“We’ve all become used to thinking of Gen Z as the first truly “digital native” generation. They were born when the internet was available to everyone and don’t remember a time when it wasn’t normal to carry a smartphone wherever they go and document their lives on TikTok and Instagram. Unfortunately, it turns out that this form of digital native might not translate to being able to work with the tools and technologies that are expected to shape the 21st century.”

– Is Our Digital Future At Risk Because Of The Gen Z Skills Gap?

The digital skills gap is an ongoing concern, but in building a successful digital skilling program over the past two decades I’ve trial and errored my way to an efficient process for getting students from thinking they have digital fluency to actually having it. Here’s how:

Step 1: Start Where People Are Most Familiar (I.T.!)

Information Technology (or I.T.) is where most people have regular contact with digital technology, though many people don’t know what I.T. stands for. The devices we live our lives on in 2023 all depend on digital infrastructure and incredible engineering to do what they do. To unpack all that and make people aware of how this technology works, you build it!

RCT Ontario is the local branch of the Computers For Schools national program that takes off-lease technology and gives it to schools and others in need. They are all you need to get hands on with digital technology. I’ve found that building a desktop computer from scratch is a great way to get past the bluster of self-professed computer experts (aka: students who have been told they are digital natives) and let them show what they actually know.

All digital technology follows the same basic foundation of hardware, firmware, operating system, software. The desktop is a modular, relatively easy to assemble example of this architecture, but everything from laptops to smartphones to ATMs to Teslas uses the same stuff in the same way.

By building their own PCs from scratch, students who have some experience fill in gaps and students with no tech background find that they have a clear understanding based on hands-on familiarity. This also does a lot to clear away misconceptions and myths around digital tech (like that digital native one).

Another good resource is PC Part Picker that lets students theorize their perfect PC. Once they have an understanding of the hardware and how it goes together, suddenly customization becomes a possibility and the generic tech that most people live with isn’t enough. Many of my grade 9s have built their own PC at home by the time I see them again in grade 10.

Cisco’s I.T. Essentials course is available for free on Netacademy and offers media rich, current online learning support for this hands on I.T. exploration. It also makes students aware of the world of industry certifications out there in information technology. Students starting in I.T. Essentials can work towards their CompTIA A+ computer technician certification which is the first step towards moving in many directions in the industry.

Once everyone has their hardware worked out, it’s time to get into operating systems. Like I.T. hardware, people have experience with OSes but seldom get under the hood. A good way to expand familiarity and get students interested in OS options is to have them build a multi-boot system on their DIYed PCs.

Our record OS stacks in grade 9 had many operating systems ranging from various versions of Windows (XP, 7, 8, 10, server, etc) along with multiple Linux distributions (an OS most students haven’t touched but one that runs behind a lot of the tech we use) all bootable off one desktop. Familiarity with many different operating systems is a powerful step forward from the ‘we just use Chromebooks’ approach many schools have adopted (Chrome OS is actually a version of Linux).

We can usually do the PC builds and OS stacks in a week of classes (about 6 hours of instructional time). In an intensive course you could get everyone hands-on and familiar with the architecture of computers and operating systems in a day (6-7 hours).

Step 2: Use Your DIY TechTo Scale Down and Explore Electronics & Coding With Arduino

The Arduino micro-controller is a simple digital device that does a great job of showing the basics of how computer code performs with hardware. It also introduces students to circuits and the electronics fundamentals that drive all digital technology.

Arduino is open-source (like Linux) and doesn’t usually come in a pre-fabricated activity/kit from your friendly neighborhood edtech for-profit with pre-set lessons and learning outcomes (a sure way to fail at developing real digital fluency).

With relatively small outlay you can collect together Arduino microcontrollers and basic electronics like LEDs and resistors and facilitate a hands-on understanding of the electronics that make the modern world work. Kits with many parts cost less than $80 and if you’re crafty, far less). We always used Abra Electronics in Montreal to keep it Canadian.

There are piles of Arduino projects that students can try, but we always worked through the ARDX Arduino circuits to get everyone familiar with how breadboards and circuits work first. The Arduino plugs into the student-built desktops with a USB cable and then runs software that lets students explore both coding and circuit building in a very real way.

This is another area where the bluster gets cleared away by demonstrated mastery. If a
student tells me they already know all about electronics, I tell them that they only have to do circuit number five and then can go right into designing their own project. A few can show what they claim to know, but many struggle and then I gently redirect them to doing the circuits as a ‘refresher’. By the end of the Arduino unit everyone has tactile knowledge of the basics in circuit building and  coding.

