Dusty World – Page 32 – Mechanical Sympathy

Competitive Urges and Real World Expectations: How to Differentiate For Experts

One of the ways I differentiate my courses in order to cater to students who will become digital engineers and technicians is to find opportunities to compete in skills based competitions. Not only does this offer them advanced study in specific areas of computer technology, but it also provides curriculum material that often trickles down into my regular course work.

In the fall we took our first run at the CyberPatriot/CyberTitan IT security competition. Cyber-security is a high demand field we don’t produce enough of in Canada. With a very strong team of seniors we made big steps forward in each round figuring out how the competition works and what we needed to focus on to get better at it. Once we knew how to focus on Windows and Linux operating systems and Cisco networking, we got a lot better. By the final round we’d fought our way up to the sharp end of the competition and ended up finishing in the top 10 out of 90 odd Canadian teams. We’re off to Fredericton in May to see how we fare in the national finals.

I’ve been looking at ways to bring cyber-security into my curriculum and this ICTC run competition has provided me with a pile of material on all levels of IT security from the desktop all the way up to networking. In the meantime, I’ve got four students who are national finalists, which looks mighty fine on both a job and post-secondary program applications. The team isn’t a mono-culture either. One student is aiming at software engineering, another at information technology, another at teaching and the last isn’t ICT focused but is a strong, multi-talented student who can solve esoteric problems well. They also work well as a team, so we’re looking forward to seeing how we fare in the finals in New Brunswick.

Meanwhile, we’ve got four students aiming for Skills Ontario provincial finals in Toronto in May. Unlike last year when we tried to commute into the GTA for the event (utter misery), we are lining up hotel rooms and staying overnight, so everyone will arrive early and well rested – no seven hour school bus commutes for us this time. We’ve got last year’s bronze medalist at IT and Networking who is angling for a higher finish, last year’s 7th place electronics student in the hunt for a medal and last year’s 10th place web developer looking for a top five finish. I’ve also got a ringer for the first ever coding competition at Skills Ontario provincials. Like the CyberTitan competition, I’ve been able to lift a lot of useful course focuses out of Skills scopes. Our electronics have diversified and become much more complex thanks to our competitor’s work in skills (and I love that she’s beating the boys in a predominantly male competition). The web development we started last year is going to provide much of the coding focus for our new grade ten computer class that starts next year.

I get a real charge out of competition. I used to coach soccer at school but now I spend my time focused on supporting technology curriculum. The differences are many. Instead of only catering to students who are wealthy enough to not work and have the free time to play games at school all week, I find myself supporting a wide socio-economic range of students, which I find more gratifying. In the process I’ve been able to show many of them opportunities and post secondary pathways that they hadn’t considered before. I didn’t manage to produce a single professional soccer player in years of coaching, but I’ve managed to help engineers, technicians and digital artists begin their careers. Of course, I don’t get paid to do any of this, but finding students and helping them develop into competitive provincial and national challengers is one of the favourite aspects of my job, even though it isn’t actually my job. The hardest part is convincing them that it’s possible; doubt is the hardest thing to overcome.

Meanwhile, in the classroom this semester I’m running yet another round of capped at 31 students software engineering (it’s tricky to stuff 31 student computers into a classroom, but I manage it). I started this course three years ago as a bit of a joke, but I couldn’t run it like one, the opportunities it provides are too real. Our school started offering courses in hockey and camping and I jokingly suggested I make a video game course if we’re giving credits out for recreational activities. I spent much of my youth playing hockey, camping and video gaming, so why not? Of course, I didn’t get high school credits in those things, but I digress.

Our software engineering class has become an applied coding course that focuses on engineering process rather than the mathematical minutia of coding, which I leave to computer science. We start with IEEE’s Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) to get a handle on best practices in real-world software building, then we learn 3d modelling in Blender and scripting in C# in Unity in order to prepare everyone for some game development.

This class has produced published software since the first year it ran and has allowed students to produce digital portfolio work that has gotten many graduates into some of the most challenging post secondary programs in the province. Like the competition opportunities described above, software engineering has turned into an intense but demanding real world opportunity that allows senior students to step up and demonstrate some leading edge digital skills.

We’ve just finished the training portion of the course where the grade twelves introduce the grade elevens to SWEBOK, the basics of 3d modelling and the Unity game development platform. With these basic skills in place everyone then reorganizes into startups and proceeds to develop software titles for the rest of the semester. This time around we’ve got a mini putt VR simulator, a VR based survival game called Grave Dug, a nostalgia arcade title called Devil’s Hollow, a two player cooperative asymmetrical puzzle game called Shield and Staff, an atmospheric stealth title called Instinct and for the first time we’re also developing a non-interactive title focused on 3d animation that should offer our 3d artists a less restricted and more experimental approach to modelling without the complexities of interactivity. We hope to use VR (Tiltbrush, Oculus Medium) and our Structure Sensor 3d scanner to produce less Blenderized looking models and experiment with our design process.

