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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

This is a headship like no other.

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

***

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

Fire can save you, or burn you…

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

***

Tech Cloud Brainstorming

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Ontario Ministry of Education works its way into elearning

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

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

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

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

Blended learning stats from 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The other night Alanna noted that I seem much more intent on presenting my best work during my computer engineering qualification than I have in others.  This stirred up a whole pile of history for me.

I completed my honours BA in English and philosophy from the University of Guelph in 1995.  I staggered out of my four year program elated, dissolussioned and fairly determined not to wade back into academics again.  I found a subset of professors (the young up and coming type usually) close minded, aggressive and cliquey.  Many of the post grads I met were intellectually cannibalistic, competitive and cruel.  That feeling kept me away from Teacher’s College for many years, and still has me firmly refusing to consider a Master’s program.  The arbitrary, cliquey nature of academics was alienating.

In university I approached liberal arts liberally, trying one of each subject area in my first year.  One of the reasons I cottoned on to English was that I was good at it.  Being drilled in reading and writing let me resolve a skill; I improved in noticeable ways.  My profs were hard but the skills continuum was pretty clear.

Where I got into muddy water was in philosophy.  The vast majority of my profs were older and tended to approach it in a friendly hands-off manner; I remember those profs fondly.  The younger ones, as mentioned above, seemed intent on discouraging interrogative learning and appeared constantly in a state of dismissive negativity, unless undergrads were fawning idiots.   Philosophy seemed to be about collecting disciples rather than understanding some of the greatest thinking in history.  Being an older student, I tended to be of an age with many of these life long academics, though having come from a school of sweaty warehouses and machine shops.

Ironically, many of the best teachers I had growing up weren’t teachers at all, but rather senior mechanics who were willing to take time to help along a young apprentice.  It was a learn fast or get caught on fire kind of environment, but learn I did, and the power structure was never arbitrary.  You either knew what you were doing, or your work spoke for you.  It was never a matter of how much money my parents had spent on tuition or what your academic pedigree was that dictated relationships.

Taking my first tech-qualification this year as a teacher feels like coming home.  I’m going to miss teaching English, but I’m not going to miss the sweatshop approach to English and literacy in high school where every class is at cap and the rooms are filled with students being forced into a mandatory subject.  I love English.  The reading, the writing, Shakespeare…  Watching how it’s made into work, overfilled and underfunded is depressing, I won’t miss that.

So here I go into the tech classroom where I think I’m going to channel my apprenticeship experiences over my academic experiences.  What we’re learning isn’t easily politicized, or easily based on classism or culty academia.  Teaching tech includes an element of objective quality, it works or it doesn’t, you know how to do it or you don’t.  I’m looking forward to that solid ground.

I just finished reading Matthew Crawford’s “Shop Class for Soulcraft”, a philosophical look at the value of skilled, physical labour.  Having come from a mechanical background into an academic one, a philosopher-mechanic’s critical examination of the ‘creative economy’ we’re all dying to jump into was refreshing.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12108000

I’ve often missed the clarity and satisfaction I found in repairing machines, and now I have a philosophical explanation of that sense of loss.  Crawford delineates meaningful work in terms of objective standards, a sense of community and individual agency.  He then goes on to disembowel the MBA speak found in the otherworldly knowledge economy that can only exist in an entirely abstract sense of work, one I fear that has been applied to the skilled trade of teaching courtesy of lawyers and politicians.

It’s been a few weeks now since I finished the book.  I’m finding that the lasting impression is one of embracing my smart hands again.  The idea that mind work is somehow superior to hand work is nonsense, though our school is streamed according to that logic (academic/applied, university/college).  The argument that we discover the truest aspect of human intelligence when we work our minds through our hands continues to ring true for me.

The other, unintentional side effect has been a re-awakening of my love of motorcycles.  I’d originally gone after one when I was 16, but my parents offered to up what I’d saved to get me into a car.  It’s probably one of the reasons I’m here today, it was a smart move.  At 43 I’m not interested in wrapping myself around a pole.  Riding is a way to be alone with your thoughts, no obtrusive media, and the development of a constant awareness; you can’t let your mind wander on a bike, they are ruthlessly observant of incompetence. Riding also offers an intimate familiarity with a machine in a very minimalist way that is appealing.

I come by my urges honestly.  Here is a picture of my Grand-dad Bill in the late nineteen forties… I need to get myself some white riding shoes!

I hope to be licensed and riding in the spring.

I’m trying out some introductory ideas for computer studies in the Fall…

Your tech cloud is the digital equivalent of ‘who are you wearing?’ on the red carpet at the Oscars, except for geeks.  And like high fashion, we fetishize the the personal electronics we surround ourselves with, identify with them, identify ourselves through them.  Your digital persona is an increasingly important means of self expression.  The tools you use to create your digital self have a lot to do with how you present yourself.

From a meta-cognitive point of view, this might be a handy way to start a discussion, do a tech-introduction and get to know my classes of computer-interested students.  Having said that, it would work in any class where you’re considering media or technology and how we use it to express ourselves.

HERE is my tech cloud:

The (4yr) old laptop, the Rogers trapped smartphone situation, the even older (5 yrs old) desktop.  I’ve got kit, but it isn’t what I wish I had.  About the only things I’d keep are my awesome new Olympus EPL-3 (though I desperately need to lens up), and the brilliant HAF case (which I’d gut and put a new i7 system in).  I’m hooked on Androids though, and after trying ipads and Android tablets, I think I’d just give the whole tablet thing a pass and get a phablet.  A phone/tablet combo is as far as I’m willing to go with tablets.

