Page 31 – Mechanical Sympathy

Leadership is Exhausting #1: headships & heirarchies

Some people make leadership their life’s work, but I’m not one of them. I find managing other people tiresome and tedious. The only time I pursue leadership is if I feel it’s the only way to get things done. Getting things done is what I’m all about and with a few exceptions I prefer to do it without management hierarchy. I greatly enjoy collaborating and find few things more satisfying than a team working well together, but those teams are best when populated with experts pursuing their expertise, not when dictated to by a hands-off management expert.

I just completed a two year term as co-head of technology at my school. The only thing worse than leading is having to go to committee every time a decision has to be made, which is what the co-head structure was designed to do. Rather than get tangled up in that nonsense I focused on the things my co-head wasn’t conversant in, like communication and encouraging department improving extracurriculars. At no point was I embroiled in co-head who’s-the-boss arguments (as others were) or telling anyone what to do, though this approached baffled many of the other people on the leadership team. My co-head took care of safety and hard-tech shop requirements, I did the other things. We collaborated on things like sectioning, though even here there was sometimes friction. I wouldn’t recommend co-headships. At their best they are a compromise.

At the end of my tenure our department had re-established itself as one of the leaders in the board in Skills Canada participation, re-connected with board funding for technology and had become used to actually knowing what happens in leadership team meetings thanks to my detailed, live and often colourful note taking. I think I left the department in a more aware and positively engaged extracurricular place than I found it.

I’ve been a drill sergeant, I know how to bark orders and expect them to be obeyed. It is only in very hierarchical situations that a dominating leader can operate effectively. The punishments have to be immediate and the focus razor sharp. Everybody involved is usually willing to do this because you’re training for a life and death situation so you need to have your shit together. I enjoyed operating in an environment like that because expectations were clear and the efficiencies were obvious, but leadership in education is anything but clear on objectives and expectations (it’s managed by politicians).

It is such a relief to put that headship down. The lack of focus or clarity of purpose makes for a very murky operating environment. Everyone’s opinion is carefully listened to and then decisions happen seemingly of their own accord. Having to listen to people who think everyone should do what they tell them for hours at a time in Head’s meetings is one of my least favourite things to do. Trying to find quorum in a crowded room of conflicting self interests led to never ending discussions that never produced conclusions. A room where less was said for longer amounts of time I don’t think I’ve ever sat in.

Now that I’m free from the yoke of leadership I’m doing what I do best and doubling down my energy on research and development. I voluntarily took on too many sections of teaching again just to give my students opportunities to explore the technology they want to make their life’s work. We’re taking a run at cyber-security competition for the first time with ICTC’s Cyber Titan program. We’ve already put together a powerful roster of Skills Ontario competitors, and I’m pursuing half a dozen emerging technology initiatives. My seniors are building VR ready computers for schools across the board and we’re developing ipad based software for DD students to better understand emotional expression. We’ve repaired dozens of Chromebooks and other school hardware, installed software and enabled technology across the school. We’re also in the process of working out how to create immersive 360° video as an introduction to the school so that students can become familiar with the layout before they arrive. All that’s happening while I’m teaching five sections in three classes.

It’s my kind of work; it’s wide ranging, there are no right answers, there are no instructions because no one really knows how to do a lot of it, and it demands a real sense of discovery. Isn’t this just another form of leadership you ask? I’m certainly managing a lot of activity, but I’m back to my flat hierarchy where I work to develop expertise in my students so that they can self-govern their work (an expert is defined by how they design their work space in order to display their expertise). I don’t want a production line, or even submission to hierarchy, I want experts I can collaborate with in pursuing solutions to challenging, non-linear, real-world engineering problems. That might be the worst definition of leadership ever devised, but it’s what I value, and it’s the opposite of exhausting.

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Playing To Win

Last year we were stunned to get an email saying we’d made it through to the Canadian national finals for the first ever CyberTitan student cybersecurity contest. We knew, on the face of things, that we weren’t up at the pointy end of things, though we had made big improvements as we came to see what the competition wanted from us. We couldn’t really understand how we’d finished top two other than the fact that there really weren’t many teams in the eastern division.

CyberTitan is the Information and Communications Technology Council (ICTC) of Canada’s national competition for Canadian students interested in developing skills in cyber security. We’ve become so dependant on ICT infrastructure that it underpins many other critical systems like our food delivery, energy and finance sectors. Yet this critical infrastructure is taught as an afterthought in Ontario’s education system (even as it becomes instrumental in delivering curriculum in all other areas of learning). Being able to secure and maintain ICT infrastructure isn’t a nice idea, it’s increasingly a life and death one.

ICTC’s creation of the CyberTitan program is a forward thinking move. With one of the largest job vacancy rates of any field and while other countries create military and civilian agencies to develop this new expression of ill intent, cyber security is being ignored at our own peril, but ICTC is trying to do something about it.

We went to last year’s nationals in Fredericton and had a fantastic experience. Three of our team had never left the province or been on a plane before. The competition took a radical turn from the Cyberpatriot rounds we’d done previously, but we did our best and managed a fifth place finish being beaten only by teams who have been doing this for years through the American Cyberpatriot competition.

