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22C Ed: Gaming School

Kyle looked at the stairs going up to the next floor, he couldn’t unlock the door to them, but he could peer through the small windows to the painted walls and carpeted floors beyond.

He looked down at his student badge, under his name and next to his picture it still said, “n00b learner”. Kyle wasn’t stupid, not by a long stretch, but he was incredibly lazy and was easily influenced by his peers negatively, though that had been changing recently. He used to spend most of his time trying to needle other students or his teachers. He found this amusing, only a small group of others did, but Kyle had been stuck on the first floor with them for two years now, almost all the rest of his elementary class had gone upstairs. The big 2nd year wasn’t enjoying hanging out with the kids any more.
The bell rang on the first floor, the only floor where bells rang, and Kyle trudged off to his next class. The room was painfully white; tables, chairs, walls… the teacher walked in and put her briefcase on the teacher desk. She quickly looked at the scan log on her monitor, noticed who wasn’t in class on time and said, “alright, let’s begin.”
The door closed automatically as she spoke, and anyone still out in the hall was being herded into remedial classes that would also take up their lunches. Very few people skipped or were late; better to just be there.
The lesson today was on writing basic sentences. Kyle knew how to do this, so zoned out during the instruction. Back in grade nine he would have talked over the teacher, thrown things at classmates or otherwise assed about, but standing for the whole class kinda sucked, so he didn’t do these things any more. Damien, two seats up, was a bit of a tool, and he wasn’t thinking about consequences very well this morning. He whipped a pen at the back of the kid in the front row. His chair seat dropped away immediately, depositing in him on the floor. Bright red in the face he stood up to the class laughing.
Ms Creighton looked at him for a moment and shook her head, “forty minutes is a long time to be standing Damien.”
“He started it,” Damien mumbled, looking at his feet.
“He still has a seat,” Ms Creighton replied with a smirk, and turned back to the use of commas.
It was your typical n00b class, students kept forgetting about consequences and by halfway through half a dozen of them were shifting from one foot to another, while trying to take notes. Three others, including Damien, had decided to trade in lunch for a seat and were off in remedial, learning an awful lot more about sentence structure than they had perhaps intended.
The data being collected was more detailed than Kyle realized. His previous attempts (and improvements) in sentence building where being held up against how he performed today. His galvanic skin response (read through his desk) even gave indicators on how much attention he was paying, and even if he was likely to act up, though the system had a very low probability of that happening.
What Kyle didn’t realize is that in the last six months his tardies had fallen to zero (mainly because he didn’t want to miss lunch any more), he had no absences and his teacher had noted improvements in engagement across logic, numeracy, literacy, techniracy, kinesthetics and creativity. His scores had been slowly, but steadily improving, indicating a measurable improvement in learning facilities. Ms Creighton knew this, and she was hoping that young man who started the year so badly would ace this activity, as she knew he could; it might be the bump he needed.
With fifteen minutes left in the class Kyle’s badge suddenly chimed. It usually only did this when he was late to class or otherwise in trouble. He irritably grabbed it and stared.
“Level 1: Novice Learner”
Creighton stood up immediately with a big smile. “Well done Kyle! The system had you on the cusp, but you’ve gone over!”
Kyle stood up nervously, his face flushing red. “What do I do?” he stammered.
“They’re waiting for you upstairs! Enjoy yourself, and keep improving your learning!”
Kyle walked down the aisle as dozens of eyes followed him, some enviously, which the system made note of. The door opened as he approached and he was out alone in the hallway. Alone in the hallway never happened to n00bs and he almost felt vertigo. He walked stiffly to the doors to the second floor and they slid open as he approached.
“Welcome to the next level,” a cool, female voice chimed as he passed through.
By the end of the day, Kyle was beginning to see why almost no one ever came back downstairs. His biggest class had a dozen students in it, as opposed to the forty he’d had in English this morning. Whereas downstairs was antiseptically clean and monotone, the second floor contained rooms in varying shades. Instead of shared desk screens, everyone carried their own computer, could share their content to the white boards, and were encouraged to develop what they had studied in class independently. Instead of six hours of proscribed class, the second floor had four hours of teacher time and two hour of independent study.
From having very limited, measured choice, Kyle suddenly found he could choose to focus his learning in specific areas. The system watched his initial ascension closely, some students needed a firmer hand while they became acclimatized to their new freedoms, though the data suggested that Kyle would not, and he didn’t. As the novelty wore off, Kyle found himself wondering why it took him so long to get out of his own way, then he realized it, the system wasn’t grading him on what he knew, it was grading him on how well he learned. Until he’d been able to demonstrate some self control, self direction and curiosity, he couldn’t focus on all there was to learn; now he could. Instead of worrying about what the idiots in his class were thinking, he had, over the past half year, allowed his own natural curiosity to emerge.
Kyle quickly found Phin, a friend from the neighborhood who had ascended a few weeks earlier.
“Know what the best part is?” Phin said one day as they ate lunch in the smaller, less industrially designed cafeteria on the second floor.
“We’re not n00bs any more? The technology access? The fact they the teachers can leave you alone because you’ve shown you can learn without training wheels?”
Phin laughed and nodded, “true, but not it! The real best part is that after we ascend through intermediate to senior, we get to go to the final floor… and it’s supposed to be even better than this!”
Kyle looked across the caf at the doors to the third floor. His imagination took off.
“What could they have up there? Holographics? Hypnotics? Virtual studios?”
“You’re such a tech-head,” Phin laughed. “Bet they’ve got all that and more, but they also have the heli-pad, and I’ve seen Seniors come and go from it.”
Phin left the thought of being able to travel on the supersonic ‘copters hanging in the air. Both of them looked at each other and a new determination germinated between them. Deep in the core the system made the necessary adjustments. Kyle was improving Phin’s approach to learning and Phin was improving Kyle’s. Subtle changes were made in the scheduling to match them together and with other students at this stage of development. Teachers looking over the data called it the booster stage. Students at that stage could develop their own learning skills at a much more efficient rate, often over a surprisingly short period of time.
It wouldn’t be taking Kyle two years to get up to that next floor this time.
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The Perfect Interface

