Dusty World – Page 6 – Mechanical Sympathy

Metacognition Missteps

What Mr. Cleese is so eloquently describing above is the Dunning-Kruger Effect, something that didn’t receive a moment of notice in the metacognitive PD we recently received. Metacognition is often seen as a way to encourage student directed learning, and I’m generally a fan of the idea, but this bias deserves some consideration, especially if we’re trying to improve student learning.

In trying to break this down I came up with the Venn diagram to the right in hopes of understanding what should be a process toward enlightenment rather than a barrier to it.

There is a degree of stupidity so intense that it is self-consuming. People trapped in that tend to reinforce their own ignorance and simply can’t hear alternative points of view, even if they are self evident. These people tend to wallow in limited, habitual action. If you want to see it happening watch most digital natives on a computer. In that kind of stupidity you’re going to be hard pressed to learn anything, let alone expect any kind of accurate self assessment.

Ignorance is bliss, you’re going to be happy if you think you know everything. Anyone who lives in an Earth centred universe and thinks their species the darling of creation is that kind of certain-happy. People like this make a point of surrounding themselves with like minded people.

If you can begin to take in evidence from around you, certain self-evident truths will begin to make you question your beliefs. That would get you out of the stupid vortex and into ignorance. The more you realize you don’t know, the more rapidly you’re able to move toward knowledge. Humility is a vital component in this process, and where metacognition could begin to help.

In the realm of knowledge you may know many things but your experience with them is limited, so while you know theory you are unable to successfully interact with it in reality – this is one of the reasons I enjoy teaching tech so much (reality doesn’t coddle you in your learning). You’ve read about riding a bicycle but you’ve never done the deed. The final step is to do as well as know, only then do you graduate from talking head to doer.

Metacognition is a valuable tool in creating the kind of self-aware humility that can move you from ignorance to knowledge, but applying it too early will push you in the wrong direction. At the early stages of learning you are incapable of knowing what you don’t know, so you’ll think you’re better at something than you are. This appears especially true in mind based, academic work because your math equation doesn’t burst into flames when you do it wrong.

At no point did our metacognitive training suggest that there was a threshold where you should (carefully) begin to implement self-analysis of learning, rather, it was suggested that we do this continually and throughout, which appears to be just what you shouldn’t do if you want to get somewhere with it.

I like the DIY motive here, but getting to “learning to self correct” is a tricky step
that can push you the wrong way if you do it too soon.

Finding a Patch of Sun

As the sun rose on the shortest day of the year our little dog managed to find a fleeting patch of it and opened his solar collector ears to get as much as possible. In a matter of minutes it was gone to be replaced by days of grey fog over Christmas; there was something in that moment.

If you get to fifty without any scars you’re not doing it right, and I have my fair share of scars. I found myself struggling through another Christmas season feeling like the weight of the world was on my shoulders. With a couple of weeks away from the emotional deficit that is Ontario education these days, I got some perspective and decided to try and make a conscious decision to find that patch of sunlight rather than dwell on the darkness.

The return to school started well enough, but you’re not just battling your own negativity, you’re also facing it in your students and colleagues. With the end of the semester approaching and the system under attack from the elected representatives sworn to look after it, everyone is terse, but I was finding that my bonhomie was working. I was able to calm and direct students, and when a colleague was rather unprofessional with my wife, I was able to help her through that too.

Yesterday was an epic shit show though. I got to school only to have my cell – which I’d forgotten in my classroom in a rush to get to the information picket the afternoon before – ringing off the hook. It was my wife saying a snow plow had backed into her. I rushed home to find the back window of the car blown out, glass all over the road and the ‘C’ pillar bashed in. The plow had not only hit her, it had then pushed the car two feet sideways before stopping.

Alanna was ok but the kid driving the plow didn’t say a word. His supervisor showed up and then the OPP. It was all very amiable, but in retrospect this was them trying to manage an obviously at-fault accident. The OPP officer (who never gave us his name) gave us an incident report number and that was that. The township guys shovelled up the glass and I followed Alanna over to the repair centre in Fergus to discover we were already $500 in the hole for a deductible. They then said it might be a week before they even start working on it, and we only have 7 days of rental car coverage. Nice to know our second most expensive car insurance in Canada rates don’t begin to pay for an accident that was in no way our fault.

Even with all that we were getting our sense of humour back as I drove Alanna to school. As we approached the last traffic light before school I was in no rush and doing about 50kmh/hr. I must have seen something in my peripheral vision because I suddenly found myself standing on the brake without knowing why as a mid-sized sedan blew through the red-light perpendicular to us. I think we missed it by about fifteen feet. At 50km/hr we were moving at about 13.9 metres per second. Had I been moving at only a couple of kilometres per hour faster we would have been t-boned by that big, V6 sedan in our small hatchback and our son would have been an orphan.

None of this registered in the moment. We were both already pretty shaken up by the morning and this was simply more nonsense piled on top. We went to school and I got there about half an hour before my first class. I spent most of that time sitting with my wife listening to the discussion with insurance.

With no breaks for the rest of the day I found myself unable to engage with my students effectively. I told my seniors what happened and they went about their culminating projects and tried to give me some space. I didn’t tell my junior classes, but our head of student support dropped by and when I told her what happened she offered to cover my class so I could get some head space. It was nice to hear someone acknowledge how traumatic a morning like the one I had was. I didn’t take her up on it and didn’t pursue leaving. I’m anxious about asking for compassionate leave because I don’t have the greatest history when it comes to getting support while in crisis.

The next day I apologized to my junior students for being so short with them and found my way back onto the beam again. After a weekend of biblical rain the sun rose on Sunday morning and the world had the colour turned up to eleven. I just have to keep working on getting back to that small patch of sun, even when the world seems full of ineptitude and chaos.

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The DIGITAL LENS: How Education Has Ignored A Third Foundational Fluency During The Information Revolution

I’ve been battling against digital illiteracy in Ontario’s public education system for going on a decade now and I’m frustrated at the slow rate of change. I’ve applied for multiple positions at the board and ministry levels and watched as future administrators get moved into these positions and fail to move the needle before they evaporate off into management. Perhaps my mistake is that I want to take on a curriculum enhancement role not to escape the classroom or to get myself into an office but to actually improve system response to an ongoing crisis that everyone else seems to want to sweep under the rug.

