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A Cure For Your Insanity Part 2: Ottawa Construction And Traffic, Gatineau Off-Roading And Happy Accidents

Saturday morning was sunny and clear and I’d had a good nights sleep in Osgoode.  I talked Fiona, who I was staying with, into coming for a ride over to the Gatineau Hills in Quebec.  I’ve never ridden in “La Belle Province” before so it would check that box, and Gatineau Park in the hills is lovely.

We found a Cora’s to do breakfast out near where I used to live in Ottawa before we pushed on through town.  I hadn’t ridden two up on the Tiger since the summer before (the Concours does that duty now), and Fi hadn’t been on a bike in a long time, so we were a bit jerky to begin with but got smoother as we went.  I also don’t spend a lot of time in cities if I can help it, especially on a bike, so I was re engaging with my urban riding skills.  Ottawa has a fascination with traffic lights and (like everywhere in Ontario this summer) construction is running rampant.  I had the G-maps up again which did a good job of navigating the maze of closures to get us over the bridge and into Quebec.

The park was also full of closed roads which had us turning around many times.  Where data is easily collected (ie: in urban spaces), online mapping apps are functional, but the moment we were in less data driven areas (like Gatineau Park), it lost the plot, first suggesting we head around Meech Lake.  That ended at a heavily secured gate complete with RCMP with automatic weapons.  We guessed someone was in residence.

Back around Meech Lake (the road is atrocious but the views are nice), the bike was handling the crumbling pavement, but the x-cross smartphone holder I use on the handlebars was slowly giving up its grip on my phone.  We finally gave up on trying to get to a lookout (all roads to it were closed) and headed back into Hull to cross the river again.  Roads there were in really poor shape and while making a left hand turn we rolled into and out of a mega-pothole (no way to avoid it, it was lane wide) and the phone popped free and flew over my shoulder.

The old OnePlus5 was in its fifth year of service but didn’t survive the crash.  I  ran back to get it and when I rounded the corner a shifty looking fellow had picked it up to take it back to his car.  I trotted up in head to toe kevlar and told him it was mine and he handed it back.  Some shifty cloning and he might have been able to get into some sensitive data on there, so I’m glad I got it back.

Fi got us back through the construction madness and to Osgoode where I loaded up the paniers and made my way over to the hotel by the party in Kanata.  That involved lots of changes of direction because of all the road closures (including the main 417 highway through the city).  Finally finding the first open on-ramp, the Tiger and I pulled onto an empty five lane highway and legged it to Kanata, the temperature gauge falling back down to normal levels once we got the wind moving.  Even in the heat and traffic the bike worked flawlessly with the fans running when needed.
The Best Western GLO in Kanata is ultra-modern with Team Sweden coloured (royal blue and yellow) furniture and big neon lights on the outside.  Fi called my old friend Darren and we discovered we were staying in the same hotel, so I arranged a ride over to the party with them, like it was 1989.  How didn’t we know we were in the same hotel?  Because smartphones isolate us in strange ways.  They stop us from asking for directions.  They stop us from talking to each other because they provide the information we need (at a price).

All my maps were on the phone and the phone was no more, so I didn’t even know where the party was.  Being dependent on someone else for directions or information is what a smartphone frees you from, but is it really such a bad thing?  I was more annoyed by my atrophied brain struggling to remember phone numbers, something that I used to have no trouble with.  We off load all of this information into our devices and then convince ourselves that we’re incapable of doing it ourselves.  Read The Shallows if you want a deeper dive into what I’m talking about here.  Losing the phone has me rethinking how to map a road trip.

The party was another piece to the puzzle on this trip.  Getting older as a male can be an isolating experience.  Seeing the old faces and sharing memories was sorely needed.  We got back to the hotel around midnight and I was soon asleep.  The next morning I followed Darren and family over to a breakfast in Barrhaven with the old crew.  Afterwards I stopped by Canadian Tire and picked up a paper map of Ontario.  A brief look in the parking lot got me as far as Calabogie where I aimed to stop again once clear of the urban sprawl and do some old school mapping.  What would it be like to ride without the phone barking orders?  Would I be able to remember my route without stopping every five minutes?  I was about to find out…

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A Cure For Your Insanity Part 1: East Across Ontario


Due to financial constraints and various responsibilities I’d almost talked myself out of going to visit an old friend (we’ve known each other since he was 13) at his 50th birthday party last weekend, but I’m so glad I didn’t.  Seeing the old faces and catching up was brilliant, but so was the chance to be out in the wind for days on my bike.  Sometimes it takes stepping away from your place in the world to gain the perspective you need to better understand it.

I left on a Friday morning as the sun beat down and temperatures started to rise.  I’d intended to take the Kawasaki but it picked up a flat last week and replacement tire isn’t in yet so I turned to the trusty nearly 20 year old/84k Triumph Tiger to take me away.  Following standard GTA avoidance protocols I headed east instead of south to the crowded and manic highways of Toronto, which Google Maps always prompts me towards (getting there five minutes sooner is much more important than your mental health!).  Other than a traffic light in Centre Wellington not seeing me waiting (they’re quick to road-tax me but slow to recognize motorcycles as a vehicle – I ended up putting the kickstand down and running over to the pedestrian button to change the light), it was clear sailing out of my increasingly crowded and poorly infrastructured home county.