Thinking about tablets recently, I’ve been trying to imagine what the perfect online interface would be. Since getting a smartphone and doing the Web2.0 thing, I’m finding I don’t go to the internet like I used to, getting online is now a micro event, not the main event. Web2.0 wants you to pop in and out in social media, produce content and grab information relevant to what you’re doing in reality, and that doesn’t fit well with a desktop.

If I’m not going to the internet as the main event, but rather as an enhancement to my reality, what would be the best way to access that? You’d want something with you all the time; the legendary wearable computer.
I’m not feeling the desktop like I used to. I still use desktop horsepower to game (which is still an event in and of itself), and to move big photoshop files, but not much else, using the internet as augmented reality doesn’t require a monster processor or graphics power. Instead I’m out and about, and wanting to catch a moment and push it online quickly and easily without interrupting what’s going on. Facebook encourages this somewhat, Twitter relies on it. What you can share online easily is what makes your digital self. You’re mute and half invisible online if you can’t interact as your virtual self.
I find the smartphone sometimes frustrating entering text on (I have the same problem with tablets), but the fact that they are easy to take everywhere is their ace in the hole. My Xperia has an awesome camera, does good video and has a big enough screen to easily share information on, it comes close to being an ideal tether between meat me and virtual me.

My future ideal device has a stylish pair of glasses, shoes and clothes that recharge from bodily motion, or solar power like the awesome Casio I recently got. Having a device that is self powered is where all mobile tech should head. Having a watch/compass/weather station on my wrist that is essentially self-sufficient makes you aware of all the umbillicalage that connects us to our digital selves.
The perfect device only asserts itself as much as it has to in order to complete online interactions. Photos are a quick motion away, interfaces respond to bodily motions (eye blinks, hand gestures, etc). Typing by following eye motion? Typing by looking at any surface with a keyboard imposed on it through the glasses? Speech to text, direct speech and let’s drop the textiness?
I guess, somewhere into this, you could be playing an interactive real world/virtually enhanced game with people in which how accurately you create spell gestures dictates how well the spell will work. You’d see people playing in the park, pointing fingers at each other and seeing virtual paint balls. Gym classes would take on a whole new historical context. You could run 100m against Donovan Bailey and actually see him on the course (way) ahead of you.
William Gibson has a fantastic scene in Spook Country, where the main character is looking (through glasses with a digital screen) at the body of a virtual dead River Phoenix lying on the sidewalk where he actually died. Past and present colliding virtually… imagine that field trip to Quebec City, where you’re walking across the Plains of Abraham and seeing the battle unfold around you… or you can spend a day at the reconstructed Globe Theatre watching the King’s Men preparing to stage Romeo & Juliet for the first time (complete with cast from Shakespeare in Love).
Virtual Reality doesn’t offer nearly the nuance and ease of use that augmented reality does. Here’s hoping Moore’s Law gets us there sooner than later. I want to actually work up a sweat next time I’m doing a dungeon crawl with my party of adventurers.
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Spotty Internet & Spoiling The Argument

I’m feeling bad about bad mouthing the board internet now. The last few events I’ve been to seem to point to continuous and crappy wifi execution at the enterprise level. Does good high usage wifi exist anywhere?

