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an immanent disruption

We’re on the verge of a market change due to digital distribution, very similar to what happened in the music industry a decade ago. Just as music changed from a manufactured, industrial medium (CDs) to a digital, fluid medium (mp3s), text books (and books in general, but especially texts because of the ludicris overhead) will begin to ‘leak’ digitally.

As the means to access digital texts becomes more available, the medium will force a change in how distribution occurs. Because (like the music industry before them) the text book publishing industry has a huge industrial infrastructure they have to try and continually justify, they will not adapt to the new means of text transmission. Disruption is immanent and unavoidable.

“This certainly doesn’t mean the end of the traditional textbook, but if the existing publishers follow the footsteps of other industries in trying to resist this disruption rather than adapt to it, expect plenty of angry stories about the evils of internet “piracy,” with little recognition that piracy isn’t the problem at all.”

Already open source publications have started to appear.

The text book publishing industry has fed at great expense from the public (and private) school systems almost since the beginning. The change of transmission medium poses some interesting challenges for teachers, but also many opportunities for authors and editors, especially in locally developed courses. Without having to carry massive printing and shipping costs, and all the sales and marketing infrastructure that has to force it into a high volume industry to stay financially viable, text books could easily be developed at very local levels quite affordably. Ministries could share resources across common curriculum and the results would be locally grown content that fits our specific needs. No more mass market American focused text books that we have no choice but to buy into. The elearning system has already proven the viability of this.

Academics have long peer edited, reviewed, assessed and produced their own literature. Teachers are more than capable of doing the same, and I know many who would happily take a period in a semester to build a new e-text for board or provincial distribution. In house, without the weight of paper publication attached, educational texts could become much more current and specifically designed for student needs, much as the OERB and elearning courses have been written by Ontario teachers for Ontario students. In many cases, that same material could be re purposed to an e-text format without having to reinvent the wheel. Because the material is owned communally and locally, it could easily and often be updated and maintained for continuous consumption. Following the idea of a modular text book, teachers could even assemble specific material in a specific order prior to beginning their class – a digital version of those booklets you used to buy from professors with the selected readings bound in them.

No more 15 year old texts warning of the impending release of Windows XP, no more mold, no more focuses on other countries because our choices simply didn’t offer a Canadian equivalent.

This is my kind of disruption.

To push things along, I’m presenting an ereader pilot tomorrow at our heads’ meeting. We’re hoping to see where the technology is and how etexts might work in the classroom. There’s nothing worse than being on the wrong side of the fence when everything changes. Go look up one of the modern history texts in your school this week and find the chapter on the recent collapse of the iron curtain, and you’ll see why.

Want to see a future text book? Have a look here. Whether it’s ipads, Knos, laptops, PDAs or one of a million variations on the Android tablet, we’re on the verge of making digital content easier to access than paper based content. The education system, the main source of income for this fumbling giant, will need to find a better way as it collapses, and collapse it will. No one invested in billions in infrastructure and decades of consistent market place dominance will even know how to begin to adapt, even if what they are doing is wasteful, expensive and self serving.
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elearning and the teacher/student relationship

A little while back I caught a National Geographic show studying human intelligence. In studying various great ape social groups they narrowed down perhaps the most exceptional aspect of human being: our ability to teach each other. Most of the technology we develop is keyed to enhancing this aspect of human civilization.  What began as the transmission of basic skills has evolved into a world wide civilization that has peaked into the heart of matter and seen to the edge of the universe. We suddenly find ourselves holding immense power, and only seek to discover more. The ability to learn and teach are powerful skills indeed.

The fundamental relationship at the heart of this transmission of knowledge: master/apprentice, teacher/student, mentor/mentee, exists in every human (and, it appears, any intelligent animal) society, and is generally acknowledged as one of great importance. Whether you’re a Sensei in a dojo, a master craftsman passing on the skills of your trade, or a teacher in a modern education system, the fundamental nature of your job is the same: transmission of knowledge through human contact.

Transmission of knowledge occurs very effectively through these human relationships. When I think about key teachers in my life, they ring true for me because they were people of exceptional emotional honesty, as well as knowledgeable people. They related to me on many levels. I see students cotton on to various teachers in the school because, on many levels, they vibrate at the same frequency. From an administrative point of view, this is why it’s vital that schools have many different kinds of teachers who teach in different ways. It’s also one of the fundamental problems with trying to systematize the transmission of learning.

We’ve got the elearning Ontario conference coming up and I’m just coming off a semester where I had to manage no less than 6 elearning courses. Having now taught elearning remotely and in-class, I’m trying to wrestle with the challenges of teaching through the elearning system. In-class, I found good students frustrated because they felt isolated from the teacher (because of the split focus between the online course and the physical presence of the teacher). I found weak students frustrated because of poor computer literacy. They didn’t want or seek a stronger relationship with the teacher, but couldn’t access the course information or assignments behind a digital veil; anger was often the result.

Over the years I’ve had some wonderful teachable moments with remote students. Sometimes through text (with exceptional writers and readers in 4U English), but more often through video conference (which doesn’t demand a poet’s touch for honest, direct contact). A while back, our board set up an Adobe Connect server allowing me to talk to students directly. While still not as immediate as an in-class relationship with a student, the video link does a lot to mitigate the sense of isolation. Unfortunately, the html only elearning system has no intrinsic ability to make this multi-media link possible.

