Dusty World – Page 24 – Mechanical Sympathy

The Neverending Story of Rational Reductionism

Remember the first time you went away from home without your family? I’d done scout weekends and that sort of thing, but the first extended time away was when I was heading to Air Cadet Basic Training in Trenton for two weeks in the summer of 1984. Just before I left I saw The Neverending Story. As a creative kid who was neck deep in Dungeons & Dragons and art, and whose dad kept telling him to stop wasting his time and take real courses that led somewhere, it resonated.

It’s been thirty-five years since fifteen year old me saw that film and an awful lot has happened in the meantime. Having just watched it again, I’m stunned by how strange a film it is. What I took as a high fantasy romp when I was a teen is actually a bizarrely meta (physical) narrative that would make a suicidally depressed Hamlet snort with amusement. The film was directed by famed German director Wolfgang Petersen, and boy does das kopfkino it produces lay on the schadenfreude thick.

The film’s message, that your imagination can save you from the banality of existence, suggests that you need something more than rationality to justify your reason for being. Or, back to Hamlet again, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” I find a great deal of comfort in recognizing the complexity of existence, though many people seem terrified of it and go to great lengths to simplify it.

The film’s thesis is that imagination allows us to withstand the pointlessness of existence and offers hope. If you turn yourself off from the impossible it prevents you from holding despair at bay. The scene in the film where Atreyu’s horse gives up hope and sinks into the mud of a swamp (of Sadness no less) is one of the most powerful in the film.

The quest that drives the story forward is the destruction of Fantasia, an alternate reality that exists as an expression of human creativity and imagination. It’s being destroyed because people are losing their hopes and dreams, the very things that cause Fantasia to exist.

***

Viewing this film produced one of those strange lateral connections for me that science minded people put down to coincidence but artists thrive on. I’ve just finished reading Michael Crichton’s Travels, an autobiographical book by the popular author where he reflects on his travels, both physical and spiritual. As a hardening atheist (thanks to reading Dawkins’ The God Delusion) I found myself suppressing eye rolls as Crichton attempts new-age spiritualism again and again in search of something tangible beyond the science he started with as a Harvard trained medical doctor. But Crichton’s canny speech at the end of the book offers an approach to the unknowable that I couldn’t help but agree with.

It’s worth reading Travels just go get to to the closing speech that he never gave. It deconstructs a number of scientific prejudices that hard rationalists cling to even though they aren’t particularly logical, such as surgeries carried out to prevent a possibility of illness with no clear scientific benefit, or the long history of fake experimental results that are accepted because they support a current world view rather than the truth of things. Hard rationalism is as susceptible to fantastic thinking as any other human endeavour. Crichton’s final lines highlight the space he has made for human understanding beyond the limitations of rational inquiry:

“…we need the insights of the mystic every bit as much as we need the insights of the scientist. Mankind is diminished when either is missing. Carl Jung said: The nature of the psyche reaches into obscurities far beyond the scope of our understanding.”

Our rational understanding of things allows us to do many relatively mundane things in the real world, but our existence reaches deeper than that, and we ignore what we are capable of if we limit ourselves to the realms of what our remarkable but limited intellects can comprehend. Put another way, there is understanding to be found in our being as well as in our thinking.

Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching had this covered 2500 years ago. We’ve
forgotten a lot of that wisdom in our information age.

In addition to critiquing science’s hypocrisy, Crichton also bounces back 2500 years to Lao Tzu (who I have a weakness for) and describes how the founder of Taoism understood how our rational minds and our irrational existence must work together to bring us into a fuller understanding of our place in the universe. It’s powerful stuff, and a reminder that there is no simple (ie: only mind-based) answers to the big questions. It takes all that we are to even begin to attempt answer them. In embracing our existential intelligence we also come to a more balanced understanding of our place in the world.

***

With Crichton’s angle on how we frame the impossible in my mind, I was slapped in the face by The Neverending Story’s strident attack on reductive, ‘feet on the ground’ rationality in the face of the threat of non-existence. The brief scene between Bastion and his father is stark and cruel, but I think it points to something obvious. It’s never mentioned how Bastion’s mother dies, but the father’s unwillingness to acknowledge it in any way suggests a shameful death, and we all know which kind of death is the most shameful and must not be spoken of.

“When a visibly sad Bastian tells his father that he’s had yet another dream about his mom, he responds that he understands, but quickly adds that they have to move on, emphasizing that they can’t let her passing stop them from getting things done. And just when you think he’ll soften up and help Bastian process his pain, Bastian’s father lays into his son for doodling in his notebook during math class.”

– Things about The NeverEnding Story you only notice as an adult

Considering the metaphysical message of this film and that strange dialogue between father and son, I was left hanging on the edge of tears. My Mum was upstairs the last time I saw this film. She’s been dead six years this time around, but that sense of loss is always surprisingly quick to surface. Her life as an artist was frequently derailed and undervalued, and her end was, I suspect, similar to Bastion’s mom’s. The Neverending Story suddenly took on a resonance that it didn’t have before.

The evil that is destroying the world in The Neverending Story is The Nothing. It is quite literally non-existence. Bastion’s father’s brusque ‘move on and keep your feet on the ground’ advice suggests (quite obviously I think) that his mother commited suicide. The entire narrative in Neverending Story is based around Bastion trying to summon his imagination to battle this existential disaster, something that Lao Tzu and Michael Crichton would both agree can’t be done with reason alone. The film’s only weakness is it’s reductive imagination is the answer philosophy. Imagination is vital in bringing you to a place beyond the rational, but populating it with make believe isn’t the goal once you get there. Imagination is what allows us to see beyond the world around us and plumb those existential mysteries.

***

From Kermit the Frog pondering Rainbow Connections to Alice looking down rabbit holes, there is a lot of art that seeks to explore the limitations of rational inquiry and how it fails to answer the big questions. Creativity is hard enough without tying your hands up with rational absolutism, so I can appreciate why many artists lean more heavily on the hidden intelligence found in existentialism for their inspiration; there is power in our being that cannot be easily explained.

Our ability to reach down into our selves and gain inspiration and insight makes us powerful in a way that thinking never can. For the Bastions of Neverending Story, travelling Crichtons and other artists out there, it’s something we should never let the hard rationalists of science ever try and trivialize away as flights of fancy. There are truths in our being that can’t be found through rational inquiry.

Imagination by itself is a fine thing, but when it’s used as a means of opening the door to existential comprehension it really comes into its own. Crichton describes how measurement always misses the quiddity of a thing, it’s inherently reductive to say anything can be completely understood through its measurements. A wholistic, existential understanding, along with specific, rational comprehension, is the most complete way a human being can relate and understand the world. Crichton’s closing lines encouraging us not to ignore and belittle the irrational – something that The Neverending Story also argues, though it gets lost in imagination for imagaination’s sake.

