Dusty World – Page 35 – Mechanical Sympathy

Get off the Bus and Drive

The transition from institutionalized, single platform education technology to a decentralized model is in full swing at our school. I’m getting blow back from various teachers who want things to remain as they’ve always been. I don’t think they mean ditto machines, facsimiles and telegrams, but they might. There is always a tendency to fight advances in technology, it’s difficult to change ingrained habits.

The difference between this and previous technological shifts is that we’ve institutionalized helplessness into educational digital technology. We’ve convinced teachers that computers are an appliance and networking is a utility. We treat internet access the same way we treat electricity or water delivery; it’s off loaded to a bureaucracy who guarantees delivery. As the old guard retires and their traditional thinking around passive technology use fades, we are left with whole generations of teachers who have been taught to do nothing except sit on the institutionally provided bus and go where it takes them. Complaining about it is about all they can do.

Any decision making about educational technology has long been taken from teachers. Digital learning tools are seen as remotely operated apparatus that should be dropped the moment they don’t perform as expected.

When I suggest that teachers can get off the #edtech bus and drive their own educational technology they get anxious; driving a car takes a lot of effort compared to sitting on the bus. You not only have to drive it, but you’ve got to look after it too, make sure it has gas, service it, take ownership of it. The reward is much finer control over how you travel on your journey.

If you want to get where you’re going (making education relevant and useful to your students?) driving your technology will get you there much sooner. You’ll get to decide what vehicle to take, what options to put on it, and even how you want various technologies to enhance your teaching. Diversification of technology is vital to a better understanding of what it is and how to use it effectively. Digital technology isn’t one app or one platform, it is a sea change in how we access and share information.

Driving your own technology usage does take a lot more effort than sitting on the #edtech bus, though it’s just a different kind of effort. All that energy you used to expend on worrying when the bus would show up? or why it’s so old and dilapidated? You can now spend deciding what to get, what options you want and how you want to implement it. You get to decide what, when and how your students are using technology to enhance their learning; you get to actually control your digital learning environment.

That last bit is perhaps the most enjoyable part of driving your own technology use; being able to control your #edtech environment is a key factor in customizing 21st Century learning to suit your students.

If we treated classrooms the way we treat digital learning environments, all rooms would be exactly the same, with the same seating plans, the same chalk boards and the same size. Those classrooms would also be years out of date, and the teacher couldn’t move a table or chair if they wanted to, because they’d all be nailed to the floor. If you dare to ask why the furniture is nailed to the floor you’d be reprimanded with a fear based diatribe on how not keeping everything locked down and the same is potentially dangerous to your students and staff.

A Digital Skills Continuum: Differentiation of technology is a key to technical fluency!

If you’re teaching using technology you’re also teaching technology, and it would behove you to know what’s under the hood. Being ignorant of the machinery you’re operating makes you a very bad driver indeed. You don’t necessarily need to be a full-on mechanic, but a tinkerer’s mindset allows you to understand and look after your own needs in terms of the technology you use.

There are going to be some crashes with all these new drivers coming onto the road, but each collision will result in a learning experience. I only hope that teachers who are inexperienced are willing to look past the messiness of their own learning to the possibilities opening up to them in a digital world. At some point we’ll tip over and teachers will accept that competence in technology isn’t someone else’s job but an integral part of their profession in the twenty-first century, just as it has become a basic fluency in so many other professions.

The Appearance of Credibility and Other Useless Pursuits

I’ve got two other posts on the back burner because I spent hours this weekend fabricating the appearance of credibility. It’s mid-term time, which means I’ve finally got to put together the dreaded markbook that I’ve been neglecting. I used to think I neglected it because I’m lazy, but that’s not really the case. I spend all sorts of time in and out of class getting materials, working on lesson plans and spending time individually with students. I spend most of my lunches with students offering them extra help or just space to tinker. I spend hours outside of school communicating with other teachers about education. These are not the actions of a lazy man.

So why am I so reticent to build up my markbook? Why does the idea of putting numbers into complex programs that divide and weigh marks make me roll my eyes and find something productive to do? Because it’s all about building a fiction.

Yeah, you are, but you’re a really difficult
to calculate number!

Like so much else of what we do in our nineteenth century education factory, the idea of reducing human beings to numbers so that we can define them smacks of reductive, Taylorist thinking, but reducing people to easily compared numbers is what the system demands. That grade has an aura of magic around it, we think it full of deep and profound meaning but it’s fabricated out of thin air.

Learning is a complex, rich process, but we don’t focus on that in education, we focus on gross simplifications in order to spin out self supporting statistics. We create numbers to justify the system, to give it the appearance of credibility and meaning. The system feeds the system with evidence of its own success. This goes well beyond k-12, post secondary is predicated on this fiction.

Each year we fabricate grades using complex alchemical processes. Last year I had staff say they couldn’t use Engrade because it didn’t offer enough fine control over category weighing. Our Ministry goes to great lengths to on this, and teachers agonize over it, yet no two do it the same, even in the same course, even on the same assignment.

