I’ve always had a soft spot for the ugly-duckling Kawasaki Versys. I’ve even suggested that it be the first bike to ride coast to coast to coast in Canada when the Dempster Highway is finished. The Versys points to a time when bikes weren’t styled and marketed to a genre.
The new Versys is no ugly duckling, and I’m looking forward to throwing a leg over it at shows this winter. I’m also hoping that Kawasaki Canada will put this bike out there as a viable alternative to other light-weight / multi-purpose bikes. An adventure bike doesn’t need to be some off-road inspired, knobby tired monster, and the Versys could be that swiss-army knife of a bike. My first experience with the 650 Versys was less than stellar. I suspect a lot of that had to do with how much the Versys felt like my Ninja. I’m not looking for hard suspension and a purely road focused bike with the Versys, I’m looking for something more flexible. I’m hoping that the new bike offers the kind of clearance, suspension travel and all-round usefulness that the old one lacked. That it offers much more leg room and a less road bike inspired stance is a great start. The adventure bike-set seems to have a lock on the all-purpose motorcycle at the moment, but there was a time when multi-purpose motorbikes weren’t duck-billed monsters. The Kawasaki Versys could reinvent that pre-adventure bike ideal of a multi-purpose machine without the big nose.
Nerdismo works like any other kind of machismo, insecure boys belittle others and make the most of what little they know to establish a social space they can control.
I attended an excellent talk by Anne Shillolo on how to engage girls in technology at the ECOO Conference this year. I’ve been struggling for a number of years to convince girls to hang in there in senior computer classes. In the grade nine introduction course I have a number of girls who are often front runners in terms of skills and ability to learn tech, but they all drift away in the senior grades. Anne covered the systemic and social issues around this in great detail during her presentation. Hopefully those issues will begin to resolve themselves now that many tech companies are conscious of the problem. As much as I’d like to I can’t model being a woman in technology, but there are some other angles I can pursue. In grade nine, especially in semester one, you tend not to get a lot of attitude because they are all fairly terrified to be in high school for the first time and are cautious. As students become acclimatized to their new school they look for where they are strongest and tend to establish dominance in those areas; the jocks own the gym, the drama kids rule the stage, etc. I was dismissively told by a university professor once that tribalism is dead as a theory of human socialization, but that guy was an idiot. In the world of high school (and pretty much everywhere else, including online) tribalism is alive and well. Computer society is more tribalistic than most. In the senior grades the (mostly male) computer geeks do to computer lab what the jocks do to the gymnasium, they establish dominance. I’ve seen a number of girls begin a senior computer studies course only to bail after the first week because of all the posturing. The most frustrating was a coding prodigy whose parents were both programmers who vanished to take an alternate course online where she didn’t have to put up with the drama. This nerdismo ends up damaging the field of computer studies in all sorts of ways, not the least of which is choking it of sections in high school because the vast majority of students feel ostracized by the culture of the students in the room. Anne’s girls missing out on technology presentation led me to consider just how insular computer culture can be. The idea of barriers to learning mathematics, sciences and technology came up in Anne’s presentation. As someone who wanted to be an astronomer before he almost failed grade 10 physics (and did fail grade 11), I know that it takes a fair amount of effort by the alpha-nerds of the world to shake otherwise interested right-brained kids out of ‘their’ fields of study. From the science teachers who seemed to take great joy in pointing out that this wasn’t my thing to the computer science teacher who watched me drown in mathematical abstraction with an absent smile on his face when all I wanted to do was tinker with code, I’ve experienced those barriers first hand. As a non-linear/tactile/intuitive/experimental thinker I was intentionally bludgeoned by numbers until I couldn’t care less about computers. Watching the tribe of like-minded students (many of whom were good friends) form around those teachers and pass beyond that semi-permeable membrane into the math/science/tech wonderland scarred me. My tactile nature eventually paid off when I got back into computers (years later – scars heal) through information technology, but I’ve never forgotten how those left brained mathletes made me doubt myself and turn away from the computer technology I loved. I went from being the first kid in our school to publish code and own his own printer to going to college for art (and dropping out) because that was what I thought was left to me. There was certainly nothing like code.org leading a charge for greater accessibility in learning coding (Anne showed this in her presentation):
I can’t help but wonder how many kids we shake out of technology because they don’t approach it in an orthodox manner, or don’t fit the stereotype of what we think a person in tech is. It might be slowly changing, but the gateway to learning technology is guarded by your stereotypical computer geek, and they are as fierce about guarding it as any athlete in a locker room. When I see teachers putting students in silos because of this kind of thinking, or worse, punishing students who don’t follow their discipline in the same way that they do, I can’t help but remember that I was once that kid who ended up dropping out and walking away. Everyone can learn coding and computers. Anyone who says, “I’m no good at that stuff” (including all the teachers I hear say it daily) are responding to the barriers that surround it. Exclusivity driven by arrogance has defined how many people see the computer field. Digital technology is so big now that any kind of thinker and doer can survive and thrive in the field, but we need the traditional computer experts to tone down the nerdismo. The people who build the digital world we inhabit have as much swagger as a professional athlete does nowadays, and it starts in high school with insecure boys chasing everyone who isn’t like them out of the lab. Until we take steps to open up technology to more diverse learners it’ll continue to chase the girls and atypical thinkers out of this left brained, male dominated industry. Perhaps I can convince more girls and alternative thinkers to keep learning technology into senior high school by not being an arrogant git, but I’m also fighting this well established conception of what a computer geek is. Until I can tone down the nerdismo in the classroom, I fear that preconceptions and the aggressive nerdismo in the computer lab will dictate who takes my courses. The field of computer studies would greatly benefit from an influx of creative/alternative thinkers, but until the geeks loosen their grip, nothing will change.
