Dusty World – Page 26 – Mechanical Sympathy

Authoring Your Digital Self

I’ve written about owning your digital self in previous posts, but how that ownership happens is a function of how capable you are of authoring it. Developing that authorship requires freedom of choice, you can’t make full use of any medium if you don’t have creative control.

I’m currently working toward my qualifications as a computer technology teacher, and this technical ability that allows for creative, deep use of technology is on my mind. The magic of being technically skilled is misunderstanding that I want to move past. Teaching technology means freeing up our access to it, and expecting anyone who wants to use it to be competent with it. 21st Century skills need to be as ubiquitous as literacy or numeracy skills.

When we are teaching writing, we don’t prescribe the type of writing tool or the type of paper. If a particular pen or type of paper encourages a student to write more, we’re overjoyed to use it. As soon as we can, we have students writing about their experiences using their own style of forming letters (within readability parameters). We encourage individualization of this complicated process in order to assist students in internalizing these complex skills; their ability to form letters is one of the most unique things they do as a person.

What we do with edtech is the equivalent of only showing students cards with words on them and then declaring them literate when they can string together a sentence of words. We don’t allow them to personalize their learning, and so make it impersonal, simplistic and ultimately forgettable.

A school computer is about as inflexible and impersonal as a computer can be made to be. If we’re going to recognize 21st Century learning as complex, inter-related skill sets that need to be nurtured and developed over time (like literacy itself), then we need to look at how we are presenting digital learning opportunities in education.

Our students currently teach themselves 21st Century skills outside education. When they come to school they meet panicky (usually older) teachers and administrators who fear the magic box of lights and discourage any use of them that aren’t understandable parallels of familiar analogue activities (word processing/type writer, powerpoint/slide show, etc). Activities that don’t have a pre-digital analogue are morally wrong / intellectually bankrupt / a waste of time… pick one and frown. Edtech is designed around this philosophy of belittling digital change, and ignoring the development of teaching in technology.

appears every time we open up IE, which forgets
all your settings when you log out again.. #edtechfail

If we want our students to be able to author their digital selves now and in the future, we MUST free up the technology and allow students to customize their digital experiences. The broken installation of Internet Explorer on my board computers (the only browser of choice) doesn’t cut it. Browser choice (complete with apps, mods and other personalization) makes all the difference in developing a skilled approach to accessing the internet. It should remember your customizations as well.

This flexibility needs to go deep into software. A student who has had access to multiple operating systems (Windows, OSx and Linux minimally) immediately has a better sense of how computers work because they are able to develop some perspective around how OSes make use of the hardware they are on, not to mention the software ecosystems each possess.

A truly agile edtech plan also breaks apart the hardware monotony found in every board. The minilab goes a long way toward addressing this while also addressing the software miasma. The only time in their lives they will ever be forced to use rows of identical desktops is in school (or a 20th Century factory). Preparing students for an IT environment that hasn’t existed for over a decade is positively backward looking

Educational technology is not about ease of administration for the board’s IT department, and it’s not about fear mongering about privacy that never existed, it’s about teaching students real, usable skills that will serve them in the future.

It would be nice if we started doing that.

A Slippery Slope

Fortunately, the ark didn’t have to worry about any of
those pesky fictional icebergs…

Over the past couple of days the concept of professionalism seems to keep popping up, usually after it’s been lit on fire. It began when someone posted a quote on Facebook based on a Twitter storm. It was described as ‘interesting’ on Facebook and lots of people on there were very happy to prop it up. I would have called it asinine. My first instinct was to write back, ‘it’s important to remember that amateurs built the starship Enterprise but professionals built the space shuttle.’ But I didn’t.

Beyond the amateurs-are-really-good-at-building-things-that-don’t-exist thinking, I was more put off by the implicit attack on professionalism. Ironically, it’s the lack of professionalism in our news that’s accelerating this anti-professional bias. When you share media created to force an opinion rather than declare facts, you’re pouring gas on the ignorance fire. From patients spending half an hour on Google and then telling their doctors what their self-diagnosis is and demanding they medicate them for it (self assured arrogance is a wonderful byproduct of everyone’s-an-expert), to shady business men taking over super powers (dido), the idea that we don’t need professionals any more because we all have access to information, and therefore know everything, is rampant.

The problem with our information deluge is that it isn’t vetted. With no oversight or fact checking, alternative facts become facts when they are repeated often enough. Opinions become truths when you find enough people to repeat them. Part of this comes down to the shear volume of information around us. We’re living in a tsunami of data, and we’re very bad at curating it.

That quote is from 2010. The revolution happened, but it hasn’t been the touchy-feely future of knowledge that we thought it would be. Maybe AI can sort it out, because we’ve made a mess of it.

The flood of social media data has us awash in information, much of it crap. With a waning (professional) fourth estate and everyone on the planet rapidly getting to the point where they can broadcast their opinions no matter how factually bereft, we are living in dangerous times. There was some hope, early on, that crowd sourcing would help manage this onslaught, but it turns out a large proportion of the crowd doing the sourcing are idiots.

