Dusty World – Page 5 – Mechanical Sympathy

Edcamp Hamilton: Let It Flow

I attended edcamp Hamilton this past weekend. It was my first cross country trip on my newly minted motorbike license as well as a chance to meet and self direct my professional development with colleagues from beyond my own board. I got there heavily oxygenated and cold; the Starbucks on tap helped warm me up and then we were into sessions that the edcampers themselves suggested.

With over 140 people interested in education showing up on a Saturday morning just to talk shop, it was a busy, energizing affair. The first session I attended started off a bit stiff, but quickly loosened up as the bar was raised on the pedagogical reflection. Peter Skillen pitched some critical thinking on technology use in learning, and it wasn’t all the gee-wiz thinking from a few years ago. We are such chameleons in our ability to change ourselves to fit our technology. Peter asked some hard questions about how we’re making students connect to technology. Educational technology seems to have reached a stage of maturity where we can ask hard questions about it. Jane Mitchinson also brought up the idea of multi-tasking (or more accurately, rapid task switching) in terms of the information overflow students face when using digital tools. Getting information from the internet is like drinking from a fire hose you’ll get a face full, and it won’t be graceful or particularly useful. Learning how to use these tools is something we’re still not very good at. As an opening discussion it got everyone moving and for the newer edcampers it got them realizing how a single person isn’t running any of the sessions; this is a truly an open, democratic process. It can’t be directed.

An awful lot of people meeting on their own time to discuss their profession,
I wonder how many politicians do that.

I got restless in the seconds session because it seemed to belabor a point that wasn’t going anywhere. After listening to a bit of talk around how to keep your idealism in the current educational environment, I started getting quite negative, so I went for a wander to think about what was said and do one of the best things you can do at an edcamp – wander by rooms and stumble across awesome conversations.

In that session I left, Carlo Fusco said, “the education system was designed to sort people into jobs in order to fit them in to the new industrial model. Education is there to sort people.” I suspect he was being Socratic and pushing an idea so that others could question it, but my cynicism knows no bounds after the past year teaching in Ontario. Others took a stab at it before I commented that I find it impossible to remain an idealist in the current Ontario educational climate. With unions, governments and corporations playing games with education for their own benefit, I said I find it hard to believe in anyone’s best intentions.

The wandering broke up my negativity as I stumbled across wonderful, critical discussions about gamification, online learning tools and what a twenty first century student needs to know. One of the nicest things about an edcamp is that you want to be there (or you wouldn’t be). No one is holding you to one mode of learning or thinking.

Earlier edcamps I attended had very few people in upper administrative roles attending, it was a real grass roots movement of teachers, student teachers and onsite admin, the people who work with students directly every day. It was nice to see more senior administrative types at edcamp Hamilton, though their predilection for telling people how they should be thinking might get in the way of what edcamps are really about. If asking big questions settles my value theory and allows me to do my job better, then I’ll do it at an edcamp because that is where I get to direct my own professional development. Suggesting limitations on what people should be allowed to talk about in order to promote an administrative objective strikes me a missing the point. This has me thinking about educational leadership in a twenty first century context. If we’re moving toward more self directed, less hierarchical ways of directing PD, how does an education leader move people in the direction they want them to? We talk about student centered learning as an ideal to move towards. Edcamps do that for PD, but not if we’re going to start drawing lines around what people can and can’t talk about.

I ended the day with some very interrogative discussions with people I have fundamental disagreements with about recent events in the Ontario PLN community. This too was great PD because it allowed me to understand their point of view and be less reactionary to it.

The last session of the edcamp still had larger groups meeting, but many smaller groups spun off and talked about what they needed to. Ah, the freedom to not be told what to think; if only other PD had more of that.

I’ll call #EdCampHam another excellent EdCamp experience. Thanks to the EdcampHam organizers for a wonderfully immersive day of thinking about my profession.

Some other Ed-blogs on EdCampHamilton:
Karen
Michelle
Jane
Sue
Mark
Heidi
Stephen
Aviva

BYOD: yet another edtech failure

Four years ago I was advocating for BYOD.

I was a big fan of the bring your own device (BYOD) approach to educational technology. I’d hoped that it would diversify the technology we were using in class that looked like it was evolving toward a Google owned Chromebook driven internet and would allow the students who wanted to differentiate their digital access to do so. It should also have left more money free to ensure that all students have some kind of digital access, therefore addressing equity of access worries. It turns out that offering free data to students means there isn’t a lot of money left for anything and has been detrimental to teaching digital fluency.

Our school board went in early and built out wireless infrastructure and developed a BYOD network that was open to anyone entering one of our schools. In the years since this happened the number of students bringing in their own devices hasn’t changed (most do), but the type of device they bring and fill up the network with also hasn’t changed. Laptops and other more creation focused devices are a non-entity on our BYOD network – it is packed full of smartphones focused on personal use. You can make an argument for these devices as creation tools, but their function is built around consumerism and the data collection that monetizes the modern internet. The vast majority of smartphone users are consumers by design, not creators in anything other than a selfie sense.

