Dusty World – Page 37 – Mechanical Sympathy

The Tyranny of Paper

Students in my board collect over 17,000 sheets of paper in handouts in their k-12 school careers. Most Canadian schools are probably similar…

Every piece of finished paper has measurable environmental costs: http://bit.ly/p9wpqq

We burn a 60 watt light bulb continuously for 159.1 years so that we can hand out those handouts, one for each student… we burn plutonium to keep them in handouts.

We put 76.5 kilos of carbon into the atmosphere for each student who goes through our system… just so we can give them handouts.

Each student consumes almost one whole tree in paper in handouts from k-12. Think of the tens of thousands of students going through the system. We deforest just to give them handouts.

At 6 cents per copy that’s $1020 per student during their k-12 career. Over one thousand dollars spent on EACH student, just so we can give them handouts.

That’s all end-product related. The paper industry is one of the most polluting industrial processes we maintain, even giving oil a run for its money: paper pollution.

Last year, the wood/pulp/paper industry produced more particulate pollution than oil production in Canada. Only stone and metal based heavy industry were worse polluters.

In addition to all those handouts, I haven’t even gotten into the millions of dollars we spend on the tons of paper in text books, all supporting that polluting paper pulp industry.

I don’t doubt an electronic solution has its own problems, but I can’t believe that with some intelligent design, we couldn’t come up with a dependable, tough tablet device that would take paper and the massive polluting industry out of our schools. A simple reading and data entry device along the lines of a Kobo or Kindle would end the tyranny of paper; we’re close to this technologically now.

Individualizing technology in education isn’t just more efficient, it’s cheaper and more ecological too.

Anti-Edtech or Anti-Distraction?

Originally published on Dusty World way back in September of 2014:

Is technology in the classroom a distraction or a tool for improving learning? The results of vastly improved student learning from technology haven’t materialized, yet we continue to throw money at educational technology hoping that it will help.

A wise internet jedi recently shared an article in which a new media professor is putting an end to digital distraction in a class in which he teaches about digital distraction. A better person to explain the assumptions we make about digital technology you’d be hard pressed to find. He had a couple of quotes that really punched assumptions about edtech use in the face.

“Multi-taskers often think they are like gym rats, bulking up their ability to juggle tasks, when in fact they are like alcoholics, degrading their abilities through over-consumption.”

“Multi-tasking is cognitively exhausting; when we do it by choice, being asked to stop can come as a welcome change.”

The concept of multitasking has long been championed by the rise of the digital native crowd. It’s something we poor immigrants to this brave new world simply can’t do like they can, except it isn’t. If you want to follow the science rather than the marketing, you’ll find that multi-tasking is indeed a myth. If you want to do something well, you focus on it. That might seem like simple common sense, but you’ll find a lot of digital education evangelists pushing for it anyway.

For the Luddites that want to attack computers themselves for this dilemma, he had this:

“programming, a famously arduous cognitive task, will acquaint you with stories of people falling into code-flow so deep they lose track of time, forgetting to eat or sleep. Computers are not inherent sources of distraction — they can in fact be powerful engines of focus — but latter-day versions have been designed to be, because attention is the substance which makes the whole consumer internet go.”

As a philosophically minded technologist I straddle this uneasy divide between the tech-hater and the fan-boy/girl, and I like neither. Where I see computer technology as a tool to use, many others either vilify or champion it from an emotional angle. I struggle mightily in class to get students to stop this emotional love/hate relationship with computers that many model on the adults in their lives, but it’s a simple truth when Shirky says our computers are now designed to be distractions. If you’re only going to be a user, you’re going to be a loser.

Clay Shirky goes on to describe the intellect as the rider atop an elephant of emotions, desires and urges. The rider may direct the elephant occasionally, but when the two are in conflict the elephant will usually win. This is what happens when you put a distraction engine like the modern internet in front of a child whose rider is still working out how to direct the elephant (not that many adults are better). No wonder I find it a continual frustration to direct students… and I’m teaching computers designed to distract!

The engagement game we play in education nowadays is based on this battle with software designed to distract. As Shirky says, we’re bringing whiteboard markers to a gun fight, and losing badly. When we decide to get in sync with the modern world we are actually downgrading education in order to play the distraction game in the same split attention, broken thinking world that has people driving into each other.