Valuing both rational and irrational human comprehension offers us a more balanced and effective way forward, and gets us into the vicinity of answering the big questions. The trick is not to get carried away with imagination or rationalism and end up treating either one as the answer to everything. As in all things, balance offers more insight.

Other notes:

Atreyu: If you don’t tell me, and the Nothing keeps coming, you will die too, both of you!
Morla, the Ancient One: Die? Now that, at least, would be *something*.

Urgl: I like that, the patient telling the doctor it’s all right. It has to hurt if it’s to heal.

I’m not the only one picking up on the weird vibe this film is giving:
http://www.dorkly.com/post/75705/reasons-the-neverending-story-is-a-psychological-horror-show
http://nerdbastards.com/2017/07/25/7-facts-you-probably-didnt-know-about-the-neverending-story/
https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/10/06/neverending-story-dad-bastian_n_8248450.html

From a 2018/the sky is falling/we’re-all-illiterate-because-of-technology point of view, the book keeper’s scorn when talking to Bastion, the pre-teen main character way back in 1983 (over two decades before smartphones) is interesting:

Koreander: The video arcade is down the street. Here we just sell small rectangular objects. They’re called books. They require a little effort on your part, and make no bee-bee-bee-bee-beeps. On your way please.

… and reminds me of the Socrates quote and that we’re most prejudiced with our own children. It’s also a timely reminder that the tech of our time doesn’t define us any more than video arcades did in the ’80s. I grew up in them and it didn’t make me illiterate.

The Way: https://terebess.hu/english/tao/chan.html

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COVID19 Reflections: Status Quo, Enthusiasm & the Compassionate Path

The other week Alec Couros asked for predictions on what will come of this pandemic remote learning situation. I find myself straddling this divide. On the one side you have the powers that be who have no interest in changing a status quo that has put them in charge. On the other you have technology multinationals and the branded teachers who support them wanting to use this situation as an opportunity to push a more technology dependent evolution in schooling. In between them all are working teachers who are just trying to make this work.

Six years ago I found myself in Arizona at the Education Innovation (sic) Summit at the invitation of Wikispaces (who have since evaporated). I say sic because it had very little to do with education or innovation and a lot to do with market share and the rollout of an inflexible digital delivery system (or LMS if you prefer). There were a couple of comments from that conference that are resonating with me during this pandemic emergency response. I overheard a senior VP at a multi-national tech company you’d have heard of that likes to ‘certify’ and brand teachers say, “with the new common core curriculum and the charter school push, this is our moment to strike!” You could almost hear the drool hitting the floor from the predators who filled up this ‘education innovation’ summit. This should sound strangely familiar to Ontario educators after this past year.

An opposing moment came as a round table of Ph.Ds talked about data exhaust and tracking the vast improvements that have happened in education and learning thanks to our adoption of digital technology. The problem is that there is no such data. Countries that adopted digital technology in learning early on show little or no statistical change in learning outcomes. This is what happens when we adopt digital technology primarily to reduce photocopying budgets instead of applying pedagogy to leverage new communication mediums.

In the six years since that conference I’ve watched our school systems lurch toward the stake I claimed on the digital frontier, adopting wireless and cloud based technologies and expanding general student access to edtech, but the learning outcomes are seldom different because we have done little to improve digital transliteracy. Students who struggled before tend to actually struggle more in the poorly understood digital cesspool of conflicting mediums. Now that I’m teaching computer technology full time I see it happening on a province-wide basis; technology isn’t the great equalizer, it’s either hugely reductive or an invitation to chaos. Instead of adapting and engaging with new mediums and developing transliteracies around them, we’ve reduced digital technology to a cost saving measure that doesn’t actually save any money. We don’t teach digital fluency, we just magically expect it, and in the meantime we’re buying mounds of technology that almost no one knows how to leverage effectively.

At the end of 2019 a novel virus that we’ve never seen before began spreading across the world. Unchecked it would kill millions and overwhelm our austerity riddled medical systems. After a year of bullying Ontario education with absurd threats of mandatory elearning courses for all, COVID19 suddenly delivered the perfect opportunity to prove that it’s possible. What’s happening with remote learning right now isn’t designed to deliver the best possible learning outcomes using the all of the digital tools at our disposal, it’s a marketing exercise.

I’m in a position where I teach digital technology to a self selected group of students who are much more likely to be connected, have their own technology AND (most importantly!) know how to use it. In our first week of remote learning I’ve got eyes on every one of my students and a 100% engagement rate across all classes, but to use this as proof that elearning might work is the worst kind of skulduggery.

When this all kicked off I was keen to move quickly, take initiative and demonstrate what our digital fluency could accomplish. While the rest of the system lost initiative in two weeks of silence, I had a number of students who were already crushing what would become the radically reduced expectations that the Ministry eventually worked out.

Three hours of remote learning per week per course? We spend over six high bandwidth face to face hours a week in class and senior students usually drop another couple of hours in on top of that. Three hours of remote learning is a tiny fraction of this. How tiny? The introduction to networking piece we usually do in a blended online LMS and F2F grade 10 class on Cisco’s Netacademy takes one week to finish – I’ve given my remote learning grade 10s an entire month to do the same thing, and many won’t manage it, in some cases because the locked down Chromebooks they were shipped won’t install the software, in other cases because of a lack of space or time, and in others because without an adult present some students just won’t do anything. There are so many reasons why this shouldn’t work, but we keep adding more reasons on top.

If we prove this works at all (and many are having trouble reaching even that lowered target), we’ve proven that remote learning is only fractionally as effective as face to face learning, which was why so many teachers fought this government’s callous mandatory elearning push in the first place, and that’s not even getting into digital divides, equity and digital illiteracy. In a perfect case with carefully selected students with the tech, connectivity and skills required, remote learning is 25% as effective as what we usually do. In reality it won’t even come close to that.

***

My ‘let’s floor it and show everyone what digital fluency can do’ approach changed dramatically over the first few weeks as remote learning finally rolled out. Colleague Diane‘s comment in the union portion of our first online staff meeting (another impossibility – our union is famously anti-tech) began a shift in my thinking; this isn’t an opportunity to push elearning, it’s an emergency response. How we name it might sound pedantic, but it isn’t. Names carry implications, and even though Ontario’s emergency response remote learning is pretty much entirely elearning based, it shouldn’t be, as this article from the Broadbent Institute suggests…

“To roll out what has been a specialized program serving a minority of students to the majority of students in an emergency — sets up expectations against which we are poised to fail.”

“The provincial “Learn at Home” approach draws not only on a fantasy of eagerly connected students with ample resources, but also on a fantasy of home free from conflict and space constraints, supported by caregivers who can and will provide structure, motivation, and mediate learning between the teacher and their child.”