The vast majority of those smartphones are not used for school work and are often directly opposed to it. Our administration is now trying to manage cyberbullying that is happening in class across the entire school on networks students shouldn’t even have access to. The problems caused aren’t just lack of student focus in class, these devices cause systemic problems as well.

If a smartphone is used for anything class related it is a minuscule percent of its daily use. Many of our teachers have issues with managing off task smartphone use in class. Earnest #edtech types (usually with corporate backing) tell us this is because we’re not doing it right and we should buy into their system. As someone who was doing it right before your Google/Apple/Whatever certification existed, I’m here to tell you that this is nonsense. Smartphones aren’t creative tools, they aren’t designed to be, they’re designed by data collection companies to collect data. Trying to build your classroom around a device like that is like trying to set up a roofless tent in a rainstorm to stay dry.

Our school board has made numerous attempts to focus network data use on learning, but students are willing to open themselves up to phishing and other hacks by installing policy banned VPN networks to bypass website filters. Even in our carefully moderated network environment we’ve got students sharing their data through unknown off shore servers just so they can Snapchat while in class. They do all this without a clue about what they’ve done to their data integrity.

I’m not sure at what point school boards in Ontario decided that they should be providing free internet to students, but it isn’t cheap. Our board has struggled to stay ahead of the data tsunami caused by all these vampire smartphones clamping on to our BYOD network each day. Apps that constantly update and stream data are the new normal and the current round of digital natives expect to be able to drink from the tap all the time in whatever manner they see fit. This is costing tens of thousands of dollars a month at a time when department budgets are tightening up and I’m not even given enough to cover the basic costs of consumables like wiring and electrical components in my technology classroom.

I would love to see BYOD being used for its intended purpose, but instead of valuing the network they’ve been given, students see it as an expectation, like running water or electricity. They make minimal efforts to moderate their use of it and become incensed if it’s adjusted to try and focus them on using it for school related work while in the classroom. If it was taken away at this point I think there would be much gnashing of teeth and agonized screaming by students who think that free internet access is some kind of constitutional right. In the meantime we’re all paying millions of dollars a month across the province to provide these students with bandwidth that feeds their habitual technology use and is more often a detriment to learning.

I’m as frustrated as anyone, but simply offering internet for everything doesn’t seem to be working. Once again, I come back to the lack of a digital fluency continuum of learning in Ontario. If students aren’t shown how to use technology effectively, offering them unbridled access to it isn’t going get us anywhere.

Our implicit enabling of habitual technology use makes for whole generations of digital narcissists.

It’s been five years now and Ontario still has no mandatory digital skills continuum even though digital technology is pretty much everywhere now. We expect students to learn foundational skills in other aspects that are curriculum wide (literacy, numeracy), but we magically expect them to understand and make effective use of digital technology. The BYOD failure is just another symptom of this disease.

All we have to do to do it, is do it:

I don’t care whose skills development process we use, but can we start teaching technology if we’re going to use it in everything? Digital technology is prompting systemic change in how we share information, create media and collaborate on learning. Can we start to treat it like the fundamental skill it is? Please?!?

I roughed out an idea a few years ago – in it I suggested limiting access to technology to fluency and slowly opening up that access as technical skills improved. BYOD is a great idea for digitally fluent students who know what it is and how to use it effectively.

In literacy terms this would be like slowly increasing reading difficulty as vocabulary and reading fluency improves. What we do with digital technology is nothing at all until a student brings in their own copy of War and Peace, which they then use to prop open doors and doodle in it.

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You Didn’t Prepare Me for Post-Secondary

Over the past several years I’ve been contacted by graduates or their parents with a similar complaint: why didn’t you prepare me/my child for post secondary math?

A few years ago it was a college bound student with learning challenges. His mom was… outspoken (that’s being very charitable) while he was in school, but I was able to work well with him and he eventually went into information technology at a local college. He dropped out in his first semester with failing maths grades. Mom emailed me in a rage blaming me for this. I pointed out that I teach computer technology and asked how he was doing in those classes (he was getting 90s). That ended that particular interaction, but it wasn’t the first and it won’t be the last.

I’ve also had students who I worked closely with both in class and on school teams, students who know me well enough to be straight up, get in touch while in post-secondary to say that they too are struggling with maths. It’s a familiar refrain; a student who got high 90s in high school maths suddenly finds themselves dysfunctional in post secondary. A recent multi-award winning graduate put it well: “when we’re given a problem, other students apply their maths skills like taking tools out of a toolbox. They assess the problem and then apply the right mathematical approach to solve it. I feel like we spent all our time learning mechanics on worksheets but spent no time contextualizing what we were doing.” This would be like trying to learn how to play hockey by drilling yourself independently on stick handling, skating and shooting, but never contextualizing those skills as a whole in a game.

When some of our most academically decorated students come back to me with this kind of feedback, I’m left wondering how to address it. I don’t think it’s fair that the blame falls entirely on teachers. Thanks to our community’s everyone-can-go-to-university-if-they-want-to sense of privilege, many of our academic classes are populated by students without the background or interest in using what we’re trying to teach them. This means teachers have to simplify and compartmentalize their content to such a degree that the students who actually need it aren’t getting it. I frequently see students with weeks of absences who are still expected to earn a credit (you got auto-dropped at 10 absences when I was in high school). When you’ve got students who barely attend, compartmentalizing the learning becomes a survival technique. It also makes it nearly impossible to contextualize learning beyond single period lessons.