The process of grading, from the teacher assessing a piece of work (and some of them also taking into account what the student’s sibling was like, or that they are in a bad mood that day, or that this is a nice kid who should be forgiven the odd error) to how it is entered in what mark program (it varies from teacher to teacher), makes this a very slippery slope. We’re asked to assess curriculum but in most cases the personality and circumstances of the student interfere with this to the point where getting a good read on the last, best example of their demonstrated skill is impossible. Even if it is possible, reducing their learning of complex subject areas down to a single percentage grade is absurd, yet that is what we do.

When someone says that grading is killing education I agree, but not because we should be living in a hippy commune doing whatever strikes us as fun. The fiction of grading supports other fictions, like passing. I wouldn’t trust anyone to do anything if they got it right 50% of the time, yet that is a pass in education. Grading is killing education because it is meaningless in terms of learning.

Now that I’ve built that set of grades up all is safe from questioning. You can’t question modern marking practices, they’re designed to prevent simple analysis. That markbook I built is really to make the grade I give appear credible. Look! There are mathematics at work here! This number must mean something important because it was calculated by a machine. Grade production is an arbitrary, fictitious structure based on the constantly moving sands of circumstance and personality. That it is used to discipline and direct students has more to do with enforcing the absurdity of the classroom situation than it ever did with learning. If you don’t sit in rows and capitulate you’ll fail!

If anyone says, ‘Hey! Why is that my mark?!?” I need only crack open the byzantine markbook and baffle them with categories and weights to quell any further questions. Assessment of learning has been made sufficiently obscure as to defy questioning.

What do I do? Nothing dear, you’re not qualified!
This may as well have happened in a classroom, it’s the
same approach.

We receive a great deal of PD around assessment and evaluation (you can’t serve the system unless you know what the system needs). You’d think, based on how assessment works, that learning was a professionally mandated enterprise that the layman couldn’t hope to comprehend, just the way the education complex wants you to think about learning, it’s something done to you not something you do yourself.

Unfortunately, until parents stop expecting us to reduce their children to numbers this isn’t going to change.

Until post-secondary institutions stop empowering the mythology of marks by basing entrance requirements mainly on high school grades this isn’t going to change.

Random Inquiry Based Learning

Inquiry based learning is the current buzz in educational circles, but until we truly free students from the yoke of expectation, they can never be free to own their own learning. In order to recognize the entirely arbitrary and capricious nature of the world, we take a page from Zen.

The RIBL classroom

Inquiry based learning depends upon the teacher to create an environment in which students pursue their own goals in their own way, Random Inquiry Based Learning (RIBL) takes it a step further. In order to experience RIBL, a student must be surprised by the learning. Taking a page from Zen teaching, RIBL thrives on coincidence, serendipity and happenstance. Any attempt to organize RIBL results in a RIBL-less outcome.

RIBL cares nothing for fairness or rules. RIBL capers in the chaos of a dancing star.

In a RIBLed classroom the teacher must take on the roll of instigator, chaos clown and mischief maker, unless of course students are expecting that; only the unexpected can yield RIBLed results. RIBL thrives in the unexpected.

The RIBL teacher recognizes that life is essentially meaningless and doesn’t force a false sense of security on their students. They discourage any belief in social norms and try for existential angst whenever they can.

RIBLed rubrics contain sections like: shock, awe, bewilderment and eureka. If the learning is unexpected and creating an epiphany in the learner, then RIBL has been achieved. If a student learns what they are supposed to be learning, the teacher has failed. Only when students discover momentous breakthroughs in calculus while studying Shakespeare, or suddenly grasp photo-synthesis in phys-ed class, is RIBL being achieved.

RIBLed students are often nervous or completely terrified of what may happen in class. They often cower in groups in the hallway, refusing to make eye contact with their terrifying, unpredictable teachers. Many high schools seem to have adopted RIBL approaches to learning already.

There is only one rule about RIBL, you do not talk about RIBL! (unless you unexpectedly do)

RIBL defies optimization or organization, in fact, it actively dismantles them. The RIBL that can be explained is not the true RIBL. Only through lack of certainty can students truly exceed their own expectations and learn something new about themselves.

Beware staring into RIBL, for

the longer you stare in to RIBL,

the longer RIBL stares back into you!

Graduates of RIBL schooling include: Vinny VanGogh, Freddy Nietzsche, Gini Wolfe and Bertie Einstein. Students of the RIBL school produce unpredictable results, and surprise their teachers with amputated body parts or dramatic suicide attempts. Collateral damage is a certainty if you’re RIBLing properly, but if you’re a committed RIBLer you gain more from failing than you do from succeeding. Safety is another false belief that the RIBLer discards.

A student who produces work that annoys or seems irrelevant to the work at hand is a strong candidate for a good RIBLing.

Engagement is never an issue in the RIBLed classroom as RIBLed students are often in great peril and tend to approach classwork in a defensive/survival stance rather than with sighs of boredom.