Riding into the rising sun I made good time until I hit Newmarket, which was all poorly timed traffic lights and frantic citiots rushing to get one car ahead.  I was going to stop for a coffee but nothing presented itself in the strip-mall cookie-cutter desert of GTA expansion and rather than grate on about wearing masks all the time I preferred to just avoid the masses, so I pressed on out the other side and back into the country, except the country is now plastered with gravel trucks grumbling in and out of construction sites to build more housing for the ever expanding Greater Toronto Area.

I’d been on the road about two hours when I rounded the end of Lake Scugog on the Port Perry causeway and pressed on towards Peterborough.  At a four way intersection someone in a trophy truck (top of the line full-sized pickup with bling wheels and chrome that will never do a day of work in its life) ran the red light making a right hand turn in front of me.  I edged over in my lane ready to do something more drastic but he stopped.  The lead rider in a gaggle of Harleys coming the other way started making angry monkey gestures because he felt that I was encroaching on his lane (which he was cutting the corner on).  It’s one of those things about riding in the insanity of Southern Ontario: everyone is very keen to tell you what you should be doing rather than making better decisions themselves.

I pushed on, hoping to get beyond the gravitational suck of Toronto driving culture.  Construction on the highway into Peterborough slowed things up again as people in massive SUVs rushed up the soon to be closed left hand lane to get a few cars ahead (and cause miles of backup), but if you’re not driving a massive SUV and butting in line you’re not doing it right.

Finally on Highway 7, I continued east toward Ottawa aiming for the Iron Rooster about halfway along the day one map.  Traffic thinned out and everyone settled into a less manic rush as the (sh)city fell behind.  After a stop in Marmora for gas I didn’t really need but a stretch I did, I rolled on to the Iron Rooster for lunch.  I haven’t seen any Ontario Provincial Police presence in my community for weeks, but on Hwy 7 there were multi-car speed traps set up every 300 feet or so.  By the time I stopped for lunch I’d seen over 20 police vehicles.  By the time I got to Osgoode (south of Ottawa) the number was over 50.  It’s nice to know that the OPP is focused on bonus tax collection and making sure the insurance industry is getting its pound of flesh rather than looking after the communities it claims to police.

The Iron Rooster is a cool spot right off the highway with a big parking lot and indoor/outdoor seating that helps ease any covid anxieties (they roll up multiple doors to make the inside outside).  The entire place is motorcycle themed and specializes in rotisserie chicken in various sandwiches.  That focus makes for good food and I enjoyed “The Rossi” which was a “Rotisserie chicken tossed in pesto mayo with tomato, avocado and havarti cheese” on a toasted brioche bun, locally cut fries too, nice!

Moto-inspired philosophy on the wall…


A wee museum with some interesting old bikes in it and the walls covered in posters including everything from The Great Escape to On Any Sunday and Easy Rider – it was a great stop!


A 1918 BSA!


Coming out of the restaurant I ran into three native women who were out for a ride on their Indian motorcycles.  One of the nice things about riding is that it tends to remove the social barriers that prevent us from talking to each other.  We struck up a conversation about our bikes and I asked them if the name bothered them and they shrugged, saying it was a historical brand and they liked how the company represented their culture, and they loved the bikes (all three were on variations of Indian Scouts).  We then had a good talk about why we enjoyed riding so much.  Being out in the world on a bike puts you in touch with the thermoclines you’re passing through and we all dug that you can feel the air and smell the smells when out in the wind; it puts you in touch with Turtle Island.

A distance was starting to form in my mind from where I’ve been feeling stuck in the village we moved into that is rapidly being converted into an urban subdivision.  As I rode away from the Rooster with a full stomach and some perspective, the old bones of the earth started to appear in the form of the Canadian Shield, poking up between pines and lakes (if you could see past all the police parked on the side of the road).

I had the smartphone clamped on the handlebars and when it wasn’t barking instructions at me it was flashing speed trap warnings.  I used to drive Highway 7 quite often when I lived in Ottawa and the lakes, woods and stony Shield were always my favourite parts of the drive.  Fast food restaurants now litter the route and the prettiness is being chased away by an influx of people.  Those chain restaurants have done a good job of chasing small town diners out of business as well.  One of the magical things about urban expansion is that everywhere starts to look the same after a while.

Traffic was light and I made the occasional pass, but between the police blitz and volume of traffic, Highway 7 isn’t the picturesque alternative to the 401 that it once was.  I wasn’t in a rush to get to Osgoode but I found the smartphone’s manic attention getting behaviour exhausting and when I did occasionally see a place I might stop it I found myself pushing on to keep to with the schedule Google had decided for me.  I finally turned it off and found I could enjoy the scenery and the ride more without all that noise.

Six and a half hours in I stopped in Perth to hang the phone back up and guide me in to Osgoode.  I rode past a the only non-franchise local coffee shop I’d seen on the entire ride because it was neck deep in construction and the phone was barking alternatives at me all through town.  As the sun started to stretch out the shadows I made my way into Osgoode on back roads and finally to a friend’s place I could stop at for the night.

