Dusty World – Page 39 – Mechanical Sympathy

Closer To Genius

I just spent a brain busting three days wandering around Amsterdam. It was my first time there, and like all travel to new places it pushed my thinking in a number of ways.

Mastery is hard work

The Van Gogh Museum is one of those must visit places while in Amsterdam. The main thrust of the current display is his development as an artist. This has strong undercurrents for anyone in education, teacher or learner.

Like all original thinkers, Van Gogh didn’t suddenly wake up one morning full of genius. Genius is often presented to us as an unattainable brilliance, something normals can look at with wonder and awe. There is a hidden assumption of a magic, genetic advantage in this presentation of genius, but it isn’t true.

Vincent’s early career was full of formal and informal learning opportunities that he took and walked away from. His early work is rough, even poor, but he improved with practice. Van Gogh learned what he needed to learn and then moved on, usually completely out of sync with whatever the curriculum or his classmates were doing – it was a self directed curriculum. I imagine he was a failure in every way on his report cards. However formal education helped or hindered him Vincent moved on, a self-directed learner voracious for an opportunity to learn more about his craft.

Self directed learning is a key aspect of mastery. Walter Gretzky once responded to a reporter who described Wayne as a natural born talent. He said this was nonsense. Before school every day, rain or shine, Wayne would be out with a hockey stick in hand. Every day after school until it got dark he’d be out with a stick in hand; mastery is never a gift.

Any talent you’re born with isn’t mastery, it’s probably something simple, like being ambidextrous. Real craft mastery is only earned through the old adage: blood, sweat and tears.

The only thing that people like Van Gogh, Gretzky or Einstein bring to their mastery naturally is a fascination, an inborn love of their area of study. That atypical fixation allows (forces?) them to ignore just about everything else in order to hone their craft in a way that the typical, disinterested, distracted, minimally engaged human being never will.

It’s vogue these days to assume that everyone is a genius is some way, they just have to find out what it is. After visiting Vincent’s museum and immersing myself in his work for a few hours I couldn’t help but think that true genius is something well beyond what most people are capable of. Most people don’t have the will power or focus to master simple skills (driving, reading, writing) let alone the relentless drive to open up new areas of human endeavor. Real genius also leads to emotional crisis and a ghettoization of the person struck by it; others find your obsessive fixation frightening. That so many geniuses suffer the fate that Vincent did isn’t a surprise. That we admire genius from a safe distance isn’t a surprise.

What I did take from Vincent’s development as an artist is that his mastery was a function of an unyielding and constant development of his skill. If you want to develop mastery in anything, anything at all, a genuine relationship with your craft is what you want to cultivate. If you’re able to nurture and maintain that intimacy with your craft you’ll find mastery.

The trick, if you’re not a natural obsessive, is not to fall out of love with what you’re learning.

In a classroom, demonstrating a genuine affection for the material you’re teaching and encouraging this in students might be the closest many of us ever come to genius. It’s a shame that education doesn’t recognize a love of a subject in learners and teachers alike. We make gestures towards the lifelong learner but do nothing to acknowledge its presence in students or teachers. A living fascination with your learning is the surest path to the most effective, most enthralling kind of education (and life) you could hope for, and, as Vincent will tell you, the only road to mastery.

Note:
I was in Amsterdam after returning my Mum’s ashes home. Her suicide was on my mind as I wandered through Vincent’s work. She too was an artist, a talented one, and her work often consumed her. I’m still not sure whether to take Van Gogh’s meandering trip into madness as a warning or a comfort. In the end we all die, it would be nice to think that our fixations, though they may eventually claim us, would also allow us to create some beauty to be left behind in the world.

Coding Is A Hands-on Skill

Originally published on Dusty World in July, 2013 – WIRED caught up to me in 2017 with The Next Big Blue Collar Job Is Coding.

I’m frustrated at how computer science seems to own coding. In Ontario it is now an orphaned subject unto itself. There is no way someone without a degree in computer science can teach coding, though coding isn’t computer science any more than auto mechanics is theoretical physics.

This reminds me of the Big Bang Theory when Leonard’s car breaks down. He asks, “does anyone here know how internal combustion engines work?” and all the the scientists in the car laugh and nod. He then asks, “can anyone here fix a car?” And all the heads go down and they say no.

Computer science is the theoretical end of a spectrum of coding that goes from hands-on hacking through professional coding and into academic research. That only math quants who were looking for a second teachable pretty much like their first can teach it greatly limits its appeal to the general population.

Code.org agrees with me, as does Steve Jobs, as does Codeacademy, Khan Academy and many other online groups. These organizations are proliferating because we are not offering our students meaningful access to computer programming.

If we’re going to treat coding (as a part of digital fluency in general) like other basic skills (literacy, numeracy), then we need to free up coding from the bizarre limitations placed upon it by the Ministry of Education and computer scientists.

Can you imagine if all the autoshop teachers had to be theoretical physicists or engineers before they could apply that knowledge to repairing vehicles? It’s a ridiculous idea, yet that is precisely what we are doing with coding in Ontario schools. There are many ways a teacher could approach computer programming, limiting it to an extreme, theoretical end of the spectrum doesn’t respect the variety of people who get into coding, and it doesn’t offer students that variety in the classroom. Coding isn’t a theoretically biased branch of knowledge, in fact I’d argue that coding has much more in common with stochastic technical skills.