Considering Ontario’s current state of affairs, I’ll probably have to wait until after June 2nd for us to get a government interested in doing anything other than torturing our exceptional public education system into submission in order to hand a charter system for their donors. When Ontario comes to its senses (if it doesn’t, I think we’re moving), I’d really like to see us address digital illiteracy, but not just for the societal benefits it would provide – my actual interest is in developing a cyber-awareness curriculum that improves Canada’s ability to survive in a networked world while also clarifying this hidden pathway for students capable and interested in pursuing it.

Unfortunately, cyber and information security aren’t foundational digital abilities, they are advanced, complex skillsets that are developed on top of more simple fluencies. An academic comparison would be writing a complex essay of a challenging piece of writing in English class. In order to tackle the dreaded Hamlet essay, a student would need advanced reading skills with the ability to tackle complex vocabulary and grammar that includes an understanding of both poetic syntax and the chronological difficulties inherent in reading something over four hundred years old. This contextual challenge alone would stress most people’s language skills. On top of all that, the writing itself is a complex set of skills developed on top of simpler abilities. Students would need to understand spelling and grammar, and sentence construction and paragraph construction and argumentative theme development across the entire paper – it’s a staggeringly complex ask that we can only attempt in high school because we’ve placed literacy as a foundational skillset in our education system.

That was in 2010 – over a decade later Schmidt is still
trying to get people to understand the digital
revolution that is happening around them.

With that perspective in mind, I thought I’d try and take a run at infographicking how our
analogue education system has digitized over the past twenty years. This digitization of education has ramped up dramatically in the past decade – much of what I’ve written in Dusty World has orbited around this sea-change in digital teaching and learning.

The suddenness of this change has left many people behind. There are administrators and ‘curriculum experts’ in our system who have never used the cloud-based learning systems we’re now required to use in every lesson. I’m up the pointy end of digitally fluent educators in the province. I applied for a system IT support role last year and didn’t get it – I suspect mainly because the system is incapable of understanding and appreciating digital fluency on anything but a puerile level; it’s a case of illiterate people failing to value and understand what literacy looks like; I’d really like to change that.

If we consider the education system I grew up in 1980s in Ontario, it was a very analogue place. Teachers hand wrote notes on the board, which we copied by hand onto paper (which many students promptly lost, assuming they made the notes in the first place). I can remember vindictive teachers doing a whole 76 minute period of note taking to ‘ready us for university’. Nothing prepares you for university like claw hand! These ‘lessons’ weren’t about how to take quality notes, they were about how to copy everything that was on the board as exactly and quickly as possible. In retrospect they did nothing to prepare me for university, but they were and example of the entrenched lessons we all experienced about creating analogue content; we never had a problem with teaching analogue skills because they hadn’t changed for generations. In the past two decades we’ve revolutionized information recording and access but we’ve also all but ignored learning best practices in these new mediums for teachers and students.

Analogue learning materials, analogue formative learning note taking leading to analogue communication of learning – and we drilled students on how to do each of these analogue exercises in order to create these skillsets. We assume the same skills in digital spaces rather than teaching them.

My generation has been described as ‘digital immigrants’ as we arrived at the current state of affairs from a time that would seem completely alien to anyone currently under forty years old. Along with the framing of us as digital immigrants comes the absurd framing of kids who have grown up in digital abundance as ‘digital natives‘. If you’re read Dusty World before you know what I think of this concept (it’s absurd – just because I grew up in a time with cars didn’t mean I magically knew how to drive!). What this lazy observation did was absolve education of the responsibility for teaching digital communications as a foundational skill, even as it became the basis for how we teach and learn. When I tried to replicate the 20th Century Teaching & Learning above with how 21st Century Teaching & Learning has become digitized, it quickly becomes apparent that digital skills aren’t just needed to communicate your learning (it’s even how we run the literacy test now!), they are also inherent in the learning materials you receive and the formative learning you are documenting. Many parents struggle with the new digital means of communications from their schools (online reporting and such) because of their own digital illiteracy. If you aren’t digitally fluent, you aren’t capable of learning in an Ontario classroom in 2022. You aren’t capable of teaching in one either, though that’s the new expectation in our on again off again emergency remote classrooms.

Learning materials are now almost entirely digital. Even if a textbook is used it’s often digitized first so that the information in it can be shared more fluidly in digital spaces. Staff and students need to know how to research and find information online (including curating their own which many can’t or don’t do). Formative learning is documented (when it’s documented at all) on digital notes taken in cloud based documents, though more often than not it doesn’t happen at all because we’ve lost note taking as a skill during the digital ~~devolution~~ revolution. Communicating learning is now also digital with most students incapable of writing by hand legibly (part of what has killed off formative note taking). We’ve replaced all those lessons about analogue skills with INFORMATION, because information is so readily available to us (though apparently only a minority can critically assess its value).

That digital lens is now between everything we do in education, including the traditional foundational skills of literacy and numeracy. If you require digital fluency to teach and learn literacy and numeracy in a 2022 classroom, doesn’t that make digital fluency itself a foundational skill? Perhaps you’re curious as to how many mandatory digital fluency programs Ontario teachers have to take? None. Know how many mandatory digital fluency classes there are in Ontario high schools? None. Know how many classes you need digital fluency in to best teach and learn? All of them. That is how messed up things are as 2021 ends in an ongoing pandemic that has pushed us into fully digital learning for months at a time. Fluency is but one part of this equation. The digital divide also includes equity issues around bandwidth and devices, but we only talk about equity when it doesn’t cost us anything. Our ignoring of digital fluency has been a socio-economic/equity issue from the start (kids with access to tech and connectivity are obviously going to be more comfortable with it). You might say that our lack of movement on digital fluency is simply a way to hide inequity behind something complex and difficult to deal with while still spouting about how equitable we have become.