As we begin to move from oil dependence, elearning is going to become a more critical means of delivering curriculum. Being physically present in the same place at the same time will become increasingly expensive. At the moment, elearning does a lot to minimize the personal nature of that teacher/student relationship. Much of this revolves around bandwidth, technology accessibility and lack of experience in both students and teachers. I’ve been sitting in school waiting 10 seconds for *every* page to load while working through elearning – and those were text pages. In addition to the technical issues, elearning also contains courses not written by the teachers delivering them. Any teacher who teaches other people’s material knows how awkward this can be. Elearning is still new, and is having on going problems in its completion rates due to these difficulties.

At home I’m an online game player. I have lists of friends, very few of whom I’ve met in person, many of whom I feel I know well. We’ve fought zombies, explored strange wildernesses and worked together through all sorts of adventures. With sufficient bandwidth and technology on site, multimedia information can flow between people in surprisingly complex and meaningful ways. It’s still not the same as being in the same place, but it can come astonishingly close. If you ever have a chance to play WoW, or another in-depth online game, you know what I’m talking about.

I’m not in elearning because it will solve all of our problems instantly, that is ridiculous. I’m in it because it is embryonic. Using technology that people couldn’t even imagine 2 generations ago, I want to try to find a way to bring the essence of that fantastically ancient learning relationship alive, not just through eyes, vocal chords and ears, but through fibre optics, interactive media and the cybernetics that have become a part of who we are.

It’s as close as I can get to sci-fi while teaching. Frustrating? Sure, but I get to “boldly go…”, and that is priceless.

.

Notes:

This is a post from a few weeks ago on that elearning pilot program. It includes a review of the student survey statistics from the end of the course.

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Peak oil is all about peak food production

You can’t feed six billion people without it. I’m reading The End Of Food right now. The level of societal change we would have to undertake to revert 80% of the population to manual food production would (will) be impossible. The fact that we don’t even see it coming is just absurd.
The whole middle east uprising isn’t about freedom or democracy at all, it’s about food. Prices skyrocketed, wheat yields in Africa collapsed starting 2 years ago, corn is unavailable so Americans can drive pickup trucks, and not even iron fisted dictators can stop a hungry mob. The amount of press afforded the “Arab Awakening” in terms of freedom, democracy or the even more crass “power of social networking” is completely out to lunch.
Middle east uprisings aren’t about democracy, or rights, but food prices and cost of living. I read an article on the ug99 crop fungus in WIRED last year. Unconnected? I suspect not.
A verilent new version of a crop disease that almost crippled the world in the 70s (saved by some gene splicing and dna magic) has figured out how to overcome the GM crops designed to resist it – it starts in Northern Africa, causing wheat to all but disappear from the market, corn has since been diverted to ethanol production, making it in short supply… chaos ensues, but we try and say, “it’s because they want to be like us!”
Who said colonialism is dead?
The future looks bleak If we want to be teaching useful education, we should be teaching them how to grow their own food, without oil, immediately. Instead we spend a fortune running a school that is, on net analysis, doing more damage to the world than good – and we’re in the business of making better people! Imagine what the net worth of a self-serving business is in a world of dwindling resources.
Instead we complain about high gas prices, irrationally saying that they should be lower because that is more convenient for us and go on buying gene-copyrighted crops (that are about to fail wholesale) from Monsanto from the lowest bidder.
Local sustainability should become an immediate local, provincial and national mandate. Globalism has collapsed, but we’ve become so dependent on a broken system that we are virtually helpless.
We’ve taught ourselves to be helpless on the eve of the greatest disaster in human history.
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back from the future

Ever wondered what it would be like to teach a class where all students have their own laptop? Anyone reading this has probably spend some time wondering what it would be like to have internet access and computers for all students. No digital divide…

I’m just wrapping up a semester where I was asked to pilot the elearning version of the Career Studies, grade 10 half semester course. I was teaching all of the career studies in a school of approximately 1500 students. We have a workplace focused high school in our board, but it’s far enough away that most parents opt to keep their children in the community at our school, as a result we have a full spectrum of students, all of whom must take this mandatory class.  The students in the open career studies course ran the gamut from highly at-risk and barely literate to students already attending lectures at The Perimeter Institute in Waterloo. The grade range ran from end to end (from 0 to 100%).

What follows is a review of the elearning pilot, with some supporting statistics and observations.

Summary


If I had to summarize quickly, I’d say that doing career studies in a hybrid elearning class was very useful. Students assume they know more about computers than they actually do (partly due to the fact that we keep telling them that they are digital natives). Doing elearning in a hybrid/introductory way does several things:

• it shows many of them how hopelessly addicted to Facebook they are (which created some interesting self-reflexive analysis in the classroom)

Any review of network traffic showed Facebook returning page views at a rate of 50 to 1 over ALL OTHER INTERNET TRAFFIC COMBINED. They are unable to turn it off and are constantly distracted by it. Turning it off at the router caused a minor uprising where they all suddenly appear to have grown Law degrees and a working knowledge of the Constitution.


This broke the myth of the digital native for me.  When I asked them to estimate their own expertise on computers, I (like most others) expected this:

The FAKE stat.

… but I got this:

The real stat.

…which looks mighty similar to the ability curve you get in the general population.


