edchat – Page 9 – Mechanical Sympathy

Dreaming Of A Representative Salary Grid

One of the reasons I became a teacher is because it seemed like a particularly credible profession. The process of becoming a teacher appeared to have more in common with an apprenticeship than an abstract degree. My teacher’s college in particular was focused on getting us as much in-class time with a working, mentor teacher as possible. Once in the profession, it takes a teacher twelve years to earn full pay, once again implying that this is an apprenticeship that takes a great deal of time to come to fruition.

I’m in year eight of teaching and life on the ground has been somewhat less affirming. The vast majority of teachers I’ve met do little to expand their teaching skills, unless they are new and so desperate for a position that they spend thousands of dollars collecting additional qualifications. Many older teachers I know still have the two teachables they started with, and in some cases aren’t even actually qualified to teach the subjects they are teaching. A surprising number have never updated to honours specialist so they could top out on the salary grid (though that would be hard to do if you don’t actually have a degree or any background in what you’re teaching).

Having found an online community of teachers who are actually interested in improving their craft (and recognizing the changes digitization is having on education and society in general) has been a saving grace, but I still face comments like, “why in God’s name would I want to talk about teaching when I’m not at work?” or “oh great, another pointless PD day” when I’m on the ground in school.

To that end, I’d like to consider revisions to the much maligned ‘grid’ that determines teacher salaries in Ontario. Ranging from just over forty thousand a year (which isn’t an awful lot when you’ve just spent over one hundred thousands dollars on five years of university), to just over ninety thousand a year more than a decade into working, the grid relies mainly on years in the classroom as a justification for pay raises. The difference between an honours specialist in a subject and a teacher who has never lifted a finger to try and improve is less than 5% of pay at the top of the grid.*

I would suggest that there is a lot more to the craft of teaching than years in the classroom, especially if you’re not one of those very special teachers who like to trot out the same old lesson, year in, year out (one you probably photocopied from someone else in the first place). In the great scheme of becoming a master teacher, your activity both in and beyond the classroom are vital to your understanding of how your profession works as a whole.

Teachers who are active in their professional organizations (ECOO, OHASSTA, OLA, OAME, ELAN, OCTE, and others), are working to enhance their craft by working with colleagues in their various disciplines. How this isn’t a consideration in a salary grid is beyond me.

Teachers who are active in school leadership roles (such as department heads, directions teams members, etc) are currently offered a rather silly little stipend to do what is essentially another part time job. They do this with no time given from regular teacher duties, and for a couple of bucks a day. Why these ‘positions of additional responsibility’ aren’t considered in the salary grid is beyond me.

Teachers who take on student teachers and do one of the most important jobs in our profession? Nothing on the grid.

Teachers who spend time developing school teams and clubs over the long term? Nothing on the grid.

Teachers who spend time developing school events like graduation or grade nine introductory programs? Nothing on the grid.

Teachers who spend their own time and money away from home attending professional conferences to enhance their practice? You got it, nothing on the grid.

I’m not advocating for a pay per-extracurricular approach here, but I am asking for a grid that works from something other than how long you’ve been doing the job. If we graded students the same way we salary teachers, they’d get higher and higher grades the longer they are in school, regardless of what they are doing.

Talk of extending the grid from 11 to 15 years is as myopic as basing the grid primarily on years of teaching in the first place. Seniority has its place in teaching, there is no doubt. How long a teacher has been teaching is an important metric in determining their quality, but it certainly shouldn’t be the key factor in calculating their pay.

If we’re going to overhaul the salary grid, let’s really examine what determines a teacher who is trying to perfect their imperfectable craft, and then make a grid that isn’t solely based on how old you are as a teacher. That grid would be fluid and flexible, with people moving up and down in various elements of it. You’d still enjoy seniority bumps, but a senior teacher who does nothing other than show up and go home, offering no mentor-ship to younger teachers, no direction for their school, no enrichment for their students, and who has no specialization in the subject they teach, wouldn’t be able to make within 5% of the trained specialist who offers up their time to lead departments, train new teachers, or lead subject enrichment.

This kind of grid would encourage the kind of meta-cognition we expect to see in our students, and encourage senior teachers to mentor and improve the craft, rather than closing the door to their classroom five years early while they glide to retirement. It would also support teachers who recognize how changeable the world is at the moment and who take steps to try and prepare students for a future that will be quite unlike the past.

If we’re going to fix the grid, let’s fix it. Seniority is only one (relatively minor) metric in considering how hard a teacher is working at becoming a better teacher.

Note: teacher pay based on student test scores are another American myth that are designed to diminish the profession while cloaking justifications (usually financial) in fictional, statistical validity. Standardized tests are inherently limited, and teachers who teach well to them are probably such compliant, mechanical creatures that they are actually poor teachers. US world rankings would suggest that trying to standardize teaching around this kind of testing is a disaster. A well designed salary grid would recognize the many individual ways that a teacher could improve their craft, without grossly simplifying the metrics for excellence (such as basing the grid almost entirely on seniority).