I’m live in hope that our education system is put back on the rails and a we stop our oblivious approach to digital skills development in both teaching and learning. If we’re going to use networked digital tools like we are, it is incumbent on every teacher to become fluent enough with it to teach best practices to their students. Our blind leading the blind approach isn’t viable or safe and never should have happened in the first place. Had we been working on this like we should have in the decade leading up to the pandemic, the desperate lunge into emergency remote learning could have been much more equitable and functional and done a lot to reduce the strain on families being mulched by the pandemic.

When that hope is realized I want to go after the hardest part of this in-the-land-of-the-blind skillset: cybersecurity skills. This skillset assumes advanced ICT (information & communication technology) hardware and software skills and then, like that Hamlet essay, goes after complex, esoteric skills far beyond where most people will operate. I want Ontario to develop a cyber-awareness curriculum that brings all users of networked technology (that’s pretty much everyone in the province) up to a point where their digital illiteracy is no longer a detriment to the province. Illiterate users are still the biggest threat in cybersecurity and I’d like to get everyone to the point where they aren’t oblivious to how the digital world they’re living their lives in works so that they can not only learn and teach more effectively in our digital systems but also better protect their data privacy and online presence.

I’d also like to clear away the obstructions our digitally illiterate education system has placed in front of the most digitally adept students and clear pathways into jobs in critical ICT infrastructure, most especially in cybersecurity. If we don’t take steps to secure our digital infrastructure, everything else fails (electricity, water & gas all depend on IT).

We should be producing graduates with the digital fluency needed to confidently make their way in our brave new world while also clarifying pathways for those students willing and able to protect everyone else from an increasingly threatening threatscape.

HOW TO ENGAGE EDUCATION WITH CYBERSECURITY

https://prezi.com/view/7pqMzlLdfOFltD78ILP6/

Over the past couple of years I’ve done a fair bit of writing for various provincial and national agencies around cyber-education. In every case they seemed to be looking for an in-and-out, short duration of work online course they could post that teachers and students would magically flock to. Having presented on cybersecurity education in the classroom both face to face pre-pandemic and online once it kicked off, I became aware of just how fearful most staff are in engaging with this subject that jumps up and down on their digital doubts while also threatening them with horrible outcomes that they don’t understand. Throwing up an online course isn’t going to bridge this fear/illiteracy gap.

Having worked with CyberTitan and Field Effect (an Ottawa based cybersecurity provider) on a joint federal government/private enterprise/public education presentation at the NICE K-12 Cybersecurity Education Conference this past December, we presented on how with industry expertise, federal vision and provincial public education community outreach we could make cyber-pathways available to all pathways interested students while also offering immersive and meaningful cloud-based simulations that are equitably available to all.

ICTC did an ICT Teacher Champion Day pre-COVID where they provided interested and engaged teachers with resources and support. I think this approach is how you bypass the fear and get staff and students to engage with scary-cyber on a basic fluency level. It would also present competition opportunities that clarify pathways for the most cyber-interested. By finding local champions who are willing/able to engage others in cyber-skills development, we could connect and walk people through some of that dormant online material and actually produce a change in how we’re doing things. This requires boots on the ground and a longer term commitment than throwing together an online course.

As digital fluency becomes a mandatory part of our public school experience and we begin producing more digitally fluent teachers and students, we can up our game in advanced digital areas like cybersecurity and emerging technologies like machine learning and 3d modelling and create digitally skilled graduates who aren’t self-taught and potentially dangerous young adults who put our economy and communities at risk.

There is much to do. I’m looking forward to being part of an Ontario that is ready to take on this challenging future even as it hatches around us.

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Digital Footprint 2.0

SOURCES

The source(s) of this post (and a good example of the richness of thinking you can get out of an online PLN):

@MzMollyTL’s Digital Footprint discussion from ECOO last year that stirred up the new teachers in my AQ.

@melaniemcbride’s comment on the sweatshop mentality of the always on teacher:

https://twitter.com/melaniemcbride/status/230841214180683779

@dougpete’s blog on edublogging:
http://dougpete.wordpress.com/2012/08/03/this-week-in-ontario-edublogs-27/

…which led to some interesting questions about online presence:
http://dougpete.wordpress.com/2012/08/05/dont-hurt-yourself-with-social-media/

Phew! That is a lot of build up! Here I go…

DIGITAL FOOTPRINT 2.0

I think we’re ready for an evolution in what our expectations are around this. Diana’s original presentation suggested that teachers need to familiarize themselves with online media, and that is still true. However, since that presentation there have been political upheavals supported by social media, underground poltical movements powered by social media, and I’m currently watching the ‘Twitter Olympics’: the first really social media powered Olympic games. Even the forth estate is grudgingly trying to manage the tidal wave of social media. Merely familiarizing yourself isn’t going to cut it anymore. Ignoring it will make you irrelevant to your students with astonishing speed.

Social media is becoming mainstream and there are increasing expectations that people know how to use it. Only in extremely staid, conservative situations (educational administration) is social media being shunned. Even the very conservative family reunion I attended recently wanted to start making use of social media to keep in touch, and these were people who play banjos. Social media is becoming ubiquitous, even unhooking the Ontario government’s ability to manipulate media into justifying its agenda. This is a powerful force, not something to be trifled with or poked at tentatively. If you’re going to do it, do it honestly, and be yourself. You’ll find the ability to expand your interests online empowering if you don’t try and game it.

POCKET NETWORKS

The social networks we see spring up like mushrooms in the rain are being prompted by the miniaturization of computer hardware. Smartphones are increasingly common, and since 2010, the vast majority of ‘phone’ use has been in data, not voice. We use our mobile computers as interconnected computers, not as phones. Our students do it, we do it, even boomers are doing it. Like the telegraph, then the telephone after it, this is a revolution in how we communicate with each other, and almost everyone is carrying around the means in their pockets.

Our classrooms have more processing power in the pockets of students than desktop labs did ten years ago. Their ability to communicate is unparalleled in history, and disregards geography like no other telecommunications system before it. Just hoping that everyone considers doing something with their online presence is no longer enough, and ignoring or banning the hardware that is causing this is turning a blind eye to a profound shift in social communications. Schools that ban smartphones should be banning other new inventions, like electricity, telephones, televisions… which very quickly starts to look backward.

