Page 106 – Mechanical Sympathy

North American International Motorcycle Show

Hey NAIMS, you coulda had my wife there… a master’s degree,
great job, but you’re not appealing to her demographic…

My son and I went down on Friday morning in -25°C temperatures for our first ever motorcycle show at the International Centre in Mississauga. My wife didn’t come because the advertising on the website (which also had a complete lack of social media) put her off. I suspect you’ll get a better class of customer with more in their pocket if you appeal to educated women interested in the sport. I’m not sure who you cater to with the twinkies, but I suspect they aren’t great customers. You’d also bring in many more younger riders (I think the average age at the show was about 50) if you embraced social media.

Old white guys & twinkies, it’s a weird,
backwards, and kinda creepy
dynamic, time to change it up

Since it was my first time at a show like this I was a bit worried that I was bringing my son to a de-tuned strip club, but I was pleasantly surprised. There were a few other families there and the crowd represented a typical Canadian cross section. With the bike clubs on hand, the variety of bikes on show and the various supporting retailers, this wasn’t a biker bar scene at all – it’s a shame that the advertising doesn’t show this for what it is.

There were little herds of Harley aficionados trying too hard in their leathers and badges, but they were a minority. On our way in from the parking lot an older fellow we were walking in with gave us a discount coupon, and the people in the show were encouraging, accessible and not at all snobby (which is nice when you’re a n00b).

We spent the better part of four hours walking around and missed an entire hall. The amount of material was prolific, from the gear to the bikes themselves. Two brands really stood out for me and the others were generally a disappointment.

You’d normally be hard pressed to get me interested in a
Harley, but they make it easy to like them, and what a
good looking bike!

I’m the furthest thing from a Harley Fan, but Harley Davidson Canada put on a great show. They took a good chunk of floor space, had a lot of room to try out bikes and were more than willing to focus on developing a relationship with their customers rather than leaving it to dealers who are only interested in moving units.

Having dealers take care of your brand loyalty is like have the tigers at the zoo do the job of the zookeepers. If they can drum up any customer relationship building at all they’re only pretending, all they really want to do is feed themselves a sale.

I ended up throwing a leg over a bunch of Harleys and I’m much more curious now than I was before, well done HD.

Shows like NAIMS are an ideal opportunity for manufacturers to develop a relationship with their customers, and I was surprised that so few did. I want to be a Triumph fan, I’m from the UK, I love their bikes from a design point of view, but they were only there through a local dealer who parked the bikes so close together that it was impossible to sit on many of them (which was no doubt the idea). The special ‘deal’ on Triumph t-shirts had them on ‘sale’ for $60… for a t-shirt. Between the inaccessible bikes, the over-priced merch and the dealers rolling their eyes whenever your kid wants to try and sit on a bike, we didn’t spend much time in Triumph land.

After the show I’m reconsidering how and why I might become attached to a specific make, or even whether I should (though motorcycling seems particularly intense in its tribal approach to brand).

Beautiful naked bike, the Z1000… it’s got me
thinking…

Another manufacturer who didn’t take my loyalty for granted was Kawasaki. My first bike was supposed to be a Honda or a Suzuki and it ended up being a Ninja. It’s been a great first bike and the KLR has long been on my mind as an alternate/multi-purpose bike (though the insurance chat later is making that unlikely). Kawasaki has been good to me so far, and the show only made me more of a fan.

Like Harley, Kawasaki showed up instead of only being there through dealers. The reps they had on hand were friendly, helpful and approachable. The bikes were displayed in a way that encouraged you to try them out, and Kawi also brought the bling (which I immediately put up in the garage).

Kawasaki was never on my bike lust list when I was younger (I was all about Interceptors and Gixers), but as an adult buyer they have my attention. Well done Kawasaki!

The rest of the bike show was a whirlwind of gear and meet and greets. Two Wheel Motorsport was there, and I had a quick chat with my motorcycle course instructor (while getting a great deal on a Bell Helmet for my son – I’m all about Bell helmets since seeing Rush).

