Dusty World – Page 25 – Mechanical Sympathy

ECOO16: the DIY approach protects you from the tyranny of technology

The perils of presenting last; you’ve got other things on
your mind instead of what you planned to present,
but it helped!

By the time I got to my presentation in the last slot on Friday I was brain full, exhausted and not entirely sure I would be coherent. After a rambling review of what got me to the DIY lab concept I finally got rolling on the building and operation of your own classroom computer lab. I hadn’t intended to, but a moment from my time as a high school dropout was on my mind as I began the presentation. Vocalizing the story helped connect several ideas that explained where the DIY technology idea came from.

Being handy I ended up working at a Canadian Tire for a couple of months as the tire change guy before I started apprenticing as a millwright. One day early on I was watching one of the mechanics diagnosing a Renault Fuego. As he moved around under this unfamiliar car he burned his arm on the exhaust pipe. In a fit of rage he threw his spanner across the shop and then stormed off, shouting that he was going to make the customer buy a new exhaust system (the car was in with carburetor issues). The customer, having no idea what happens under the hood of her car, reluctantly accepted the ‘fact’ that she needed a very expensive exhaust system replacement. This moment stayed with me because it not only taught me what ignorance can cost you, but also made me question the veracity of ‘professionals’.

My father is an industrial heavy machinery mechanic and told me, even as my technology got increasingly complicated (bicycle to car, Meccano to early computers), that if something was built by people he could figure out how it worked. I’d internalized that idea from an early age. My second bicycle was home made, after buying early software I started writing my own. We spent cold hours on the driveway replacing head gaskets and tuning carburetors. I came to the point where I’d never shrug off the complexity of technology and trust it to someone else.

This doesn’t mean I’m an expert at everything, but I always have a look under the hood and grasp the basics before I use a technology, whether it’s smartphones, the internet or a motorcycle. Since cars became dependable enough the vast majority of the public have lost any interest in their inner workings, but that wasn’t always the case. Early adopters of automobiles were their own mechanics. The maker movement is a step back towards that kind of technical familiarity, but it takes a special breed to maintain that level of curiosity and ownership of knowledge.

The difference between digital technology and automotive technology is that the digital stuff insinuates itself into your relationships and becomes a 24/7 part of your life. It affects your thinking rather than your muscles. Not knowing how a car works might occasionally inconvenience you and cost some money, but not understanding digital technology when you spend hours a day socializing through it or (worse) teaching with it, is a disaster waiting to happen. It isn’t a disaster for tech driven multinationals who live off your data though. They will happily convert your and your students’ ignorance into profit.

This growing ignorance is what prompted the do-it-yourself classroom computer lab. Handing students turnkey digital tools like Chromebooks might suit Google’s market penetration strategy, but it doesn’t teach students about the tools they are using. Some teachers have said that they are teaching their curriculum and not technology but if you’re going to use it you should, as a teacher, understand it, otherwise it will make decisions for you. That is neither professional nor desirable. If you can’t be bothered to understand it, don’t use it – but you risk quickly becoming irrelevant.

I’m in the strange situation of teaching the technology that the vast majority of Canadians use but no one wants to understand. A general understanding of how digital technology works is vital if you’re going to have it participating in your life all day every day, and especially if you’re going to teach and learn with it. You don’t need to be an expert, but you do need to have some conception of how this potentially invasive thing works.

ICTC posts Canadian statistics in digital technology
jobs each month. Yet Geography is a mandatory course
while computer technology is an afterthought.

I look at Ontario curriculum and fail to understand how digital technological literacy isn’t a fundamental requirement. The vast majority of Canada’s population uses personal, digital technology and in many cases that use is almost continuous, yet very few people understand how it works.

We’re graduating students into a millennial unemployment rate of over 14%, but it drops to 6% if they are information-communication technology focused. Even if they aren’t specializing in technology, every graduate we produce is going to use ICT/computers in their job in some capacity or another.

The DIY lab I presented might be a bridge too far for many teachers, but for digital technology teachers or anyone whose curriculum depends implicitly on digital technologies (business tech, media arts) I think it should be a requirement. The teachers presenting this technology to their students owe it to them to develop a deeper understanding of the tools they are using. For everyone else (teachers and students), an understanding of what’s under the hood should be an essential requirement otherwise they are teaching and learning in ignorance, which isn’t helping anyone.