Educational IT should be the leading edge, designed to vary student access to digital technology in order to promote pedagogy at every step. What it shouldn’t be is what it is, a hand-me-down variety of the very software and hardware that is causing the problem in the first place. This realization puts concepts like BYOD, tech-branded education and open internet access in a very awkward place if you want to champion learning over engagement, though I get the sense that engagement has infected educational management much as it has everything else.

This infected thinking, the kind that has monetized the internet and made a generation of software engineers billionaires, demands constant human attention. When everything touched by technological integration gets infected with the idea of deep psychological engagement, people in the world become little more than variables in an economic equation.

Education is now just another enabler in a digital distraction end game that is infecting society as a whole.

Learning Without A Safety Net

As a learner I tend to have problems following curriculum (I have trouble following it as a teacher too). For me, learning is a challenging, self-directed, non-linear activity. It’s a delight when you have that eureka moment and frustrating when you’re can’t grasp a concept because you don’t have enough context around it. I don’t want it to be easy, and I don’t want it to be fail-proof. Classes that are unfailable are pointless in my eyes; difficulties in learning are what make it empowering! Success shouldn’t be assured, if it is, you’ve sacrificed any real sense of accomplishment.

If a teacher, closely following set curriculum, spoon feeds me a lesson, I don’t feel that I’ve learned it, so much as learned the wrong thing (being told how to do it rather than figuring out how to do it). When students ask me to resolve a problem for them, I point them in the right direction, I don’t fix it for them. They aren’t in class to learn how to ask someone to correct their grammar, operate Adobe Flash or build a computer, they are in class to learn how to do these things for themselves. If they’re miles from figuring it out for themselves, I simply try and close that gap, but never take the last step, they need to do that themselves, or they won’t own their learning. To quote the mighty Morpheus, ” I’m trying to free your mind, Neo. But I can only show you the door. You’re the one that has to walk through it. ”

I set up my classrooms as research centres and each assignment as a project. The environment should quickly and easily provide the tools needed to learn in a hands-on way. Failures aren’t failures, the only way to fail is to do nothing (which an increasing number of students seem to be doing once they realize how hard it is to fail in the current system). I encourage experimentation, and the opportunities found in resolving your own misunderstandings. Most of all, I make it very clear that the only way to fail is to make no attempt. Once students are engaged, they inevitably find success in a supportive learning environment.

I did this in English and it often caused conflict with the force-feeders who feel that you’re not teaching unless you’re talking at the class. Those force-feeders are as often students as they are teachers; the expectation of most academic students are that the teacher will give you information, you’ll repeat it back, and see high grades. Giving them room to fail makes them very nervous. Seeing that the technology curriculum is actually based on this idea of broad based, project focused learning, I’m looking forward to teaching a subject built upon this open, student centred approach. I loved teaching art for the same reason; project based, hands-on learning with lots of time for me to work one on one with students as they develop tangible skills.

In a tightly restricted, curriculum based classroom, I feel like I’m trying to dance in a straight jacket (both as a teacher, and as a student). I’m not saying that there shouldn’t be some focus, but the moment you dictate the entire process of learning, you effectively kill any personal meaning or satisfaction in it.

Which Digital Overlord Do you Bow To?

I’m pretty handy when it comes to technology, but the past week has really underlined for me just how proprietary digital technology has become. In the past seven days I’ve had to root my phone and I’m still struggling to free the magazines I have purchased from the clutches of Apple.

With content so closely tied to software delivery, and more and more of that software delivery being locked to specific hardware, you seemingly have to accept the fact that you don’t own anything you legally download from the internet without also accepting that the only way to view it is through a multinational’s proprietary ecosystem.

While the tech giants are holding each other off with proprietary technology, the humans run for cover. Tech used to be all about user empowerment, its first duty now is to the multinational that created it, users are way down the priority list.

I’m just over two years into a three year contract with Telus. Last year Samsung decided that my Galaxy Note2 wasn’t allowed to update the Google Android operating system that runs on it. I normally wouldn’t care, but Google Play keeps updating the apps I have on the phone, eventually making a number of them incompatible with my stale version of Android.

Why would Samsung do this? It’s been two years, it’s time to force me into an upgrade to a new phone. This wouldn’t be an issue in most markets where telecoms can’t bully customers, but it’s only recently that Canada decided to join the rest of the first world in limiting its cellular carriers in terms of abusive contracts. Why would Telus shrug about my phone problems? Because they are selling me a new phone early, even while I’m still on a contract that was deemed unfair to consumers.