My senior computer technology (TEJ) courses also focus on real world problem solving. We cover CompTIA industry testing for A+ technician in 3M and NETWORK+ administration in 4M, and both courses also do in-school tech support. We’re also building VR ready systems for our board SHSM program to distribute to other schools. Working in real world situations with live problem solving and deadlines is something my students find invaluable, whether it’s in class or in competition. It gives them strong portfolio work (check out our ever expanding collection of 3d models, in 3d!) and prepares them for the intensity of life outside of the rubber walled, failure-not-an-option world of high school. It’s a lot of extra work, but I didn’t get into teaching computer technology in order to be able to spin the same lessons out year after year; the constantly changing nature of the subject area is one of the reasons I chose to do it. The real world challenges and intensity of competition keeps things interesting for me too.

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2019-20: Persistence and Possibility

I stand on the cusp of another year teaching computer technology and I have to say I’m looking forward to it in spite of the various nonsense surrounding Ontario education these days. I have a particularly strong crop of seniors and I’m hoping to exceed the lofty heights we’ve previously reached. @CWcomptech continues to grow and seek out new opportunities.

I’m hoping for at least two Skills Ontario provincial medals and successful runs at CyberTitan and by all three (and possibly a fourth) of our teams. Thanks to the groundbreaking work of our Terabytches last year, we’ve achieved a 50/50 gender split in our cybersecurity teams with 2 co-ed teams and our champion all-female team at a time when the industry is struggling to balance a 25/75 gender split.

I’m also hoping this strong senior group will uncover new opportunities for us to explore, but then they already have. The Cybersmart Project, a student run training course for other schools interested in getting onto CyberTitan started over the summer and has already picked up a number of schools they are going to help.

We had Gord Alexander from IBM Canada come in last year and show our grade 10s how to code IBMcloud’s Watson AI. The pickup on that was amazing with students of all skill levels returning to it in their culminating projects. Gord followed up by applying to present at this year’s ECOO Conference #BIT19 on how students can access this free and very accessible artificial intelligence learning environment. I’m looking forward to helping out with that at the conference.

One of the nicest things about teaching computer technology is that it’s never the same year to year, but sometimes those emerging technologies can be difficult to access. Not so with Watson. If you’ve got students who can code in Scratch, you can get them going with Watson and have scripted, AI supported projects very quickly. I suspect students from grades four onward could manage the coding involved and I’m looking forward to sharing this exciting possibility with Ontario teachers in November.

Over the summer I took two Cisco courses (thanks Philippe!) that will improve our practice. The IT Essentials course was something I’d been looking to complete in order to give my students access to current materials. Up until now I’ve been cobbling things together from books and various online sites. It was a lot of work and constantly falling out of date. The Cisco Net Academy course is current and covers much of what we were doing anyway, but in a concentrated and curated format that should lighten my preparation for teaching IT in junior high school classes.

Having been a certified computer technician since 2002, the IT Essentials course was review, but the other course I took was a bit more ferocious. The CCNA Cyber Operations course is designed for cybersecurity specialists who want to get a handle on the current state of play as they begin working in cybersec. It’s a no-holds barred review of advanced networking analysis tools followed by detailed explanations of how cybersecurity has been implemented in the very networked world of 2019. I’ve really enjoyed taking the course and should be wrapping it up over the next couple of weeks. Having an understanding of best management practices in cybersec should help me coach our school teams more efficiently and effectively. It has also handed me a plethora of current network assessment and management tools that will find their way into my senior ICT curriculum immediately!

2019-20 feels like it could be a banner year. Competition is always fickle and you never know what Goliaths you’ll face, but we’ve never had better access to the tools we need to succeed as we do now. As long as the education system isn’t thrown into an artificial crisis, we should be ready to produce an exceptional year of graduates with rich extracurricular experiences who are ready to tackle the challenging, digitally empowered 21st Century workplace.

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Hybridized Education

The Toyota Prius hybrid car is a series of expensive compromises. Born at a time when we are transitioning from fossil fuels to electrical power, the Prius is a car that combines gas tanks, gas powered drive trains and engines with batteries, and electrical motors that do the same jobs more efficiently. The result is a poor performing car that weights a thousand pounds more than the equivalent gas powered vehicle because it’s trying to live in two worlds at once. If you’ve ever driven one, you’ve got to know that the future is grim indeed. Fortunately, hybrid cars are a momentary blip on the automotive evolutionary scale. As the transition from gasoline to electrical vehicles happens, and electrical infrastructure and technologies improve, the compromise of a hybrid along with all the pointless redundancy will no longer be necessary.

Our education system is in a similar situation, and it’s an expensive moment to have to live through. The future consists of paperless, friction-less information. The past consisted of papered, controlled, expensive, limited access to information. In 2012 education is straddling that paper/digital divide, trying to answer to centuries of paper based tradition while also struggling to remain relevant in a rapidly digitizing world. It’s an expensive gap to cross, and one that is full of incongruities and compromises – ask Toyota engineers, it’s an impossible position to create anything elegant in.

We struggle to produce students relevant to the increasingly digital world they are graduating into while experiencing more paper-based drag than just about any other industry. Whereas business and research have leapt into digitization, driven by the need to find efficiencies in order to be competitive, education struggles to understand and embrace the inherent advantages of digitization. The only urge to do so is in trying to remain relevant to our students – perhaps the least politically powerful (yet most important) members of the educational community.