There is a lot of fantasy in how this is all unfolding. Over the years I’ve often found myself surrounded by perfectly operational computers that were destined for landfill. At one point I got our student success person on board and built free, Linux based computers to hand out to families in need – it was a disaster. When you hand out unfamiliar technology that people don’t know how to use, they don’t know how to use it – how’s that for a stunning revelation? We’ve just done logistical backflips on a system wide scale in Ontario during this remote learning crisis to do exactly that. How bad is digital fluency in Canadian society? Worse than you think. The belief that ‘digital natives’ who are familiar with habitual use of technology somehow have mastery of it is just another fantasy we can’t be bothered to dispel.

The remote learning push will be what it will be, and what it ends up being will be nothing remotely close to what it could have been thanks to our wilfully oblivious approach to digital divides and transliteracy. We’ve done what we always do: drastically simplify a complex situation for appearances, but it’s to be expected when a critical service like education is run by politics. Handing out books to illiterate people isn’t going to prompt a lot of reading – but that’s exactly what we’re expecting with our sudden onset elearning plan.

Other pedagogically focused educators I look to when reflecting and adjusting my teaching have also emphasized the importance of re-framing this situation away from a digital technology marketing opportunity. Zoe and Brenda have both emphasized the importance of a compassionate, considered approach rather than driving for curriculum consumption. Alanna’s blog post on social media distancing with students changed my mind about trying to recreate a classroom environment by driving for video chat access. Knowing that my students are digitally skilled and connected, I was frustrated when I didn’t have quick pickup from my seniors, only to discover that the quiet ones had suddenly been pressed into 40+ hours a week of reduced minimum wage work and were sorry for not doing the 3 hours per class that private school Stephen, who didn’t need a job in high school and most certainly never balanced a full time reduced minimum wage job during a pandemic, has decided is appropriate.

***

Would I like to see us adopt a coherent digital skills curriculum with specifically identified and developed skills? Yes, I would. I’d like us to become authors of educational technology rather than just consumers or branded representatives of multi-nationals. I seek a nuanced, transliterative use of digital technology and an adaptive, self-aware pedagogy that leverages these new mediums of communication to maximize learning outcomes for everyone. I’ve been advocating for a digital apprenticeship for our students and staff for over a decade and I don’t see that changing, but using an emergency situation to push that agenda is inappropriate, and what we’ve done in terms of expecting miracles from it has cast a harsh light on our myopic approach to digital transliteracy to date.

The irony of this crisis is that it has improved digital transliteracy in one of the hardest to crack bastions of the education system. I’ve seen staff who I would never have imagined on video chats, and doing that while they’re also having to integrate unfamiliar digital tools in a live learning environment (such as it is). If Alec is still looking for a bright side in this, maybe this will be what comes of it; that more educators begin to understand the possibilities of digital transliteracy in learning. Maybe then enough educators will know enough about it to create a sea change in how we approach our digital divides, because it sure ain’t coming from the top down.

Related Material:
ECOO 2011 Presentation: Dancing in the Datasphere – we cling to outdated concepts of information and communication even as a digital revolution envelops us
ECOO 2016 Presentation: The DIY Computer Lab – differentiating technology use to raise digital fluency
2017: The Digital Divide is Deep & Wide – access to digitally enhanced learning is about much more than just technology and connectivity
2018: How To Resolve Poor Technical Fluency – courses that teach digital transliteracy are few and far between in Ontario classes, yet every class uses digital tools…

Digital Fluency: it kicked off Dusty World and is a recurring theme in it (because it has never been addressed)

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We’re Not Ready For This: A.I.

I saw this the other day:

He goes over deep learning, self-directed computer intelligence for the first fifteen minutes or so and summarizes at about 17:00 minutes. The social implications of deep machine learning are quite profound.

Here are some other artificial intelligence related media that you might want to peruse:

Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near (a long and tedious mathematical read with some wonderful implications mixed in.)

Her, Spike Jonze’ deep ode to A.I.:

A lot of Hollywood A.I. talk falls short into HAL type horror, but this one doesn’t, it goes all the way. By the end you’ll be questioning our short comings rather than fearing what a superior intelligence might do. I wonder what Kurzweil thought of the A.I. in this film and what it ends up doing.

Better education doesn’t help? Work is irrelevant? What do we do
in a world of human pets that serve no real function in terms of survival?
This could be an age of unprecedented creativity, or the beginning of the end.

The TED talk has an interesting moment in those final two minutes where Howard is talking about the social implications of an imminent (the next five years!) machine intelligence revolution. He talks about computers taking over jobs that we consider to be human-only and doing them better than people ever could. This isn’t about coding a better piece of software, it’s about computers coding themselves in a never ending cycle of improvement. It’s also about people no longer having to be responsible for their own survival decisions.

What happens to insurance companies when automotive accidents are a thing of the past? Accidents don’t happen when the A.I. managing it can not only control the car in question, but also move the entire traffic jam up ten feet to avoid accidents. This is often misunderstood as people say that A.I. driven vehicles could have bad code that causes a massive pile up. These aren’t machines running code, these are machines that create code as they need it, kind of like people do, but much faster, and with absolute precision. And however well they do it now, they’ll do it better tomorrow.

What happens to human beings when they are no longer
responsible for their own survival?

The busy truck driver still needs to sleep, what replaces him won’t. It’ll never drive tired or hungry or angry or distracted either. It’ll only ever use the least amount of gas to get where it’s going. One of the tricky things about trying to grasp human superior A.I. is in trying to envisage all the ways that it would be superior. That superior A.I. would never stop improving, it would take over any concept of efficiency in business.

As Howard says, machines that are able to build machines in a continuously improving manner are going to make the social change caused by the industrial revolution look like a blip on the radar.

Perhaps the hardest implication of a machine intelligence revolution is the idea that your income is tied to your usefulness. Our entire society is predicated on the idea that your income somehow reflects your usefulness. If human usefulness is no longer tied to social status, what would society look like?

During the big market bailouts in 2008 someone online described business as the cockroaches that feed off the work of human society. He suggested that you don’t feed them steak, you just let them thrive on the waste. The implication was that capitalism is a necessary evil that serves human beings, not the other way around as it’s often stated (people are a necessary evil in capitalism).

The idea that people could be free to pursue their own excellence in the future without having to work for the cockroaches is quite thrilling, though it would require a huge jump in social maturity for human beings. We’d have to begin identifying our own self worth through our own actions rather than our education and employment. I suspect most people aren’t close to that. We’d also have to recognize that everyone has a unique and valuable place in society, which sounds like socialism!

Education is as guilty as any social construction in aiming children towards the idea of success being employability and income. We stream students according to their intellectual capital and then tell them to work hard in order to achieve financial success in the future. The very idea of effort is tied to financial success – something we’d have to change in a machine intelligent future. Can humans value themselves and seek excellence without the yoke of survival hung around their necks?