This week at the Mississauga Better Living Centre the wifi was so slow as to be useless. Signal strength was fine, the throughput was nonexistent. When it takes more than 10 seconds to load Google, something isn’t right.
The Sheraton Parkway North in Richmond Hill I’ve been to twice this year. Better than Mississauga’s attempt, but still boggy and slow at times, and again, this is regardless of signal strength.
One of the sure-fire killers of tech use in class rooms is boggy internet. Teachers are on tender hooks every time they try something online. If it fails to load, they are stressed and tend to face a lot of blow back from students looking for an out. If you’re going to pitch the cloud, online collaborative tools and an alternate to the desktop, you’re not going to do it with patchy internet.
Our school wifi system is a monster. It cost a fortune, and, in theory, works very well… until all our traffic gets funneled into the queue we share with 88 other schools for a single internet connection through the board office, then, not so good. I constantly hear students railing against the ‘crap computers in this school’. It’s not the computers, you’d think the digital natives would know that.
Back in the day when I was learning networking (the computer kind, not the people kind), we were told again and again to design out any SPoFs. Single Points of Failure will kill a network stone dead. They’ll kill the use of technology in the class room for any but the most hard core digital evangelists as well. Nobody needs the time wasted, stress and headache of setting up a lesson only to have it fail because the internet wasn’t there for you when you needed it.
People always get hyped about technology, I do too. Things like chalk boards and chalk? I’ve never had that technology fail on me of its own accord. Can you imagine if 20% of the time you went to write on the board and nothing came out? It’s certainty is what makes it good technology. Same thing can be said for paper and pen…
I hope that we are not just looking for faster network speeds, but also resiliency in our networks. I’d love to see my next gen wifi receiver using whichever band is offering the best throughput (N, G, B, I don’t care; they never get near their theoretical bandwidth limits anyway). I’d love to see a school network that never reaches bandwidth limits because it shapes and prioritizes traffic to ensure smooth operation (Facebook packages low priority please), and I’d love to see wifi networks intelligently and resiliently dealing with traffic crush, traffic sharing and shaping to push data not necessarily as quickly, but as efficiently as they can.
I fear in the headlong rush for faster transfer speeds, we are forgetting to build any kind of resiliency into our networks, which will make things like Chromebooks look little more than curiosities. No one is interested in a computer that won’t work as often as the poor wifi I’ve seen implemented.
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Simulation In Education: DM as teacher

Simulation in education is going under many names nowadays. Gamification is a gross simplification of the application of game play to learning. You can’t gamify lessons and expect the students to have a genuine experience, yet gamification has been the catch-word educators have picked up on in trying to access gaming culture.

You can’t throw badges on completion tasks and call it a game. Game play requires a coherent internal system of interaction that rewards contextual, interactive play. Even meta-game play (hacking, working the system, etc) should be integrated by the game creator. The more complete the contextualization of a game, the more effective it is as a game and the more immersive (and genuine) it is as a learning experience.

Simplifying game play/in-class simulation as an add on to existing, simplistic lessons is certain to fail. You might have success the first time you do it based student response to a new, novel approach to learning, but repeating a simplistic gaming pattern will quickly cause students to drop out of the simulation. The game has to have enough complexity and contextual development or it will be too easy for students to step out of the game, it needs to be encompassing.

Some thoughts on sims in education:

– Teacher as referee rather than resource, puts focus on student to figure out material. Sports do this well, creating an apparently certain context (it’s all made up, buy you couldn’t convince a hockey player of the arbitrary nature of the rules they are playing in)

– “The point of economic policy in a game isn’t to simulate reality; it’s to make the synthetic scarcity so entertaining that the truly scarce good (the players’ time) goes toward solving problems in the game, not in the outer world.” Geekonomics. Simulation should be designed around maximizing player’s experience within the game context.

– Immersion is a powerful thing! Rewarding a student’s immersion in a game by rewarding their efforts within the simulation is key.

– What is better? Intrinsic or extrinsic motivation (intrinsic is, extrinsic is transient)

– Must develop an intrinsic motivation! It’s better to have a ‘good in itself’, summum bonum,or some fecundity (both much more motivating) or else players are just jumping through hoops, the teacher won’t get their best work, students don’t get best learning.

– Is curriculum motivating in itself? No, just a set of arbitrary government rules. At best it offers a Foursquare like badging system (grades), or a sudden, harsh result (post secondary options). Grade leveling is eased all the way until they hit the wall of trying to access post secondary (something that seems far away in the teenage mind). Wouldn’t it be interesting if we could gamify the student experience? “You’re a level 11 writer and a level 6 hockey player? Cool.”

– What makes a motivated student? Relevance of material? Control of the situation? Social interaction? Non-confrontational relationship with teacher? Strong interpersonal relationship with teacher? Sense of self-direction? Self confidence?