Introducing Arduino and running through the basic circuits typically takes about a week of high school classes, so it would be another day (6-7 hours) if students were in focused training to quickly develop these real digital fluencies.

Step 3: Using Your DIY Tech to Scale Up And Explore Connectivity & Networking

To get students the Arduino software and access to circuits on their desktops, you would have to connect them to the internet. After Arduino, students are more comfortable with their PCs and how they work, so it’s time to go upstream and tackle networking!

This is another intimate aspect of people’s lives that is often misunderstood. By having students build local networks with each other’s machines and pass data across, they again benefit from direct, tactile, experiential learning.

We then connect these local networks together into a class-wide network and watch data travel across it in real time, but the favourite part is stress testing the network to see how much data it can handle. Tools like LOIC (low orbit ion canon!) can be used to DDOS machines off the network by overloading them with data. At this point complex, multi-disciplinary specialities in digital technologies (like cybersecurity) start to glimmer in the distance. Anyone trying to teacher cyber from a place with none of these foundational understandings in place is going to have trouble.

Another good stress test is to set up an older LAN based game which requires inputting IP addresses and other details. It’s not often students have playing a multi-player game as a classroom learning target. You can guess how popular that is.

Tools wise, Cisco offers their Packet Tracer network simulator for free (you can become a Cisco Network Academy at no cost, which makes dozens of introductory ICT, networking and coding courses available). Packet Tracer lets students build complex theoretical networks and then push data through them to see if and how they work.

The networking unit typically takes another week of high school classes, so could be managed in a single 6-7 hour day. By the end of it students are experimenting with their DIY desktops on their DIY networks. The learning doesn’t get any more genuine than this and the result is students who are tangibly developing real digital fluency.

Step 4: Using Your DIY Tech to Explore Data Management and Programming Through an Introduction to HTML and How the Web Works

In the high school junior grades we focus on Javascript and HTML (both common web-focused coding languages). HTML works well as it allows students to quickly understand how the webpages they spend so much time on are displayed. Javascript is helpful because it allows webpages to run executable scripts and hints at the complexity modern webpages are capable of. LIke the other steps, the point here is to get behind the curtain an begin to make students aware of how the technology they are codependent on works.

Students can create and share simple HTML webpages on their network giving them a hands-on introduction to internet architecture. W3 Schools does a great intro to HTML and Javascript (and CSS and HTML5). The point isn’t to create a web developer in a day, but to (once again) develop tactile familiarity with digital technologies that have always been hidden from them.

Coding takes time to develop, but an introduction to web design typically takes about a week to get students to the point where they know enough syntax to build a simple webpage. What’s nice about HTML is that there is an immediacy to it. You put in a command and immediately see the result.

Step 5: PLAY!

When you’ve got foundational digital fluency, you can chase down NASA complex projects! Here CyberTitans Vlad & Wyatt (also a 2x Skills Ontario medalist in IT & Networking) are building a Beowulf supercomputer!.. out of ewaste!

I’d run this in adult up-skilling as an intensive week of digital fluency training. The final day would be a student directed mini-project. For those who dug PC building, they can build something to a specific purpose. For those who dug the Arduino and electronics, opportunities to explore await, and for those intrepid few who enjoyed networking and data management/programming, they can chase down more complex connectivity or web development.

When I did my A+ training way back during Y2K it was an intensive week which gave me enough context to chase down my certification in a few months of practice and study. I’ve had a few students manage to get A+ certified as a computer technician while still in high school, but it’s a challenge due to the breadth of material. I.T. techs need to be familiar with older tech and newer tech as well as what’s current. That experience takes time, which is why my seniors do in-school I.T. support. Being dropped into real world technology complications helps they hone the skills they need to be an effective technicians.

Why Do this?

This level of hands-on technical familiarity could be established in 35 instructional hours. When I see Ontario dedicating more time to mandatory courses like ‘Career Studies’ I shake my head. This kind of digital fluency would actually lead to a career, but instead we have grade 10s, most of whom have no idea what they want to do for a living, spinning in circles for half a semester (it’s also one of the most failed courses in the curriculum). We could be delivering digitally competent students and close the digital skills gap, but instead we mandate mandatory eLearning, then we’ll wonder why that didn’t work either. 