It turns out that walking in to the presentation unfocused allowed me to laterally connect a lot of the foundational ideas around this do-it-yourself philosophy of educational technology use.

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In 2017 not much has changed: The Digital Divide is Deep & Wide…

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/

Enhanced Self Awareness

At ECOO last year, digital footprints were the focus of many sessions. The concern revolved around students (and teachers) showing anything of themselves online. The fear was clear and present, as was the suggestion that we MUST craft a meaningful online presence. Many were surprised at this year’s conference when our keynote speaker talked about how digitization has gone beyond self presentation and become interactive as a means of self improvement. Tech doesn’t want to be passive, it wants to interact with us, become a part of us!

At the Educational Computing Organization of Ontario’s conference this week we had Nora Young from CBC Spark talking about how digitization and the proliferation of data is creating a kind of self awareness that is entirely new. She used examples of bio-metric tools and productivity time assessment software to present examples of this digital mirror.

This is a world that our students are immersed in 18 out of every 24 hours (when school is in session) – and it leaks into classrooms constantly on smartphones. Trying to address that tide by telliing students to bring their own devices, or go on generic, years behind the times school computers is one of the many places you can see education failing.

Words like relevance and engagement are thrown around in panic. People start flipping class rooms and attempting to engage students by offering the same un-directed over empowerment that kids receive through digital devices; that’s an arms race that no one wins. The resulting habitual usage at best offers minimum educational gains, at worst it actually impedes student abilities in other areas. If you’ve ever watched a digital serf mindlessly copy an essay from the internet to submit, you’re watching undirected digital empowerment in action.

Where Nora was talking about a kind of enhanced self awareness through digital tools, many ‘digital natives’ are blissfully unaware of how public their digital presence is, or where their data goes. It’s merely a part of their lives, and they don’t think twice about posting material that makes them unemployable because in their minds it is the equivalent of talking to friends. They haven’t thought twice about publicity settings, it doesn’t occur to them.

On top of that, the data that they might use to become more efficient, or digitally empower their learning, or self-organize are often out of reach because students, as digital natives, are unaware of anything but their self-taught habitual usage. We certainly aren’t doing much to address habitual usage in schools (a digital continuum would be a start), even going to far as to encourage it with BYO-device BYO-technology initiatives.

It’s a nice idea to imagine digital tools offering us data that helps to make us better people (Wired did a cool article on this a while back). The digerati will do this to great effect, once again empowering themselves in ways that Luddites will lack. As a teacher my concern is that the digital native is as incapable of grasping these tools as the tech-hater. It takes technological fluency to grasp these kinds of digital self-awareness opportunities. Unless we’re developing those fluencies, this is just another 21st Century opportunity lost to on our students.

Surviving First Contact With The Enemy

The wise, Jedi-like Colin Jagoe posted a link about how the COVID19 pandemic is very much like being at war. This got me thinking about how our behind-closed-doors / business-as-usual approach to managing this crisis has been… minimalist. This shouldn’t be about maintaining the organizational status quo, it should be about building a resilient, transparent and responsive approach to dealing with an unprecedented social engineering challenge.

The following reflection highlights how a transparent, communicative, engaged leadership approach helps mitigate one of the truths of fighting a war: “No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.” In the fluid and rapidly changing situation we find ourselves in, it might be wise to lean on some military wisdom in our response.

***

I was an air cadet in the 1980s in Mississauga. One of the major pillars of that program is teaching leadership. I took summer courses on it and spent at least dozen hours over and above school each week working through cadet syllabus on it. It’s safe to say air cadets was a seminal experience for me in that it not only showed me how I can best fit into an operational structure, but also how to run one effectively in a changeable environment.

When I was halfway through my cadet career we went up to Base Borden for a March Break training exercise. Pete Rudin was my flight sergeant and as experienced as a cadet can get being only a couple of months away from retiring. I was a very keen new corporal. Our flight consisted of about 35 kids ranging in age from brand new 13 year old recruits up to savvy 18 year old veterans like Pete. We got put into a capture the flag game against other flights, but Pete did something no one else did.

While all the other flight sergeants split their groups up into the standard squads (one experienced NCO leading 4-5 very excited and inexperienced younger cadets) and ran things top down, Pete differentiated his leadership approach based on the human resources he had at hand. His plan was to create a massive group of all the new recruits who were anxious and a bit freaked out and move into the exercise with this slow moving but unstoppable unit. He knew he had a few experienced and gung-ho junior NCOs who wanted to run, so rather than hold them back in the big group he told us to recon where the other teams were and report back.