Dancing in the Datasphere

From the Prezi brainstorming graphical interface: http://prezi.com/mlmks5pq65dz/dancing-in-the-datasphere/

If we live in an increasingly data-rich, but resource poor world, what do we need to do as teachers to give our students a fighting chance?

There is no reason to assume that Eric Schmidt is blowing smoke. If we really are generating this much information, and now have a means of saving, reviewing, organizing, and learning from it, we need to radically re-think how we educate our children. Knowledge itself is now plentiful and accessible, teachers are no longer the font of knowledge.

Traditional classrooms work on a data-drip of information, out of the teacher’s mouth. Many of these teachers are willfully ignorant of the radical revolutions going on in their disciplines as information is no longer confined to the limits of human specialists. Interdisciplinary studies are prompting radical changes in how we understand just about everything. Teaching your twenty year out of date university experience out of a ten year out of date text book makes you about as pertinent as a dodo. Many of our current teaching habits assume nothing is changing, but it is, radically, quickly, meaningfully, everywhere but in the classroom.

When I was a kid I was an astronomy nut. I memorized the nine planets, the meaningful moons, I knew distances, sizes; the universe was a (relatively) small solar system with stars beyond. We currently know of over 600 planets, and discover an average of a dozen a week, every week. We are discovering solar systems so bizarre in nature that they beggar belief; but none of that is in the text book, and most teachers won’t bother with it because accessing the datasphere is too difficult with limited technology access in school (fixable with this).

We are discovering these things with drastically improved sensing technology that has been accelerated by the information revolution. We record this data in abundance using storage technology that has been accelerated by the information revolution. We often fail to access it for years after the fact because we have not yet caught up with our ability to observe and record the universe around us. Fortunately we’re now developing systems that sort their own data, and make connections without human oversight – the data itself is beginning to self organize. The future will be smarter than we can imagine as individuals.

This acceleration is happening in all fields of human endeavor. We are teasing free nuances in archaeology, history, and science. We understand in greater detail how the masters painted five centuries ago, we have seen to the edge of reality and felt the remnants of the explosive expansion that started everything. What we haven’t done is evolved education to prepare our students for this deluge of data. We still mete out information because we define ourselves as holders of knowledge. We’re holding a cup of water as the dam breaks around us.

We drip feed students information in class and then complain that they are unfocused, disinterested. We then agonize over how to make our lessons more engaging. We wring our hands over outright lies and insinuations instead of letting the datasphere show the truth; we cater to myth, habit and tradition of paper based learning.

In the meantime a steady stream of data overwhelms our students from social networks that dwarf in size any their parents or grandparents had. We belittle their circumstance by demeaning their means of communication, and overvaluing our traditional modes of contact. Because they don’t ‘pick up a phone’, they don’t demonstrate meaningful relationships like people of a certain age do (oddly similar to what the phone-people’s parents said about them when they couldn’t be bothered to go and visit people face to face any more). Kids nowadays, their social networks are empty things devoid of real meaning.

Worst of all, we don’t teach them how to manage the avalanche of data that threatens to bury them; then we criticize them for not managing it well. Many teachers manage it by ignoring it entirely

We spoon feed them vetted data in tiny amounts because we think that is credible, safe and real, but that isn’t the world they are going to graduate into. Being able to manage multiple, often conflicting data, organize information out of the noise and critically analyze material is far more relevant than memorizing the right answers to the same questions we’ve been asking for years.

Until we take our responsibility to prepare our students for the 21st Century seriously, we will continue to think that slowing them down, unplugging them and ignoring the datasphere that continues to grow around us at a prodigious rate is not only the easier (cheaper) thing to do, but it is the right thing to do too.

What we aren’t doing is making them familiar with their likely future circumstances, and we do it because it’s easier to ignore a revolution than recognize it, even if it’s happening all around us.

Literacy, Engagement and Marketing

The latest WIRED has an editorial by Clive Thompson about Minecraft and literacy. In the article it is suggested that Minecraft (and other video games) have engaged reluctant readers to the point where they are able to overcome their reading problems and devour challenging texts with near perfect accuracy.

I usually enjoy Thompson’s reach, he tends to push back assumptions, but in this case it feels hyperbolic. “Minecraft is the hot new videogame among teachers and parents”. It was three years ago, but then it hasn’t just been sold to Microsoft for billions (with a “B”) of dollars. Sometimes I can’t tell if it’s hyperbole or marketing.

Thompson goes on to state: “Minecraft is surrounded by a culture of literacy.” So is any hobby, video games are not magical because of this. Motor vehicles are surrounded by a ‘culture of literacy’ – look in any magazine rack. Back in the day Dungeons and Dragons was surrounded by a ‘culture of literacy’ with books and magazines galore. Movies are surrounded by a ‘culture of literacy’ (IMDB, Entertainment Weekly etc), so is technology in general (WIRED). That we read and write about the things that interest us is hardly a shock. Why should video games be any different? Many reluctant readers are willing to read material about a subject that interests them. That this is newsworthy is a bit baffling, what is more surprising are the assumptions further on in the article.