I had a chat with Riders Plus Insurance. They insured me in my first year of riding and were helpful and efficient. This time round I was curious about how insuring multiple bikes work. They told me that buying a second bike means you’re doubling your insurance payments. This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me as I can only ride one bike at a time. I expected something like you’re insured at the rate of whatever the highest cost bike is plus 10% for the paperwork on the other bike. What I was told was that you get a 10% discount on your second bike and pay another full set of insurance on it… which makes owning multiple bikes not really financially viable, so that dream goes down the toilet.

I was looking for Motorcycle Mojo as we wandered about since I’ve been emailing with the publisher, but couldn’t find them! This show really is huge. But I did find The Widow’s Sons. After a round of secret handshakes I got some contact information. A number of guys in my lodge have bikes but don’t ride with others. I’m wondering if I can start a local chapter, or perhaps join the Grand River Chapter.

My son and I both really enjoyed the show. It let us throw our legs over a lot of bikes and talk with a wide variety of people in the sport. It was a wonderful thing to get excited about riding again even as the temperature outside turned truly arctic. Kawasaki & Harley both get nods as my favourite manufacturers of the show. Their stand up showing has me questioning brand loyalty based on some weird sense of belonging rather than a manufacturer’s interest in genuinely developing a relationship with their customer. As a new rider I’m looking to be wooed. Harley & Kawi both did some quality wooing.

My suggestion? Get yourself out to the North American Motorcycle Show and bring your family along, they’ll have a great time and maybe even get a sense of why you love riding like you do.

I hope the show will reconsider the marketing angle and get away from the twinkie/biker thing on the website and embrace social media next year. If they do, maybe I can convince my wife to come along with us.

Some pictures from the show.

The Wolverine & Corporate Product Placement

Filmed In Japan, Manufactured in Italy

I just saw The Wolverine and enjoyed it. I lived in Japan for a couple of years and have a soft spot for it. The idea of Logan in Japan was cool and I was looking forward to seeing what local vehicular colour they put into it (Japan does a lot of domestic one-offs that you don’t see anywhere else).

Unfortunately I’d forgotten that Marvel is in bed with Volkswagen Group. Imagine my disappointment when everyone in Japan is driving Audis or riding Ducatis (Ducati is owned by VW Group). To top it off most of it was filmed in Australia and made to look like Japan. If you’re looking for a film that shows you Japan, this ain’t it.

So while Logan and his sidekick are on Ducatis (in Japan, sort of), I wonder what the local manufacturers are thinking. Since the whole advertising/placement thing is sorted out by lawyers, I imagine that Honda, Kawasaki, Suzuki and Yamaha had no say in it anyway. Isn’t it a shame that brilliant local engineering like that can be made to not exist in a film? Can you imagine if they did a film in America and everyone was riding Ducatis with not a Harley in sight? It would seem unrealistic. If film makers are more interested in milking advertisers for product placement than they are in making a film seem properly placed, it bodes poorly for the future of film.

I’d read an online discussion about the best summer riding gear and someone suggested looking at what Boorman & McGregor wore on Long Way Down. It was immediately suggested that this wasn’t the best kit but merely the one that sponsored them. Like Ducatis in Japan, media is more about advertising than fact. With that in mind, can you trust anything you see on film about motorbikes or even the kit being used?

Ninjas! On motorbikes!

One scene that was motorbike crazy was Logan taking on a squad (clutch? herd?) of ninjas on motor-cross bikes. I couldn’t see what they were (it was dark, there were ninjas everywhere), but it made for some frantic fight scenes, especially when one of the ninjas did a stoppie and hit Logan in the face with the back wheel.

I enjoyed The Wolverine, it was a good action flick, but it would be nice if they made more of an effort to create a genuine vehicular experience in the film instead of chasing hidden advertising revenue.

Motorbike Books

I just finished Melissa Holbrook-Pierson’s The Perfect Vehicle. She has a wonderful writing voice, you really get to know her and her love of two wheels through reading the book. The anecdotal pieces on trips she’s taken and the history flashbacks are very immersive and informative. At other times she prosetalizes and it wanders a bit, but she always seems to find her way back to that love of bikes again.