Our willingness to absorb untruths are amplified by the idea that we customize our social media feeds based on our own beliefs. Doing so turns our ‘news’ intake into an echo chamber of ideas that only support our world view; a sort of self-fulfilling propaganda. This quickly takes on Orwellian proportions as people who once kept their racist thoughts to themselves suddenly find themselves at the virtual equivalent of a Clan meeting. Those embarrassing prejudices are suddenly worth broadcasting. This process is a powerful one, and its tail is wagging the political dog in 2017.

Alternative is right – this ‘headline’ photo is taken from a
2007 HBO film. Welcome to 2017.

It isn’t just the alt-right who are happy to take this neo-propaganda and make use of it. With no oversight, everyone with a strong opinion is happy to take pictures from a film and publish them as if they are news, just to convince people that what they think is right.

Way back in the naughties (’06 I think) one of my media studies students brought in a video that prompted tears and a lot of conversation. The inevitability of what they proposed in that video caused a lot of anxiety in our class, me included. At the time, social media barely existed so this seemed like a real stretch, but in the dystopian future they describe in the film the traditional news media has fallen apart, eaten by the internet. What’s left is a shallow, sensationalist mediascape that caters to the quality of thought most people aspire to. In the past year I’ve begun to think that this quality of thought isn’t anywhere near where I thought it was.

The description at the end might be starting to feel all too familiar:
“At its best, edited for the savviest readers, EPIC is a summary of the world, deeper and broader and more nuanced than anything available before. But at its worst, and for too many, EPIC is merely a collection of trivia, much of it untrue, all of it narrow, shallow and sensational, but EPIC is what we wanted…” It’s what we have today.

We’re too busy, distracted and incompetent to vet and even critically analyze the media that engulfs us, and we’re too cheap to hire people to do it for us. It turns out we weren’t just paying for information from the fourth estate, we were also paying for critical analysis. But if we can get sensationalism for free why pay for hard truths?

A philosophical underpinning to all of this is the idea that anyone can do or say anything they want simply by wanting to do it. Effort to develop mastery in a skill (ie: professionalism) is frowned upon. We’re told by wealthy people that doctors, politicians, teachers and other professionals are shysters who are trying to take advantage of us, and we buy it! We idolize the mega-rich who are so simply because of the situation of their birth rather than because of any professionally developed skill. The lies we tell ourselves every day are part of a vicious cycle made possible by an information revolution that made everything except learning the truth easier.

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Easy Money

There is a strong undercurrent of animosity about what teachers get paid and a lot of misinformation about teacher average pay. Like anything, it’s more complicated than it appears. Here’s my stab at trying to explain how Ontario teacher pay works, though the people complaining about it probably aren’t interested in any facts:

The latest Ontario secondary teacher salary grid from my board:

http://www.d18.osstf.ca/-/media/districts/d18-staging/ugdsb-occasionals/2017_2/central-agreement/1-electronic-collective-agreement-signed.ashx?la=en-CA

To get your foot in the door on this grid you need to have spent 4 years in an undergraduate degree and then another 2 years getting your bachelor of education. If you’ve ever had any trouble with the law you’re already out of contention. You need to have a clean criminal record to be a teacher.Your average cost for a university degree in Canada these days is about $6500 a year.
https://www.topuniversities.com/student-info/student-finance/how-much-does-it-cost-study-canada
So you’re about $40,000 in debt before you even get a whiff of that ‘super’ teacher pay. Ontario is (of course) one of the most expensive places in Canada to get your post-secondary education:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/733512/tuition-fee-for-full-time-canadian-undergraduates-by-province/

So that $6500 Canadian average turns into almost $8000 a year and your Ontario teacher is typically sitting under about fifty grand in debt to get onto the grid.

Six contract sections don’t exist for new teachers these days. From what I’ve seen, you’d be hard pressed to find any Ontario teacher under 30 years old who has six contract sections (full time equivalence – six sections is a full year of work). It’s fair to expect most teachers to take 5-6 years to get to full contract these days, many give up on the process. There are a number of teachers who, for various reasons, never get to six contract sections and are part time throughout their career.

It takes the typical Canadian student 10 years to get out from under student loan debt, so I put that in too – but didn’t count the ongoing debt required to pay for your teacher training.

Remember that salary grid? To get up the sharp end of it you need to have an honours degree in what you’re teaching and then take additional qualification (AQ) courses after teaching experience to earn your ‘honours specialist’ and get into the top ‘level 4’ section of the salary grid.
https://cpl.oise.utoronto.ca/public/category/programStream.do?method=load&selectedProgramAreaId=18104&selectedProgramStreamId=18599
https://www.oct.ca/members/additional-qualifications/prerequisites

A number of teachers never get there because they don’t have the university background or aren’t willing to spend thousands more dollars when they aren’t teaching to get additional qualifications. You can look up any teacher on OCT to see what their qualifications are and whether they’ve spent more of their own time and money to get additional qualifications.
https://www.oct.ca/Home/FindATeacher

So, to get up to the top end of the teacher’s salary, currently $96,068 in my board, you need to have dropped at least fifty grand on university degrees plus another couple of thousand on honours specialist additional qualifications. Most teachers don’t stop there and get other AQs in other specializations as well (I have 2 other subjects I’ve AQ’d in as well as my honours specialist).