We re-aligned our computer courses last year. Our school formerly was one of the few with a Computer Studies Department, with computer science and computer technology courses all existing under a single banner. Last year the department was dissolved and computer science was put under the Mathematics Department while computer technology was re-integrated with the Technology Department. I transitioned from Computer Studies Head to a co-head of Technology, but I’m finding working in such a diverse (we cover everything from metal work to food school to digital design) department challenging. With so many horses pulling in so many directions, I can’t help but feel that digital technologies tends to be a second thought. Rather than feel excluded I’ve been finding ways to develop a stronger digital technologies continuum. The computer lab has always been next to the design lab, though run by different departments. Now that we’re on the same team so to speak, I’ve been re-thinking how digital technologies, always minimally represented in terms of classes, should work within the school. We’ve been developing an integrated digital technologies curriculum in order to facilitate that. With the dissolution of Computer Studies the realigning of our school’s digital technologies was inevitable. No longer is Technology Design the lone digitally focused technology course in the department. Combined with Computer Technology, our digital technology courses can now offer a continuum of learning across a wide variety of digital platforms. I initially felt that dissolving the computer department was going to be bad for the discipline, but now I’m feeling a new synergy.
By drawing together our digitally focused technology courses under the many common threads they share we’re able to offer 9-12 curriculum in a wider variety of areas. For students in a rural area where digital-tech doesn’t have the social impact it has in more urban settings this is a big deal. The first step was to diversify our high-tech offerings. I argued successfully at Heads for Tech-Design to offer Robotics (our tech design teacher has a background in it). I also argued successfully for a Software Engineering option that would allow students interested in the field to experience industry standard practices around software development rather than the mathematics focus offered by computer science.
From the junior grades students get a wide variety of choice in 11 & 12 around what aspects of digital technology they want to pursue. And even if the student isn’t going into a tech-focused profession, they are at least able to develop the kind of digital fluency that will be handy in any 21st Century workplace. Of course, digital-tech doesn’t end at the workplace. If we’re going to graduate citizens capable of communicating in the 21st Century, they need to have digital fluency. I always felt isolated as the head of computers with only a part time comp-sci teacher who wasn’t interested in collaborating. Now that I’m the co-head of tech, or perhaps Head of Digital Technologies fits better, I’m able to empower our tech-design as well as my own computer-tech fields and build a more complete set of options for our students to benefit from. Change isn’t always easy, but in this case I feel like it’s led to a good place where teamwork and a common goal has replaced cold, distant collegiality.
A 9-12 Digital Technologies Continuum with a healthy variety of choice that will develop graduates ready to take on the challenges of the 21st Century:
Turns out the Concours didn’t need a new bulb, it just needed some more electrical connection cleaning. After replacing the bulb that wasn’t blown I finally took off the fairing only to discover that, like all the other electrical gremlins, it was a matter of dirty connectors. After cleaning up the wiring harness, suddenly all the lights work again. I posted what happened on the COG discussions and got this pearl:
As usually happens in a case like this, you immediately see the good advice repeated. Only a couple of nights later I was reading Performance Bike Magazine. They do a bit each month on what to look for in finding an older model sport bike, in this case the thirteen year old Honda VTR1000 SP2. In the article they suggest that cleaning and protecting all electrical contacts on a bike that old is a good winter-time activity. If it’s true for well cared for sports bikes half as old, it’s even truer for my field-found Connie.