Universal income is an idea being floated in Switzerland and elsewhere. If the future is one where people are no longer integral to their own survival, we better find something other than a survival instinct to base our self value on, or we’re going to quickly run out of reasons for being.

The IT idiot

I’m currently reading the very meaty and painfully direct “Shop Class as Soulcraft” by Matt Crawford. In the book he laments idiocy in professionals and (at another point) the vagaries of management language in modern business where there is no objective means of determining an employee’s competency. Both of these arguments come together beautifully in the relatively recent field of information technology.

I’ve been working in IT, both in the private and public sectors, for going on fifteen years now. I’ve worked in small offices, and on massive installs, in engineering shops, manufacturing concerns, universities, schools, and in offices. With a certain breadth of experience comes a pretty good bullshit detector. Crawford’s ideas around professional idiocy and manager-speak appear to have, unfortunately, come together in a perfect storm of hidden incompetence in information technology.

THE IDIOT

Crawford talks about Robert Persig (the author of Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance – another great read)’s idiot mechanic, who is more intent on appearances and action than submitting himself to the truths the bike is trying to tell him, and what that means to his public role as a professional mechanic. The kid ends up butchering Persig’s bike while taking no time to actually try and diagnose what the problem is; he’s all hands and no brain. Crawford describes the idiot:

“Persig’s mechanic is, in the original sense of the word, an idiot. Indeed, he exemplifies the truth about idiocy, which is that it is at once an ethical and a cognitive failure. The Greek idios means “private,” and an idiotes means a private person, as opposed to a person in their public role – for example, that of motorcycle mechanic. Persig’s mechanic is idiotic because he fails to grasp his public role, which entails, or should, a relation of active concern to others, and to the machine. He is not involved. It is not his problem. Because he is an idiot… At bottom, the idiot is a solipsist.” (p98)

That lack of involvement should spark a memory with any teacher reading this. The student who refuses, at all costs, regardless of the differentiation you throw at it, to do anything whatsoever, is an idiot in the technical sense of the word.

From the IT angle, I see people like Persig’s idiot mechanic every day. You know the type, they know just enough to be dangerous (and have tools on hand). They tend to make grand assumptions, usually based on a non-existent knowledge base, and then act on them to make the situation worse. They talk loudly, and use a lot of word whispers (“you know?”, “right?”, “know what I mean?”, etc) to make sure you agree with them (it’s a handy way to externally monitor what’s going on when you have no idea yourself, and dovetails nicely with the idea of management speak presented later).

The disengaged idiot fits especially well with information technology because it’s a dark art to the vast majority of people. You can talk out of your ass to 95% of the population and they have no idea what you’re saying, freeing you to say pretty much anything you want. The bigger the words the better. And because most people are users, they’re more than happy to sit in on the tech talk, and participate at the same level as the disengaged idiot.

Many moons ago, right out of high school, I found myself working in a Canadian Tire shop. One day one of the mechanics burned himself on Fuego. He proceeded to flip out and run up a bill of unneeded repairs to the order of a thousand dollars; a good example of the moral failure of the idiot, and one I see all the time in IT, especially when dealing with older customers to whom the dark art seems positively Satanic.

MANAGEMENT SPEAK

Crawford also does a brilliant dissection of the ‘peculiarly chancy and fluid’ life of the corporate manager (substitute administrator or educational consultant for equal value here). In a world with no objective means of assessing competence, the manager lives in a purgatory of abstraction, using vague language “…staking out a position on all sides of a situation, so you always have plausible deniability of a failure.” Crawford goes to great lengths to point out that this isn’t done maliciously, but rather as a means of psychic protection for the people trapped in this morass. At any point an arbitrary decision can make you redundant (shown brilliantly in Up In The Air – many of the people in the interviews are real people who have actually been downsized), regardless of your own abilities or actions.

In a world of meaningless language, actual technical competency is devalued with every spoken word (a central theme in Crawford’s book). Objective competency is ignored in favor of MBA wording that allows the initiate of globalized business speak to survive regardless of what decisions they might have made. In fact, the very making of decisions is discouraged. In places where reality matters, your opinion is not as important as it has been socially projected to be. As Crawford so cuttingly notes: “This stance toward ‘established reality,’ which can only be described as psychedelic, is best not indulged around a table saw.”

One of the many reasons I’m looking forward to ‘teaching tech’ this fall; there is no doubt of the student’s focus, ability and honesty of effort when reality is judging them. If you made it, ignored lessons, examples and process, and it didn’t work, no amount of ‘but you’re still fantastic’ student success talk will mitigate a failure staring everyone in the face. The fantasy of ‘everyone’s a hidden genius’ so popular in education today is best not indulged when reality (and the objective assessment implied in it) are judging the results. Do or do not, there is no good try in tech… and that’s not a bad thing, unless you’re trying to peddle a new ed-theory on zero failure.

Management speak, based on the the surreal, ‘psychedelic’, entirely provisional world of business became popular along with globalization (itself founded on many hidden assumptions). Grown out of the initial industrially driven abstractions of Taylorism in the early 20th Century, modern business is so far from the witness of truth (like the stock market it has spawned) that it has more in common with Alice in Wonderland than it does with a shop manual; the best you can hope for are some vague metaphors to describe it.

The IT Idiot Management Babbling: Making An Objective Technical Skill Abstract

Information technology is a new technical field. It began and grew in a well established, Taylorist, globalized, MBA driven, entirely fictional world. The language around IT maintenance is often clouded in mysticism, grown from the same vague, plausibly deniable language of modern business and finance. We feed that fire with talk of digital natives, people who magically have technical skills because of their birth date. In education, we ignore this new, vital fluency in favor of magical realism; our adherence to business speak serves our students poorly.

I’m not saying every student needs to be a qualified information technology technician, but it is safe to say that every student graduating at the moment should be familiar enough with digital technology that they don’t get white washed by an idiot’s babbling, or convinced by the parochial and intentionally misleading language surrounding information technology. Auto shop is often taught this way – as a means of delivering a basic familiarity to students so they aren’t bamboozled by an idiot. IT should adopt the same position as this older, wiser tech.

IT is a measurable skill. I take great pleasure in offering up the A+ certification practice test to the resident experts in senior computer engineering. When the best of them barely get half right, and realize that they are 30% away from a pass, it sets the stage for a systemic, meaningful learning of a technical skill they’ve always been told they magically gained by being born in the nineties.

I wonder if people born in the 1900s were magically imbued with the ability to fix the new automobiles just coming out. What we do is absurd, and it feeds misinformation and empowers the idiot. It’s bad enough when we purposefully remove objective standards from academic classes (and I’m not talking about standardized tests – they are about as far from objective standards as you can get, just another fiction), but to actively discourage objective standards in a technical field? That gets downright dangerous, and expensive!