We are killing a vital 21st Century fluency stone dead with arbitrary limitations. Coding should be a technology course, it should be hands on, and it should work hand in hand with engineering (because that is what it is and what it does). That it is artificially separated into a null space between mathematics and computer studies helps no one other than old school computer scientists, and there aren’t many of them. The irony is that many of the math teachers with comp-sci as a teachable don’t want to teach it because they never kept up with it other than as a theoretical/academic course of study in university; they don’t love coding, it was simply an easy way to extend their mathematical degree work.

Computer science, like theoretical physics, is a vital subject, but it’s highly specialized and how we teach it should recognize that. Coding is a skill anyone can learn, and should.

Changing My Mind About PD

OISE’s Senior Computer Tech AQ

I’m about to head into the senior part of my computer technology AQ with the University of Toronto. My instructor is an outstanding fellow, we’re in a new school with a fantastic lab and if it’s anything like last year I’ll expand my knowledge in a subject I really enjoy both professionally and personally.

I’ve found myself at times falling in to the negativity that many teachers feel around PD, but it’s easy to get excited about this course. I could get all long in the face about how much it’s costing me, how many weeks of my summer I’ve got to spend doing it, why I have to take an AQ in this subject when I see so many other teachers with no background or qualifications in the subjects they teach not doing it. I could wallow in the negativity, but I won’t because I don’t want it to spoil the learning opportunity. Learning dynamics are so closely tied to the emotional approach of the student that I’m making a conscious choice not to. This has left me wondering at all those teachers who hate on PD.

I work with a number of teachers who don’t do the AQ thing. They think it’s a waste of time and money, they think it’s just a money grab with no real value. These teachers often end up teaching subjects they have no background in. Over time they learn how to teach the subject because they are smart, capable people who want to do the job well, but they consider teacher training to be beneath them.

I first came across this attitude in educators in teacher’s college and I found it demoralizing and unhelpful. I didn’t sign up for teacher’s college to go through the motions just to get an empty qualification. As I began teaching I found that cynical negativity surrounding professional development. PD was treated by a surprising number of teachers as a waste of their time, something beneath them.

Teaching is one of those jobs that demands a degree of arrogance in order to survive. If you’re timid or unsure you’ll get eaten up by a difficult class. Confidence, even over-confidence, is an important survival tool. The spill-over into our own learning is distressing though. Teaching is a challenging discipline, if anyone thinks they’ve got it all figured out they are kidding themselves. By turning that self-defensive cockiness on our own learning we effectively limit our ability to perform our work well.

I’m not a fan of mindless optimism. An accurate assessment of what is going on is more important than mindless positivity. I see a lot of management types who do this and it drives me nuts. The easiest way to lose me as a team member is to ignore facts in favor blind positivity, but that doesn’t mean blind cynicism is any better, in fact it’s worse.

A teacher who won’t be taught is about as useful as a mechanic who can’t drive or a doctor who ignores health; in both cases these are people are can’t make use of what they claim to be experts in. A negative approach to learning affects a teacher’s ability to teach. Beyond the professional problems, teachers who are bad students are hypocrites; they berate a student in class for doing what they themselves do at PD. Unless you’re able to model productive learning you aren’t showing your students what you’d like them to do, and you probably don’t have a good grasp on what it is you’re supposed to be doing in a classroom.

Those teachers who don’t make productive use of professional development, including taking AQs, do themselves and their profession a disservice. Those administrators that trivialize teaching by ignoring qualifications aren’t the kind of educators I enjoy working with. There is something to be said for objectively taught professional designations. They certainly have more credence than someone simply giving a teacher a class because they like them or think them capable.

So, tomorrow I begin a two hour daily commute and eight hours a day in class for three weeks to study a subject I worked in professionally for years before I became a teacher. I could turn my nose up at it, trivialize the experience, make it less than it could be, or I could approach it the way I’d like a student to approach my own class, with curiosity, humility, positivity and integrity.

Next time you find yourself dismissing professional development, consider how changing your mind might make you a better learner and teacher. And if you’re avoiding an AQ because you think it beneath you, perhaps you shouldn’t be teaching that subject in the first place. It’s hard to argue for teaching as a profession if it doesn’t have credible, valuable training that is a requirement for the job. It’s even harder to understand a teacher who refuses to be taught anything.

ECOO BIT18: Reductionism and Ignorance in Educational Technology

I’ve been ruminating over the latest ECOO conference for a couple of days now. Strangely, this technology conference began and ended for me with others suggesting that digital technology is a dangerous waste of time and that we should step away from it in our classrooms. Looking at my ECOO reflections over the past eight years I’m seeing a clear shift from optimism that we will get a handle on the digital revolution to caution and now a determined luddite push to walk away from it entirely. The now obviously deleterious effects of the attention economy seem to have produced an unprecedented negativity around educational digital technology in 2018, and ECOO book-ended it for me.

These aren’t toys, they’re tools!
Calling them toys says a lot
about how YOU use them.