Last year my son was told, “don’t worry, everyone fails that unit” in his grade eleven maths class. If I had a unit that everyone failed, my first assumption would be that I’m teaching it wrong and I’d change my approach, but one of the ways we appear to drag students to the end of the Ontario maths curriculum is to just keep pushing through it, regardless of comprehension, context or mastery of previous concepts. This isn’t a new phenomenon, it happened to me in the 1980s too.

I’d quote statistics to you about how successful our graduates are once they leave the building, but no one in Ontario public education keeps those statistics. Instead of quoting EQAO scores, what we should be doing is collecting data on the success rates of our graduates in post-secondary. If we all claim to be about backward design, this kind of data would make that possible on a meta-level, but it’s better to fly blind, then we don’t have to take responsibility for those failures or change anything.

There is a lot of talk around destreaming as a cure-all to systemic prejudice, but the people framing it that way are usually the ones happy to see larger class sizes for everyone at a lower cost. Streaming wasn’t designed to denigrate anyone, it was instituted to let classes focus on learner needs with higher needs students having smaller classes and students aiming at advanced post-secondary programs working in a room where everyone is driving for the same goals. The unfortunate truth is the destreaming has already occurred thanks in large part to parents and guidance ignoring it. When I last taught university level classes I found that less than half the class was university bound and a number of those directionless students were put into university stream to ‘keep their options open’. In keeping their options open these students were knocking others out of contention. In curriculums like English and mathematics, where skills development is vital in order for students to operate at the senior end of the program, this kind of watering down of intent hurts many of our graduates.

Even in my technology courses I see this. My ‘M’ level courses are supposed to be for post-secondary bound students but I typically see 10-20% of the class coming out of credit poor essential and applied situations who have no intention of going into post-secondary. I then spend an inordinate amount of my time catering to these high-needs children instead of helping the students who selected the right stream get to where they want to go.

I’m not sure why, with the pressure to reduce costs, we’re not offering alternate pathways that allow the students who don’t need senior classes to take alternate pathways. An early graduation workplace/apprenticeship pathways option for students should be available for anyone who has passed the literacy and maths testing in grades 9 and 10. If those students who would rather be out working were, we could refocus our classrooms on preparing the students in them for post-secondary success instead of watering everything down in order to babysit those who don’t want to be there. Instead we’re all handcuffed by Ontario’s learning until eighteen law. If we’re all really advocates for life-long learning, then it should be obvious that this doesn’t just happen in schools. There would be many benefits to stepping away from this mandatory restriction and refocusing our classrooms on developing rich, contextualized learning opportunities for students who show up and want to be there in order to go on and tackle post-secondary specialities.

This issue goes well beyond maths, but the structured development of skills over many years in mathematics exacerbates the problem in ways that make it much more visible.

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Dairy of a Disenfranchised Coder

The first blog entry I ever wrote (about 18 months ago), spoke of risk aversion in students, but began with a brief ‘why I never pursued computers’. This one opens that up a a bit and looks at how childhood interests never seem to fade away.

In the 1980s, I became interested in computers because my father wouldn’t buy me an Intellivision game console. The Vic 20 we got instead became our gaming system, but it was much more. I’ve carried a sense of intellectual superiority over game consoles ever since. The Vic could plug in cartridges and play games, but where it really took off was with the datasette. When we got our hands on that, we suddenly had the ability to save our work. Before I knew it, I was begging my parents to drive to the only computer store in the area whenever a new COMPUTE! magazine came out so I could type out the basic programs in there.

None of this had anything to do with school. Our junior high school had 3 Pets in the library, but it was typically a 2 week wait to get half an hour on one. You had no chance of gaining any kind of familiarity with them.

It started all about video games, but quickly turned to coding. Instead of buying the latest game (Cosmic Cruncher?), I was saving the paper route money for a 3k memory expander (I kept filling up the 3.5k of working RAM with code). With more room to move, I began modifying those COMPUTE! programs, turning a road racing game into a Star Wars trench battle or the 8 key sound synthesizer into full keyboard synthesizer.

I’d shown friends what I was doing and soon Ataris and Apples began to appear in the neighborhood. We’d dictate code while the fastest typer would hammer away at it, then we’d proof and run it. Hours of speculation and experimentation about how changes might affect things followed.

There was no grade 9 computer course in high school, but I quickly leapt at the grade 10 one in 1985. By then I had a Commodore 64 at home and we’d all discovered that if you had a good recording deck, you could sound record the cassettes that software came on. There was a thriving pirating hub in high school with what looked like homemade mixed tapes. A teacher once took one that was being passed in class and tried to listen to it, it wasn’t pretty.

That grade 10 class used a card reader. We laboriously spent hours penciling in our lines of code, and would receive a printout off a dot matrix printer (which sounded like a machine gun tearing through silk). I lasted about a month at this before I became determined to get a printer of my own. No one else in the school had one, and the only place to find one was half way across the city. Four bus transfers and a long night of travel got me back home with the printer, only to discover it was defective. Another six hours on the bus and I was home again with the only dot matrix printer anyone had.

