We have more computer access now than we’ve ever had before, both in and out of school. We have more internet access now than ever before, both in and out of school. This is all simple fact…
The full non-twitterized quote was, “Great, I couldn’t find a computer lab to book, now I won’t get my marking done.” Implication? You book a computer lab so the kids have something to do while you catch up on work. You don’t teach using computers, they are a way to keep students amused, distracted.
Anecdotally speaking, the vast majority of labs I walk by on any given day contain a teacher studiously ignoring their students, either on a computer themselves or frantically marking, while their students wander the internet looking for entertainment, the room aglow with the moderate cobalt blue of Facebook.
Last week we had a teacher angrily emailing because the labs he’d booked while he was absent had been double booked. Implication? I can book a lab while I’m away so the students have something to do. Presumably there was work attached to the lab booking, but once again there was no teaching involved in it. You book a lab so a supply teacher doesn’t have to teach either.
This does a couple of damaging things. First of all, it reinforces in student’s minds that computers are only for entertainment. If the teacher isn’t actively involved in the use of computers in the class, if computer access isn’t intrinsic to what students are learning, then we only reinforce the idea of technology as an entertainment/time waster.
I teach media arts in an Apple lab. It seems like a dream technical teaching situation, but the difficulty in trying to get students cultured to vegetate in front of a screen to recognize all that they don’t know, and use a computer for productive and/or creative purposes is agonizing. It’s like trying to get a morphine addict to recognize how small measured doses can actually help someone manage pain; they don’t care, they just want to keep overusing it for their own amusement.
I want to thank all those teachers who use school computer labs as a distraction that encourages these bad habits.
Another problem is teacher computer literacy. This is a major problem in the general public, and in teachers as well; people generally know how to do only a few things, and have no idea how what they use works, they certainly aren’t experimental with their usage. Teacher lack of familiarity with computer and internet use makes them poor facilitators in digital learning environments, and they aren’t going to get much better at it if they treat computer lab time as an excuse to do work irrelevant to what students are doing.
If we’re going to develop digital pedagogy, we need to be recognizing how digital tools can become vital components in learning and not merely a replacement for analogue options (ie: poster board/PowerPoint, pen & paper/word processor) that you can leave students with in a lab while you catch up on marking.
Left to their own devices (and they almost always are), students on a computer revert to simplistic habits: Facebook lurking, Youtube staring or the dreaded pointless online game/time-waster. This disconnect also produces the vast majority of school computer vandalism, something that actively prevents us from buying more computers (because we have to keep repairing the under supervised labs we have instead of having cash on hand to develop diverse educational technology).
These are usually the first teachers who complain about lack of access, because they can’t find themselves a period off. As a teacher that has technology baked into their curriculum, these people make my job that much harder than it already is.
This week I brought some 360° cameras to the 2017 ECOO Conference to show how (kind of) easy it is to make immersive media for virtual reality viewers like Google Cardboard. I brought along my favourite 360 camera, the Ricoh Theta (physical controls, good shape, very intuitive to use, easy to manage and produce files), and some others:
a Samsung Gear360 4k camera (harder to access physical controls buried in menus, awkward shape, files that are such a pain to use in the Samsung software that it will take you days to turn out content)
a 360Fly 4k not-quiet 360° camera (awkward wireless controls over smartphone, doesn’t stitch together 2 180° images into a full view, water/cold proof and tough, easy to manage files, useful time lapse functions built in)
at the last minute I brought along the Instapro 360 8k professional camera, but it demands a special type of SD memory card so I couldn’t make use of it. The software and hardware is also very difficult to manage – it’s going to take a while to figure this camera out.
360° cameras offer a unique opportunity to capture a moment in a way that hasn’t been possible before. When combined with immersive VR viewers like Google Cardboard, full systems like HTC’s Vive or upcoming Google Daydream platforms, 360 video and photography allow the viewer to inhabit the media, looking out into it as a part of it rather thank peering at it through a framed window as we’ve always done before.
This lack of perspective, framing or directional intent makes 360 video and photography a very different medium to work in. The tyranny of the director’s eye is gone, leaving the viewer to interact with the media as they see fit. This is both good and bad. If you’re watching a film through Steven Spielberg’s director’s eye you’re seeing it better than you probably could yourself; you benefit from that framing of a narrative. If you’re looking at an Ansel Adam’s photograph you’re experiencing what he saw and benefiting from his genius in the process. That eye and the ability to effectively use a medium to demonstrate it is what makes a good film director or photographer, but 360 media tosses all that out.
The irony in all of this is that being a good 360 director has more to do with setting a scene and getting out of the way than it does with framing everything just so. It also means that if your viewer has a trained eye they can find moments in your media that you might not even have intended. It also means that if the viewer of your 360 media is technically incompetent or has the visual standards of an amoeba they won’t find anything of value in it at all. Suddenly the audience has a lot of control over how effective your media is when you’re shooting in 360.
The examples below show just how 360 images can be directed like former ‘windowed’ media or left open and viewer directed:
When the media maker directs your view, you see what they want you to see:
Or you can produce 360 media that the viewer controls that maybe tells the whole story:
Teaching visual intelligence will become much more important in the future if 360 media and immersive virtual media viewing become the new norm. If your audience is too visually ignorant to make effective use of your media they won’t recognize the value in it. I wonder if you won’t see directed views of 360 media done by people who can still provide the majority of people who aren’t interested in building up visual media fluency the chance to enjoy media at its maximum effectiveness.
Beyond the director/audience change in power there are also a number of challenges in producing effective 360 media. The biggest problem is that the camera sees everything, so you can’t have a crew out of sight behind the lens because there is no out of sight. We’ve gone to ridiculous lengths in producing 360 video for our virtual school walk through in order to try and let the viewer feel like they are immersed in the media without drawing their attention to the apparatus that is being used to create the media.
Tools like GiimbalGuru’s 360 friendly gimbal that minimizes wobbles that are much queasier in immersive VR viewers than on screen helps the process. This gimbal is 360 friendly because unlike other camera gimbals that block views to the sides and back, the GimbalGuru 360 is vertically balanced and so stays out of the shot. One of the issues with the Samsung Gear is that the short handle means you have a lot of hand in any photo. The shape of the Ricoh Theta minimizes that problem. A good 360 camera should be stick shaped, not stubby to minimize hand in the shot.