This elearning course, the first for all of these students, pointed out a number of challenges:

  • it makes students aware of how little they know about basic computer functionality (file types and organization, how to edit simple documents, basic network and computer operation, online digital tools that are available – not one of them had heard of Prezi or knew that their hotmail accounts would allow them to save documents online). Less than 1/4 had ever used googledocs.
  • it makes those students that do have technical literacy appreciate (and be appreciated for) what they know (instead of telling them that they all know it because they are teenagers, when they clearly don’t, which devalues the knowledge).  Student tech-wizes are as rare as tech-wizes in the general population, but we belittle their knowledge by assuming they all ‘know computers’.
  • it gives students a fundamental understanding of the elearning system. A few will see it as an avenue for success (which is good), but many who suddenly find they may need elearning to graduate will see far greater success because of their exposure here.

How the course went:

Doing it as an open/full spectrum course clearly shed light on what I’ve always found to be true; elearning’s self-directed element is what kills it for most at-risk students. It introduces a medium between the student and the material that gives them an excuse not to do work, usually while clearly highlighting their lack of digital skills (which causes embarrasment and some difficult classroom management situations).

I did elearning in Peel, and as far back as 2005, Peel was aiming elearning at University level students who had shown a clear aptitude for self-directed learning and strong computer skills. Without either of these skills (skills I’d argue that are developed much more significantly in academic/university level classes), elearning is likely to result in very poor success rates, specifically in non-academic streams.


Unless we’re going to focus on developing self-directed learning and digital competencies in non-academic classrooms it will continue this way.

As things developed, I had to go through the course, collect together all the summative pieces and print them out on paper for about 1/3 of the students in order for them to complete the required material. They did not have the technical skills to edit documents in a word processor and upload it to the elearning system, let alone keep their digital selves organized enough to find assignments they started (many never named files and copied over previous work with the same default file name).  There was little sense of continuity from class to class in these students, most of whom saw it as a Facebook miasma, rather than a course to pass.


A student’s ability to organize becomes much weaker when I would find the vast majority of the machines a student brought to me with a problem running Facebook in the background (it’s hard to stay organized, it’s harder to stay organized when facebook constantly interrupts you with pointless trivia).

Conclusion

I think the real problem is the myth of the digital native. We got shown this last year. Have you seen it? This kind of thinking drives me crazy. Computer skills are taught, they aren’t some kind of natural occurance based on your birth date. What this really is is fear. Older and/or less technically inclined people who feel overwhelmed by technology dress up kids today in this because they see them hop onto a computer without worrying about doing something wrong. Being familiar with something doesn’t indicate skill. If you actually observe what they are doing, you’ll see (as I did during this course) that weak students are digital serfs – they don’t know how to do anything, solve anything or look into new things, they only know how to do one or two things (usually Facebook and youtube: the internet for the dim).

What’s worse is that students who have developed real skill have it belittled when some Luddite says, “yeah, you guys all know this stuff, you’re digital natives.” (subtext: now I don’t have to address it or waste valuable class time trying to teach it to you)

Digital literacy should start in the junior grades, and they should be developing specific skills (data management, media creation, file management). In grade 9 there should be specific digital literacy targets in core subjects, but there aren’t (mainly due to a dirth of teachers who feel comfortable enough themselves to teach it). We expect them to know this stuff intrinsically, which is ludicrous.  21st Century skills will be much more vital to student success than 19th Century skills like sitting in factory organized rows listening to a teacher speak, but we don’t teach them.

In the meantime, boards propagate the myth of the digital native that excuses us from addressing digital literacy as a serious issue (they showed us that video above at a staff meeting).

Familiarity with computers isn’t a developed skill-set.  Self-taught digital skills are mostly just habit forming. Watching those careers students struggle with basic issues made me realize that elearning is really only designed for success for the top third of digitally literate students. The rest don’t have the vaguest idea of what they don’t know:

“Hey, I can’t edit this document!”
“You’re looking at it in WORD viewer…”
blank stares…

“I can’t find my file”
“You’ve saved all of your files in the course as the same name and over written it again and again.  That is why you have fourteen documents called document(1), document(2)…”
blank stares…

Some Other Observations:

Even though perhaps a quarter of our students come from rural/farming backgrounds, high speed internet penetration is quite good. This is probably due to two main factors: it’s now seen as a requirement for academic success (at home) and prioritized, and long range wireless (wimax, etc) has become standard in the area. 


 I suspect the real dividing line now is purely financial, which begs the question: when are we going to support students in getting over the digital divide?

When given a choice about whether they could have taken this class as elearning or in a traditional class, almost two thirds opted for the regular class. There was a real lash back against using computers for something productive – it spoiled/interfered with their only purpose (Facebook/Youtube access).  It’s hard to convince people that a toy is actually a tool.
As you can see, the same students willing to take the course over again in a hybrid classroom, are also willing to kick the training wheels off and do elearning completely remotely. If they get it, they get it.

An interesting discrepancy between technical skill and willingness to self-direct learning. The whole student centered thing is still pretty new, but getting students to direct their own learning is like pulling teeth. This goes beyond juniors in an open careers class. My university grade 12 computer science students were just as unwilling initially. In their case it was risk aversion. They were so afraid of not getting the numbers they need to go to university that they had no interest in doing open research that wouldn’t lead to a perfect result. 