Because of all these variables, calculating what the actual average teacher salary is in Ontario is a tricky business, which is why no one has bothered, but I’ll give it a go:

Your first year you’re teaching as an occassional teacher at the bottom of the grid. Let’s be optimistic and say you’re teaching six sections (full time) on a short term contract, but many aren’t. From years 2-6 let’s say you’re getting one contract section a year and are still able to fill up the rest of your time table with short term contract jobs (again, many aren’t). Let’s assume you’ve got an honours degree in what you’re teaching. In your third year you drop another couple of thousand bucks on getting your honours specialist and move up to level four on the salary grid and keep climbing year over year.

That eighty-three grand average is mighty optimistic. It ignores the endemic under-employment in new teachers these days. It also ignores maternity leaves and any other family or medical leaves that happen in people’s lives. I’d estimate that the average Ontario teacher is making something more like seventy grand a year, with many making substantially less.Wild eyed conservative leaning reporters will bleat on and on about how the average Ontarian should rise up against these overpaid teachers, but when you look into statistics around pay and education level, the typical degree carrying Ontarian makes about $85,000 a year. Your average teacher salary is less than that:

https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/as-sa/98-200-x/2016024/98-200-x2016024-eng.cfm

Playing that rhetorical game and equating people who have spent years of their lives and tens of thousand so their own dollars to earn a qualification with people who haven’t is a nasty bit of neo-con politics. The people playing that game are trying to sell you on equality when they’re actually selling the opposite. We live in a society that rewards dilligence, competence and effort, don’t we? Maybe we don’t.

The benefits and pension piece are another angle that gets a lot of air play. I pay almost eight hundred bucks a month into my pension. If everyone paid that much into a pension plan, they too would have a good one waiting for them. The only difference between teachers and everyone else is that we’re forced to do it. My take home pay as a teacher only equalled my take home pay as a millwright in 1991 after fifteen years and tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt. I’ll have a better pension when I retire as a teacher than I would have as a millwright (though National Grocer’s millwrights were well looked after until they broke the union and fired them all).

I’m always left with the vague feeling that there is some good old fashioned sexism in conservative attacks on teachers. Almost 70% of teachers in Canada are women, and there is no glass ceiling in it because we’re paid equally for the work we do. I imagine this grates on the nerves of the manly conservative men who are looking for reasons to hate on the job and the unions that enabled this equity, but I gotta tell ya, most of those dudes wouldn’t last five minutes in a classroom.

If you’re able to handle the crushing student debt, the hatred of people who couldn’t or wouldn’t do what it takes to do the same job and have the resiliency to survive in classrooms (stats show that typically about 30% of people who do the degree work drop out of teaching), then teaching is a rewarding profession and one of the few remaining that let you lead a middle class life.

If you think you can handle all that and don’t mind being attacked and belittled publiclly by the very government you work for while producing educational outcomes that are envied the world over, then go for it, but don’t ever assume it’s easy money.

I just spent most of the day making no money and walking the picket lines
for better learning conditions for my students while we all struggle under
an almost psychotically vindictive provincial government who seem intent
on hurting the most vulnerable students in our system.

Some stats to consider:

Ontario pays less per student for education than most other provinces while producing results that raise us into the top 10 world wide – but this is Ontario so expect to be attacked for that.

Canada is close to the world average in terms of education spending as a percentage of government spending. Again, Ontario is the largest single system in the country, so we wag that dog too, but expect to be attacked for it.

In terms of cost we’re pretty much neck and neck with the USA, but Canada is top 10 in the world, the US isn’t in the top 30. If you want to be acknowledged and rewarded for a job well done don’t teach in Ontario.

There has been a lot of mis-information around Ontario teachers making the highest salary in Canada. That’s not true either: https://www.narcity.com/life/these-are-the-highest-and-lowest-paying-canadian-cities-for-teachers Toronto is 4th out of 8 on this 2018 list. Teachers get paid more in Nunavut, Alberta and Manitoba, and only make a couple of grand more than teachers in Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan. I’m sure you can quickly figure out the difference in housing costs between Toronto and Halifax or Toronto and Saskatchewan…

Still want to earn that easy teacher money?

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Bottlenecks

It used to be the desktop, but we’ve got more processing power than we know what to do with nowadays. The real bottleneck is internet access. I spent a frustrating day today in a public high school trying to fit an elephant of a live video feed through the doorway – it didn’t fit. If the school was empty, and the network dormant, it ran fine. Unfortunately, I had to share bandwidth with 1500 other people, facebook must go on.

All I needed was a 700kb/sec video feed to run continuously all day. I’ll blame the university for sending us an uncompressed, 640×480 monster of a feed. We could stream youtube or TEDtalks, but not the university live feed. The irony is it was one of the pre-eminent computer science universities in Canada, and they didn’t know how to feed it to us so we could follow it.