This year we hit the ground running in September. I’d already arranged a senior team and an all female team, but interest was so high I took the hit before I discovering my department budget had been eviscerated and paid the late fee for another team of interested junior students. Those students named themselves the Cybears and stunned everyone by topping our scores in the first two rounds of Cyberpatriot, the US run competition that CyberTitan follows in the early rounds. Cyberpatriot tiers the teams after the two opening rounds and then pitches challenges to each tier depending on their ability. Platinum teams are still in the hunt for the world wide title but lower tiers still get to compete for top of tier prizes.

Since this was our first time seeing platinum level challenges, the State Round was a rough ride for our Cybears. They didn’t manage to finish in the top 25% of platinum teams worldwide and as a result they are out of the semi-final round coming up next week. Having to tell our strongest team that they are out wasn’t easy, but it did shed light on how we got to nationals last year and how the competition is organized.

Last year we struggled at the beginning but got better and better each round. We ended up Gold tiered and in the State Round had our best run yet, which is what got us to the Canadian Nationals – CyberTitan only looks at State Round results and doesn’t take tiering into account. Platinum teams trying to climb Everest are considered on equal footing with Gold and Silver teams climbing Blue Mountain. It would be like having some students write a 4C exam and others a 4U exam and then saying the grades are equivalent.

This led to an interesting conversation with the frustrated Cybears who, had they backed off on points in the early rounds would have landed in an easier tier and had a direct run to a top score in the State Round. Do we play dumb and get an easier tier to get higher scores at the end? That’s the path we unknowingly took to the national finals last year.

In talking it through we all eventually came around to the same conclusion: we go full bore the whole time even if it means a tougher time later on in the competition. The goal should be to go Platinum and then qualify for the national semifinals and get through the hard way. This puts us in the best possible place to actually win Nationals. We could be cunning and play this to our advantage and get easier points to game our way into the Nationals, but getting to Nationals isn’t the point, improving our skills and being competitive in it is.

Next year we’re aiming to build an all-star team out of the strongest contenders in this year’s three teams. That team isn’t going to try and game its way into a National finalist spot. We’re going the long way around, or not at all.

Meanwhile, our senior team got strong in Windows security management and thanks mainly to the scores of those Windows boys ended up finishing 2nd in Canada in the Gold tier. Their Cisco networking and Linux results, while slowly improving, are way out of line with other teams around them, so they have an uphill battle to get the points they need to survive the semi-final round. Since they’re in the Gold tier the images won’t be as hard as they might be, so points should be findable. They’ve gotten better in each round, so a strong national finish is in the cards.

Our junior team is actually our girls’ team. Most of them were grade 9s last year with only two in grade 11. The contest stressed them early but they showed incredible resilience and adaptability, pulling themselves up into the Gold tier and finishing right behind the senior Cybeavers, 3rd in Canada in their tier.

Last year’s nationals was a very male centric contest. This doesn’t surprise me as finding females willing to stick with digital technologies has been an ongoing struggle at my conservative, rural school. The all-female staff of ICTC people at the Nationals noted the lack of female competitors. Getting women into technology is an ongoing battle, but more than a wildcard entry, I’d love to see the Terabytches win their way into the National finals and be the first all female team to do it. I’d then like to see them take a serious run at winning it.

Unlike last year when we built a team of graduating seniors who all left us for university, this year we only have one or two graduating seniors. We have already seen a significant step forward in terms of raising our skills and knowledge of cybersecurity (all three teams beat last year’s team’s State Round score). By being able to cultivate talent and build experience year over year, our future teams in this competition look promising indeed.

Two Gold Tier finishes in the 2019 State Round – nice to see!

The Cyberpatriot competition does a lot of things that align with Ontario’s computer technology curriculum. Joining it gives you access to Cisco’s Netacademy while also encouraging focus on what to get better at quickly. The maintenance work we do in Windows 8.1, 10 and Server aligns with Skills Ontario’s IT & Networking scope, acting as a great review for our Skills competitors. We struggle with Linux, but understanding Unix based operating systems is vital for web development, another Skills Ontario scope we’re chasing, so getting better there is no bad thing.

With so much student interest, our successes to date, and how complementary CyberTitan is with our other activities, I don’t see us dropping it any time soon, though it was mighty difficult to tell the hardest working, most focused and most successful team that they are out because they qualified too well. Spending the $400 on registration and then another couple of hundred feeding my CyberTitans while they were battling in this cyber-marathon is also hurting now that I’m looking at an eviscerated department budget.

Friday, February 1st, while everyone writing day four exams thanks to some nasty winter weather, I’ve arranged to have all my competitors’ exams bumped to Monday and we’ll be in a six hour battle to see if we can win our way to the National Finals for the second year in a row. I hope both teams show up ready to do their best work. As long as we’re running at 100% of our capacity, the results don’t really matter, though when we’re this close, it’d be nice to win!

It looks like at least two eastern division teams are ahead of us
on points, so it looks like our 2018-19 CyberTitan drive is at an end.

As a quick follow up, it looks like we’re finally out of the competition after the semi-finals. The Terabytches did great work in Windows and Cisco, but struggled in Linux and fell short in the semi-finals. Doing this round we’ve never seen before in the middle of exams made it very difficult for the everyone, but especially the juniors, to focus on preparing for semis. The Terabytches (for the first time in the contest) seemed ruffled, making mistakes they hadn’t previously when managing images and working within the competition framework. The penalties received were all good experience though and will only make for a more resilient team next year. Now we’ve seen what can go wrong, we know how to avoid it in the future.