Whether it’s how we’ve taught them to be dependent or how we’ve taught them to be terrified of errors, we aren’t producing self-directed learners, which is a tragedy.



The last one is hardware specific. The netbooks were coveted at the beginning of the course, but their limitations quickly became apparent. I posted the most common complaints (too slow, though this had more to do with the school network than the netbooks, but the digital natives didn’t comprehend that), and the tiny screen. Elearning is set up in long, texty pages. Students who aren’t strong readers go bonkers trying to read it on a 600 pixels tall netbook screen. Stronger readers can deal with it (and remember what they’re looking at), but for the weak readers, every scroll or paging action is another excuse to click on that Facebook tab and get hit by lots of disconnected, pointless information (the way they like it). 


The course would have been better served by a device that rotates for reading longways, then rotates back for data entry (or a big square screen, I guess).

The raw data from the student survey is below. This pilot was a very useful program that shed light on all sorts of issues. I was happy to do it and would like to see it continue, but I fear that it uncovers so many holes that it will quietly disappear back into the ether. Here’s hoping it doesn’t.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask. The data was collected from 52 students in November, 2010, and 46 students in the second week of January, 2011.

The raw data can be found here (Excel format):

https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B53Xb3MP_t-cOGYxZjI1NzItNjExZS00YzQwLTllMjYtNWJkMzgyMmE3YzUy&hl=en&authkey=CLqC08kH


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Sustainable Anything?

My on going reading has led me through Coupland’s Player One, Saul’s The Collapse of Globalism, and Wright’s A Brief History of Progress. I’m currently on John Birmingham‘s After America, an alternate history novel about what would have happened if a freak event had wiped out almost all of Continental North America on the eve of the Iraq invasion (if you like Tom Clancy, you’ll love Birmingham).

Alternate histories aside, there seems to be a rising sense of urgency in both fiction and non-fiction about the predicament we are getting ourselves into. I’ve long thought that the zombie apocalypse sub-culture (and believe me, there is one – Zombieland and Shaun of the Dead are just the tips of the iceberg) is a subconscious response to the impending Malthusian collapse we face.  I saw a version of this at the ROM the other week. How can we not see this ending in disaster? In our lifetimes?

The interdependencies of modern life make it inherently frail. We’re so isolated from the necessities of life that virtually all of us never give them a second thought. Food is never a problem, neither is clean drinking water. These things becomes immediate, panicky concerns when Walmart and all the rest aren’t delivering at the lowest possible price. We don’t have a grasp on what the actual costs of life really are; we are increasingly unprepared for a breakdown.

Human history has lasted for tens of thousands of years. All of those lifetimes were, with precious few exceptions, dependent on the individual being able to contribute to their own and their immediate society’s good. You didn’t get an extended childhood (into your early 20s) or a retirement where you could ‘stop’ working. Civilization grew out of our ability to sustain ourselves through increasingly complex group work, making these moments of non-responsibility possible. But as Wright mentions in “…Progress”, there isn’t a single example of a great civilization that hasn’t collapsed under its own weight. As an experiment in civilized growth, we seem incapable of recognizing our own unsustainability until it is too late. We seem intent on building civilization to the point where it can carry a large number of members who contribute little or nothing, or actively work to take more than they need. Wright’s case studies on Easter Island and the Roman Empire especially ring true – 2 successful civilizations that died under their own weight by destroying their own ecosystems. Wright’s conclusion is that we face a mass extinction when we finally exhaust the ability of the small planet we’re on to sustain the groaning weight of billions.

If we’re ever to truly develop a successful civilization, it must recognize our ability to overcome natural limitations, and it must recognize our need to self limit our own growth, even though that works against every evolved fibre in our animal beings. Some people appear to recognize this, but the vast majority of the human race does not. We will not have a civilization for millenia until we develop the self-discipline at an individual and societal level to recognize what an industrialized human being is capable of. If pursuit of technology and science are a pure goal, this understanding has to be at the basis of it, or else everything built will consume itself.

Nature is a wonderful system because it can balance itself. It can seem cruel (from a self absorbed human point of view), but it is sustainable, and had been for a billion years on Earth in many forms. It is nuanced, non-linear and complex, unlike our ridiculous systems based on simple greed, self-interest and insulated simplicity. Perhaps its time to start taking a serious look at how nature does its business, and create a human civilization that recognizes some fundamental truths.

I read an article in the Economist in which they suggested we can reduce population by increasing standard of living (this has already happened in many industrialized countries). Their solution to world overpopulation? Make poor countries more like rich countries, and they’ll have less babies (and more ipods). China tried this, and it worked… for a while, and now they find they can’t look after a massive bubble of aging population with too few children, and want to relax the one child policy (which is responsible for half a billion less people in the world today). The Chinese are richer than they have been, but in a population crisis. Economics won’t lead to a solution here. Neither will simplistic birth control measures.

So we can’t have less babies or we end up with many older people living much longer while not contributing. We are forced into a continuing growth bubble in a world that is running out of resources and is focused primarily on individual wealth rather than societal good.

Maybe we’ll get it right next time, after the impending crash.