After doing backflips all morning trying to fix it, some awesome grade 12 students filled in the afternoon with some presentations on number theory, robotics and computers. It wasn’t a wasted day, but it’s hard to sell technology as a course of study when the guy teaching it can’t make it work.

I’d asked for a priority on the video feed over the 400 facebook accounts that were open, but apparently that’s impossible. I find this frustrating. I had no trouble prioritizing traffic or outright banning it when I was network admining, I’m not sure whether it’s a case of can’t or can’t be bothered. In either case, I’m at the end of a long day trying to make things work that simply won’t because the board won’t adjust bandwidth to need (it’s cheaper) and a university didn’t optimize it’s feed (it’s cheaper).

At the end of it, I got some grade 9s interested in robotics, and considering taking computers further on. I’m not sure that I got through to the half a dozen girls I convinced to come out. We don’t have a single female in grade 12 comp-sci or comp-eng, which I’d really like to fix.

I also wanted to backchannel the heck out of this. I introduced 90% of the students to twitter and showed them how universities use it during seminars, then the university didn’t use it at all, we were the only ones lighting up the hashtags or posting on the facebook page. I also tried running wallwisher.com. This thing could be brilliant. We had it running live on a wall through a projector. Alas, due to bandwidth restrictions, it crashed constantly and wouldn’t refresh at any time.

Until our school board starts taking traffic shaping seriously, the school network continues to be hijacked by facebook junkies and youtubers filling up the bandwidth with noise not remotely related to anything educational.

It’s been a long day watching technology not work.

The End of Google Plus

I was an early adopter into G+. I was already getting the willies about Facebook back in 2011 and was looking for a way to curate links to thinkers and artists that wasn’t designed around monetizing my existing relationships. Facebook serves a purpose – keeping you in touch with extended friends and family, but that echo-chamber doesn’t help you develop new ideas and perspectives, it tends to be a pretty insular place… even a petri dish for spreading fake news. I know a number of people who have since radically diminished or backed right out of the increasingly caustic environment on Facebook, but I was looking for ways out way back in 2011.

That Facebook is an advertising company built around monetizing my personal relationships has always bothered me, so into G+ I leapt. G+ allowed me to curate connections that Facebook wouldn’t. Over the years I’ve developed links to thousands of people, almost none of them based on personal relationships. Those links exist because these people are not mainstream (most celebrities don’t use G+, there’s no money in it). G+ was my go to for intelligent, curated content that I wasn’t seeing anywhere else on the internet.

Google recently announced that is was shutting down Google Plus under what everyone agrees are pretty flimsy circumstances. While other social media giants are leaking data and monetizing fake news in tangible ways, Google is shutting down G+ because of a security vulnerability that never happened. Why it’s really shutting G+ down is because it isn’t what social media is expected to be these days: an efficient way to capture as many people’s personal information as possible in order to monetize it. The problem with G+ is that it’s actually a social media network – people go on there to share ideas and often create long form discussions with each other. G+ isn’t mainstream, doesn’t cater to idiots and don’t produce easily monetizable lies that you can advertise from.

A G+ user recently posted this:  Educators, niche groups will miss Google+

“the people on G+ are just better at the ‘social’ part of networking” – true that. I can expect a constant boil of political negativity and outright nonsense often based on outright lies on Facebook, which has established itself as the low bar for social media because it’s the one everyone is on. We underestimate how many stupid people there are in the world, but Facebook hasn’t and it has become a giant catering to them.  It might have been smaller than other social media, but G+ was a carefully curated, rich source of content I wasn’t seeing anywhere else. I’ll miss it.

The early 21st century attention economy feels a lot like robber baron capitalism of the 19th Century. In that time industrialization was driving new economies in natural resource extraction and manufacturing in an entirely unsustainable way that produced obscene amounts of wealth for a small number of people. Sound familiar? The new resource these days is our attention. If you’ve developed a low relative use (G+ had millions of active users, which isn’t Facebook’s billions) social media platform that encourages long form reading and benign, drama-free interaction between its users you’re not churning through the resource as efficiently as you could be. As a result you’re not aggressively pursuing the marketing money like every other corporate social media platform is.

The upside of this is that the end of Google Plus has me looking for alternatives, and people like Tim Berners-Lee and others are trying to pry your personal data out of the tax dodging attention economy robber barons. Think you could leave the Google mothership? I’m trying.

Some alternate social media sites I’m trying:

GooglePlus users are pretty handy at self organizing (the best they could hope for from Google was benign neglect). Many are working to organise the diaspora.

MeWe: https://mewe.com/myworld
Engineered with privacy-by-design, MeWe turns the table on Facebook and other social media companies with a revolutionary service that emphasizes privacy and social sharing where people can be their true, uncensored selves. No Ads. No Spyware. No BS. MeWe members are #Not4Sale and enjoy the protection of MeWe’s Privacy Bill Of Rights.

Pluspora: https://pluspora.com/stream
A favourite landing spot of G+ users that offers strong user-focused privacy controls.