– Immersive simulation adapts to each student experience, (must) offers contextual, supporting material, develops confidence because the student’s experience prompts the learning, develops a supportive, non confrontational relationship with the teacher.

Simulation development has to go well beyond the Khan Academy approach, it has to offer an immersive, meaningful, personalized experience, and you can’t do that by adapting lessons, you need to begin with big ideas and work the lessons into that coherent whole.

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Types of Genius

I just re-read a fantastic article in WIRED about types of genius.

After examining art history, an economics professor noticed two distinct expressions of genius. There is the Conceptualist, who usually goes right after her goals with a preconceived notion of how to get there. Conceptualists usually peak early and loudly, they are the ‘typical’ kind of child genius people think of, like Mozart. The less well known creative genius is the Experimentalist. They slowly develop across their lives and their greatest work usually comes later in life.

Someone like Jackson Pollack didn’t really start producing until his thirties and didn’t really hit his stride until well into his forties. His early work is terrible. He developed his style through years of trial and error, hence, an experimentalist.

Picasso’s greatest works came early and created an incredible shock wave. He had a preconceived notion of what he wanted to do and did it. As a conceptualist his work presented a radical change in how things were done. While he produced many great works across his long life, it is generally understood that his early work presents his strongest.

I’ve always liked Robert Frost, and now that I know his history, I see he’s an experimentalist, just like me. It’s nice to be in such good company. As a late bloomer myself, I remember the painful efforts of my teachers to educate me when I simply wasn’t ready for it. I was always a good reader and writer, but even my English teachers (I now have an honours degree in English) couldn’t reach me (“a disruptive influence in class”). I finally had the sense to drop out (something kids aren’t allowed to do any more) and work for a few years before I went back and graduated at the age of 22.

It makes you wonder just what a FAILURE in a course really means. I had my fair share of them, and they weren’t exactly great for my slow-motion approach to development.

The recent round of ‘your son is not up to STANDARDS’ from his elementary teachers had me very worried, but when I dug up this article again, I feel a bit better. Even geniuses can arrive last, being off-average in school is by no means an indicator of your actual abilities, it’s simply a system based on averages. Exceptionality lives outside of those averages, I’d rather be there than in the NORMAL range.

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Archive: 2007: Artist Training With Historical Context

Summary of: http://atking.ca/timothy/arttraining.htm


Art education has evolved to meet the needs of the human society in which it exists. In a less complex, earlier society, the apprenticeship system offered a mirror of the human family structure that allowed practitioners to work in an intensive, personalized environment. As the population grew, this one on one instruction was no longer possible. Educational expectations made it financially impossible for a teacher to only have handful of students over the course of their careers. Apprenticeships became guild affiliated and finally the training of visual arts became the purview of specialized institutions of higher education. During this advancement, the personal/mentoring aspect of the apprenticeship system has been lost.

The modern view of visual arts is complex. Once a straightforward trade based entirely on quantifiable and observable skills development surrounding the recreation of natural forms, the visual artist has become something of a hybrid, straddling the lines between the experiential, materials handling, hand-eye skills associated with a skilled trade and the mental disciplines associated with aesthetics, philosophy, art history and the development of a personalized and unique artistic sensibility. The requirement of both of these rigorous mental and physical aspects within the field of visual arts is quite unique. Few other disciplines require the mental athleticism and hand eye skills that a mastery in visual arts demands. Teaching to this requirement is an ongoing struggle.

The benefits of this research in terms of presenting art history are fairly straightforward. What is perhaps more valuable to me is an awareness of just how difficult it is to balance the widely differing needs of visual arts in one course of study. My own background suggested that high school visual arts attempts to focus too much on the mental aspects of the discipline and leaves the challenging (and often repetitive) hand-eye skills development to college. My initial drive in reviewing the history of art and art training was to resurrect an interest in improving the technical proficiency of the high school visual arts student by recreating something of the intensity I experienced while apprenticing.

In retrospect, I think this will not work. As an apprentice, I was financially and professionally obliged to work through some very difficult material. Dropping out would have cost me a great deal of money, not to mention lost me my job. High school students do not have this motivation, especially in visual arts which is not even a mandatory course. In order to serve as wide a public audience as possible, it makes sense to design visual arts curriculum around Socrates’ view of visual arts, as a course designed to create an interest in the visual arts as part of a liberal arts education. This would, of course, require students to become aware of the means of production of visual arts (so studio work is still an important portion of the curriculum), but it would not require the students themselves to be artists with the associated intensity of expression. I find this very similar to the current atmosphere in English, where literacy is stressed, but the teacher isn’t looking to cater to student writers. It is assumed that these students will display competence in the basic skills and find ways to express their writing skills in specialized courses or outside of the curriculum.