What’s left for the user? The hacker community, thankfully. After having a chat with my students (all of whom have hacked their phones), I found Jedi X and installed it on the Note2. Suddenly the phone is faster than it’s ever been, no stability issues at all, lots of extra features that I got to select, and best of all, I’m not forced to run any of the cruft that Telus and Samsung demand I run ‘under contract’.

I’m suddenly no longer the owner of a phone that bricks itself every two hours and needs the battery pulled to restart it. I’m also the owner of a Note2 that makes lightsaber noises whenever you take the stylus out (I can’t express how happy this makes me). Without the modding community I’d be stuck with a useless phone and paying my way out of a contract that wouldn’t be legal in most of the world, and isn’t legal any more in Canada.

So, with the phone hacked and sorted, I turned to Apple’s Newsstand. I’ve been using an ipad mini to read, but some magazines on the newsstand are locked to aspect ratio and zoom. Since they were designed for a regular ipad, they don’t present well on the mini. Fortunately, after much searching, I’ve found a tablet that I actually enjoy using. The Microsoft Surface is a tablet that also lets me snap a keyboard on and do work as a full Intel i5 laptop. I can even do photoshop and video editing on it! Its high resolution screen is comfortable for reading too.

Like my Microsoft iPad?
It can also be a Microsoft
Android tablet, or a linux
PC, or, you know, a
Windows PC.

Should be no problem, right? Just install itunes and I’ll be able to access the content I paid for. Um, no. Apple locks that content to an i-device. You don’t own the magazine you paid for, it only exists when you’re looking at it through an Apple iOS screen. I don’t save money buying electronic subscriptions, each magazine costs me $3.99 instead of $6.99 for a paper copy, plus the price of an ipad.

As you might imagine, Apple doesn’t make an ipad emulator, but lots of other people have. A couple of downloads later (and a second OS install) and I’m in business, reading the content I paid for on the device of my choice. I can also boot the Surface into Android mode and view Google Apps on it. I’m sure this is breaking all kinds of Apple, Microsoft and Google legalese, which is really the point of this whole piece.

There was a time when digital technology was designed to empower users at all costs; the user wasn’t the first thing, they were the only thing. Users weren’t a data point to be mined, or consumer to be duped into committing to a closed ecosystem, they weren’t buried in legalese and they could expect hardware to run software without worrying about the brand on it.

In the earlier days of digital technology, before these digital giants (who are now synonymous with high-technology) turned this into a vicious game of one-upmanship capitalism, we could depend on digital tech to offer real improvements over the way we used to do things. Recently I’ve found myself instead wondering what the angle is every time I see a new digital delivery system.

The good news is most people aren’t bothered to learn ways around it and just keep feeding the giants money. For the few who are willing to learn and experiment, there are always work arounds.

The State of Educational Hashtags, FEB 2012

I’ve become quite habitual in my use of hashtags, and haven’t really been exploring the edges. At conferences I’m diligent about following and using the correct hastag, but when it comes to topic specific ideas, I tend to resort to the basics (#edchat #edtech).

I thought it time to look into the current state of edu-hashtags and try and dig up some new resources for them.

An interesting post on the reach of various Education hashtags. Personal favs from those lists: #edchat #edtech

Twitter U: lists of Education hashtags with explanations. Hashtags of interest:

#TUfuture: future trends… sounds interesting (and up my alley)
#TUtin: tech integration in specific teaching areas

EDUDEMIC hashtag listings:

#mlearning: mobile learning using mobile tech
#vitalcpd: effective use of tech in the classroom
#elearning: dedicated to… fish! No, just kidding, it’s about elearning

Supercool School hashtags list.

Hashonomy: the science of hashtags (in beta right now).

Some Canadian specific hashtags… #cdned: general Canadian education tag. There are some BC ones that I don’t follow too much, such as #bced, though I should.

Anyone got any Ontario educational hashtags or other Canadian specific ones? Not that I get that wound up about geographically specific tags – they tend to not get the point of the internet (common interests matter more that geographical proximity).

Reply with any I missed! I want to poach your hashtag knowhow!

Naked Lies

When you’re using digital tools to assist your writing process, you’re not only getting grammar and spelling support, but you’re also performing your writing process in a fishbowl. It’s amazing how many digital natives seem to be unaware of this. When you create online you’re creating in a radically transparent environment. If you’re going to do something less than honest, it’ll show.