I see teachers spending thousands of dollars a year on photocopying handouts (of information easily findable online which then get left behind), and no one bats an eyelash. Thousands more are spent on text books that are already out of date when they are published, also often showing information that can as easily be found online. At the same time we struggle to find funds to get the basic equipment needed to embrace digital advantages; the between directions is apparent.

No trees were destroyed in the writing of this blog, but a significant number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.

The good news is that this is a temporary shortcoming – we won’t be building Priuses or trying to fund two parallel (analogue & digital) education systems for long. Once the tipping point is reached and migration happens, the inherent efficiencies of digital information will transform education. In 20 years will look back on this time of factory schools like we look back on the age of one room school houses. In the meantime, the strain of trying to please the past and the future at the same time is causing confusion and misdirection.

We ignore what is happening digitally in society in general and risk becoming increasingly irrelevant as an education system. We also risk producing students who are increasingly unable to perform (aren’t taught how to manage the digital) in a world very different from the one they were presented in school. In the meantime we’re trying to satisfy traditional academic habits in order to appear proper and correct (books on shelves, teacher at the front, tests on readily available information, streamed classes that feed the right students to the right post secondary institutions using the same old established marking paradigms).

Once again, the ECOO Conference, its feet firmly planted in the future, looked forward while getting slew footed by traditional interests. Perhaps the best we can hope for is compromised hybridization. Oddly, those traditional interests often include the people who run IT in education who seem more interested in ease of management than they are in our primary purpose (learning… right?).

The term guerilla-teacher came up again and again; a teacher who goes off into the digital wilderness alone in order to try and teach their students some sense of the digital world they will graduate into. The last presentation I saw by Lisa Neale and Jared Bennett made a compelling argument for bringing the rogue digital teacher in from the cold, but as a digital commando I am reluctant to trust a system that still places perilously little importance on my hard earned digital skills.

Very little of my practice now occurs in traditional teaching paradigms. My classes are all blended (online and live), virtually all of my students’ work happens online in a collaborative, fluid, digital medium. I don’t spend a lot of time in board online environments. It’s as much about my own discovery as it is my students. Traditional teaching situations seem more about centralization, standardization, itemization and control.

If we move past a hybridized analogue/digital divide in education and digitized learning becomes standardized and systematized, I may very well lose interest. There’s something to be said about being a cyber settler, alone on the digital frontier. Perhaps I should be pushing the hybridized divide – it keeps this hacker/teacher beyond the reach of standardization.

Death by Maintenance

One of the dangerous things about watching the shows my son likes to watch is that many of them aren’t what they appear to be. He likes complexity, and there are few things on TV these days as complex as Rick & Morty (if it is ever on TV again…). Like a lot of other modern cartoons, Rick & Morty hides surprisingly complex narrative behind simplistic animation.

Rick is a scientist who has discovered interdimensional travel and so can exist in any timeline. As this ‘infinite Rick‘ he has almost god like power and is constantly criticizing everyone else for not realizing how pointless and narcissistic their reality is – any ethical value they place anywhere is a result of their lack of perspective. This show goes to great lengths to force its viewers to question morality and how embedded it is in our personal circumstances. If you’re looking for a show that makes you feel better about your circumstances, Rick & Morty is the opposite. It shows you a multiverse in which even your unique self isn’t unique let alone special. This pan-dimensional multiverse is so vast and so overwhelmingly indifferent to your circumstances that it continually screams a central premise of the show: nothing matters. Yet even in this chaotic and indifferent multiverse, Rick and the other characters in the show stand out as prime movers; people who make their own meaning in spite of the alienating size and indifference of reality.

In one of the most popular episodes from the last season of the show, Rick turns himself into a pickle so that he doesn’t have to go to family therapy:

He, of course, ends up in it anyway after he fights his way (as a pickle) through an impromptu action movie. The therapist (voiced by Susan Sarandon!) finally gets to judge this character who goes to great lengths to avoid judgement. Her monologue (which Rick immediately bashes as they’re driving away from it) is another of those moments where Rick & Morty gets startlingly real:

I have no doubt that you would be bored senseless by therapy, the same way I’m bored when I brush my teeth and wipe my ass. Because the thing about repairing, maintaining, and cleaning is it’s not an adventure. There’s no way to do it so wrong you might die. It’s just work. And the bottom line is, some people are okay going to work, and some people well, some people would rather die.

Each of us gets to choose.

This is idea of death by maintenance has stayed with me. I turn fifty next year and I’m on my way to two decades in a career I’d never have guessed I’d be doing. Unlike many teachers, I’ve never been struck by the divine ‘calling’ of teaching. My early life of rolling over into a new career every few years as emerging technology caught my attention and encouraged me into learning something new is a distant memory while pensions, mortgages and stability drive most of my decisions these days. I imagine this is how most people age until they end up the typically habitual old person who is scared of everything and avoids risk at all costs until they are in a nursing home. It’s a long battle to get to that point of declining mediocrity, and the win condition kinda sucks.