The last piece on 360 media making concerns the audience. At the ECOO Conference keynote the ever aware Colin Jagoe asked the obvious question, did you get everyone to sign waivers? It’s a question you see on lots of people’s faces when they see you take a 360 photo or video. The answer to this runs back to the idea of a director or photographer directing the viewer’s vision.
If take a photo or video of a person, I’m pointing the camera at them and they are the subject of it. As the subject of a piece of media it’s fair to ask if that subject should have a say over whether or not I can make them the subject of my media making. However, since the 360 camera isn’t taking a picture of them (it’s taking a picture of everything), they aren’t the focused subject of my media. The assumption they are working under is one that has been drilled into us subconsciously by the directed, ‘windowed’ media we’ve had up until now. If someone points a camera at you it is about you, at least mostly. If someone takes a 360 image in the same moment, you are just one of many possible focuses in that image. If I had any advice for those pursed lips I see whenever I take a 360 media image it would be, ‘chill out, it’s not all about you.’
The law around this is fairly straightforward: “when people are in a public space, they’ve already forfeited some of their right to privacy… Generally, as long as the images of people aren’t offensive, defamatory or unreasonably invade their privacy, you don’t have to get every person in the crowd to sign a release.”
360 media, because of its lack of point of view, is even less likely to invade anyone’s rights to privacy, especially if you’re taking an image in a public space with many people in it. It’s going to take a while for people to realize that 360 media isn’t all about them just because they happened to be in the vicinity when it occurred. The short answer to Colin’s question on Twitter is easy, “I don’t have to get a waiver from you dude!”
There are a number of media production and social issues around 360/immersive media production, and I’m sure we’ll be working them out for years to come. Spielberg is currently working on the VR futurist movie adaption of Ready Player One, coming out in the spring. He is developing a lot of VR/immersive/360 content for that film – it may be the first big budget picture to really embrace immersive 360 media. I imagine he’s working through a lot of these problems in post production (green screening out the crew in 360 shots?).
I haven’t even gotten into the technical requirements of 360 media production. If you think hi-def ‘windowed’ video makes a lot of data, 4k 360 video will knock you flat on your back. The 8k camera I’ve yet to get going requires such a strange, high performance SD card that I’ve had to special order it. The camera is going to use tens of gigs of data to make even short videos and post-processing on even a descent desktop computer will take 15 minutes for every minute of footage. Working in high def 360 footage is very storage and processor heavy work.
All of this will get sorted out in time and the benefits of immersive 360 media are obvious to anyone who has tried it. In the meantime I got to experiment with this emerging medium at #BIT17 and really enjoyed both my time catching moments with it and swearing at how awkward it was to get working. My next goal is to exercise my new UAV pilot qualifications and explore 360 media from an aerial perspective. Hey, if it was easy, everyone would experiment with emerging technologies.
Here is some of our media from the ECOO 2017 Conference in Niagara Falls:
Using the time lapse function (one image every 10 seconds) on the 360Fly camera, here’s a morning of VR demonstrations at Minds on Media on the Wednesday of #BIT17
My 13 year old son Max takes you on a virtual tour of Minds on Media on Wednesday morning using the Samsung Gear360 camera and the GimbalGuru mount to steady it.
Pushing the limits of the GuruGimbal and Samsung 360Gear – a motorcycle ride around Elora. If you’ve got the patience for how long it takes to process in the Samsung Action Director software, it produces some nice, high definition footage.
The idea that technology will somehow make teaching easier (or superfluous) makes me sad… and angry. The idea that it might be making us inferior to previous generations drives me right over the edge.
I’ve been reading Nick Carr’s The Shallows. If you’re a techie-educator, you might disagree with him, but the Pulitzer prize panel didn’t. Neither did the Laptops & Learning research which demonstrated that students retain less information about a lecture when they have a digital distraction on their laps. Carr’s argument that digital tools teach a plastic brain to reorganize in simplistic ways has resonated with many people, usually people that didn’t like digital options in the first place.
There is a big backlash against this single minded approach, which I think was addressed at the recent ECOO conference. If students aren’t able to recall details from a lecture, I think I have to start with the sage and the stage. The idea of passive learning is rapidly losing traction as the most effective way to teach. Countries that cling to the idea (usually as a cost saving measure and to try and adhere to standardized tests) are tumbling down world rankings in education.
A teacher who talks at their students for an hour will view laptops in their class as an invader who fights them for their (not so) captive audience’s attention. If you want to accept digital tools into a uni-directional, passive classroom environment, they are going to disrupt the learning.
Several of my students came up to me today and asked me how to perform a function in imovie (we’re editing videos we’ve been working on for three weeks). I told them both that I wouldn’t show them. Following the sage logic, I should have given them an in-depth 20 minute lecture on how to add pictures to credits, and then chastised them if their attention ever seemed to wander to the imacs in front of them. Instead, I suggested they look at the help information, and then go out into the wild west of the internet if they were still lost. I not only wanted them to resolve their own (relatively simple) learning dilemmas, I wanted them to feel like they had solved them themselves. Within ten minutes they both had figured out what to do without being spoon fed the details; they owned that information. For the rest of the period they were showing other interested parties how to do it.
If I had saged that whole thing, digital tools would have appeared to be a detriment to thinking and learning; nothing but a distraction.
The other side of this is the idea that teachers no longer teach, they simply facilitate, like trainers on a bench. This usually plays to the ‘technology will make my life simple’ crowd, and it isn’t remotely true. To begin with, many students haven’t learned to use digital tools in productive ways. When they turn on a computer it means hours of mindless, narcissistic navel gazing on Facebook. Students in my class are expected to use the computer as a source of information, a communication tool and a vehicle for artistic expression. They aren’t going to be the players if they don’t even know the game. I have to model and learn along side them, I have to demonstrate expertise on the equipment, and more importantly, expertise as an effective, self-directed learner. If I do this well enough, I can eventually step back, but I’m more the weathered veteran on the bench good for a few more pinch shifts when I’m really needed, than I am a towel jockey.