I opened the conference bringing armfuls of emerging technology to Minds on Media. I’ve long tried to avoid the ‘here’s-a-turnkey-tech-tool’ presentation because it usually comes with corporate compromises. That split focus in a lot of ‘edtech’ means much of it isn’t really so much about learning as it is about data collection or closed ecosystems that drive profitability. Besides, I’ve long advocated for teachers who push technology to actually understand the technology they are requiring students to use. That kind of technical fluency means you don’t get sucked into absurd situations like giving away student data for a ‘free’ service or driving students into expensive, proprietary, closed technology designed to make a profit when it inevitably breaks.

As in previous ECOO MoM demonstrations, I brought a variety of tech from different manufacturers and simply encouraged educators to become aware of an emerging new medium, in this case virtual reality. I have no agenda and nothing to sell. I get nothing for showing the technology and don’t benefit from anyone buying one thing or another. This platform agnosticism means I can talk about the tech without prejudice or hidden agenda. I was happy to be attending another MoM day and looking forward to showing people this emerging medium.

At least I was until Peter went around the room having the stations introduce themselves. It all went well until we got stuck on one station that repeatedly described what everyone else was doing in the room as ‘playing with toys’ while describing their own noble pursuit as being ‘real’ and technology free (though without ICT infrastructure they couldn’t have done what they were doing at all). This attitude isn’t new. A surprising number of educators refuse to leverage digital tools to make their teaching more effective, but to hear someone shit can what everyone else is doing at this edtech conference was shocking. There was no opportunity to call her out on it then, but I can now:

Too bad we don’t teach it like it matters. Critical Infrastructure. Jobs in ICT.

This Minds on Media presenter monopolized the microphone to suggest anything digital was essentially meaningless (a toy) and that when people were ready to stop playing with their toys here she was ready to show them something real. As a technician who trains engineers and technicians to run the world we live in, this made me angry, especially considering it was done at an educational technology conference that should be advocating for technical fluency across our education system in order to understand and effectively participate in the world we live in. This didn’t put me in a great frame of mind to start the conference, but I soldiered on.

Cybersecurity in our classrooms.

I did two other presentations during the conference. Both were presenting on platform agnostic technology opportunities that would teach students and teachers about a critical infrastructure (cybersecurity) and addressing our collective ignorance of 3d media. In both cases I was advocating for not-for-profit digitally powerful learning opportunities that would enable Ontario educators and students to leverage the digital TOOLS at their disposal. This is the opposite of the reductive and now recessive thinking I kept experiencing.

3d media in marketing & learning

There is now a two pronged attack on digital technology in the classroom. The corrosive ra-ra edtech crowd seems increasingly determined to brand themselves behind proprietary corporate systems designed to deliver technology with no understanding required (and with lots of hidden profit centres), while the increasingly loud anti-tech crowd rises up against them, advocating that we receded from technology because it’s a distraction and a waste of time. Both sides seem determined to ignore a simple fact: we’re supposed to be TEACHING students how this all works, not branding them or hiding them in a cave. What edtech there is seems determined to follow consumerism into the most simplistic and ignorant relationship with digital tools possible. In 2018 you can get branded or abstain from tech entirely and then feel mighty righteous about it. Is anyone left just, ya know, teaching it any more?

There are technicians and engineers all around the world who provide digital infrastructure that we all depend on. These people understand this technology and are much less likely to act like the sheeple who stare slack-jawed at their phones for hours on end. To digitally literate people this technology is a powerful tool that is enabling us to do everything from gene editing diseases and linking disparate areas of study to creating more efficient critical utility systems. Digital technology has become a vital part of the infrastructure around us, yet the vast majority of us, including many teachers, are completely ignorant of it.

For some baffling reason we seem intent on ignoring the actual teaching and understanding of these powerful digital technologies in favour of using them with the same perverse ignorance, and now fear, as the general public. What is our role as educators in terms of technology if we aren’t producing technically competent graduates who can successfully navigate and participate in the digital world around them? By the way, our ignorance of digital technologies is staggeringly bad. If you haven’t followed any of the supporting links in this so far, follow that one.

The closing keynote ended the conference by banging the same drum as that ‘when you’re done playing with these toys come and do something real’ comment that kicked it off. This time one of the engineers of the attention economy that is causing so much damage earnestly suggested that we need to recede from digital activity in order to preserve not just learning but our very humanity! Rather than acknowledge the potential for digital technology to enhance learning, his entire talk was aimed at retreating from it.

This particular group of Silicon Valley architects now wants to save the consumers they got wealthy commodifying. I get the impulse. If I had a bank account full of blood money like that I’d feel bad about it too, but as a means of resolving this technological adolescence we’re all living in, it won’t work – they can’t see past the mess they’ve made and they certainly aren’t approaching it from an educator’s mindset – but then neither are the educators.

There was not a single example of how digital technology might amplify or improve learning outcomes – a decidedly odd way to wrap up an edtech conference. Our speaker went on to encourage the removal of personal technology from the hands of students and get back to a pre-digital time when everything was better. As a digital immigrant I know that there was no such time. If you think students weren’t distracted in class in the 1980s you weren’t a student in the 1980s. These Silicon Valley wolves can’t see people as anything other than the consumer sheep they used to prey on. I’d hope that teachers see much more potential in their students than these attention peddlars do, but I’m starting to think that vapid consumerism is the only relationship we’ll ever have with digital technology.