The Cybeavers were as strong as ever in Windows, where they were consistently near or at the top of the country. They struggled in Linux but came in at about the State Round average number of points in that category, so held their own. The Cisco networking once again stumped them, causing us to lose places and ultimately fall short or at least two other eastern division teams, which means we’re probably finished.

Creating senior teams that are strong across all sectors of the competition (Windows OS and Linux OS security management and Cisco networking) is going to be the goal for next year, and looking at our two junior teams, we’re spoiled for choice. Up until last year I was still getting bumped into teaching English and wasn’t even a full time ICT teacher. Computer science at our school is only a couple of sections and digital technologies in general struggle to reach a sustainable level in our building. That our peripheral program in our rural school is able to produce results like we do is very satisfying and shows my students what they can do if they work together and apply themselves. We’ll keep doing that, one way or another, even if it means winning the hard way. Next year we’ll be doing it with our first ever veteran teams.

If you’re trying to drum up interest in ICT in your school, this is a good way to do it!

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More Than A Book

I’ve got a nine year old son who is a big fan of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series on Nickelodeon. It’s a huge improvement over his Spongebob period and a very intelligently written series. I am guilty of watching it over his shoulder from time to time.

This Splinter was once a man who grew up in a family clan of ninjas who benefited from a lifetime of rich, traditional learning. The action movie one read a book.

In the cartoon Splinter, the turtles’ surrogate father and sensei, is the descendent of a ninja clan. He had been trained as a martial artist his entire life. When he was mutated into a rat, he used this deep mastery to train the turtles. Splinter is a master who is both funny, approachable and very strict. His relationship with the turtles is deep and nuanced.

Because of this fixation with TMNT I found myself sitting in a movie theatre with my son watching Michael Bay’s ‘live’ action movie this summer. The Splinter in the film is actually a rat. When he got mutated (into a bigger rat) he found a book on ninjitsu and trained the turtles. That the kids watching this film think that this is a viable avenue into mastering martial arts points to a lot of things wrong with the world today. A lot of that thinking is driven by the ease of access to information championed by digital technology. But information isn’t knowledge and it certainly isn’t mastery.

***

I like the concept, it’s empowering, but even the best self
directed learning is going to pale in comparison to what
you’ll develop in a rich social context.

Computers have been a hobby for me since I was ten. I did a lot of learning on my own out of books and magazines, but the process of taking courses and certifications to become a qualified technician pushed me well out of my comfort zone and forced me to become familiar with aspects of computers that I otherwise would have stayed away from because I find them difficult. Working with experts also let me see how they fill in the massive spaces between information. How we manifest knowledge is more important than the knowledge itself.

I’ve always been interested in writing and philosophy, but taking degrees that oversaw skills development and demanded ongoing demonstration of my improvement with a variety of experts created something that no number of books could.

Knowledge is the start of the process, not the end.

The idea of mastery learning implies that a master passes it on to you. My professors and mentors did a lot more for me than simply pass on information, they also showed me how it might manifest itself. Modelling is a mighty powerful means of passing on knowledge, and you get none of it out of text.

If someone told me that I could get the same thing my degree gave me out of a book I’d call them a fool, though many people call higher education a waste of time purely on those grounds. Information is accessible and cheap, so teach yourself! You’ll only be as effective as your teacher, but hey, it’s inexpensive. This feeds modern value theory that devalues human capital in favour of machine capital, in this case championing information over experience.

Mastery learning requires something more than a book. I’m not surprised that the team of writers for that movie didn’t get that though, looking at the quality of their script.

It’s a trap! But watch Nickelodeon’s TV series, it’s brilliant!

Archive: 1999: Bloodsport, the gore of experience (points)

Piles of corpses and rivers of blood…

I’m currently swinging my way through Never Winter Nights and last night, after clearing out a room of guards, I paused for a moment. Bodies lay scattered around me and the blood was thick on the floor. In my character’s head came the thought, “I just murdered eight men.”

The bodies just fade away in NWN, it’s all very antiseptic and clean (and I imagine it makes life easier for the graphics card). Bodies don’t really fade away though do they? In a more realistic world guards and investigators would be swarming around that house shortly after the guards on shift change found their slaughtered companions. People who saw me enter and leave with heavy pockets would have been questioned, the bodies would not have disappeared, my life would have been forever changed by that action.

I think about the mountains of corpses I’ve made in this game (which I’m enjoying otherwise – it is quite beautifully rendered), and I’m only on Chapter 2! This isn’t slagging against NWN specifically, all computer based role playing games do this. I think they do it because the people who design and make the games aren’t role-players, they’re programmers and marketing types; people who think linearly and modularly. I know it’s easy for game makers to make experience = killing because it’s mechanical, and simple and it satisfies an innate human need for violence, but if graphics are getting as good as they are (almost movie quality at times), then perhaps this lazy approach to game design should finally be put aside. I don’t think it does anyone any good to control a mass murderer, especially when this usually happens for the greater good in the context of the game.

Why can’t my opponents see that I can easily kill them and surrender? Why couldn’t I earn experience by taking it away from people I subdue (that even makes sense in a balance of nature sort of way). Imagine a young fighter who gains experience and loses it too when he is subdued by a powerful foe. If he ever got knocked back down to zero experience I’m sure he’d be rethinking his career choice. It would also help in a game situation where developers wouldn’t have to worry about linear design so much. With lethality as a rare occurrence, but being subdued having an immediate effect on experience, I imagine most characters would be more careful especially if this system also took away or greatly minimized the ‘save game’ crutch. I take many more risks knowing that I’m 10 seconds of hard drive access away from trying it again. Continuity would help players develop real connection to their characters instead of using them as tools to attack a linear plot.