I find it unfortunate that curriculum can not cater to mastery focused students in this way. Visual artists in high school would simply, for them, an empty survey of the subject matter while they wait for an opportunity to really exercise their creativity in a post-secondary situation more suited to their need for specialization. This situation makes me wish for a means of bypassing years of unproductive basics, especially if a student wants to specialize intensively in a particular subject. An early graduation for these students might be a suggestion to move them into more effective learning. If an exceptional fine arts student demonstrated sufficient technical ability and the wish to more aggressively pursue their discipline, the opportunity to apply to post-secondary institutions at the age of 16 or 17 might make public education more than simply waiting to turn eighteen.

Note: Interestingly, the high skills arts major became an option only two years after this was written.

Note: Interesting tie in with the Mastery Blog entry from last week.

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Information – Skills – Mastery

I was chatting with @banana29 about that learning thing on the weekend. She’d been wrestling with the idea of skills based learning, ultimately finding it too limiting in describing what we’re actually aiming for in education.

After we ruminated for a few minutes, we came up with the idea of Mastery. We don’t teach students information, or even skills, but what we look for ultimately is mastery (something more encompassing and complex than knowledge or simple skills development).
This bounced me back to a conversation I’d had the other week at a heads PD on assessment. The teacher I was chatting with had been heavily involved with the Hockey Canada coaching program. While in it, they were told that in order for a player to have gained a mastery of the game, they need to have put ten thousand hours into to it. While talking to him, we brought up Wayne Gretzky. I saw an interview with his Dad, Walter, back in the day. The interviewer was saying how Wayne was a natural and Walter just shook his head and laughed. He then told the story of Wayne’s childhood. He’d get up, and go play hockey before school, he’d play hockey on recess and at lunch, he’d come home and… play hockey. In the winter he averaged 4-6 hours a day on the backyard rink; in the summer he played ball hockey. Wayne Gretzky wasn’t a natural, he was a master, who’d put the hours in and learned (and earned) his mastery.
Back to the skills talk: the idea of skills is inherently limited. A skill is defined by its limitations; it’s one of the ways we’re able to focus on them and perfect them. To take the hockey metaphor again, skating is a skill, stick handling is a skill, shooting is a skill. These and many others work in complex ways to develop something that relies on them and many other indirect and seemingly esoteric skills and knowledge to create an encompassing and complete mastery.
Perhaps this is that missing piece everyone seems to be looking for in education. We focus on knowledge and information, we focus on skills development, but we never look for mastery, or encourage it in all its esoteric forms. Mastery training can get awfully abtruse too, bizarre even. I once saw the Detroit Red Wings playing hackey sack before a playoff game; masters getting Zen while warming up their hand/foot/eye coordination, teamwork and focus? or guys screwing around?
Mastery assumes a level of professionalism and focus that isn’t in question. We have trouble doing that in PD, let alone with students. If we can’t trust teachers to apply themselves to their professional development in a self directed, meaningful way (something a master will do no matter what), the idea of students doing it approaches absurdity. Perhaps mastery is more than we can expect from the education system.
Another problem in elementary and secondary education (it happens in post secondary) is being able to focus on a specific field in order to develop mastery. In Ontario, this is changing now with High Skills Specialists and other focuses beyond the bland, traditional subject haze that students have been dragged through.
The problems don’t end there. In a system that prides itself on segmentation and order, mastery becomes a slippery concept that doesn’t fit well into curriculum documents, class bells, mid term reports and percentage grades. Mastery leaves all of that nonsense behind, the master becomes an embodiment of their discipline.
That ‘nonsense’ is vital to an apprentice though. Without structure, and planned practice that develops the knowledge and skills needed, someone working toward mastery will take much longer to embody their expertise. Perhaps the fact that mastery isn’t mentioned, or even understood to be the point of the educational process, is where we run into trouble. Structure is vital to learning, but it seems empty and pointless if there isn’t an ultimate goal beyond the skills and knowledge happening right in front of you. The student being drilled on grammar or working to develop their sentence structure has no sense of what it is they are pursuing: the mastery of a writer. If they aren’t pursuing mastery, they are spending all of their time getting drilled in stick handling, passing and shooting and never getting to play a hockey game.
The problem there might be that the masters teaching aren’t really masters themselves, but rather experts in running drills and practicing. It’s not always easy to convince a master to teach their discipline to the unwashed masses, they tend to want to pick and choose their apprentices, looking for people who demonstrate the kind of personalities and inherent abilities that will improve chances of success. Spending time and energy on an unworthy apprentice is exhausting and wasteful.
Ultimately, mastery, or even the striving for it, ends up seeming exclusionary, but training with no purpose creates skills and knowledge without context, which is very hard to explain or justify.
Last year I had a student who earned a 46% in grade eleven college level English. He thanked me profusely for ‘giving’ him a 50% and a pass. I told him it was no favour, moving him to grade 12 was going to be very difficult for him. His response was, “it’s ok, I just didn’t try this year, I’ll try next year and get the B average I need for college.”
He didn’t get that 70%, in fact, he dropped the course on his first go around and is now at a loss on what to do. His problem wasn’t effort, his problem was that he couldn’t spell, his grammar was atrocious, I’d seen grade 9s with better vocabulary and he had virtually no understanding of sentence or paragraph structure. He could try as hard as he wanted, but his complete lack of a workable foundation in English is where the real problem lay.
In a system that feels to many students like random, fractured, pointless skills development with wads of knowledge dumped on top, the idea that they need to be developing toward something other than their next summative assessment is foreign. It’s foreign for many of their teachers too.
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Backwards edtech