My next steps are to look into blockchain driven encrypted networks that offer adamant user protections from the powers that be… here’s a link to some early research on that.

Eventually this will mean pulling up stakes at Blogger (Google’s blogging platform), but that’s a tricky business. I’ve migrated to WordPress with Mechanical Sympathy and import blog posts from my three Blogger blogs (Dusty World, Tim’s Motorcycle Diaries and Kingfisher Imaging), but I’ve found blogging in WordPress to be needlessly fussy. Blogger’s great advantage is it’s simple to use which is vital when I’m concentrating on writing. If I can get WordPress to give me a WYSIWYG editing tool that isn’t so annoying when formatting text and inputting digital media I’d be looking at migrating there too.

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Refresh 2

@banana29 got me thinking about the computer refresh going on at her school last week. We’re in the same process at my school.

In my case I’m the head of computers and trying to focus on keeping as many computers as possible in student hands. We waste a lot of machines at teacher desks to do online attendance and check email, work that could easily happen on an alternate, much cheaper and efficient device than a full desktop system, but even those changes would resolve into a desperate attempt to keep things the same.

I had a couple of my seniors do an inventory of the school. We have over 300 desktops. Each costs about $1500 when you factor in purchasing and insurance on them. We have close to half a million dollars of desktop computers in our building, and every year we squirm to keep as many as we can as we are refreshed down. If we were to drop the cost of those desktops, radically reduce the number of printers in the building (and the subsequent tens of thousands of dollars we spend each year on printing), and remove local server storage, we could easily produce over $500 for every staff member and student in the building; more than enough for a device per person, even if those devices aren’t attached to specific people. Some classes with Chromebooks, some with Windows, some with Macs, some on Linux, some tablets, some laptops, some BYOD. A startlingly wide ecosystem of technology that encourages broad familiarity with many digital tools.

Broad Based Digital Skills Development

We status quo our edtech because change is hard, and we’ve borrowed an educationally uncomplimentary business model of I.T.. We fight to keep antiquated desktops because many teachers barely know how to use a ready made lab, let alone what to do with a variety of hardware with various operating systems and software on them. With digital fluency removed from them by board I.T., many teachers have learned helplessness. Those that struggle against this forced ignorance often disappear into the cloud in order to avoid the stifling local computer environment… a choking environment that should be founded on learning, not on ease of management or paranoia.

I’d love to spring us free from the nineties corporate I.T. model we’ve been slavishly following and begin pushing widespread familiarity and fluency on digital tools of all shapes and sizes. I dream of an experimental, curiosity driven access to technology that encourages timely, relevant learning for our students.

I fear we’ll end up finishing another year still running Windows XP on five year old desktops with an increasingly irrelevant OSAPAC software image. I suspect I’m going to escape into the cloud again to escape that choking simplicity, all while playing the keep-the-desktop-game on the management side.

Canada Learning Code: Iterating a Romantic Engineering Process

We had a romantic Valentine’s Day evening after school on a Friday night at Canada Learning Code’s HTML/CSS Valentine’s Card coding night. CLC offers a lot of coding experiences for people who haven’t done it before. You get a room full of volunteer experts who code all day for a living, which I found particularly interesting because I wanted to see how they solved problems.

The majority of people in the room had never looked behind the webpages they view every day, so the presentation started off with explanations of what Hypertext Markup Language and Cascading Style Sheets are (you’re using them now to read this). From there we all installed ATOM, an HTML/CSS editor, onto our laptops and got stuck in.

Coding can seem like an all or nothing proposition to people new to it. Unlike written language, if you have a single error in code the whole thing can become unrunnable with no clear reason why. Imagine writing an English essay and if you have a single grammar or spelling error the whole thing is nonsensical. That’s the challenge of coding, but there are some supports you can put in place that help you deal with this absolutism, and CLC introduces you to all of them.

The ATOM IDE (integrated development environment – like a word-processor for coding) colour codes your text as you’re typing and offers suggestions. It quickly lets you add and change what you’re working on. When you save your code in ATOM you pivot over to your browser and refresh your page to see what’s changed.

While coding is harsh when dealing with errors, a good IDE and that iterative approach of being able to quickly try something helps you work around those error landmines, but getting people into that mindset is tricky, especially after school where we tend to drive students toward one-try grading (quizzes, tests, exams, interviews, performances, pretty much everything we do in education). As a result students have learned not to iterate. If it doesn’t work at first you’ve failed, which is a disastrous approach to coding. Recognizing the value of the engineering process and iteration was the biggest single takeaway for me at this event.

At one point Michelle Mabuyo, the lead of the KW Chapter of Canada Learning Code, ran into a problem with the animations we were running on our websites. Without hesitation she immediately attacked the problem using the same engineering process I continually drill into my students. As she iterated attempts at fixing the problem she kept escalating her scale, eventually reverse engineering the error out of the code from a known good, working program.

Watching someone who is good at something turn it on and do their thing is something I really enjoy. Michelle wasn’t aiming to put on an engineering show, this was supposed to be a gentle introduction to web development, but an error made her kick it up a gear and engineer a solution in real time. My best seniors get to this point by the end of high school, and when they do I know they’re ready to tackle whatever post secondary is going to throw at them.