A good teacher challenges, and then is able to recede, but even that recession is a carefully modulated choice that balances student ability with student independence. This is never going to be anything but a challenging dance that you will always be leading, even if you’re not necessarily in front. We CANNOT assume that students know how to use digital tools effectively, any more than we can assume they will intuitively grasp band-saws, or nail guns.
If you’re into tech in education because you think it’s an easy way out, it’s time to realize that there are no short cuts, and that your job will constantly change, and you better be mentally lithe enough to keep up with it, or else the digital natives will use the tech in the most simplistic, asinine ways imaginable, and Nick Carr’s Shallows will become the truth.
I went to the strangest education conference of my career this past couple of days. Wikispaces invited me down to attend and what a learning experience it was. Surrounded by a struggling US education system that spends more and produces less than our own, I found it difficult to follow the circumstances they’ve invented for themselves. Being a stranger in a strange land I wasn’t necessarily trapped by the expectations of the other people in attendance, though I wasn’t the only one questioning what I saw. There seems to be a clear split in American education. There are the Common Curriculum fans (check out that webpage, ride the hyperbole!), and then there are parents & teachers who are questioning the value of such a regimented, testing focused approach to learning. Strangely, very few education technology companies seem to be questioning this approach, though they all appear quite interested in education. The whole thing occurred on the surface of a conference that was more an educational technology trade show than an examination of sound pedagogical practice. That politics and the business that feeds it drives the US education system rather than sound pedagogy became more apparent to me as the conference went on:
The only time I heard someone actually refer to pedagogical practice, best practices in teaching and learning, was when Michael Crow, the ASU president, gave a thoughtful talk on how we adapt to technology use in changing times. Everything else was urging people to get on board with the common curriculum (and buy our system that caters to it). That educational technology in the States is so focused on the politics of testing rather than best practices should concern every Canadian who adopts American technology in the classroom. I’ve got a lot of notes and ideas I want to chase down from this experience. In the next week or two I’ll write to them after mulling it over. In the meantime, here are some photos of beautiful Arizona in bloom…
You hear a lot about the magic of the cloud these days. It’s linked to online integration, website optimization and the evolution of computers.
Integration and optimization involve encouraging users to put information online and making that data easy for aggregators to access. The modern, monetized internet is built around turning data into a commodity. The 2014 web is designed around encouraging you to put as much of your life online as possible because that data has value.
The idea of computers evolving from mainframes to desktops to laptops to smartphones appears self evident, but I’m not so sure. I’m starting to think the devices prompted us online and the evolution idea was set up afterwards as a marketing angle. Our devices might not be a response to market needs, but a push by the data bankers to get more people producing.
When you boot up a computer you’ve created a self contained virtual environment that is designed for and subservient to your needs. Within that machine you have security, privacy and administrative power over your data. It’s hard to argue that this is anything other than an empowering position for a user. When you connect to the internet you surrender administrative control. Your virtual environment is no longer yours, your data is no longer internal and local, it’s no longer your data. Privacy is an antiquated idea you have to let go of and security is entirely at the discretion of hackers who are increasingly supported by big business and government. When you go online you have lost that private computing experience and thrown it wide open to many interested parties.
When you send in three one year old broken Chromebooks you get one back, the
rest aren’t cost effective. If driving people online to collect data is the goal, then the Chromebook is a master stroke – disposable hardware that funnels you into using a single browser – a branded internet.
Why have we stampeded to the cloud? Did our devices change to serve our needs or have our devices been designed to drive us online? Apple famously rolled out the ipad. At the same time they put together itunes, which not only dominates media sales but has also now come to dominate app sales as well. Selling an ipad is nice, constantly selling media is an exciting, never ending source of income. Data as an income stream is at the root of our online migration. Microsoft made billions selling an operating system, but the data produced inside it was very much the domain of the user. Software we purchase for that environment had to also be subservient to the user. This is a lousy approach if you want to monetize data and enjoy the benefits of a continuous income stream. Blizzard realized this with the move to online gaming. World of Warcraft was one of the first games to successfully follow the data=continual income model, charging monthly fees instead of a one time point of sale for the game. The end result is a gamer spending hundreds of dollars on a game instead of the single $50 outlay. If you don’t think it worked, check out how WoW compares to the other top grossing games of all time. Google famously claims that it wants to organize the world’s information and make it available and useful. This is always dressed in altruistic nonsense, but this is a profit driven business that goes to great lengths to not pay taxes. Google is a data mining company, it always has been. The happy result of this data mining is a remarkably accurate search engine that also happens to feed the data mining operation. Once the search engine was established Google went after traditional desktop based applications. Lite versions of word processing, spreadsheet software and other traditional desktop apps drew users in with the suggestion that your software and data could be wherever your internet connection was. This drove the expansion of the internet as well as the need for more bandwidth. Once the apps were rolling other data collection techniques like mapping and geo-location were added to the mining process. The more data that feeds the machine, the more ways it can monetize it. Claiming to be free, these apps drive users out of their private desktops and into the fishbowl of the internet. Online apps feed data mining operations just like search engines do. This blog is written on Blogger, a Google owned web application that encourages information to be put online so it can be mined. Why do I use it? Because I want to publish my writing. In certain circumstances it makes sense to put data out into the fishbowl, but you don’t get to choose those circumstances on the web today. The reason Google struggles with offering unmined online resources is because Google is a data mining company, it’s what they do. This isn’t necessarily evil or nefarious, but it behooves us to understand how online companies work, especially if we’re going to get all giddy about driving students online. A lot of infrastructure had to be put into place for your personal computer to be built, but that infrastructure is minuscule compared to what is involved in creating an internet. The cost of building and maintaining a worldwide networking infrastructure is staggering. The only way to make it cost effective is to make the data itself pay. There are cost benefits to scaling up this kind of infrastructure, so online companies drive as many people into producing data as possible.