 

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the grace, the space, the pace

I just spent a month on the road, driving from Ontario, Canada to Tofino on the western coast of British Columbia before driving back through The States.  It was a great family road trip, but after having spent days and days (and days) on some of the best riding roads on the continent (we crossed the Rockies twice and spent time in Yellowstone and the Black Hills) while stuck on four wheels, I’ve had a lot of time to think about what makes riding a motorcycle such a wonderful thing by comparison.

The trip was made in a Buick Encore, a small SUV which allowed us to cover 500 kilometre average days in relative comfort (my sweaty back on leather seats notwithstanding).  Even when we weren’t swallowing miles across the continent we were touring around Yellowstone, or hitting the beaches and trails south of Tofino, so we ended up doing well over twelve thousand kilometres in less than a month.  The Buick managed it all with no problems and mid-thirties mpg efficiency.  Other than getting shot in the windscreen by kids with a pellet gun in Montana, the car is in good shape (you haven’t lived until you’ve been shot at in Montana).

I don’t usually spend much time on four wheels in the summer these days, though I used to be car mad, chasing high performance vehicles and taking advanced driving schools when I was younger.  I was well aware of apexes and how to efficiently corner long before I started riding, but this trip emphasized just how limited your options are in a car.  While you’ve got a whole lane width to find apexes and explore a road on a bike, you’re trapped in train tracks in a car with only a couple of inches to move side to side.  I constantly bumped up against this limitation and found the lack of space tiresome.  On roads where I’d be dancing on a bike, in the car I’m forced to contain myself, constantly watching for oncoming four wheelers that weren’t.

 Cornering in a car on a road isn’t fun, it’s tedious.



Even with the magic of leaning into a corner (which lets you dance on a tire instead of dumping all your weight to the outside) out of the equation, driving on twisty roads was a pale imitation of riding on the same tarmac.  This was emphasized when crossing the Bighorn National Forest which had staggeringly twisty roads hanging from the sides of truly epic mountains (when they weren’t falling off them as they were in multiple places).  A car on this road was tedious and sometimes terrifying rather than electrifying; that space also means a safety margin.

The claustrophobia I felt in our small SUV was of two types:  the boxed in a cage type and the stuck on rails on the road type.  On my first ride the day after we got home, I revelled at the sky above and the space to stretch, as well as how wide and accommodating the roads felt.  Days on end in a car might be logistically necessary, but they aren’t fun.

On this trip we saw people travelling in all manner of vehicles from the bafflingly expensive recreational vehicle to the sports car. Corvettes were an obvious and particularly popular choice in the US. On most roads this massive sled’s six foot plus width completely fills a small lane, giving the driver no room to move at all and leaving oncoming traffic to dodge his wing mirrors if he’s looking for an apex. Coming around a corner on a small mountain pass and seeing an RV spilling over into my lane was a common occurrence. The sheer size of North American vehicles bring their own problems.

Decades ago Jaguar came out with one of the most famous automotive marketing slogans in history.  It captured the luxury grand touring ethos of Jaguar to such a degree that it has remained in the public consciousness since.  I’d like to repurpose that brilliant piece of marketing for the vehicle that best exemplifies it.  The motorcycle, for all its short comings, offers you the space to move gracefully down the road.  With that grace comes the pace that motorcycles enjoy, which would explain why we got overtaken by so many of them on this trip.

 The opportunity to retrace my four wheeled journey, especially through Yellowstone and the Bighorn National Forest is on my mind now.  It’s a fifteen hour slog west over the plains to get to the edge of motorcycling’s magic kingdom.  From there it’s the South Dakota Badlands, Black Hills, over Bighorn and on to Yellowstone.  That would be a truly stunning motorcycling memory.


Some roads from the trip that might prompt you westward (if you’re in the east):

Bottom left:  sometimes the road can’t hang on to the side of the mountain…


Some suggested must sees as you head west across the northern US:

 South Dakota Badlands Scenic Road:
The Black Hills are riddled with small twisty roads, just try and avoid early August unless you like riding slowly behind farm vehicles.  We stayed in Custer, but Rapid City has great restaurants and is a full on city with everything you could need, so I’d suggest that as a base camp for exploring the Hills:
Bighorn National Park was a brilliant surprise.  We did Shell to Dayton through Burgess Junction.  The roads ranged from some of the most dangly and exciting we’d seen to miles of gravel, ideal for an adventure bike.  The 2-up Harley riders didn’t look like they were enjoying the road based colonoscopy so much.  The national parks stop at Shell Falls was brilliant, with all sorts of information on hand about where we were:
Cody is worth a stop.  It’s a great town with everything you could need with a genuine western flair.  The two loops in Yellowstone each take a day, don’t think you can burn around them as quick as you can (you can’t).  Between small roads, animals that weigh thousands of pounds walking onto the road at random, your bike at seven thousand plus feet breathing hard, and the other tourists, you’ll find rushing Yellowstone stressful.  You’d also be missing the point.  Stop often and check out the geothermal features and stunning scenery.  A day for the north loop, a day for the south loop, and enjoy taking your time.


I’d hoped to get down to Jackson Hole in the Teutons in the south, but didn’t.  Maybe on two wheels in the future.  West Yellowstone offered better hotel rates than the North Gate which tends to be busier with better interstate access, but cheap hotel options are few and far between around the park.