RIBLing is the most divine form of teaching, it’s what the world does when class isn’t on.

Death of Vision

I was listening to CBC radio the other day and Ideas had a review of the repatriation of the Canadian Charter. One of the people pondering the politics of the day noted that modern politicians don’t stand for anything. They remorselessly chase poll numbers, trying to place themselves in front of whatever the herd currently believes is worthwhile (itself dictated by big media interests). McGuinty’s shameless chasing of right wing votes while throwing teachers under the bus this summer is a fine example of that approach.

Don’t look for moral standards, or even any kind of consistency in modern politicians. As the radio interviewer suggested, we look back on our political leaders as giants and see the modern ones as dwarfs. The old ones would push for a vision based on belief, even if it wasn’t always rational. The current ones shamelessly chase data in hopes of power. It makes the business of politics very economical (and I don’t mean that in a flattering way).

CTV is quite excited by this as ads for their Powerplay political commentary show declare, they are all about watching how politicians get and keep power. I thought politics were about developing visionary leaders who take Canada toward a better version of itself. It’s now all about holding power, and not standing for anything in the process other than a Machiavellian quest for control.

Last summer I was once again listening to CBC, this time Matt Galloway interviewing the CEO of RIM. As the agonizing interview went on, it became clear that this MBA wasn’t put in charge of RIM to lead it, but rather to manage it into successful insolvency. He shrugged off a question about RIM failing by simply suggesting that investors will make money on the deal because he’ll just cut the business into pieces and sell them off.

Can you imagine if Churchill had suggested that? Instead of we will fight in the fields, we will never surrender, how about we give you Scotland and Wales and call it even? Everybody ends up happy, and so much more productive.

We value leaders because they stand for something, and never back off it, even (or especially) if it makes them difficult. Wired did a recent article on Steve Jobs as either angel or demon. The man was difficult, almost impossible to work with, and the result was market dominance. He took over from a bumbling committee of MBAs who had discussed Apple into insolvency and took the company from the brink of destruction to an enviable market position before his death. I have difficulty liking Apple products due to their closed nature and proprietary design, but I have to appreciate the power of a Steve Jobs. If you want to be a visionary you aren’t looking for consensus, you’re driving for the best vision even if it seems unattainable; Churchill would have approved.

It’s a pity that RIM went to the MBA pool to find another finance monkey to further run the company into the ground. I’d much rather see a visionary, a true believer, attempt greatness rather than a controlled slide into insolvency all to benefit the moneyed class. This German jackass they’ve hired couldn’t give a damn what will happen to Waterloo and the many RIM facilities that communities depend on around the world if he manages to successfully dissolve Research In Motion into the highest bidders.

John Ralston Saul talks about the death of leadership and the rise of management in his The Collapse of Globalism. Using false economics (there is no other kind), Saul cuts apart the chop logic of globalism and how it is used to manage people into a massive mono-culture with no way out. Globalism comes complete with a data driven wrapper that is self justifying, and that desire to base leadership action on data driven decisions has been conditioned into us for decades now as the only credible justification for planning; it’s scientific, logical!

In an age of computing it serves our current mindset to over value the potential of computed statistics

The MBA manager/priest uses incomplete/fictional statistics (are there any other kind?) to manipulate belief, founding all decisions on the inherently logical and statistically valid benefits of globalization, all while ignoring simple truths. Those truths don’t go away. When you found your system on the idea of an unlimited, limited resource (cheap oil) the truth will make itself evident. The problem with globalism (and the politics, media, and education it has infected) is that we have all been conditioned to swallow statistics like they are Truth.

The last half century of post-modernism, globalism and mass media have weaned us from visionaries and simple truths. These things are now aberration s rather than a cause for celebration; panicky by-products of a lack of control in an era of false computational certainty.

I am NOT a committee!

Next time your data-driven boss/principal/MP tries to base future plans on data that are obviously minimalist, fictional and/or fabricated (and what facts born of data aren’t?), ask yourself where our sense of vision went.

I don’t want to base my very important job on data. I’m not interested in grossly simplifying teaching to suit ease of management for MBAs looking for efficiency. What I’d like is a leader with vision, maybe even someone who asks for the impossible and leads us on a charge into it. Even a near miss in that case is better than the best laid plans of a data driven committee, and sometimes the results are revolutionary. Even the failures are more helpful than statistically supported fictions leading to more data that prove how right everything is; simplifications supporting simplifications.

I’d rather take the road less traveled and risk failure while attempting greatness. I’d rather fail trying to address hard truths than present false successes best seen in standardized test scores. Most importantly, I’d rather believe in what I’m doing rather than being told what to think by a spreadsheet.

I guess I’m a man out of my time.