If I had the means, I’d get the ultrabook I think is so pretty it works in a high fashion shoot (and has a battery that lasts me all day at a conference), lens up the Olympus, and drop the tablets and the string of broken Rogers Sony phones, and the lousy service.  I’d then phablet up with the Samsung Galaxy Note with Telus.  The desktop would get a much needed upgrade from the old AMD to an i7 Intel system with a spanking new video card and SSD.  The whole thing would be a quad-booting monster, getting me into Win7, Win8 beta, Linux and OSx all on the same machine.  I’d want my tech cloud to demonstrate my Jedi tech skills!

Feel free to grab the blank tech cloud prezi and make a copy.  Show what you’ve got and what you wish you had!

http://prezi.com/rvbysmjms-qb/your-tech-cloud/

Share away!

One of those fun things about Twitter is that you can end up communicating with unexpected people.  The other day I got a response from the Press Secretary for the Ontario Liberal party.

We’re in a bit of a mess in Ontario.  Economically we’re on the wrong end of history.  Once Canada’s manufacturing heartland, now that North Americans don’t make anything and just wait for shipping containers to arrive, Ontario has fallen on rough times.

To resolve these economic issues, and perhaps to catch some soft righties in the next election, our liberal minority government has decided that they don’t have to negotiate contracts, can mandate teachers, doctors, firemen and other unions back to work, and will drastically scale back our agreements to balance a budget that got blown to pieces by a financial crisis the public sector had absolutely nothing to do with (bankers aren’t being looked at to chip in on the deficit).

From the twitter feed:

Personalizing of technology will one day reach education (hope, hope)

I went to my principal last year and suggested we try the mini-lab idea, wherein a technology curious/experienced teacher collects a class set of digital tools around themselves in order to develop some digitized pedagogy.  Alas, we couldn’t go all in.  The idea of a teacher directly selecting diverse technology and then going off the school/board controlled and organized IT system was more than even our forward thinking principal could take.

The end result was a laptop cart of netbooks, one for each of our three floors.  The idea of the mini-lab is a constellation of differentiated technology orbiting a specific teacher. The variation in technology encourages wider digital fluency, and the single teacher focus produces a strong sense of ownership that helps reduce neglect and misuse.

Acer Netbook  http://www.acer.ca/ac/en/CA/content/model/LU.SGA0D.064   :

It was great to get these machines unhobbled by board IT.  The last time the board issued a cart of netbooks, they’d erased the manufacturer’s fresh Windows 7 and installed the board’s ten year old Windows XP package complete with numerous driver problems (companies don’t make a new laptop then spend a lot of time building drivers for an operating system no one has used in three years).  The results were disastrous.  These new netbooks are no slouches (dual processor, decent memory, the latest software), they worked right out of the box, but they didn’t have anything to do with the antiquated board network.

I had real trepidation about how to administer these carts.  The massive job of unpacking and setting up 70 odd netbooks seemed overwhelming, but a couple of pizzas and some helping hands later it got done over lunches; then came the putting them into operation part.

At the staff meeting I showed everyone the cart and explained that these are not board issued laptops.  This involved answering a number of questions around what that means.  No, the school server with it’s piddling 10 megs of memory per student isn’t available, but Googledocs is with 8 gigs, or Microsoft’s Skydrive is waiting for you to use for free with 25 gigs.  No, you can’t print to school printers, they’re all on a closed network, but if you had to print, you could always have students email you work, or, you know, don’t print it and just look at it on the screen.

I also stressed that these are our computer carts.  The board isn’t going to maintain them, so benign neglect isn’t an option.  If you’re booking a lab so you can ignore your students for the period while you mark, these are a poor choice.  Tech-keen teachers on each floor were given the happy job of looking after the carts.  In many cases this allowed them to make use of the carts, which they have done eagerly.  Adoption by other teachers has been slow, but it has steadily improved, which worries me.

The first problem resolved around poor student privacy habits.  When a class ends the vast majority of students simply shut the lid and walk away, leaving themselves logged into Facebook (which they are inevitably running in the background), and saving whatever they are working on to the desktop.  Soon Macbeth papers, history essays, moderns translations and other digital flotsam, all named document1, document2, etc, bloomed on the desktops.  The inevitable Facebook spamming ensued, which greatly upset the students too lazy or clueless (or both) to bother logging off before putting the machines away.

Concern has arisen around plagiarism (taking essays found on a laptop and handing them in because an essay left by someone on a desktop called document3 HAS to be worth copying), and the opportunity for digital bullying with the not logging off the social network they’re not supposed to be on anyway.

Today I got my first broken hardware issue.  Apparently a key ‘popped off’ the keyboard.  Those things are like popcorn, sometimes they just come flying off by themselves.

We’re getting out of the initial roll-out phase of the off board IT netbook experiment.  The novelty is wearing off and teachers who wouldn’t otherwise use them are starting to book them for periods they aren’t actually in the school so the kids can play online (yes, we made a rule about that, but some teachers can be remarkably lackadaisical about rules when it means they have to be there to enforce them).

The digital coaches I’d envisioned in the mini-lab are still competently using the carts regularly, but as the carts find their way into the hinterlands of our school, teachers who don’t understand (or care to understand) how to use digital devices in class to actually, you know, teach, will book out the carts and return them in a steadily deteriorating state.

We’ve done well with the initial portion of the roll out, putting the laptops together and having digital coach types making good use of them early, now comes the mediocrity.  One of the things we strive for is equal access to technology in education.  Unfortunately, we don’t encourage development of digital competency in teachers and the end result is a lot of extra work for the few educators who are interested in making education meaningful and relevant to a new, digital millennium.