Invent a crisis and then offer a solution
to it. American business in action.

From an educational perspective digital technology offers a powerful tool for learning, but it doesn’t work if the teachers, administrators and government driving it are ignorant of how it works. If the teachers and parents can’t manage the tech, then we can hardly expect students to. I’d hope that ECOO and other curriculum support organizations would understand that and advocate for understanding and the development of broader technical fluency rather than encouraging willful ignorance.

Hiding digital tools and telling people to ignore the way the world works is a poor way to run an educational system, unless your goal is to produce ignorant consumers. Instead of running away from the digital revolution that is driving innovation and increasingly managing the infrastructure around us, we should be teaching self regulation of personal technology and comprehension of how it all works in order to generate a genuine understanding the world we’re creating. Teaching effective digital fluency means we’re less likely to be taken by the consumerist wolves and are able to effectively use digital tools rather than being used by them.

I’m all for being challenged in my thinking and often go out of my way to try on difficult ideas just to see how they fit. I’ve weathered Nick Carr’s The Shallows and watched society wobbling under the weight of the robber barons of the attention economy. Now I’ve attended an educational technology conference that began and ended with an ignorant and frankly dangerous dismissal of digital technology as a toy for idiots that should just be taken away. Meanwhile digital infrastructure made that very event happen. It fed the people who attended it and provided them with the resources they needed to travel to it, yet it isn’t worthy of teaching in our schools? And teaching it is precisely the problem. We pick up edtech and apply it without teaching it to staff or students, and now we’re shocked that it isn’t working well? Sometimes I wonder how educationally aware our education system is.

I’ve been banging my head against this call for technology fluency for so long that I can’t help but feel like this dismissal of technology both by participants and the conference itself in that closing keynote is a betrayal of what I thought were shared values.

I first attended ECOO in 2010. I joined Twitter, began meeting other technology interested teachers, started blogging and became part of a vibrant online PLN as a result of attending. Over the years ECOO has given me ideas and offered me a platform to present my own. What I’d always hoped was an evolution towards greater understanding of the digital revolution we are all living through has faltered now. We don’t want to learn how the world we’ve built works. Pro-edtech educators want to keep the curtain firmly in place and leave the understanding and management of technology to others while the increasingly noisy anti-tech crowd are advocating receding from it entirely. Our only contact with digital technology is through the lens of vapid consumerism and the only response we can have to that other than participating is to run and hide.

I’m frustrated, tired and losing hope in our ability to manage an understanding of the digital revolution that surrounds us. Education seems particularly incapable of seeing their way out of this digital hole we’ve dug for ourselves. The answer has always been to teach technological fluency, but ironically, I’m finding it harder and harder to find anyone who wants to.

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Fear & Arrogance

Quote from Bull Durham

The industrial mindset around education tends to look away from this approach to learning, but there is something to be said for bravery in the face of overwhelming odds; it’s a true commitment to what you’re learning. Of course, if you’re going to learn something like it matters then failure should be an expectation if anything other than competence is demonstrated. In a school system that prides itself on stats it generates about itself, this kind of without-a-net learning doesn’t happen.

When I say true commitment I mean a willingness to put your learning to the test (and I don’t mean a standardized test). There is a reflective aspect to learning that we tend to ignore in education. We like to say we’re looking at meta-cognition and self-aware learning, but only without questioning the context we frame it with. Unless a student is considering the school system in which they find themselves complete with all its financially forced lunacy, the metacognition they are asked to endure in class is little more than another attempt to pretend rows of desks and student numbers are the ideal. In that environment the student who shrugs and walks out of class in order to truly test themselves in a trade or other real pursuit is the only one answering the metacognitive question correctly.

Learning without concrete, relevant feedback is empty, pointless. The type of feedback students get in school tends to be abstract to the point of emptiness. We then wonder why their poor grades don’t motivate them to try harder to get better abstract numbers, and then teachers agonize over how to ‘engage’ them.

When I first started to teach in Japan I tried to understand why my classes were so different even though the lessons were the same. In looking at my learners I realized that some were intrinsically motivated and some extrinsically motivated. The doctor who came in to work on their presentation to have their work shared in an international conference? Those classes were stellar. The employees who were required by management to upgrade their English? Tedious. Intrinsically motivated learners are a joy to teach though also a great challenge because of how voracious they are. When we create an education system we iron out intrinsic motivation in favour of standardized, extrinsic motivations (grades, standardized test scores, report cards). Any fear or arrogance in daring to explore and expand beyond our comfort zone is stamped out in favour of standardized assessment.

I’ve been learning the art and science of motorbike riding over the last couple of months. I can’t think of an activity that requires a greater commitment (except perhaps tight rope walking). The learning process for this activity is ruthless and demanding. I don’t get days off or time to relax when I’m working on my craft. I don’t have someone constantly correcting my behavior to keep me on task. And it hurts doing it, let alone if I do it poorly. What got me on a bike in the first place? Fear and arrogance; the chance to do something difficult well. Thinking that I could learn this thing with grace and skill was a dare I’ve always wanted to take. That I want to be successful in something I’ve seen kill other people is perverse and satisfying.