You can imagine how that felt. When your flight sergeant acknowledges your esprit de corps and gifts you with a special assignment, your already gung-ho approach steps up another gear. Things went as you might imagine. The other junior NCOs and I ran off into the woods full of adrenaline and immediately began finding those little homogeneous squads. As soon as we made contact we’d run back to the hive, usually with that squad chasing us thinking we were an easy kill… then they’d come over a hill and find dozens of excited youngsters swarming around our flight sergeant, and get retired from the game.

We began hoovering up squads and about an hour in I stumbled across the other team’s flag – the one we had to capture that would end the game. I barely got out of there alive (if they pulled the flag off your arm you’re considered retired), they had two of their most experienced squads on defence. I managed to get away and ran back breathless to tell Rudin where the flag was. Ten minutes later it was all over as our hive swarmed over the hill into the dell where their flag was hidden. The two squads they’d put on defence couldn’t believe what was coming at them. Our youngest, tiniest new cadet took the flag and ended the game (I think Pete made a point of that).

Afterwards, I asked Flight Sergeant Rudin how he came up with this bizarre approach. He said something I’ve never forgotten: “I figured if I tried to keep you guys back with the big group you’d be hard to manage and it wouldn’t help things. We’d perform better if I didn’t have to micromanage when you wanted to be doing something else that would produce better results for all of us anyway. The little ones looked terrified, so I wanted to keep them with me and build their confidence.”

We were the younger team in that capture the flag, with less experienced NCOs – the other team was cocky and confident because they had many ringers. Rather than open up the rule-book and follow homogeneous protocols designed around top-down control that would have ended up with us losing, Pete differentiated his leadership approach and gave each of his people just what they needed to succeed. He also arranged things so that everyone was in contact with everyone else and made communication easier by giving us a clear focus to return to, it really was a brilliant piece of planning beautifully executed.

I never forgot that lesson. In retrospect, it was the centralization of resources, clarity of the planning (it was all done out loud with us all standing around Pete as he elicited ideas and worked out what we were going to do), and the focus on communication that allowed it to succeed like it did. Everyone knew what we were doing, why we were doing it and how to let the group know if it was or wasn’t working. When we caught the fourth squad who had no idea that three others had been caught by our big hive, I began to realize what that lack of communication was doing to the other teams. No battle plan may survive first contact with the enemy, but designing a plan transparently and reflexively with clear communications channels allows your organization to respond to surprises quickly and effectively.

I ended up retiring a sergeant in cadets. Others have suggested that only making it half way up the command structure is somehow a failure, but I don’t see it that way. I finished my career as Rifle Guard Commander and Colour Party Commander and occupied a specialist role in our large organization. The metacognitive awareness of how I can operate most effectively in a large organizational structure was another invaluable result of my time in cadets. I’m very much a sergeant – good at dealing with tangible, immediate issues in small groups collaboratively and imaginatively (handy classroom teacher skills, eh?). Given latitude I liked to exercise initiative and move quickly – did this sometimes get me into trouble? Yep, but the leaders I had recognized those skills and made a point of leveraging them. That made me feel like a valued member of the organization, rank wasn’t the only thing that defined me.

I was good friends with many of the younger cadets who ended up in charge of our squadron – many of them attended my 50th birthday party last year (we’re all old now, so those year or two differences don’t matter any more – but then they didn’t back then either). They didn’t make rank about exclusion, privilege and control and they acknowledged their cadets’ expertise and experience by making productive use of them by differentiating the roles they assigned.

This collegial and transparent approach to leadership allowed us to execute the cadet syllabus with precision and flair. It also allowed us to revise and respond to the unknown quickly and effectively when on exercises, contact with the enemy be damned. I’m really proud of the things we learned and work we did. This experience has aided us all in our professional lives as adults. This transparent, communicative approach has informed much of my teaching practice. If you asked my students what they find most compelling about my classes, I think many would say that sense of agency – I acknowledge their strengths and honour them by differentiating their work.

I’m missing that transparency, clarity of purpose and engagement now, even though not one of the teens I just described had a post graduate degree in leadership. If we are indeed at war as Colin suggests, then we need to quickly engage and develop effective communications and a clarity of common purpose, or all of those secret plans being developed behind closed doors won’t survive first contact with an enemy we’ve too often underestimated. Initiative is lost, but it’s never too late to try and get it back.