Why does it have to be about gallons of blood and piles of corpses? … and why does violence have to be mechanical?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a hockey player, a kendo practicioner and I’ve had a go at half a dozen martial arts; violence isn’t a stranger to me, but maybe that’s why I’ve got respect for it, because I’m familiar with it.

I enjoy a good fight more than most people, but what’s happening in NWN (and every other computer RPG I’ve played) is not a good fight, it’s a dumbed down fight against dimensionless opponents. Do you know how hard it is to find an opponent who won’t cut and run at the first injury? 99% of opponents are not commited to the fight, they are commited to their own well being (as they should be). I think it’s safe to say that the vast majority of people that you meet will do anything to avoid a physical confrontation and the most dangerous opponents are those who willingly consider a physical confrontation but avoid it if circumstances aren’t to their liking. In a more lawless society that might mean they’ll try and get you later when you’re busy, asleep or otherwise indisposed. That would only enrich the experience more. Having repeat encounters with a character who you first think is a coward and later learn is a vendeta ridden lunatic bent on revenge at all costs might make you reconsider being a jackass in the first place. People aren’t always what they appear at first blush; it’s part of their charm.

Have you ever been in a fist fight? Can you remember the adrenaline? That was only a fist fight! Can you imagine what it would feel like with a real sword in your hand and an opponent facing you with a lethal weapon? Wouldn’t you think twice about it if the person/monster you were facing had a hungry gleam in their eye? If you submit early perhaps you can escape intact, without losing any equipment and with a minimal experience point loss. If you mouth off and get in over your head, your teacher will certainly take more of your valuables as well as skim off more experience. You’d have to gamble to rise quickly. If you’re third level and you want to face off against a fifth level character you will probably lose, but if you win by luck or skill you would take more experience suddenly and find yourself levelling up. Wouldn’t they think twice if they saw that same look in your eye?

I’d like my role-playing battles to approach the intensity (are rarity) of the real thing. It should never be mechanical, it should never be done without thought and it should almost never end in a mortal wound. Having to submit and then being sold into slavery would greatly enrich a character’s background and provide a solid source of motivation to get better with that damn sword.

There are so many ways that a role playing world can become encompassing, but the game makers don’t seem to want to take that step. If it sells as it is why tamper with it I guess. Well here’s another angle: build it and they will come. If a designer out there can come up with a role playing game that incorporates a respect for violence and concentrates on developing a stronger tie between player and character, I’ll be the first to sign up.

Just some thoughts while standing ankle deep in the blood of guards who were just doing their jobs.

Winter Maintenance: Triumph Tiger 955i Engine Guard Install and plasma cutting!

How cold has the polar vortex been? So f#*%ing cold! Our garage is attached to the house and we’re in and out of it quite often, so it benefits from a lot of residual heat. Even with this insulated garage with heating pipes in the attic and a lot of sympathetic heat from the attached house, the Tiger was a solid block of ice (pic on right shows it thawing) when I went in to attach mine Hepco & Becker motorschutzbügel (engine guard) in schwarz (black). I ended up giving up on the -36°C degree Saturday and went back when it was only -17°on Sunday.

I’ve been looking for ways to protect the Tiger as I aim for more off-tarmac activities with it, and an engine guard seemed like a good idea. Finding such an engine guard for a European (at least until Brexit) bike that’s sixteen years out of date isn’t easy, but I came across the German manufacturer Hepco & Becker and then followed links to their American distributor, Motomachines, who happened to have just what I needed in stock and have no problems shipping to Canada. They’re also really quick to respond if you have any questions and give you quick, friendly, concise communication, I’ll use them again.

It was about a week to get here through US and Canadian federal mail services and cost me another thirty bucks at the door in border fees, so all in I was at about $350US to get the thing into my hands. It arrived well packaged and in new condition. There was some surface rust on the threads into the pipes, but it cleaned up easily with WD40.

Some German engineering for my British Bike, except Triumph was founded by a German immigrant, so it’s kinda German already! Bet that makes Brexiteers angry.

After not being able to feel my hands anymore despite propane heaters blaring away in the corner on Saturday, I finished the job on Sunday. Holding the nuts on the back while securing the bolts is a bit fussy (these guards attach right to the engine frame mounts), and swearing increased trying to do it on a frozen bike, but I eventually got them sorted.

The guards are very sturdy and the welds on them are a thing of beauty. They’re low profile things that should protect the tank in case of a spill. The finish on them is excellent and looks to be very long wearing. With a couple of places to kick my feet up onto, they might help me stretch out my legs on a long ride too. I’m tempted to throw some fold up highway pegs on them, but this aggravates the adventure bike image police.

I’m still some weeks (months, who am I kidding, though if I can’t be optimistic in February I start to go bonkers) away from having a chance to ride with them, but they look good on the bike, got here pretty quickly and with a lot of quick and clear communication from Motomachines. If you’re looking for an engine guard for an older Tiger (or anything else, they have a big selection), I’d suggest heading over to their site and then get in touch with them on email, you’ll hear back quickly from responsive customer service.