Any company that lives online can’t simply create something of value and then stand by it. The sand is constantly falling through the hourglass, it costs bandwidth to offer even a simple online service in this expensive, complex, cut throat infrastructure. The only way you can survive in an environment this carnivorously expensive is to make the data you’re attracting pay. You push to schools, to charities, anywhere you can to generate input. There is no such thing as a free online app. The whole point of any online service is to get you producing data that can be mined. This data is valuable even if your name isn’t attached. Most privacy legalese attached to online services explicitly allows them to use your data as they see fit. Cursory efforts are made to hide your name because no name = privacy, but your data is where the money is, and it isn’t yours according to most online agreements. You surrender control of your data when you agree to use their data mining, um, nifty, online application. Now that we’ve trained entire generations to ignore traditional media, this intrusive and invasive analysis is where market research has gone. Multinationals don’t spend marketing dollars on TV commercials for people under thirty any more, it’s wasted money. Instead, they drive the herd online, creating heat around exciting new smartphones / tablets / wearable computing – whatever gets people producing data to feed the network. Again, this is neither good nor evil, but it is an evolution away from ideas of traditional advertising (which itself could be cast in a poor light). The questions we need to ask ourselves as educators are:
If we demand that students use online services that monetize the information they share, are we eroding ideas of privacy and personal security by demanding their online interaction?
Are we commoditizing our students’ learning?
Should that make us uncomfortable?
There are ways to bypass all of this, but that means turning away from the carefully designed, market driven future laid out for us. Education could adopt open source software that offers complete administrative control. Educators could require students to actually learn how to manage digital tools from a mastery learning perspective (instead of whatever bizarre kids-know-this-stuff-intuitively / digital native thing we’re doing now).
We could supply Tor browsers for students to use that would guarantee real anonymity and privacy. We could expect students and teachers to learn how to manage their own online spaces and develop their own tools with education as the focus and no hidden data mining agenda. We could leverage the sharing power of the internet to spread these tools around the world at little or no cost, but we don’t, because the future we’ve been sold is so shiny that we can’t think of anything else.
One thing is for sure, the future will be branded. Branded information, branded thinking, branded learning?
At the Google presentation at the recent ECOO conference the g-employee asked the room, “why aren’t you all joining Google For Education? I’m not going to go on until someone can tell me why!” He was very enthusiastic in his hard sell.
In a less high-pressure sale situation I can formulate a response: I use Google tools, but I make a point of understanding what they are. I get the impression that most Google Certified Teachers are more interested in being unpaid sales reps than they are recognizing the complexities of cloud based computing. Any teacher who rushes into branding themselves with a private company’s logo makes me question their commitment to pedagogy. What’s more important, using the best tool available or using the best tool from your brand? It’s a big reason why the idea of brand specific computing devices will never get my vote. We’re being led to the cloud by implacable market forces who have monetized our information flow. They offer ease of access, integration and a general malaise that many regular users of technology turn into ecstatic fandom. You don’t need to learn this stuff, we’ll take care of all that for you, just hook yourself up to this milking machine and it’ll all be OK.
Hook up students to the milking machine and tell them it’s for their own good. Edtech is preparing them for the future!
I somehow managed to fanangle my way into an Edtech symposium this week on the sustainable development of digital technology in education. Amidst former deputy ministers of education, board CIOs and other provincial education types I got to see the other side of the equation.
This year as head of Computers/IT has been good for this actually, getting my head out of the classroom context and seeing the bigger picture. I’ve been able to attend imaging committee meetings at the board level and gained an understanding of why everyone can’t have whatever they want. At this past meeting I tweeted that I felt like a sergeant from the trenches who suddenly found himself in a 5-star strategic planning meeting; it was engrossing.
During any battle to use digital technology in the class room (getting access, getting it to work, getting students over their jitters), I often feel like I’m losing ground. I’ll take one step forward in implementing a new piece of technology in a lesson or on a school wide basis, and get knocked back two steps by angry senior teachers who feel out of step with what’s going on, or lack of access to equipment, or failure of the tech, or OCT/board restrictions that seem panicky and unfounded, or the union telling of a horror story that seems to justify panicky and unfounded restrictions…
One of my preliminary thoughts before I went was to ask about how to beat the malaise of that feeling; how not to give up. I’ve heard from colleagues about how they burn out trying to push that envelope, and ultimately just disappear back into their classrooms and do their own thing. John Kershaw had an honest and helpful response to the question:
During his talk he spoke of a big set back where the winning party in an election used his one laptop per student policy as an example of government waste, and won on it, after telling him that they supported the program. This is exactly the kind of thing that brings idealists to their knees. His solution was pragmatic: work on your environment. Set the stage so that what you’re doing becomes a certainty, if not now, then eventually.
In the case of the laptop plan, he’d done groundwork with business groups (who were onside for more digitally literate graduates), the general public (who wanted their children more literate with technology), and the school system (who wanted to better prepare their students for their futures). That groundwork meant that even though the politics turned on him in the moment, the plan eventually went through, and he got what he thought was important; a New Brunswick education system that actually mattered in a 21st Century context.
I’ve been thinking over his for a few days now. If you’re on the right side of history, if you know you’re fighting a good fight, you’ve got to shrug off the knock backs. If you keep working to create the environment you’re aiming for, and you know you’re part of a wave of change, have some faith in the fact that the truth of what you’re trying to do will eventually win out.
Last year while at the CyberTitan National Finals in Fredericton I happened to be standing by Sandra Saric, ICTC’s VP of talent innovation, during a photo opportunity where the fifty or so student competitors were all together on a long stairway. Under her breath she wondered, “where are all the girls?” There were maybe three or four female contestants. Sandra’s comment resonated with me and I became determined to put together a female team that would get their own points and where no one is ‘just a sub’.
CyberTitan and Cyberpatriot have doubled down on this focus on bringing women into a cybersecurity industry that has only moved from 11% to 20% female participation in the past five years. For the 2018-19 season any all-female teams had their costs waived. For a program that isn’t rolling in support, that made a big difference and enabled me to pursue this inequity.
Graduating girls into non-traditional careers is an ongoing challenge in education. Pushing against social norms is never easy, particularly so in our conservative, rural school where gender expectations tend to be even more binary and specialized program support significantly lower than in urban environments. I’ve managed to have one or two graduating female computer technology focused students each year, but even that small step has only come after massive effort, and it’s not nearly enough. Even with all that stacked against us, we still managed a 33% female participation rate in CyberTitan this year, and of our six Skills Ontario competitors, two were female. We’re aiming to raise that even higher next year.