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The Money Trap

I know it’s hard to imagine, but there was a time when money did not dictate your self-value. This seems a foreign concept in the twenty-first Century, but prior to the neo-liberal ideas that we now take for granted, humans valued themselves in very different ways.

Bucky’s quote popped up the other day and got me thinking about self-value. Can you imagine a world where the purpose of people was to push the boundaries of their thinking instead of being forced into servitude to an economic system that reduces them to drudgery?

Rather than battle this kind of reductionist and inhuman economic thinking, education has been struggling to get on board with it (there is nothing worse than looking like you’re out of step with society – it’s never wrong). Pathways to employment is modern education’s reason for being, and it plays nicely into 1% thinking that earning money is all that matters, all that makes you worthwhile.

The rich want you to self-identify with your earning potential, then they own your means of happiness. When your self-worth is tied to your ability to earn a trivial income you are drip-fed your reason for being by people who (according to your own core belief that money is what makes you valuable) will happily starve you for their own ends.

Asking a 21st Century person to believe that their income does not dictate their self value is impossible. This kind of viral capitalism is every bit as limiting to human potential as medieval serfdom, dogmatic church states or god-kings.

People are fond of criticizing history for ideas that seem silly in retrospect. These are the very same people who argue for and justify our current woeful state of being. Our unsuccessful students aren’t high earners. Our successful students go to work for those oil companies. It’s a difficult thing to see past the myths, misinformation and indoctrination of our own culture, but I suspect you’ll never find happiness if you don’t, especially in the early twenty-first Century.

***

It’s the day before classes start again and I’m up at 6am after too many tedious work anxiety dreams (not of being in the classroom, but of being in school. Teaching doesn’t freak me out, the systemic nature of modern education does).

I had a good break, but now I’m back to seeing how far I can encourage free thinking before I crash into The System again. I’m a 20%er at heart. I always tend toward the more difficult road, I get more out of travelling on it but it’s tiring being a minority all the time.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been away from the classroom for a few days, found some perspective and wondered if I’m in the best place to learn. The irony isn’t lost on me.

Exceptional Times

Thoughts from the depths of the COVID19 pandemic: Rather than give in to the digital divide in times of crisis, why not leverage this moment and make moves to resolve it?

***

It has been suggested that due to the inequity of access to technology and internet, our education system should shut down during the COVID19 pandemic. Rather than surrender to this inequity, why not attempt to address it directly? We could leverage educational technology manufacturers and create one to one technology access for our student populations on the wrong side of the digital divide.

At the same time we could offer limited access to our public school library learning commons where students would have access to internet. With appropriate safety precautions (limited numbers allowed, strict hygiene practices, solo seating arrangements), we could take immediate steps to bridge the digital divide and allow some form of education to continue for students across Canada. Simply turning off the education system for months at a time will cause lasting damage for millions of students.

This is a measured and logical approach to resolving the digital divide (a lack of educational technology access to all students) that has long plagued education. Rather than having this pandemic make it worse, why not leverage it to make it better?

Handing out one to one technology for students in need so we can keep moving everyone forward educationally wouldn’t be as expensive as you might think and the alternative is significantly more costly. Our public schools have developed the network infrastructure necessary to provide internet, so limited access to that infrastructure could still address the needs of social distancing while providing connectivity.

If this pandemic has shown anything, it’s that our ICT infrastructure is more vital than ever if we’re going to move against this crisis in a unified manner; communication is key. There are existing technologies we could apply to extend school and municipal wireless networking out into the communities that surround them. With fundamental networking infrastructure in place, some innovative final mile solutions (like Blimpernet – an idea that my students and I came up with last year) could make the internet available to many more Canadians just when we need it.

Wouldn’t it be something if one of the lasting results of this pandemic was that it helped us close the digital divide and improve equity through access to technology in our schools? That it would also allow our education systems to continue in a limited capacity instead of shutting down is a consequence that would benefit all Canadians.

***

I sent this to a number of MPs as well as the PM. I only hope a measured, reasonable response is still in the cards.

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Gamer culture, the alt right and online sexism

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That link above takes you to a vetted story by our national broadcaster about a PhD student’s academically researched work on gamer culture. If you can find an academically vetted refutation of these facts (not some dude’s YouTube video) then I’m all ears. I doubt such a thing exists. Merely implying that this isn’t true isn’t an effective response either.

It’s a salty but accurate explanation
of how the early internet evolved
toward what we have today.