I had a series of plagiarism issues teaching elearning this semester. In one case a student handed in the same thing copied off the internet in two different assignments. Worst. Plagiarizer. Ever.

Turnitin lights up copied text and links you to where the material came from online, very handy.

The Ontario elearning system has Turnitin.com built into it, so catching the plagiarism was a matter of opening the report, screen capturing it and sending it on to the student. When it’s that easy, it’s not even particularly time consuming to call a student on copied text. I often have students try to beat turnitin in order to show them how it works. They leave with an appreciation of how easy it is for the teacher to wield and how hard it is for a student to beat. It’s easier to just write it yourself.

When I catch a plagiarizer I usually just show them the report without explanation and then see what they say. I’ve gotten some funny responses to this, like the time the rural Ontario farm kid stole an essay from an honours student from India. When I asked him what a ‘chap’ was, he said it, “was a kind of stick.” That’s some quality plagiarism. To most English teachers it’s patently obvious when plagiarism occurs. When a kid who appears to have a vocabulary mainly consisting of swear words suddenly starts dropping four syllable terms in picture perfect compound sentences, alarms go off.

Since we’ve gone to Google-docs it gets even more transparent. A colleague told me about a student who handed in a suddenly perfect French paper. She opened up the editing history and saw that the boyfriend had logged in (under his own account) and edited the entire thing. When called on it the student said she’d had to use his account because she couldn’t get into her’s… but she’d shared the file from hers. It’s hard to make lies stick when it’s all out there.

Until students realize just how transparent working online is, they are labouring under a huge misconception. That misunderstanding is based on the false sense of anonymity they feel when they are online. Because they feel that eyes are off them, they are more likely to push moral boundaries, but they don’t understand that digital processes are documenting their every move.

Here is yet another example of how ‘digital natives‘ fail to grasp the basic concepts that drive digital processes. We shouldn’t be smitten with familiarity, we should be advocating for understanding… at least if we’re still trying to educate people (which may not be the case). From that neo-lib point of view, the digital native is one of those magical assumptions that integrate digital technology into the very biology of our students, it becomes a fundamental truth we base learning on, but it’s just a convenient assumption that frees us from taking on the responsibility of understanding it ourselves.

Someone shared The Brave New World of 21st Century Teaching the other day in our teacher Facebook group. I responded:

The subtext of 21st Century skills is the de-branding of educators as teachers and the re-branding of educators as facilitators. Edtech could be used to enhance pedagogy and individualize learning, instead it will be used to Walmart education into a process overseen by centralized administration and bereft of teachers, and it has the convenience of being much more ‘efficient’ (read: cheaper) than our current system. It’s also more controlable than trying to manage a bunch of professionals bent on something as airy fairy as pedagogy.

Technology doesn’t appear to be moving the needle on student success, yet we’re pushing into 21st century skills as though they will resolve all ills. I’m a strong advocate of mastering technology, but integrating it in ignorance is a disaster in the making. It caters to exactly the kind of blind faith in technocratic neo liberalism that is infecting everything else. When we adopt machines in ignorance we let their limitations become our limitations. Those machines are all created and owned by very politically motivated interests.

For someone who has always been involved in the advancement of educational technology, it’s heart-breaking to see it implemented as a means of diminishing the teaching profession and placing human learning in the context of a software environment. I’d always thought pedagogy would drive educational adoption of technology, but as in the rest of society, there is something much more sinister at work in digitization.

The constant downward pressure on freedom of information and the push to striate and own data (including the data users willingly give) points toward a dystopian and authoritarian end to our digital frontier. The very processes that monitor plagiarism above can as easily be used to invade privacy, grossly simplify learning and itemize people for political reasons, and they are.

I’m glad it’s summer. Time to put this down for a while before we walk straight into another round of manufactured austerity and digital marketing. I wonder how much longer education can withstand these social forces.

No Heroes & Distractions

Originally published on Dusty World in June of 2014

I suspect the general public thinks that teaching is easy. I’m not talking about classroom management, that everyone agrees is difficult, but teaching, the process of enabling learning, is generally seen as easy. Anyone can tell someone else what to think, right? Pretty much everyone has been through school, so they all know what it is and how it works.

I’ve talked about the terrifyingly vast concept of pedagogy before, but most lay-people have never heard the term and so don’t know or care about its complexities. Strangely, few teachers or administrators seem to want to talk about it either, but that’s for another post. The process of creating a rich learning environment is subtle, ever changing and very difficult; reflection is a good teacher’s best defence against this challenge. By constantly reflecting on our teaching, we hope to cull bad habits and maximize the learning environment around us. Honest reflection isn’t something that seems to come up much in PD either.

