Cyborgs are all around us now, and they have trouble finishing a thought

If you popped into a current classroom from any time before the last five years you’d think your students had gone mad, or were in need of an exorcist. Being unfamiliar with the rapid miniaturization and personalization of electronics, you’d be left wondering what it is they are fiddling with on their navels, why they seem to be constantly thinking about something else, and why when you walk into your next class the students there already know what happened to pretty much everyone else in the school (and the ones who skipped) last period.

I was talking to a colleague the other night about this sense of personal dislocation in students, though digital vertigo isn’t a student only issue. The teacher in question won’t even make a Facebook account because he believes (perhaps rightly) that it means the internets will know where he is all the time. He was telling me about a difficult student who was giving him a hard time in class. This teacher has a great rapport with students so many other students leapt in and argued his point for him. Afterwards the difficult student in question seemed overly despondent and would not re-engage in discussion. I suggested that the disagreement in class may not have ended in the classroom but had become virtualized.  The idea that invisible forces were emanating from and reflecting back into the classroom was quite upsetting to this teacher.

The fluidity with which teens pass back and forth between physical and virtual space make them very hard to read, at many moments in their day they are literally in two places at once. That uncommunicative student may still be getting hammered on Facebook long after the physical confrontation is over; digital echoes of a verbal disagreement. The moods so common in teens anyway are amplified by these invisible, always on, invasive connections; their volatile minds are wired to always-on drama.

There was a time when you could read a class by the students you had in it. Relationships were obvious and management challenging but straightforward. If you had the nitro and the glycerin in the room  you could separate them, you can’t do that any more.  You can’t do that if you move them to a different class… or a different school.  I’ve had students who moved up to our small town to get out of the GTA and away from a bad influence only to be intimately connected with them on Facebook the moment anyone’s back is turned. Always on, always connected, always being emotionally amplified – that is the modern, connected high school student.

This creates some  interesting new psychology in the classroom.  That student who used to feel isolated for their poor behavior in class might be experiencing any number of unseen influences.  Instead of being able to modify poor behavior by moving a student, or placing them in classes where their bad influences are not, they are always connected.  Many of those connections may very well be morally supporting or even inciting them; they never feel isolated in their bad attitude and are always supported in their beliefs, even if it is hurting them.  In that sense you might argue for a lack of emotional growth because  you never have a chance to get free of a clique or bad influence.  In the other direction you’ve got the example above where a group of students may easily create an ad hoc digital mob and go after someone. This can happen so quickly and quietly that it’s almost impossible to consider let alone manage.


Working with the emotionality of high school students is challenging at the best of times, but with the drama-net of Facebook fully embedded in every student’s mind, administration struggles with the more obvious cyber-bullying while the subtle ghostly influences go unnoticed, thought every teacher faces them daily.

As students migrate to Twitter without realizing the very public nature of it (many think it similar to texting),  coercive social media becomes even more widely broadcast than just between Facebook friends. Suddenly we have social media as means of large scale slander, creating influence well beyond the intent of the ignorant person thinking their tweets are private.

This is a new social situation that affects early adopters while others remain entirely ignorant.  Many teachers don’t consider it at all because they have no experience with social media yet it increasingly influences the students in their classrooms. Kids whose minds are in many places at once, constantly being emotionally tweaked and influenced by social media inputs, not knowing how to manage this pervasive influence in an effective way.

Digital literacy considers media fluency, collaboration and critical thinking, but the extent to which digital media is influencing the minds of our students isn’t really on the table. Their inability to manage their own access (watch a student, they are Pavlovian in their use of social media, they can’t self manage) is only one part of the problem.  In the emotionally charged world of high school, social media pours gasoline on that fire, making teaching a challenge in ways that it never was before.

***
had to add a wee update. It’s Monday morning and the internet meme from the weekend that all the grade 10s are talking about is of a girl and her feminine hygiene product on youtube.  It sets new (low) standards on what teens are willing to do to get seen online.  

This race to the bottom in terms what teens are able to subject themselves to is radically changing how they approach both sexuality and social norms in general.  Teens nowadays have seen things that would have been virtually impossible for them to see even a decade ago, and this is entirely a digitized influence.

You really don’t want even think about what teens do for truth or dare nowadays, they’ve seen things that will make you ill, they dare each other to.  The entire nasty world is available to them and influencing them moment to moment. Yet another way that online  influence creates a classroom unlike any before.

One of the reasons I love teaching is that the job isn’t about making a fat, old, white guy a bit richer than he already is. Every other job I’ve had has been inherently limited by this focus; the only reason you’re there is to make a one percenter a little bit richer.  That raison d’etre infects everything about working in a money focused business. That I hear people refer to this as ‘real work’ always makes me laugh; it’s real work in the same way that prostitution is real honest work – you lay yourself down for the money.  The argument that working for money adds real vigor and toughness to a workplace is nonsense. What it actually does is create fearful, simpering employees who believe that sucking up to their boss is more important than the work they do.