You’re Supposed To Tell Me The Answer

“You’re supposed to tell me the answer, you’re the teacher, it’s your job!”

Isn’t that a sad expectation from a senior high school student? After twelve years in education this is what they think the process is about. I wonder how many teachers it took to embed this thinking in these students.

My considered response to this was, “it’s not my job to give you the answer. If I give you an answer it isn’t yours. It’s my job to ask you the right questions and give you the tools you need to answer them yourself.” This isn’t a handing off of the responsibilities of teaching, and it isn’t easier than giving students answers by talking at them each period; this isn’t a case of a teacher becoming a facilitator.

Part of setting up the right question is carefully considering the student’s knowledge and where it can go next. The right question is a tricky proposition. Your classroom relationship with students has to contain a lot of two way communication and observation if you’re going to get a handle on where they are in their learning, you’re never doing that when you’re talking at students giving them all the answers. You can’t frame questions that are in a student’s zone of proximal development without a lot of feedback and observation. Teachers who talk at students and hand out answers and information like candy have little idea of where student understanding begins or ends.

The other side of this equation is providing tools for learning. This is a bit more complicated in an engineering class as I have to bring in a lot of equipment for student use. That equipment needs to be open and accessible so that students are the ones setting it up and making it functional. I was amazed this year when the vast majority of my senior computer engineering students had never partitioned a hard drive and installed an operating system. That kind of nuts and bolts work when building a functional learning environment is vital if students are going to begin to take responsibility for their learning.

Responsibility is at the bottom of this. Learning isn’t something that you do to someone, though many of our students believe this to be the case. Learning never happens unless the student doing the learning is active in the process, no one ever learned something from being told.

We’re back at it again tomorrow, and I’m still working to convince my senior engineers that they are the ones creating their learning, not me, I do a lot to curation though.

Demonizing Public Employment

An article by a conservative think tank, disseminated by a conservative media outlet:

http://m.torontosun.com/News/1304708716881

“Teachers have also seen very decent raises — 12.55% between 2008 and 2012 (10.4% for public elementary teachers) — while the rest of us have lost jobs or are just treading water.“

Facts by the government:

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/subjects-sujets/cpi-ipc/cpi-ipc-eng.htm

“The largest increase occurred in the transportation component, where prices rose 6.6% in the 12 months to March.”

Here’s where the opinion starts:

So, according to StatsCan, we are in an inflationary spiral (a boom/bust cycle predicted by Jeff Rubin in Why Your World is About to Get a lot Smaller caused by increasing limitations on oil production and economies designed to work on nothing else).

If we’re averaging 2-3+% inflation every year since 2008, that ENORMOUS 12.55% teacher salary increase actually looks more like (2008 2%, 2009 2%, 2010 3%, 2011 3% 2012 3% = 13%) a net loss in standard of living. But we shouldn’t even try to keep up with the standard of living, should we?

Why is the economy in such a mess? Because the free market has swallowed itself with its own greed. Public employees didn’t crash the economy, private business did.

I first heard this a couple of years ago in the middle of the financial melt down, when an investment banker had the nerve (after his industry made a mockery of capitalism) to suggest that the local waste removal workers should take pay cuts to help pay for something they had nothing to do with. The people who orchestrated this market collapse have somehow convinced the dull, cow-eyed public that they should enjoy a less restricted marketplace and continue to serve themselves bail outs with taxpayers’ money.

In an unrestricted marketplace, private employees lose their jobs, take pay cuts and can do nothing. With no oversight they are indentured servants to the wealthy. They are then incited to riot against the public sector employees who work for the social collective (government), performing duties vital to the public good. In the process, there is some kind of odd flip that happens where the private wage earners actually feel that what they do is more inherently valuable (putting money in rich people’s pockets), than what a public employee does (earning a living while serving the public good).

I’m choking on this nonsense. Evidently business and the economy are vital to us, but we shouldn’t oversee and ensure its smooth operation. We should eviscerate government services and oversight and put all that money back into the pockets of a self serving marketplace that would destroy itself for short term gain that benefits a tiny percentage of people. They then seem to Jedi mind trick a weak willed public that they employ as minimally as possible to accept the lie that private sector salaries are somehow more honestly earned than public sector ones.

Don’t pay taxes and slash government oversight now so you can pay enormous bailouts later. It’s not a great deal you idiots, and in the meantime you’re fired and hired for less over and over again. Left to its own devices, an unrestricted marketplace would place the lowest possible value on human work as it can. There are more and more people in the world, where do you think that puts your value as a worker?

Democracy isn’t going to work when special interest groups make claims regardless of the truth, and are allowed to manipulate media to indoctrinate a dim, accepting public.

Don’t feel bad about working for the public good, it’s one hell of a lot better than working as disposable labour to make the rich a bit richer.

And if you work for a private company? It’s not a bad thing unless you give them the reigns, they’ll sell you for a short term gain in a second (if it hasn’t happened already to you, it will). Only intelligent public oversight will ensure a reasonable, sustainable, fair private sector. Left to itself private business would cannibalize society for short term gain.

Public Teacher, Public Job

Originally published November, 2012 in Dusty World

I’ve been teaching now for eight years so this is my first time experiencing work action. I’ve had union jobs before, union jobs that went to the wall with job action, but the teacher experience is very different. When I was a warehouse worker for National Grocers we were fighting for our benefits and pay, but no one in the general public ever thought that they knew what my job was or demanded that I stay after my shift to volunteer to do extra work for no pay; I guess the private sector has it easy.

The public nature of this teacher job action has produced a startling realization – there is a portion of the population that hates teachers. Around that small kernel of teacher-haters is a larger layer of people in the general public who think that teachers are lazy, overpaid and undeserving of even basic Charter rights. I have noted that many of these people tend to be under-educated and have a lasting hatred of what happened to them in school.

Listening to someone who couldn’t hack high school, let alone university (twice, once for undergrad, and again for teacher’s college) crying about how little teachers do is like listening to the guy who thinks he can play hockey but can barely skate going on about how he could have gone pro. That doesn’t stop ignorant, lazy people from making noise though.

Then there is the management thing. If you’ve ever tried to work out a deal with private business, they are cheap and relentless, but they are consistent. If you can understand what their parameters are in negotiating, you can come to an agreement. Also, if you do your job very efficiently and make money for them it makes more room for you in negotiation. At no point in private bargaining situations did I see a deal stopped for political reasons. You also have the benefit of working for bosses who are experts in the business (because they made it). I never had to explain to National Grocers management what our job was because everyone at the table knew the business.

Ontario: top 3 in the world, midpack in cost –
best bang for the buck in education in the world!
If you don’t believe me, believe the freaking UN!