Normally pedagogy would be my focus, one of the joys of my job is how intellectually challenging it is. I use this blog mainly to try and tackle the challenges of pedagogy in a rapidly changing technological situation, but for the past month I and many teachers I know in Ontario have been distracted by politics. We have to be because the circus that is modern politics oversees our profession, and we are one of their favourite whipping boys.

Unlike heroic police officers, firefighters and doctors, teachers don’t get a halo. If the internet doesn’t convince you of the banality of teaching turn on the TV. How many heroic teacher shows do you see on there? Emergency services are protected by their halo, and since we’re all public servants it’s pretty obvious who is going to get thrown under the austerity bus. Whenever the political class decides to vilify public servants to collect some vapid public support we know it’ll be us, hence the distraction.

The public perception is that teachers are overpaid, under-worked and largely clerical in what we do. Unlike those men (and women, but let’s face it, the hero professions have a male face to them) of action, teachers are presented publicly as female, supportive and administrative rather than as action heroes. Any time a government wants to take a swipe at public servants teachers make an easy target, like last year when teachers across the province had their wages and benefits illegally stripped even as the OPP enjoyed big year on year raises; it’s a financial emergency, but not for everybody.

In a climate like this our unions urged us to carefully consider our votes in strategic terms because the Ontario Progressive (sic) Conservative party had adopted tea-party American ideologies and was prepared to cut Ontario to pieces while following Michigan and the rust belt down the rabbit hole. That urge to strategically vote worked very well encouraging many public servants to participate in this election, it also unified and focused non-conservative votes. The result deposited the morally bankrupt Liberal party into a four year majority. This was the same party that stripped contracts and forced work conditions through illegal legislation. It’s also the same party that will do what Hudak and the PCs promised, they just won’t do it on an election year.

It begs the question, is it better to be stabbed in the front or in the back?

Teachers seem to be relieved by the Liberal win, but our profession with its poor public perception will be the first (again) to be thrown under the bus by Wynne and the Liberals. It’s ironic that the meritocratic Liberals are going to throw a world-class education system under the bus because of optics. If we do our difficult job well it won’t matter because ignorant people think we’re lazy and poll chasing politicians can use that. The social and political environment we’ve been draped in for the past two years makes basic positivity difficult, let alone cultivating an attitude of improvement, and improvement is where we have to be if we want to maintain our excellence and keep up with the technological revolution happening all around us.

There are a lot of ways we could make education more efficient in Ontario rather than just cutting people’s wages and benefits and worsening their work environment. When I first started teaching there was a guy who ran the Simpsons in his class and then sat in the English office eating his lunch at 10am. He later got suspended for over a year while they reviewed claims that he’d slept with a grade 11 student. They are a small minority in the system, but there are teachers who are incompetent or simply unsuited for the profession, and the system as it stands makes it almost impossible to remove them. As a Liberal (that’s a large L Liberal who believes in the values of liberalism rather than blindly voting for a political party) I’d be all for making the removal of incompetent teachers easier, though not if it’s done by administrators who haven’t been teaching for years or pencil pushers who have never taught a class in their lives. Peer review by a group of experienced, working teachers would be a fair way of doing this, but if it ever does happen it’ll be forced on us, probably by illegal legislation that punishes us for political advantage. It would be nice to work in a system focused on excellence instead of political gain.

Then there is the whole weird duality of the Ontario public school system, but no one will touch that… the optics are bad, and you’ll never pry a publicly funded private religious system out of the hands of a majority, even if the UN does object. It’s hard to consider hack and slash politics like Bill 115 fair when the system protects incompetent teachers and encourages very one sided religious favouritism.

There is a storm ahead for educators in Ontario and it’s going to be hard to focus on the complexities of pedagogy, the challenges of technological change and all that social work that we do as people with little or no understanding of education make decisions based on optics rather than reason or fact.

Doctors and nurses won’t be expected to justify their profession, police officers and firefighters will continue to produce heroic television, and I’ll be painted as a lazy clerical worker doing a job that anyone could do. While all that’s going on I’ll do everything I can to prepare my students to hack a technocratic neo-liberal future that makes it harder and harder for young people to find good work and become independent. The same thing stepping on our profession is stepping on our students.