The most memorable parts for me are her poetic descriptions of how it feels to ride. She has come closest (by far) in describing the feeling of riding a bike. If you are willing to let her take you on a ride and aren’t freaked out by her intelligence or gender, you’ll find the trip rewarding.

I then moved on to Motorcycling: A Life Long Passion, and after the Ondaatchi-esque prose of Melissa I’m having trouble getting into this strange book.

I previously read Odessey To Ushuaia by the very entertaining Andres Carlstein, who makes a trans-American trip sound both naive and remarkably slutty at the same time; I really enjoyed it.

So here I am reading a less engaging road trip and then alternate chapters on the experience of motorcycling whose prose isn’t up to the task. I’m only a couple of chapters in, but it isn’t grabbing me as the other two books did. I’ll keep at it with the hopes that it ups its game.

On a different angle I also picked up some more tech-orientated books. I got the Ninja Haynes Manual when I got the bike in the spring, but I was looking for more general overviews of bike mechanics when I came across the Basics Techbook and Motorcycle Maintenance on Amazon.

I’ve started the Techbook and after skipping the explanations of two and four stroke motors, I got a good explanation of the variety of motorcycle engines out there. I’m finding the book detailed and well written so far.

After spending so much time finishing the garage, the only gratuitous purchase was the How To Set Up Your Motorcycle Workshop. It’ll be both enjoyable and frustrating to see what a more perfect bike repair area would look like.

If I can’t be riding at least I can work my mind around other aspects of the sport.

Motorbike Magazine Mania

Since I’m in riding withdrawal I’ve been continuing my overdose on motorcycle media.

In one of the many magazines I’ve been picking up I came across the Overland Adventure Rally, which happens to be only about half an hour away from where I live. I won’t be participating on a Ninja, but I’m working on that.

The magazine picks have been many and varied. On the Canadian side I have picked up Inside Motorcycles and Canadian Biker.

IM is very race focused so I’ve been trying to use it to get a grip on what racing is offered/popular in Canada. I stumbled across the last MotoGP race of the year on SPEED and gave it a watch. Utter madness! But more entertaining than any F1 race I watched this season.

I’m still partial to British bike magazines and pick them up when I come across them. Motorcycle Sport & Leisure is written from older perspective but the mag holds up the quality end of British magazines. Few ads, lots of articles on a wide range of subjects, well written too.

BIKE magazine is a big one in the UK and I can see why. The writing is top notch, I was laughing out loud as I read one piece on all the ways an author has fallen off a motorcycle.

I’d pick up Adventure Bike Rider again, but it was hard to find even when I was in the UK this summer.

These hard to find British magazines may drive me to reading on a tablet just so I can get at them.

Cycle Canada is the only bike magazine I’ve gotten a subscription to so far, no regrets there.

Mastery Learning, Digitally Empowering Idiocy & Being Humble Before the Task

I ended up presenting on what mastery learning is and what mastery might look like in digital realms at ECOO13 last week .

HERE is the prezi.

Developing digital mastery in a digital world

The Humble Egotist: A teacher who encourages learning…

In untangling what digital mastery might look like I had to back up and describe mastery learning in general. This ended up clarifying my ideas around the process of learning itself. As much as we’d like to think we impart learning as teachers, the process itself is very much internal to the learner. Teachers aren’t nearly as central to the process as they like to think they are.

I started studying instructional technique when I was still a teen in air cadets and through coaching sports. That progressed into technology instruction in business and then language instruction in Japan. Finally getting my B.Ed. years later was just the latest in an ongoing personal journey to understand learning.

I’m self taught in so many things that I have trouble remembering being taught. I’ve dropped out of every kind of education you can imagine, and finished some too. I have real trouble with authority for the sake of authority and I’ve always found a strong element of that in teaching. There is no doubt that a teacher can be an important influence in a young person’s growth (I have several who were, we all do), but those people were never magical because they taught me something, they were magical because they enabled me to learn something. No one else has ever been the architect of my learning, it has always failed or succeeded because of how I tackled it. A good teacher looked at me and figured out how to enable my tendencies toward learning something effectively. A bad teacher would sabotage my learning, usually because my hero worship wasn’t up to their standards.