In completely different news, thanks to all of this lousy weather we’ve had a number of no-bus days at school which gave me a chance to ask our metal shop teacher to exercise his plasma cutter on my behalf. I gave him a vector image of the Concours tail piece I wanted cut and the machine ripped through the aluminum I got for the job in about five seconds, cutting a perfect outline of the cardboard piece I’d wrapped around the tail section before unfolding. This strange shape lines up with the frame bolts on back end of the bike and covers all the wiring and ugly bits in the most minimal way possible. I’m going to form it over a wood buck and then paint it to match the tank. That should take care of the back end of the Concours ZG1K custom project.

Now I need to get the carbs balanced and tuned and it should be good to go, which I intend to do as soon as the roads are clear… in, like, ten years.

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Winter Stable Dreams

It’s snowing so thick you can’t see the road. I’m at the end of a semester and in full day-dreaming mode. If I were out bike shopping this week, this is what I’d be aiming to bring back:

The naked: I’m still smitten with the Kawasaki Z1000. An orange one, with a tail tidy to get rid of the only ugly part of this stunning machine (the ugly plastic plate hanger off the back). Some aero crash protectors and I’d be ready to track day with it as well.

The sporty road bike: the jewel-like Honda VFR800 still plucks a heart string. It’s the descendant of one of my first motorbike crushes and would make for a mighty entertaining, sport focused road bike that could still swallow miles if needed. It looks spectacular in white, but it also needs a tail tidy!

The all terrain bike is a tricky piece of work. The temptation is just to go all in on a big adventure bike, but the main purpose for one of those is as a road riding mile-muncher. My off road able bike needs to work on the road and keep up with traffic (something my current 250cc Kawasaki isn’t great at), but its focus should be off tarmac (unlike a big, heavy adventure bike).

A light-weight scrambler would be a the preferred choice aesthetically. Building out my own custom from an existing, off-road focused bike would offer both the scrambler vibe while using light-weight, off-road ready tech.

The Suzuki DR-Z400S makes for a great base. At 144 kilos (317lbs) it’s almost half the weight of BMW’s big queen of adventure bikes, and made by a manufacturer that makes bikes with one quarter the number of manufacturing mistakes. I don’t feel reckless in the decision.

Is a Scrambler DR-Z400S possible? I wouldn’t be the first to try. The DR-Z400SM is a street version of the off-roader, so Suzuki has already done a less off-road focused version. It’s an adaptable bike.

Too bad no one makes a sub 500cc off road focused, light weight Scrambler (instead they market stylish new ones or sell recycled history). Anything north of 200kgs (441lbs) might be surprisingly capable off road, but it’ll still be a misery to pickup and all that weight means you’re going to be breaking suspension all the time.

Suzuki already has the platform on which to build a perfect modern scrambler. C’mon, you’re almost there!

Some people want a $30k bike that can do one thing, I’d happily spend that money on a Kawasaki, Honda and Suzuki that can do just about everything.

Like a Fish in Water

1) Setup Anxiety

We just finished the final round of this year’s Cyberpatriot / CyberTitan Canadian Student Cybersecurity Competition. To say this year has been a challenge would be a gross understatement. We lost half our teams immediately thanks to COVID restrictions. The cancelled teams were both the junior teams who have missed a vital year of apprenticing with the seniors as we prepare for competition. Thanks to this break in our process we’ll be seeing a reduction in the skills we’ve systemically developed over the past three years.

With our two senior teams we limped through two rounds of the competition mask socially distanced to mask (because no one is face to face anymore) in our nerd lab at school.

The first round was shaky, especially on our senior co-ed team where our most experienced, senior students didn’t show up mentally on competition day. Some careful coaching and focusing got them on track for round two where both teams scored more like they’re able.

We just completed the final round of competition last Friday, and (because things weren’t already hard enough) this time it was fully remote thanks to Ontario’s systemic mishandling of COVID19. This had me up nights worrying about connectivity and tech at home for eleven competitors on two teams in eleven different home locations. Our student built DIY lab means I can take care of the complex setup needed to do Cyberpatriot and let the students focus on the material itself, but not this time.

The competition uses virtual images (computers simulated inside a window) that give students hands on experience with infected and compromised computers. When you open a virtual image and start working on it a timer starts and you’ve got six straight hours to maximize points by fixing the image. If one of your images doesn’t open or a student is having technical issues, you’re still on the clock and losing time. Doing IT support in a live environment with harsh consequences like that is very stressful, which is why I’d been anxious.

I delivered technology to students at home and did everything I could to ensure that they had what they needed. I said repeatedly, “don’t talk about what you’re going to do, rehearse it!” This was finally heard (after repeating it several times – teens don’t like to practice things) and students didn’t just think they were ready for Friday, they knew.

They sent me photos of their home setups, most of which were home made/DIY computers that we either made in our lab at school or they built at home using the skills they learned at school. That produced a level of satisfaction I hadn’t considered; this final round students were competing on technology they built themselves that they’d also done all the software setup on so they could then demonstrate advanced digital skills well beyond what Ontario’s atrophied digital skills curriculum asks.

Put another way, I’ve been presenting on Cyberpatriot/CyberTitan for several years and a number of teachers have told me they’d do it but the technical setup is too complicated. It wasn’t for the grade 10s, 11s and 12s at home last week. Maybe it’s time to integrate digital fluency into Ontario’s Teacher’s Colleges if we’re expecting every teacher in the province to be proficient in the medium.