The ride east was enlightening and it started a process that has me rethinking many of the habits I’ve fallen into because of where I live.  There is a manic oneupmanship that is a central tenet of Southern Ontario driving culture, and it’s something that makes everyone who buys into it supremely unhappy and stressed.  Getting one car ahead, even if it’s wasteful and potentially dangerous is everyone’s goal.

From many miles away I was thinking back to where I live as I rode the final miles of this Friday across Ontario.  Construction noises start before 7am every day.  Sitting outside for a morning coffee has you surrounded by the stucato gun shots of nail guns in the new housing division next to us harmonizing with layers of beeping from various heavy equipment backing up again and again.  This morning that was eventually drowned out by our neighbour’s professional lawn service getting their industrial grade (helicopter-loud) lawn mower out (at 7:30 in the morning) to trim their golf-course perfect lawn.  With that never ending noise, dust and with thousands of new people moving into the area, my quiet village is no longer either of those things.  Looking back on it from that great distance across the province I wondered if I’m holding on too tight to something that simply isn’t there any more.


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Riding Construction: How to Make a Mint Not Doing Anything

I took the Tiger for a ride to the big blue yesterday (that’s Georgian Bay around here).  It was about 300kms and involved no less than 3 completely closed roads causing turnbacks and over half an hour waiting on the ‘open’ ones…

South Western Ontario has closures
all over the place, and even Toronto
has lost the plot.  If you can’t cash in
on a lapse in infrastructure spending
by provincial governments by taking
more contracts than you can serve,
you’re doing it wrong.

Each photo is 15 seconds apart, there are 35 photos in that animated gif – making that a 9 minute wait to get through the construction (who didn’t have the personnel to manage a four way intersection though that didn’t stop them from digging it up).  It seems that there is a construction boom happening in Ontario but with very little oversight from our new and improved, stripped back government.  As everyone bellies up to the public money trough, lots of these projects are sitting dormant.

I was turned back multiple times yesterday by road closures that had no activity evident at them.  The ones that were open were short on people for traffic management and weren’t in full production either.  I know it isn’t a comfortable thought, but we’re still unable to leverage our human resources with an ongoing pandemic.  Doesn’t stop the construction companies from cashing in though.

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Exploring Alternate Motorcycle Gear

I did a ~300km ride up to Georgian Bay the other day and thought I’d try out the work pants I just got from Marks Work Warehouse.  On an extended ride last week I was finding the technical pants I have are both hot and uncomfortable in the saddle and went looking for alternatives.

These are Timberland Ironhide workpants and they make use of technical protective weaves including high denier count (1000D) Cordura and flexible technical canvas.  They don’t have padding in them, but as a step beyond regular jeans, these approach ‘motorcycle jeans‘ in terms of durability for a fraction of the price, and they’re more comfortable too.

They were cool and comfortable even on a hot day in the saddle (humidex temps in the mid-30s Celsius) and because they’re work pants flexibility is an important part of their functionality, which means they sit well when on the bike as well as when off it.  The sizing was spot on, so order to fit.  They look smart too with excellent fit and a ‘trim’ look to them.

So impressed am I with these pants that I’ll probably get a second pair at some point.  Of course, it would be nice to pop out and buy the latest in technical motorcycling pants, but at a thousand bucks for a pair of pants it’s also prohibitive for most riders.  I’m all about the ATGATT and riding around in shorts and flipflops isn’t going to happen, but some crafty research can get you durable, comfortable and protective gear for a fraction of the cost of motorcycle industry specific stuff – ATGATT doesn’t have to be only for the wealthy and having a look at the latest technical work-wear for the skilled trades is a good place to start.

There might be an argument here for getting the very best gear regardless of cost, but anyone saying that is speaking from a place of great financial privilege (and probably has an interest in selling it to you).  Riding is always going to be reward over risk calculation, but it doesn’t have to be one driven by fear and money.  My raingear is also construction based high-vis and works wonders (actually better than moto-gear) for a fraction of the cost of ‘motorcycle rain gear’.  If you’re ever stuck for well put together gear for riding you could do worse than checking out your local farm or industrial clothing store.

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Moto-Crafting: Motorcycle Helmet Art

It’s so stupidly hot out that even working the garage on the Bonneville is making me drip, so I’m back inside doing motorcycle crafting instead.

I got an LS2 Spitfire helmet last year and always figured I’d do something artistic on it (it’s flat black and I’m not into the angry pirate look that seems to inspire so many ‘bikers‘). Since it’s black, I was initially thinking about a lightning pattern over the black using metallic paints. I saw an exceptional lighting storm a couple of years ago that provided the inspiration. On in particular I’ve always wanted to immortalize: the lightning dragon!



I’d need to get some metallic purple to make that happen.


In the meantime I’m still partial to the art-deco art in the Rudge Book of the Road.  So I pulled the graphic out, cleaned it up and made a stencil to get the dimensions right on the curved side of the helmet.


I used a silver sharpie making dots around the edge and then painted connect the dots with chrome-silver metallic modelling paint…




The Concours makes riding with an open faced helmet less bug-crashy thanks to the transformable windshield, so I’ll give this a whirl next week.  If anyone in Ontario recognizes it for what it is, I’ll be amazed.