Interest and engagement are key elements in developing basic literacy skills, no doubt, but the article goes on to imply that engagement through video games can somehow overcome illiteracy. This is going from hyperbole to gross over-simplification. I’ve already got my doubts about gamification, but championing gaming engagement as the solution to illiteracy isn’t respecting the complexity of the skill, though it does sync well with valuations in gaming companies.

Back in 1973 when I was a three year old learning to read my grandmother would read me a bit of The Magic Faraway Tree and then say she was tired and put it down, usually at a critical part of the story. I’d struggle through the text using the light from the doorway, desperately trying to find out what happened after she left me to go to sleep. I have no doubt that she knew what I was doing.

I suppose WIRED might have written an article about that, but Enid Blyton doesn’t have the market reach of Minecraft or the magic we desperately want to believe inhabits our brave new and oh-so-very-valuable media.

I’m a strong reader. I can’t remember a time when I couldn’t read. For me it meant independence and the ability to satisfy my own curiosity. There is no doubt that my determination created intense engagement at a time when reading wasn’t easy for me, but it was just the first step on the long road of literacy. I wasn’t displaying illiteracy one day and then suddenly became a fluent reader the next because I was “really, really motivated”.

Thompson quotes Constance Steinkuehler (of whom I’m a fan) on the effects of video game focused literacy. Middle and high school struggling readers were asked:

“…to choose a game topic they were interested in, and then she picked texts from game sites for them to read—some as difficult as first-year-college language. The kids devoured them with no help and nearly perfect accuracy.”

How could they do this? “Because they’re really, really motivated,” Steinkuehler tells me. It wasn’t just that the students knew the domain well; there were plenty of unfamiliar words. But they persisted more because they cared about the task. “It’s situated knowledge. They see a piece of language, a turn of phrase, and they figure it out.”

Situated knowledge plays a key role in literacy. Scaffolded understanding and context awareness are inherent to good reading. On a micro level it assists vocabulary and parsing written conventions like punctuation and grammar. As we build our understanding of written language we’re able to comprehend more complex texts using previous experience; literacy builds on itself in this way.

Contextualization also assists a reader at the level of themes and ideas. Being conversant in a video game allows you to make assumptions about words and concepts you would otherwise have no link to through the text. No doubt many of those struggling readers were able to accurately guess vocabulary and concepts from their own experience, the text becomes a secondary resource, literacy a secondary skill. Large scale contextualization can help a strong reader parse a complex, unfamiliar text, but if it is being used to parse familiar concepts and materials I’d argue that it isn’t assessing literacy that effectively.

Literacy isn’t merely the repetition of familiar ideas, at its best it is the ability to deeply comprehend new ideas through a written medium. Video games might offer a hook that helps reluctant readers engage, but to suggest that Minecraft or any other game could act as a solution to illiteracy is more than misleading, it’s dishonest. It’s also why complex, long term skills development like literacy is best left to education, where quarterly earnings and attention grabbing don’t attempt to outsell learning.

The End of Knowledge

I’ve just wrapped up a grade 11 university level English class. I only tend to teach these classes once every couple of years now, so I see real differences in how academic students are evolving with technology use.

This time around we have a Google Apps for Educators system well established and I assumed academically focused students would be very handy with it. I shouldn’t assume these things. Once again I’m surprised at how habitual digital natives are with their technology use; they know how to do the few repetitive things they use technology for very fluently, but asking them to extend that fluency to other software or hardware results in the same kind of frustration you see in anyone. Technology use really needs to be a generally taught skill – teaching specific apps on specific hardware doesn’t create genuine understanding of information technology and what it can do for you.

Beyond the typical tech-incompetence that we prefer to ignore rather than resolve, there were some deeper implications to technology use that became apparent while marking the final exam. As a general rule, I encourage productive use of online information resources. I consider a student who can meaningfully and accurately use the internet to enhance their knowledge to be in a good place academically. I’m starting to rethink that position.

Marking these exams, I was surprised at how many of the students I thought were A+ English students couldn’t see the figurative implications of a fairly basic piece of satire. This article from The Onion was included on the exam, but a frustratingly high number of students thought it was about ants. Those that did pierce the literal barrier more often than not thought it was about the government (?) in spite of me telling them again and again that figurative meaning isn’t your opinion, it’s there in the text. Less than 1/5 of the class were able to recognize the obvious references to religion and see that article as a satire about it.

Google doesn’t know anything. The confusion between
information and knowledge is now rampant. It’s
based on misunderstanding how technology works.

I’m left wondering, as I finalize grades in this class, how many students didn’t so much understand Macbeth as spout internet revelations about it. In class, students would frequently answer questions from the smartphone Google search in their laps. I once lamented, “there is no intelligence left, just high speed internet.”

Perhaps the future of learning is the opposite of what it has always been. Instead of internalizing information and creating constellations of meaning within our own minds, we only need know how to find what someone else said about it on the interwebs. This raises some scary questions around what understanding is. Complex ideas, like being able to see into figurative meaning in a text, aren’t a matter of looking up what to say on the internet. Skills like these are based on interrelated knowledge and practice. If it isn’t internalized, no matter how tedious digital natives may find that process, you don’t know it.