This year CyberTitan made a point of trying to address the very one sided gender participation in the cybersecurity industry by making the national wildcard position open to all-female teams. There were only 15 out of 190+ teams in the competition, and our Terabytches finished in top spot. We were delighted to discover that one of our boy’s teams actually finished one place out of the top four eastern teams. A number of people (oddly all male) grumbled about the all-female wildcard spot, but the irony is that we knocked ourselves out of the finals.
Taking an all-female team meant that I needed a female chaperone with us. Fortunately, our board’s head of dual credit programming is a triple threat. Not only is she very tech focused (her student just won top secondary brick layer in Ontario!), but she’s also computer science qualified and an absolute joy to travel with (I went to Skills Canada Nationals in Edmonton with her last year), so I quickly asked her to join us when the call came through to bring our girls to nationals. Not only did she not need coverage herself, but she kindly covered mine so my school literally paid nothing for this trip.
I like to think I’m pretty sensitive to gender roles in the first place, but taking an all-female crew to this event had me constantly seeing micro-aggressions I might have otherwise missed. Within five minutes of picking up the Toronto (all-male) teams on the bus ride to Ottawa, one of them had intimated that we were only there because we’re a girl’s team. Another later said that it’s not fair that girls are getting special attention. It must be tough when everything isn’t about you all the time. These comments were a daily occurrence from all the other teams, even the two co-ed ones, one of the girls of which said that she was just the sub.
That same Toronto team was able to attentively listen to a male speaker during the visits to cybersecurity companies in the Ottawa area after the competition, but the moment a woman stepped up to speak they began a loud and rude conversation among themselves. I wonder how often these little princes (who did ever so well in the competition) have had their gender superiority enforced to develop such outstanding habits.
Walking in to the competition, our team had all signed in but one and as she reached for the pen a boy from another team stepped in front of her like she wasn’t there. Talking to Joanne and the team about it after, they shrugged and said, “you get used to it.” By that point I’d been triggered by this so much that my already light grip on my aspie-ness was slipping and I was starting to get right angry, but even that anger response is couched in a male sense of privilege. When a man gets angry it’s seen as assertiveness, when a woman gets angry she’s a bitch, which brings up yet another point.
After fighting to get a team together against overwhelmingly genderized expectations in our community, and encouraging that team to develop a representative sense of identity in an overwhelmingly male contest, and then having to push back when the powers that be didn’t like the name, you’d think this was all starting to get too heavy, but it has only clarified my sense of purpose. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if girls didn’t have to get used to being invisible and could self-identify without being told what they can and cannot be called? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if everyone could be what they are and explore what they could be without some small minded traditionalist trying to put them in a superficial box? When you push back against that social apathy you get a surprising amount of kickback from the people it benefits. Ontario’s current political mess is entirely a result of that conservative push back.
You even get kick back from the people it subjugates. At an ICT teacher’s meeting earlier in the year, a teacher from an Ottawa school said she would never run an all female team because it isn’t fair to her boys. Were everything else level, I’d agree with her sentiment, but in the landslide of unfairness around us, you’d have to be wilfully blind to ignore historically integrated misogyny in order to be ‘fair to your boys’. This teacher taught at the local International Baccalaureate school, which brings up yet another side of competition and privilege.
Toronto, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Vancouver… Fergus. Your usual expected centres of digital excellence.
We’re a rural composite school that spreads itself thin catering to our entire community. The major industry in our region is farming, we recently had our annual Tractor Day. Our school contains programs for developmentally delayed students and has a sizable special needs student population. We also manage to run a number of successful academic programs, but these are by no means our sole purpose. Tech exists in there somewhere.
As far as computer technology goes, our lab is a room full of ewaste we’ve re-purposed to teach ourselves technology. Thanks to some board SHSM funding and an industry donation from AMD we got the cheapest CPUs and motherboards we could find and put them in ten year old ewasted board PC cases running on ancient hard drives and power supplies. My students have never touched a new keyboard or mouse in our lab. We have to clear away our practice networks built of garbage because we have the largest tech classes in our board and province and we have no room in the lab to leave those networks set up with classes of 31 coming in next period. I don’t imagine any of the other schools operate in a similar environment.
We returned the board desktops in our room to the school who redistributed that money into other departments because you can’t teach digital skills on a locked down machine. We’ve received no school funding for the current lab. Looking into the backgrounds of who we were up against in this competition, every other school is a specialist school from an urban centre. In many cases they only teach top academic stream students pulled from other schools, and yet they can’t put together an all-female team for this competition? One wonders if those competition focused, talent skimming schools inherently encourage gender imbalanced technology with their incessant focus on winning.
We’re built on sweat and tears. Our disadvantage is also our strength, but when it comes to competition it gets frustrating not getting to run the same race as everyone else.
The socio-economic side of privilege is every bit as battering as the sexism. One of the little princes from Toronto was telling a Terabytche about his parent free March Break touring Europe with his friends. She replied, “Hmm, I spent the week playing video games in Fergus…” Last year half of our CyberTitan team had never left Ontario before, let alone had a week in Europe with their buddies. The students who attend these specialized schools tend to come from economically enabled backgrounds and have parents looking to leverage that advantage. The amount of support those wealthy families rain down on these specialty programs is yet another advantage we can only dream of.
Think the privilege ends there? Because we cater to the full spectrum of students in our community, my classes are huge in order to reserve smaller sections for high-needs students (even though many of them also take my courses). In talking to other coaches, my class sizes were the largest by a range of 20% to a staggering 50%, and their operational budgets ranged from five to twenty times what mine are; I teach up to a third more students with a fraction of the budget in a lab made out of garbage.
We were surprised to learn that we would be beginning the competition short-handed because one of the IB schools had exams some of their competitors had to write, so to keep it fair we’d all start short handed. Right. Gotta keep it fair. That these urban, wealthy, gender empowered, privileged kids are flexing that privilege doesn’t surprise me. That they continually complained about special treatment for a group of underfunded, rural, girls busting through gender expectations in technology, and who fought their way to these nationals literally using ewaste, only underlines the expectation that comes with their privilege; the expectation of winning.
In spite of these society-deep gender inequities and our specific socio-economic circumstances, the quality of my students continues to shine through. Finishing fifth last year with only four team members and two broken competition laptops was just the kind of awesomeness I’ve come to expect from our kids. It didn’t occur to me to have the whole competition changed to make it fair for them.