I coded at home, printed out my results and got to bypass the agony of the card reader. Others begged me for access. It became a nice sideline and paid for itself in short order.

Our grade 10 computer teacher was a young guy who got the job because he was the only one who could maintain the card reader without it jamming up all the time, he didn’t actually know much about coding (and why would he, he only had a card reader to figure it out on). I did well in grade 10 intro to computers but was really excited to get into senior computer science. The astronomer dream had been dashed in grade 10 physics when I discovered, to my horror, that physics was really just lots and lots of math, which I found tedious and unimaginative. Anything that had only one way to a single solution seemed mind numbingly dull. I was still hoping to find my niche in computer science though.

Finally able to get onto the senior computer science lab (first gen IBM x86s!), I was stunned to learn that our computer science teacher wanted us to program… math. I found the assignments linear and the teacher, who already knew the mathletes in the class, didn’t have time for anyone else or anything other than mathematical certainty in coding; the opposite of my experimental, hacking approach to programming. Five years of passionate self-driven learning dissipated in a cloud of frustration and disinterest over that semester.

My parents went to the teacher conference confused at how a kid who spent hours and hours of his free time coding could be such an epic failure in this class. My weakness in maths was sighted as the problem. I’d signed up for the grade 12 class in semester two, but withdrew immediately when it started. The teacher seemed surprised that I’d signed up for consecutive semesters of comp-sci. I was surprised that he remembered my name. And so ended my love affair with coding computers.

Of course I maintained an interest in computers, mainly around gaming and hardware, and eventually went on to get some I.T. certifications and even worked in software implementation in a few places, but getting knocked out of the holy grail of computing, the place where you author how a machine thinks, put the idea of working fully in the field beyond reach, and created a sense of self doubt that a teen is only too willing to embrace.

I’m getting computer certified this summer as a teacher. When I walk into that class in the fall I’m hoping that I can support as many different approaches to coding as there are students in the room. The last thing I want to do is knock a keen, self directed learner out of a woefully underdeveloped field of study in secondary schools.

Consumerist Edtech has us all living in Hotel California

If you work in education and leverage technology (so that’ll be anyone in any classroom these days), give this a read and see if it doesn’t make you a bit uncomfortable.

The Metaverse Is Simply Big Tech, but Bigger

Perhaps you’re thinking that your particular edtech provider isn’t like that, but they’re all coming at it from the same angle:

Apple is into it.

Google is into it.

Microsoft is into it.

And what angle is that? Marketing for the attention economy, of course. Big tech’s focus on a ‘total service environment’ is there to make sure you never leave: whether it’s #tech or #edtech, we’re all living in Hotel California; you can check out any time you like but you can never leave.

Platform agnosticism has been a recurring theme on Dusty World since it began. I’ve been barking at the moon about this for years because we don’t leverage educational technology to teach how technology works, we just let it insinuate itself into all our learning while being illiterate in terms of how it influences us through media and medium. We predicate technology use in education on media illiteracy.

Dreaming of ‘free range’ open source
technology access in 2013.

If we taught digital fluency, anyone who became digitally skilled in our education system would be much better at identifying fake news and managing their digital presence. If we taught digital fluency instead of depending on consumerism to do it for us we’d be platform agnostic both in hardware and software in every classroom so students understood how things work and influence their thinking instead of producing blinkered consumers for corporate consumption.

Imagine if our language and social studies teachers got certifications by certain book publishers and then only taught from that publisher’s collection in the way that their particular publisher provided; that’s what we’ve done in educational technology over the past two decades.

“In a social-science class last year, the students each grabbed a Google-powered laptop. They opened Google Classroom, an app where teachers make assignments. Then they clicked on Google Docs, a writing program, & began composing essays.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/13/technology/google-education-chromebooks-schools.html

We use edtech to indoctrinate students in closed digital ecosystems designed to monetize their attention. It doesn’t matter which multinational edtech ‘solution’ your board uses, they’re all the same, and they’re all playing the #metaverse marketing game: “marketing spin on Big Tech’s increasing reach and power. It’ll be Big Tech—just as problem-riddled as now—but bigger.”

Wouldn’t it be something if we required and taught platform agnostic access to all technology in our classrooms instead of acting as a marketing arm for rich, tax dodging corporations? These organizations are parasitic, our kids deserve better.

The ‘drink from the firehose’ approach to edtech doesn’t end when we’re told what we have to teach with. Many teachers then brand their practice with corporate logos.

The point of that article is that a true metaverse (a shared, non-partisan online space) hasn’t existed since the dawn of the internet. Once the attention merchants got a hold of it they subverted democracies around the world and created a privacy and security nightmare, including in education.

Perhaps the saving grace in this might be that if any of them could get past their greed, educational technology would be the place to make this non-partisan metaverse happen. Instead of demanding control of the technology narrative to generate users, wouldn’t it be something if the technology giants and school systems around the world worked together to create an educational metaverse that was platform agnostic and open to all?