For those tackling adult re-skilling, I see a lot of cybersecurity ‘bootcamps’ that assume much of this digital fluency (much like K12 does) and then wonder why their dropout rates are so high. Cybersecurity is a multi-disciplinary specialization within ICT and you can’t get to it directly any more than you can expect an illiterate adult to tackle romantic poetry; you need foundations skills before you take on that kind of complexity. It isn’t an impossible ask, but it is one that needs to recognize the need to start from where people are at, which is further back than we think they are.

Resolving the digital skills gap and providing everyone with the fluency they need to operate effectively in digital spaces isn’t an option in 2023, yet we still treat it like one. Here’s the fix.

Follow Up Links

The Digital Divide is Deep and Wide (2017): https://temkblog.blogspot.com/2017/12/the-digital-divide-is-deep-and-wide.html

How to Pivot Ontario Education to Prepare for The Next Wave (we didn’t): https://temkblog.blogspot.com/2020/05/how-to-pivot-ontario-education-to.html

Exceptional Times: Using a Pandemic to Close the Digital Divide (any day now): https://temkblog.blogspot.com/2020/03/exceptional-times.html

Why Canadian Education is so Reluctant to Move on Digital Literacy (hard to teach it when you don’t have it either): https://temkblog.blogspot.com/2023/02/why-canadian-education-is-so-reluctant.html

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 If you’re not paying attention to quantum technology development, you’re missing out on the most exciting tech evolutions happening. Quantum computers are still in development, but as MIT suggests, “Thanks to some recent breakthroughs, aggressive roadmapping, and high levels of funding, we may see general-purpose quantum computers earlier than many would have anticipated just a few years ago”.

Had I remained in the classroom this year I would have been building a library of quantum computing resources that I could introduce to my seniors in hopes that some of them might consider it as a viable (and much supported) pathway in their post-secondary journey. But I’m not in the classroom, so I’m considering quantum on a much bigger scale, ideally a national one where I can connect educators to accessible quantum technology learning opportunities for students both in STEM and in non-technical fields of study.

Back in January, the Minister of Innovation, Science & Economic Development for Canada (ISED), François-Philippe Champagne, announced Canada’s Quantum Strategy. Looking past the ambition in the announcement, Champagne described Quantum as “…not vertical, it’s horizontal. Like AI, it is going to have an impact on everything.” This emphasizes the breadth of this new discipline even more than the hundreds of millions of dollars.

When electronic computers caught on at the end of the Second World War an industry needed to grow up around them to support their rapid development. There will certainly be a need for quantum algorithm creators who emigrate out of traditional computer science programs to explore this new and quite different form of programming, and there will be a need for engineers to design the complex systems needed to create stable superpositioned qubits at near absolute zero temperatures in environments screened from all interference. But there will also be places for human resources professionals, marketing types and other personnel who need a working understanding of quantum technologies in order to understand the business model and support the engineering needed to make it happen.

Quantum learning resources for your classroom:

Jan, 2023: GOVERNMENT OF CANADA REVEALS PLANS FOR $360 MILLION NATIONAL QUANTUM STRATEGY

Jan, 2023: MIT: What’s next for quantum computing

2020: Business: What quantum computing could mean for customer experience

2020: Quantum computing and quantum supremacy, explained

What a quantum computer is and online mini-games that help explain it: http://quantum-hub.herokuapp.com

An open source quantum programming online learning opportunity: https://qiskit.org/ Coding in quantum looks more like circuit design than what people traditionally think of programming.

Canada’s National Quantum Strategy: https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/national-quantum-strategy/en/canadas-national-quantum-strategy

9 Industries at Risk from Y2Q: https://www.spiceworks.com/it-security/security-general/guest-article/post-quantum-cryptography-nine-industries-at-risk-from-y2q/

2022 Summer, Quantum Progress: https://er.educause.edu/articles/2022/7/quantum-computing-current-progress-and-future-directions

Digital Supercluster Quantum K-12 Program: https://www.digitalsupercluster.ca/projects/diversifying-talent-in-quantum-computing/

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We rolled back initial lessons to the point where we’re introducing students to how computers store local files, but even that wasn’t far enough. With no coherent digital skills curriculum in our schools, you have to clear away a lot of misconceptions and back up the truck all the way before you can start building a coherent understanding of how digital technology works. As in the case of most problems, thinking about pizza helps…

Only Old People Use Computers…

 ‘Wait a minute!’ you say. ‘I’m super cool! I don’t use old fashioned things like computers! I’m a digital native who lives on their phone.’