Ideas like excellence, originality, creativity and even work ethic are pretty much irrelevant.  If they can make more money by tossing out the hardest working, most creative, excellent employee, they will (and do – especially in the short term gains world we live in now). The only time businesses produce excellence is when small groups within the organization are protected from the pimps who are running it. That doesn’t happen often. What usually happens is that businesses take the excellence and research they need from publicly funded universities.

That infectious economic thinking has blighted Ontario education thanks to Laurel Broten’s story telling around fiscal responsibility.  Listening to the tragic prostitutes in the private sector telling us to accept their shabby circumstances because of economic necessity is purely the result of Ontario Liberal Party spin, and it has demonized my profession as a result.

Education: a reason to be optimistic about the future!

Teaching in Ontario has achieved real excellence in the past decade. We are truly world class, one of the very best. What made this happen? Bonuses? Financial incentives? No teacher ever got into teaching to make money. No teacher has ever gotten a cash payout for doing their job at a world class level (we’ll leave that for all those excellent bankers out there). If financial reward isn’t the point of performing at such an outstanding level, what is?

Public education is one of the most powerful social movements we’ve ever created. As Ray Kurzweil states his five reasons to be optimistic about the future, we are more educated than we’ve ever been before. We pay ten times what we used to into education as a society, but our post secondary graduation has increased by 280 times. We are making better use of the talent of our people; that is the crowning achievement of public education: social efficiency on a previously unheard of scale. The irony is that this very socialist mechanism, designed to realize the potential of all members of our society, also drives economic growth.

I’m back at school again tomorrow, dropped in to the political maelstrom of a forced contract, listening to blathering idiots whining about how much teachers get paid and how little they do. I’m tempted to get stingy about my work, but I don’t think I can. I didn’t get into this profession for the politics or the economics, I got into it because it’s one of the finest possible reasons anyone could have for going to work; to help human beings recognize their potential.

What I do is the opposite of the pyramid scheme most people find themselves working at each day; it’s a good in itself, economically, socially, personally. I can’t help but want to over achieve, no matter what the lowered expectations around me might suggest.

2012 has been a challenging year for me as a teacher, a Canadian and an online citizen. My five big wishes for 2013 range from recognizing digital literacy to changing the way we run organizations, but the underlying theme becomes obvious:  technology is changing how we interact with and influence each other.

A flattening mediascape means everyone can publish information. From wikileaks to Anonymous to social media induced political upheaval, technology is unhinging how societies control their members. Organizations that used to control their message through limited access, broadcast media are stumbling while whole populations are discovering that they can now speak to more people than multinationals could in television commercials only twenty years ago.

Here are my five big wishes for these interesting times in which we live:

We stop wishing for digital literacy and actually do something coordinated about it.

Students flounder in this strange new world as much as anyone else.  We’ve not been very organized about trying to get them up to speed. A Digital Skills Continuum needs to be integrated into curriculum. We need to stop putting our faith in myths like digital natives and BYOD and begin to intelligently address the revolution we’re in the middle of.  We do a real disservice to students with the half-assed way in which we deliver digital literacy.

As a teacher I’m worried not only for students I see being graduated into a time of radical change with virtually no preparation from their education, but also for the teachers who seem intent on patently ignoring these changes to both their own detriment and those of their students.  If I could get Ontario education leadership to stop playing politics and get back to, you know, education, this is what I’d be begging them to begin taking seriously.

Listening to business types begging us to graduate people who are useful in a digitally enhanced workplace is panic inducing! I really wish we’d start taking this seriously and build it into curriculum so technologically illiterate teachers couldn’t just ignore it.

Ontario politicians stop using teachers in their shabby games.

Watching the Ontario Liberal Party thrashing around in its death throes was been startling, getting black eyes from their their dishonest, manipulative politics has been very disheartening. Ontario has one of the cheapest, highest performing education systems in the G20 and performs favorably when education costs per GDP are concerned with even many third world countries. We don’t pay much for the fantastic results we get. Watching politicians (who get to magically become my boss when they have no background in what I do at all)  heap lies on their mistakes and vilify my profession has been very demoralizing.

I’m sorry that I let the divisive nature of this battle turn me on Ontario Catholic teachers. I think the dual nature of our public/Catholic boards in Ontario must enrichen our educational process somehow, and it isn’t breaking the bank as many might have you believe. If we’re this good for this little, just leave us alone to do our work; go play your shabby political games by yourselves.

Perhaps begin by not bailing out giant multinational banks and lousy car makers.