GENUINE ONLINE PRESENCE

Being online offers you an opportunity to be anonymous, but this requires a great deal of work on your part. The nature of the internet means you’re always leaving digital bread crumbs about how and where you’re communicating from. Anti-web types will use this as an excuse to harp on privacy issues, but when have we ever been able to communicate privately? Gossip has always been and always will, and what you say has always followed you, it just follows you in an amplified manner now. Social media allows you to broadcast gossip. If you were a gossip before, you’re a digitally enhanced gossip now. It’s never been more important to be the best person you are in public; there is a record now, and I’ve seen students constantly bitten by this as their Facebook updates land them in the VP’s office.

Trying to be someone else is exhausting!

The genuine self as an online presence offers an opportunity to meet others beyond your geographic situation that share your interests. You quickly find yourself a part of an online community that reflects your predilections and offers you a sense of collaborative discourse that might be missing in your workplace, or your immediate geography. If you’re genuine in expressing your interests, you’ll create a genuinely satisfying social media ecosystem. If you fabricate yourself, or limit yourself to specific identities (your teacher self comes to mind here), you won’t be exploring the actual usefulness of this new medium.

The other advantage of being genuine online is that you attract meaningful dialogue. If you’re one dimensional, you tend to attract n00bs, marketing interests and bots (who are also one dimensional). If you’re genuine and human in your presentation of self, you’ll attract a richer class of connection, one that offers powerful insights regardless of where you are in relation to each other on the planet. You’re harnessing the true potential of social media when you are multi-dimensional and human in your approach to it.

Developing a digital footprint is no longer about simply participating, or creating a cardboard cutout of your professional self, it’s about honestly expressing your own views in a genuine manner. The myriad of apps and means of communicating in a social network allow you to express yourself in simple (twitter), complex (blog) or focused interests (Google+, Facebook) ways. Knowing how to use the tools effectively is key.

If you’re fabricating a professional appearance, well, that’s just work, and doing it all summer, 24/7 is not going to do you any real good. Ultimately, you’re doing an awful lot of work and not exploring this new medium effectively, probably because you’re scared of it.

School Leadership 2.0

Several school administrators made comments in Doug’s blog about the need for restraint. In a leadership role, you’re not free to fly off the handle whenever you have an opinion. You always need to consider the working relationship you have to foster. Having said that, George’s comment about social media being a useful tool in fostering a team based on real knowledge of each other suggests that social media can be a means of allowing people who might not otherwise to know each other better.

The tendency has been for management (union, board, ministry, and any other ed-based management you can suggest) to shy away from social media. They fear the de-centralization of power, and see it as a threat to their dominance. It’s nice to know some administrators are fighting this tendency, but I’ve heard of many more who don’t hire the best candidates because their online presence creates unease, and in worst cases not considering hiring a teacher at all because they are familiar with the social web that most students spend their lives in. Why they think that hiring belligerent, intentionally irrelevant teachers is a good idea is beyond me.

What I love about social media is that it is democratizing information. No longer do we have to succumb to the broadcast media’s idea of what is true. Twitter told me about Bin Laden hours before broadcast media would, or could. As a social media-ist, I’m responsible for vetting my own information feed, and broadcasting my own truth. As both a leader, and a professional, this means not being a jackass, but being a meaningful social mediaist requires this from the get go. If you’re going to do social media well, being a gossip, spreading untruths, will eventually turn the crowd on you. Generating drama and controlling spin doesn’t work very well in a democratized information medium; the truth just bypasses you.

Social media is an opportunity to build a more ideal information medium, one without favoritism or fabrication, one that does not favor the status quo in order to maintain it; the crowdsourced truth is dangerously unmanageable… and free from spin.

As a member of that tribe I try not to let invective and one-up-man-ship dictate my actions, I try to be collaboratively engaging. This isn’t contrary to any professional or leadership role I may have; in fact, it should enhance those roles. When you broadcast your actions, it behooves you to it well.

CONCLUSION: THE REVOLUTION IS HAPPENING, REGARDLESS

The social media revolution has harnessed mobile electronics and the internet to produce a democratized media frenzy. Old-school, forth estate media is floundering, trying to manage their loss of broadcasting monopoly, but still seeing it as an immanent threat. Other power structures are also frustrated by this decentralization of voice. Where once a hierarchy could dictate the message, now social media swirls around these old-school broadcasting roadblocks.

Unions are watching members broadcast their opinions directly, without being able to dictate a unified response. Governments and corporations are finding that the dictatorial control they once had over traditional media is weakening, because traditional media matters less. As social media responses bypass traditional censorship, we once again see the many assert their power.

There is no doubt that these changes will force a fundamental shift in how we work with each other. This kind of radical, data driven transparency gives control freaks a nervous breakdown, but in the end, I can’t believe that freeing the signal from the self-involved interests of the powerful isn’t better for everyone; that it will result in fairer, transparent, more effective organizations.

As educators, we have to try and get a grip on this ourselves, and then be ready to try and (usefully) assist our students in effectively navigating this exciting, historical change. It’s no longer enough to pay some attention to what your digital footprint is. It’s no longer enough to do the minimum necessary. If we’re going to teach future generations how to survive in the rough sea of democratized data we’ve made for them, we need to adapt and master the waves ourselves.

A relevant educator is recognizing the radical nature of these changes and is doing their best to create a genuine online persona, one that accurately reflects the public persona they demonstrate in their physical life. What’s private isn’t at issue here, but our public selves are changing, and it doesn’t do anyone any good to try and game social media by making cardboard cutouts of themselves online.

Some things to consider:
Dancing in the Datasphere: a philosophical look at where we are going
The Singularity: an inside look at what Silicon Valley believes is coming

Don’t kid yourself, you’re living in the middle of a revolution!

Higher Ground

AMPA: redemocratizing OSSTF

I shouldn’t write about politics. As a field of human endeavor it demonstrates some of our most unflattering qualities, but AMPA approaches and I can’t pass up another opportunity to seek a higher standard of conduct from my union.