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The Mobile Chicanery of RVs

I’m at the end of a month long drive across North America and back.  It’s time to have a go at the RV/motorhome crowd after being stuck behind these monkeys for hours on end.  The woman who got out of her truck/trailer combo near Creemore on the weekend, blocking half the pumps and causing a line just shrugged and said, “they’ll have to wait.”  It’s that kind of thinking that seems to typify the RV owner’s outlook.  The Germans renting them to drive across Vancouver Island to Tofino on the very twisty and rough Highway 4 also seemed particularly adept at getting in front of you and then stopping, but then they’re driving large, awkward, unfamiliar vehicles in a foreign country on difficult roads.

Since you end up spending a lot of time looking at the back of RVs while driving across the continent, a recurring annoyance are the names manufacturers give to the damned things.  Popular ideas revolve around freedom, power and exploration, all things that RVs don’t do.  What they actually do is create a huge amount of drag and cost to your trip while giving the impression of independence, as long as you like living like a refugee (Tom’s right, you don’t), and taking your housework with you.

We spent a few days at Pacific Playgrounds near Campbell River on Vancouver Island and I was astonished at the size and cost of the trailers and RVs on display.  In addition to the (I’m told) tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars dropped on a trailer or RV, they were pressed together inches apart in this trailer park.  The sound of poorly raised children screaming would begin at sunrise every day and continue throughout.  What little space you had was considered public and you could expect dozens of people to walk through it daily without batting an eyelash.  That people would spend upwards of fifty grand for a trailer or more than my first two houses for motorhome and then enjoy single digit mpg figures while having no space is living the dream, but it isn’t mine.

A big motorhome holds about 150 gallons of gas – at the three bucks US a gallon it was on this trip, that’s a $450+US ($585CAD) fill up each time, and that’s with cheap US gas.  In Canada you can expect to drop about eight hundred bucks (!!!) on each fill up.  If you’re enjoying 8mpg, as seems typical for these things, then you’re getting just over a thousand miles to a tank.  If you’re moving like we were on this trip, averaging over 500 miles a day, then you’re looking at $200+US a day in gas – we paid just over $100 a day for our hotel stays (all of which included breakfast) and we didn’t have to do the dishes, or drive like turds blocking the roads.  You might make a bit back by not eating in restaurants all the time, but unless you really enjoy housekeeping why would you take it on holiday with you?

After following around Nomad Explorers and Freedom Masters for
weeks on end, I’ve got some more realistic suggestions for RV names.
In case you can’t tell, I am not a fan of the RV/motorhome lifestyle.  You can find comfortable, long distance capable vehicles that get above 30mpg, cost a fraction as much and will commute you to work capably instead of sitting in your driveway costing you time, money and space even when not in use.  You’ll also get to sleep in real beds and skip the dishes with the money you aren’t pouring into an RV in gas costs (I’ll leave the transmission rebuilds, toilet maintenance and the fact that campsites cost you half what a motel room does nowadays out of the equation).  To top it all off you won’t have to live like a refugee in a trailer park.

Listen to Tom, he knows…
Mid-thirties MPG, quick in the
mountains, effortless on the plains,
our Buick Encore was a comfortable
and efficient way to see the
continent.  That’s a geothermal
vent in Yellowstone making the
steam, not the Buick.



Ignoring the hundreds of thousands of dollars I’d have had to pour into a motorhome or trailer and truck to pull it, the cost of us doing this same trip using a recreational (and I use the term lightly) vehicle would have been stratospheric.  Ferry fees for a motorhome/RV onto and off Vancouver Island are six times what we paid, costing you well north of six hundred bucks for each crossing.


Averaging mid-thirties miles per gallon in our little SUV, we spent well under a thousand bucks in gas carrying three adult sized people and their luggage comfortably.  An 8mpg (typical) RV would have cost us more than seven grand just in gasoline!!!  We paid about five grand in hotels over the month on the road, some of that included a house rental.  Our hotel and gas costs were less than gas alone in an RV.  Had the three ferry trips been with the take-all-your-shit-with-you RV variety we would have been looking at a two grand ferry bill instead of the less than three hundred we paid.  


I would have enjoyed a bit more space, and I’ve often wondered how big a vehicle I’d need to bring a motorbike along on a big family road trip, but with Honda Ridgelines and other efficient crew cab trucks getting high twenties in gas mileage, and modern, large utility vans getting up there too, there are agile, non-road blocking options that let me still get close to 30mpg while bringing a bike along, and I don’t have to live like a refugee while using them.

The idea of a reasonably sized vehicle to move people ends for me in the realm of a  minivan.  The thought of a hyper efficient human mover appeals though.  VW is looking a few years down the road at re-producing a futuristic version of its mini-bus.  That’s as far down the RV lifestyle path as I dare to tread.  What VW is doing looks a bit sci-fi and improbable, but an efficient hybrid people mover that could carry a bike?  I’m in.

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A Kinder, Gentler Cross Canada Touring Unit

We’re about to undertake a cross Canada drive and I’m already missing the thought of riding for a whole month this summer.  I’ve previously thought about Guy Martining up with a van to carry a bike, but that’s a pretty industrial approach that wouldn’t be very comfortable.  I’ve also thought about carrying a bike on this trip, but again, I was pretty industrial in my thinking.