We don’t like students to learn things that are challenging to them, we like them to all do the same thing on a bell curve. We process them as statistics that we can then manage. If you’ve ever tried to submit a class of all failures or all perfects you know this to be true; they want a bell curve of grades with a median in the Bs. Student centred learning tries to put an individualized face on this, but the assessment rubric will quickly bring it back in line again. It’s unreasonable to expect a teacher to individualize learning for thirty people, but if we’re going to run this like an assembly line we can’t bemoan the loss of individual learning.

The real trick with learning is to want to do it. Once you’re there and you have a deeply seated need to figure out what it is you want master, you can begin to develop those skills. In addition to fear and arrogance (two methods of not being daunted by learning a challenging skill), you should also embrace patience and a willingness to laugh at your failures without ignoring them. With a flexible, resilient approach to learning in place you are sure to succeed at your craft, though not always in ways you may have imagined.

Mastery takes longer, but this’ll get you over the steep bit
at the beginning of the learning curve

I stumbled across the chart on the right a few weeks ago on Google+. Whenever I hear someone say, “I wish I could draw”, or, “I wish I could code”, or any other longed for learning you care to name, I think back to this chart and wonder why they never spent the time if they wanted it that badly; they obviously never wanted it that badly. Learning isn’t magic and teaching isn’t a dark art. The learner has to recognize the value of the learning and have an emotional need to achieve it. The teacher has already walked that path to expertise and cultivates that love of the material by challenging the student to achieve that which is barely within their reach. Their expertise allows them to dare the student to appropriate challenges. Learning is a visceral, thrilling self-driven, emotional experience, not a pedantic, systemic process to be forced on rows of victims.

These moments of learning greatness where students reach for more than they should and see success (and failure) happen in schools all the time, but they are usually the result of a good teacher trying to protect students from systemic processing. They also tend to happen in stochastic learning or extracurriculars more than the ordered learning of the class room. In the kinetic action of arts, technology or physical education students still have the freedom of unregimented, hands on learning toward less specific ends. That stochastic space allows them room to attempt greatness, to bypass the routine learning and realize a eureka moment. Formal classroom education irons that out with curriculum, formalized assessment and systemic teaching practice. The freedom still evident in stochastic learning tends to unnerve the professional student and educational administrator, both of whom have learned to play the game of Education rather than simply encourage people do what they are naturally predisposed to do. For the true apprentice hands on learning is the last bastion of real learning in our education system. It may be the unspoken reason that killing extracurriculars in Ontario this year cut so deeply. Only in sport and other physical activity can we appreciate the immediacy of failure and the joy of real success. You can’t bell-curve reality.

All is not lost. We could begin revising education towards learning rather than self serving statistics gathering.

Imagine an education system that didn’t work to generate its own self-serving statistics. A school system that was focused on developing an environment in which students were able to develop a deep, intrinsic love of learning, where no extrinsic motivation existed to force them into a mold of grades and average expectations. Failure in this system could be brutal and obvious, but students would be encouraged to attack their learning with fear and arrogance (and patience and humor) knowing that they would never be demeaned for failing but only for ignoring their failures.

Influence Without Affluence

After a Social Media gathering a couple of weeks ago and a rewatch of We Are Legion I’ve been pondering what social expectations we’re developing in our new digital society. Why would I do this? Since our students are immersed in this radical, unprecedented counter culture it might behoove us as educators to have some idea of what cultural norms are coming out of it. Recognizing what is normative online behavior goes some distance toward explaining the seemingly bizarre responses teachers are seeing in class.

If you think the buttoned down 1950s era teacher had trouble understanding the hippy counter culture student of the sixties, you ain’t seen nothing yet. What technology is offering students today is nothing short of an entirely new social medium to inhabit, and what that is doing to early adopters (like teens) is nothing short of a paradigm shift in social behavior.

A number of years ago (2006!) WIRED did a quick piece on GENERATION XBOX, in which they talked about the expectations of gamer culture and how different they are from preceding (non digital) generations. This short list hit the gaming ethos precisely: arrogant, hacking (competitive, results focused regardless of rules), insubordinate… sound like anyone in your classroom? That gaming ethos has done a great deal to influence online presence. The egalitarian nature of the gamer is clearly seen in internet cultures like Anonymous where there is a strong emphasis on your contribution rather than your social standing in the ‘real’ world. What matters is what you say and how well you say it, not how much money your parents had or who you’re the boss of.

You might think this is socialist, but it really isn’t, it can be crushingly cruel and direct and has no patience for bullshit or spin. Everyone isn’t equal, though everyone does have equal access and ability to contribute. This ties organizations, especially politically powerful ones, in knots, especially when they expect the same kind of submission they can force in traditional media in an open digitized space. I suspect it’s hitting a lot of people who are used to the benefits of their social circumstances hard.

If suddenly all of the benefits you had (race, socio-economic status, education, family) are ignored, how do you establish yourself as an alpha? Especially when you’re used to having it handed to you. In the last post I tried to push privacy and ownership of information as far as I logically could considering the near friction-less information we find online.