Shop Class as Soulcraft

Originally published on Dusty World in way back in August of 2012: https://temkblog.blogspot.com/2012/08/shop-class-as-soulcraft.html

It might sound very tech-specific, but this book contains many education related thoughts. Here are some of my favorite bits from Shop Class As Soulcraft, along with some observations in blue:

In schools we create artificial learning environments for our children that they know to be contrived and undeserving of their full attention and engagement… Without the opportunity to learn through the hands, the world remains abstract and distant, and the passions for learning will not be engaged – Doug Stowe (Wisdom of the hands Blog)

“We have a generation of students that can answer questions on standardized tests, know factoids, but they can’t do anything” – Jim Aschwanden

I never failed to take pleasure in the movement, at the end of a job, when I would flip the switch. “And there would be light.”

I too feel this whenever I finish building a computer. I call it ‘first light’ (a term I stole from astronomy for when a telescope is first turned to the sky and used). I get a thrill every time, when all of those complex components work together for the first time, and attain a kind of dim intelligence. If AI ever happens, I would happily propogate it, it feels like birth!

Boasting is what a boy does, because he has no real effect on the world. But the tradesman must reckon with the infallible judgement of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpretted away. His well founded pride is far from the gratuitous ‘self-esteem’ that educators would impart to students, as though by magic.

This focus on student self-esteem seems cart before the horsish to me. You develop self esteem as a by-product of making your way in the world under your own steam. It is one of those things that cannot be given to you, yet so much education theory revolves around building self esteem in classrooms. Unless you allow failure, self esteem is meaningless. My soccer players gain more self esteem in a draw against a better team that should have crushed them than they ever got in a classroom designed to hand it to them.

The craftsman is proud of what he has made, and cherishes it, while the consumer discards things that are perfectly serviceable in his restless pursuit of the new. – Richard Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism

You won’t find a better description of modern, globalized capitalist consumerism than in these two quotes. Why this is a standard for economics, let alone ethics, is completely beyond me. I’ve always believed that if you can’t build it, you shouldn’t get to use it. Can’t build a working computer? You don’t get to use one. Can’t build a car? You don’t get to drive. Were this the case, we’d have far fewer incompetents operating equipment they are far too dim to be using.

Since the standards of craftsmanship issue from the logic of things rather than the art of persuasion, practiced submission to them perhaps gives the craftsman some psychic ground to stand on against fantastic hopes aroused by demagogues, whether commercial or political.

On of my greatest frustations… trying to have a rational discussion with fanboys (and girls) about technology. Mac users are the worst… though AMD fanboys aren’t far behind. I’m interested in the brilliance of the engineering, not whether or not you’ve been convinced by witty advertising, though many people make their technology (all?) purchases based on little other than a cult of personality.

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

Many a student I’ve seen be idiotic in the truest sense of the word. They fail to grasp what being a student is, and then create all sorts of social tension as a result. I once had a student in media arts who was having a rough time. She stormed out of class one day and another student wondered aloud at all the drama. This troubled student didn’t do anything, failed everything, and otherwise used an disproportionate amount of school resources to keep them from wreaking even more havoc. I asked the questioning student why she was here, at school. She said, “so I can get good grades, do post-secondary and get a satisfying job” (which I thought was a brilliant answer from a 15 year old). I told her that other student has no idea why she is here. This is a cruel, jail-like torture for her. She sees no value in it for herself (likely because her life isn’t full of parental role models that demonstrate the advantages of a good education). The whole class stopped to listen to our conversation, I suspect many of them wondered why this student was this difficult.

Management: a “peculiarly chancy and fluid” character (Robert Jackall) … vulnerability of managers in managing abstract, non-objective work develop a highly provisional way of speaking and feeling. Staking out a position on all sides of a situation, so you always have plausible deniability of a failure (that’s not what I meant). Vague language to protect a vague job. Managers are always on probation, constantly vulnerable and anxious about the essentially meaningless role they play in a fickle corporation that could shift the ground under their feet at any moment.

Up in the Air for a poignant look at this kind of management in the middle of the 2008/9 1% money grab… and one of the reasons I never worked well in business. Also one of the reasons I’m fairly relentless with people when they start talking about private business/corporate work ethics, organization and effectiveness. I worked in a number of private companies before I became a teacher, I was lucky to find one in five run competently, let alone effectively.

A last, favorite piece, and a brilliant analysis of the apprenticeship process:
Often someone working at a speed shop spent his younger days lingering around the counter, then, as he penetrated the social hierarchy, in the back, allowed now to pull his car around and perhaps use a floor jack to install some shock absorbers purchased at the counter. Such an exposure to injury liability would give a lawyer fits; implicit in the invitation to the back is a judgement of the young man’s character and a large measure of trust. He will get some light supervision that is likely to be disguised as a stream of sexual insults, delivered from ten feet away by someone he cannot see (only his shoes) as he lies under his car. Such insults are another index of trust. If he is able to return these outrageous comments with wit, the conversation will cascade toward real depravity; the trust is pushed further and made reciprocal. If the young man shows promise, that is, if he is judged to have some potential to plumb new depths of moral turpitude, he may get hired: here is someone around whom everyone can relax. p 183

That sense of relaxation and trust is something I really miss from mechanics. The education environment, so focused on political correctness, is the antithesis of shop culture; even justified swearing is a real no-no.