From a passenger carrying perspective, a minivan would be the logical choice.  A Chrysler Pacifica is just what I’m looking for.  It’s very efficient for what it is (much better mileage than the industrial vans I was considering before).  With a nine speed transmission it’d also be quiet and comfortable in addition to getting better than thirty miles per gallon.  Unlike our small SUV, it would also be able to carry whatever we wanted to bring and the flip and hide rear seats means leg stretching room in the back.

The reason a minivan would work is because I found a hitch mounted motorcycle carrier, which means I’d be able to carry a bike on the back of it.  A trailer is such a pain in the ass and is so hard on gas and transmissions that I’m not interested, but this rack fits right onto the Pacifica’s frame mounted trailer hitch and distributes the weight on the back properly.  The Pacifica is a strong towing vehicle with a frame mounted trailer hitch option.  The rack can only carry five hundred pounds, but I wouldn’t need anything like that.  KTM’s 690 Enduro is a Swiss Army Knife of a bike that only weighs 330lbs before fuel, so it wouldn’t stress the rack much at all.


Being so light weight the Enduro makes a capable off road machine, but that light weight also means you can load it on a rack designed for dirt bikes.  The Enduro is also a big bike that’d fit me and is more than capable of making time on paved roads.  It’s a multi-talented choice that fits.


The question is, can the Pacifica actually handle a bike rack with a sub-four hundred pound bike on it?  The issue doesn’t seem to be the rack itself.  I’ve found single racks and even double racks that can hold up to six hundred pounds along with road bike specific racks, so finding a rack capable of holding the Enduro isn’t an issue.  The problem comes from tongue weight and how a vehicle can handle that vertical weight (as opposed to the horizontal weight of towing a trailer that rests on its own wheels).


The Pacifica’s stock Class III frame mounted hitch is also the kind suggested for a bike rack, and while the Pacifica has a massive 3600lb towing capacity, the tongue weight (the only thing really matters with the bike rack) is rated at 360lbs, which is mighty close to what I need here.  Tongue weight is usually calculated as being ok if it’s between 9 and 15% of the towing weight, which should put the Pacifica well over 500lbs at the top end, but evidently it isn’t. 

I might contact a Chrysler dealer and see if this is possible…

Lightweight, multi-talented KTM Enduro on the back of a fuel efficient Chrysler Pacifica?  Yes please!

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Tiger Motorcycle Pixel Art

My son came up with this pixel art 8-bit image of the two of us on the Tiger.  I’d asked him for something I could use as the icon on the website (they appear in the tab at the top of the browser).

I did a bit of beveling on it in Photoshop and then cropped and reshaped it into a square image under 100kb (requirements for an icon).

The end result looks pretty good, I think.  If you’re reading this on a browser with tabs, you should see Max’s 8-bit art at the top.  From the original art on the right I made up a poster, then cropped the bike with us on it, then made the square icon you see at the top.

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nosce aspie te ipsum

This past week I was taking first aid (again).  I’ve been first aid qualified since I first did it in air cadets thirty three years ago and needed to be current to take my cyber-security team to the national finals in New Brunswick next month.  As we were wrapping up the course our instructor First aid instructor shared a Will Smith video about surrounding yourself with good people:

It’s a good piece of advice from a talented fellow who has made a lot of conscious decisions to nurture and grow opportunities across many genres; you’d think this is good advice that would apply to everyone, but for a lot of people building this kind of social network is nearly impossible.

I’ve been recently reviewing various situations that have happened to me through an aspie lens.  It does a lot to explain why I’ve run into the problems I have.  Knowing myself in this way earlier might have helped me understand why I was doing what I was doing and might have led to different outcomes.  Being aware of a diagnosis would also have helped others understand why I’m not acting in a way they consider normal.

Back in air cadets I went for my pilot’s license.  I did well at the training, commuting for the better part of three hours every Saturday to get myself down to where we met at the opposite end of Mississauga; commitment wasn’t a problem.  I ended up missing a single meeting due to a work conflict and even though I communicated this, the guy in charge took the opportunity to drop me from the application for the summer flying scholarship course, even though I had the highest score in powered flight that year.  I ended up despondent and frustrated by the process, hundreds of hours of volunteer effort disappeared in a moment.

That situation ended up ratcheting up an already awkward relationship with that officer and did much to prevent me from advancing through the ranks.  In an organization I’d spent thousands of hours volunteering for, and one that I thought might lead me into a career, I ended up peripheral and bitter.  As I got older I began taking opportunities to sabotage situations and undermine the command structure.  I didn’t do this out of a maliciousness, I did it out of a sense of disenfranchisement.  I was capable, I was dedicated and I was keen but I was dismissed as a kid they neither liked nor trusted because I didn’t fit into the hierarchy and act like everyone else.

In school at about the same time, I was hanging out with a bunch of kids who started to get into teen-related nonsense, from smoking to drugs and other darker experiments.  Rather than value emotional connections with people over the nonsense, as everyone else did, I simply walked away.  This wasn’t easy, and I was lonely, but it wasn’t in my nature to prioritize friendships first and follow those guys down the rabbit hole.

That approach to things has always made me socially peripheral even though I played team sports throughout my childhood.  In many cases I played isolated positions like goalie that further limited my ability to interact with team mates, but then that was never the point of playing for me, as it was with pretty much everyone else.  As an adult, I couldn’t hang on to hockey because so many adult teams are friendship based and I was never good at prioritizing that aspect of the game.  The mandatory after game beers in any sport seemed like an awkward social moment, but for many of the guys there it was the point of coming out.