If you can’t own information because trying to hold it is impossible when it can be copied and spread with no real effort, and privacy is irrelevant because anyone can copy and paste your information, and almost everyone has a media recording device unimaginable 20 years ago and can capture you at any time regardless of whether you want to be seen or not, regardless of whether you yourself are online or not; how do we understand what is ours? Ownership is at the foundation of how we relate to other people in society. With no ability to own material and with information being so slippery we can’t regulate who sees it online, how do we establish social dominance? If we can’t flash the car, the house, our jobs, or even our educations at people and expect benefits, what value do these things have?

The tendency would be to fall back on existing power structures, to try and exercise the same protections that advantage us in society in an online milieu, but this has been shown to fail again and again. Digital information does not work in a personal context the way that social status does. The only thing that makes you special is what you’re doing right now. Your interaction is your credibility online. If you try to game the system and people can find that data, they can make you look the fool. If you are able to maintain an honest and insightful digital footprint, you come as close as you’re ever going to get to being untouchable in the Wild West of the internet.

Someone who puts Ph.D. after their name online is as likely to be made fun of as they are to be respected. If that same person does not advertise their traditional social standing, but produces excellent ideas clearly and accessibly through an understanding of the tools available, then they will gain online currency. If the approach is one of indirect, politically motivated self interest, then the proliferation of digital information makes it very difficult to game the truth, or play people. That email or DM where you instruct other people to do something that you wouldn’t want everyone to know? It’ll end up buried in your back. You can’t stop the signal. If you’ve done it online, it’s obtainable.

I still maintain that radical transparency is what will evolve out of this startling social evolution. Say what you mean and do what you say, be consistent and don’t be afraid. If you make a mistake own it, and if you can’t handle what’s happening don’t advertise it by leaving a permanent record. Lurking is a perfectly reasonable place to back away to online.

I suspect that many of our students lurk online because they are trying to parse the wild west that they see out there. They don’t want to make fools of themselves, but they are also wrestling with what they know happens in the real world (you can get away with lying, deceit and social/political games quite easily in a world where information is ownable – especially if you’re the beneficiary of racial, social or cultural advantage). Online the powers aren’t powers and the socially weak can suddenly become something else if they have the voice and the will to do it.

Being hacked may not be a bad thing if it keeps everyone honest. The threat of hacking is what prevents many of the ‘real’ world powers from abusing the internet (that and it has insinuated itself into business and society to such a degree that pulling the plug would be a disaster). Marx may not have taken down capitalism, but online society offers the kind of radical egalitarianism that wraps monopolistic capitalists in knots.

The other thing about this radically flat mediascape is that hierarchies that force group think tend to fail. Rather than being threatened into following the crowd, you are free to disappear online. You aren’t beholden to social context in the same way you are in the real world. This means you can do things online you’d never do in ‘real’ life. Like the guy who screams obscenities and gives the finger to others while driving who would never do the same thing while walking down the sidewalk; the person online is removed and empowered in an interesting way by the machines that isolate them from their social context.

I’ve enjoyed watching the dismantling of these assumptions in a number of large organizations. I’ve been frustrated by others that claim democracy while really wanting to enforce an existing hierarchy. Online society is the most radically democratic ideal we’ve ever created. Access is cheaper and more available than citizenship in the first world (arguably the previous means of access to political control). As we miniaturize and mobilize computing and billions more people come online and realize that they are not powerless in their societies (and that they belong to a larger, more pervasive and more powerful online society), the world will change, and the ones who will suffer are those that have benefited from history the most.

Privacy Never Existed & Ownership of Information Is Dead

What you do when you try to privatize,
own or control digital content in the C21st

When #ontsm considered how to introduce social media to students there was a lot of talk about walled gardens and safe places. By creating private digital spaces students could become used to the nuances of online life in a tidal pool before they wandered out into the ocean. It’s a nice idea. It’s predicated on a myth.

The flaw in this thinking is that privacy exists, that it ever existed. Anonymity is very difficult to maintain, it always has been. This isn’t a digital issue. A hundred years ago, people weren’t able to move about as easily as they do now. You tended to exist in a much more colloquial and static social group. Your town or village knew who you were because you were contextualized in it by your family, job, religion, culture and friends. Modern cities barely existed at that point. Industrialization and the machinery it produced gave us the ability to migrate individually in the 20th Century, but even that came with a lot of social baggage. If you were out alone on a motorcycle, you were socially classified, even if people didn’t know you personally. We do this all the time with race, socio-economic status, even accent; every time we stereotype we do it. Privacy has always been a myth. If anyone lays eyes on you who doesn’t know you, their impression of you is what you are socially. Digital information makes a greater mockery of that myth by spreading us across the web, ignoring our geography.

Digital information is so fluid, so easy to create and share, that it is frictionless. You don’t have to physically share a book to share text any more, you don’t have to physically share a DVD to share a video any more. When information is a stream of data constantly flowing, ownership and privacy become impossible to manage in any traditional sense.