This idea that online gaming culture may act a petri dish for alt-right thinking doesn’t surprise me. Every year I have grade 9 boys begin my program, find out I game, and immediately begin testing the waters with shockingly racist and sexist language to see if I speak the lingo. I don’t. I come from an earlier internet where trolling and trash talk were used to instruct and support the kind of radical egalitarianism the early web was promising, not to protect the diminishing historical privilege of white males. I used to think their offensive language was a function of living in a rural, conservative community but now I’m thinking that a pervasive, new online culture might be the cause.

The podcast above describes astonishingly sexist online situations and suggests that these aren’t rare. I’ve run into similar problems teaching computer technology. Trying to keep girls in these courses is an ongoing frustration. Back in 2014 I called this poisonous environment “nerd machismo” and had a great deal of trouble redirecting how many tech focused boys treated these classes like their own private domain. In retrospect, if they were immersed onlline in the kind of sexism shown in the podcast above, it’s little wonder they were acting this way. The odd girl who did appear in senior computer classes tended to drop out after a couple of days of listening to this bluster. I could hardly blame them.

Girls are being chased out of ICT courses by an online culture that can
be best described as incredibly misogynistic. In the process they are
missing a job sector with great prospects.

In managing my own online presence I’ve removed any online discussion functionality. I’m happy to talk to people about what I write and thrilled if they share it but I’m not in the business of vetting comments and weeding out the increasing toxicity I was experiencing. It became tedious and depressing trying to manage these idiots. Online flaming has decreased in intelligence and increased in misdirected usage to the point where I don’t read (especially anonymous) online comments any more. By default now my blogs and other online media do not allow for comments. I don’t want to spend my time reading and erasing offensive material. If people want to discuss it intelligently they can leverage their own social media presence to do it. In some small way this mitigates the savage idiocy of the anonymous online flamer by assigning at least a minimal kind of ownership. If I’m cutting and running from online engagement (a white, male, early adopter), I can’t imagine what kind of negativity has chased out others.

***

Last month at the ECOO Conference Andrew Campbell did a great presentation on how computer science was stolen from the pioneering women who did much of the coding in the early days:

Ed tech and equity from Andrew Campbell

When you consider how misogyny has directed the field of computer science in the past forty years it’s little wonder that the online culture arising from all that coding tends toward the same thinking. The medium delivering the message is being made by the same special interests. This is the worst kind of systemic sexism.

Between this podcast, my own experiences and Andrew’s presentation I seem to be at a confluence of ideas all pointing to a kind of misogyny that I thought was going extinct. It’s 2016 but we seem to be wrestling with ideas that would look more comfortable in pre-suffragette days a century ago.

I’m a firm believer in developing technical prowess in everyone. Democratizing technical know-how is the best defence we have against being manipulated by increasingly invasive digital systems continually rolled out by billionaires. Excluding half the population from technical literacy simply because of their gender plays right into their hands. No wonder political movements like the alt-right find such a comfortable home online where the powers that be don’t want you thinking about how it works. In that place ignorance is power. In the meantime I get to go to school and interact with children who think this is how you should talk to women:

Screen grabs of what women experience online.

In addition to experiencing harassment much more regularly, young women also experience a much wider
variety and intensity of harassment online. If you experience this online how must you
look at the people you meet in real life? I’d be constantly wondering what they really think.

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Head Space

For the first time in my ten years of teaching I didn’t teach summer school or take an additional qualification this summer. I did build a deck that you can land a helicopter on, restore a motorbike I found in a field and travelled across most of Ontario, but I’ve been far away from thinking about teaching.

What have I learned from my summer of George? I’d be a very good retired person. I’m seldom idle, I love learning new things and resolving engineering challenges. I get a great deal of satisfaction in taking something broken and making it work. Mechanical sympathy has always led me into technology, I tend toward an empathetic connection with machines. I also enjoy working with my head and hands in concert (not just one or the other). I spent the summer practising the engineering process, perhaps I can take a more active modelling role in the lab in order to keep that experience alive (for myself as well as for my students).

The writing didn’t slow down, it just changed focus. Putting experience into words allows me to meditate on that experience and clarify my thinking about it. It’s nice to know that whatever I’m doing, writing is a natural response to it.

I’m now in the process of re-engaging with teaching. Empathy tends to lead me in this as well, though I find the irrationality and randomness of dealing with people exhausting and frustrating in comparison to the simple honesty of machines. The education system is all about people, from the social complexities of dealing with fellow teachers and administration to the hugely varied psychology of students, it’s a complex system that is more about fecundity than resolution.