In my younger years, with very little guidance or support from home, I struggled through high school, college, apprenticeships and university, trying to find my way towards a life that made best use of my abilities. I walked away from stability and income many times in favour of those opportunities as a young man, and it’s why I’m where I am now, but I’m not inclined to follow that trajectory and maintain myself into mediocrity. If I can’t find satisfaction in teaching, I’ll go elsewhere, but I’m hoping that teaching is one of those careers that can evolve with me.

The first ever blog post I did on Dusty World way back in 2010 was on Caution, Fear and Risk Aversion in students. Those students are long gone but the learning risks we took paid off for many of them. Taking risks and pushing learning has become my default setting in the classroom. If we can’t reach for the potentially undoable then we’re just maintaining ourselves into mediocrity. Whether it’s dangling students out in competition or creating difficult courses that push them to deal with real world consequences, including failure, I’ve got to find my way past the learning as maintenance approach or teaching is going to get dangerously stale and abstract.

Speaking of real, with the return of school this year I’ve realized I’ve only got a decade left in teaching. I’m not sure how I’ll be able to approach that in a way that will let me finish with alacrity, but whatever it is, it’ll need to be something other than status quo maintenance teaching. I know a number of my colleagues find this approach tiresome, but it’s the only way I’ll be able to stick with the job. Some people love maintaining the status quo and ensuring continuity and conformity, they thrive on it! I’m not one of those people.

Some find Rick’s lack of boundaries or context upsetting, but it’s that kind of existential freedom that we all enjoy, we just hide it behind socially constructed barriers. Rick isn’t special, he just realizes that his future is his to author and doesn’t have to be determined by overly restrictive social norms. In that freedom he prizes adventure and risk as the only real way to live and grow. Testing boundaries and pushing limits is where we find ourselves. When I eventually retire I hope I can dedicate my remaining years to those same goals and not spend my time and energy hiding from life. If there is a better working definition of lifelong learning, I’ve yet to hear it.

If you’ve never watched Rick & Morty, give it a go. Many of your students are.

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Tech Girlz

Girl Power

On a cold, snow squalling Saturday morning I had another PLN twitter moment courtesy of Shadi Yazdan on Twitter. Her link to this New York Times blog has a fantastic video with re-written Beastie Boy lyrics – talk about reclaiming media. That the author takes a very misogynistic song and uses it to empower girls is ironically compelling. This spin only amplifies the message in the video: that girls are groomed to be objects, but they don’t have to listen.

I’ve long agonized at the complete lack of *any* girls in *any* of the senior computer engineering or computer science classes at my high school. We’re in a small town/rural community so the interest in high-technology is pretty limited anyway. If we have high-skills specialist majors it’s in heavy industry or arts. Of course, once they leave our small town high-tech is one of the most in-demand industries to work in, but without the culture to support it I’m finding this a continuing struggle, and one that if I lose does a disservice to our graduates who enter the working world missing imperative digital skills the rest of the world is expecting them to have.

After looking over this article it appears that the number of women in high technology is declining across the sector. Is this because as consumerism becomes our main form of socialized identity we become stereotypes of our gender, age and income? Girls become consumerized princesses, boys become consumerized soldiers? Not so long ago we learned our social roles through complex traditional influences like nationalism and religion. In our brave new border-less world where money is the main defining feature of our social character we become shadowy stereotypes of the consumer data that pours out of us.

Women in Technology by the numbers.
From 37% to 14% in the past 25 years?

Boys and girls both suffer a limited existence in this environment, though the female stereotype carries with it a submissive objectivity that ensures that girls are mainly valued in terms of their appearance, whereas boys are stereotypically the doers, girls are passive.

Of course, this is ridiculous. Your ability to think is your magic power in engineering or coding, your gender doesn’t enter into it. It is only because girls are convinced that boys are ‘tough enough’ to handle the maths or the complexity of engineering and programming that they get shaken out of the field; stereotypes forcing inequality.

It appears my struggle to convince small town/rural high school girls to give computer studies a try goes well beyond the limiting geography and toward a societal trend. That doesn’t mean I’m going to stop, but it does make me consider this from media influence rather than as a primarily local influence.

http://www.ncwit.org/sites/default/files/legacy/pdf/BytheNumbers09.pdf

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/20/a-viral-video-encourages-girls-to-become-engineers/

Professionalism: it’s more than skin deep

Head’s meetings give me a chance to think without constantly having to juggle the needs of dozens of students at once. Our most recent one had us developing a school mission statement. The idea was that if staff develop the mission they’ll be more likely to back it. It was an agonizing process of planning by committee, but we got it done.

In the process of developing this statement one of the more golden heads suggested that focusing on the dress code would reinvigorate a sense of professionalism in the staff. I don’t entirely disagree, dressing appropriately does help present a sense of professionalism, but thinking that an enforced dress code will somehow improve professionalism in staff had me thinking about what is involved in a teacher’s sense of professionalism.

Visual cues like dress codes felt like the crust of something much more complicated, so I went to work on an orange.

If you want a sense of a teacher’s professionalism start with their qualifications. Do they have advanced qualifications (honours, post-graduate, master-technical, etc) in the subject areas that they teach?