2. Swimming with the Digital Fishes

I’ve talked about the power of authorship in understanding and developing a meaningful pedagogy around technology use many times, but this time we took things to a place where few dare to tread. As we prepared for this seemingly insurmountable challenge I didn’t tighten things into rote demands for compliance, I gave these students agency, and doing so gave me a peak into a world few teachers ever get to see.

Thanks to Heidi Siwak’s suggestion, I watched My Octopus Teacher last week. What I saw on Friday in competition is much like what Craig Foster saw when getting to know his octopus: a wild animal being brilliant in its native habitat.

When you see students operating in the restrictive, overly prescribed walled garden of your corporately provided educational technology you’re seeing (in the ones that are actually digitally fluent because most aren’t) a wild animal in a restrictive, unfamiliar and domesticated environment. This produces a kind of reticence in the digitally fluent student that means you’re not seeing them as they really are when they operate in digital spaces. Even teachers with digitally literate students don’t often get to see this natural behaviour, which is expressive, efficient and astonishingly rich.

One of the ways we came to terms with managing the many challenges of trying to compete in a technically challenging international cybersecurity competition while stuck at home in a lockdown was by letting the students self-select the tools they would need to do the job. This started with making sure they were on technology that gave them the administrative privileges they needed to move freely. Nothing we’ve ever been handed at school was that. The other side of the equation is selecting the software we needed to be able to communicate quickly, privately and efficiently.

The students selected Discord as their communications medium of choice. I’ve had a passing acquaintance with this software but hadn’t been on it recently. One of my jobs as Cyberpatriot Coach is to proctor the teams and ensure compliance with the rules; I’m judge as well as coach. Cyberpatriot’s minimum requirements for fully remote competition only asked for a single check in with competitors but considering the circumstances (worldwide health emergency, remember?) I thought a bit more contact was in order.

The teams each set up private Discord chats focused on various areas of the competition. They couldn’t see each other, but I could quickly move between both groups and connect to live voice and video chats as well as screen sharing. This was vital in our approach to the competition as we encourage and depend on collaborative team interaction when problem solving. Other teams may like to do the loner hacker in a room by themselves, but we’ve never approached it that way.

One of the reasons for this is that I’m trying to raise digital skills in cybersecurity in a place where we started with nothing. To do that senior students work with the juniors when we’re practicing for competition (teams are physically and virtually contained during competition rounds). Collaboration isn’t just how we compete, it’s also how we learn the material.

Discord’s fluid and efficient communications environment not only allowed me to proctor the competition by easily moving between teams, it also let the teams design their own internal communications structures and then leverage them with astonishing effectiveness. Because they are all fluent in the medium their use of it is emotive and staggeringly fast.

While we were waiting for the email from CPOC to start round three (it never arrived, I had to contact Maryland directly to get access – my best guess is it got blocked by my work email – sigh), I watched memes appear and morph in the group chat. This was happening beneath continuous voice chats and screen shares.

Once competition began I was moving between the specialists on each team and then between the teams. I would drop into an ongoing discussion about how to solve a problem and immediately get a, ‘hey, King’ from the people in the chat. Discord has a little chime that goes off when you join a chat and the students are keyed to it. There is a misconception that teens aren’t engaged online but it’s because of how we situate them in educational technology, not because they are incapable of rich, interactive online engagement.

Over the course of the six hour competition I was flitting between discussions, but Discord doesn’t just make those discussions fluid and natural, it also lets you know what’s going on in them. At one point three students were in the senior team’s Linux chat and our two operators were both sharing their screens so that all three people could see them. This is precisely the kind of collaboration I feared we’d lose in a fully remote environment, but Discord made it possible for us to do what we normally do in a very difficult situation.

What made this potential disaster a success was DIY technology at home on self-selected communications platforms. We started and ended the day in a Google Meet on our board system and it managed to be both laggy and disengaging after Discord. Students never turned on webcams in Discord but because they could quickly and easily screenshare and emote in written chat while verbally communicating, they created an immersive and powerful online communications experience. On our stilted video chat at the end of the day I was left wondering why video chats are seen as the future. Like telephone calls, they’re the fixation of a generation, but not the future. If we weren’t spending all our time pressing students faces into their webcams on that limited video platform we’d be able to see how they actually swim in their digital sea and meet them there instead.

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Procedural Learning

From Dusty World in December of 2014:

You can learn anywhere, but some places are better than others

We had one of our few professional development days last week (this one on metacognition) and I had a moment of insight in spite of the circumstances.

For the better part of three hours we were sitting on too-small benches designed for children in a large, drafty, echo-y cafeteria listening to booming, static-y microphones and online videos. It was a near perfect storm of poor environmental factors around learning for me. I’m not a good auditory learner at the best of times, when barriers to listening are in place I quickly fall off the engagement wagon, though I try to hang on.

Why was our professional development done here? Because we could fit two schools worth of teachers into that space. When teachers don’t consider basic pedagogical factors in teaching each other, it makes me wonder what happens in their classrooms (also designed to fit as many bodies as possible).

What would a learning space designed for learning (rather than body count) look like? Tech could mitigate the need for massive spaces to warehouse lots of bodies. We’ve build this complex and expensive communications infrastructure between schools, but we still expect teachers to burn fossil fuels and gather physically for material that could have more efficiently and effectively been delivered through interactive video and shared notes. If the advanced life-long learners aren’t going to test these possibilities, who will?