At one point Muhammad, a software engineer from Google who was volunteering at this event, came by to see how I was doing. He doesn’t spend any time in HTML at Google, but once you understand how code works, you can move laterally into other languages quite quickly. I was trying to do something with the falling hearts animations that was a bit beyond the instructions, so he said what I always say, “look it up!” I told him about the Futurama Fry meme and he laughed because he has a copy pinned up by his desk… and he’s a software engineer!

That self deprecating piece is something that people who are good at something tend towards. The cocky types tend to be way back in the Dunning-Kruger effect. People who are good at something tend to be aware of how difficult it is and are more likely to take a more humble approach.

I really enjoyed our nerdy Friday night Valentine’s Day at Canada Learning Code. I always doubt myself coming in to something like this (my comp-sci teacher did a number on me in high school), but coding (at least when you’re doing it as something other than an academic exercise) isn’t about mathematical perfection, though that was how it was portrayed in my high school comp-sci classes before I dropped them. Coding is an applied process; it’s about an experimental, agile, iterative mindset and never taking your eye off the goal of a functioning solution. From that point of view, coding is little different than tuning the carburetor on my motorcycle.

I have no doubt that I could get more fluent in coding, but it’s a small part of the many subjects I juggle when teaching Ontario’s vague and encompassing computer engineering curriculum. In the meantime, I’ve got the agility and experience to quickly find solutions and modify them to work, and I need to acknowledge those skills. From that I could quickly develop the familiarity with coding needed to do it with less lookup. As a goal for my students, that’s an achievable, applied target, and not something to be ashamed of.

As we were wrapping things up another of the volunteers came by and commented on how much he liked the flip-card 3d effect in HTML. I asked him how it worked and you can guess what he said… look it up! So I did, and was able to get it working in about 5 minutes at the end of the session.

Coding is an opportunity to take risks and not worry about failing because iterating your way out of a problem is the solution. I only wish more computer science teachers would take that approach in Ontario classrooms.

If you get a chance, go to a Canada Learning Code workshop. They have specific meetings for girls, kids, women, teachers and teens, so you can always find a comfortable fit.

At the end of this particular meeting they also offered some pathways for people looking for a career change, which is a whole other angle to this. Coding familiarity is a vital employment skill these days.

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When the Pupil is Ready, The Master Will Appear

From a Zen Koan, anyone who has attempted to gain mastery
in something has probably experienced this to some degree,
but it doesn’t usually happen in the education system.

I always have my ear to the ground, waiting to hear from a student who wants something more than curriculum. On a good year I’m lucky to find one or two students who are looking for a career rather than a credit.

I came across this saying the other week and it got me thinking about that hope I hold out for ready pupils. Teachers are paid to deliver curriculum whether students are ready or not (though the good ones try to minimize this friction); students are mandated to be there. The option to be formally uneducated isn’t available in Ontario nowadays, we’ve institutionalized education into a mandatory process. This regimented system reduces student readiness to engagement and throws the concept of patiently waiting for student readiness out the window. That patience suggests a process where student learning is the main focus. Have we lost the freedom to patiently wait for student readiness to the systemic efficiencies of regimented grading?

That a teacher will appear when you need them to advance your learning is a wonderful thought. It suggests that teaching is implied in mastery, which isn’t the case nowadays. In a time before mastery was monetized, keeping it alive by passing on skills rather than maximizing personal income was a big part of mastery. Waiting on student readiness also places great value on the student, making their preparedness the priority in learning. Engagement isn’t an issue with the student who seeks a teacher. Perhaps the issue is that we’re buried in teachers nowadays.

That the teacher-student relationship has been subverted by the education system is old news. Historically, learning was an experience unique to each individual, usually prompted by innate skill and desire. Systematizing education might mean more people get educated, but not in with the same rigour and certainly not for the same reasons.

Perhaps the most damaging aspect of systemic education is the externalization and abstraction of learning criteria. By setting standards and holding students to them we create a system that has measurable criteria for curriculum, teacher and standards effectiveness. We do this to create the appearance of academic credibility, so learning is not the focus of this kind of education, system integrity is. This modern approach to learning creates a strange distance in the classroom from learning which has led to such insightful comments as, “Those who can do, those who can’t teach.”

When the Zen koan that kicked this off was written a thousand years ago people who taught did so from their own mastery and were driven to do it to keep their expertise alive. Students were driven to learn from a radical sense of self preservation; their learning was central to their lives and livelihood. Teaching wasn’t considered a skill in itself, but was an important tool to keep mastery alive. When we separate teaching from mastery, as helpful as that is for school systems to generate curriculum, qualify teachers and graduate students, it leads us to a strange place where teaching and learning have little to do personally with the people in the classroom. Education has only evolved into this odd system in the past two centuries.