Have they expanded their teacher training from what they graduated teacher’s college with? Do they demonstrate the kind of life long learning they claim is so important in their students?

Are they attending subject specific PD to improve their ability to teach this material in the most current and comprehensive manner possible? Do they create curriculum? Serve on their subject council? Work to improve learning in their subject area in other ways?

Have they developed a diverse personal learning network (this doesn’t necessarily have to be digital). Are they known in their school, in their board, in their province, in their country, in their world, as a collaborative and supportive colleague? Do they encourage growth in learning? Do they interact with other educators to improve their craft?

Have they taken on school leadership roles? Are they known in the school as a dependable fixer? A colleague who puts the needs of the school before their own? Do they work in other aspects of the school? Student competitions? Sports? Clubs? School events? Academic initiatives?

Have they ever supported the organization that protects their profession? Volunteering for union work says a lot about how much a professional is willing to put themselves out to protect their profession. It also demonstrates a sense of belonging to that profession.

There is probably much more you could put into the orange, but these many things are what feed the skin of the orange (the appearance of the teacher). Dress codes and appearance do matter, but professionalism is much more than skin deep.

***

At its root professionalism is a self driven desire to improve one’s field of work. Being self driven is the key to professionalism and the major difference between an employee and a professional. The professional takes their work to heart and self-identifies with how they are doing it, an employee just does what they are paid for and no more. Employees require direction. Professionals are self directed. Unfortunately, I know a fair number of teachers who approach teaching as an employee. If you want to resurrect teacher professionalism it doesn’t mean ties for all, it means getting those disaffected employees to approach their profession with a sense of authorship.

… unless you play for Newcastle

The other morning I was watching Premier League Football and heard about how Newcastle has hired an motivational speaker for its players. The millionaire players who never had to grow up and get paid more per week to play a game than I make in a year need motivation? This speaks to professionalism in a big way. Having been coddled and paid ludicrous sums of money since they were teenagers, many of these players have no idea how good they have it playing a game that the rest of us pay to play for leisure. Can you be a professional without a profound appreciation of the importance of the work that you do? This situation does point to a key element of professionalism: an unwavering commitment to your profession and a willingness to seek constant improvement. You’re not a professional unless you’re always on the clock, always ready to perform beyond minimal expectations.

A doctor doesn’t get to say she’s on holiday when someone has a heart attack on the beach where they happen to be vacationing. It is professionalism that drives her to say that she is a doctor and perform her duty. When you see Mike Holmes losing his mind about poor craftsmanship in a home reno you’re seeing a man railing against a lack of professionalism. When Newcastle has to hire a motivational speaker to convince its millionaire players to do their job, you’re looking at a deep lack of professionalism.

Professionalism seems to germinate in people where the work they are doing is valued, valuable and challenging. The professional becomes attached to their profession, self-identifying with it and authoring their approach to it.

Professionalism isn’t conformity, it’s empowerment. Many workplaces use the word professionalism while offering staff no opportunity to critically assess and improve their process. In such dictated working environments professionalism is a catch phrase for doing what you’re told promptly and without question (ie: being manageable). These workplaces have a strange democratic flatness to them – we’re all professionals here at Xmart! Perhaps this is why professionalism is so confused in the modern mind – we have a misplaced idea of what it is.

Out of high school I became I millwright’s apprentice. One of my mentors, Leo, was an older Caribbean gentleman who was incapable of sugar coating things, though his honesty was presented with a Jamaican easy-goingness that made it easy to listen to. One day he told me the story of our department supervisor. This was the guy who used to take night shifts and then roll himself under a truck and fall asleep for hours. He had one of the worst work records in the shop and was known for being the guy you shouldn’t go to see if you were having technical problems. He got promoted off the floor to minimize the damage he was doing there. Leo looked me in the eye and said, ‘that’s what most management is. If they were good at something, they’d still be doing it.’ I’ve tended to approach management with a suspect eye ever since.

Leo was proud of his mechanical skills, he was a master of his trade. He took great pains to perform his job at the highest level and continually looked for challenges to grow his skill and knowledge. That one of the most impactful mentors I’ve ever had wore coveralls while the clown running the department showed up in shirt and tie every day has meant I’ve always preferred to see what people do rather than what they look like before I start to form an opinion about their sense of professionalism.

Between the smoke and mirrors business-appearance sense of professionalism and the demonstrated excellence of the true professional there is a lot of social static. Things are further complicated by organizations eager to use the term professionalism as an adjective to encourage compliance and conformity to corporate norms, but for professionalism to germinate the person doing the work has to have control over their approach to the work – and germination is indeed the process. You can’t force professionalism with a dress code. What you can do is create a fertile environment where people are engaged in their work. Where the work is challenging and complex enough that it makes demands on the worker to continuously develop their own approaches to it rather than being managed into a conformed response. Systematized work environments are the death of professionalism.

In spite of the business blah blah that greets you when you look up professionalism, there isn’t a single, regimented pathway to it unless you’re in business where your can-do attitude and proper attire matters more than any specialized skills you may have. Professionalism blooms out of expertise and works in service to it. Some of the best teachers I’ve ever had wore overalls, many of the worst wore suits. Appearance can be as much a distraction as it can be an indicator of professionalism (unless you’re in business).