Teachers vocalize how difficult their job is

Part of the political angle played against teachers is that they are overpaid and under-worked. This plays to an uneducated idiot’s view of the profession – I’m surprised by how many people swallow this, and it isn’t helped by many teachers not saying anything in response.

I don’t doubt that there are a few that do as little as they can while milking the system, but in my experience these people are a tiny minority. The vast majority of teachers I know put in sixty hour plus weeks while in school, and still spend hours a week working on preparation and research when not actually in class. 

I recently did the math, if you look at the time I put into my job, I make about $15/hour… and I need two degrees, first aid qualifications, a clean driver’s license, a clean criminal record and years of experience to make that much. Starting teachers make less than minimum wage if they are also doing the requisite extra curriculars and extra class work.

Watch any teacher who is active online and you’ll see how much time they spend collaborating on lessons and building good pedagogy. If we judged every profession by the 5% who bottom feed, no one would be looking very good.

I wish more teachers would open their mouths and explain to friends and family what it is they do. The chance to spread this information far and wide lies at your fingertips.

No more charter school American education consultants brought up here at great expense in order to tell us how to do something we’re already much better than them at

I’ve been begging Canadians to put away their be-polite mantra and recognize what we are doing well.  Apparently being proud about hockey is as far as we’re willing to go.  Watching (evidently) cash strapped boards throwing out thousands of dollars to push bankrupt American philosophy makes me financially, culturally and educationally sick. If we do something well, recognize it and bring in the local talent that is making us world class. I’d love to see more Canadian content in the educational conferences I’m attending. I’d love to see more Canadian educators publishing and presenting on what we are doing; the rest of the world would benefit from it… especially the Americans… even the Charter school ones.

Radical transparency in our institutions… all of our institutions.

Social media is wreaking havoc on the status quo. Organizations used to a hierarchy based on one sided media transmission are floundering. The signal is no longer owned by the few rich, anyone can now publish information to the world. 

An active democratic population isn’t what most of these organizations want though. They are far happier with an apathetic electorate that hands them sufficient power every few years and then does what they are told. This came home to me not just with the Ontario Liberal nonsense, but with my own union’s nonsense too. It’s a tough thing to have two organizations that are supposed to be representing you instead threatening you for exercising your voice.

After making mistakes that would make any individual blush, these ‘leaders’ are incapable of a simple apology, which only indicates the arrogance still found in the crumbling halls of power. Many of these people in positions of power still feel that they are superior human beings to the rest of us. I’m all about the healthy dose of humility coming their way.

The democratization of media is forcing a democratization in organizations too. I tried to do this in my union and was demonized for it. At least the inevitability of progress is on my side with this one. With individuals having more voice than ever before, the idea that organizations can force their members into a lockstep, parroting the company/union/government line is an old idea whose time has passed. 

Democracy is messy, loud and boisterous; forcing a single voice in this noise is factory thinking.  As is said in Radical Transparency, “Radical transparency means you don’t have to stand up and read a script, you don’t have to wonder how the numbers will play out on a new policy… you know your beliefs and you act on them.”  

Leaders who are managers and don’t stand for anything shouldn’t be leading. I’m looking for people who believe in what they say, and say it consistently   Clever people who think they can manipulate people to their own ends? Those people have an uphill struggle in a flattening mediascape.  The leader who is transparent and direct in their communications? That person need never fear many voices, their transparency is their strength.

Wrap Up

What I’m really wishing for is a digitally literate population who makes effective use of our new ability to speak loudly to each other without being pushed to distraction  by it.  The weak link in our current digital maelstrom are the people using it.  If we could manage:

• Social media that respects and empowers its users without hypocrisy
•  Digital tools that clarity and amplify their users rather than obfuscate and distract them
• Technology companies that respect user effectiveness, and aren’t solely purposed to get in the way
•  Educational systems that produce technically and socially competent students, especially in the middle of a digital revolution

 we’d be able to begin to exercise the real power of a global village.  Classrooms that range across the world, world wide democratic voices empowered by free information, transparent organizations that prevent abuse by being only what they are, publicly… that’s all I’m wishing for in 2013.

Mr Universe Knows!

I just read an email from our union lamenting the lack of control when it comes to presenting our contract information to us.  In the 36 hours OSSTF took to put together a two page comparison of our deal with the one the Catholic teachers had land on them, details leaked to the press and were already flowing around social media before that.

When we finally got ‘official’ information it was formatted entirely in comparison to the OECTA deal – we don’t get to see actual details, we get a selection of facts designed to look better than the pile of manure OECTA provincial executive signed off on for their members (none of whom have ratified it) last summer.  I’m having trouble seeing the democracy through the political machinations.