In university I managed to alienate a professor I thought was one of the best I’d ever had.  He got us to aggressively question the foundations of what we were doing, but in a case of Aspergers gone too far, I ended up questioning the group think he had generated in the class room and in doing so, once again made myself a pariah. I’m a perennially bad joiner.

At work I’ve run into similarly problems.  When I moved out of the city and up to a rural small town school I immediately ran into complications.  Being a big, white guy, you’d think the all white, all Canadian, mono-cultural class I suddenly found myself in would have felt more comfortable than the multi-cultural classes I’d just left, but the opposite was true.  In the previous multi-cultural environment, everyone tended to fall back on a more rational approach to interaction because cultural norms couldn’t be assumed, but in a mono-cultural, rural classroom all sorts of really offensive (to only me apparently) norms were accepted.  Students would use terms like, “he jewed me out of five bucks”, and drop the ‘n’ word in class like a  password.  They were doing this to confirm cultural conformity with each other.  It made them feel secure and meant they all believed similar things, it drove me around the bend.

I ended up showing this senior English class the Canadian-written academy award winning film Crash, as a way to make them question their overt racism and discriminatory thinking.  It’s a challenging film, but then that was kind of the point.  It put an end to kids talking like that in my class, but it also got me removed from the school.

Once again, I’d failed to adopt social norms and conform to group-think and instead went after a moral absolute.  People really don’t like that.  What people like is when you reinforce their prejudices and act like they expect you to.  In this case, one of the students in the class was the daughter of a local church leader and he decided this would be an excellent excuse for a good old fashioned witch-hunt.  I got moved out of there by the school board before things got sillier.  I’m sure nothing has changed up there and everyone is still more than happy being racist red necks – and this is precisely my problem.

When our teacher’s union lost the plot I couldn’t help but make a stand based on principle rather than supporting the people in the organization no matter what.  I’m a staunch believer in unionism – left to their own devices, the rich would happily disenfranchise everyone and return us to the middle ages.  An argument could be made that I should have supported the union at all costs considering this ever-present threat to the middle class, but I don’t think that way.  When the union broke its own rules around fair voting practices and forced an illegal contract on our members, I fought it tooth and nail.  No one had to strike and members got a contract (albeit an illegal one that has since cost tax payer millions), shouldn’t I have encouraged that?  I could have complied and ingratiated myself to the powers that be and found myself rising up the hierarchy, but not doing that is precisely my problem.  Rising up hierarchies depends on conformity of thought and valuing relationships before principles.  This is the single reason why I don’t pursue leadership positions.

Back to Will Smith’s advice.  I’ve always found it hard to make friends, let alone find supporters who will stoke my fire, though I’ve never lacked for flames.  I’m driven and capable, but I find it impossible to put social expectation above rational and moral consideration.  An inability to do that means I never develop the deep levels of trust that other people lean on in their careers.

Yesterday at PD we were looking at White Ribbon scenarios and they all seem absurd to me.  Cases where teen age boys agree to isolate drunk girls to take advantage of them?  Evidently it’s a thing now in Toronto where groups of high school boys are convincing girls to perform sex acts for money.  If that’s what neuro-typical, socially focused people end up doing with those tight networks they develop, then I’m glad it’s beyond me, but then so is Will’s empowering social network.

Of course, there are precedents for aspies building great success, but in a lot of cases they don’t do it with a supportive social network, they do it through sheer malicious will.  I tend to fixate on creative and technical challenges, people domination isn’t in my wheelhouse.  Most business-successful aspies are fixated on that kind of dominance.

Finding people with complimentary skills sets is a way around this impasse.  The problem for an aspie is that the people who tend to be very good at social discourse find our lack of it trying and don’t associate with us.  In many cases, those are precisely the people who have attacked me socially.  It has been the rare socially skilled person who has been able to see past my lack of tact and recognize what lies beneath.  Finding a leader who stokes my fire rather than pouring water on my inabilities is a rarity.  I long to find people worthy of being loyal to, but they are vanishingly rare.  When I do find people like that, I’m the staunchest ally imaginable, as long as we fighting the good fight.

Looking for people to fan your flames is a difficult proposition at the best of times.  Without the deep at-all-costs social ties most people leverage, the aspie is left depending entirely on their technical skills to get anywhere.  Most people factor in trust when making hiring and promotional decisions.  That trust is usually based on their sense of how loyal a person is to them.  In almost any management decision this emotional bias means the technical aspie loses out to nepotism – something that has happened throughout my life:  don’t expect fair or skills based promotion, expect nepotism.  In a world where who you know always takes you further than what you know, this is perhaps the single largest disadvantage this aspie has faced.

NOTES:
Asperger’s inside the ASD spectrum: high functioning autism without specific titles.
A survival guide for people with Aspbergers
ASD and aging: peaks and valleys of youth and old age
Zuckerberg: coping with Aspbergers
ASD as flavour:  this kind of thinking gives me hope that my son won’t suffer the same prejudices that I have – perhaps he’ll even be given a chance to take Will’s advice and build that empowering social network.
An interesting piece of ASD media:  Roman J. Isreal Esq…

The dreaded online personality test:

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