For the vast majority of human history education has been a bespoke experience, unique to the individual. It didn’t happen on a rigid timeline overseen by bureaucrats, and it often didn’t happen at all. When it did happen it was focused on mastery learning, which couldn’t happen until the student was ready for it. That kind of patience is missing from our classrooms and is one of the main reasons it feels so forced, and fake.

Imagining that pre-industrial intensely personal world of learning from our perspective way up here in the regimented twenty-first Century is difficult, yet it is how human beings learned for millennia. In that long ago world many people were left behind, but for the few who were driven to achieve excellence the master would appear when needed.

Building Capacity: Taking CyberTitan from Niche Activity to School Culture

Just over three years ago I stumbled across the inaugural CyberTitan Student Cybersecurity Competition on ICTC’s webpage while looking up statistics for the information and communication technology job market. I managed to convince four of my seniors to take a swing at it. We got better and better round over round as we honed in on the expectations of the US CyberPatriot competition that CyberTitan works from.

In the competition students are given a virtual machine image (imagine a computer operating system like Windows operating inside a window). These images are broken, with improper settings and things installed that shouldn’t be. If you’ve ever had to try and clean a school laptop after a student has used it, you know what sort of messes can occur.

We were already pretty good at IT & Networking and CyberTitan offered us a way to exercise those skills while also discovering a newly emerging aspect of computing: cybersecurity. I found that our expansion into CyberTitan directly supported our Skills Ontario preparation – the two things are symbiotic.

We surprised ourselves by getting an email inviting us to the first Canadian National Finals in Fredericton, New Brunswick in May of 2018…

That success made some noise and the next year we had three teams of six students each. While standing at the student photo for the 2018 finals, Sandra Saric, then VP of Innovation with ICTC, said under her breath, “where are all the girls?” I took that and ran with it, encouraging my strongest grade 9 girls (I barely keep any of them into senior computer engineering classes) to form an all-female team for the 2018-19 season.

The girls did fabulously well, often chasing down our senior team on points. Our junior team, the Cybears, also got us into the top tier of the competition for the first time before getting eliminated in the state finals. The Terabytches offered me an inside look into systemic sexism in education as well as technology and made it clear why so many girls don’t pursue technology pathways in high school and beyond.

The Terabytches won the top female team in Canada wildcard spot for the 2018-19 National Finals in Ottawa and did a lot of press which I think (hope?) opened up the possibility of ICT and cybersecurity careers to more girls.

While 2019 was definitely the year of the Terabytches, it was also a good year consolidating our skills and building capacity. For the first time in 2019/20 we had students returning who were no longer rookies in the competition (our first year team had all graduated). For the 2020 season I encouraged the most experienced and engaged students to make a senior team with the intent of scoring higher in the competition than we’d ever done previously. The team consisted of one of the Terabytches from the year before and the junior team who had gone platinum. They re-branded themselves Kings Guard and tackled the 2020 competition with a focus that can only come from experience.

In previous years we were usually the best of the rest, getting beaten by specialist, urban schools from the big cities across Canada. This year Kings Guard beat all but two of those teams for a third place finish in the semi-final round. We went top-tier platinum and then proceeded to land in the top quarter of the best teams in the world. We’d never breathed the air up here, and it tasted good!

The Terabytches experienced some turnover, but with three veterans and three rookies,

consistently beat their national champion scores from the year before. Our two junior teams also scored well, with Altron in particular punching well above their weight. Both junior teams made it to the gold tier semi-finals and produced strong results. Altron finished top 12 in the world out of thousands of teams. Seeing our little, rural school (it is literally surrounded by farm fields) on a list with some of the top cyber-schools in North America never gets old.

We’re waiting on CyberTitan to announce the Canadian finalists for this year’s competition as I write this, but regardless of the outcome this year’s students have produced outstanding results which point to a way forward for educators across Canada who want to engage their students with a subject that frankly freaks people out.

We aren’t magic. What got us into this was an opportunity to explore an emerging field in technology and make our program more relevant. If you’re curious and willing to give it a whirl, and can find students with the same curiosity, you can get involved with CyberTitan and begin to build capacity in this vital 21st Century fluency too.

Krista Sarginson, who teaches at St Leonard in Manotick near Ottawa, took the plunge this year and had an epic rookie season, finishing second in Canada in the middle school division. As more teachers get involved with CyberTitan, the network grows, as does the support.

Krista described the competition early on as techy and quite particular, but it didn’t take long for her to get a handle on the process and, as you can see from her team’s results, they very quickly got good at it! What could happen next? Hopefully her Cyberlions all head off to middle school (St Leonard is a k-6 school) and encourage them to participate next year. Those vets are likely to clinch a national title! Meanwhile, Krista is encouraging and engaging other teachers in her board.

What does your school get out of CyberTitan? It teaches students and staff hands on about best cybersecurity practices and raises your digital literacy in meaningful ways. Your board’s IT department will love your participation in it as it helps raise awareness around cybersecurity and promotes a healthier digital infrastructure. The media glow around it is also very positive. We’ve had a lot of attention from local and provincial media who are also very aware of the cybersecurity shortage we’re living in. I won’t mention the swag students and coaches receive that includes t-shirts, all sorts of technical support, access to Cisco’s Netacademy, along with medals and awards.