When I showed this to my wife she just shook her head and said, “I have no experience in this.” This sort of environment is created in groups of males. I see it in hockey change rooms, on shop floors, and in warehouses where I’ve worked. It’s not that women are incapable of working in that environment, I’ve known a number who have successfully done it, it’s that the vast majority of women see this as cruel, degrading and pointless.

This is a complicated issue, one that I’m still working out myself. There is a direct roughness, a kind of honesty, to how men socialize that has been squeezed out of business (education being a subset of that culture). Boys in school respond to it. If we’re playing soccer and player goes down having been kicked in the groin, I go ballistic at the ref and get a warning. I then attend to the kid on the ground. He’s hurting. I say, “how did that feel?” The kid laughs despite the pain. He knows I’ve just almost been removed because of what happened, he has no doubt of my stance on what’s happened, and the flippancy helps him deal with the agony. Those opportunities don’t come up in class; another reason to protect extracurriculars, they let you create a more genuine bond with your students.

In Crawford’s brilliant analysis above, he emphasizes the honesty and familiarity that can come out of this kind of ribbing, a real sense of camaraderie. It’s the kind of thing that makes Fight Club resonate with boys, and men, who read/watch it. You can’t relax around someone who tells you to trust them. You can relax around someone who is able to display real ‘moral turpitude’ in response to your own baiting. The lack of understanding of how this works separates many men from developing a close working relationship in feminized work environments.

Whether you agree, disagree or simply want to try and understand, Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft makes a compelling argument for value of skilled manual labour, and the culture that surrounds it.

Expectations

In a very hands-on computer technology grade 12 class, we’ve built our own network from scratch and students have been working through the A+ CompTIA technician‘s course. The final goal of the course is to get students into the position of actually getting certified as PC technicians. If they go on to college for courses, they’ll already have the first certification they need. If they go to work, they’ll be able to work in Futureshop, Staples or whatever (all those computer support people must have A+ certification).

The goal was a relevant, purpose driven class with real world value and as much technology as I could possibly provide.

I’ve spent a lot of time and energy getting my hands on equipment and making space for the students to be able to develop technology from the ground up. I hadn’t spent as much time walking students through some very information heavy review, my hope was that the hands on technology would offer us in-class opportunities to review the material.

Some students, once they got the network to a functional level, got very distracted by the fact that it can play networked games. This conversation happened recently when I suggested they needed to be ready to review the entire course because we were running out of time. One student felt that he hadn’t been handed the learning on a silver enough platter:

Grade 12 student: “but you’re the teacher, shouldn’t you be making us learn this?” (instead of letting us play games)

Me: “I’ve done back flips to get you guys access to multiple A+ courses, material and testing practice. I’ve also drilled you on the material on a daily basis. When we get done with that, you are given time to read ahead on future material, review what you missed, or apply your theory hands on. At that point I want to help people on a one on one basis. If you choose to play games with that time, it’s my job to force you to learn?”

student: “…”

me: “I’m not here to force you to learn, no one can do that. You’re senior students on the verge of graduating. If this were a junior class, we’d have more regimented lessons, but it isn’t. I expect you to be able to address yourself to what’s going on. I’m not about to force your head into the learning water here, if you don’t want to drink, that is your choice. It puts you in a bad place in post secondary though, they don’t spoon feed at all.”

student: “but we’re not college students, you shouldn’t run the class like that.”

me: “you’re about to be, at what point would you like to transition into post secondary if not in grade 12? Do you think they are going to spoon feed you next year?”

Not ten minutes later we wrapped up the chapter review and students were let loose on the network. Guess what he did…

me: “After our recent conversation, what you’re doing there is quite provocative. Are you trying to aggravate me?”

He didn’t stop, he just minimized the window. I feel sorry for the guy.

This class has a truly awesome amount of technology at their disposal, I’m jealous. When I took my certifications, I had to take apart and reassemble the only PC we had in the house, and look at pictures of other ones because I had nothing on hand. I didn’t have a certified technician there enthusiastic about experimenting and throwing everything from imacs to netbooks, to laptops to multiple desktop formats into the mix. I also had to pay four times what I’m getting the certs for this group of students for. This guy is spoiled for choice but all he wants to do is play lame, online games and whine about not being treated like a ten year old. I’m not saying they shouldn’t take a break and blow off some steam, but they seldom put in the effort to deserve the break.

I’ve got some good students in that class, but they’re all bitten to a greater or lesser degree by their wealth; it makes them complacent and lazy. When I think about what the students in my computer club at my old school in the suburbs would have done with all of this equipment, it makes me sad. Even when you make the learning, meaningful, individualized and pack it with technology, you can’t force a spoiled, lazy horse to drink it up.

ECOO16: Virtual Reality & The DIY School Computer Lab

A chance to see some of my favourite
people and study one of my favourite things!