Teaching is a tricky business. It takes a lot of self confidence to do the job, but it also takes a lot of humility to get out of the way and let people learn. Self confidence and humility seldom co-exist comfortably in the same person. The urge to sage on the stage is strong in a lot of teachers, they really enjoy the attention and the social status (no matter how staged it is).

Not unless you do it you don’t,
learning isn’t downloaded,
it isn’t given, it isn’t easy

But learning is an internal process, you can’t have learning implanted in you (this was one of the reasons it seems so magical in The Matrix), as the learner you have to be the active agent, learning is hard work. We confuse this with a lot of edu-babble about engagement and over-focus on how entertaining a teacher can be but this ignores the essential issue. If a student doesn’t want to learn then they won’t. The value of learning should be self evident. It takes a colossal amount of work by the education system to assume responsibility for learning and hide the truth that students are the real agents of their learning.

During the ECOO presentation I described a good teacher as an awesome roadie, you can’t even tell they are there until they adjust or fix something to better enable the show. The learner is the one on stage doing the learning, a good teacher, like a good roadie, makes the show run smoothly but they aren’t the main act.

I see far too many full period lectures with sages on stages. Those people retire and are immediately back in the classroom because they miss the audience, they miss being in a socially constructed place where people have to listen to them. They don’t do much in the way of encouraging learning, but boy do they talk a lot, and they have no idea that students live in an information rich world and don’t have to wait for the slow drip of a teacher’s talk to learn a fact.

This isn’t to say that the flipped classroom is the obvious way to manage this. Learners have to internalize their own learning, but students who are many miles away from what they need to be broken out of their habitual patterns if they are going to learn something new. Sometimes this takes a teacher who is the centre of focus in a classroom.

How do you manage a room full of digitally super charged ids?

This is especially true when educators attempt to integrate digital devices into learning. Digital devices slavishly satisfy the desires of their users no matter how asinine or repetitive. An idiot on a digital device becomes an empowered idiot. A teacher can be a vital influence in breaking that destructive, repetitive cycle, but not if they are as habitual and limited in their use of digital tools as their students. Being humble before the task of learning gets even harder in a digital environment where every stupid urge is moments away from being satisfied. The teacher cannot facilitate student learning in an environment that they themselves are also oppressed by.

One of the key pressure points in learning is breaking someone out of
habitual use in technology (the pink bit), but that’s impossible if the
teacher is as habitual and illiterate as the student is…

If you’ve ever seen how many students (and teachers) treat school computer labs you know what I’m talking about. Rather than selecting the tool for the job, a teacher with low digital fluency will ask students to use computers as an analogue for something else. The computer is treated like a book, or a paper and pen. Booking a lab for this purpose is akin to renting a car to drive to the end of your street. You’re not using the technology for it’s capabilities, you’re using it to exacerbate your own habits.

That’s assuming the teacher didn’t book the lab as a digital babysitter while they get marking done (or so they could just surf the net in the same way as their students). In those classes I’m having to replace vandalized computers and students may as well be at home doing whatever they do there online. This damages digital fluency for everyone in the room by actually encouraging habitual usage, and it’s expensive.

Trying to focus on learning is difficult in the hyper-personally empowering digital realm.

Developing mastery of any kind isn’t a focus in education, trying to do it now with digital narcissism at every fingertip is even more difficult. Classes are set with 50% credits and minimal expectations around attendance in order to facilitate pass rates. In terms of digital mastery, administration seems to think this is about device access, but it’s more about people, self-discipline and work habits. Digital mastery falls back on the habits of the learner. A strong, self-directed learner is empowered by a digital environment, a weak, dependent one is impoverished by it. For the strong it empowers their ability to learn, for the weak it offers them a constant stream of distractions so that they can stay in the most base, trivial, superficial and habitual parts of their minds.

If we practiced mastery learning across education then digital mastery would follow. If we took teaching digital fluency seriously (in both staff and students) we would have a chance at using technology to create amplified learners who are able to access information and self direct their learning at a rate unseen before.