NOTES

True Colours offers some real insights into personality types. Being a green / blue I’m not beholden to social expectations or image. The Gold who suggested adhering to dress codes is though. Where she thinks that professionalism can be generated by dressing nicely, I’ve experienced the opposite. I try to keep this in mind when I hear someone suggest something that I have an immediate negative reaction to. What works for them might work for them…

A teacher focused technology initiative

Email intercept: @tk1ng to school admin, 12/9/11

re: tech coaching and tech possies

Dear Administrator,

…I showed an interest in tech coaching, but my real intent lies in empowering the teachers we have in the school who have displayed persistent curiosity and tenacity in developing technology in the classroom.I found that I was able to lob netbooks and other useful tools at tech-keen teachers last year to good effect. One of the main reasons I considered tech-headship again was to retain that access to tools.
Is there anything board side or within school directions that allow us to create a group around technology use in teaching and try to spread the knowledge to our largely disassociated colleagues? The tech-coach position seems like it heads in this direction, but it seems librarian and online research focused exclusively.
With a wee budget and some keen hands we’d be able to show various digital tools at staff meetings, perhaps even during PD days or rotating around PLCs.
We had a tech-council a few years ago, but it never really met or did anything. I’m thinking of more of a grass-roots, teacher focused support group with this, perhaps with shared PLC time and some access to online tools and hardware in order to develop some intelligent digital pedagogy.
Whatcha think?

Think I can get a tech-posse going?

A teacher based, grass roots group who are into tech and are willing to take some risks to implement it in class and diversify the monoculture of school board computer access?

A group that can get access to non-standard equipment and try out its use in classroom situations?

A group that could expand our almost non-existent digital pedagogy? Perhaps even in a coherent manner?

With no budget we could beg and borrow board equipment that is otherwise relatively unused. With a tiny budget and some freedom to try the incredible variation in technology available beyond the walls of the school, we could experiment hands on with various tools and examine their application in real learning situations.

***Alas, the board doesn’t have any kind of initiative like that, but our VP is keen to get the tech-posse together and see if we can’t begin to organize a little bit of a digital renaissance within our walls.

Why oh why don’t boards and ministries fund micro-initiatives like this, looking to find and develop potential hot groups, and build PD from the ground up instead of top down?

Perhaps this kind of genuine seed change doesn’t earn you enough political points, demonstrate senior management reach or spend enough of the budget in one place.

In the meantime, I’m going to see if I can’t get the grass burning just a little bit where we are.

Tablets are like high heels

I’ve had an opportunity to use a Motorola Xoom tablet this week and respond to my board about how it might be used in class rooms. I’ve been crushing on the idea of getting a tablet for a while now. After using netbooks in class last semester, I love the idea of a rotatable screen that lets you read without over-scrolling, the super battery life, instant on functionality and the super small form factor.

Last year at ECOO I got to use an ipad for a day, but the wireless was so dodgey (not the ipad’s fault), that I barely got any real sense of how it could work. This time round the tablet was with me at work, at home and everywhere in between.

The Xoom has a higher resolution, wide screen and faster processor than the ipad2, and runs on the Android Honeycomb OS (it’s basically a google device). It gets along natively with any google apps and lets you access the MASSIVE android marketplace so that your six year old can play a lot of Angry Birds. It also plays Flash, so you don’t get the internet-lite ipad experience.

One of the amazing things about touch screens is how quickly and intuitively people take to them. Said six year old was tossing birds at towers in moments, and skipping through the OS to watch youtube or find new software. As a tool for children, or people new to the world of digital content, tablets make a great opening. Tablets offer a great feel of immediacy, you’re actually touching the content. Keyboards start to look like bars on the door to the digital wonderland. Thinking about how poor most people’s typing is, this might be a tablet’s greatest strength.

The android honeycomb OS works well enough, I occasionally experienced bog downs when trying to type (an agonizing process on a touch screen which I thought would be better than what happens on my touch screen android phone, but wasn’t). Its biggest draw back was no Firstclass (school email) android app, so I couldn’t see board email, which makes it somewhat useless as a communication device for me at work (the Firstclass web interface stinks). If our board moves to Google, as it looks like it will, Honeycomb will suddenly look like a smart choice though.

Any kind of data entry is where I fall down on this tablet thing. I’ve seen certain (Barkerish) people touch typing on ipads (curious to know what her wpm are), but this seems like a painful transition. My typing on the Xoom alternated between trying to thumb type while in landscape mode and not being able to reach the middle of the keyboard (and I don’t have small hands), thumb text typing in portrait mode but the weight of the tablet made this uncomfortable, or trying to actually type from the home keys while it’s on my lap or on a table (when it wasn’t trying to re-orientate itself). The lack of tactile feedback if you’re a touch typer means you’re relearning how to assess accuracy (made more difficult when it pauses on you before barfing out a pile of letters). The lack of response and no tactile feed back had me deleting half a line of painfully entered text only to go back and make corrections. Trying to touch the screen and go to the specific error was pretty hit and miss, so I often resorted to the ‘screw it, I’ll start over again’ approach.