At PD this week we were working with arts teachers, many of whom were technically disinterested if not outright techno-phobic. Watching them work with our frustratingly slow network while trying to show them basic Google tools only amplified their distrust. One asked me, “why would I wait around to see if this works? Why not just TALK to the students?”
EDTECH TRUTH: poor network delivery weakens all aspects of online educational support.
  • It’s frustrating to see all of that good stuff, stuff I can use fluently and easily at home, grind to a stop while on the board internet.
  • It makes teaching others how to use it almost impossible
  • It makes doing elearning at school agonizing (for teachers and students)
  • It makes edtech seem like a giant time-sink, when it’s supposed to be an efficiency booster.
  • It calls into question the competency of the people trying to show the material in the minds of new tech learners (when it won’t load, it looks like we don’t know what we’re doing)
The problem is that we still think IT delivery in education revolves around access to machines (still mainly focused on desktop computers). The vast majority of students have their own technology to access the internet. Cheap smart phones, netbooks and tablets have de-centralized online access, but we still spend all our time and money on maintaining easily (and often) vandalized desktop labs. These time and energy sinks should be kicked to the curb.
When I think about the labs in my school, I think only the CAD/design and media arts labs needs full desktops (they need the CPU horsepower and big screens). Every other lab would work better as a mobile netbook lab or mobile tablet lab. The cost of a desktop lab of 24 machines? About $45,000. The cost of a mobile lab of 30 ipads? About $18,000 (and that includes a teacher macbook, charging cart, the works! Isn’t that cool?), a better than 2 to 1 price advantage. Imagine swapping out all of your labs at a 2 to 1 ratio and replacing them with ipads, or netbooks (which are actually cheaper – under $10,000 for a 30 laptop lab). I won’t even get into the energy savings (mobile devices use way less electricity, create less heat and lower A/C costs too).
Edtech is staggering in this direction, years behind where business is. In 2002-3 when I was working as an IT technician, my offices were all being converted to laptops. Those same offices are now a mix of smart phones, tablets and laptops, depending on what the employee needs access for. I think the servers are the only thing left that look desktoppy. The office runs multiple overlapping wireless networks that automatically switch traffic depending on load through two IPs. They also shape traffic based on values; you can access facebook and youtube, but those packets are deprioritized over machine to machine and other internet packets (I’ve asked our board to do this and they say they can’t). They’ve had no downtime in two years thanks to built in redundancy; no single points of failure.
After becoming a teacher I was flabberghasted to see the labs still modeled on 80’s tech, and they’re still here. My first year teaching I told our librarian about wifi, he’d never heard of it before. He was excited about trying it out because so many students were bringing their laptops in and couldn’t access the internet. The computer club I founded got a wireless router and plugged it in behind a book case. For less than a hundred bucks dozens of students were able to get online. Some careful setup allowed them only onto the internet and not the board network. It took board IT a year to notice it and demand that it be removed, though not a single problem had occurred while it was running for that year, and the library became the place to go to get your research done; obviously not what should be happening in a library.
Here I am, seven years later. Wifi is now available school wide, but it typically takes 10 seconds to load a single page and has the most asinine security I’ve ever seen (open network with a pointless login that makes mobile devices go crazy). Our board has spent big money to create a fibre optic school to board office network, with a single internet connection to feed all schools through the board, and now it’s overloaded.
I wonder when they’ll catch up to my office from 2003.
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Do Or Do Not, There Is No Try

I just got back from a morning session of department head PD looking over Damian Cooper’s ideas on assessment; it was a lot to take in and I’m trying to give some voice to the doubts while also sorting through what I liked about Cooper’s ideas.