Newsflash! Smartphones are computers! So are tablets, Chromebooks, laptops, desktops, IoT devices like your smart thermostat or the Alexa that’s listening all the time. Because they’re all fundamentally the same thing, you can understand and fix them when they go wrong. You’re using a computer to read this right now, it just might not look like one.

ALL COMPUTERS ARE LIKE A PIZZA

If you think about pizza when you’re diagnosing a computer (which might look like a phone, car fuel injection system, laptop or smart fridge), it helps you to isolate where the problem is and clarifies what you need to do to fix it. All electronic computers share the same fundamental components, and those components are pizza-licious!

The Dough: HARDWARE

This is the part of the pizza that can look very different. The physical shell we put a computer in can range in size from a smartwatch to building-sized supercomputers. Generally, the smaller they are the slower they are because electronic computing generates heat and that’s hard to get rid of when you can’t install fans and other cooling stuff to get the heat out and let the processor run at top speed.

That’s why desktops always feel faster than laptops. Their architecture can be designed for speed because engineers can get rid of the heat made from running a processor fast. Mobile processors are often throttled down desktop hardware. Even smaller computers tend to be specialists only having to do a few tasks that engineers can optimize the hardware for. Phones can only run certain apps, watches are even more limited and single function computers like ATMs or smart thermostats can optimize all of their hardware to a single task.

If you’re having hardware headaches, like a computer overheating and locking up, you can fix it like a mechanic, with tools (and thermal paste) and some physical attention. If you get handy enough, you can even start building your own crusts.

The Sauce: FIRMWARE

Computer hardware doesn’t know what it is – it’s just STUFF. When you first power up a computer (phone, desktop whatever), you often see text appear for a second and then disappear. That’s the saucy FIRMWARE. Firmware is software that’s written onto a chip in the computer that tells it what kind of hardware its running on. 

Firmware is sometimes called BIOS, which stands for Basic Input/Output System – which is literally what it is; software that tells the computer what hardware it has that takes care of inputting and outputting data. UEFI replaced BIOS on modern computers, but it’s just a fancy BIOS with graphics that make it easier to navigate. It’s pointless acronym expansion like this that puts people off learning about computers!

The Cheese: OPERATING SYSTEMS

On top of the firmware sauce you have the cheesy OPERATING SYSTEM. You’ve seen logos for them for years, but probably don’t give them much thought. If you’re a PC type person you’ll have seen Windows evolve through XP, 7. 8. 10 and now Windows 11 versions. Apple people know OSx (Operating System 10), and if you know any nerds they’ll tell you about Linux – the free, open source operating system that gives you great power to modify.

OSes are the software that span the gap between users and the machine itself. OSes have a lot of work to do running an incredible variety of applications, some of it very poorly made, without crashing, though sometimes they do. OSes have to integrate all the different input methods (touchscreen, mouse, trackpad, keyboard, etc) and all the possible output methods like screens, printers, haptic feedback or even the LED lights on the computer itself. Juggling all of that hardware and software, all of it engineered to different standards and coded with varying levels of skill, is a might task, though that doesn’t stop people from ripping on the cheesy OS…

It’s in the cheese of operating systems where you run into a lot of headaches, unless you make a computer so absurdly simple that it can only do one thing. Rather than learn the complexity computers are capable of in order to leverage the flexibility that a general purpose machine can perform, we’ve surged toward simplicity. It started with Apple’s ‘walled garden’ approach to iOS, where apps must comply with (and pay for) strict standards. This allowed the iPhone to create a larger user base because it simply worked – just not in as many ways as it might.

Android came along with a more open approach and took back some market share, but most people would rather do less if it means not having to learn anything about computers. Nowhere is this better shown than with Chromebooks. Chrome OS that runs on a Chromebook is actually a flavour of Linux designed to give you only a browser. They’re great because you can barely do anything with them and they’re easy to manage – which is why we use them in schools to teach digital fluency.

Of course, if you’re crafty you can work around all these blocks. You can ‘jail break‘ Android and iOS phones to allow you to update the OS (many  companies freeze you out of updates after a couple of years in order to force you to buy a new device). Jail breaking usually involves finding a hacked firmware (remember the sauce?) that has removed any locks on what kind of OS can be installed. You overwrite the official firmware with deristricted firmware sauce and then you can keep updating your Android or iOS versions or install software on the device that the manufacturer blocked.

The Toppings: APPLICATIONS and PROGRAMS

A pizza wouldn’t be a pizza without some toppings that customize it to your taste. When you first start up a new computer it’s a plain cheese pizza. Your dough (hardware) powers up and runs your sauce (firmware), which makes the computer aware of its hardware and then hands it all off to the cheese (operating system), which loads you into a plain pizza starting environment.