I like to make content, especially writing. I can’t imagine using a tablet for that. It was even uncomfortable for tweets and social networking, I just didn’t like trying to enter data into it. I could work at improving typing on the screen, but I don’t think I’ll ever come close to how fast I can type on a good, tactile, nicely spaced keyboard with responsive keys, so why bother?

The other contenty side of things for me are graphics. If I’m working in photoshop, I need processing horsepower to move big files (not a tablet forte), and very fine control (a super high dpi mouse minimum, or a very accurate drawing slate). A finger print covered screen that only senses gross motor commands sets of my OCD (I HATE dirty screens, I even clean my car windshield often), and does very little for me in creating graphic content where I want fine control of the environment.

I get the whole tablet thing, I mean, who wouldn’t want to look this cool? And tablets aren’t without their perks. The battery life is incredible, I ran it all day at school, then it came home and got beaten up on by @banana29 and the mighty Max, often doing very processor heavy tasks – even in that consumptive environment, it took 13+ hours of constant on again off again use before it cried for a recharge.

The instant on functionality is another aspect of that immediacy that must appeal to the old or very young, it removes another barrier to access. All computers should be instant on, no boot time at all, otherwise the web isn’t immediate, and becomes a secondary mental realm instead of enhancing our reality. You don’t get enhanced reality after a 30 second bootup. Win7 does quite well on new laptops with this, open the lid and it’s on, everything should be that instant, or it’s just too far away.

As a web browser, the tablet seems untouchable. I wish they could design a laptop screen that would rotate to vertical for reading and writing, then drop into horizontal mode the odd time you need it like that; auto-rotation rocks. I think I’d keep it in portrait mode most of the time, I don’t watch high def movies on a laptop, I’m not sure why wide screens are now the norm, I’d prefer a tall one.

The size of this tablet is pretty sweet too. The Xoom would disappear into any kind of bag with ease, and is very light and so thin as to be invisible.

What I’ve got here is a device that is only good in a few, specific situations, it fits in a very thin place between my smart phone and my laptop, a space that I suspect is actually too small for me to care about now that I’ve tried it.

I don’t care for super small phones, and I’d be just as happy with a big 5 inch smartphone that has tablety qualities than I would with a book sized tablet that works well as a reader, but I can’t seem to find another use for. If convergence is what we’re aiming for, tablets are an offshoot that will eventually be subsumed by a smartphone evolution (I’d bet on build-in, interactive projectors in phones that make bigger screens moot).

The Xoom and ipad look fantastic, but the touch screen makes me nuts when it gets finger printy, and is sometimes unresponsive (though I must admit having less problems there with the ipad, so maybe that’s an Android issue, or just what you get for not having to run any gadgets or flash). You wouldn’t type anything meaningful on a tablet, you can’t take decent photos or video with it (you’d do far better with a dedicated camera), but it looks fantastic, futuristic and makes the user look very chic.

Like those awesome Tron inspired stilettos, the Xoom is great to think about using, but after 10 minutes, you wouldn’t be getting much done and it would just hurt, though you’d still look fabulous!

Tablets are like high heels PART DEUX! (complete with awesome geeky high heels!)

paper teachers

This is another go at the Tyranny of Paper, with a sprinkling of teacher psychology…

Ecology

Trying to balance photocopy budgets.

I recently got my photocopying costs for the computer department for the first half of the spring semester. Every class we teach in computers has a 1:1 student:computer ratio. You’d think there wouldn’t be any photocopying costs.

The one teacher we have teaching computers full time did $273 in photocopying from February to April this semester. I happen to be teaching an English so I get to see their copying costs too. The most expansive copier in English where they have to kill to get computer access and have to actually teach letters on paper? $217. Most of the others were less than half that.

This made me angry. If you have computers in front of every student, why in heaven’s name wouldn’t you use them to communicate with your students? How would teaching computer programming be easier on paper? With a limited budget that requires very specific (and expensive) hardware and software, why would I want to spend 1/5 of my budget so a single teacher can produce thousands of sheets of paper?

A recent analysis of photocopying costs (one of the single largest costs in our school and I imagine most others), was that a typical student collects an entire tree worth of handouts in their k-12 career…
each…
student…

The ecological costs are staggering. Billions a year and entire forests are consumed so students around the world can get handouts. I’m not convinced the return on investment balances the educational advantages with the ecological costs, but education is a conservative beast, and getting it to change industrial era habits isn’t easy.

Psychology

Teacher preparing for class

The ecological disaster aside, I’ve always been curious about this photocopying habit in teachers. In teacher’s college I asked myself why I was lining up for photocopiers all the time. When you’re new, you are terrified that what you’re doing will not take the whole period, so you structure it on a photocopy to slow students from tearing through the work. It also takes the attention off you and puts it on the desk, so you don’t feel like you’re madly tap dancing for the whole lesson. It also means you’ve done much of the organization for students who seem increasingly incapable of organizing themselves. Lastly, it allows you face the students while giving them information, something a new teacher is conscious of every time they turn their back to write on the board.