If you put student data into a digital format, your ‘privacy settings’ (an ode to the myth to make you feel better) are set to whomever is the viewer of your content with the least goodwill toward you and the least respect for your privacy. This goes beyond the people you shared it with to anyone at all who can view your information. Any attempts to ‘lock down’ (another backward looking term designed to make you feel better) digital information is easily bypassed by a screen capture or a cut and paste.

The digital is leaking into the physical world too. If anyone sees or hears you doing anything, anywhere, at any time, and they have a smart phone on them, you are the push of a button away from being published. Stupidity has never been so readily documented; see youtube for a billion examples. If you think you’re ‘safe’ because you’re not doing something digitally, the ability to record and publish digitally makes your point moot. Want to go back to report cards on paper? It’s one photo away from being on Facebook. Think you’re in private because you’ve closed the door to your classroom? The kid videoing you without your knowing will have you on youtube in thirty seconds, and then copies of copies of copies spread across the web.

The idea of privacy might be a byproduct of industrialization – that machines can insulate us from our social context and offer us a kind of freedom people have never really had before. We leapt into digital machines thinking they would further isolate us from each other and preserve the myth of privacy, but the slippery nature of digital information makes a mockery of the myths of privacy and ownership of information.

Revolutions and Dataspheres

When you can propagate information this easily and quickly, and exponentially like a virus, who owns it? When we stumbleupon material intentionally author intent quickly becomes a secondary influence in media. The viral nature of social media sharing pushes information in a way that used to be the job of publication. It’s hard to even introduce traditional publishing into this environment. This is such a chaotic, crowdsourced, place, the idea of a professional publisher (itself based on an industrialized limitation around the costs of printing to paper) becomes almost impossible to justify. Editors give way to crowd wisdom and the results are often indistinguishable. An argument might be made for professional publishing, but if crowd sourced material finds ways to approach the quality of traditional media, and ends up forcing it out of the market, what is left for the professional publisher?

Does the author’s intended audience matter? That information takes on a life of its own. Its audience is dictated by its accessibility and how effectively it hooks a viewer’s attention. In a medium where people are buried in information, caprice replaces intent, information that captures curiosity is gold.

The shear volume of data in this wild-west is so overwhelming that it couldn’t possibly be managed by traditional (industrially designed, limited paper media driven) editorial systems. Machines can try to self organize the data they present, and they are getting better and better at it, but crowd sourcing offers a way to keep a human touch in information flow. It lacks the clarity of purpose of professional editorial work, but given enough time it often produces surprisingly similar results. In fact, it often bypasses the political spin and self interest that traditional hierarchies have always put on the limited industrially defined information they claimed ownership over. Democratization of information means it becomes free from manipulation by the former gatekeepers of it.

If you’re making content in this brave new world, don’t expect to own or even direct it, once it’s out, it may end up in unexpected places. If you’re not making content, don’t worry, everyone one around you is, and it will end up where you don’t want it as well. How do companies and individuals survive in this madness? No one is really sure (I have a guess), but one thing is sure, it won’t be boring.

FOLLOW UP:
I was listening to CBC’s The Current today as they had Jared Cohen, the head of Google Ideas on talking about what is about to happen to the world. Two billion people are online, another five billion are about to join them. We’ve already seen the internet bypass governments and ferment revolution in the Middle East, and we’ve seen Western governments struggling with trying to keep control of information with wikileaks and other hactivism. If you have a few minutes, listen to Cohen on The Current. His ideas about where the world is going are radically transformative. The only part I’d question is his assertion that Google is a force of nature in this process, rather than just the most successful parasite.

Corporate Shills

This is one hot potato on a Sunday morning. #ontsm trended nationally yesterday and attracted a lot of attention, which I suspect was the point. The fact that the attention has a life of its own is probably a concern to people who are used to controlling the message. Ironically, it’s trending again today, driven in large part by people who objected to it for various reasons.

I heard the term shill a couple of times this weekend. It’s not a commonly used piece of language. My favorite moment was when another one of the attendees (and one of the smartest guys I know) said, “yeah Tim, you gotta be careful we don’t turn into corporate shills.” He said it with a glint in his eye, knowing that we were all at a paid for event the week after I’d been criticizing another corporate event; nothing like some tasty irony.

If you want an idea of the conversation around what some are calling a controversy, me writing at you won’t present it well. Go over to the twitter feed and enjoy the diversity of opinion. Some are worried that this is dividing the PLN. The PLN isn’t a single group with a single approach. What you’ll see on the twitter feed (and in other blog posts) are what complex discussion and disagreement could look like online. It doesn’t have to be modeled on a fifteen year old’s idea of flaming. I’ve disagreed with a number of colleagues on there, and that is fine. I still respect them as professionals, and even if we end up agreeing to disagree, I’m still OK with that. Online communication can be deep, nuanced and even contrary without becoming personally inflammatory It’s all good, and I’d much rather the disagreements get aired in public than kept in, or hidden.

This will be resolved, as it was started, transparently and publicly online; the best kind of modelling for a new communication medium I can think of.

Is The Digital World A Branded World?

Who Is Paying For This?

I’m at the Google Apps for Educators Summit in Kitchener on a Saturday morning. I’m a Google fan. I Android, I use UGcloud for school work, I use Google+. I’m aware that all of these services require a means of income or they’ll evaporate, hence the Google ads I see on them; I’m OK with that. In a field that can get grabby and greedy, I think Google is more balanced in how it performs its business than most.