This year we managed a ninth place finish out of ten teams, only beating the intermediate team who can’t really compete with older more experienced teams anyway. That earned another round of, ‘you’re only here because you’re girls’ from other teams. After careful consideration I think my response is: if you came from where we came from, I wonder where you would have finished.
Is winning more about how you perform, or how you are economically and socially engineered to succeed? I’d love to give gender and social equity to those complaining about our presence. Having those boys experience people talking over them and stepping in front of them like they aren’t there would be good for them. Facing down gender based prejudice in an industry where women are a small minority is an act of bravery, not special treatment. Wouldn’t it be nice to bring everyone up instead of holding people down? To do that we need to recognize what winning is and how privilege enables it.
Next year we have returning students for the first time in this competition. I’m aiming to put a co-ed team of our fiercest veteran cyber-ninjas together, build tech out of garbage and then win anyway. Nothing gets me going more than an underdog fight against privilege, especially when those with that privilege like to selectively ignore it.
I hope we’ll be back with another all-female team too. Many of the Terabytches are interested in returning, but I can understand their hesitancy. Working through this competition has challenged many of them in ways that were unintended. If it was just about technical skill, then we’d have been much further down the track, but when you have to fight to be noticed and are constantly talked down to, it’s exhausting. I get why they might think twice about going through the never-ending online and face to face sexism all over again. It’d be nice if other schools would pick this up and run with it instead of rolling their eyes at it.
Last year was all about giving the haves a black eye, and it thrilled me. We didn’t return home with a trophy or a banner, but we were running a different race. I’m not even sure how anyone could make this an even race. Teaching technology is dependent upon access to it, and the digital divide is deep and wide. This year it was about something even bigger. Yet again we came home empty handed, but I think what we won was worth more than any of the prizes. I hope the girls see that and come back to defend their title.
An amazing opportunity and a chance to begin to create balance in an industry that lacks it. Great work ICTC!
I’m just back from my first trip to California. Having visited it so many times virtually, I was surprised at how different the place is from how it frames itself. Like a movie set, Southern California has a face that looks good while hiding a lot of things that don’t work. My favourite parts of California were the real bits: the coast, Joshua Tree Park, Mount Palomar. It got dodgy for me the minute we wandered into the invented places, strangely also the most crowded places. We’re all victims of our own childhood. My parents spent ours taking us camping. When we went to The States we visited family and hung out on the beach. In Florida we went to the Kennedy Space Centre, but never Disneyworld. This might have had as much to do with how much disposable income we had as it did with our interests. Going to California for the first time, my wife, who has fond memories of attending Disneyworld as a kid, wanted to show me Disneyland. I’ve had a long personal history with Disney. It was what we watched as a family on Sunday nights on TV growing up. The first film I ever saw was Jungle Book. Being an animator at Disney was a long time dream. I’m anything but a Disney hater, but I’ve never had an interest in going to their theme parks. Going on Christmas Day with thousands of giddy people in mouse ears felt like attending some kind of cult meeting. I don’t do well in crowds and this particularly day is one of the busiest the park has. I enjoyed various aspects of the park, but at the end of a hot, sweaty, crowded day, what it did most was clarify for me the difference between a shallow, scripted experience and a genuine one that offers depth of narrative. I used to enjoy amusement park rides, but nowadays if I want a thrill I’ll scare myself for real on a motorcycle rather than sitting like a lab mouse in a centrifuge. I prefer a situation where my own skill dictates the quality of the physical experience. This also ensures that the experience will be mine instead of what is spoon fed to me. Two people on a rollercoaster walk away with the same cookie cutter experience. Two people riding motorbikes on a mountain road do not. My son isn’t a fan of rides either, so we tended toward shows and entertainment rather than lining up to strap into spinning things. The Star Wars tour, Pirates of the Caribbean and various stage shows all offered a focus on entertainment rather than vacuous adrenaline. Disneyland tends to focus on immersion in the Disney ethos, so you can easily go to the park and not once get on a spinny ride. Having said that, we didn’t go on ‘It’s a Small World‘ because it would have taken two hours of lining up to see just how small the world is.
People get in their vehicles and sit in traffic to get to Disney World, where they line up to get into the park, and then line up to get on this ride where they then sit in traffic. Some people’s idea of fun is completely foreign to me.
Strangely, I’m more than happy to shift into a more passive mode and follow a narrative on the screen. Experiences that use digital technology to create interactive, sensory experiences are quite interesting to me. In our time in California we also went to Universal and did the Minion Mayhem ride, which is a great example of advanced digital media being used to create an experience, it feels like a roller coaster with a plot. Pirates of The Caribbean also was remarkably immersive with complex robotic tableaus that told a story. Star Tours was a nice mix of both, with a smartly done interactive line up that leads to a digitally immersive ride; I can get lost in narratives like those. Now that I’m back in school I can’t help but consider these ‘amusement park’ experiences in terms of learning. There is such a strong emphasis on engagement at all cost that many classrooms have taken on the giddy quality of the spiny ride, complete with lineups to get on the digital tools needed. Any experience that comes out of it tends to be scrambled if retained at all, and the idea of patiently building deeper understanding doesn’t have a chance. The hook becomes the reason for the lesson rather than anything you can immerse yourself in and take away afterwards. I’ve heard students talk about how they ‘did’ a rollercoaster – as though their interaction with it somehow affected the outcome. The rollercoaster did them, they didn’t do the rollercoaster. When students talk about video games designed to deliver you to a conclusion I feel the same way – the game played you, you didn’t play the game. When failure is never an option, you never get to succeed at anything. It’s the difference between real and not real experience. I’m willing to bet that, if surveyed, the majority of students would feel that their education was something that was done to them rather than anything they had a say in the outcome of. When I think of those millions who press their way through Disney to see concrete starfish plastered on walls when real ones are only a few miles away at the beach, I wonder what it is we’re aiming at in terms of engagement. Giving people what they want is often pointless when what they want is empty.
10:12am, May 6: 61.4% voter turnout. Positive tax returns should be automatically applied to the national debt if voters can’t bother to do this simple thing.