As WillyP states above, bikes aren’t built to keep out the elements, even the most covered bike is virtually naked compared to a car. Even in the case of a well cared for, covered sports bike, cleaning the electrical contacts is a worthwhile off-season ritual. In the case of a field-found Concours, it’s where I should have started in the first place. A breakdown and electrical cleaning is my go-to next time around.
As a project bike the Concours continues to teach lessons even as it becomes more and more roadworthy.
This changes on a moment to moment basis, but in this moment, here is what I wish was looking back at me when I opened the door to the iron horse stable: 1) An outfit fit for my son and I: A Royal Enfield Bullet Classic with a Rocket Sidecar. 500cc Bullet Classic: $6350 Sportmax Rocket sidecar: $3500+~$1200 installation The whole outfit would cost about ~$11,000 new… I found a used outfit for $8000, might find another for less.
2) A scooter for my wife: Vespa 946 It’s a dream list so I’ll go for the fantastically expensive Vespa, though Honda makes some mighty nice alternatives for one third the price. The Vespa? $9999 for a year old new one (!?!) (the similarly spec-ed Honda PCX150 comes in at $3899). I’ve found clean, used scooters for about $1000.
3) State of the art Hyper-bike: This has always been a Hayabusa, though I’d chuck it all in for the new Ninja H2R. Hayabusa: $14999 Ninja H2R: ??? 4) A Light Weight, Swiss-Army Knife dual purpose bike: The Suzuki DR-Z400S: $7299 Over 100lbs lighter than a KLR, a super capable, light weight enduro machine that can manage weight, still has good power, but follows the Austin Vince minimalist ethos: nimble, efficient, ultra-capable off road. Found a used one in good nick for about $4000. 5) A matching off-road bike for my son: Not sure of the spec on this one. It would have to be the one he feels most comfortable on because he’s a cautious fellow. ~$2-3000 new – there seem to be a lot of used ones about for ~$1000
I’d be looking at about $50,000 in new (dream) gear. On a budget I think I could pick up (used) the two dirt bikes for $5000, a hyperbike for $7000, a scooter for $1500 and an outfit for $3-5000. So $16-18500 for a more realistic dream stable… Inclusivity is what I’m aiming for with this collection. We three could go for a putter on scooter and outfit. My son and I could go off roading together. Only the Hayabusa really smacks of selfishness. Of course this will all change again next week, so I’m not holding my breath.
We had a tough week at work. A colleague, the kind of guy who you assume will outlast you because he does everything right, was killed last weekend in a motor vehicle ‘accident’. I put accident in quotes because it’s not really an accident when the other driver blows through a stop sign while speeding and kills you and your wife (and himself). You’d be right to say I’m a bit angry about this, but I’m also rather desperately looking for a reason for it. That things can happen for no reason bothers me, but they do. They did nothing wrong. They were driving home after dropping their son off at university. They were driving in an SUV with a five star safety rating. I want there to be a reason (the guy who hit them was drunk, distracted, somehow incompetent), but I fear there is none; there is no reason why they are dead other than the most basic one: motor vehicles are inherently dangerous and a number of people who operate them aren’t able to do so well enough to ensure your safety. If we are going to let pretty much anyone strap themselves into a metal box powered by exploding gases and shoot themselves down roads at high speed, we have to accept that there is an inherent risk, no matter how capable they may be, of death. Whenever you get into any kind of motor vehicle you accept this risk, or you don’t get into the vehicle. It’s generally understood that getting on a motorbike makes this calculus so obvious that people can’t help but tell you (over and over) how dangerous it is. Those same people will go out and buy five star rated SUVs thinking they’ve beaten the odds. Those big vehicles mean you’ll always come out of a minor incident, and if you find yourself in a lot of minor incidents then I suppose they make sense. Better to spend the money on a bigger vehicle rather than making efforts to reduce your inability. Driver training courses are significantly cheaper than operating a large vehicle, but pride prevents most people from considering them. We end up in an arms race with the most distracted, incapable drivers operating larger and larger vehicles for their own safety. I’ve been trying to suss out government safety statistics. I have a feeling that people who have taken motorcycle safety training have fewer accidents than the general public. The kind of defensive driving presented to new motorcycle riders is foreign to most drivers in cages who don’t respect the dangerous position they are placing themselves in. I suspect that there would be way fewer accidents if everyone had to ride a motorbike for the first year of their license. Exposure gives you a healthy respect for the dangerous mechanics of operating a motor vehicle at high speed. Were I in my mini-van with my wife and son, I would have probably driven into this disaster just as that colleague of mine did. Were I on my motorbike, I’d approach that intersection with the same everyone-is-trying-to-kill-me attitude that I’ve adopted since my initial motorbike training course. On a bike I’d have sworn at the idiot who ran the stop sign after braking hard to avoid him. In an insulated motor vehicle, remote from the world around me, I’d have assumed I was safely following the laws of the road until it didn’t matter any more. Followup: just to make things weirder, this past week I died in a car accident (same name, similar age, lived about 100kms west of me) and a guy who started teaching at the same time I did and is a year younger than me also passed. Maybe this is just what getting older feels like, you see others around you dropping out of life and can’t help but wonder why you’re still here.