Sometimes I wonder if we aren’t dropping the digital football just to keep the traditional power structures in play.

note: this is the 4th re-write of this post, it’s an ongoing attempt to figure out some big ideas, I’m still not happy with it but I’m going to let it lie and move on. I suspect I’ll be trying to clarify the ideas in here in future posts.

ASD Heroes and Where To Find Them

Seeing a neuro-atypical hero who resembles yourself is jarring.
Seeing one that defies toxic masculine stereotypes is thrilling,
bad probably for business. People prefer reductive stereotypes.

Throughout my life I’ve been kindly described by friends and family as ‘marching to the beat of a different drummer’. In less supportive circumstances I’ve met people who take an immediate and intense dislike to that difference. When I was younger this often involved a gathering of like minded people and me getting a beating. It persists into adulthood and frustrates many of my attempts at socializing.

As an adolescent I tried to harness the anger I was feeling in those beatings and express it physically but just couldn’t. The thought of hurting someone else while I was in a rage was something I couldn’t bring myself to do. I recall several instances when a part of me was impassionately observing my assailants. The look of sheer, savage joy on their faces was utterly foreign to me; it’s something I couldn’t begin to emulate. Knowing that this kind of viciousness is pretty common in human beings is one of the reasons I’m so cautious with them. I’ve yet, at nearly fifty years old, laid knuckles on anyone else in anger, it just isn’t in me though I’ve often wished it were – it would make being male much easier. I suspect my gender dysphoria is at least in part due to this sense of alienation with what most consider to be appropriate male behaviour.

Being the bottom feeder it is, media is only happy to capitalize on this base, stereotypically reductive male behaviour. Unless your hero is an aggressive sociopath he isn’t a real man. You’d be hard pressed to find any male hero that isn’t written into this bizarre little box and then used as a dimensionless plot device to drive adrenaline fueled violence. For men looking for another way of being male that isn’t founded on this mythology, there isn’t much out there. For a neuro-atypical male the opportunity to see heroes that in any way reflect my experience is pretty much a zero game, I never see anyone like myself on film.

Last weekend we went to see Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, the latest Harry Potter film. I’d almost been talked out of seeing it by CBC’s movie critic Eli Glasner, who seemed to dislike every aspect of the film, but especially the main character, Newt Scamander, who he described as awkward and unlikeable. I don’t disagree with Glasner’s analysis of the plot, I think JK(Rowling – the author) tried to fit too much into one film and it gets a bit jumbled (I’d love to see an edited version that cleans up the plot), but when it comes to Eddie Redmayne’s character Newt I was annoyed at Glasner’s neurotypically prejudiced response to his complex, non-typical heroism. Fortunately, I’m not the only one:

(at 9:12 on): “Newt exhibits the characteristics of someone on the autism spectrum. He’s awkward in social settings. He doesn’t like being touched. He feels intense empathy for others but has trouble connecting to people and making friends… careful viewers will notice his aversion to direct eye contact…. Newt’s social anxieties are not framed in the stereotypical ways we’ve come to expect from Hollywood.”

That description of what ASD can feel like certainly resonates with me. What a stark difference it is to every other male hero you see in film. Newt’s neuro-atypicality allows JK to avoid the toxic masculine stereo-trap while also presenting a viable alternative hero. Many examples are shown in the video above of the kind of sociopathic, violent movie hero we show our boys in film. The majority pick this up quickly and then weaponize it socially as shown in Ontario’s recent boys’ private school scandal or pretty much any sports locker room. Fantastic Beasts has managed to side step the stereotypically male hero, but avoidance may also be its downfall.

I’m glad we didn’t let Glasner talk us out of seeing Fantastic Beasts. His dislike of the main character is in tune with criticism found all over especially North American reviews and another reminder of how hard it is to find a male movie hero who isn’t toxically reductive.

Fantastic Beasts goes well beyond toxic masculinity by actually showing us a nuanced, non-stereotypical ASD hero, which is quite frankly astonishing, and perhaps unique. The instinctive dislike of him by most people (as evidenced in pretty much every movie review you’ll read) reflects my own experience and will be why the franchise fails. It will become yet another reminder to those on the ASD spectrum, or any male that doesn’t want to put on the toxic masculinity society expects of them,of just how peripheral they are. Reductive toxic male stereotypes are the only ones that sell.