Even Hollywood can only envision a corporate owned future mind-space.

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A Canadian Student Bill of Rights

2020 was an unprecedented year in Ontario public education. After two years of a hostile, incompetent government hacking away at the system in order to replace it with inferior, for-profit options conveniently supplied by their party donors, we rolled into a world wide pandemic that only amplified the lack of competence in our political leadership.

Education is too important to be derailed by political demagogues intent on dismantling public services for their friends’ profit. If the past three years have shown us anything, it’s that Canada needs a student charter of rights in order to prevent corrosive political interests from abusing this vulnerable population.

With Canada’s history of systemic abuse in education you’d think protecting students from misguided political interests would be an obvious step forward, but no politician likes to enact laws that limit them from doing whatever they like while grasping for another election win.

I’m not sure how to pry education out of the hands of self-serving and manipulative provincial politicians, but something needs to be done federally to ensure that Canadians who are members of vulnerable communities (like k-12 students who have no vote or say in how our society operates) have protections enshrined in law.

You’d hope their parents would act in their children’s best interests but that clearly hasn’t been the case in Ontario or other Canadian jurisdictions. It’ll take someone with principles and fortitude at the federal level to see this through. A Canadian Student Charter of Rights would mean Machiavellian interests can’t run roughshod over the rights of every child in Canada to access a safe and rationally administered learning environment focused on enabling them to become their best selves.

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The Determined Luddite

They showed this at the Google Summit a couple of weeks ago:

A metaphor for users of technology?

It’s a special kind of learned helplessness, and I see it every day when trying to get people moving on their computers again. There is nothing magical about computers, though many people like to think there is (it gives them an excuse not to engage in learning about them). If we’re going to make digital skills a foundational skill set in the twenty first century (and we certainly seem to be moving in that direction), then we need to integrate digiracy into curriculum in the same way we integrate literacy and numeracy, and we need teachers to be able to demonstrate competence in digital skill in the same way that we expect them to display proficiency in traditional literacies; acting helpless does nothing to move this forward.

Our board is about to take steps toward a BYOD/multi-platform approach to #edtech. This can’t happen until people get off the escalator and figure out how to open a book.

Helplessness, learned or otherwise, isn’t going to lead to the effective integration of technology in the classroom. How we train teachers to become digitally competent is a vital piece to this puzzle. The mini-lab approach with digital coaches assigned to their own tech-cloud is a way to encourage the tech-curious to develop better skills. It also (through collegial interaction with peers) lets the tech-curious spread their enthusiasm and know-how to the less keen.

Build digeracy through scaffolded, objective learning with diverse technology. Opting out is no longer an option. It was an embarrassing approach ten years ago, it’s quickly becoming untenable now.

That people seem to rewind well past where you think reasonable caution may lie in trouble shooting computers is frustrating from a tech’s point of view. If a user has a genuine issue with their computer, or something has actually broken, then we’re generally happy to be of assistance, but when a teacher says a printer is broken when it is simply unplugged, this points to a willful kind of ignorance. When that teacher is also one of the schools computer teachers I want to move to the arctic and give up.

A minimum expectation of digital fluency should be a willingness to address basic, operational issues before evoking support. If schools want to develop digital fluency, an expectation of honest engagement has to be where that starts. If the internet is really becoming that important, then it becomes incumbent upon the user to make that connection as stable and effective as possible. I’d say that 80% of the tech calls I deal with are people unplugging things they shouldn’t be touching in the first place, and then everyone else being too helpless to plug it back in again.

One of my grade 9s shared this as a video to help them out with an introduction to computers (the editing is hilarious): Komputer Kindergarten. MSDOS and the beige 1990s are the reason this sounds so antiquated (and funny). That so many people twenty years down the road still don’t “do that stuff'” is getting to be equally ridiculous. I’m not saying everyone has to be a technician, but everyone should be able to change their own tire, otherwise they shouldn’t be driving. You can’t be expected to operate the equipment effectively if you’re determined to know nothing about it and want nothing to do with it.

Effective teaching with digital tools begins with teachers, and I find so many of them not just reluctant but downright contrary to the idea of learning even the basics of how a computer or network functions. Some of that lies at the feet of teacher unions and school boards who have taught teachers to be helpless through locked, fear driven educational I.T. regimes. Educators who have bypassed these restrictions and developed digital fluency in spite of their union and board’s best efforts are the ones we need to bring back in from the cold now that the school technology cold war is over. Their fluency as digital coaches could create momentum to inflect enough colleagues to adopt a more open approach to learning technology.

The idiotic idea that technology is the realm of the young and if you want to know anything about it, just ask your students, needs to die. Students are the rocket scientists who unplug an ethernet cable to plug into their infected laptop so they can have faster internet. They then leave it unplugged and the next student comes along and instead of plugging the end back into the computer, plugs it into the wall, creating havoc as the network loops itself. Then everyone complains at how slow and unreliable the internet is; it’s not the internet that is slow and unreliable.

As school systems stumble along years behind business and society, they have finally gotten the idea that being online is just a new medium of communication (not bad, only a decade after the rest of us did). As education evolves into a more diverse, open technological environment, perhaps the hardest people to convince will be teachers who have bought into the fear and panic of their unions and employers and have been forced out of step with social expectation as a result.