“You Never Teach Us Anything”

Originally published on Dusty World in May of 2014:

I had an interesting chat with a student yesterday. He’s yellow, I’m green:

“You never teach us anything.”
“By teaching do you mean do it for you?”
“Um, yes?”
“I don’t do everything for you because unless you figure it out for yourself, you haven’t figured out anything at all.”
“… but you never help.”
“I don’t think that’s true, I offer suggestions, and give you a framework to develop ideas in, I’ve provided you with thousands of dollars of free equipment and access to professional level learning resources. Have I never helped?”
“Ok, so you’ve helped, but you don’t teach.”
“What do you think teaching is?”
“When someone tells you what you should know…”
“Do you think that’s what a lesson is? When someone gives you information?”
“Yeah, isn’t it?”

Good question that, isn’t a lesson when you tell people what they should know? Isn’t teaching when you do everything for the student so they can be passive receptacles?

That a strong student who has ‘figured out’ the education system has such a poor view of our profession is worrying. I wonder how many lessons it took before he came to see pedagogy as little more than a fill in the blank exercise.

I wonder what it will take now to have him take possession of his own learning. I don’t imagine that will happen before post secondary, and when it does it will be a shock.

Moving the Needle

Originally published on Dusty World in May of 2014

There were a number of incisive and critical reviews of both the U.S. education system and the role education technology plays in it at this year’s ASU/GSV Summit in Phoenix. Constance Steinkuehler mentioned data exhaust, which I’ve already mulled over. At a later discussion another speaker by the name of Brandon Busteed stunned the audience with this:

“Educational technology has failed to move the needle on either cost effectiveness or student success in the past ten years…” – Brandon Busteed, Gallup Education

This is an astonishing thing to say at an education technology conference, but he went on to back up his statement with a boat load of facts that fit so well with the anecdotal experiences of the teachers in the room that many were nodding along with him.

With the magic ipad, Google Apps and wifi for everyone we must surely be personalizing education away from that industrialized factory model we all find so abhorrent. In this digital renaissance we are using our newly found access to information to individualize learning and cater to the needs of each child, right? Surely we aren’t using it to create data from standardized testing. That would be like getting one of those new-fangled automobiles and then hooking your horse up to it so you could tow it into town and show it off.

The chart on the left is completely fictitious. After reading Busteed’s quote from my notes I went looking for data that would prove him wrong; I couldn’t find any. What I did find was that in longitudinal analysis PISA results aren’t particularly flattering to an increasingly digitized learning environment.

Pick your country, from strong performers like Finland and Canada to poorer countries struggling to reach the average, it appears Brandon is right, education technology isn’t moving the needle, in fact it may be hurting more than it helps. That PISA numbers are at best inconsistent and at worse show a decline (especially in digitally focused countries) in the past eleven years should suggest that educational technology might not be as revolutionary as we suspect, or that we’re doing it wrong.

There are a number of influences pushing down student scores. Ironically, many of them are also under the influence of the information revolution. Income disparity is increasing in large part because the world is recovering from an economic crisis inflicted on it by Wall Street quants who harnessed newly available digital technology to play an economic shell game on a global scale. Workers displaced in both economic and workplace digital disruption are not able to raise their children in the same socio-economic environment that they were raised in. The middle-class itself is evaporating as the wealthy harness digital connectivity to push wealth beyond the reach of governments; technology is amoral and caters to the needs of those who can afford it without consideration for right action. Socio-economic factors are one of the key indicators in student success and the vast majority of people in the world are poorer today than they were a decade ago.

***

That digital disruption seems to feed economic disparity on a systemic basis should be a cause of concern for everyone, but especially people in an egalitarian social project like education. Is digitization a tool of income disparity? I’m not sure that we’ve answered that question yet, though I’d argue that if we are creating consumers rather than hackers then yes, it is. Passive acceptance and integration of digitization is a recipe for a newly efficient kind of serfdom.

This could as easily be the promise of edtech

The way digital technology disrupts existing industry is very exciting to the people who sell it. They have been so successful in presenting the idea of freedom from industrialization that digital disruption has become a desired expectation, especially for younger people. Expectation becomes inevitability but the results are producing efficiencies where we aren’t looking for them. Instead of individualizing education (like all the digital education tools promise) we are using digital technology to propagate the worst aspects of the industrial system we’re still clothed in, such as standardized testing and data collection. Instead of freeing us from systemic, cookie-cutter thinking, education technology is supporting a political push to re-institute data driven learning on such a wide scale that no one will be spared. The promise of easily manipulable data thrills educational management because it lends an air of credibility to what has always been a difficult to analyze process.