ECOO 2016 is coming this week. As a chance to catch up with tech-interested teachers from across the province it’s unparalleled. It’s also a wonderful opportunity to see what those people are doing in their classrooms and get tangible information on how to work with technology in a classroom. I end up with a full brain and a great deal of enthusiasm after a few days at the annual ECOO conference.

I’m beginning the conference on Wednesday by demonstrating virtual reality to teachers from across the province at Brenda Sherry and Peter Skillen‘s Minds on Media. MoM (or in this case MEGA MoM) is a showcase of #edtech in action, and a must see event. As an emerging technology VR is going to have a profound influence on education in the future. Having a chance to give people a taste of that future is exciting. The only reason I’ve been able to explore VR as it emerges is because of the DIY lab I’m presenting on Friday.

I get to spend the Thursday soaking up the latest in technology and how it can amplify pedagogy. On Friday I’m presenting on why you should develop your own do it yourself school computer lab and how to do it.

I first presented the concept at ECOO four years ago. It’s taken me that long to develop the contacts and build a program that can do the idea justice. I’ve always felt that offering students turn-key no-responsibility educational technology was a disservice, now I’m able to demonstrate the benefits of a student-built computer technology lab and explain the process of putting one together. I realize I’m swimming upstream from the put-a-Chromebook-in-every-hand current school of thought, but that’s my way.

There are a couple of things that have changed over the years that have made this once impossible idea possible. Our board’s IT department underwent a major change in management and philosophy a few years ago. The old school was all about locking everything down and keeping it the same for ease of management. The new guard sees digital technology as a means of improving teaching rather than as an end in itself. They encourage and enable rather than complain and prevent.

The other major change was that my department got reintegrated into technology (it was formerly a computer science based mini-department of its own). Back in tech I was suddenly able to access specialist high skills major funding and support and found I was able to build the DIY concept – something I could never have done without our board’s tech-support funding model.

Thanks to that new, adaptive, open concept IT approach I’m able to access a BYOD wireless network with anything I want. I don’t have to teach students on locked down, board

imaged, out of date PCs. My computer engineering seniors helped me build what we now have and the results have been impressive. In addition to students in our little rural school suddenly winning Skills Ontario for information technology and networking, we’re also top ten in electronics and, best of all, the number of students we have successfully getting into high demand, high-tech post secondary programs is steadily rising.

When I thought it might be interesting for students to get their hands on emerging virtual reality hardware in the spring it was only a matter of finding the funding. We built the PC we needed to make it happen and then it did. We’ve had VR running in the lab for almost half a year now at a time when most people haven’t even tried it. Because we were doing it ourselves, what costs $5000 for people who need a turn key system cost us three thousand. We’re now producing those systems for other schools in our board.

A do it yourself lab is more work but it allows your students and you, the teacher, to author your own technology use. Until you’ve done it you can’t imagine how enabling this is. My students don’t complain about computers not working, they diagnose and repair them. My students don’t wonder what it’s like to run the latest software, they do it. Does everything work perfectly all the time? Of course not, but we are the ones who decide what to build and what software to use to get a job done, which allows us to understand not only what’s on stage but everything behind the curtains too.

If that grabs you as an interesting way to run a classroom, I‘m presenting at 2pm on Friday. If not, fear not, ECOO has hundreds of other presentations happening on everything from how to use Minecraft in your classroom to deep pedagogical talks on how to create a culture that effectively integrates technology into education.

Thursday’s keynote is Shelly Sanchez Terrell, a tech orientated teacher/author who offers a challenging look at how to tackle technology use in education. Friday’s keynote is the Jesse Brown (who I’m really looking forward to hearing), a software engineer and futurist who asks tough questions about just how disruptive technology may be to Canadian society.

If you’re at all interested in technology use in learning, you should get down to Niagara Falls this week and have a taste of ECOO. You’ll leave full of ideas and feel empowered and optimistic enough to try them. You’ll also find that you suddenly have a PLN of tech savvy people who can help, enable and encourage your exploration. I hope I can be one of them.

If you can’t make it, you can always watch it trend on Twitter:

#bit16 Tweets
note: to make a feed embed on twitter, go to settings-widget-create new and play with it, very easy!

Data Exhaust

At a recent educational technology conference in Phoenix Constance Steinkuehler mentioned the term ‘data exhaust’ in passing to describe the numbers pouring out of testing. The idea of data as pollution has been with me for a while. The statistics I’ve seen derived from data in education have often been farcical attempts at justifying questionable programming. It’s gotten to the point that when someone starts throwing charts and graphs up in a presentation I assume they are hiding something.

.
Constance’s term ‘data exhaust’ had me tumbling through metaphorical implications. If the data we generate out of education is the exhaust, what are we doing when we turn the education system toward producing data exhaust for its own sake? No student will ever face a standardized test in the working world, it’s a completely unrealistic and limited way in which to measure learning let alone prepare students for the rest of their lives. Using standardized testing to measure learning has us revving the education vehicle at high rpm in neutral; we’re making a lot of smoke and not going anywhere.