That digital natives, even the really capable ones, are shying away from internalizing knowledge in favour of getting highly proficient at finding other people’s thoughts online is a real problem. General ignorance around how digital technology works allows people to say stupid things like ‘Google knows everything!’ Educational technology happily exists in that ignorance, encouraging the use of technology without understanding the hows of it. Rather than question technology use in learning using epistemology and pedagogy, we try to mimic its general use in society where it is driven by market forces. If the kids are carrying smartphones around with them everywhere, they should be in class too. BYOD, wifi everywhere, a screen for every student; these things aren’t going to necessarily increase learning. When you’ve got Google in your pocket you end up questioning nothing.

Learning has always demanded the internalization of information in order to form knowledge. This was due in part to the scarcity of information in the past, but it also developed the kind of self discipline that allowed knowledgeable people to do their own research. In our information rich world the struggle for knowledge is everything modern education is turning away from. Student centred learning, 1:1 technology, de-emphasis on traditional learning methods – all of this is the new normal. What was once a mentally rich and demanding internal process is turning into flat, generic, external fact regurgitation.

Digital natives live in a world of media at their finger tips. The information revolution is, for them, an entertainment revolution where digital delivery systems create a personalized cocoon of immediate and continuous whim satisfaction. The personalization of media has created the impression that technology is there as either distraction or, at best, a shortcut to easy answers. When all our knowledge is reduced to information we might be able to spout facts, but we understand nothing.

***

After repeatedly being told verbally and in writing that you can’t have an electronic device within reach during a formal exam, one of those grade 11s had his cell phone fall out of his jacket pocket while writing. He wasn’t cheating with it, he just thought all those warnings didn’t apply to him because asking him to leave his phone at the front of the room is the equivalent, in his mind, of asking him to pull off his ears. The digital revolution is fusing itself to our bodies and our minds, and it isn’t always an improvement.

Thoughts on how information becomes knowledge. We simplify a complex process that demands focus and self discipline
when we infect human knowledge with machine fact.

Suffering And Sacrifice in Eastern Thinking

A student used this as a graphic
text in an English Elearning course

I had an English student hand this in yesterday as an example of a graphics text. The assignment was to create three questions with answers based on the graphic text. This is a surprisingly quick way to assess a student’s understanding of a graphic text (well done Elearning Ontario).

But ya gotta be careful with the manga, it can get deep quickly, especially when you throw cultural differences into the mix. The student’s understanding of this snippet fell into a number of problems, not the least of which was the yawning gap between how a Christian middle-class, white teen in rural Ontario and the Buddhist, Japanese writer of the manga interpret suffering.

The student took “a painless lesson is one without any meaning” and focused on the lack of meaning. He suggested when random, pointless things happen to you, you should just roll with it; suffering just happens arbitrarily. I like how student’s analysis of a text often tells you more about them than it does about the text.

Incompetence: when students suddenly decide to try they
think instant success will follow because the only thing
preventing it before was their lack of effort. It turns out
that mastery requires a bit more than showing up once.

I wrote back suggesting that without fully committing to what you’re doing and suffering loss and sacrifice in the process, you never really learn anything. Only by being fully committed to your lesson, and possibly losing something valuable to you in the process, can you hope to truly learn. A painless, safe lesson is meaningless because you’ll never learn (keep) anything from it. It’s also useless because you’re not working at the ragged edge of your abilities, so you’re not doing anything you haven’t done before. Put another way, no risk, no reward.

The student didn’t seem interested in my interpretation. It fits a Western 21st Century teen’s world view to frame learning in terms of pointless suffering and minimal personal investment. By being an intentionally ineffective agent in an arbitrary world, you can blame everything except yourself for your circumstances. Your abilities are never in question because you are never the architect of any failure.

Eastern thinking is an ongoing fascination for me. I did my first two years as a teacher in Japan. This student’s graphic text was especially resonant because I’d just read this the week before:

The nail that stands highest gets hammered down.
What looks like cruelty takes on a different tone
when you consider how stress and suffering
are integrated into Eastern Culture.

Struggle for Smarts: How Eastern And Western Cultures Tackle Learning
From a Western perspective, struggle is “a sign of low ability — people who are smart don’t struggle, they just naturally get it, that’s our folk theory. Whereas in Asian cultures they tend to see struggle more as an opportunity.”

Like the author of that article, I saw Japanese students almost revelling in the difficulty of what they were failing at. That difficulty and failure is what made it all the more satisfying when they eventually found success. The Japanese don’t toss out suffering because it’s difficult, they use it to leverage learning and they do it in a culturally immersive way. What looks like cruelty to foreign eyes is actually a sign of respect from a Japanese perspective. If everyone is focused on doing their best then the rest will happen. We’re much more focused on the end result in the West.

They don’t say good luck in Japan,
they say gambate: do your best.