Rudge art-deco graphic design is still alive in 2022!   Rudge Book of the Road, well worth a read!

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Exploring The North on Unridden Roads

 

Finding some roads I haven’t ridden before:  this ride involves circumnavigating Georgian Bay (which I did in 2015 on the old Concours C10), but then going north onto roads I haven’t ridden before.  This time around I’d do it on the C14 if Alanna wanted to come along or on the TIger if I were solo.

Three nights four days on the road breaks it up into manageable chunks that would allow for frequent stops and off piste explorations.  If I did it in August the temperatures shouldn’t be too mad.

ONTARIO MOTORCYCLE TOURING RESOURCES

Ride The North: https://www.northeasternontario.com/ride-the-north/

Northern Ontario Travel Motorcycle Routes: https://www.northernontario.travel/motorcycle-touring/top-10-motorcycle-routes-for-2020

Ontario Motorcycle Tour Routes:  https://www.destinationontario.com/en-ca/motorcycle-tour-routes-ontario

Haliburton Highlands:  https://www.ridethehighlands.ca/

Destination Northern Ontario: https://destinationnorthernontario.ca/

Northern Ontario Road Trip: https://ivebeenbit.ca/northern-ontario-road-trip/

What to see and do in Northern Ontario: https://us-keepexploring.canada.travel/things-to-do/what-see-and-do-northern-ontario

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Summer Workshop Sortout

 

It’s probably just a summer thing but the garage was filling with flies after our trip out to Jasper, so a deep clean was in order.  It ended up producing a car load going to the dump and space has been restored.  More importantly I feel like I can get stuck in on mechanical work without tripping over disorganization.  The Triumph Bonneville project has reached an apex with the engine out 

I’ve had a couple of longer rides this week on the Concours and that resulted in some more ergonomic adjustments.  This video talked me through how to adjust the gear lever (without wasting my time with a lot of youtube blahblah), so I did and now I’m not lifting my foot to change gears.  Even with modified pegs, new saddle and handlebars I’m still struggling to feel the kind of ‘it-fits’ feeling I get on the Tiger though.  It isn’t a Kawasaki thing, it’s a sports-touring thing.  The big Versys I rode 8 years ago fit the same way.  Perhaps what I’m looking for is a shaft drive big adventure bike with a big load capacity, like the newer 1200cc Tiger or the BMW GS.  Though if I wanted to get really eccentric I could consider so Italian options like the Moto Guzzi V85TT.

***

The Motorcycle Electrical Systems book I got last winter suggested popping a voltmeter on your bike if it didn’t come with one.  The Kawasaki has one in the digital display but the analogue Triumph Tiger doesn’t, but now it does:

There was a relay under the dash that had full voltage only when the ignition was on, so I slipped the wires for the voltmeter in there and it only comes one when I’m riding.  The Tiger showed a steady 12.4v when I rode it up and down the street, suggesting that the reg/rectifier fix I did last year is working well.

It was a busy week, but after dropping off the boy at camp one day I went for a ride and ended up at Higher Ground Café in Belfountain where even mid-week you’ll find an interesting assortment of bikes, this time including an old C10 Concours!

I’d like to work an extended ride into the summer and I still have a few weeks to go before the school year picks up again so hopefully I can figure something out.

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Dancing in the Datasphere 2022 Edition: AI Refined User Interfaces!

This quote is 12 years old now, but it’s more true than
ever, and our technology is about to take another leap
forward that will make our current passive information
/screen based approach to digital information look
as outdated as a fax machine.

Way back in 2011 I made one of my first presentations for a provincial education conference (Dancing in the Datasphere).  Leveraging years in IT prior to teaching, I tried to edge teachers closer to an understanding of how the rest of the world had moved on in terms of their digital engagement.  Stepping out of IT in 2003 to become a teacher felt like time warping back 20 years, so out of date was the use of technology in education.  In 2019 I attended Cisco Live and discovered that the rest of the world has moved on again, leveraging cloud based systems in a way that no one in education is, so the anti-tech habits of education are still there.  The need for online/cloud based systems in education is apparent (especially since the pandemic began), but poor cybersecurity management is often used as an excuse to stay out of it.  We’re still the only school in South Western Ontario doing CyberTitan and one of only five in the province with any kind of cyber-focus.

In the past decade education has staggered into the 21st Century, though Ontario has gone out of its way to fear and shun it until all the tech-haters suddenly desperately needed it during the pandemic.  The past two years have forced a recognition of the importance of digital fluency, though there are still no mandatory digital literacy courses in any Ontario high school.

On To The Future, Ready or Not…

With all that in mind, what’s coming next offers some exciting possibilities, not that education will leverage them before I retire.  Machine learning and the artificial intelligence growing out of it is already offering students a silent AI partner for coding with Github’s Copilot.  The GPT-3 OpenAI system Copilot runs on is already producing original text, and perhaps even some of the original essays that teachers think are written by students.

As systems become smarter information falls to hand more readily and old habits become irrelevant (like memorizing phone numbers).  With all that in mind, I’ve had grade 10s building IBM Watson AI powered chatbots for several years now, and this past semester several of my seniors used Copilot to make their culminating coding projects.  Being able to communicate effectively with ML & AI is going to become increasingly important in the next decade.