Time management is a concern I have. It’s one thing to suggest that assessment be the result of diligent and ongoing consultation with students, but it’s another to ask that this be done when you have 90+ students in a single semester. A system that is still mired in 19th and 20th Century ideas about reportage and teachers who want to make assessment meaningful are about as far apart as two things can get. Teachers trying to do this in the current framework would be stretched mighty thin.

Our reportage is still very much time specific and causes a great deal of stress with teachers and students. We’re coming up on midterms now, we’ve been given a specific time (down to the minute) when percentage grades, specific learning skills and precise comments are required. In the next breath we’re being told to open up assessment, despecify grades into learning levels and provide constant meaningful assessment as feedback.

Perhaps the most valuable thing Cooper’s ideas can do is create a political movement for change at the Ministry level. By changing parental (and teacher) expectations around assessment, perhaps we can move towards a more flexible, meaningful reporting environment that still provides post secondary education with the yard stick they need for entrance, but also allows us to focus more on developing student learning.

Imagine a system where teachers and students create a constantly evolving assessment space that is open to parents, completely transparent. Rather than trying to hit specific timelines behind closed doors, teachers are able to develop assessment with students and constantly update how students are transitioning through the curriculum. The criteria are open and wide ranging, taking into account everything from soft skills like teamwork and self directed learning, all the way to curriculum specific hard skills. This open system would have to get rid of the edu-speak because students and teachers must be able to observe and participate in it while parents would be able to look in; a truly transparent and meaningful exercise in assessment. A less rigid grading system not dictated by mid-term specific timing, or percentage marks means that grades could evolve and develop while a student is with a teacher, allowing for latest, greatest results without math games like weighting creating even more abstract results. Grades would be end-of-course-weighted to ensure a better look at what students have actually learned in the course, rather than forcing early grades before they can demonstrate best work.

The Khan Academy concept of competence would be, perhaps, a better way to consider whether or not a student has actually attained mastery of a concept. Percentage grades are an abstract concept. I got low Cs in high school math up until grade 12, and in my 2 senior years I ended up getting 50s and failing, because I had nothing like the foundation needed to succeed. 50% is an abstract concept, it has nothing to do with whether you know the subject or not, yet we think of it as a pass. Would you want this level of grading to apply to the mechanic who just fixed your brakes? Or the pilot landing the plane? The static, percentage system has somehow become a habit that is seen to have academic validity, because it’s harsh? It seems to offer some kind of certainty? When it comes to hard skills in curriculum, a student knows it or they don’t, they can demonstrate it or they can’t. This isn’t a question of whether they are present or participating, it’s a matter of skill.

The Khan idea is that you either understand the concept and can demonstrate it consistently, or you don’t. If you don’t, you keep hacking away at it without fear of failure, until you get a handle on it. One of the big fears we face in the class is risk aversion, which is almost entirely a result of the arbitrary, static and specific grading and reporting system we use. I couldn’t get grade 12s to try things and fail, they only wanted to do it right the first time (“because I have to get high marks to get into university”). We feed that fear with midterms and percentage grades.

If we’re assessing skills, do you really want to assess it based on “they kind of know it” (is that what a 64% says?), or “they pretty much know it” (77%)? There is no validity in this, just a vague kind of petty certainty, put in place to make it easy for post secondary education to think they are accurately separating the wheat from the chaff; it doesn’t serve learning at all.

I guess I like Damian’s ideas, but simplifying grading from percentages to levels doesn’t go far enough. It really comes down to you can demonstrate what you know or you can’t. You can do this in many different and meaningful ways, but you either can or you can’t.

Do or do not, there is no try.

Do you know it or don’t you? Can you demonstrate big understandings or not? This certainly applies to literacy and numeracy, and I’d argue that any subject area that has any kind of coherent development of skills (ie: all of them).

In that brave new world of assessment, post secondary institutions would have to stop thinking that 83% describes a person’s knowledge of a complex field. To begin with, they should start basing entrance on learning skills, which could easily be expanded to target successful criteria for post secondary students (self discipline, ability to overcome learning obstacles, attendance and punctuality, timeliness, peer pressure skills, etc). If teachers could get away from agonizing over abstract percentages that have no real world meaning and simply look at whether or not a student grasps the skills they need to have, we’d finally have assessment serving learning.

 

FUTURE SCHOOL:  A bit of fiction about an open, individualized education system after the Singularity.

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DIY Electrical Generation Should Be A Mandated Future

Everyone is wringing their hands over the disaster in Japan, questioning nuclear energy (usually while using it to power their computers to post complaints about it). I’m a fan of nuclear energy, but it does come with risks, especially when you hit well run facilities with a massive earthquake and then a ten metre wall of water. In these circumstances a disaster is immanent.