Gasping For Breath: the lost art of pedagogy in Ontario schools

Written Feb, 2022:

Horses usually get put down when they break a leg. They get euthanized because a three legged horse can’t stand on its own and ends up developing consequent health problems. Keeping a lame horse alive is simply extending its misery. These days, Dusty World feels like a lame horse. I started this blog in 2010 after having attended my first ECOO conference and found it a valuable way to share my own ABL (always be learning) approach to teaching and learning effectively while navigating an information revolution.

Dancing in the Datasphere: thoughts on digital pedagogy from way back in 2011.

I’m sitting here looking at a dozen posts I haven’t published on Dusty World in the past year because I think there is no point. It has been years since we focused on pedagogical best practices in Ontario education. My reflections on this blog have always been focused on that slippery and often ignored concept. Even at the best of times getting our education system to focus on pedagogical best practices has proven problematic, and we’re very far away from the best of times here in early 2022.

I’ve used pedagogical best practices to direct my teaching throughout my career, even when it made me unpopular with management, my union and even colleagues and students (many are happy to do less – learning is hard work). In my mind, pedagogy means I’m focusing on maximizing student learning to the exclusion of all else. The past two years have made so many educational workers (and students, and parents) disinterested in pedagogy to the point where I may be one of the only people left who gives it any thought. Many weren’t into it in the first place, others have bailed for their own survival, and some have even actively attacked the idea of learning as a focus in schools, usually for their own political ends.

Pedagogy in Ontario public education has been set back decades since 2018. These days we’re reduced to focussing on student wellness (usually while being driven to destroy our own) rather than teaching, but good pedagogy leads to student success which also brings with it meaningful (rather than proscriptive) wellness, though that is much more difficult to do than simply tossing learning out the window in favour of proscriptive wellness. I didn’t became a teacher to provide daycare or be an emotional councillor, I got into teaching to teach. In an attempt to survive this ongoing disaster, Ontario education has given up on teaching and learning and has fallen back to wellness as a last raison d’être.

Pedagogical best practices have always struggled to survive in our educational bureaucracy. I’d honestly hoped that a change in government in Ontario would create efficiencies and opportunities in a system too long under single party control, but the new guys are just as (if not more) duplicitous and manipulative as the old guys, and obviously not focused on pedagogy. This loss of faith in our provincial education system is what had me daydreaming about a student bill of rights for all Canadian students. Unfortunately, Canada’s colonial history tends to systemically abuse disenfranchised people (like students under 18), leaving me worried for the safety and efficacy of learning for our children.

For me, the point of Dusty World is to allow me to transparently reflect on my teaching practice in order to improve it. I have always done this publicly in the hopes that other people might find it useful, but the unpublished posts I’m looking at feel more like hopelessness than they do constructive reflective practice. Every time I post something I get blowback from exhausted people who are trying to make nonsensical system-think work in practice. The best thing I seem able to do as one of the few people left in the system actually interested in effective teaching and learning is to not publish reflections on it, which breaks my heart. We seem to have lost the plot entirely.

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Systemic Pedagogical Failures Continue…

Not posting anything doesn’t mean there are still major problems in our system. So far this year I’ve had graduates tell me they are in real trouble in post-secondary maths classes. How an A+ high school student can suddenly find themselves failing in post secondary raises very concerning questions about how we are teaching and learning. Other students are able to use their maths like a toolbox to solve problems, but our grads struggle with rote learning that renders them ineffective. My son had a senior maths class last year where the entire class failed unit 5. The teacher said it’s ok, everyone fails unit 5. If we were focusing on pedagogy we’d be trying to solve this.

This past year I had prominent STEM educators tell me that only academic/white collar courses matter. When I suggested we create content for non-academic technology courses I was told that they don’t matter because barely any schools teach them. This STEM is more just S & M thinking is ongoing and obviously inequitable. This is one of those things I’d hoped a change in government might address, but blue collar subjects (and students) are still an afterthought in our degree fixated system. Were we considering pedagogy on a systemic level, this kind of thing wouldn’t come up in conversation.

I’m currently teaching over 70 students in grades 10-12 in computer technology and engineering, four of them are girls and there are no girls in my senior class. Sexism and genderism is still a major problem in our system. My partner had one of our local students in elearning last quadmester and she told the story of how, when she expressed concern about her course selections she was told, “you’re so pretty, you don’t need to worry about that kind of thing.” I want to have trouble believing that this was said, but then I look at how genderized our course selections continue to be and wonder how this kind of systemic genderism can happen.

I’m one of the few that has tried to keep extracurriculars alive in our aimless wander through COVID and have had many difficult experiences and observations about how student performance is affected by long term trauma, but that too can’t be publicly reflected on because it doesn’t matter anymore, and doing so only seems to aggravate the situation. Having an opportunity to reflect, share and talk to other professional educators about my practice has been a valuable ‘breathing’ process for my teaching, but like trying to teach through a mask every day, I’m left gasping for breath.