Watching the government, the forth estate and our union trying to manipulate the flood of information in an increasingly flat mediascape is rather tragic to watch.  These lumbering dinosaurs try to breach holes or spin facts, only be swamped by crowd-sourced social media.  They want to harness the crowd for their own ends only to find their carefully laid plans designed to manipulate results thrown into the weeds.

We might have evolved into Web2.0, but it is also causing a more democratic means of understanding the world and ushering in a Democracy2.0 wherein people have access to more information sources and are no longer held captive by traditional organizations and the big media that served them.  The Arab Spring, Occupy, Anonymous and many other social movements are happening because governments and corporations don’t own the signal any more.  Anyone with an internet connection can publish to the world, find information and create community with like minded people.

How is a political organization to survive in a time where they can’t control their own message?  Perhaps by putting out a message that doesn’t need controlling in order to be accepted.  This would mean un-spinning and de-lawyerizing your organization and simply being direct and consistent with what you stand for.  Being accessible and open about communicating wouldn’t hurt either – if you’re working behind closed doors, you’re not getting the point..

Your political party shouldn’t be trying to win elections, it should have a clear vision of what it stands for and then never waiver from that goal in word and deed.  If you’re consistent, radical transparency and the flattening mediascape doesn’t frighten you, it empowers you.  If you’re a shifty, manipulative organization that is used to getting its own way by having direct access to big media, your days are numbered.

Radical transparency means you don’t have to stand up and read a script, you don’t have to wonder how the numbers will play out on a new policy, and you never have to come back to an interview and say, wow, we really screwed that up.  You don’t have spin doctors telling you what to think about issues, you know your beliefs and you act on them.

As insane as I think Tim Hudak’s tea party Conservatives are, at least they are consistent in their insanity.  The NDP are also consistent in their left winged-ness.  The Liberal party (whom I used to vote for and was considering membership in after I became a Canadian citizen) are something unique to Canada, but in trying to be centrist they have ended up being worse than the right wing bullies; a manipulative party that only stands for being in power, consistency be damned.

I’m having trouble being unionist at a time when my union seems to be playing the same kind of Liberal game, of speaking out of both sides of their faces.  One moment the offered contract is a disaster and we’re ordered to go on work action; the union is overjoyed at the crowd sourced support they are seeing online and myself and others are more than happy to vocally convey the unfairness of the situation.  In the next we are suddenly accepting a similar contract.  Communication has stopped and online voices have turned from supportive to hurt and confused.

I’m a creature of this flattened mediascape.  I cannot understand or condone the backroom politics or spin.  I don’t want to be manipulated, I don’t want to be treated like an idiot who can’t know details, I want the facts, and if I’m not given them, they are easily enough found online.

I’m thinking about what the ideal digital tool would be for student learning.

It has to offer strong reading and browsing abilities as well as data entry.  I want the benefits of a passive consumption device (like a tablet) with the benefits of an active media production device (like a laptop).  My ideal device must have a keyboard and mouse pad, but also offer touch screen functionality.  It’ll also rotate to use the screen more effectively as a reader/tablet.

It also has to be ruggedized (I have no misconceptions about how hard kids are on electronics).  It would also be built like lego (compartmentalized and accessible to easily replace failed parts).  The goal weight would be under 3 pounds.  At three pounds we’d be providing a device that can easily carry all the student’s text books, binders and loose paper without injuring them or destroying the planet.

Some devices I’d shamelessly steal brilliant design ideas from:

Dell’s latest round of ultrabooks with a flippable screen offer the kind of flexibility I’m looking for – the benefits of a rotating tablet screen (allowing you to turn a widescreen to a tall screen for reading), light weight, flexible, powerful…




In fairness (and because I have one), HP has been making touch screen/tablet laptops for years.

I don’t care which technology gets used (which ever is more durable), but the idea of a lightweight touch screen reader AND a laptop that allows for full media creation is vital!

Horizontal wide-screens are designed for entertainment, but reading only happens well when you’ve got continuous text you don’t have to constantly scroll through a narrow window.  These learning tools MUST allow for the most accessible e-reading experience – meaning a device that can mimic a tablet.  


The end result has at least a 128GB solid state drive (SSD), that allows for multiple OS installs if a student wants them.  The hardware would be able to run CHROME OS, LINUX, OSx and Windows (depending on student experience, preference and ability).  The choice to upgrade on-device storage would be easy because the SSD it comes with would be a standard 2.5 inch laptop hard drive bay that would take any of many choices of hard or solid state drive.

Basic connectivity to the device would be through USB3 and video out – mini-dvi (for sharing presentations).  No manufacturer specific connectors (Apple, I’m looking at you and your weird dongle fixation).