I studied Kendo while I was in Japan. In the thousand year old temple that was our dojo I was the only gaijin. For the first six months I couldn’t get anyone to teach me defence. My Sensei (a principal at the local high school) said I should be focused entirely on attack, if you think defensively you’ll never succeed. I liked the boo-ya Bushido samurai thinking behind this, but suspected it was really because the other students loved beating the hell out of me with a stick. I used to come home cross eyed from getting hit on the head, but I wouldn’t give up, I’m stupid like that, but it turns out that this stubbornness was what the Japanese enjoyed most about me.

I also played hockey while in Japan. I had all sorts of trouble getting comfortable with my team mates until we had a wedding party that never ended followed by a morning hockey game. We were a wreck, but seeing me in that kind of misery seemed to break down all the barriers. Did the Japanese like to see me suffer, or did they like to see me gambatte? It’s all about the effort, not the result in Japan. It took me a long time to see it from an Eastern point of view.

Resiliency and genuine, deeply personal learning are born of failure, Eastern thought embraces this. Western students, by contrast, preempt failure by refusing to fully commit to learning in the first place. When they fail they shrug because they know it isn’t their failure; you can’t lose if you don’t play. Our glorious sense of Western individualism is remarkably fragile. Isn’t this all about protecting egg-shell egos? Western education systems encourage this approach by presenting learning in the most impersonal, abstract way possible and hiding any failures. Safety nets abound ensuring that students can disengage from learning the moment it becomes difficult.

You’d never expect a Western school to take the weakest kid in the class and have them display their lack of skill in front of everyone as happens in that article, but then you’d not expect Western students to earnestly cheer the student when they overcome repeated frustration and see success either. I suspect Stigler is right, we frame struggle in terms of a lack of intelligence rather than recognizing it as the foundation of resilience and genuine learning.

That English student stepped in a surprisingly deep puddle with that graphic text.

Dream Apps

Over the last couple of days I’ve been wishing for a couple of Apps…

Idea #1:

Don’t you wish you were a fly on the wall?

FLY ON THE WALL: an app that lets you share live video from webcams at a conference you couldn’t attend in person. You get a flavour of a conference by following the twitter feed, and you can even interact with it, but you miss the moment to moment ideas, and you’re ultimately limited to what other people consider important.

Fly on the wall creates a live stream that people can watch, similar to the Edupunk spreecast we did the other day. This doesn’t need to be a huge bandwidth deal, and multiple streams from the same location can be upvoted if they are better situated. If people wanted to see the conference through the eyes of a friend, then their choice to stay with them would keep the feed active. People could even offer voice overs or supporting commentary as part of their feeds.

The benefits to conferences would be obvious, they could even tier attendance and offer a discount rate through an official fly on the wall feed to conference presentations. Virtual presence in conferences would become a regular part of the process.

Anyone want to have a go at this with me?

Idea #2:

I’m the sun!

Gravity: a web3.0 app that shows me as the centre of the system and social networking comments in orbits that are closer if they are more important to me.

Tweets that mention me are closer than general tweets, tweets that refer to demonstrated interests orbit in closer. Over time this app would get a sense of what my interests are and float in ‘interest comets’, making suggestions on items that should suit me. Facebook, twitter, Linkedin and Google+ (as well as other social networks) would be synced though Gravity to push objects of interest into your orbit.

A well trained Gravity system would feed you the must see and keep out the flotsam of your social networking feeds.

Idea #3:

Deep Reader: A web app that blocks distractions while you adopt a deep, meditative reading pose with online material. The interwebs are a distraction engine. Trying to read online is a difficult process with constant interruptions. Deep Reader holds off the onslaught while giving you the time and mental space to really grok an author’s thoughts as you used to on paper.

The problem with deep reading isn’t reading a screen, as any Kindle or Nook will show you, it’s trying to read while being in a medium that encourages a shallow surfing of information.

Deep Reader gives you a space to read as you are meant to.

I’d love to see those three. Got any more you’d love to see?

Is Always On Exhausting or Exhilarating?

In a recent conversation with a techno-phobic (or at least reticent) colleague she was bemoaning the constant state of connectedness that modern technology forces upon people. I’ve heard this complaint from a lot of people who struggle to remain unplugged.

The conversation:

she: I choose to remain present and not in a state of constant inattention!

me: It’s more of a oneness with the datasphere, you’re never alone, a living cell in a massive organism… a heightened state of awareness, the world is all around you, information conducted by you…

she: Wow…sounds almost like Zen Buddhism. Ohm.

One of the reasons this onlineness isn’t work for me is because it’s cathartic. I never feel like I’m doing work, it feels more like self expression. I’m the one who directs it, it’s empowering.

What I find exhausting is sitting in traffic, fascism , traffic lights, current Canadian politics, indoctrination and standing in lines. If I had to do that 24/7, I’d go mental, yet millions of people accommodate these things as the necessities of daily life. When I’m online I’m orchestrating my interests, communicating with people I enjoy and feeding my mind. How would I ever get tired of that?

And as for information overload…. well…

Digital Serfs

This topic has come up before, but I’ve been rehashing it in my mind over the past day or two after having a twitter-talk with @innovativeedu.