 As you customize your pizza computer to your needs, you install apps adding another layer of complexity to your poor old operating system. Generally, the longer a computer has been with a user, the more toppings they’ve piled on. This gets complicated by apps and operating systems getting out of date, then you might have rotten toppings wrecking your otherwise yummy pizza. You’ve got to keep your toppings (OS cheese and even your FIRMWARE sauce) up to date or you can end up with problems. The vast majority of pizza lovers aren’t very good at looking after their cheese wheels, which makes hackers very happy.

If you really like pizza, you’ll make your own…

These PC pizzas were just coming into being when I was growing up in the 1980s. Early machines came complete as a ‘deluxe pizza’ with the crust, sauce and cheese all per-selected for me. My first two PCs, a Commodore VIC-20 and Commodore 64, offered crust upgrades (memory I could plug into the expansion port), and gave me control of the toppings, which we quickly learned how to customize.

In the late 80s/early 90s I got into i386 IBM clone computers. This was my first go at a truly DIY pizza PC. I got to select components to customize my crust, the sauce firmware comes with the hardware, but then I could pick my OS cheese too. I haven’t owned a ‘deluxe’ pre-made pizza PC since. My current desktop is a custom case I selected for its big fans so that it runs quick, cool and quiet (it also happens to look like the bat mobile). To that I added a high-speed motherboard, fast processor and lots of RAM (fast memory), so it never hesitates, even when I’m running many applications at once. A VR ready video card means my graphics are super quick and the whole thing is aimed at precisely what I want to do with it. Custom crusts are the way to go.

For the cheese I always install multiple operating systems. Right after my firmware sauce finishes it gives me a menu that lets me choose between many different OS cheeses depending on what I want to do.  My desktop will boot into two versions of Windows, three versions of LInux (each customized for a specific task) and it even ‘hackintoshes‘ if I need to test something in an Apple environment. My pizzaPC changes its cheese based on what I need it to do!

The Pre-made Pizza Dilemma: DELUXE PIZZAS USUALLY AREN’T

The urge to Chromebook us has always been with us. The ‘game system’ industry is a Chromebook for games.
Pre-selected crust, sauce and cheese lead to a limited selection of
toppings (games), but this simplification and one trick pony reduction of multi-purpose computers into toys is where the money is.

When we simplify computers to satisfy simple people
needs, we end up even more oblivious to how they work. When I first started teaching computer technology in high school, I could assume my incoming grade 9s knew how to navigate file management in a computer (that’s deep in the cheese). But as Chromebooks took over I realized that (thanks to cloud based everything), students had lost their understanding of how local files are stored.

 

RESOURCES IF YOU WANT TO MAKE YOUR OWN PIZZA PC

If you’re curious about customizing your own pizza PC, PC Parts Picker is
a great place to start. Once you realize what’s available in terms of
doughy hardware and what you can do with your cheesy operating systems,
computers suddenly turn from something you barely understand (even
though you use them every day) to a tool that you can fix and customize
to your needs.

Here is the lesson plan we work from when I introduce students to computer architecture.

But the best possible way to get these concepts across to students is to have them build
desktops with their own hands and you can do this FOR FREE! Find the COMPUTERS FOR SCHOOLS program in your province and they will happily provide you with computer hardware to DIY your PC builds. I’ve worked with RCT Ontario for many years and they are fantastic, providing teachers who want to build genuine technology fluency in a hands on way.

Students love building their own machines, but the best part is the EQUITY and INCLUSION it enables. For students who don’t have a computers at home, they can build one and then take it home, making this one of very few times where the education system is actually closing rather than widening the digital divide.

The Digital Divide is Deep & Wide

Using the Pandemic to Close the Digital Divide

 How to Pivot Ontario Education to Prepare for The Next Wave 

Why Canadian Education is so Reluctant to Move on Digital Literacy

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 All sides are going to drag their feet for as long as they can with the new teacher contracts in Ontario. I’d certainly like my pay to keep up with inflation, but that hasn’t happened in any time recently, so I’m not sure why it should be a show stopper now. My buying power, even with the sub-par increases we’ve eked out, is significantly less than it was in 2010. This isn’t a ‘this government’ thing – the last one was pretty good at making us poorer each time too. The difference these days is that this one also likes to cripple learning conditions.