But what really excites me about intelligent machines is how they’re able to simulate activities with human users in order to streamline and improve the human-machine interface.  Last week we were watching FITC’s Spotlight UX, an online conference about the multidisciplinary field of User Experience (UX) based on digital design, ergonomics and user interfaces.  UX opens things up to consider all aspects of digital design from a user’s point of view; it has a lot in common with student centered learning in education.  The opening speaker was formerly an ethnologist before getting into UX and her background allowed her to dismantle many of the assumptions that alienate users, especially in online systems that may be designed in one country and used many others.

At the same time I was reading Guy Huntington’s piece on The Coming Classroom Revolution.  One of the things he covers is the concept of a virtual-self personal learning assistant.  Guy is looking at the AssistBot from a legal/privacy perspective in the article, but a complex digital model of a students’ learning habits offers some interesting possibilities.  What if the virtual student could be run through simulations using various software?  User interface issues could be recognized even before a student picks up a new device or software for the first time.  Interfaces that have been refined by AI driven user simulations would feel intuitive in a way they never have been before because each user would be interacting with digital information on an interface that was custom designed for them based on thousands of hours of simulation prior to them ever picking it up for the first time.

The learning benefits should also be apparent if everyone is walking around with a digital doppelganger in tow.  A teacher might pitch a lesson into a simulation space and the virtual student-bots would be able to show where it does and doesn’t work for them, and the lesson could then be customized for each student as needed prior to them ever seeing it for the first time.  Classrooms would become radically personalized after over a century of factory conformity and low resolution information sharing.

A buzzword flying about at the moment is ‘metaverse‘, especially after Facebook rebranded itself Meta.  In the last post I talked about my long involvement with interactive and immersive virtual reality, and after years of development we are close to finally making it happen on a system-wide scale, but it’s going to happen while the systems themselves are becoming intelligent and the web itself is attempting to evolve itself past the attention merchant economy that web2.0 became.

Back in April I watched FITC’s big early conference and they had Jared Ficklin keynoting about how web3 (driven by blockchain encryption) might give us back control of our own data and change the paradigm we’re stuck in online with multi-nationals selling our data as if they owned it.  It was a thrilling talk and I’ve since come across similar thinking in WIRED.

Web3’s a bit of a dog’s breakfast thanks to crypto and the mess it has made, but the possibility of individuals owning their online presence is a thrilling return to what the internet once was and might be again.

Combining all of these converging ideas into a viable technological future is ambitious, but it’s something worth pursuing because if you don’t push for the best outcome for the most people we end up with what we have now.

Could the internet provide us with secure interaction and storage without abusing our information?  Could we move past the low-resolution two dimensional windows that we all peer into the datasphere with now?  Could we leverage machine intelligence to treat each other in a more human way than our ‘superior’ one teacher to 30+ student brick-in-the-wall classrooms continue to do even now?

Imagine if you will a future where you are able to move in and out of digital information at will without it ever distracting you from the real world as it does now.  Peripheral user interface ergonomics will drastically improve as we get clear of the smartphone myopia we’re currently stuck in.  When deep diving into digital data you’ll be able to do it using complex multi-dimensional interfaces that make our current screen fixation look positively archaic.  Haptic IoT devices mean you’ll interact with data with more than your fingers, allowing for much more nuanced control of your digital interactions.  Your awareness of that environment will also be dimensionally greater than peering through a 2d screen.  Moving three dimensionally in digital data offers you a much richer connection to your digital self.

A better interface with digital information is already here and will only improve, and though Web3 struggles to make sense at the best of times, the idea that we could bring our shared network back to a user-centric experience where our privacy and personal information is owned and controlled by users points to a possible future beyond the tyranny of the attention economy.  But what’s most exciting to me is the idea that we can have virtual versions of our habits that we can run simulations on in order to produce software experiences unlike any we’ve had before.  The efficiency in that combined with all these other converging technologies points to a digital future much richer than the step we’re stuck on now.

Imagine opening up a brand new app to discover that it intuitively makes sense to you because it was designed using thousands of simulated hours with your digital avatar.  This also offers some interesting security opportunities because no two interfaces would be the same since each would be tailored to its user.  Combined with a more privacy friendly web, multi-dimensional user interfaces and machine learning that enables us to refine the human-machine connection even before first use, the cybernaut of the future will be doing things in digital spaces that will challenge what we think is possible, which is vital because we will interacting with more and more complex artificial intelligences when digitally connected and if we don’t refine and improve our ability to operate in digital spaces, we’ll rapidly lose touch with what these automated intelligences are doing.

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Exploring Jasper and Surrounding Area: some motorcycle ideas

I’m not on two wheels but it feels good to travel again.  As I write this I’m sitting in a B&B as the sun cuts through early morning clouds on the eastern edge of the Canadian Rockies.


We spent a couple of mad days in Edmonton, but cities aren’t my thing and giant malls even less so.  Now that we’re 3+ hours west of Edmonton in the mountains, the adventure begins.  Today we’re heading a couple of hours south to the Athabasca Ice Fields for an eco-tour of the glacier.  We’re in Brule for the week and so far the landscape has not disappointed.