She posted a blog on using Facebook in class. Before last semester, I would probably have read it, nodded, and moved on.

Last semester I found myself teaching career studies (a grade 10 compulsory credit to prepare students for the work place). It isn’t a challenging course, so our board decided to use it as a pilot to introduce students to elearning. I thought this was a great idea. Our completion rates in elearning aren’t good and introducing students to the technology before they have to go live with it alone and online is a solid step towards fixing things. (I initially wrote about that pilot here).

Even at high academic levels (pre university English is what I’ve taught on elearning), we typically have a 50% dropout rate. Last time through I had a 60% completion rate and I was over the moon about it. Part of the problem is how guidances place students into elearning – it seems to be a ‘you’ve exhausted all other options so we’ll dump you there’ situation for many students – not an ideal way to cull candidates for a technically challenging, lonely learning experience. After doing these recent in-class/hybrid elearning classes I now think the failure rate has to do with digital literacy; very few people have it.

Part of the problem is an educational assumption (usually based on ignorance, age based ludditism and/or fear of technology), that young people have some kind of magical connection to technology that allows them to immediately understand and make effective use of it. We dress them up in terms like ‘digital native‘ and sit there complacently, happily waiting for them to wow us with their, um, digital nativity.

When you’re teaching elearning remotely, you’re not seeing what they’re doing first hand, you just get a (digital) window into what’s going on (which is often nothing). When work does come in, it’s often a jumbled mess. Students ignore things like file format (.rtf please, nothing else, then you get everything else). Students ignore file naming conventions (everything handed in is called document.doc, and is usually not what they thought it was because by mid-way through the course they have a documents folder filled with document(1) document(2) .doc files).

When you do finally get something as (technologically) simple as an essay, they often show little or no understanding of how the word processor they used actually works. They don’t know how to format simple things like line spacing and margins, let alone more complex layout issues like APA citations. There isn’t a lot of room in the grade 12 university bound English curriculum for teaching grade 7 computer skills.

This all leads me to the realization I had in that open grade 10 careers class. In a class of 25 (I taught 4 such classes, they all played out similarly), ten students took to the elearning environment like fish to water. They had the technical chops to manage uploads, file management and the various IT issues that arose. Ten or so had enough computer experience to push their way through the course and be successful. Five or so students in each class had very limited computer knowledge. They were comfortable doing only very specific things with a computer. They had no idea what file types were, how to upload things to the internet or stay focused on what they were supposed to be doing. These students were constantly, and I mean constantly, staring at Facebook.

What’s interesting about that distribution is that it’s pretty much the same across the general population. Teens don’t have a magical insight into technology any more than boomers do. The willingness to learn and understand computers is not age specific.

I should add that all students were on Facebook at various points (including the student who finished with a 100% in the course). The difference between the technically literate ones and the digital serfs were telling though. The serfs weren’t doing this because they were bored, they were doing it because they literally don’t know how to do anything else with a computer.

In working with them I noticed big differences in their Facebook profiles as well. Strong students had media rich walls with many links, comments and discussions with a wide variety of contacts (many of whom were family members); they were media generators and social networkers. Weak students tended to have empty walls, minimal written contact with people (virtually all peers, most of which was appallingly low brow and often related to pictures that would turn their parents’ hair white). They didn’t know how to use the internet to add interesting content, they were users, not makers, and they were not in peer groups that encouraged more effective use of technology.

The more confusing part was that the vacant Facebookers would sit there for hours, looking at pictures, there was very little reading involved. This reminds me of a video I saw the other day. Put simply, many people will not self-direct their learning, even in a media rich, technologically plentiful environment where the entire history of human development is laid open before them. If the gap between what a student knows and what they are being asked to do is so great, the preferred solution is to ignore the situation entirely by pretending it doesn’t exist; Facebook is the ideal go-to in these situations.

These students don’t know what they don’t know, and think they know a lot that is, in fact, wrong (just like those in that video). This is a Zone of Proximal Development issue. Their ignorance is so great that they can’t even begin to realize how little they actually know. Their knowledge is akin to belief.

The internet, for many, is a vacuous, narcissistic waste of time. Their habitual use of very few (often two: youtube and facebook) websites has made them new media illiterate. They know virtually nothing about computers, navigation or using the net to provide resources, to the point of begging even common sense.

“It doesn’t work”

“it’s unplugged”

“I can’t edit this file”

“You’re looking at it in WORD viewer”

“The internet doesn’t work”

“You haven’t connected to the wireless” (this after 3 weeks of doing this)

I’ve had colleagues working with grade 12s who have no idea, not one of them in a class of thirty, about how to create a hypertext. They were supposed to be developing google docs about a piece of literature, but she’s teaching them simple hypertext because none of them have any idea how the internet works.

Until we start taking digital literacy seriously and begin to develop the necessary skills in a coherent manner throughout school, we’re throwing students into the digital sea with very unfair limitations, often based on family circumstance and technology access.

Answer Enright’s Questions!