11:15am, May 6: Wow, the conservatives even won our student vote. The future’s so bright, I’ve got to start building a post apocalyptic shelter!
Responses:
… the mob that elects politicians is only interested in their own affairs, they are incapable of looking at the greater good. We’re at the pinnacle of mob run society (call it democracy if you want to). In a thousand years, assuming there is anyone around to write about it, democratic capitalism will be described as the engine that (hopefully almost) destroyed human civilization.
Any society based on self interest and greed is doomed, it’s just a matter of time.
Nature never rewards mindless voracity, it seeks balance.
***
In response to “it’s better than if the NDP or Libs won it”
Go for a walking tour of Northern Alberta, you might think differently. Ask anyone one internationally connected how Canada’s reputation has dropped, especially over environmental misdirection.
Somehow, in the past 24 hours, 24% of Canadians have implicitly endorsed Parliamentary contempt. Perhaps we should just chuck the system entirely, if the ruling party ignores it, and the opposition parties are worse… Canadian democracy’s a sham!
Ive got to stop reading factual, science based books on climate change (http://www.tvo.org/TVOsites/WebObjects/TvoMicrosite.woa?b%3F9078791267844400000). No one else will care until it’s too late, they all want cheap gas and business as usual. Our business as usual is making slaves of our grand children. We’re not even intent on trying to find a way out, the majority just want things to stay the same.
Any aliens monitoring facebook? I”m ready to go back to the mothership!
***
May 3rd, 10:53pm: After another epic failure of the first past the post system in representing actual voter interest, think we have any chance of seeing a fair and representative system with King Stephen? I wouldn’t hold your breath. Can’t wait to see the voter turnout next time around. We’ve got to have one of the only democratic systems that actually encourages voter apathy.
More Responses (to it’s pretty much business as usual with a stable government, so why worry):
One in four people just voted for parliamentary contempt. In one riding a complete turd burger who openly lied to everyone got re-elected (nice one Oda). One in four Canadians have open contempt for our governmental system and support a party that does too (and now has a majority). If our democracy’s based on parliament, then it’s a sham.
Canada won’t become a dictatorship, but it will continue to be a shifty, lying international presence that says one thing, does another and makes slaves of future generations in the process.
Oh, and more than one in three Canadians couldn’t be bothered to vote at all. It’s not really a democracy, is it? It’s more like gangs of roving political interest groups in-fighting and self aggrandizing themselves (I say that about all of the parties).
I’ve hesitated to post this because I get the sense that competition is generally sneered upon in Ontario classrooms these days. With earnest people saying everyone is a genius and anyone with the urge to pick up a tool is a craftsperson, something like Skills Canada might seem like a cruel and unusual way to show that as obviously incorrect.
I’ve always had a competitive streak and think there is real value in both winning and losing, but losing really bothers me (hence, competitive streak). This was written on a long flight back from Edmonton as I struggled with failure. Contrary to popular belief, I consider this to be a good thing.
.
Can you feel the heat? Skills Canada Nationals is a pressure cooker of excellence!
I was in a foul mood when I started writing this, but by the end I’d thought my way out of the frustration, which is the most I can ask from a reflection…
I’m at a loss to explain how we can be so dominant in provincial competition and then fumble Nationals. Two times now we’ve taken the time and expense to come out to Skills Canada Nationals and have come up short. In the latest case I could not have possibly arranged things any better. From coop to employment opportunities to multiple in-class opportunities and supports, my current candidate had every tool possibly on hand to achieve success, but we haven’t. This is the worst possible time to ask me (on the plane, flying home, empty handed), but I’m feeling tired, frustrated and struggling to understand why I’d go through this again.
4am wake up for a 10am departure – moving hundreds of
people, many of them with hundreds of pounds of tools
is a logistical challenge.
A consistent issue with leaving our small town to come to nationals is circumstantial. In our first go around, the social pressure around missing high school prom proved such a distraction that my candidate arrived with a pocket full of angry texts and little chance to focus on preparing for the coming battle. In this year’s case, a sports injury in a pointless local game the week before the competition led to a week away in wheelchairs and on crutches. In both cases small town life conspired to produce the kind of static that knocked capable technicians off a medal. But maybe there is more to it than that.
I don’t think the competition is particularly technically challenging. There is nothing asked that my competitors aren’t directed to and encouraged to get a handle on. This has worked so well provincially that we’ve medalled the past three years (two golds and a bronze), but at Nationals both times the wheels have fallen off the cart. That we can do so differently at two near identical competitions suggests that our issue is psychological, not technical.
Team Ontario is a monster!
So, what about Nationals is so overwhelming? The assumption (I think) is that Nationals will be next level, but Ontario provincials have many more competitors from many more schools. Getting out of Ontario is by far the most difficult part, and we’ve managed it twice. The people we face at Nationals aren’t IT unicorns; they’re kids, all with less experience in competition. In some cases they only had to show up to get to Nationals because there were barely any provincial competitors. I’d assumed that our previous ‘blind’ Nationals experience (where we placed 4th anyway), had prepared us for this one. My candidate was more experienced, more focused (barring sports injuries and school plays) and had been given many more opportunities to develop their IT skills than our first go around, yet subjectively we’ve underachieved. Our best hope now, prior to knowing the scoring, is a tie with our last attempt, but I fear that might be too much to hope for.
Got the kit…
Last year we blew provincials and didn’t go through. I lay the blame for that entirely at my own feet. The change to a Toronto based venue meant a cruel and unusual commute that made us exhausted and late; we didn’t have a hope of peak performing (yet we still managed a medal). This year we did back flips arranging hotels and finding ways to minimize the financial burden on our competitors in order to ensure our best shot, and that worked. Leading up to Nationals I made sure everything was taken care of and any possible need was filled prior to sitting down to compete.
Expectations are perhaps the killer here. Our first time around I took Nationals to be a reconnaissance. We’d already over achieved to such a degree at Provincials that I was just happy to be there. Sure, a medal would have been nice, but understanding the contest was my real goal. That we came so close to getting a medal had me convinced we were moving in the right direction. This time around my previous champion gave a detailed rundown of what to expect on Nationals and we didn’t go in blind, yet we have failed to capitalize on that information. This could mean it was bad information, but I doubt that. It could also mean we simply didn’t make the time to make use of that information because my two competitors have an unhealthy competitiveness between them. We have underperformed, yet the competition was described as too easy, and we knew what was coming. How are we bottom half? With the medal ceremony behind us, I’m left wondering where we are, and, as a coach, I don’t like the feeling – the lack of understanding feels like a failure on my part.