Tim’s bike-hole, once a storage place for unused furniture,
now an insulated work space with two Kawis in it.
Season 1 ended with me getting my license, my first bike and getting over 5000kms of riding in, including a full month of long commutes. Â The original bike bucket list included getting the license and first bike. As season two began I was looking to expand. Â Bike bucket list 2.0:
Some of these are well beyond what I can pull off at the moment, but you never know when circumstances might change. Â Besides, if you’re gonna dream, might as well dream big! Â If I’m going to do that, retiring into my own little shop would be awesome! Â Custom mechanical, digital parts fabrication and finishing!
I came across YogaMotorSport on Google+ and began looking into yoga from a riding perspective. Â It turns out many professional riders practice yoga. Â I’ve never really done yoga before so I wasn’t sure what I was getting into beyond some stereotypes.
Our little town has a nice yoga studio right down by the Grand River, a 15 minute walk away.  Awareness Yoga happens in a large basement studio with old stone walls and the sound of the Elora Gorge thundering away outside.  I’m a firm believer in ley lines, and there is definitely a lot of energy coming out of the ground in the middle of Elora.  It’s a nice spot to do yoga. I went in thinking it was some deep breathing and stretching.  It is that but it’s also a lot of core strength building and I found myself sweating buckets simply following the workout.  I’ve had three classes so far and find the combination of stretching and strength training intense, but combined with the mindset you’re encouraged to follow, it’s also remarkably relaxing.  I don’t come out of it all worked up like I do after a hockey game.  I come out of it calm and loose (though it tends to be sore the next day). Yoga looks to flexibility, core strength and mental focus, all things that should be in frequent use while riding, I can see why professional riders do it.  I was lucky that my local studio does stiff guy yoga, it’s a men’s only class and I’ve got to say, it’s a really nice change from your typical guy-sports workout, and something uniquely suited to motorbike riders.
Via NBCnews: the glory of the hardcore video gamer.  Not  the kind of thing that’s ever going to challenge the Olympics for public attention I think.
I’ve had a lot of trouble playing video games lately. Â My problem seems to be around that idea of scripted experience. Â If I’m playing a video game I’m working through a narrative someone else created. Â I enjoy narratives but what irks me about video games is they pretend to have an element of choice in them when in fact they don’t. Â They suggest that they are the next evolution in entertainment but the interactivity they offer is so limited that it’s really just a hidden script that you follow under the illusion of choice. Â Gamification in general seeks to use this illusion to hook people into otherwise tedious situations.
The first step away from video gaming occurred when I found I couldn’t get into single player games anymore.  Even the good ones with epic narratives felt banal.  I went to multi-player games for several years hoping that the human element would create choice, but I find that these too are scripted, and worse, they force players into scripted responses to the point where you can’t tell the players from the bots.  When a game is so restrictive that it makes the people in it act like machines it’s not a game I care to play.
There is a particular situation in which we’re happy to turn people into bots if the illusion of engagement is preserved. Â That situation also happens to be seen as quite tedious by many of its participants. Â Education is eager to digitize if it ensures engagement, even if that engagement mimics the dimensionless engagement found in online activity. Â Standardized testing feeds this thinking, producing learning outcomes that are easily quantifiable as data even as they fail to demonstrate learning. Â Deep contextual human activities (like learning) are lost in simplistic digital data.
Doubt is cast on an individual teachers’ ability to teach a subject.  Consistency is demanded in modern education as a result of this doubt and the slippery nature of digital information encourages this by eroding the space between classrooms and lessons.  This is shown as some kind of great step forward in terms of fairness, but what it really does is reduce teaching (as it has done with many other human activities) to a vapid exchange of information, incidentally what digital machines do best.Â
We fill in templates, teach centralized material and are encouraged to sync how we teach it. Â Proof of success is found in standardized test scores. Â There is little interest in assessing teaching or learning in any other way.