The screen would be a 13 inch unit with a standard resolution of 1366×768, though a student who wants a higher (retina) level display could always upgrade to one (since they bolt on, this would be a matter of standardizing monitor connectors and offering variations in resolution and colour quality based on cost and need.  

While we’re standardizing things, these digital tools would use standardized screws and fasteners that make repairs easy (are you still listening Apple?).  Any high school would have its own genius bar/nerd cave where students in senior computer engineering can repair and upgrade equipment at minimal cost.

The compartmentalization is vital to this tool.  The screen needs to detach logically and easily for replacement, same with the memory, hard/solid state drive, CPU, battery and keyboard.  Compartmentalization allows for much cheaper upkeep.  I’d also like all the pieces to be easily recyclable as well as replace/up-gradable.

The idea of an environmentally sensible laptop isn’t a pipe dream.

Google could easily make this happen working with their hardware partners (an Edu-Nexus?) – Microsoft and Apple seem intent on closed eco-system models, even for education, but I live in hope.

It’s already the end of 2012.  I’d love to see the silicon valley geniuses recognize that digital literacy is vital for education (and for the future of industry too – we’re not producing digitally literate graduates!).

If we could get our hands on that modular, easily upgrade-able/maintainable, ruggedized transformable laptop/data creation, tablet/content consumption device, we’d be one giant step closer to helping students grasp opportunities for digital literacy.

I think we could mass produce these things for $300 for a basic one up to $600 for a tricked out one.  The revolution is well underway, it’s time for someone to give us the classroom tools we need to teach it.

 I’ve recently thrown my hat in with a rough bunch of commando teacher types (@stevewynen, @mrmarnold) who have applied for TLLP funding.  My wife, Alanna (@banana29), saw my ECOO presentation on integrating BYOD into a digital skills continuum (instead of just instituting the policy randomly with no thought to pedagogical need).  The idea of doing some action research into developing a digital skills continuum was the foundation of the application the four of us have forwarded.

One of the arguments I made was that bringing your own device to class does not imply technological skill, and may ultimately hurt a student as much as help them.  It certainly does nothing but disrupt learning in a class if no one in the room actually knows how to problem solve and/or effectively use the device – especially a device where familiarity is founded upon its entertainment value – using that device for a previously unexpected purpose is perilous indeed!  Students who own their own device but have very little actual facility with it aren’t served by trying to include it, unsupported, in an effective learning environment.

From the student who got the two thousand dollar camera and was going to return it because ‘it took bad pictures’ (it was set on web-sized 600×800 pixels, it was a 24 megapixel DSLR…), to the student with the new laptop that only has stolen games, videos, pornography and oodles of viruses on it, unstructured BYOD is a technological (and learning) quagmire in the making.   The assumption that because someone owns a digital tool that they know how to effectively use it is just that, a huge assumption; not exactly sound pedagogical practice.

How we assess and teach digital fluency lacks any cohesion at all, yet everyone is itching to throw ipads at students.  The problem goes well beyond student technological prowess to include many teachers as well.  If we’re going to produce students ready and relevant to future workplaces then we really need to get a handle on our expectations around effective use of digital technology.

To that end it is well past time to begin developing a digital skills continuum – an objective, mastery based learning continuum (no, 50% is not a pass).  You either know how to use digital tools effectively, or you don’t, and it’s time to figure out who knows what.

It’s early days yet, but it seems to me that digital fluencies break down into two fundamental areas, like the technology itself.  One side is communication/data driven and involves effective management of information in digital environments.  The other side is the technical/hardware side of the equation and how fluent you are with using technology to access digital information.  Both sides can be broken down further…

Any one of these particulars may be further developed to create a more nuanced understanding of a person’s digital fluency.  Even regular users might be surprised by their lack of breadth in this area.  Knowing how to do one thing, over and over again on a specific (single) device well does not make you an expert.

Many years ago when I went for my Comptia A+ and Net+ certifications, I became aware of what the differences between a keen amateur and a professional were when it comes to computer technology.  The first time I took a practice exam I was stunned to be getting in the forty percents, I thought I was an expert.  That testing process is grueling and requires a 75% pass rate.  You don’t get to call yourself an expert by getting it half right (why we think 50% is a pass is beyond me).  I’d like to bring some of that objective credibility to this digital skills continuum.  People need to be able to articulate and demonstrate what they know.  Guessing is where we are now, we need to move beyond that.

I’d also like to hook up differentiation of and access to technology based on how people are able to demonstrate their digital fluency.  A teacher with low digital fluency can access a supported lab, but the more advanced teacher can access diverse mini/mobile labs or even, eventually, a bring your own device model of learning, but only if they have clearly demonstrated the mastery needed to make that quagmire actually work.