If you’re a teacher in Ontario these days your boss has no background whatsoever in what you do, and even though you produce some of the best results in your field in the world it isn’t acknowledged at all; you still get to hear an unrelenting carcophany in media and the public about how easy your job is and how lazy you are. Even your boss, a lawyer who hasn’t taught a day in her life, likes to point out that you just took the whole summer off (which you hadn’t).

Ontario’s education system is truly world class, to the point where it is copied around the world. If you go to an international school there is a very good chance that it will be running the Ontario K to 12 curriculum. Private schools copy our public school system, it’s that awesome. If we were building cars, they would be the best in the world, they’d be selling like hotcakes, no one would think to question what we were doing.

So here we are, dealing with a Minister of Education who has never actually worked in Education – ever, a government that is more interested in poll numbers than in resolving serious issues and getting everyone back to work, and it’s all happening while Ontario Education is the envy of the world. Trying to negotiate in this environment makes very little sense. It makes me long for the private sector where things made sense.

We threw money at GM so they could stop making crappy cars and become solvent. We threw money at banks that had purchased bad loans. If private businesses make bad choices, we cripple ourselves financially to support them.

However, if we create excellence we bitterly attack it, demean it and then use it for shabby political ends. It’s not hard to see why Ontario is going down the toilet. We don’t even recognize and protect excellence any more. And when we’ve let ignorant (dare I say stupid?) loud mouths vent their frustrations at their own failures by blaming teachers for their own short comings while at school, we’re left with a demoralized education system… hardly the kind of place that can compete successfully on the global stage.

Other Notes:
The poor right winger: what you get when laziness and greed replace industry and reward
All Hands on Deck: when politics dictate economics
Death of Vision: where our leadership went
Educational Maelstroms: what it’s like to hear the negativity
Surfed PISA lately?: How fantastic our Ed system is!

Virtual Possibilities

I was asked the other day what virtual reality could do beyond the obvious entertainment it provides. A bit of online research shows VR moving in a number of directions beneficial to education.

Below is a list that covers everything from currently available software to academic research and emerging uses. It isn’t even remotely complete.

***

VR for physio therapy

Phantom Limb Pain Recovery
http://ift.tt/2gZdE69

When I worked in Japan I did a lot of work with a local doctor who was researching therapeutic muscle stimulation in patients recovering from paralysis. A lot of that physiotherapy was very hard work for both the patients and the people working with them. VR would offer a way to produce more natural, targeted and full range interaction without the tedium and limitation of repetitive exercise.

The CBC piece above is talking about how amputees with phantom limb syndrome use VR to reconnect the neural pathways that used to operate the missing part. Body confusion over the missing part appears to be the cause of phantom pains in missing limbs. The immersive nature of VR allows patients to exercise those neurons and reduce instances of false pain responses.

Physical Therapy VR Research
http://ift.tt/2i3rUbH
If you’ve ever immersed yourself in VR you quickly become aware of how elsewhere you feel. I’ve felt vertigo while standing on a cliff in Google Earth. As a tool for balance and movement it has obvious immediate applications.

A Home-made VR Motion Sensor and Data Collection Tool

Currently, my senior computer engineering students are designing an Arduino based virtual reality movement sensor that will collect data on a user’s movements while immersed. They are programming a Java based back end in computer science to collect the data streaming from the ultrasonic sensor in order to create data-sets of movement while immersed. This data could be used to measure the depth of immersion the user is experiencing. More immersed people tend to physically interact more with the virtual environment – that physical interaction can be used to collect data.

Analysis of the data means they might be able to produce accurate information on how well a user is playing a game, how effectively an athlete is following a VR training regimen or perhaps if a patient recovering from an injury is making the right motions in physio. It should be able to isolate and describe the physical limitations of a user in VR. Unlike previous digital experiences through the window of a monitor, VR offers immediate physical feedback that we’re going to record.

Digital interaction is going to be much less sedentary in the future.

VR and Autism

Floreo Autism Therapy

http://ift.tt/2i3pdqV
Founded by two dads of kids with autism, Floreo explores VR as a therapy. I like their approach: autism isn’t seen as a defect but a difference that we can support with therapies designed to allow these different thinking kids to survive and thrive with everyone else.

Austism Speaks on Virtual Reality
http://ift.tt/2i3oKoj

Autism Speaks is a science focused advocacy group that is encouraging a seed change in how society views the spectrum of atypical autism related thinking.

In this article they are funding research into a VR based social cognition training in order for autistic people to function more effectively with others. The complexities of autism means they need to proceed carefully with data collection. VR’s unique sense of immersion means they can simulate social situations (and the anxiety that arises from them) more accurately and produce responses that reflect it. The data collected from this specifically targeted research is vital to creating tools to help people with autism practice social skills more effectively.

Having kids who are already comfortable with VR means that when this therapy is ready they won’t have to get familiar with the technology before they benefit from the therapeutic value of the program.

Sensitivity Training for Neurotypicals
http://ift.tt/1PM1nPM
We’re currently using a 360 camera to create a VR based tour of our school. In it students get to move around the building looking where they want in order to begin to get a sense of where everything is. Editing 4k 360° video is a challenge – I have to use the best VR PC we have to do it (when it isn’t running VR), but we’ll get there.

In the meantime, I came across this immersive video made by the UK’s National Autistic Society. Designed in collaboration with autistic people, it gives you some idea of how overwhelming the world can be when an autistic child has a panic attack. It’s overwhelming watching it on the screen. Watching it in VR I was in tears…

If you’re not in VR and haven’t done 360° video before, you can move the point of view around with your mouse as you watch. As a way of trying to explain to others how it feels to have a panic attack when you’re autistic, it’s a powerful tool.

Using VR to Teach Autistic Teens How to Drive
http://ift.tt/2i3toTC
Another ready-now application for VR is in vehicle operation. High performance operators such as racers use it to learn tracks. Heavy equipment operators are using it to train people on expensive industrial machines before they ever get into the cab for the first time. Pilots have to log flight time in a simulator as part of becoming qualified on a new plane. As a way to get people familiar with a complex machine it’s cheap and effective.

In this case VR is being used to ease the anxiety of learning to drive in teens with autism. Every high school in our board has driving instruction starting in their parking lots. They should all be adopting this first step in order to ease anxiety before putting any kid behind the wheel for the first time.

General education links

The Virtual Reality Society
http://ift.tt/2gZexMj
Based out of the UK, this group offers a great resource site to get your feet wet in VR. They are also very interested in how VR can be used in teaching and learning and a lot of their links will take you emerging uses of this technology.

That Tim King Guy
http://ift.tt/2i3piLf

There’s this guy in Canada who jumped into this early and has his students building VR kits for other schools. He’s out and about often demonstrating the technology in his school, his board and his province to anyone who will listen. He and his students have put hundreds of people through their first experience with VR.