Michael Enright is interviewing 4 “new” teachers on Sunday Edition today (though I’m not sure a year 7 teacher qualifies as new). Here are the questions he asked these bright and shiny teachers from across Canada. Once he settled them in, the discussion got real!

Being an interrogative, tarnished, unpicked teacher, I thought I’d throw in my two cents too! Feel free to grab the questions and reply for yourself below…

Why did you become a teacher?
I got downsized 3 times in business, and started to get the sense that you’ll get used and tossed by business no matter how hard you work at it. You’ll put in years above and beyond and get chucked when it suits them. I’d taught in Japan for a couple of years and my wife was a teacher. When the last downsize happened she encouraged me to go take teacher’s college in Ontario. I didn’t like school, didn’t do particularly well at it, and still think it’s a bit of a holding cell for disenfranchised young citizens (if the voting age was changed to 16, graduation age would quickly follow it).

I’ve learned in many different environments from classrooms to online to machine shops. In my experience classrooms tend to be more about control than learning. Every year before I go back into the classroom I listen to Another Brick In The Wall, and then promise never to do that to anyone. It’s very easy for education to become a mechanical system.

I love learning, and I see my students as people, not statistics. I loved being Sensei in Japan, being ‘teacher’ in Canada isn’t quite as renowned, but I’m dedicated to my professional practice and believe that what I do matters.

Are you a minority in your field (gender? race? age?) What’s that like?
I was the oldest in my teacher training program by many years. Most of my colleagues were career eductionalists (public school straight into university straight into teacher’s college straight into teaching). I often found myself applying experience to what was a challenging teaching program while the pro-students choked on the work loads.

I’ve often found it difficult to see eye to eye with how academic teachers do things. But one of the most important things about teachers is that they represent all aspects of society. If the only teachers students met were academic A+ average robots, many students would be alienated. It’s important that we have a diverse teaching population for a diverse student population. Mentors aren’t found in ranks of similar people.

Has being a teacher changed you?
I’ve really enjoyed building a profession knowing that I can commit myself to it and not get dumped because of a spreadsheet. That sense of security allows me to do an important job well. It allows me to justify the thousands of dollars I’ve spent on my own qualifications without fear that it may be wasted. Teaching is a long view profession that I enjoy developing year after year.

There has been a lot of latitude in job options, so I’m never bored. Teaching hasn’t changed me much, but I’ve finally found a profession that matches my intensity. If it’s changed me at all, it’s made me a bit more reluctant to argue ideas (believe it or not), while I work out all sides of an issue. Teaching makes you less likely to jump to conclusions.

Regionally, what’s challenging about your job?
On the edge of rural and urban Canada, I have a great deal of difficulty dealing with students driving to school with large rebel flags in their pickup trucks. The overt racism can be shocking (though it tends to be repeated from the dinner table and is based more on a lack of experience than a sense of actual hatred). I enjoy taking as many students as possible on field trips to Toronto – it’s good for them, though many fear they will be murdered.

Anyone spread too thin by teaching?
I tend to jump into breaches, suddenly find myself teaching pilot programs, heading departments, running sports and clubs, presenting at conferences, representing in the union… often all at the same time. My wife teaches too, and between us I feel a great deal of tension wanting to participate in the full spectrum of teaching related work and keeping up with family commitments.

One of the hardest things I’ve found in teaching (I’m going into year 9) is the gearing. You go at 110% all semester and then suddenly it’s exams. In June it then means summer. The change in gears is stressful, it’s hard to put it down, and it gets awfully heavy if you don’t.

I’ve had half a dozen distinct careers… none have been remotely as emotionally, physically and intellectually exhausting as teaching. If you’re at work, you’re full on, all the time. There are no easy days when you feel like taking it slow. If you’re away, you’re still planning all the work, so you’re never really off. When you are there, you’re surrounded by people, an unfortunate percentage of whom are of questionable personal hygiene. You get sick a lot. You make your family sick a lot. All while going 100%, all the time.

Are we asking teachers to do too much?

http://www.torontosun.com/2012/08/16/broten-tackles-teacher-pay
“no average Ontarian would expect a 5.5% pay hike in these economic times,
just because they took the summer off and refused to negotiate”

Average Ontarians don’t have 5+ years of higher education.
The vast majority of teachers don’t take the summer off.
Teacher’s didn’t refuse the negotiate, the government did and then created an illegal forced contract that has since been struck down.

If their bosses are going to publicly humiliate them and ignore the actual job in favor of public illusions about the profession, then yes, we are asking teachers to do too much without recognizing what the job actually is. I have been teaching for 8 years and have yet to have a ‘summer off’. I know some teachers do walk away and do nothing, but many more don’t. If you’re going to represent a profession by their worst members, no job in the world is going to look appealing. Teachers don’t mind doing the extra work, they tend to do it for the right reasons (passion), but not if it’s going to be used against them, which it has been.

How do you deal with the bureaucracy?
Cautiously, especially now that I understand I work for a ministry that is run by morally bankrupt vote grabbers who stand for nothing and are willing to toss any ideal they claim to represent into the fire if they think it’ll satisfy the mob.