Brule makes for a nice, quiet base for exploring the northern Jasper area.  It would be a 3700km odyssey across the Canadian Shield and then the Praries to get here by bike.  We drove across Canada in 2018 and did it in Elora to Sault Ste Marie to Thunder Bay to Winnipeg and then kept going on the south route.  To get up here it’d need a Saskatoon and Edmonton stop before pushing on to Brule.  That’d be 3 days of  700-800kms per day and then a couple of shorter days into the mountains.

It has been single digit temperatures here in July in the mornings and sometimes when it’s raining.  A warm day will get up into the low 20s, which is nice riding weather, but you’d want to dress for the cool.  It has also been quite wet, so good rain gear is a must.

Coming back, Yellowstone is about 1400kms south of us, so a couple of days ride down there, a couple of more days riding around the park, then a scenic 2300km ride back to The Sault, then a final leg home.  That’d be about 7000kms of getting there and back with shorter scenic rides on location, so perhaps 10k kms.  Spread out over a month, this’d be one heck of a way to see a lot of North America’s middle.

***

I’m at the end of our week out here and this place is fantastic.  Were I living out here I’d have my choice of epic rides on my doorstep.  The big roads are sweeping, high speed routes with unbelievable views.  It’s Canada so the tarmac isn’t smooth and you’re dealing with tar snakes and buckled ashphalt, but it’s never SWOnt tedious.

The Big Routes:

Brule to Jasper to the Athabasca Glacier: we drove this (in a car) on Wednesday and it’s a spectacular drive.  You’re climbing from 979m (3200ft) to 2121m (6958ft) with another 618m is descents – the trip is seldom on the level and usually in a bend, especially on the AB-93 Icefields Parkway – one of the most scenic drives in Canada.

Every stop smells of burnt brakes and transmission fluid.  It isn’t gentle on cars, but riding the Icefields Parkway would be a bucket list riding trip for any motorcyclist.
We hiked the Athabasca Glacier with Rockaboo Adventures – highly recommended!

This lot have the right idea – but pack your raingear, weather in the mountains changes quickly and often.  On the upside, if you don’t like what it’s doing, wait five minutes.

Jasper to Tête Jaune Cache, British Columbia

You pass Mount Robson (the highest peak in the Canadian Rockies) on the way into BC.  It’s worth a stop.

Mt Robson is as big as it gets in the Canadian Rockies…

The drive this way is fast-mountain-highway with lots of trucks.  On the way out we had a bear stop on the side of the road to let us by before crossing.  It’s that kind of ride.

Over the continental divide the forests get lusher and have a more Pacific rain forest vibe, though you’re still at altitude so it’s mainly coniferous.  We went down as far as Valemount to check out the Three Ranges Brewing Co..   The place has a nice vibe with pictures of all the local high school grads on each light post.

Driving us back to Jasper, we observed some near disastrous truck passing.  The people moving heavy goods through the mountains seldom slow down and the result is often passes on the shoulder and other high risk moves.  Once I had a handle on how the big trucks rolled, when you see one brake take it seriously, they don’t slow down for much.
If you like the fast sweeping roads and views that never quit, along with the sudden animal spotting, you’ll love the highways in and around Jasper.  Just one last note:  speeds limits seem pretty tight in Jasper National Park, so if you’ve got an Ontario 100 means 140 mindset, you’ll run into problems.  Alberta has a pretty reasonable 110km/hr limit and most people on the highway seem to stick within 10km/hr of it.  In the park it’s usually 80km/hr but often slows due to high animal areas or other environmental factors.  Park wardens can pull you over for speeding and other infractions and there are a lot of them about.  Why rush anyway?  The place is well worthy of a slower pace.

Technical Back Roads:

The Road to Miette Hot springs:

If you’re looking for interesting technical roads to ride, you want to hit some of the spur roads up to other areas of the park.  We did Miette Hot springs one day and the Google map doesn’t do it justice.  In addition to some gnarly switchbacks, the rest of the road into the mountains is never straight and always going in a new direction.  It’s 17kms of really nice riding.

The road is Canadian (so no butter smooth tarmac here), but it’s well maintained and the views are spectacular.  Once we got up there we discovered that Parks Canada runs noon to 8pm hours in the summer so locals can make their way up there after work for a soak.  Nice, eh?  If I were living near the north gate of Jasper I’d be aiming for 34kms of engaging technical riding with a soak in the hot springs to break it up many times a week during the summer.

There’s also a nice family run restaurant just down from the springs if you’re looking to eat.

17kms from the main Jasper highway up to Miette Hot springs.

The Road to Maligne Lake:

This is another wonderfully technical road with constant direction changes.  It’s much longer than the Miette Hot springs road but you end at the lost world of Maligne Lake where you’ve probably got the best chance on the planet to see a dinosaur.

The road follows the outflow from Medicine Lake, twisting and turning with the raging river and then traces the shoreline before climbing even higher towards Maligne Lake.  Stunning views frequent animal sightings and never dull roads meant this was one of the most motorcycled routes we saw.  In the photos below you’ll see rain and then sun – they were taken less than a minute apart.  You always want to be ready for rain but it seems to pass quickly up in the Rockies.