Instead of complexifying and diversifying our understanding of pedagogy, educational technology is supporting a political push to drastically simplify it, and it’s doing it under an onslaught of data and statistics. Had other examples of digital disruption led to that promised land of personalization, self expression and equality for everyone I might have hope, but as it stands, if you’re just using it you’re also just feeding its assumptions.

The art of our times…

When we put technology into the hands of students without expecting them to understand it we’re asking them to internalize and accept all the compromises and assumptions inherent in that technology, and make no mistake, all that complex hardware, software and networking are full of compromises.

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again, unless we teach students how this technology we expect them to use works, we are laying the foundation for a new generation of systemic thinkers that will make factory formatted graduates look like an egalitarian dream. There was still space to be individual among the gears of the old regime, there is no space between the ones and zeroes of the new one.

Dogmatic Digitization

Digital technology thrives on a covenant of radical democracy that promises information for all. The giants of technology market themselves on this egalitarian ideal. From Google’s corporate counter culture to Apple’s fixation on design to empower the user, technology companies are founded and thrive on the idea of a future of individual empowerment. People love them for it and self identify with digital technology companies in a personal way that is quite foreign to other consumer relationships.

Social norms have changed over the past five years. Where once pulling out a smartphone demonstrated your importance and wealth, it is now a common gesture for pretty much everyone in North America. We’ve passed a tipping point, the majority of people are on a computer connected to the internet all the time. If you don’t believe me go for a walk in any public place and see how many people are operating handheld computing devices.

As the majority adopts digital platforms I’ve seen a consistent dumbing down of digital tools and content in order to reach as wide an audience as possible. This is probably a complaint form many early adopters, but when I see simplicity and limitation rather than functionality and access begin to infect how we use technology in education I have to question the pedagogical value of our educational technology.

In order to cater to as many people as possible educational technology has created systems that hide much of what happens behind simplistic interfaces. Can the promise of radical democratization of information survive when most people want to be spoon fed in the most limited manner possible? Free access to material doesn’t matter when most people only want to use the internet in the same, simplistic way.

Digital technology still presents itself with those early ideals of democratic information access and transparency, but like everything else as it matures it begins to develop a more pragmatic approach. My feeling now is that these egalitarian, transparent technology companies are actually anything but. No one that wealthy feels the need to be transparent, or to educate others. When you are worth billions your goal becomes market share and monopoly.

Educational technology, as an offspring of the digital technology giants, suffers from this dogmatic stiffening of its intent. Rather than focusing on individual empowerment and the promise of de-industrializing the education system they are happy to embrace dehumanizing, data-driven testing, especially if it offers ease of implementation. If education technology isn’t interested in offering users diverse, personally nuanced, highly adaptive, open ended digital learning tools in a transparent and universal access to information, then what hope have the rest of us in a consumer driven digital world? We’re preparing the next generation of drones.

Tweets from the ASU/GSV Summit in Phoenix

We’re in a position as educators and educational technologists to try and direct digitization away from closed systems with limited access to tools and information but the money infects our good intent. Rather than focusing on diversity and acclimatizing students to the radical openness of the internet (something that, like the Wild West, may soon disappear), we preach walled gardens and monopolistic access. We teach students to value limited access in order to train them for a future internet controlled by the rich and we do it because it’s easier, not because it’s better.

For some new tools empower,
but for far too many they create
habitually driven repetiton

That this is all done under the guise of freer information for all is laughable. How can education claim to support the ideals of the early information revolution if it is in bed with pragmatic companies pushing for tiered access to information based on wealth? If the information revolution was ever about ideals it has long since been replaced by moneyed interest.

Between datamining users to support wrong headed standardized testing policies to simply fleecing student data to generate sellable marketing information, the flipside to education technology is complex and not particularly flattering. As a teacher of technology I hope to empower my students with knowledge of how information technology works in order for them to remain independent entities in the brave new world we’re creating. For the other 95% who take no computer studies and yet live on this technology all day every day, I see a future every bit as dogmatic and limited as the industrial one we are now shedding. In fact, it may be much worse because, unlike the punch card factory worker of the Twentieth Century who was reduced to a number for eight hours a day, dogmatic, digitized information demands your undying attention and submission 24/7/365.

If you can’t hack it, it owns you.