We’re surrounded by toxic masculine heroes that trivialize what being male could mean to all men while at the same time encouraging gender driven violence. Fantastic Beasts’ ASD hero sidesteps this trap and breaks these conventions. It’s a shame that it won’t sell to the North American public because it doesn’t pander to their prejudices. Fortunately, it’s doing better on the rest of the planet.

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Bike Hole

No room for a car, but a bike…

A long Canadian winter approaches. Rather than look longingly out into an unusable, uninsulated garage full of junk I’m getting my home reno on and finishing it.

It’s supposed to be a single car garage, but with the vent system intrusions and everything else in there I couldn’t even fit a Mazda2 into it. It’s turned into more of a shed than a garage.

Since getting the Ninja I’ve been working on it in the garage. It was fine over the summer, but with frost on the ground the floor is nasty cold and the wind seems to push the cold through the unfinished walls.

Unfinished, cold and messy…

Step one was to figure out how to finish it. Rather than dry walling it like the house side of it is, I’m going with wood panels so I can mount shelves where I want them rather than only where studs are available.

It cost under $300 for the paneling, insulation, paint and hardware to do it, not bad for what will be a warm garage at the end. I’m also going to look at some rubber garage flooring for parts of it, so that will push it over $300, but still a bargain considering I’ll get a huge work space out of it.

Saturday afternoon, halfway there…

This past weekend with lows in the -4c at night, I started on it, stripping the shelving off the walls and removing the home made bench at the back. With all of the stuff under a tarp on the driveway (in the rain), I insulated and hung the board.

By the end of Sunday I had the three unfinished walls insulated and the board up. The only slow down was not looking up as I moved down the wall putting up the board. As I went up the ladder I drilled my head into the garage door hardware hanging from the ceilling. Head wounds bleed a lot, especially when you get a jagged cut from a rough metal hanger.

I took Monday off (head hurting), and went back at it again Tuesday after work, putting on an unfinished can of primer. I’ll finish the priming this week and paint it next weekend. Last night when I was doing the priming a single, small space heater made it comfortable in there, it was below zero outside.

The end result will be warm and finished with better lighting and twice the workbench area, more shelving and better organization, so the gardening equipment doesn’t take over again. I’m still thinking about what to put on the walls…

Sidecar for my Side Kick

Side cars are cool!

I’ve been thinking about getting a second bike, one that lets me do some distance with my son (and wife if I can convince her). I’d initially wanted to get a Royal Enfield with a side car so we could Harry Potter it up.

Like a fish in water.

All together that’s about a $12,000 new piece of kit. I love the classic looks but with a 500cc engine, the RE wouldn’t be brisk, though it would be frugal.

Something that might fit better happens to be for sale in Guelph just south of us with an asking price of $5000. I didn’t know anything about XS1100s, though the sidecar was done by Old Vintage Cranks so it’ll be done properly.

Looking into the XS Eleven, I found some interesting history. A monster bike in its day, it was known as a fast, heavy machine that you needed a sledge hammer to roll over in corners. Since it’s with sidecar I’m not so worried about laying it down. It would certainly have the pickup needed to move a sidecar rig and would have enough grunt to manage all three of us. At less than half the price of the Royal Enfield (though with less of the classic look I like and over 70k on it), it has some appeal.

As a second bike I’m hoping for something very different from the Ninja which I’d still like to hang on to because I’m not finished learning from it yet. A big, classic Yamaha with side car is about as far from an ’07 650r Ninja as you’re going to get.

http://guelph.kijiji.ca/c-cars-vehicles-motorcycles-touring-xs1100-yamaha-special-with-sidecar-W0QQAdIdZ529601037

…bike is vintage & in great shape needs nothing for cert, sidecar is new cost $5500 to purchase & have installed by OVC the sidecar pros! comes with gel pak in newly recovered seat,, am/ fm/ USB for ipod or iphone cd sounds fine on the highway.