My current situation (massive classes while trying to teach hands-on engineering skills without the space needed to do it) has always been an issue where I teach, but nothing changes because I’m expected to hurt myself making it work every year, at least until there is an injury then it’ll be my fault. I recently had a student in my post-secondary bound senior computer engineering class (capped at 31, like an advanced calculus class) who is credit poor, essential level/DD and has a history of violence. When I asked guidance why this student was directed into our class I was told that he had selected my course, which begs the question: who is being guided? We have resources set aside for students like this, but when we don’t guide them into those programs we reduce the efficacy of everyone else’s learning.

Speaking as a parent as well as a teacher, I’d like our education system to focus on teaching and learning best practices, which should include gender unprejudiced and level appropriate guidance. I suspect the dearth of maths skills in our grads is also a result of the ‘pick-what-you-like’ (unless you’re female) approach. It’s hard to cover pathway appropriate curriculum when a significant portion of every class has neither the inclination nor background to engage with it. If pedagogy mattered, we’d be resolving these problems instead of ignoring them.

The world has many problems and I feel that pedagogically focused public education is the answer to many of them, but because of politics and circumstance, schools in Ontario aren’t focused on being schools anymore.

Meanwhile, the digital information revolution is, if anything, accelerating, and we’ve thrown hundreds of thousands of staff and students into the digital divide in an attempt to weather the pandemic, all with no time or training to tackle any of it with pedagogy in mind. I’m rejigging my entire curriculum again for the 3rd major change in scheduling in the past 18 months (with no time given). It’s like trying to build a plane while it’s in the air… again.

Inconsistencies have poked so many holes in the fiction that is our public education system that many people are now questioning it in ways they wouldn’t have before. The one-two punch of a vindictive, populist government and this never-ending pandemic has left our schools angry and confused. That loss of faith is hard to recover from. Trying to honestly reflect on pedagogical best practices in this void only seems to aggravate the situation. It might be time to send Dusty World on sabbatical for a while and focus on something where I can give it 100% without other people constantly telling me to do less. I didn’t get into teaching to do it at low intensity, the kids deserve more, but that’s where we’re at.

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Music, millenials and the lost art of curation

The other day I asked my senior class how millennials listen to music when they get their first car. They seemed confused by the question. I’ve noticed that young people don’t like to manage files any more (many grade 9s don’t know how to find files on a desktop), and since music turned into file management around the turn of the millennium, it’s all about file management these days, isn’t it? It turns out it isn’t.

When I started driving near the end of the 80s the couple of cassettes in my pocket turned into a briefcase of tapes. That briefcase contained whole albums by artists, both what they released and B side stuff. When you went to a concert you’d hear the released stuff, but you’d also hear the unreleased songs, and the majority of people in the audience were very familiar with it; they were fans of the artist who had spent a lot of time in a long form medium (the album).

That process continued into the 90s as my tape collection evolved into compact disks. The smaller form factor resulted in flip books of disks. The plastic box with the album art on it got left behind, but I was still listening to whole albums and collecting the works of specific artists in a detailed, long form, album based manner. I was introduced to mixed tapes in the mid-90s by my hot, new girlfriend, so the idea of designing your own playlists have been around for a long time, but albums were the main point. We spent a lot of time curating our collections. You’d discover new artists in friends’ collections, you’d hear unreleased music while in their car. At a concert you knew the words to every song, even the unreleased stuff. What happens at concerts nowadays? They play their released songs only and then do popular covers so everyone can sing along?

I went digital early. From Napster to modern mp3 distribution, I kept cultivating a locally based, artist focused collection of music, but that isn’t the way that the industry has gone. Nor is it the way that teens today relate to music. The gigs of music I’ve curated aren’t the future, it’s me using modern tools to imitate my past relationship with less fluid, physical mediums, but is that a bad thing? I’d argue that my relationship with an artist’s music was deeper and more intimate because of the limitations of our mediums. When you have the collected works of Dire Straits (six original albums plus four live ones) on hand, you are diving deep into what they did. Surely deeper familiarity breeds a more loyal fan.

Kids are still into music, but the digitization of the medium has resulted in a much more fluid relationship with it. I frequently watch students randomize YouTube videos as background music and then click through a song in the first ten seconds if it isn’t grabbing them. Their’s is a high input low attention threshold relationship with the artist. You can hardly blame modern artists for producing shallow, catching songs – the cloud based medium that has descended upon us pre-selects that kind of music for success in a fluid, digital landscape.

Laying on a bunk at air cadet camp in Trenton on a hot, un-air conditioned summer night in 1985 and getting lost in Brothers in Arms on a walkman isn’t something millennials consider doing with music, is it? We started doing the skip a song thing on CDs in the 1990s, but it was such a pain on tape that you’d just listen to the song. In doing so you sometimes came around to liking something that didn’t grab your attention in the first ten seconds. At the very least you’re experiencing an artist’s thoughts and music in a more detailed fashion.