After a summer of making things work I’m most anxious about returning to a process that is often irrational, opaque and unsolvable.

Once more into the breach dear friends…

The Digital Narcissist

How We Build Digital Narcissists

Narcissus fell in love with his own image while staring into the water. That kind of self-infatuation is difficult to come by in our world with its relentless competition and big problems; you can’t help but feel humble before what faces us.

Fortunately, many first world children don’t have to face that reality. In the past decade they have found a new cocoon to wrap themselves in that isolates them from the harsh truths that surround them.

In that digital cocoon they are free to see only what they want to see. The machines that serve them slavishly see to their every whim no matter how asinine, base or self-serving it may be.

At the best of times it’s tricky to develop a sense of humility and perspective in children, they tend toward an egotistic world view. The technology cocoon amplifies this and insulates them from adults (both parents and teachers) in a way unseen before. In a whirl of habituated media consumption, children today are always able to find a ‘fact’ on the internet that backs up their myopic world view. They are immediately and constantly able to communicate with peers who are more than happy to reinforce their prejudices. In spite of its promise, social media is very socially insular. Rather than moving us into an era of interaction and awareness on a global scale, for far too many people the internet is offering something more akin to mental masturbation.

The other week we went to the backwoods of Ontario. With limited internet and basic cable, we weren’t in the self-directed, media rich world we usually are. I stumbled upon a fascinating documentary that compared militant Hindu girls’ camps and the Miss India pageant. We ended up watching (and learning) something that we wouldn’t have in our self-directed media paradise.

Remember when TV was only a few channels and you ended up watching what was on? It was in this way that I discovered The Twilight Zone, Woody Allen, early Japanese Anime and a variety of media that I would never have picked up in our insular modern media world where we define ourselves by our niches. I’m not saying things were better that way, but limited media did tend to push us out of our comfort zones and try things we otherwise wouldn’t. We also tended to watch something only once or twice. Limited media forces you beyond your areas of interest and you tend to focus better on it because access to it is special.

I used to beg for rides or ride
the bike for miles to get this!

When Bits & Bytes on TVO wasn’t enough to satisfy my new computer fixation in the early ’80s I had to search far and wide for media that would cover this new medium. When I found COMPUTE! magazine in a small shop in a strip mall five miles from home I used to beg for a ride over there or jump on the bicycle and ride forever to go get the latest copy. That media was hard to get and greatly valued. Every page of that magazine was a glass of water in the Sahara. My urge to find it had to be great or I wouldn’t have bothered. Limited media makes us value the information we find and lends a sense of accomplishment to our learning. All that is lost today.

In 2013 media practically scratches at the door of your mind to be let in. You have to make an effort to stop it rather than find it. Ironically, this inflection in media delivery does a lot to take away our ability to self direct our interests. It’s hard to enjoy a glass of water in a flood. What’s worse is that instead of amplifying our ability to learn, modern media delivery has cordoned people off into their own habitual interests.

Instead of focusing on research and access we need to consider how to manage distraction and information overflow. Only once this is in hand can we start to direct ourselves in this storm. The digital narcissist is the logical result of our sudden access to any information that we want, and it fits hand in glove with the consumerist drive that dictates digital development. It behooves the companies that are reducing users to consumers to create a false sense of how powerful we are; it sells.

Generation Xbox

In a media vacuum you have time with your thoughts. In that silence you have a chance to examine yourself critically, figure out a direction you want to go. We expect meta-cognition in students but I’m finding that they are increasingly out of touch with a balanced view of their self worth because they are buried under a media avalanche that is not simply a result of technology advancement, there is intent in the deluge.

The navel gazing digital narcissist can’t examine themselves because they exist entirely as a figment of their own imaginations. Meta-cognition and the sense of perspective it demands is impossible for them in this media storm; a quiet mind is an unknown experience.

The digital native is trapped in an ego feedback loop with a steady stream of media that caters to their every urge, and because the longer they are engaged with media the more they are worth, the media itself is more interested in keeping them plugged in that it is in advancing their thinking.

Wrapped in this digital cocoon, is it any wonder that the poor digital native can’t help but gaze at the screen like Narcissus and his pond?

