useless because you’re not working at the ragged edge of your abilities, so you’re not doing anything you haven’t done before. Put another way, no risk, no reward.

The student didn’t seem interested in my interpretation. It fits a Western 21st Century teen’s world view to frame learning in terms of pointless suffering and minimal personal investment. By being an intentionally ineffective agent in an arbitrary world, you can blame everything except yourself for your circumstances. Your abilities are never in question because you are never the architect of any failure.

Eastern thinking is an ongoing fascination for me. I did my first two years as a teacher in Japan. This student’s graphic text was especially resonant because I’d just read this the week before:

The nail that stands highest gets hammered down.
What looks like cruelty takes on a different tone
when you consider how stress and suffering
are integrated into Eastern Culture.

Struggle for Smarts: How Eastern And Western Cultures Tackle Learning
From a Western perspective, struggle is “a sign of low ability — people who are smart don’t struggle, they just naturally get it, that’s our folk theory. Whereas in Asian cultures they tend to see struggle more as an opportunity.”

Like the author of that article, I saw Japanese students almost revelling in the difficulty of what they were failing at. That difficulty and failure is what made it all the more satisfying when they eventually found success. The Japanese don’t toss out suffering because it’s difficult, they use it to leverage learning and they do it in a culturally immersive way. What looks like cruelty to foreign eyes is actually a sign of respect from a Japanese perspective. If everyone is focused on doing their best then the rest will happen. We’re much more focused on the end result in the West.

They don’t say good luck in Japan,
they say gambate: do your best.

I studied Kendo while I was in Japan. In the thousand year old temple that was our dojo I was the only gaijin. For the first six months I couldn’t get anyone to teach me defence. My Sensei (a principal at the local high school) said I should be focused entirely on attack, if you think defensively you’ll never succeed. I liked the boo-ya Bushido samurai thinking behind this, but suspected it was really because the other students loved beating the hell out of me with a stick. I used to come home cross eyed from getting hit on the head, but I wouldn’t give up, I’m stupid like that, but it turns out that this stubbornness was what the Japanese enjoyed most about me.

I also played hockey while in Japan. I had all sorts of trouble getting comfortable with my team mates until we had a wedding party that never ended followed by a morning hockey game. We were a wreck, but seeing me in that kind of misery seemed to break down all the barriers. Did the Japanese like to see me suffer, or did they like to see me gambatte? It’s all about the effort, not the result in Japan. It took me a long time to see it from an Eastern point of view.

Resiliency and genuine, deeply personal learning are born of failure, Eastern thought embraces this. Western students, by contrast, preempt failure by refusing to fully commit to learning in the first place. When they fail they shrug because they know it isn’t their failure; you can’t lose if you don’t play. Our glorious sense of Western individualism is remarkably fragile. Isn’t this all about protecting egg-shell egos? Western education systems encourage this approach by presenting learning in the most impersonal, abstract way possible and hiding any failures. Safety nets abound ensuring that students can disengage from learning the moment it becomes difficult.

You’d never expect a Western school to take the weakest kid in the class and have them display their lack of skill in front of everyone as happens in that article, but then you’d not expect Western students to earnestly cheer the student when they overcome repeated frustration and see success either. I suspect Stigler is right, we frame struggle in terms of a lack of intelligence rather than recognizing it as the foundation of resilience and genuine learning.

That English student stepped in a surprisingly deep puddle with that graphic text.