If we really want to deal with our electrical dependency we need to change the way we’re using it. We only develop industrial scale electrical generation to keep prices artificially low and hide the costs of generating it. Don’t think it’s hidden? Do you have a nuclear/fossil fuel fired/wind farm generating system near you? If you do, you don’t think it’s hidden.
Eventually what you want is locally generated electricity. If this is done on small, local scales it doesn’t have to be painful. The NIMBYism that surrounds generation is because industrial scale operations are planted in people’s back yards. A personal wind collector isn’t that big a deal, dozens of three hundred foot tall towers are.
Conservation shouldn’t be a choice, it should be a standard. From the existing infrastructure a cap of 100kWh/person/month in a residence could be a starting point. We need existing infrastructure to maintain this standard for us. That means continuing to use nuclear and fossil fuel generators.  If you want to generate your own after that you’d have first dibs on using it (it would be added to your total usable amount). Whatever you don’t use in a month is refunded back to you. A family of three who generates 200KWhs a month would be able to live much as we do now (we average about 500kWh a month in a 1700 sq ft house in Canada). A dozen solar panels on the roof would exceed this if well placed and maintained. Our neighbor has just done this very thing, they are making more electricity than they use in a month now. Three houses could share the cost and maintenance of a small scale wind generator and live at current consumption levels comfortably.
This is with existing technology. Future technology in both concentrated solar and lighter than air wind turbines that hang above the boundary layer of air are much more efficient. Focused solar produces stunning amounts of energy in a short time and lighter than air wind turbines resolve many of the problems surrounding noise while at the same time making use of the more constant and efficient air streams above the turbulent air that flows over the ground.
A mandated push into self generated electricity would put an end to industrial scale mega projects (nuclear, wind farm, fossil fuel burning or otherwise). The problem we have is that we want other people to do all the work to generate electricity out of sight and out of mind. We take no responsibility in what we consume and then complain about how it’s all being done. In many cases we’re completely ignorant of how these systems work, and after reading the panicky comments on the internet this week, I’ve realized many people are happy to live in fear and ignorance of nuclear power generation as long as their bills are low. How someone can attack nuclear power generation while using it to power their house and post stupid comments on the internet is an irony of our times. It’s time we started taking responsibility for what we are using.
Decentralizing the electrical system means making a system that is less a one way delivery system from industry to consumer and more a web of interconnected users and generators. This smart grid would encourage and make use of locally developed energy generation. Even if you aren’t using your solar at a given moment you could be using your neighbor’s wind or locally developed hydro. By using local sources the losses in transmission fall dramatically. Our current industrial/remote generation model loses about 6.5% of the energy produced to transmission. The further you have to transmit, the more you lose. Those long transmission systems are the sources of failure in ice storms and what over heat when energy use is too much. Transmission is our greatest single point of failure (though generation is giving it a run for its money in the news this week).
Until we take responsibility for generating at least some of the energy we want to use, we will keep making massive, industrial scale power generators that cause local problems. Taking the money spent on new, large projects and applying to locally generated power is a first step. Not forcing industrial scale energy production just because it’s sustainable (a question in itself), but truly democratizing energy production. Existing infrastructure could be modernized and eventually downsized as the power grid becomes decentralized, more efficient and a true multi-directional conduit for us to share our power amongst ourselves.
In that future, Japan would have had fewer nuclear power plants operating when the tsunami hit, locals in Wellington county wouldn’t be upset over heavy handed provincial plans to force massive wind farms on them, and we’d pour money into the companies that are doing R&D on more efficient solar and wind systems. That future might have solar energy collecting windows in every home, focused solar collectors that rise out of the ground every morning and disappear at night, and turbines hanging in the steady winds hundreds of metres up, constantly generating in a small but sustainable way.
There is no doubt that large scale electrical production still needs to occur. Nuclear systems need to become even more efficient, and eventually lead to fusion and other more advanced energy systems. We learn a lot from generating nuclear energy (more than we do from doing what cavemen did on an industrial scale by burning fossil fuels). What we learn from those big projects might eventually lead us to orbiting energy production and other space based solutions.
Even at its best a massive population centre would have trouble keeping up with demand. Businesses are by far the largest energy hogs. Stories last summer about stores leaving their doors open and air conditioning on full blast so customers would be enticed in on a hot day are representative of how businesses don’t think about conservation. A 100kWh/1000 sq/ft/month limit unless they begin to generate their own would be a start. Having much larger roofs, these stores could easily produce much more electricity if they wished, and perhaps they’d be a bit more reticent about flushing it out the door on a hot day if they were paying properly for it.
If we could begin the process of diversification by demanding legislation that requires an energy network rather than a distribution system (this is already happening), and encourages people to take on the responsibility of at least some of their own energy generation and consumption, then at least we’d be moving in a better direction than our current one of ignorance, fear and NIMBYism.