This digital infection also carries the parasitic idea of gamification, usually championed by video game evangelists who believe that the structure of gaming can overcome every obstacle.  Teachers are encouraged to design student success through scripted outcomes pretty much like a video game does.  If the game you’re playing is designed to have you eventually win it isn’t much of a challenge and certainly isn’t something you can be proud of, but then modern learning isn’t about challenge, it’s about engagement.  The idea of gamification makes me uneasy for this very reason.  When we gamify situations that aren’t games I’m afraid that we pollute complex situations with the implied success found in most gaming outcomes.  If education is supposed to prepare students for the world beyond school this isn’t going to do it.
Gaming the game has a long and storied history in geek culture. Can you suspend your disbelief if you’re always looking to subvert the delivery method?
If you offer open ended, ‘real’ experience many digital natives shy away from a situation where the rules can’t be gamed for advantage. Â The hacking mindset implies that the system is more important than the content. Â Perhaps that’s why I can’t play video games anymore. Â It’s hard to get lost in a narrative when you’re constantly looking at ways to subvert the delivery method.
Wilful suspension of disbelief is lost in the digital age.  This is the root of the pessimism and disengagement you see in many students.  When education becomes another process you hack to guaranty your own success it becomes increasingly impossible to do anything useful with it.
This grew out of Scripted Lives which itself grew out of Unscripted Moments. Â I’m pulling at a lot of threads here. Â I’ve been a fan of RPGs since I got into D&D when I was 10. Â I love sports and would describe myself as a serious gamer. Â I’ve spent most of my life learning digital technology so I’d hardly call myself a tech-hater either, but watching digital technology and gamification aiming for society wide acceptance has made me very uneasy.
Steve Hoffarth has a good editorial piece in the August/September 2014 edition of Inside Motorcycles that got me thinking about scripted experience.  Steve was lamenting his inability to go racing this year.  He compared going on rides at a theme park and found them lacking.  A scripted experience like being a passive rider on a roller coaster has nothing on the complex, non-linear and entirely participatory experience of racing. I was sitting in the garage last night working on the Concours when my wife stuck her head in the door and asked how I was doing.  “I’m in my happy place,” I replied. What made it happy was that I was fixing a problem that had no instruction manual.  Success wasn’t guaranteed and I had to approach it from several different angles before I could finally come up with a solution.  Real satisfaction followed a resolution to a situation that could easily have ended in failure.  It was an entirely unscripted situation, the kind I long for after your typically scripted day in the life of a 21st Century human. So much of our lives are scripted nowadays, from phones telling us when to be where to GPS units telling us how to get there.  Brakes script themselves for us because we can’t be bothered to learn how to use them effectively, traction control leaps in at a moment’s notice to script your acceleration, vehicles will park themselves, warn you when something is behind you because you couldn’t be bothered to turn your head, and even avoid obstacles you couldn’t be bothered to pay attention to.  I used to enjoy driving, now, at its best, it feels more like sitting on a roller coaster. All this scripting is a result of software.  It may sound funny coming from a computer technology teacher, but that software kills it for me.  If I wanted to watch machines race I wouldn’t put people in the cars at all, it’s safer that way.  It’s been a long time since a driver could take a car by the scruff of its neck and drag it around a circuit.  We do all this in the name of safety, but ultimately I think it’s lowest common denominator thinking; software engineers design life for the least capable people, they can sell more of it that way. There are places in mechanics where it just makes sense to incorporate computer control, especially when it amplifies an operator’s nuanced control of a vehicle rather than overwriting it.  Thank goodness for fuel injection.  It allows us to create responsive, linear fuelling and use less of a diminishing resource, it’s all good, as are disc brakes and other technological advances that improve rider feel.  I’m certainly not anti-technology, I make my living teaching it, but I am anti-technology when it takes over human inputs instead of improving them.  That kind of thinking breeds sheeple.
Traction control (many settings!), antilock brakes (many settings!), hill start control and more electronics than a moon shot – perhaps bikes aren’t the last bastion after all.
Unscripted moments are increasingly hard to come by.  Perhaps that freedom we feel on a motorcycle is one of the last bastions of unscripted moments when a software engineer isn’t deciding how you’ll spend your time, or worse, spending it for you. Except they increasingly are.  After I started riding last year I was astonished that this is legal.  In a granny state-world where safety is all that matters, where SUVs are considered better because they’re bigger and collision avoidance systems are desirable because you shouldn’t have to pay attention while operating a vehicle, motorcycles too are succumbing to our vapid, software scripted lives.