It was in this environment, rather ironically, that Jenny Donohoo, one of the presenters, clarified procedural learning for me. She did it in the context of metacognition, but it allowed me to more accurately understand why I fell out of subjects in high school that I otherwise had a great deal of interest in.

I’d initially entered physics wanting to get into astronomy, but instead of science being a tool with which to explore the universe, I discovered that it (at least in high school in the 1980s) was a procedural course designed to chase anyone who didn’t like repetition for the sake of it out. I greatly enjoyed computers too, but the computer science teacher approached the subject with the same procedural bent, as did most of my math teachers. I’d like to think that things have changed since I was taking those classes, but the amount of photocopies still pouring out of those departments suggests otherwise.

I’d often find myself in a math or science class doing procedural work with no idea why. I’m not averse to procedural work, in fact, I have a great deal of respect for it. You don’t spend hundreds of hours power skating with a psychotic Russian figure skating instructor in full goalie’s equipment if you don’t appreciate what drilling can do for you, but I never suffered through that for the sake of suffering through that, I did it to become a better hockey goalie.

You don’t have to look far for inspirational sports quotes.
Many encourage practice, but the goal is never practice itself.

When students are asked to do procedural work (ie: getting drilled in skills so they become second nature), the reason why they are being asked to do this difficult, repetitive thing had better be crystal clear or you’re going to run into engagement problems. I’ll suffer through power skating, or exhausting 6am practices in a frozen arena if I know it’ll give me a better chance at peak performance in my next game. I’ll get up early and ride a motorbike until my legs are jello if I know it will lead me to a moment of bliss on two wheels. I won’t do these difficult things without a reason. No one has ever described dedication as doing something for no clear reason (that would be futility).

When I look back on my experiences in mathematics, science and computer science I see teachers who want to drill students without telling them why. They want stringent discipline without a goal. Unless you’re some sort of masochist or really enjoy being told what to do, procedural learning for the sake of it is likely to cause a great deal of friction with your learners; it chased me right out of those subjects.

Another thing Donohoo said in that PD was, “the most useful thing you can do for your students is find ways to communicate what is going on in your mind when you are practising your discipline.” Maybe some teachers simply enjoy solving problems and couldn’t give a care that there isn’t a greater goal in mind, but that alienates a lot of students. If your expertise allows you to do something useful, articulating that to your students is a valuable way to engage them in your discipline.

I’ve tackled this from an individual teacher perspective, but procedural learning leaks into the classroom in other ways. The most obvious example is the data gathering process of standardized testing. You can take any complex skill like literacy or numeracy and by applying standardized testing to it, reduce learning to procedure. Doing this can often result in better standardized testing scores! No one loves procedure more than statistics gatherers. I’m speculating, but I bet there is a high correlation between those teachers with encyclopedic, complex marks books and procedural approaches to learning.

They are usually the ones wringing their hands over engagement and classroom management.

The idea that education is something we do to students fits well with this procedural approach. Bells ring, ten year old photocopies are handed out, teachers repeat what they’ve said before word for word, and we continue the production line. Sometimes I’m amazed that anyone learns anything in a school.

Follow Opportunities, Not Dreams

I’m up early chasing through UK documents on their worrying lack of digital skills. A typical UK worker falls behind many other country’s workers in basic IT skills, and I suspect the same is true of many Western countries. When the digital economy is one of the few bright spots, Western students seem to be turning away from it (unless it’s video game design, everyone wants to be a video game designer – as long as it means playing video games and not actually learning how to code).

We can’t fill jobs in computer related fields, but less and less students are considering the pathway.

One of the prime movers in this shift away from viable employment follows an idea on bad advice I saw from a tech teacher at our school:

“Just because you’re passionate about something doesn’t mean you won’t suck at it.”

As a general rule, parents and students are guided in school to do what makes them happy. We fill up courses playing hockey, taking photos and give out credits for things kids are doing at home anyway. It makes for shiny, happy, low stressed students and a great graduation rate, but none of it is really preparing students for the workplace.

We are frequently updated with the number of students from our school who have been accepted to university (only university, the rest don’t matter). We never see any stats on how many of them finish the degrees they were accepted for. I suspect that stat isn’t very flattering. An even less flattering stat would be an income check at the age of thirty. I wonder what the employment prospects for those university bound students are. What is their quality of life trying to pay off debts larger than they’ve ever been in history? Yet that’s where all our ‘good’ students are directed.

I dropped out of high school and became a millwright because I had smart hands and the apprenticeship fell into my lap. When I didn’t feel like that was intellectually stressful enough I tackled university and then chased the opportunities that arose from it. I didn’t become a teacher because it was some kind of magical calling, I became a teacher because I was chasing opportunities.

Much of the advice students get in school are from life-long academics. People who went to school, attended university, and then immediately became employed for life at school again (sometimes the same school they graduated from!) These people with their carefully proscribed lives don’t experience the world the way the rest of us do. When I see them telling students to ‘do what makes you happy’ and ‘follow your dreams!’, I cringe.

My son has recently been wondering about getting a job so he can manage his own money, he’s eleven. I told him, ‘do you know why they call it work?’ He looked at me for a moment and then said, ‘because it isn’t for fun?’ Out of the mouths of babes. I only wish school guidance would realize that basic truth.