ECOO 2013 Cometh

Last year I was getting primed for ECOO 2012 by constructing a process for transitioning from school provided, generic educational technology to a bring-your-own-device learning situation. The idea was to assist this evolution toward personalized technology following some sort of pedagogical imperative rather than what appears to be a financially motivated top down drive to minimize school purchased tech.

Digital technology is intensely personal because it interacts with our
most personal selves, our minds…

Critically examining how we make use of technology has always been at the core of my teaching. As I transitioned from academically focused English to technology orientated computer engineering my willingness to look for easy answers in educational technology has dried up.

Since the last ECOO a couple of events have made me question the branded nature of #edtech. It began with the Google Education Summit in Kitchener in the spring, and then culminated with the Pearson Summit a week later. As educators it is incumbent upon us to be technologically agnostic, this is getting more and more difficult as cash strapped teachers and boards look for financial advantage courtesy of corporate offers. I’ve been battling my own understanding of this all year.

Can you imagine if your chalk board had a ‘courtesy of Crayola’ sign in the top corner? Or the paper you hand out to students had a ‘brought to you by Hilroy’ on it? Yet we don’t think twice about branding the digital technology. A student can’t get on to a school machine without getting Delled, BenQed, Microsoft’d, Jinged and Googled, and we actually enjoy that branding, we encourage it.

In only a few weeks I’m talking about our digital selves at ECOO 13. I’m excited about going to ECOO, doing Minds On Media for the first time (nurture your inner hacker, I’ll show you how to code a microcontroller and become your own I.T. support!) My worry is that I’m finding edtech increasingly owned, controlled and not focused on developing student (and educator) fluency.

I’m still being haunted by Matt Crawford’s Shopclass as Soulcraft. Crawford’s description of the consumer as a victim of their own technological ignorance resonates:

“Since the standards of craftsmanship issue from the logic of things rather than the art of persuasion, practiced submission to them perhaps gives the craftsman some psychic ground to stand on against fantastic hopes aroused by demagogues, whether commercial or political.”

The scattered, distracted 21st Century human being seems more a victim of digital technology than empowered by it. When I realize that the ‘I’m tech-savvy’ high school student doesn’t know what a disk partition or an IP address is, or how to boot to external media, I realize that what little expertise they’ve gained is almost entirely at the hands of commercial or political persuasion, and teachers are no different. This kind of fluency doesn’t suit corporate interests who would rather be able to sell you on marketing rather than engineering. The kind of ignorance this brews is staggering.

I want to produce a constructive solution to hard pedagogical questions around technology use. I’m finding this increasingly difficult as edu-tech becomes a managed, mainstream expectation rather than an experimental, fringe element. The urge to simplify with dictated systems that encourage ignorance has me wondering how education will prevent rather than produce more dysfunctional digital natives.

The perfect platform for teaching students effective use of technology is an open source system that they build from scratch and have to maintain themselves. The more you do for them, the less necessary fluency becomes. Technology literacy is a 21st Century fluency that we should be teaching curriculum wide, much like literacy or numeracy.

That ideal technology learning platform is agnostic, varied and offers redundancy and resilience. Students should never be in a position where the network technology is broken, but the hands on technology shouldn’t be done for them. What I’m seeing in educational technology is completely backwards; everything is locked down and done for students, and it seldom works. This is a recipe for ignorance and about as far from pedagogically useful as we can get.

There is precious little open source software used in education, mostly because it demands competence and

Don’t you wish there were a shared,open source
option for educational technology? There is,
but there is no money in it and it requires
competence.

responsibility. Buying a corporate system offers you turn key technology. We could offer cheap, debranded technology with open source, shared development software, but we don’t because we’d rather be consumers than makers. This is a result of teacher indifference as much as anything else. Basic fluencies should be attended to and you’d have to be obtuse to think that effective use of digital tools isn’t going to be as important as literacy and numeracy in the 21st Century.

I’m still not sure where I’m going with ECOO13…

The Perfect Fall Ride

Originally posted on Tim’s Motorcycle Diaries back in the Ninja days of September, 2013

Other riders I know are talking about putting their bikes away already, I just can’t bring myself to do it. Riding in the cool autumn air as the leaves turn around you? How on earth can you put a bike away with that going on outside?