We were fooled once in District 18 by what might be described kindly as a disorganized vote, but what I fear was a Machiavellian attempt to withhold information in order to secure the desired ‘yes’ outcome. In seeking to redress this wrong we tried contacting Provincial Executive only to have our concerns fall on deaf ears. We attempted to make an AMPA resolution only to have it gutted.

Since then we’ve begun an OLRB complaint that is now moving into a review phase. Throughout this process OSSTF has lawyered up (a profoundly satisfying use of our dues), and has been completely unwilling to even talk about the obvious problems around the ratification of our contract. The fact that we had to go to the OLRB, and the fact that it’s gone this far is both sad and distressing. Wouldn’t it be nice if our union had internal oversight? Wouldn’t it be nice if our union actually addressed member’s concerns (and not by the people who caused the concerns in the first place).

It’s cold outside, but it’s warm in bed with the OLP

Many of the Provincial Executive who were the architects of our vote, people who tossed out our own constitutional codes of conduct either through sheer incompetence or malicious intent, are now running for positions at AMPA. When I read their advertising, how they claim to support the grass roots membership, how they stand for the highest ideals of OSSTF, I wonder when they had the change of heart. Was it after misleading and withholding information from D18 members prior to our constitutionally invalid vote? Was it after deciding to donate money to the Ontario Liberal Party even while encouraging members to demonstrate out front of the leadership convention? Was it after deciding to throw out what little political action we’d been able to muster around extracurriculars based on nothing whatsoever from the new Premier?

I desperately hope AMPA delegates remember these things when considering what direction our union should go from here. OSSTF is the membership. Apathy and an overly friendly relationship with this government have resulted in some embarrassing, un-OSSTF like behavior from the very people who are supposed to be the face of our organization. Here is hoping that AMPA restores some much needed credibility, transparency and humility to our union.

I’m a Hacker!

Every year we get grades 9s who waft into our high school believing they are god’s gift to computing. In the vast majority of cases I discover that they’ve learned how to do one or two things, but the moment you move them out of their area of ‘expertise’ (which is usually so small you couldn’t really call it an area so much as a corner), things fall apart.

We have such a genius in this year’s grade 9 cohort. When the class was given CyberPatriot‘s Unity OS security simulation to play, he didn’t know how to open a zipped file and get the game running. When I queried him about it, the conversation went something like this:

“You told me you’re this great hacker, but you can’t open a zipped archive?”

“Well, this isn’t what I usually do.”

“You told me you’re this great hockey player who can score goals from anywhere on the ice, but when I ask you to show me how you skate, stick handle and shoot you can’t do any of it, which makes me wonder what it is you think you’re good at.”

Taking a script that you found online and running it doesn’t make you a hacker, it makes you an idiot.

The student in question has proudly boasted of swatting people, which I’d describe less as hacking and more as criminal harassment that wastes limited emergency services. This clarifies the difference between a hacker and a criminal in simple terms anyone can understand. One is focused on complex skills development, the other is focused on finding shortcuts.

hacker noun

hack·er | \ ˈha-kər

1: one that hacks
2: a person who is inexperienced or unskilled at a particular activity; a tennis hacker
3: an expert at programming and solving problems with a computer
4: a person who illegally gains access to and sometimes tampers with information in a computer system

#2 comes very close to what this guy is in terms of being a hacker, though he’d be popular with actual criminals if he’s thick enough to run scripts that he doesn’t understand; he’d be the perfect trigger man. If we’re applying the term in computer studies, a hacker is generally someone who is expert at solving problems with a computer or getting into systems. In either case this skillset has traditionally required years of complex skills development including a challenging apprenticeship of trial and error learning on the wilds of the internet. Criminals seldom have the kind of patience and intelligence to develop these skills; it’s part of what makes them criminals.

Malware is being sold as a service: the
‘hackers’ running it are plain old criminals

What has happened recently is that cybercriminal activity has become professionalized. Many of the people doing the ‘hacking’ now have no idea what they’re doing (like this grade 9). They buy malware as a service software from professional criminal organizations (many of whom have ties to state cyber-warfare actors) and then run a dashboard that provides them with ready-made hacking tools that do the thinking for them. Some of these MaaS systems even provide IT support! No genuine hacker would ever want nor need IT support, they’d provide it themselves.

I’m currently re-reading Matt Crawford’s The World Beyond Your Head in which he makes a
strong philosophical argument for developing complex skills rooted in real world experience. Crawford goes to great length to describe how these hard-earned skills often develop a corresponding moral character in the majority of practitioners; reality is a consistent and demanding teacher and it demands rigour and focus.

I have students who have developed deep, complex digital skillsets in the course of our four year program and I would proudly acknowledge that they are hackers in the correct sense of the word, but what most would-be hackers are is really script kiddies who run other people’s code simply to perform malicious acts.

Script kiddies exist in the first place because we go out of our way not to teach digital literacy and cyberfluency in our schools. In the absence of any direction, some of the blunter tools wander into this kind of self-identification. Students have to take 8 years of geography and history in elementary and then have mandatory geography and history courses in high school too, but there are no mandatory digital fluency courses in any Ontario high school – even after we’ve forced everyone into a remote learning stance due to COVID. Many of the problems that have arisen during emergency remote learning are a result of the terrible digital skills many educators and students possess. Script kiddies are just another symptom of our digitally illiterate education system – a system that depends increasingly on digital tools and networked information to operate.

This grade 9 may well sort himself out and become a hacker in the real sense, though I find the most boastful ones tend not to have the wherewithal to develop complex skillsets such as those required by a genuine hacker.

At the CyberTitan nationals in 2018, one of our team members (then valedictorian then University of Waterloo Computer Science student), became intrigued with the idea of pentesting as a career. Penetration testing is something that has evolved quickly as networked cybersecurity best practices have evolved. The thinking is basically this: if you want to understand how best to respond to the rapid evolution of cyberattacks, have a skilled pentester come in and probe your network for weaknesses and then assist your defensive team in sealing up any gaps in your system. Now THAT is a hacker!

White hat hackers used to do this as a kindness, though most recently it has also become a bounty hunting situation, and now a lucrative profession. Top pentesters are in high demand and make good money. What they don’t do is download and run scripts they don’t understand and then not know how to perform even simple tasks on a computer – that would be a good way to lose any credibility with their employer.