Is data always useless? Not at all, but the tendency to find patterns and turn data in statistics takes something already abstract and abstracts it even further. That people then take these inferences and limited slices of information as gospel points to the crux of the crisis in American education. We end up with what we think are facts when they are really fictions that use math of lend an air of credibility.

Even with statistics and data metrics off the table, the idea of looking at the data exhaust pouring out of education as a way of directing future action demonstrates staggering shortsightedness. Education is not a data driven, linear or binary enterprise, it is a complex human one. We are not producing expert test takers, we should be producing well rounded human beings that can thrive in a complex, competitive, data rich century. No standardized test can measure that.

If you took your poorly running car into a mechanic and they just kept revving the engine harder and harder while watching smoke billow out of the back you’d think something was wrong with them, yet that is how American education is tuning itself. They then wonder why they aren’t scoring well in world rankings. If we want the education vehicle to take us somewhere we need to crack open the hood and take a look at the engine, but what is that engine? What actually makes the engine of education run well? It isn’t fixating on the data exhaust.

Canada has performed very well in world education rankings. We find ourselves able to keep up with some of the world’s best education systems, like Finland, and we do it at a much lower cost per student than the US has managed to. It looks like all that testing and data exhaust fixation costs a lot more than your students’ well being, it’s also hugely inefficient.

A well running education system focuses on pedagogy. It is what fuels it, it is what makes the system serve its students using the best possible learning practices. Pedagogy is a tricky concept, and it doesn’t offer simplistic solutions that digital technology companies can app-up, but it does give everyone, no matter how much they may disagree on the details, a common goal.

There was a lot of talk about coming together and pulling in the same direction over the Common Curriculum at this conference. We aren’t all on the same page in Canada when it comes to processes or how the system should run, but pedagogy is on everyone’s mind. Best practices have to drive education. Having standards isn’t a bad thing, but when you’re so fixated on the data exhaust you’re producing that you forget fundamental pedagogical practice, you’ve lost sight of what education should be in the data smog you’ve created.

In Canada we pay less and produce more by focusing on pedagogy rather than empty data gathering (aka: standardized testing).

via USC Rossier’s online Doctor of Education

Archetypal Emotional Response In High Stress Learning

An editorial piece I read in Bike Magazine a while back has stayed with me. In it the author (a veteran motorcycle trainer) was describing how a rider’s emotional response to high stress situations limits their ability to learn from them. It struck me because I still catch myself falling into both of the archetypal mind traps he describes. I now struggle to get beyond them and adopt the clinical approach of a master learner that he suggests.

In a high-stakes, emotional environment like riding you can’t be trowing tantrums or assigning blame (though many do), you need to be calm and aware in order to both assess a situation as its happening and accurately recall and learn from it later. Emotion is a natural response to high stress situations but it often gets in the way of attaining mastery.

The author of the piece (I’m still looking for it but I think I lent the magazine out) suggests that people fall into archetypal behaviors when they are stressed and emotional. These behaviours prevent you from making coherent decisions in the moment as well as preventing progress by hiding memory details behind ego and emotion. The two archetypes we fall back into are child and parent. Since we’re all familiar with these roles it only makes sense that we’d revert to them when we are under pressure.

The child throws tantrums and reacts selfishly, aggressively and emotionally. People falling into this mind-set shout and cry at the circumstances and focus on blaming others. The child is emotional and blind to just about everything around them except the perceived slight. This approach tends to be dangerously over-reactive. Have you ever seen a student blow up in an asymmetrical way over a minor issue? They have fallen into the child archetype emotional trap.

The parent mind-set seems like an improvement but it is just as effective at blocking learning. The parent shakes their head disapprovingly and focuses on passing judgement. You’ll see someone in this mind-set tutting and rolling their eyes at people. The parent is focused on passing judgement loudly and publicly. You can probably see how easy it is for teachers to fall into this one.

The child is selfish, emotional and immediate. The parent wraps themselves in a false sense of superiority that makes the user feel empowered when they might otherwise feel helpless. Both archetypes attempt to mitigate frustration and ineffectiveness behind emotion and ego.

I’ve seen students stressed out by exams or other high-stakes learning situations fall into these traps but it took that motorbike instructor to clarify how students can lose their ability to internalize learning by falling into these archetypes. He describes riders who shout and yell at someone cutting them off. They are responding to their own poor judgement and lack of attention with the emotional outburst. Suddenly finding themselves in danger, they lash out emotionally in order to cover up their own inadequacies. That emotional blanket effectively hides any chance of reviewing and learning from a situation objectively.

The parent adopts that judgmental stance. Last summer I had a senior student who rides a motorcycle get involved in an accident. He had bad road rash and was bruised all over. He went with the parent approach. The woman who hit him was panicked and frightened because she hadn’t seen him. Her own mother had been hurt in a similar motorcycle accident and she felt a lot of guilt over being the cause of this one. The student said ‘she came out of no-where’. I said, ‘that’s odd, cars weight thousands of pounds. I’ve never seen one appear out of nowhere before.’ Rather than review his own actions and perhaps learn to develop better 360° awareness, the student was happy to piggy-back on the driver’s emotional response and pass judgement. He never felt any responsibility for that accident and still believes that cars can come out of nowhere.