BYOD – MINILAB – SCHOOL LAB: diversified technology digital skills continuum

We’ve painted ourselves into an ineffective corner when it comes to teaching digital literacy, and as a result we’re graduating students who are having a great deal of trouble transitioning to the twenty first century workplace.  This technology change is happening so quickly that society and the education system that serves it, is having trouble keeping up.  Digital fluency (where it exists at all)  has generally been self taught, and as a result it is unevenly distributed and almost impossible to quantify; it’s all quite magical.  Teachers who don’t have much in the way of digital fluency aren’t being assisted to improve it, meanwhile the rogue, commando types are just going off and doing it on their own.  Classrooms within the same department in the same building appear completely different in terms of teaching digital fluency.

A ministry initiative to develop a continuum of learning around the digital skills of everyone involved in the learning process would be a great place to start.  I hope our board and the ministry itself recognizes what an important and timely piece of pedagogical development this is and gives us a chance to further develop it.

Imagine you’re the head of the English department at a high school.  Your job is to support the English teachers in your department, help develop consistent and meaningful curriculum, buy department supplies and act as your teachers’ voice at school directions team meetings.  It’s one of the biggest departments in the school, you may have up to a dozen teachers, some teaching English full time and some part time, all of them with clear qualifications in their field.  You have the benefit of all those varied opinions, but you also have to try and get them moving in roughly the same direction too.  You’ve got your school’s library of novels and other texts to maintain, all the time knowing that every student in the school is going through your program which teaches vital literacy skills.  Students cannot graduate without demonstrating those literacy skills.  Your job isn’t an easy one, but its importance is self evident.

I am the head of computer studies at my high school.  I’m a department of one, which makes developing consistent and meaningful curriculum for my subject area rather difficult (and lonely).  I don’t have a collection of professionals to bounce ideas off.  I have to maintain text books, and equipment, but for vanishingly few students – computers just aren’t on the must-take list at my school (there’s no future in them?).

There’s a twist to this headship though: when you’re the head of computers, you’re not just the head of a small, unimportant department, you’re also responsible for your subject area school-wide, and it’s a growing, vital piece of modern educational practice.  Internet failures now begin to look a lot like power failures in the last century.

***

Imagine you’re that head of English again, except now you’re not just responsible for your department, but for English usage in the entire building.

Every time a student or teacher makes a grammar mistake or needs some reading material or writing stationary, you’re the one they turn to.  You’ve got your department to run, but you’ve also got to oversee the execution of your discipline throughout the entire building.  You spend your time correcting people’s reading, buying them pens and paper, and proofreading and correcting their mistakes.

They don’t hand this to you because they want to be illiterate, they do it because the school board wants to retain control of their stationary – which means its better to read and write everything for people than it is to let them learn how to become literate themselves; control is more important than learning.

The school population is capable of learning how to read and write, but remain illiterate because their employer finds that easier to manage.  In that building of illiterate people, your ability to read and write raises you to otherworldly status, people seek you out to do the impossible and read the printed page.

This isn’t entirely without historical context.  There was a time when reading and writing was a mystery of the learned class, a means of separating knowledge from the proles.  Whole alphabets were conceived around the idea of making it more difficult for commoners to become literate, churches kept literacy from the masses.  Knowledge is power and literacy is the key to knowledge.

I fear something similar is happening with computers now.  There is little doubt that they are becoming intrinsic to the functioning of modern life, but a smaller and smaller group is able to grok computing.  Overcoming intellectual barriers like this should be the primary directive of public education, yet we’re falling into the gap between the digerati and the rest.

***

It sounds ridiculous, but enforcing enforced ignorance is what I’m facing as the Computer Studies head.  I have almost no time to actually nurture the anemic department I’ve inherited because I’m looking after the people who have been taught to be helpless by their employer.  I spend most of my time managing the budget of school IT, ordering equipment and repairing or passing along problems to board tech support.  My own department is an afterthought, the actual teaching of computers to students is an echo of what I experienced in the 1980s when we barely had any computers.  My time is spent supporting a system that encourages ignorance, and it’s a system that is insinuating itself into education practice more completely every day.

This is a headship like no other.

I was thinking about this as I was doing my weekly ‘fair share’ of extra duties and covering the library so the librarian could go to lunch.  I haven’t had an uninterrupted lunch since school began.  I haven’t had an uninterrupted prep period since school began.

***

I’m feeling pretty down on the job, but it’s more a matter of appreciation for the work involved than it is the work itself.  I genuinely enjoy technology.  I’ve had my hands in computers since I was a child, it was one of my first serious hobbies.  When people say things like, “computers are making people stupid” or, “computers are making people autistic” I get angry.  Ignorance injures people, tools are only helpful in skilled hands, otherwise they can injure as easily as assist.