His interest is in the engineering that creates the immersive VR experience. It takes astonishing amounts of computing power to produce 3d immersive simulations. Astonishing amounts of computing power are what got his attention in the first place.

Education isn’t usually responsive to emerging technologies but this guy’s MO is to explore new technologies, and this one is going take immersive simulation (something he’s always been interested in) to unforeseen levels.

VR and Mathematics
http://ift.tt/2i3tkDe
Experiential algebra in VR. The benefits of visualizing mathematics in 3d are obvious. This is one of many academic papers on the subject.

http://ift.tt/29awe9z
Geometry is another obvious use for 3d data visualization. This is another academic paper on using VR in teaching geometry.

VR and Chemistry
https://devpos http://ift.tt/2gZ7seo
Chemistry is one of those hands on teaching environments that have a lot of safety oversight. Using VR to familiarize students with the safety needs of the lab could drastically reduce damage costs. The safety training applications school-wide in technology and science are obvious.

These guys used Unity just like my software engineering course does – this is something that capable high school students could render. Perhaps we will next semester.

http://ift.tt/2i3rUsp
Drop into a chemistry lab and explore.

http://ift.tt/2gZ7cMG
Data visualization is a huge part of VR. Chemistry researchers are already envisioning how it could be used to better understand advanced chemical interactions.

http://ift.tt/2i3tmuQ
An academic paper on how immersive simulation can advance the learning of chemistry.

The Body VR

http://thebodyvr.com/

A trip through the body. You can observe infections happening at a microscopic level. It has my twelve year old talking about viral nucleocapsids – I have no idea what he’s talking about.

Gender and Virtual Reality

http://ift.tt/2gZdFHf

There has been a lot of talk about gender in schools this year. The immersive nature of VR means empathy can go from difficult to access to something approaching a lived experience. Having a red neck experience the looks of distrust aimed at a black man or a misogynist spend an hour as a woman would go a long way toward addressing inequity. It’s hard to hate or belittle someone when you’ve spent some time in their shoes.

***

Does VR have any value beyond entertainment? It’s an explosive new area of technological growth and we’ve barely begun to explore what it can do. Even so, there are already hundreds of immediately useful educationally focused VR apps, and more come on line every day.

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Learning Goals & Success Criteria

This past week we had a department heads visioning day. One of the focuses (from the Ministry through the Board) was a concerted focus on clearly articulating learning goals and success criteria. This goal/criteria approach has a lot of traction in current educational thinking. Clearly stating the point of a lesson allows for greater focus for the teacher and greater fairness in instruction for the student. In the ideal classroom clearly articulated learning goals along with specific criteria that demonstrate success allow everyone to work to a commonly understood end.

Learning goals and success criteria offer a trendy sense of student centered equality and transparency with no chance of nasty teachers changing up goals to suit their own megalomania. In the process of establishing these learning goals and success criteria, teaching becomes a linear, reductive process that anyone with the right flowchart could follow.

There has been an ongoing attempt to simplify teaching in order to more efficiently (read: cheaply) manage it. This is often hidden in business terminology like data driven analysis or goal orientated production. The urge to simplify teaching offers some real financial payoffs. If teaching is something that can be reduced to piece work we can drastically reduce professional expectations (and what we pay for them). This cynicism is what I approached this latest PD with. Do the powers that be want me to do this for the good of my students or for the good of the system? The two things are often not mutually compatible.

Like many other previous educational fads LG/SC seems to have come from elementary classrooms. In a grade two class where you need to provide structure around early student learning in order to show them the way this might have a credible place. With sixteen year olds on the verge of moving beyond the classroom, clearly articulated goals and criteria could as easily obstruct the purpose of the lesson as it does help students. In complex learning environments the teacher can often use the process of self-directed discovery to empower student learning. If we are working in a lab on an experiment, clearly articulating the goal and success criteria to get you there reduces the complex process of scientific experimentation to a series of if/then statements. In a room where experienced students are working with advanced ideas, learning goals seem like a simplistic step backwards.

In the working world you don’t often find yourself with clearly articulated goals and criteria. Workplaces and even post secondary education are complex environments in which self directed learning, organization and initiative are valued more than your ability to follow clearly articulated goals, assuming you’re given any goals at all. Asking high school teachers to focus on this means of ‘student success’ is like asking capable bicycle riders to put training wheels on in order to not fall over so much. The intent might be to offer them a greater sense of safety and focus, but the result is a capable rider not being able to test their limits on the bike.

Schools already do a great job of atrophying initiative, creativity, self-direction and differentiation of learning in students. That a new system hopes to close that off even more is worrying. Where is there space for initiative, self directed learning or differentiation in classroom focused on listed goals and criteria? Clearly articulated goals might help those who have no idea why they are in school, but they limit everyone else, especially at a secondary level, and even more so in non-deterministic learning situations.

I teach computer engineering and like many technology classes the students are asked to work in a stochastic, non-deterministic learning process. As we push learners into more advanced learning situations clear goals become a detriment to their learning, much like any other expectation. Rather than being able to discover direction through research and experimentation, the goal orientated classroom is barren and linear. Perhaps it works for academic subjects but it never has in my experience, and the academic teachers it does work for aren’t teachers anyone brags about. If education is about discovery and engagement then ideas like goals and success criteria need to be handled very lightly, not suggested as a school wide success strategy by class room reviewers.

Many of the heads at our meeting weren’t interested in picking up another one year fad from the Board, though they didn’t articulate why other than simply being tired of them. For me this latest educational focus raises some fundamental questions about education. Are we teaching students to learn or are we teaching them curriculum material? Since those two things often conflict with teach other, it would be good to hear what our overall goal is. I’m all for learning to learn, and to do that you can’t be trying to reduce learning to a flowchart of actions. Learning is a fantastic and fantastically complicated process, and teaching someone how to do it goes back to the old adage about teaching a person to fish as opposed to giving them a fish.

Learning goals and success criteria fit nicely into the data driven educational management paradigm. I have a number of concerns about driving education by the numbers. Data (statistics) might offer some insight, but to drive education policy based upon them seems a cart before the horse approach. I’d much rather follow a vision than my own tail (the stats from last year). Following the numbers smacks of the kind of self-justifying business think I and others have railed against.

Teacher Intent

Teacher intent: pure evil? If so,
learning goals can save you from
yourself!

Teacher intent is probably the most important piece of this puzzle. A teacher who doesn’t know what they are doing or is doing it maliciously is the kind of teacher that needs learning goals and success criteria in order to be fair to their students; goals and clearly stated criteria stop that kind of teacher from doing damage. Anyone teaching from a place that needs learning goals and success criteria in order to be fair to their students shouldn’t be teaching. A powerful learning environment is safe enough that students can be humble without feeling inferior and a teacher can let compassion rather than megalomania direct their ego when they are trusted with that most fragile of vessels, an ignorant human being.