48kms from Jasper to Maligne Lake.  

Oh no, it’s raining on the Harleys!

Is that one of the new Husky Norden 901s?  Yes please!

It’s seldom straight!

Getting Dirty!

If you’re willing to get dirty there are a number of roads into the park that offer a more adventurous experience.  I haven’t done these but a light adventure bike and living in the area would have me riding to the end of as many remote roads as I could find, like this one!  

That’s 45kms but G-maps is saying it’ll take over an hour, so this ain’t no 100+km/hr road!

Pyramid Lake Road looks like a cracker too!

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When eLearning Evolves from Electronic Learning to Enhanced Learning via VR

I got into virtual reality way back in 2015, to the point where my secondary computer engineering program was making VR systems for other schools in our board and we developed a board-wide Ministry funded research project on it.  Having worked with this emerging technology from the very first commercially viable system, I’ve watched with interest as the field matures and it has me thinking about how we can move beyond the prejudices in our very conservative education system and toward a mindset where the ‘e’ in elearning stands for ‘enhanced’ rather than ‘electronic’ and is considered a necessity for a superior pedagogical experience rather than an evil to fight against or an excuse to cut funding.

Back in 2017 the only way you could do VR was with the processing power of a desktop computer.  We built those machines to spec and then set up a variety of fully interactive, high resolution headsets on them ranging from HTC Vives to Microsoft supported setups by Samsung through our board’s SHSM program.  I’m still providing hardware support for those machines years later.

We travelled to other schools and conferences around the province demonstrating immersive VR for students, parents and other educators.  In most cases they got stuck on the games, but games are often the early adopters, like the first-returners after a forest fire, they push technology and create systems that are adopted by later industries, like education.  Many people turned their noses up at VR even as they were stunned by how immersive and engaging it could be simply because it’s ‘all about gaming’, but (of course) that isn’t the case.

At Skills Canada Nationals in Moncton in 2016 I wandered the floor while our IT & Networking finalist duked it out in competition.  I came across a VR training system to operate one of the all-in-one lumber cutting systems (the kind that grabs the tree, cuts it, trims it and stacks the finished poles for transport).  These complex mechanical systems cost millions and the only way to train on them was to train on them, before VR got involved.  The VR training system they had cost upwards of $80,000 to put together, so it was far from cheap, but what it did was allow the company to train operators prior to putting them on the real multi-million dollar equipment and it reduced user-error in new operators by over 80% when they finally got into the real machine.  The end result was millions saved in broken equipment and lost productivity.

In applying immersive VR in our classroom I’ve come across instances where students with special needs could suddenly express their genius and I’ve had students produce complex VR based games that gave them the portfolio they needed to move on into high-demand post-secondary digital media programs.  It has also reframed for me how 3d modelling and emerging digital media have their own literacy requirements that many people are oblivious to.  This ongoing work culminated this year when we won Skills Ontario provincials in 3d animation and then went on to win Skills Canada nationals to become the top 3d animation school in the country.

All of these experiences and development feels like it’s leading somewhere, and that somewhere is beginning to come into focus.  A digitally enhanced classroom offers many benefits and improvements to pedagogical practice, but it requires staff and students who are fluent and proficient with the technology.  This is an ongoing problem in an education system that diminishes the potential of technology and clings to old ways, usually to the benefit of the organizations involved in public education.

Things have been, let’s say ‘rough‘ during COVID as the system fell into repeat rounds of remote learning without any kind of plan or expectations of success.  The new normal became to just do and expect less as the limited and atrophied format of elearning became evident to all, but any educator who approaches the job from that angle should probably be looking elsewhere for work.  As things come back toward some kind of normal I’m hoping we can explore virtual and digitally augmented learning without the entrenched prejudices surrounding webpaged based/screen delivered elearning because this emerging media offers some powerful opportunities.

In the time we’ve been in pandemic-limbo VR technology has moved along.  Those 2017 ‘coming soon’ stand alone systems are no longer lower resolution options and they are now pretty much where a desktop top driven wired system was in 2016, for one quarter the price.  The evolution toward fully interactive, high-resolution virtual reality will continue and education needs to get over it’s e-prejudices to better understand and leverage it.

My son gave the Hololens a go back at the ECOO conference in 2016.  It was very much a prototype-proof-of-concept device, but the idea of eye glasses sized headsets is where VR is headed.  Along with a pair of haptic gloves and other IoT type sensors, we should be seeing portable, capable, fully interactive systems in the next couple of years that continue to expand the bandwidth between us and our rapidly expanding digital infrastructure.  Interacting with digital information through a two dimensional low-resolution/screen will look as archaic as dot matrix printers in a decade.