This might sound like whinging or poor sportsmanship, but I didn’t spend all the time and money and stress to not place again. This isn’t even a case of gold or die, just knowing we were there or thereabouts would have met my expectations; I don’t think that’s an absurdly challenging goal. If we didn’t want to be competitive, why did we compete?
Pre-contest huddle.
One of the more surprising aspects of this trip was just how different my competitor was. On our first go I had what looked like an Eastern European rock star who had the swagger to go with it. He had the technical chops, but his cockiness also meant he’d tackle problems aggressively and with some verve; he wasn’t intimidated by anyone or anything. I suspect that fourth place finish was as much the result of that fearlessness as it was his technical skill.
This time around I had an anxious perfectionist who I couldn’t read very well and (I fear) I didn’t coach as effectively as I could have. Maybe, in this case, a less acerbic approach might have served us better, but my approach to coaching and teaching has always been to encourage an independent and experiential approach to the challenges of technology. I give students the gears if they make a silly mistake, but never penalize them for it. The ones who stick around end up resilient, self-aware and technically superior. I don’t baby students and hand them answers, I’d rather see them struggle to a solution themselves. The result is a technician who might not know all the answers, but damn well knows how to find them.
Like herding cats…
Except at Nationals.
This time around I had a university bound, academically strong student for whom this was just one of many feathers in his hat. This is his second national final in an ICT related field in as many weeks. At the CyberTitan National Competition, on our first go at it, we placed as high as I’d hoped we would and that trip was (I think) a great success. My expectations here were actually similar this week, to finish in the top half, but we’ve failed to do that. There were only 7 competitors in the national IT & Networking final – three provinces and all the territories failed to produce candidates who could meet national standards – so finishing in the top half would have meant a medal.
My first national finalist was a college bound kid who had been on the verge of failing in the years before and found his way out of that mess though finding his genius in info-tech. He ended up going to college for IT and considers his Skills experience a vital piece of his career (as he should). I never once heard my first champion say, ‘it’s just IT’ when someone asked him what competition he was in, but I heard that too many times this week. Downplaying the field of study (I fear) when competing at the national level in it was a reflection of the doubt that plagued this medal run. At one point I heard, “I don’t understand why I’m here with all these people” (meaning experts in their skilled trade). I thought it might have been false modesty, but it in retrospect it was doubt, which is a disaster when you’re in a pressure cooker like Skills Nationals. Maybe I should have identified that and talked about it earlier, but if years of straight ‘A’s in computer and software technology courses, multiple provincial medals, full time summer employment as a network technician, a top five finish in the related cybersecurity contest nationally, detailed notes from all the competitors who came before and a coop in IT wasn’t enough to instill some confidence, I fear nothing will. I don’t think this result was a deficit of technical skill.
Watching mastery across such a wide range of skills
never gets old. If you get a chance, go to Skills Nationals.
This year in electronics we took a giant step backwards, to the point of me wondering if we were ever moving in the right direction. My competitor was crushed by our poor result and this prompted me to chase down her judges and request some clarification on our results. She’d actually ended up in the medals on the two toughest categories (building circuits), which helped restore some confidence. Then we got clarification on what we missed, which has shed such a bright light on what we need to do that I can’t believe we won’t be contenders next year. Her response to all of this was stubborn anger. I can work with that. One of the judges encouraged her to hang in there saying, ‘it’s the failures that toughen you up and eventually make you a champion.’ It’s that kind of thing that makes me want to do the hours and hours of volunteer work it takes to build up to winning provincials again and perhaps going through another exhausting and potentially hope crushing week at nationals.
Maybe one of the things I need to be doing when I’m looking for candidates to take on this overwhelming challenge is to look for the tenacious scrappers who can’t, won’t and don’t stop. Maybe that was missing this year. A student following in his brother’s footsteps for whom things had fallen into place, winning medals even when he claims the whole thing was a disaster was suddenly doubtful of his place in the competition. I don’t know what to do with that. Maybe that judge is right – it’s overcoming the setbacks that make you commit to the competition and fight with conviction. Win or lose, if we left everything on the competition floor I’d be happy with the result, but something stopped us from doing that this time. Perhaps it was the injury, perhaps it was nerves, perhaps I’m just the wrong coach for a this particular student, which is a shame for us both.
I didn’t do well in school. You can count the number of ‘A’s I got on one hand. Things generally have never come easily to me, I have had to fight for them. I dropped out of college, out of an apprenticeship and struggled to get into and through University. I’m good at many things, but I don’t think I’ve ever been a natural at anything. The things I’m good at are the result of determination and stubborn disregard for failure. It’s that kind of tenacious student that I’m best able to help because I can identify with them. I find the honour roll perfectionists alien and don’t always know how to work with them to bring out their best. Perhaps the best thing I could have done here was to send another teacher instead. If I could go back and rerun this week over and over again Groundhog Day style, that would be one of the variations I’d try.
I’m most effective helping the stubborn, scrappy student I have much more in common with attain their mastery than I am trying to aim an honour roll kid at gold. Those scrappy students also play to my love of underdogs. As I said earlier, perhaps expectations are what make this so difficult to take. This time I thought I’d brought a howitzer to a knife fight. As fixated as I am in this moment on failing to medal again, in less fraught moments I’m more about a good struggle than I am about winning – but it’d sure be nice, just once, to sit on this long road home with something tangible to show for it.
***
A week after we got back we had an interview with the local paper. When asked what I thought something like Skills Canada does for a student I immediately went to the degree of resilience it develops. I truly believe that competition is good for us all, and that competition has to involve winning and losing. At the opening ceremony the MC asked the audience of hundreds of competitors who was going to win a medal, they all started cheering – the unspoken disappointment was left hanging in the air, you can’t all be winners. More people come home disappointed after Skills Nationals than satisfied. That’s no bad thing. My goal as a coach is to find ways to help competitors put their best foot forward. This year has taught me a lot about how I can better do that.