I’m in the awkward position of seeing this happen in another class. Were it me, I’d be leaning on this student hard to see what it is they actually think they know. Being at arm’s length in this scenario, my biggest worry is that this student will use our technology to hurt someone else (I fear this has already happened). If we had a student come into the school who had been convicted of vehicular manslaughter, I doubt we’d put them in an automotive technology class, yet we don’t think twice about taking a potentially digitally dangerous student and dropping them into computer technology?

This is a tricky situation to navigate. I’m actually hoping this student has genuine potential and we can get him engaged with doing more than running scripts he has no understanding of. In learning the rigours of operating in cyberspace, he will also most probably become less of a braggart as he aligns himself with the reality of the situation.

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The Subtle Art Of Learning

The transmission of knowledge between people has always been predicated on personal relationships. We come pre-wired to learn, and the way we’ve always done this is through a mentoring process be it master and apprentice or teacher and student. This deep human experience goes well beyond cultural norms. No matter where you are in the world or in human history, the art of learning is founded on this relationship between people.

Schooling systems look to standardize education so they can more easily assess their management of it, it has little to do with effective learning. In an educational world of standardized marking, testing and curriculum building, the goal is to remove personal connections in favour of more easily quantifiable and less effective teaching tools.

On top of the system pressuring education from a data collection/ease of management perspective, we also find ourselves in a surge of technological advancement that seems determined to insert itself into every aspect of human behavior, including that most sacred of human endeavours: learning. This digitization of human relationships can offer a wider range of connection, but it also tends to flatten those connections. Online relationships lack the dimensions of personal relationships. Anyone who has met online acquaintances in person has experienced this sudden deepening of previously shallow online connection.

I’ve seen technology do magical things in teaching, and I’ve long be a proponent of pushing technologically assisted experimentation as far and as fast as it will go, but I’ve never thought to swap technology for the personalized process of teaching and learning, yet that is what I see many people suggesting.

Whether it’s a rabid excitement (usually managerial or worse, financial in scope) over MOOCs or the latest gadget that will ‘revolutionize’ how we do things, or simply the drive to make students the centre of all things and reduce teachers to facilitators, there seems a constant pressure to depersonalize and grossly simplify the relationships that are the ecosystem for the art of deep, human learning.

If you see learning as the transmission of information then all these gadgets and systemic processes must seem like magic bullets that will solve all problems, that belief is probably selling your books. With good management, letting students learn whatever strikes them as interesting, and enough money for toys, you’ll be able to educate everyone for almost nothing! Oh, the efficiency.

The problem with learning is that it tends to be very non-linear. A good teacher calls this a teachable moment – adapting to an unexpected circumstance in order to teach a memorable lesson. These lessons often appear to have nothing to do with the curriculum or even the subject you’re teaching. A good teacher will bend to the needs of the moment, giving the learning momentum, and keeping in mind the development of bigger ideas in a context lost on students.

A couple of years ago we made a Minecraft server in our computer engineering class. One of the students quietly spent his lunches over the semester building up enough dynamite in the game to equal the Hiroshima bomb – he’d learned about it in his history class. At the end of the semester he announced that he was going to set it off. Everyone was freaked out, they’d spent a lot of time building things on that server and were afraid the virtual world would be destroyed, or worse, the server would crash. He set it off, the class watched the server churn through the processing, and finally it rendered a massive crater. We spent some time in a computer engineering class quietly looking at historical websites of Hiroshima after that. We eventually got to examining what happened with the server trying to process the blast, but not at the cost of the obvious historical and human context in front of us.

In my second year of teaching I was doing Macbeth with some grade 11s. I happened to mention that my parents were in the middle of a divorce, which prompted an impromptu round table by the distressingly high number of kids in the class who were either going through something similar or already had. Learning about how to deal with being a child of a divorce by more experienced people (who happened to be my students) demonstrates the two way nature of that teacher/student relationship.

I’m not saying there shouldn’t be some structure to our school system, and I’m not saying that technology and addressing student directed learning isn’t important. What I am saying is that learning is a complex process that develops most effectively through meaningful human relationships. The more dimensionally complex that relationship is, the better the learning. It is often non-linear, and at its best, it is predicated on a level of trust between teacher and student that allows for exploration and development in unexpected directions. The artistic nature of learning must drive (North American) education managers around the bend.

Human learning, this effective use of relationships we’ve evolved to teach and learn from each other, is best served by setting high standards for teachers and then giving them discretion in teaching. Micromanagement is a sure way to kill the teachable moment. Standardized testing offers simple lies to a complex truth. Ontario has also found new and interesting ways to damage this relationship in the last year. It’s remarkably easy to interfere with and poison the learning relationship.

Technology isn’t a solution, it’s, at its best, an aid, and one that should be used to support rather than replace proven pedagogy. When combined with the hard capitalist bent of most educational technology companies (themselves happy partners with US driven for profit charter schools), effective learning takes a back seat to profit margins, market gain, fictionalized standardized testing scores and quarterly statements. Technology offers some interesting opportunities in education, but it should never be at the cost of learning.

Systemic micro-management only serves accountants. If you’re managing education you need to consider how best to improve the quality of your teachers on a macro scale, and that quality isn’t based on their student’s standardized test scores.

If you recall your moments of deepest learning you’ll recognize how subtle and profound the circumstances around your eureka moments are. A good teacher is more like a gardener than a source of information, creating the circumstances that lead everyone involved in the learning process to greater realizations. We recall the teachers who create and share these fecund moments fondly because we recognize, on a fundamental level, how they are helping us realize our own potential in a uniquely personal and human way.

Some other philosophy of learning entries:

Elearning & the student/teacher relationship: personal contact in an increasingly edtech isolated world
What is learning?: what we are pre-wired to do
Speaking with dead voices: how your best teachers taught you to teach

Academic Dishonesty: listening to Sunday Edition

I’m sitting here listening to CBC’s Sunday Edition doing an interview with an ethics adviser for a California university. Her description of cheating isn’t one of deceit and intent, it’s one of accidental opportunism. She argues that students often don’t even realize they are cheating.