Fire can save you, or burn you…

Students (and educators, and education systems) who view computers as a distraction instead of an empowerment, who enforce simplistic, habitual use instead of exercising human/computer potential are more than a tragedy, they are the genuine threat that Nick Carr suggests.

I came out of business in 2003 to become a teacher in 2004.  I walked out of being IT support in an increasingly mobile office that had converted from desktops to laptops in ’02-’03 and was starting to integrate the new Blackberry/smartphone trend.

I walked into a series of schools with centrally administrated desktops modeled on a working environment I hadn’t seen since the nineties.  Workplaces evolve very quickly – mainly because of competitive pressure and a dictatorial approach to work (this is faster, adapt to it, I don’t care about your opinion or habitual usage; if you don’t like it, quit).  It’s a harsh environment, and not always a productive one, but it is more willing to experiment and evolve.

I’ve always struggled with what I know to be current trends outside of school and what I’m seeing in school. If preparing students for the world they’re walking into is one of our primary goals, educational techno-phobia and fear mongering Board IT myopia isn’t getting us any closer to it.

***

Come into my office! Could this be how we interact with colleagues in the future?

I’m still developing my talk for ECOO.  This always happens.  I have an idea I want to go with, then feel the need to make it feel as speculatively plausible as possible.  I end up radically retooling it before I go.  I like to get up there and see what I’m going to say, it’s often a nice surprise.

When I begin my presentation I want my mind-space familiar with current technology and trends.  This article helps cast a net over what might be coming.

Future workplace trends wouldn’t be a bad place for high schools to start developing meaningful curriculum around technological familiarity.  If giving students an idea of what environment they’re going to be working in when they graduate is one of our goals, we ought to be seeing where industry speculation is going.  Soon enough our students will be out of our classrooms where we do everything we can to discourage technological adaptation and into employment that will discard them if they don’t quickly adapt to new technologies.

***

Tech Cloud Brainstorming

I started with the Mini-lab idea for my ECOO talk. I’m still working along those lines, but the idea of a personal tech cloud seems like it will become even more integral to how we work with technology in the future.  From desktop adoption to laptops to smartphones, miniaturization is apparent, as is personalization.  Digital technology seems intent on integrating itself with us in the most intimate ways possible – which seems obvious as it is trying to interface with our most personal, mental selves.

I’ve said before, we live in a time of unprecedented technological growth, even the industrial revolution pales in comparison as a means of changing how humans live on this planet.  How we integrate technology into our lives will be key to us dealing with the population and resource challenges we face in the future.

Our technology continues to find ways to connect and amplify us.  Hand tools made our hands more capable, mechanization allowed dominion over our physical environments by reducing the need for repetitive work, and now our technology is creeping into our minds, offering us better memory recall, improving our senses, helping make our discoveries accessible and meaningful in ways we might not have otherwise seen.

One goal of my ECOO talk is to imagine a future classroom and what steps we might take to get there.  The idea of ubiquitous computing, technology that subtly permeates and enhances our thinking, and what an education in this world looks like is frightening, fascinating and challenging… just what I’d hoped the future would be.

Later, as waves of immigrants reach a critical mass you see them bringing all the bad habits of the world they left behind with them.  They never had the opportunity to learn what the new world is telling them because they’ve never been alone in it.  They aren’t interested in what the new world offers, they want to recreate what they left behind.  Whole political and social structures make this migration.

In the summer of 2005, only a year after I became a teacher, I signed up for summer school teaching only to have them ask (based on my technical background) if I’d be willing to give elearning a try.  I leapt at the opportunity.  Summer school was run in Peel by a separate business entity, and they were aggressively pursuing alternate means of course delivery.  It was an exciting opportunity that came to me years before the Ontario Ministry of Education even started on elearning.

The online Learning Management System Peel summer school had selected was Angel.  It was HTML friendly but often required hands on coding to get graphics and other information online.  What it had going for it was flexibility and freedom.  It was a blank slate that I could populate with my own material.  I could easily add links to outside resources and quickly got a handle on how to post up to date statistics to give students constant feedback.

I had students from across Ontario, 3 other provinces in Canada, Tokyo, Japan and Bangkok, Thailand.  Peel summer school offered the course globally (overseas students could use the grade in proving their ESL proficiency prior to going to an English speaking university).  I was buzzing with the possibilities of what a global classroom would look like because I was observing one of the first.  The student conversations were wonderful to follow, so full of curiosity.

This was the year after Zuckerberg left Havard to found his little startup.  This was years before the first tweet.  Phones were still phones.  In the dark fibre of the Internet before social media, we had a global classroom.  This was before the majority of students were psychologically (pathologically?) locked into the same three webpages whenever they went online.