You can find lots of statistics on how behind we are on cybersecurity, and education can play a big part in that. The CyberTitan/Cyberpatriot competition offers students and teachers a well supported and engaging introduction to this exciting field of study, you should give it a go!

This is what nearly 600% growth looks like – it’s gone from a niche activity to a culture…

CyberTitan is only in its third year and has seen growth similar to our own, with over 200 teams from across Canada participating this year. It’s my hope that by 2022 there are over 500 teams competing and the national finals is expanded to include three middle school teams who will duke it out for their own national title.

If we’re going to depend on ICT infrastructure to run our critical infrastructure (and we increasingly are), then we owe it to ourselves to take securing that infrastructure seriously. ICTC’s CyberTitan helps raise cyber-fluency in our education system which will in turn make for a safer, more secure Canada.

***

Wondering how to support CyberTitan from industry?
https://www.cybertitan.ca/index.php/about/partners-and-sponsors/become-a-partnersponsor/

Wondering how to support CyberTitan from government?
https://www.cybertitan.ca/index.php/about/partners-and-sponsors/national-program-ambassadors/

How CyberTitan works:
https://www.cybertitan.ca/index.php/competition-results-2018-2/how-the-competition-works/

This is the US CyberPatriot competition that CyberTitan works with:
https://www.uscyberpatriot.org/Pages/About/What-is-CyberPatriot.aspx

Here’s the presentation I’ve been doing around Ontario education for the past two years:
https://prezi.com/h4kf8yfkdtyr/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy

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The End of Public Education

A timely article in 2019, but I originally wrote it in 2014: https://temkblog.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-end-of-public-education.html

What if public education was merely the result of the need
for factory workers in a newly industrialized society? What
if education has never been anything more than an
expression of economic need?

I was directed to this interview about capitalism and education by the wise woman of twitter. It always amazes me that intelligent people are able to see where society is going and can do nothing to avert the disaster. History is rife with intellectuals warning of impending doom, but the doom happens anyway because the weight of social expectation crushes any individual insight.

You can find all sorts of people abolishing slavery before it finally turned into globalism and got hidden from sight in the third world. Slavery was abolished and re-instituted for centuries, and still exists today because it provides an economic advantage to the rich. If the rich can’t use you, then society is changed to suit. What is worrying about that article (which you really should read) is that the moneyed class no longer has need of a large swath of society. If the public education system was created to support industrialization, it’s about to lose that support as human capital becomes worthless.

“as automation and globalization renders whole swaths of the labour force useless to capital. .. From the perspective of capital, an ever-increasing portion of the population is no longer seen as a resource to be cultivated”

I believe that public education is one of the most powerful things we’ve ever created as a species. It leverages more of our population to maximize their potential than anything else we’ve come up with (yes, even democracy, capitalism or free markets). Even if it was slovenly economics that prompted it, the benefits of public education go well beyond making a few rich people richer. What’s worrying about that interview is that David Blacker has pretty much seen the future as it will unravel, though there is little we can do to stop the social momentum we carry.

His description of schooling is sickeningly accurate:

“in cities and other places, my argument is not that schools are going to dry up and blow away, that we will stop having things called schools. In fact, we might have quite well-funded places called “schools.” Prisons are more expensive than schools. So I think even though the things are called schools, their internal nature is moving further away from citizenship goals, forget learning for its own sake. Those institutions, their level of funding may even increase. To do surveillance and warehousing… maintenance of a school-to-prison pipeline can be quite expensive. So I wouldn’t see an increase in funding of school systems and school employees and school buildings as any particular cause for optimism.”

This warehousing is already happening in Ontario education. The learning to eighteen laws enacted in Ontario in 2006 ensure that students are warehoused in schools until they are eighteen years old by placing punitive limitations on them to ensure compliance (parents and students can be charged for not attending school). An increasing amount of money is spent in Ontario education every year to try and cater to a vanishingly small percentage of students who would rather be elsewhere, but the warehouse is where they must stay. I’d suggest that the edutainment and student engagement push in education also caters to this kind of thinking.

The real crush comes when governments decide to cut education even while expecting it to move from a training to a holding role. It’s a no win situation for educators who are stuck between having to cater to high needs students who don’t want to be students at all and a system that wants to cut their pay, demand extracurriculars and increase class sizes. It’s especially confusing when many teachers assume that their job is still one of teaching.

The problem is that governments are treating schools more like prisons than they are schools, but when you’re trying to game an economy designed around the devaluation of human capital by forcing kids to stay in school, the increasingly worthless people (that would be all of us) are the ones who lose. The only political cost is the vilification of teachers, something many people in the general public are happy to do. In the meantime we’re all trapped in a neoliberal agenda with no way out (unless you’re Iceland).

We’re not even arguing about the same thing any more, education isn’t about teaching people or training them for jobs, it’s about storing all that now worthless human capital. If we accept that then the attack on teaching as a professional activity suddenly makes a very different kind of sense.