When I asked my students what they do when they get a car for the first time they were confused. Spotify was the answer (it turns out Spotify is the millennial answer to any music related question). I get it if you’re swimming in wifi at home or at school all the time. Sure, it’s bandwidth and data ain’t free, but it is if you’re a kid in 2017 for the most part. But what do you do when you’re going for a ride in your first car and have no locally curated music to take with you? I figured they’d all have MP3s on their phones, but they don’t. Spotify premium was the answer. That’s ten bucks a month to listen to whatever you want, and you can evidently save it locally if you’re on the road, but do they? If you’ve never had to manage a local music collection before I suspect it wouldn’t even occur to you to do it this late in the game, it’d feel too much like work.

So the young driver’s solution to the problem of never having cultivated a personal collection of music is to pay for a monthly cloud based service and then now begin cultivating a local music collection? You could just hope your phone is willing and able to bring down all that data in a continuous way, but that’s an expensive prospect in Canada. With some of the highest mobility costs in the world and lots of long car trips in store, Canada isn’t a comfortable place to be cloud dependant for your tunes. If you end up not being able to pay the ten bucks a month for the pro version of Spotify, you lose all your local music. Just when you thought the digital native’s relationship with their tunes couldn’t get any more ephemeral, it gets more so. When you live in the cloud you don’t really own your data, do you?

Another problem with cloud-based digital music natives is the interactivity. When you’re used to constantly inputting changes to infinite cloud based music it’s second nature to go looking for whatever strikes your fancy, or skip through the play list looking for whatever drifted into your mind as a must-listen-to song in the moment. How long are your eyes off the road while you’re doing that? If that’s your relationship with music then you’ve trained yourself over many years to surf through your fluid, digital music with frequent inputs. I wonder how this is reflected in statistics…

Digital distraction for the win.

MADD stats on young drivers.
Young Driver stats on distracted driving
Transport Canada on distracted driving: “the highest proportion of distracted drivers involved in fatal crashes was in the under-20 age group (16%) followed by those aged 20 to 29 (13%)”
NHTSA on distracted driving
It’s a world wide issue, here is Australia

The texting culture is generally blamed for the problem of distracted driving, but I suspect this learned, constant input approach to music has a part to play in it as well, especially with younger drivers.

The long and the short of all this is that the music culture of young people is completely foreign to anyone over thirty. For people who got into music before it got very cloudy in the twenty-teens, curating your own local music means you can jump into a car or go on a trip and never once wonder about access; you own your music. Because of that effort you’ve probably also got a closer relationship with the artists you call your own. For the cloud dependent millennial that move to vehicular mobility produces a number of expensive problems. Of course, since you never really got into any one musician when you were younger because listening to more than one third of a song is boring, maybe you don’t care.

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Wired Thinking on Neurodiversity

Wired at 20 years old

My favorite magazine is WIRED, and I’m a magazine guy. No other magazine dares me to think as widely and as daringly about the times we live in (if you’ve never picked up a copy, give it a go!). Wired will go after interests of mine (internet culture, technology, etc) but it will also introduce me to the leading edge of fields I have only a passing experience in, and make me care about them.

This month they turn 20 years old. They’ve been daringly guessing what will happen next for two decades now, and while they don’t always get it right, they always make you realize what changes are upon us.

As I read a new edition I usually want to link and share the ideas they stir up. This edition is full of them as Wired goes over an alphabet of ideas considered in the last two decades.

Neurodiversity is a topic that hits close to home. With a son diagnosed, I’ve come to recognize how I’ve dealt with ASD myself. One of the reasons I love reading Douglas Coupland or William Gibson is because many of their characters are neuro-atypical, and it’s nice to read about people like yourself; I find much of mainstream media quite alienating.

I’ve struggled with my inability to care about social distinction forever, and I feel for my son while he does. I also think that difference is wonderful. When we heard the diagnosis I said, “excellent! Who would want to be normal!?” I guess the normal people do.

WIRED’s take on all this? Neurodiversity is like biological diversity; it develops resiliency. The neurodiverse might not all be geniuses, but the ones that are (and geniuses by definition are neurodiverse) may very well save the human race. Diversity allows a species to survive in extreme conditions, conditions that we’re making for ourselves. As long as we’re hammering round pegs into square holes, we’re not allowing human beings to be as neurally diverse as we naturally are… and we’re hurting ourselves in the process. Normal people really need to get off their high horses.

I wish I could convince the school system of this as it focuses exclusively on short comings in hopes of making the exceptional ceptional.. If they could improve my son’s image pattern recognition (which is astonishing), his special skills would be enhanced, instead they rush to make him fit a mould. The system presses him to be as widely and flatly skilled as ‘normal’ people in hopes of making him what, normal? Upcoming standardized tests won’t examine his superhuman abilities, they will focus on what ‘normal’ people are expected to do (they have charts). When he fails a literacy test because he’s unable to verbalize what he knows in a manner that suits the testers, we’re left with the pieces.

Some might suggest that alternative school systems might offer a response to this, but I doubt it. Adding money to remove expectations isn’t what is needed here.

Like eating factory produced meat, driving SUVs or buying sweatshop made products, how we treat the neurodiverse is going to be one of the things that points to our backward (hypocritical) thinking in the early twenty first century. Like the eighteenth century person who thought slavery was perfectly acceptable, this social ignorance makes us look like fools to history.

Fortunately, I don’t really care what most people think about it.