In another section of the interview a university student says that it isn’t the student’s fault, they are victims of the ease of technology. These two ideas are closely linked; accidental cheating and technological access to information. In both cases, ethical choice is removed from the ‘victim’. This is a pretty weak ethical argument. Because something is easy and readily available, it should be done? If you see a person put an ipad on a park bench and then get distracted for a few minutes, do you walk off with it? According the this victim mentality you would have no choice. The fact that all of your friends have stolen ipads from the park only makes it more acceptable.

When I think about my own university experience, it didn’t even occur to me to cheat, because of my sheer awesomeness. My arrogance ensured that I would never even consider putting in someone else’s work for my own, but then I was there to develop my own thinking. I’d walked away from a lucrative career in order to push my limits. Most of the kids I was in university with (typically 4-5 years younger than I was, many of whom dropped out) were there because they couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. You didn’t get a clear sense of who the real learning disciples were until third or forth year.

Later in the same episode, they mention that the vast majority of students in university now are there because they want a higher standard of income, they’re there for the payoff at the end. If university is really all about the money, then perhaps their victim mentality is simply the best way to morally justify taking everything you can while doing as little as possible. University should, perhaps, follow SNL’s angle from so long ago and simply accept what it is becoming.

A Psychological/Metaphysical One-Two Punch

I’m still working my way through The Science of Well Being, an online psychology course done by Doctor Laurie Santos out of Yale. This week she got into some neuroscience around how our minds work. I originally experienced this during my philosophy degree thirty years ago when I was introduced to Bertand Russell’s Analysis of the Mind, which laid bare the mythology we erect around our thinking. By the end of Russell’s book I no longer believed in a consistent sense of self because such a thing is a social construct; we don’t inhabit our own being in anything like a consistent, always-on way. Most of our lives are run out of habitual reflex with little conscious direction. We only experience moments of conscious direction before falling back into habit, some more than others.

Santos describes this in neuro-scientific terms in The Science of Well Being as a kind of default neurological network that lights up in our brains when we’re not consciously doing something. The parts of the mind that activate during these non-conscious moments are the same parts that light up when we’re thinking about the past and/or future. Amazingly, we typically spend almost half our time in this state of reverie, out of touch with the world around us.

She goes on to describe this evolutionary process that appears to be unique to our species as a cognitive achievement, but one that comes at a great emotional cost. Research into this process has demonstrated again and again that living out of the moment makes us sad; a uniquely human melancholy that we all pay for if we want to be able to think beyond cause and effect, which has obvious benefits, though we still seem exceptionally bad at it.

Santos then explains how mediation and mindfulness can decrease the impact of that default reverie thinking process that makes us so unhappy while also providing all sorts of benefits like improved academic performance and mood. Mindfulness brain exercises proved more effective than nutrition or even sleep in improving cognitive performance, which raises some interesting questions around how we’ve arranged school to be almost intentionally non-meditative.

People who haven’t had a lot of experience with mindfulness and meditation often fall into the belief that mediation is just wallowing in that default thinking reverie, but it isn’t that at all. This was emphasized for me in a strange media-mix-up last week. My son Max and I have been working our way through The Midnight Gospel on Netflix, a surrealistically animated series of podcast interviews by animator Pendleton Ward and comedian Duncan Trussell.

If you’re willing to do the mental gymnastics necessary, The Midnight Gospel will introduce you to a truly meta piece of 21st Century media. The main character, voiced by Trussell, is a “space caster” who uses a universe simulator (he sticks his head into a giant vagina to activate it) to pop in to various realities where he interviews people. The interviews are the podcasts re-jigged to fit this new format.

We’ve watched episodes on everything from Buddhism and karmic rebirth to Aleister Crowley style occultism to an explanation of the bizarre nature of North American death rituals in the 20th Century, so other than a complex subject being unpacked by smart people, you don’t really know what’s coming at you next. This all happens while Yellow Submarine level psychedelic animation sometimes describes and sometimes does everything it can to distract you from what’s being said. We got to the season finale of The Midnight Gospel not knowing what’s coming (because it makes it clear that you can’t), but looking forward to it.

The Silver Mouse is a breathtakingly personal finale where the animation suddenly clicks into gear with the story telling in the interview and amplifies it to such a degree that it left us speechless.

Duncan made this interview with his mother, Deneen Fendig, just before she passed of terminal cancer in 2013, and it describes her coming to peace with her mortality through meditation. Duncan had always struggled with the idea of mediation, and Deneen’s honest, unpretentious guided meditation practice not only worked for him in the interview, but it also resonated with me on many levels.

https://strawd0gs.blogspot.com/2017/11/suicide-how-to-steer-past-staring-into.html

The animation begins with Duncan as a young man and his mother as an older woman, but through the course of the episode she grows old and dies, only be reborn by Duncan himself so they can continue their conversation. As she grows up, Duncan grows into an old man and dies himself; it’s a beautiful representation of the circle of life, carefully crafted and delivered. For a man who lost his mother in difficult circumstances at around the same time Duncan lost his mum, it rocked me. I’m in tears now as I write this. I wish I could have had this conversation with my mum before she passed, but mental illness took her away from me long before she died.

Deneen’s wisdom in finding her way to a meditative awareness of not only her own being, but also to a sense of how it hangs in the firmament of the universe was told humbly, honestly and without pretense. That she found a tangible way of escaping the non-present ruminating mind wandering we all tend to fall back into was also inspiring. She doesn’t hang a lot of superstitious nonsense around the radical sense of self awareness that she uncovers in herself. Many people seem to cling to belief when facing the end that comes for us all, but not Deneen. Her bravery is inspiring and underscored for me the fact that we don’t have to believe in miracles and other historical fictions to realize our place in the universe and find peace in the face of death.