I enjoy riding because it is a difficult, dangerous craft that it is very important to do well. In pressurized learning situations you need an alert, open mind. I’ve never once seen this the focus of consideration in school (except perhaps in extracurricular sports). What we do instead is try and remove any pressure and cater to emotionality rather than teaching students to master it.

Other Links:
Comparing Teacher PD to Motorcycle Training
Training Fear and Ignorance out of Bikecraft
Archetypal Pedagogy

The New Efficiency

This African proverb passed me on the
internet last week, and left me thinking.

Originally published on Dusty World in June of 2015:

https://temkblog.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-new-efficiency.html

Last semester I had an energetic grade 9 suddenly stop his interaction with the internet and wonder out loud (and it was asked in all seriousness): “why is it in video games and movies old people are so cool, with hidden knowledge and special powers, but in real life they just suck?”

He received an avalanche of ‘how could you say that?!’, but then everyone went on to say how wonderful their grandparents were. Everyone loves their grandparents, but no one was willing to defend age and by extension experience in and of itself.

When this African proverb popped up I immediately felt the pinch of that class discussion (yes, I know, we were talking about the value of age and experience in a class where I was supposed to be teaching computer engineering, I guess my kids won’t be ready for whatever standardized test they invent for it).

What role does age and experience have in the information age? This proverb also refers to libraries, which have been facing their own test of relevance thanks to the Googliable nature of information.

Information technology has made personal knowledge irrelevant. The life experiences of human beings have become meaningless, replaced by internet searches. Why would you bother to ask your grandfather how to change the brakes on your car when you can just Google it? Once a useful source of information, the elders around you are now objects of affection and little more, they serve no function. You can get the information you need without any of the static (anecdotal stories that accompany the information). This sanitized, machine driven version of knowledge has many benefits.

You can reduce complex human knowledge (for example, the development of literacy) into simplistic, easy to quantify standards and then make sweeping suppositions about the results. Banal opinion based on internet ‘fact’ is the new intelligence. Like any opinion you hear online, carefully crafted grading schemes end up becoming the truth, which fits nicely into the antiseptic version of knowledge the information age peddles.

Another benefit is the downward social pressure on human communities. When you plug people into a centralized source of information you wean them from the social necessities of family, community and even nation. When no one needs anyone else (but they do need an ISP), you have removed all the social static and laid the groundwork for a kind of hypercapitalism that will make past look like the middle ages!

When we try and argue for meaningful learning (in anything other than a poster), we are met with educational administration making sad faces and saying it’s not viable. The reasonable provision of caps on class sizes is just such an attempt, which is why the meme on the right goes straight to the heart of this issue.

Tangible data that grossly oversimplify human endeavour are how we roll nowadays. As the poster states, class caps mean nothing, but fail to hand out a piece of paper with grades so abstract that they are meaningless along with computer generated comments, and ‘everyone loses their minds!’

There is some push back against the dimensionless facts that drive the information age. You find it in the physical world in grass roots movements like slow food or maker spaces where you see individuals trying to wrest control of production from the hands of remote systems. In these places the idea of human interaction is key to the process of learning. They are trying to build communities in an arid digital landscape that is bereft complex human interaction… unless they are under a corporate banner; communities designed for marketing purposes. What would be the economic sense in creating a community solely for the benefit its members?

Ironically, human interaction is less and less a factor in human education. The push to integrate technology into pedagogy without considering its implications has infected education systems with the same efficiency that we now enjoy everywhere else. We can hardly expect the personally demeaned yet highly efficient funployees in the private sector to demand anything other than consistent menial labour, it’s what they do. Developing complex personal relationships in order to effectively mentor and teach aren’t very efficient/economically viable. They are certainly discouraged in the brave new world of 21st Century education where teachers are now facilitators, reduced to getting out of the way of learning and making sure the #edtech is working.

One of my students from many years ago is now out in the world. She was sitting in a restaurant a few weeks ago watching two employees, a teenage girl and an older woman on their break. The older woman kept trying to start a conversation. The teen ignored her, buried in her phone until she finally snapped, ‘What? What do you want?” She was incensed that this woman had interrupted her texting time. She was probably in withdrawal because they don’t let her have the phone while working. I can bet which one of those two employees gets better performance reviews, though she sounds like an ass.

Maybe human experience is meaningless nowadays. Maybe old people are useless and libraries are a waste of space (great idea: replace every one in school with franchise coffee shops to balance the books!). Maybe we don’t need each other to learn any more, it’s certainly not as efficient.

LINKS

Watch the new efficiency infect the UK’s Labour Party
“In 2015 we are living in a cold, cruel, and desolate country in which benefit sanctions, foodbanks, poverty wages, and ignorance reign, governed by a clutch of rich, privately educated sociopaths whose conception of society has been ripped straight from the pages of a dystopian novel.”