After using the photocopier crutch for the first couple of years I put an end to it. I use the board if I need to display visually or help students organize information. I trust in my ears and the relationship I’ve developed with my class (which can often involve a Snape like, direct approach to inappropriate action early in the semester) when it comes to helping them learn with my back turned. Watching some of our senior teachers, I get the sense that they never put the photocopying crutch away, in fact, they’ve developed their entire career around it.

I also had the benefit of not being particularly beholden to 20th Century habits around institutional teaching, and leapt at the opportunity to get into elearning and digitally based education early on, further removing me from the pulp and paper teachers. One of the big cultural divides in our school is between the paper teacher and the digital teacher.

Media Arts Course webpage (NING)

I still occasionally have to make copies, typically for tests and such, but I try and minimize that too. When compared to department averages, I typically produce about 1/10th the copies. When I’m given a computer lab, I typically produce no copies at all. Course webpages, wikis and shared documents are the means of information transmission. In media arts I’ve had students submitting shared docs (google or skydrive) and prezis when they need to show a presentation. The entire course takes place on a private social network (Ning).

The past couple of months we’ve had a Canadian copyright foundation watchdog asking people to write down what they’re copying to ensure fair distribution of copyright funds. How very 20th Century of them, but I guess a modern high school is just the place to monitor people still doing what they were doing twenty years ago.

hiding behind photocopies

paper teacher
copies of a copy

Hack The Future

Between questions of how student data is being used and technology monopolists pushing for standardization in edtech, I’m left with an uneasy feeling. As we reach a tipping point in digital educational technology we simplify and standardize to the point where the people doing the teaching don’t know or care what happens behind the curtain. What is happening behind that curtain is being decided in closed rooms between multi-national corporations and governments. The bait is a ‘free’ digital learning system for education. The payoff is habituated users and data mining on a level unprecedented in history, and we’re happy to sell our students and ourselves into it in order to get the freebies.

If this were all happening in the light of day I’d be a lot happier about it. That it’s happening behind closed doors and shouldn’t be publicized is something that should concern everyone.

If you’re not paying for it you’re the product being sold. Corporations may state that they do no evil but they aren’t after what education is after, they are after profit. That student information is being brokered well beyond the reach of educational institutions by these information merchants should be a cause of concern, but instead I see public educators increasingly branding themselves with corporate logos and shouting their evangelism from the social media rooftops.

Technology is exciting, and digital technology is such an intimate thing because it nestles up to our minds. Our habit of elastically coupling with our technology suggests that digital-tech is going to become an intrinsic part of how we see ourselves. People are already describing unplugging as feeling like an amputism, it’s only going to become more entwined, especially as we begin to wear our digital selves.

I’m reminded of Kenneth Clark‘s unsettling end to what many consider to be the best documentary series ever created, Civilisation…

http://youtu.be/waoEyjE_dtU?t=35m31s

Start at 35:30 if the link doesn’t take you right there.

That one of the most intelligent observers of human society was pondering this in the year I was born lurks in the back of my mind. Machines that make decisions for us, many educators seem thrilled with this idea. You may be all gungho over the latest shiny i-thing or googly-eyed over that app that will revolutionize your teaching, but the true costs of these things are a carefully kept secret. At the very least, when we adopt a single digital ecosystem (no matter how free it is), we’re selling our students (and our own) habitual technology use into a closed environment.

As educators it should be a goal to recognize tools in terms of what they can do rather than how easy they are and how well integrated they come. And we should never be deciding on a tool that inserts itself into the learning process based on how little we’re expected to learn about it. Technology and the internet aren’t Google, and tablets aren’t Apple. Computers aren’t Microsoft. Only by offering students access to all of these things and more are we approaching the teaching of technology in as complete and well rounded a way as possible.

Over the past ten years I’ve watched education stagger into digitization always hesitant to change old ways, and I’ve pushed as hard as I can to encourage that change. Only by catching up to this revolution can we hope to prepare students for the strange world that awaits them. Now that we’re at a tipping point I’m watching what could be a powerful new fluency being boiled down into canned access to technology, always under a single brand. Instead of teaching technology like it’s becoming an intimate part of our lives (which it is), we pass it off with idiotic notions like ‘digital native‘ that allow people who have no interest in learning technology to also off-load the responsibility of teaching our children about technology. Into that ignorance vacuum corporations have crept, offering you an easy solution, and most people are more than happy to take it even if it means being walled in to a monopoly.

I wrote last on the idea of being a tech-ronin, a digital samurai without a master. That works for me but I come from a time before data dictated who I am. I’m worried about my students. In a world where we’ve sold them into digital servitude as data sheep (call them digital natives if that makes you feel better), the only way out is to know the system well enough to circumvent it. Instead of teaching a closed, monopoly limited mindset in technology that serves everyone except my students, I want them to develop a broad understanding of digital tools and how they work. In a broad edtech learning environment my students will develop a meta-cognitive view of both technology and how they are represented by it. In a time where we are increasingly defined by our data the only free people will be the ones who have a sense of themselves beyond their student record in the LMS.

My department logo has ‘learn how to build the future’ on it, but perhaps I need to make a change just to give my students a chance to self-realize beyond whatever data metric they are being sold into.

Rage against the machine