You couldn’t walk into the digital Wild West like that and expect to serve everyone.  The admission requirements demanded that you were proficient on a computer, knew how to get about on the internets, and were a capable student.  There wasn’t a lot of room in the digital wilderness for spoon feeding the directionless learner.  The teacher knew how to code webpages, knowing how to simply open a browser was insufficient.  The students were digital ninjas, doing everything from their own IT support to working a system that still had the wrapping on it.

There was no real idea on how to do final exams.  We elected to run them in a 2 hour window on the last day of the course.  You had to login to the course, have your IP validated by me, and then write the final exam online, live, while I observed remotely.

One of the student’s internet went down just as the exam started.  She called around until she found a friend out of the affected area, then she jumped on her bike and pedaled over there, got back online and finished the exam… on time, and well.  She also got barbaric yawps from myself and the rest of her classmates who recognized the energy and thinking that went into a fix with no excuses.  The students in Tokyo and Bangkok?  Up at 2am in the morning to write the exam.  They sent up webcam pictures of themselves with the city lights on outside… it was a sunny morning in Ontario.  That exam ran simultaneously in 7 timezones.

The Ontario Ministry of Education works its way into elearning

I ran that course again the next summer (how could I not?).  When I moved to the rural board in which I lived, I suddenly found a dearth of elearning opportunities.  It took a year before they started to develop elearning, and I leapt into the fray once again.  In that time the Ministry had worked its way online like a lumbering kraken awaking from the deep, getting its tentacles into everything!

Elearning was now going to be organized, efficient, and a cure-all for every credit poor student.  They gave me a class full of drop outs from non-academic English.  In the first week fully half of them failed to login.  There was no local support for these digitally and traditionally illiterate students.  It was a stark contrast from my first experience with elearning where students would perform super human feats of daring-do in order to get it working – the course was aimed at those students; a higher bar to strain the limits of the gifted learner.

Half a dozen survived to the end of the basic level English course, which I had to keep cutting content out of because the poor English students were drowning in the text-heavy online deliver system the Ministry had adopted.  It was a disaster, and utterly frustrating – and every student was from my board, the furthest only 60 kms away.  It was about as magical as road kill.

The next year they changed the head of elearning and in the Byzantine logic of my board, other teachers, many with no experience at all, were handed elearning courses.  I could get none.

Blended learning stats from 2010

I came back to elearning obliquely the year after by being handed a blended learning course.  The idea was to run elearning in-class with students to familiarize them with the system, so when they got to elearning they weren’t lost at sea.  The Ministry and Board were still set on using elearning as a cure all to limited access courses and credit poor students.

The stats from my blended class supported my suspicions about what a successful elearner looks like – the vast majority of students don’t have the technical aptitude or the literary chops to manage elearning, especially when it’s in an embryonic, text-heavy stage.  I ended up having to print out sections of the course so the weakest literacy students could manage the material.  Many more had a devil of a time trying to do anything useful with a computer and the internet, which they had only previously experienced as a toy and time waster (a new socialization that wasn’t an issue eight years ago).  

The intrinsically motivated learner who explores independently and develops their own understandings, who spreads their knowledge where it wants to go, unrestricted by curriculum or what comes out of a teacher’s mouth… that elearner is a small proportion of the general population.  I’d noted that the same division lies in just about everyone, including teachers.  Intrinsically motivated learners are a rare breed.

That year I heard of Digital Natives and almost threw up in my mouth.  There is no such thing.  There are capable, early adopter students who are self directed in their learning and can manage digital tools, and then there are the other 80%, most of whom are capable of learning what is needed to survive if not thrive in online learning.  The weakest 10%, dogged by weak literacy skills (no doubt a result of their poor learning habits) were incapable of interacting with computers in any meaningful way.

The fact that we are beginning to expect this proficiency in all students is worrying, especially if we’re reaching for it at the cost of basic skills, like literacy.

So here I am, about to go back into an elearning class for the first time in several years next semester.  I fear the digital stupification of people – though that’s not an accurate representation.  It’s more a matter of these hordes of digital immigrants flooding the new world with their analogue habits; people being led here by social expectation rather than any particular predilection or interest on their part.

As someone who had a farmstead on the frontiers of the digital world since the early days, I’m looking at these wide-eyed, immigrants with a steely eye, my hands calloused with the work of building the digital frontier in which they want reside, but have no interest in understanding what it is or how it works.

I’m glad I had a chance to do elearning clear of the politics and the expectations of a bunch of bureaucrats who knew nothing about what they were demanding out of a new technology.  In those vast, empty digital plains, we took elearning places where it can’t go any more because of Ministries, Consortiums , funding formulas and the modern expectations and demands of carefully managed and coddled digital usage.