As a teacher I’m a bit more cautious about how online tools are framed in terms of learning. This morning’s keynote with Jim Sill asked what kind of world do we live in. I suspect the desired answer is a giddy, Silicon Valley logo filled blurt: I live in an Instagram world! I live in a Google world! I live in a Facebook world! When the question turned to how you access this magical world, it revolved around brand names for apps. Tying brands to information offers you a unique way to infect unrelated material (and learning itself) with your logo and corporate image. Google has done this perhaps better than anyone (though Facebook takes a pretty good run at owning friendship).

Hactivism

Is the 21st Century really an information revolution, or a branding revolution? I watched We Are Legion: The Story of Hactivists last night and I’m feeling the dissonance this morning at a conference that is all about companies branding information and funneling it to eager teachers who want to be relevant to their students. I’m not saying yea or nay to this kind of business, I’m just wrestling with the chaotic freedom the information revolution inspired in hactivists last night and the business of information this morning.

If the information revolution really is about a radical change in how information moves (and I think it is), then talking about apps and brands is akin to focusing on the make of hammer you purchased when you’re learning carpentry. It would seem strange if, in learning carpentry, the master carpenter went on and on about the brand of hammer they are using. They might mention why they like it briefly, but they wouldn’t start calling carpentry “Mastercraft hammer”, that would be odd.

Google: a great tool, but be careful not to brand
learning and information with it

People identify with brands, it gives them a sense of belonging, it offers them a ready-made identity in a field where they might not know much else. Excessive brand loyalty is usually the result of ignorance. I’m less interested in the kind of hammer you’re selling and more focused on how the wood is being fitted together. I happen to enjoy using my Google hammer when online, I just don’t know that I identify an important revolution in human development with their peppy logo, and I’d hope they’d be OK with that.

Do As I Say

Reading Shopclass as Soulcraft a second time has me thinking about the similarities between Crawford’s and my work histories. I walked out of high school before I finished. I wasn’t failing anything, I was just sick of the officious and arbitrary nature of the place. I wanted to learn how to do *things*, but I was being taught how to sit in rows and do what I was told. I’m not very good at that.

“Teaching takes a back seat to the more socially salient task of sorting, and grading becomes more important for its social consequences than for its pedagogical uses.” p 146 Shopclass as Soulcraft

From there I bounced around your typical low income jobs (night time security, Canadian Tire) before finding myself an apprenticeship. This I did for a couple of years before finishing up high school and going to university. It only took me until second year to get into trouble at university, brashly questioning the veracity of my professors. The younger profs tended to want to change your life. I have a great deal of trouble buying in to systems, especially when the people advocating them put themselves in the centre of this marvelous new way of thinking. I’ve always felt that these Rasputiny types aren’t in it for mastery, they are in it to be masters. My skepticism in this has been born out in politics as well.

“The master has no need for the psychology of persuasion that will make the apprentice compliant to whatever purposes the master might dream up; those purposes are given and determinate. He does the same work as the apprentice, only better… for the apprentice there is a progressive revelation of the reasonableness of the master’s actions.” p. 159

When I worked as a Millwright, I had a number of senior mechanics who taught me the ropes. They taught me by doing the job, showing me the job, letting me do the job while they berated me for doing it badly, letting me do it on my own and if it worked, it worked. It was messy, but at no point did any of the senior guys have to tell me they were the experts and I should do what they say, they let the work demonstrate their expertise. I seldom saw that kind of do as I do, not as I say demonstration of expertise in formal education.

Students are always looking for credible teachers.

Many teachers I know don’t practice what they teach. Many business teachers teach business, they’ve never run one. Many art teachers teach art, but don’t make any themselves. Many English teachers teach writing, but don’t write themselves. You might make the argument that they teach, and that is what they are good at. I’d argue that this is an abstraction of an abstraction, and whatever it is they are teaching, credibility is in question; student engagement necessarily follows (they subconsciously pick up on a teacher’s own doubts). If you’ve ever shown students your own work, they look like meerkats; they long for credible learning, and showing mastery does that.

Last summer I took my additional qualification for computer studies. I worked in I.T. after university, mainly because objective skill sets pay a lot better than abstract ones. Ask anyone with a Masters Degree in the arts or humanities how the job search is going for proof of that. While in university I worked as an auto mechanic because it paid way better than the knowledge economy job my arts degree was preparing me for. I’ve always migrated back to those objective skill sets because it feels like credible work. You don’t have arbitrary managers downsizing you based on abstraction, personal dynamics or their own towering sense of self importance.

I love seeing those MBA types on the side of the road, their BMW SUV’s tire flat, waiting for someone who can *do* something to come and move them back into the clouds they live in.

Crawford makes a compelling argument for respecting those skills that we tend to diminish. Objective, experientially gained mastery is often looked down upon by the academic class which itself rules education with a university-clad fist. Objective mastery isn’t up for debate, or the charismatic manipulation of office politics by experts in “human management”. If you know what you’re doing, reality responds, and no amount of talking is going to change that. I miss that kind of traction in education.