During the pandemic I got to try Meta’s latest Oculus Quest 2 headset.  These are completely wireless, have school-day long battery life and offer interactive, immersive digital media access for close to the price of a Chromebook.  Early adopting programs (like mine) will be able to offer VR experiences much more easily with this gear, but it’s the next step that is most exciting:  the convergence of virtual, augmented and mixed reality into a readily accessible digital media-scape for most subjects of study.
“Education will be transformed into something far more vivid. History teachers will transport their students to the beaches of Normandy or the Cu Chi tunnels of Vietnam. In biology class, the entire room will become the inside of a mammalian cell.”
We’re getting to the point now where the hardware engineering isn’t the limitation.  The next few years will be about developing the software engineering in this new medium because having the tech in hand doesn’t help when the media isn’t there to make use of it.  The focus I’ve placed on our game development program has always included a big push beyond games as students develop increasingly complex digital portfolios.  It’s why we’ve crept into animation and 3d modelling in our engineering as well, because these skills are going to be in short supply to fulfill the needs of this emerging medium.
Our success with Skills Canada this year in 3d animation lies very much in the realm of digital media as this kind of 3d media is exactly what is needed for both virtual and augmented reality experiences to work:
Made over 2 days (2×6 hours), our team of 2 had to storyboard, script and animate an 11 second video.  They were allowed to pre-model and rig 3d character models (the loon and the beaver) but the metal pot was a wild-card model that had to be made in the competition window.  All sounds were prescribed for all teams, so the animation is storyboarded to fit them.
Our success at Skills (and the fact that it was 2 grade 11s who achieved it) means we’re integrating 3d animation into the game development training curriculum next year.  This all grew out of me pushing for better narrative structure in last year’s game, Rigged.  That led to several students (including our Skills competitors) branching off and forming animation teams to better frame the narrative in the game:
All the modelling, animation and sounds in that video were made from scratch in our classroom by grade 11/12 students in our TGI3/4M Software Engineering/Gamedev class.  We were unable to develop a VR based game as we have in previous years due to COVID restrictions, but I’m hoping to get back to it sooner than later.
It won’t be too long until you see teachers asking students to take out their headsets and join a virtual classroom where avatars allow students to be whatever they wish and the level of interactivity means teachers will be able to know whether or not a student is engaged and present.  Many online teachers during the pandemic experienced the ‘logged-in-but-absent’ student.  That kind of low-resolution online interaction would be rendered obsolete once Meta and the rest of the industry has education-ready virtual reality ready to go.  If you’re inhabiting an avatar online you can’t hide behind privacy as an excuse to not participate, and an inactive avatar in VR would look like an inactive student in class, making avoidance much more difficult.
This also means that the idea of a brick and mortar classroom as we know it is going to quickly become irrelevant and our schools as we know them will require rethinking – something that the drag-inducers in education (the vested interests in how things run right now) aren’t going to want to cooperate with.  I fear the public education system in Ontario is going to need a hard reboot to make this happen.  That may be the only way to break our ties with a past that makes little sense in the 21st Century and craft a ‘world class education system‘.  Thinking that the way things were is the pinacle we need to get back to is a big part of the problem.
Instead of passive information delivery, interactive, immersive learning opportunities mean students will experience history, science and literature first hand, bringing formerly static information to life and allowing them to explore it rather than have it land on them.  Living Lord of the Flies is much more memorable than reading it.  I did a role play of it over a decade ago in an English class and former students still talk about it today.  Interactivity is the key to engagement with modern students as this is the mediascape they live in when not in class.  They will no longer be forced to step back a decade in terms of media in the classroom if we can engage with emerging digital mediums.
In the book (and film) Ready Player One, after the collapse of an oil based transport economy virtual reality becomes the default schooling option.  A better future would be a bit less apocalyptic but the idea that VR would augment learning and help teachers produce engaged classrooms with interactive and powerful learning opportunities also suggests that we don’t need to burn tons of diesel every day transporting students to remote schools since any local school could provide digital enhancement.  Even in augmented situations where students are building in technology classes or experimenting in science, augmented reality could offer insight and direction that would enable far more students to enjoy success while also making our schooling more green; yet another aspect of our ‘perfect’ system that never was.
From the early days up until now, virtual/immersive/interactive digital tools have offered the hope of a future that finally removes us from a static relationship with information and offers radical differentiation of learning for all students.  In our increasingly information rich (or overwhelmingly information overloaded world, depending on how you look at it) we need to find better ways to find and make effective use of the information at our fingertips, and this augmented, virtual mediascape will be the key to that as well.  That it also offers a solution to our current wildly unsustainable educational transport habits is icing on the cake.  Now it’s just a matter of getting a system mired in political self interest to move forward.

RESOURCES

VR isn’t the only emerging digital technology that can empower our pedagogical practice.  Artificial Intelligence is also opening doors to radically individualized learning opportunities that would benefit all students and make our rows of desks in overcrowded classrooms look positively medieval:

Virtual possibilities back in 2016 (education has made little effort to engage in any of them):

Our MoE grant research into VR in 2017. No follow-up there either:

Reaching out to industry at the FITC conference in 2018.  Industry doesn’t know how to engage with the prickly world of public education either:

In 2016 I was looking to escape the staid and restrictive world of #edtech in order to try and explore emerging technologies.  Six years later we’re churning out national champions in fields ranging from cybersecurity to 3d animation:

Meta’s Project Cambria, the next gen in VR:

Facebook is morphing into Meta in order to drive a more complex interface with digital information:

VR in education:

10 best examples of VR in education (Forbes):

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