I’ve found my school admin to be relatively easy to work with. The vast majority are professional and dedicated to fair, reasonable work. I’m finding the larger, political structures to be somewhat less trustworthy.

What is the relationship between teachers and the ministry (bureaucracy)?
See above. No real problems until this year. We do our job very well, they support us, we look fantastic in UN rankings of world education systems. Apparently we can trash that if it means winning a single by-election. Now I am trying not to be hostile, though it is hard when your boss openly lies about you in the media.

Yes, going to school this year has been overshadowed by some very negative politics. The only thing I find more frustrating are head-in-the-sand teachers who refuse to acknowledge anything about it. It affects them, but they think they’re above it. How they can call themselves genuine when they are willfully ignorant of the hypocrisy hurting their profession is annoying. Meanwhile, they appear to be content letting other people throw themselves into a fight that will benefit them while they do nothing about it. I wonder how they teach students about democracies and human rights, it isn’t through example.

Do teachers drive students to do well in standardized testing? Is it a race?
I hate that they do, but they do. Test scores have dictated where I live, which makes me sad. Not all schools are created equally, and people grasp at anything to distinguish them. I’m an advocate of saving the millions we spend a year on testing by cancelling it. The only way we can get better is by NOT following bad US habits down the toilet. Simplifying learning into standardized testing is beneath the standard we’ve set for ourselves.

How do you handle parents with unreal expectations? or an abiding dislike of teachers?
The second bit I get a lot of around this very conservative (never been anything else) riding. As a general rule I try and deal directly with students, my covenant is with them. Having said that, I use technology to try and make my teaching as radically transparent as possible. If there are no surprises, there are usually no complaints.

I also approach teaching trying not to prejudice students. I’ve seen too many teachers gossip about a student and destroy any chance for them to build a new relationship with a different teacher. I’ve had very good relationships with students who have been nightmares for others. I try to avoid that kind of talk – it leads to confrontations with parents.

Even the most hateful parent won’t have a complaint if I’m straight up and direct with the student and them about what a course is and how to do well in it. The fact that I can talk to them from their own experiences (not just as an Ed-bot) doesn’t hurt either. It’s a lot easier to commiserate with someone who has been downsized when you’ve experienced it yourself. The shiny educationalist would find that challenging.

“You don’t know what it’s like out there, you’ve never worked
in the private sector, They expect results! (shudder)”.

***

CLICK HERE to listen to the original interviews. As mentioned, once they get settled in and get past the bright, shiny stuff, it gets real!

***
Here are the questions boiled down. Feel free to copy and paste in to go face to face with Enright yourself!

Why did you become a teacher?
Are you a minority in your field (gender? race? age?) What’s that like?
Has being a teacher changed you?
Regionally, what’s challenging about your job?
Anyone else spread too thin by teaching?
Are we asking teachers to do too much?
How do you deal with the bureaucracy?
What is the relationship between teachers and the ministry?
Do teachers drive students to do well in standardized testing? Is it a race?
How do you handle parents with unreal expectations? or an abiding dislike of teachers?

Own Your Digital Self

William Gibson (@greatdismal himself) on our changing mindscape:

At the last Educational Computing Conference in Ontario, there were a lot of presentations on digital footprints. In every case, a few, older Luddites were struggling against a perceived loss of privacy while everyone else was being (as @greatdismal says above so well) ‘benignly assimilated into the borg.’

This is one of those moments where you need to recognize a seismic shift in perception. Two hundred years ago you weren’t private, you were a public object identified by your clothing, where you lived, how you spoke, who you were related to and what you did for a living. This common knowledge defined you. Saying that you didn’t want any of it to get out because you wanted privacy would seem bizarre.

Thirty years ago, you were all of those older ideas of social identity advertising yourself as you moved more efficiently in motorized transport. Some few found their identities ruled by media, but this was a function of how limited access to that media was. Three decades ago the first bits of digital information where hanging on you, like your phone number (publicly available in a phone book, and still available through other means if you were struggling to retain the privacy you never had by going unlisted). Later on fax numbers began to follow us around, and then things got busy.

In the early days of the internet, digital information about us blossomed. Unlike earlier, industrialized media, the two-way internet pushed everyone into the lime light. Work emails, then personal emails, then work webpages, then personal webpages, then social media came along and surrounded us with constellations of public information. We can try and bury our heads in the sand, not participate, not take control of this data, but it won’t succeed in removing you from this equation.

Whenever you make a financial transaction, or communicate, you’re adding data to your digital shadow. You have a choice to author that data, but if you choose not to, it’ll end up authoring itself, or even worse, someone else will author it for you.

Those digital footprint seminars all came back to the same idea: the most powerful thing you can do in a rapidly expanding world of data is be yourself and present yourself as you want to be perceived. Burying your head in the sand doesn’t show your best public side to the datasphere.

As you may have already guessed, resistance is futile.

Looking for an interesting sci-fi angle on this? Daniel Suarez’ DAEMON & FREEDOM novels will knock you into the 21st Century with some radical, technical plausibility!

“The Matrix is everywhere, all around us, even in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television, …you can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes…”