You can derive a great deal of satisfaction out of your work without it being some kind of romantic calling. Few people live the lives of celebrities, playing a game or making art and wallowing in the money derived from it. Insinuating that kids could be that person is dishonest at worst and deceiving at best, but how would you know if you’ve never had to struggle for work? We can all find satisfying and challenging work if we push ourselves and chase opportunity. Train yourself to better chase opportunity and you’ll find your circumstances will continue to change and improve. One day you might find yourself in a well paid, challenging profession that you’d never have predicted for yourself.

Or, you know, maybe making a living…

Quinn Norton gives the blather some context. Hobbies are for fun, your career
is probably not your hobby, and that’s fine, it’s how the world works.

Absurdities

I came across this article by Yuval Noah Harari called “Are we living in a post-truth era? Yes, but that’s because we’re a post-truth species.” It’s not often that I’m rocked by something that I read, but this did that. He has a particular line in it that explains the dissonance I feel with the world at the moment:

“…truth has never been high on the agenda of Homo sapiens. If you stick to unalloyed reality, few people will follow you. False stories have an intrinsic advantage over the truth when it comes to uniting people. If you want to gauge group loyalty, requiring people to believe an absurdity is a far better test than asking them to believe the truth. “

This happens with people so often that it’s one of the main reasons I find them so taxing. Supporting other people’s fictions isn’t something that comes naturally to me. I understand the social advantage of forcing compliance to untruths in order to establish loyalty between people, I’m just terrible at it.

In the last post talking about how to move forward in the morass of misinformation and negativity surrounding us, I mentioned that if I wanted to give up my idealism I’d go into management. Management is one of those jobs that demands a facility for moving in post-truth ways.

A few years ago we had a poorly planned grade 8 day happen where an unexpected influx of students from the Catholic system resulted in over fifty children in one of the groups moving around the school seeing what’s on offer. After half a dozen groups of 25 or so students accompanied by their teacher came through our program, this horde of fifty plus unaccompanied by an adult (because the second school system in Ontario won’t acknowledge the public one) burst into my shop and proceeded to do hundreds of dollars in damage before leaving.

I was livid. I emailed admin and guidance and said (truthfully) that this was a dangerous situation that never should have been allowed to happen. This upset our new head of guidance who was a good friend of our new principal. His solution was to walk up to my room (very angry that I’d made his friend cry) and demand that I apologize for saying that this dangerous situation was dangerous. I was teaching a class at the time but he wouldn’t let me leave the hallway he’d hauled me out into until I’d apologised. It was a brutally honest moment of human hierarchical interaction where compliance to a lie was demanded and the usual niceties that we cloak our fictions in were swept aside.

More recently, as we switched to fully remote learning again following the mid-winter break, we were told “no one saw this coming” by admin. Other than every doctor and epidemiologist in the province? Other than anyone who had ready a credible news story in the past week? How big a crane do I need to suspend my disbelief? The only people who ‘didn’t see this coming’ were the politicians who caused it, and evidently education system managers who are so focused on making the wishes of what is perhaps the most malignant minister of education in Ontario’s history a reality that they’ve lost sight of reality.

One of the reasons I like working with machines is because they are honest in a way that human beings seem to find nearly impossible. Reality continues to exist beyond the fictions people dress themselves in and will always ultimately win. I find aligning myself with that reality is an opportunity for enlightenment in a way that the socially lubricating, self-serving human fictions are not.

Shakespeare has Hamlet tell Horatio, “There are more things in heaven and earth,
Horatio,Than are dreamt of in your philosophy”, and that’s a good touchstone. Reality is indeed more vast and complex than the lies we wrap each other up in. I only wish more people would get as excited about the truth of the world as they do about the self-serving fictions we demand of each other.

In the midst of this chaos a wise colleague suggested the Netflix film, My Octopus Teacher, which tells the story of a man miserably lost in the fictions we all chose to live in finding his way back to reality. It’s a beautiful story, and one we find hard to hold onto when we’re in the churn of Ontario COVID mis-management.

Rationalism will never have the following that reductionist demagogues find because the one is hard work while the other is slight-of-hand salesmanship, though the sleazy salesmen don’t always get it their way. Recent North American political change suggests that even the most persuasive demagogues get chased out of office when reality makes its presence felt. Our political system isn’t perfect, but it does tend to self correct. After years of abuse in Ontario public services and a year’s worth of fumbling the largest public health crisis in human history, that self correction sure feels a long time coming.

In the past week I’ve read articles about how doctors in Ontario & Quebec are working out protocols to decide who lives and who dies when they run out of capacity to treat pandemic patients. On the same day an article came up talking about how flights are up to sunny destinations because many people are giving up on doing right by others and just want to satisfy themselves, consequences be damned until they need medical help and there are no beds available then they will be the ones crying loudest. All while Ontario is experiencing a second wave of the pandemic that makes the first look like a hiccup.

So, we’re running out of hospital capacity to treat severe cases, testing has fallen away most likely as a way to make it look like the numbers are coming down. The politicians who have mismanaged this crisis are looking for ways to spin fictions in their favour. I drove in to school the other day and the line for testing at our local centre stretched around the hospital. People want to get tested but the powers that be are more interested in spinning self-serving fictions.

Meanwhile, at the peak of the worst pandemic in modern history and with the emergence of a new even more transmittable variant of COVID, what are we doing in Ontario education? We’re preparing to go back to face to face classes next Monday. Then we too will get to play the ‘who-gets-treatment’ game with other front line workers while interacting with and giving the highest transmitting age groups a chance to drive another spike. That’s why I’m awake at three in the morning wondering at the hypocrisy of human beings.

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