In Ontario we’ve done everything possible in the past year to damage teacher intent. From governments to media to political parties to ministry to boards and unions; teacher intent has taken a beating from pretty much everyone. Into this low place we’re delivered the latest silver bullet in education that seems designed to replace teacher intent entirely with data driven, linear, flow chart orientated goal setting.

Is teaching an art or a flowchart? Is it a complex human endeavor or a business process? I know many education managers and their financial overlords would like to turn what we do into (data driven) piece work, but that will result in an Americanization of our education system that will cause a plunge in quality much like they have experienced south of the border. Simplifying education hurts everyone.

Teacher intent is the elephant in every room whenever I hear anyone talk about teaching and learning. Politicians love to take it out and abuse it for their own shabby ends, the general public only remembers their worst experiences in school and belittle teachers for it, and unions refuse to even consider teacher intent because it would call into question the competence of their own members. Meanwhile, many teachers question it in themselves and in their colleagues.

If your teachers are caring, careful, professionals who approach each lesson with the intention of maximizing their student’s potential, you’re going to have a positive learning environment. Making teachers write that intent on the board won’t stop bad teachers from being unfair, and good teachers will find it limiting. How often have you started a lesson only to have to make an abrupt change because student understanding or mood isn’t where you need it? If you’ve already written up what you’re doing it makes what should be a graceful, responsive changes into an awkward situation in which you’ve emphasized student ignorance.

The mindset a teacher enters a classroom is pivotal to successful learning in that classroom. A teacher who is resilient, mentally agile, even handed and humble before their own power is the most powerful thing a student could hope for in learning. That teacher happily bounces out that door to do extracurriculars, works with colleagues beyond their own classroom and encourages personal growth rather than data collection in their students. They aren’t trapped in myopic data collection, they don’t see people as data, they see them as people. A happy, capable teacher is a wonder.

Rather than frankly examining, understanding and improving teacher intent we get professionally developed toward systematic, process orientated teaching practices that feed data into the education machine.

Students aren’t the only bricks in the wall.

The Diversifying Consumer VR Landscape

One of our student built PCs immersing a UGDSB
educator in To The Beat: a student built VR game.

We started exploring virtual reality almost two years ago in my senior computer technology classes. In that time we’ve completed a Ministry of Education research grant, presented at several conferences and built over a dozen VR sets for other schools in our board. VR checks a lot of boxes for me:

it’s technically demanding in both hardware and software so it challenges my students with real world problems they wouldn’t otherwise get to see
it’s a new medium that has yet to be defined, so there are no established rules or right ways to do things. You can’t ask for much more as a media creator and teacher.
it’s rapidly evolving and because we early adopted we are playing a part in that evolution

With all that going for it, I’ve enjoyed the past could of years working out how best to get it to work, and we’re not remotely done.

In October Microsoft blundered into VR with their fall Creator’s Update. Up until that point Microsoft had been quietly developing its very expensive Hololens (we tried it last year at the 2016 ECOO conference) while others went to market. We settled on the HTC Vive as the best of the first wave of classroom ready fully immersive VR systems. I’ve since put hundreds of people through their first experience with it and 99.9% of them come out of it amazed. It never gets old watching someone experience VR for the first time.

Last year building our Vive VR kits meant building a reasonably strong spec desktop computer (a fairly simple ask for my seniors) and then installing the SteamVR drivers and updating all the firmware on the Vive before installing software. After that we had stable, ready to roll systems that knocked out astonishing VR experiences. Headaches were few and once up and running the systems have performed flawlessly, which isn’t always the way with emerging technology.

This year Microsoft added all sorts of VR ready software to this Creators Update which has made our fall roll-out of seven VR sets for other schools a massive headache. What once took ten minutes of installing mature, stable SteamVR drivers is now an hours long odyssey of trying to untangle immature Windows 10 VR kits that try and run the Vive as a Microsoft Mixed Reality headset (which it isn’t). I’m sure this is no accident. If Microsoft can destabilize HTC’s market dominance with the Vive by making the running of it a misery on Windows, then they would (and did).

My frustrated seniors and I were doing multiple re-installs and trying all sorts of driver voodoo to get things working. Microsoft’s sudden interest has borked our VR installs on non-Microsoft gear, but guess what works? Microsoft’s new Mixed Reality headsets. Coincidence? Probably not.

Having a dedicated VR pilot
at home lets me test all sorts
of software and systems!

We got a Lenovo Explorer last week when it was on sale at the suggestion of a very VR experienced teacher in our board. It’s pretty lousy using the Microsoft mixed reality software (there is barely anything there and the drivers are immature), but running it on STEAM has been reasonably problem free (the odd tracking issue with the handsets but otherwise OK).

Today I tried out Space Pirate Trainer, probably the most demanding interactive title we’ve tried, on the Lenovo Explorer using Windows Mixed Reality and it works a treat. That’s a $400 kit doing what an $800 HTC Vive kit with external sensors does almost as well with much less set up. It’ll only get better as those Microsoft drivers mature.

As it stands now we build a VR ready desktop for about $1400 and then get the enterprise version of the Vive for another $1500. For three hundred bucks less we could buy the equivalent Samsung Microsoft Mixed Reality Headset and compatible laptop. That’d be a kit that is mobile (laptop and no external sensors means easy transport and setup), and similar in resolution.

It bothers me that Microsoft has used its operating system monopoly to elbow out an existing system, but it’s also a step down the evolutionary chain by not having the external sensors of the older Vive system. That’s what you get for not being first in with an emerging technology, you get to edge them out with an evolved product.

With all the driver headaches some of my students (and myself) had moments when we wondered why we’re doing this to ourselves. I finally said, “hey, if you wanted it easy you’d stick to the established technology that everyone else uses. If we want to work with emerging tech, we’ve got to be ready for a fight.”

The fight continues, and Microsoft’s one-two punch of a simpler but effective platform and aggressive monopolistic software has got me thinking about moving on to a better solution. Sometimes doing what the Sith Lord wants is the best way forward.

LINKS:

Lenovo’s Explorer Microsoft Mixed Reality Headset.HTC’s Vive: up until recently our go-to VR headset.

Microsoft Mixed Reality.
And for Canada.

It’s already gotten more diverse than it was when we presented this at ECOO last month.

Microsoft is pretty cagey about the specs for Mixed Reality. They say any typical laptop or desktop can do the business, but our school’s Dell i5 laptop wasn’t sufficient. If your ‘typical’ desktop costs north of $1500 and your ‘typical’ laptop costs beyond two grand, then yeah, you’re ready to experience mixed reality. They also require Bluetooth which most desktops don’t have, so add that in there too… and the controllers need AA batteries, which the Vive doesn’t.

Curious to see if your typical PC can do it? Here’s the link to check your hardware.

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