Today I was off work for a periodontist torture session, so when the day broke sunny and cool I jumped out for a ride before the terror was to begin. Rather than ride the barren agricultural desert of Centre Wellington again I made a point of aiming for some of my favorite geography.

The route! Elora, up the Grand River to Shelburne, a short jog up to Horning’s Mills and then down one of my favorite roads to Mansfield, south on Airport Road to the Forks of the Credit, through Erin and over to Guelph

The road north east out of Fergus through Belfountain is nicely winding as it follows the Grand River. The twists continued through Grand Valley where the road drops right down next to the river. North to Shelbourne takes you through a science fiction landscape of massive windmills. The blast down 89 into Shelbourne had me looking at the fuel light so I pulled in for gas and then stopped for a coffee.

I’m bad at looking after myself when I get going, I tend to push on rather than take the time to stay warm and charged up. After a quick coffee I saddled up again and pushed on up 124 to Horning’s Mills. Located in a river valley north of Shelbourne, Horning’s Mills has the feel of a place that time forgot.

Nothing says Shelburne like an old
Buick LeSabre!

I have a theory that when the geography rises up around you and blocks you off, all the the psychic static from those anxious, frustrated people in the GTA is deflected away; River Road out of Horning’s Mills feels wonderfully isolated and far from the world.

We’re probably still a week or two away from the fall colours, but the ride was gorgeous. It was getting on toward noon and the sun had finally warmed everything up. In keeping with my look after yourself on a ride theme I brought a fleece sweater that I put on coming out of Fergus and three pairs of gloves, to try and find the perfect set for the cold air. I ended up switching to the winter leather gloves after the warm up coffee and was glad for them.

With the first colours in the trees, crisp, cool air and a road that was very un-Ontario like in its bendiness, the warm and eager Ninja thrummed down the road with an urgency that washed away every care.

River Road between Horning’s Mills and Mansfield

The ride south on Airport Road, usually a quick road with big elevation changes, was horrible. There was some kind of grey hair convention going on, and combined with the construction, the ride was a disaster. Rather than trying to pass every pensioner in a beige Camry in Ontario, I ducked right through Mono Cliffs and over to Highway 10. While not as geographically exciting, Highway 10 did offer two lanes, and even though trucks were determined to drive side by each in them, I was able to flit through Orangeville and south to the last bit of interesting road on my trek.

The Forks of the Credit is a short bit of winding road that follows the young Credit River as it flows out of the Niagara Escarpment. Once again construction ground things to a halt, but the crazy 180° hairpin and constantly twisting pavement reminded me of how a road can talk to you, especially through two wheels.

Forks of the Credit

By this point I was getting pressed for time to get back to Guelph for my torture session so I opened up the Ninja and hit Highway 24 through Erin and south to Highway 7 past Rockwood before ducking in to Guelph just south of the University for a quick lunch and then the blood letting.

The ride did a couple of things for me. Taking longer trips I’m finding the Ninja remarkably easy to sit on for extended periods. The seat is comfortable, the handlebars fall to hand and the bike is a joy to ride, it really wants to go. What’s getting me are the pegs. Being as swept back and high as they are, my knees don’t enjoy being folded up like that for long periods. I find myself standing up on the pegs and resting my legs on the front frame sliders just to try and work out the kinks. That 14° lean angle I could live with, but the 74° bend in the knees just isn’t working for me. Being long in the torso I also get a chest full of wind even with a larger, aftermarket windshield on the Ninja.

Having said that I covered about 230kms in between four and five hours with a few stops here and there, so it’s not a show stopper. There are other bikes that would fit me better, but I’d miss the Ninja’s friskiness and eagerness to connect and become a single entity. I’m afraid that something that would fit me better would be heavy and dull by comparison.

If you’re thinking about putting your bike away, wait until the end is nigh and the snow is about to fly. You never know when that perfect autumn day is going to suddenly appear in front of you and give you a ride that you can keep in the back of your head all winter long. Yesterday’s ride, complete with sore knees, wind burn and cold hands was a revelation.