Between the psychology and science of The Science of Well Being course and the magical realism and stark emotional honesty of The Midnight Gospel, it has been a rich week of media empowered reflection that puts everything else that’s going on in perspective. To top it all off, Max and I got to watch a spectacular, once in a lifetime lightning storm blow over us the other day. My life feels unexpectedly rich at the moment.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/smqSdUzvn8E2ePc49

Notes:

Science of Well Being, Mind Control: https://www.coursera.org/learn/the-science-of-well-being/lecture/58VUO/mind-control

The Midnight Gospels: Mouse of Silver:
original podcast: http://www.duncantrussell.com/episodes/2016/7/18/my-mom-part-2
Netflix animated series: https://www.netflix.com/title/80987903

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Victory Lapping Like You Mean It

I’ve always struggled with the idea of victory lapping in Ontario high schools. As someone who returned to high school to finish his final year in his early 20s, I understand the need. Had I not been able to do that, I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing now and paying the taxes that I am. I can see the value in a victory lap, but I did it with purpose, doing a full semester of school while also working a forty hour week. For those victory lappers I see returning with that kind of intent, I have nothing but patience.

Find Rick & Morty hard to stomach? Your students don’t…

Unfortunately, this past year I saw a number of victory lappers who didn’t apply themselves in school and then did the same again on their victory lap, at great expense to the system. If it’s to get credits needed to graduate or get into a particularly difficult post-secondary program and the graduate is attacking the opportunity like it matters, then it’s obviously a good thing, but if it’s for familiarity’s sake, as has been the case this year, then I have to wonder why anyone would want to chuck their final year of income (which is usually your best one) down the toilet so they can hang out in high school for an extra year.

Just think about that for a sec. You’re not giving up your first year of income when you victory lap, you’re giving up your last. Students (and parents) often misunderstand this fact. You’ll always start off at the lower end of the pay scale, but where you finish when you retire is what you’re cutting a year from because you’re starting late. Victory lapping isn’t just expensive to the system, it’s astonishingly expensive to the student, but in a world of helicopter parents and childhoods designed to protect children from the results of poor decision making, we continue to produce graduates who want to stay in the safe, no deadline, guaranteed success of high school.

In addition to this costing each victory lapping student tens of thousands of dollars, it’s also costing the system millions. Victory lapping isn’t a very efficient way of resolving graduates, but we do tens of thousands of times a year in Ontario.

The other night I was at our graduation where I saw all sorts of students graduating who are returning next year. If they’re graduating then it means they’ve already gotten the credits they need to move on, so why stay? Some will argue that they’re staying to raise their grades. Was it worth tens of thousands of dollars to screw around in your grade 12 year instead of buckling down and getting it done? Some are staying because they simply can’t think of what to do next and couldn’t be bothered to make plans because the system is waiting to look after them yet again. Those students (and their parents) are putting an awful lot of weight on an increasingly underfunded school system by doing that, in addition to flushing that year of income down the toilet.

Year over year I’ve seen some radically different approaches to victory lapping. In 2018 I had some very strong students victory lap and in doing so they did incredible, portfolio building things that helped them get into nearly impossible to access post-secondary programs. When students do that with a victory lap, ie: ride it like they stole it, then I’d argue it’s a brilliant strategy. They might have lost a lower last year of earnings, but they’ve gained a new career trajectory that annihilates that loss. In the case of 2018, where our victory lappers were winning their way to national titles and opening up career opportunities they otherwise wouldn’t have considered, you’d be hard pressed to make an argument, economic or otherwise, for not doing it.

A few years ago I noticed that our victory lappers were often hanging around the computer tech lab having completed the course curriculum. In many cases they were heading into digital technologies in post secondary and needed a final boost in terms of experience and an opportunity to build portfolio. A few years ago I developed the TEN4M course, specifically designed for digital technologies students looking to build portfolio for post secondary. Up until this year it has worked a treat. An opportunity to exercise engineering process and lead a self directed project that raises digital literacy in our school has been very beneficial.

The first year we did it Zach, who had struggled earlier on, was able to direct his new found maturity into his development as an IT technician to the point where he dominated Skills Ontario provincials with the highest technical score and a gold medal, and then a top five finish in Canada. In the years since we’ve had students who have helped hone the TGI Game Development course into the weapon it is today, medal winning co-op students who have developed programs with our feeder schools to enhance both their technology and their teaching of it and a wide variety of other students who have developed the hands on technical experience needed to launch themselves into a career in tech. Cal, our most recent Skills Ontario champion, used his victory lap to help form our first CyberTitan cyber security team and land us a national finalist position, then he went on to win Skills Ontario and get another top 5 national finish. Cam, another of last year’s victory lappers, also helped launch our CyberTitan program and then went on to a top 10 finish in our first ever attempt at coding at Skills. In both cases these experiences launched them into Waterloo’s Computer Science program, which is notoriously hard to access.

Finding the time to develop and explore technical skills that require hands-on experience and space to develop is especially challenging in an Ontario secondary curriculum that is still very much focused on academics. For the students (and there are many) who want to work with their hands rather than at a desk, having an extra year to focus on applied skills is invaluable in a system where every subject is mandatory except those that teach hands-on technical skills. For students who are trying to expand their digital portfolio in order to access difficult post-secondary options, it really is a necessity if the curriculum is going to remain as it is.

It looks like we’ve got a pretty good handle on how to accelerate students accessing a victory lap into post-secondary options, but this past year has been a victory lap disaster. In semester one my only victory lapping student wasn’t interested in leading projects or improving school technology access and learning (the point of the course: using your digital expertise, help to improve the school’s digital access and usage). From the year before when I had students blowing expectations (both mine and their own) out of the water, I went to 2019s flaccid VLappers who were just looking for a free go-around with no initiative or effort required. In semester two they were so shaky they just ended up dropping out – after flushing a year of income down the toilet. In cases like this, it’s hard to justify victory lapping in any way.

For the students who need to make up credits or align their high school trajectory with a difficult to access program, I have infinite patience when it comes to victory lapping, but for the directionless, there needs to be something in place (a charge for dropped/failed courses?) that stops this being a year of doing as little as they can while draining a system that is already being strangled financially. If students are victory lapping with purpose, developing their capabilities using focus from late blooming maturity, then I am more than happy to pay the taxes that enable them to fight their way into a world that is more economically inaccessible now than it has been for any previous cohort.