Master/Journeyman/Apprentice

I’m once again in the additional qualification classroom in order to gain another teachable. This one was a bit tricky. I’d been working in information technology since I graduated with an honours BA in English in the mid ’90s. When I went into teaching, I looked into getting my technical qualifications (I’d spent a fair amount of money on getting IT qualified and wanted to keep a finger in the pie, so to speak). It didn’t happen. The Byzantine rules around what I needed and how I qualified were taking so long to get through, it was easier to just plug in my degree (to a very degree friendly teacher qualification system) and start there.

I did computer clubs and delved into #edtech relentlessly, but didn’t get my computer engineering qualification until now because I needed it for a headship, and they’d recently made changes that cleared up some of the labyrinthine rules around getting the qualification.

So here I am, a qualified IT technician in a computer engineering class. If we’re doing networking, or computer repair, I’m aces, but soldering? Circuit boards? Not so much. The funny thing is we have electrical engineers that don’t know what a registry is or how to reset an IP address, but they are brilliant on a circuit board. I’m starting to realize that computer engineering is another one of those subjects that collects expertise from various disciplines and files it all under the same heading. I’m also beginning to see why some comp-eng teachers’ courses look so different from other comp-eng teachers’ courses.

Other than cutting networking cables, running them and installing hardware, I’m not really a nuts and bolts of electronics kind of guy, but after taking this AQ, I will be. When I was a kid I got into cars and stereos and did some wiring then, it’s nice to get hands on with components again. My experience has all be around making it (IT) work for business, after taking this AQ, I get the sense that I’m going to end up delving more deeply into maker culture, something I’ve wanted to do for too long.

Getting my head back into wiring diagrams felt impossible in the first few days. I’m finding the tools available, especially Arduino and Fritzing to be invaluable in bridging gaps in knowledge. I know I won’t be a Jedi knight at circuitry by the end of the course, but the 1-2-3 system our instructor has been using has recognized the varieties of skills in the room and allowed people to focus on what they want to improve in, and improve I have.

I’m looking forward to hitting my tech-class in the fall and getting my hands dirty. In the meantime, I just started Shop Class As Soulcraft, suggested by our instructor on the last day of class. Some mechanic’s philosophy will help fill in the gap I’m feeling between my academic background, and my urge to work with my hands again.

It’s Time For You To Go

The ZPD: something all those people critical of
teaching have never heard of, but it’s where
teachers live all day every day.

If your teacher-craft is good you are a natural differentiator, going to great lengths to provide each student with what they need. Teachers are the pressure point between a system trying to do things as cheaply and generically as possible and individual students all learning from their own context. That stretch is why replacing teachers with elearning systems or creating enormous classrooms will result in a substantial drop in pedagogical effectiveness. You need a trained professional to attempt to bridge this enormous gap in a reasonably sized class, at least if you want it done well.

In an optional course like computer engineering this is stretched to extremes. In the same class I will have functionally illiterate students who verge on being developmentally delayed sitting next to gifted students who so aggressively pursue the work that they are operating well beyond the expectations of the grade or even the curriculum. I’m the mechanism that tries to make sure both those students (and the other twenty-two in the room) are all in their zone of proximal development, and yes, it’s exhausting at the best of times.

On top of that, because I’m teaching high school students I get to attempt this stunt with kids whose brains haven’t yet developed the ability to forecast the consequences of their actions. When their amygdalas finally develop in their early 20s their executive functions will come online and their post-secondary instructors will get to enjoy a more complete human being, but we never see them in high school. Most of the general public are also oblivious to the brain research teachers keep up on.

Because all of that isn’t enough, Ontario also likes to Victory Lap students, allowing graduates who have already finished to come back for another year at great public expense. The system used to enjoy the extra financial injection that these students brought with them, but cuts have meant that schools aren’t being funded completely to support these students properly any more. This week I’m spending more attention on two victory lappers than I am on my other 70 odd students who are actually supposed to be there.

I’ve had mixed experience with Victory Lappers. In some cases that extra year was just what they needed in terms of maturity to prepare them for post-secondary life, but too many times it’s a privileged kid enjoying an easy year in a fish tank they’ve outgrown instead of taking the big step into the unknown. That this is now happening in an unfunded and overly stretched system is causing stress cracks to appear where they didn’t before. Maybe a way forward in this is to only allow students with individual education plans the opportunity to victory lap, but whatever we do, it needs to have been done several years ago. If we could stop playing politics and actually manage Ontario’s education system effectively, we could find cost savings in something like this immediately.

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