A problem with how we get to a contract in Ontario is that you’d be lucky to find anyone at the table who has been in a classroom teaching recently. Most professional unionists have levitated out of classroom teaching, in some cases for decades. On the other side of the table there is most likely no one who has ever taught a day in their lives. These are the people deciding teaching working conditions and student learning conditions in our schools.

I’m already out of pocket significantly, so another 1% per year raise isn’t going to do much, but I know where resources could be put that would make a difference both to myself as a teacher and to my students as learners. I’d accept a three year deal that gets us to the end of this provincial government’s mandate with NO RAISE, but only if we also did the following:

1) Reduce Ontario College of Teacher fees back to prepandemic levels and freeze them there for the duration of this ‘we don’t get a raise so you don’t either’ contract.

2) Restore public education funding to prepandemic levels. In 2021, while COVID droned on, almost a billion dollars was cut from education in our province. Restore that.

That gets us back on an even keel by removing the system damaging politics that have withered public education in Ontario. With the politics deflated, lets look at how we can make the system more efficient so that we can maximizing our funding and produce better learning outcomes. I suspect many teachers would be willing to focus on improving our classroom learning because student learning conditions are also our working conditions.

Here are some ways to shake the tree and put the focus back where it belongs (…with kids’ learning? …in classrooms? No?).

3) THE FLUSH: Any teacher past retirement age is welcome to stay on, but they aren’t seconded and doing office work in a board or ministry or elsewhere. I’ve seen too many ‘teachers’ who are collecting top tier teacher pay who haven’t taught in a classroom in years (sometimes in decades). In many cases they are doing ‘support’, but how can you possible support a classroom that you have no experience in? If the last time you taught was in 2007, you have no idea how much things have changed no matter how well intentioned you may be.

3.1) THE FLUSH Part 2: make cross training is the point of curriculum support. No more life-time non-teaching roles for teachers. Every teacher can have a two year secondment to curriculum support, but must be back in the classroom for two years before being able to apply for another one. This would go far to end the nepotism and favouritism that defines many of these roles.

This focus on classroom familiarity includes vice principals. They should be teaching one class a year. You could then have more VPs in training in schools with the money saved. Cross training and future career progression should be the focus of curriculum support and junior administration roles.

4) THE REBOOT: do the maths. With this many resources on the table (restored funding, no extra money needed for raises, expensive senior teachers retiring etc), what could we do to bring class sizes down? If you told classroom teachers that their class caps are all dropping by 20% in the new contract, I imagine they’d be very happy. No one wants to lose kids in need in overcrowded classrooms. I suspect classroom teachers would be thrilled with this approach, but they aren’t the ones at the table.

4.1) REBOOT part 2: as part of class size restructuring, include multipliers for students with special needs.  If I have a class cap of 24 students, none of whom have special needs, the learning will be equitable and the class manageable.  If I have a class with ten students with special needs and they are weighted (for example, a student with high needs might weighted as a 2.2 in their IEP under the new, lower class caps), then the class cap wouldn’t be 24. That 2.2 student alone would lower the class cap to 23 and other IEP students would lower it further. Quality of learning is maintained because we’ve focused greater attention where it’s needed.

We currently have an Individual Learning Plan (IEP) system that is vague about students with special needs and offers little in terms of in classroom support. If you want students to learn productively (especially in destreamed classes), and good teachers to stay in the profession, include mechanisms that automatically reduce class sizes for students with special needs so that teachers can do what they are trained to do: help. Watching the system systemically work against that goal is one of the saddest things about teaching in Ontario these days.

5) Give classroom teachers time for professional development and improve their practice. PD has died in Ontario education in the past couple of years. The Great Squeeze has chased many teachers away from the profession and created a shortage. Encourage young teachers and potential new ones to come back to the profession while looking after them as they develop best practices. Currently classroom teachers are in such short supply that teachers are given no time to improve their practice. It’s demoralizing.

6) Offer earlier retirement. Teacher retirements haven’t changed in years. The pension fund is healthy. If it can offer tired pre-retirement teachers who have fought their final years through COVID and plummeting work quality a way out, then it should. The system benefits from this as senior teachers with maximum qualifications make more than twice what a new teacher with beginning qualifications does. You’d think senior teachers would be helping junior teacher training (they do, but they aren’t compensated for it). The people who are compensated for training teachers often have only a fraction of the classroom experience needed to do the job (see #7).

7) Honour classroom specialists by giving them time to support newer teachers. My last two teaching reviews were done by administrators with less than a quarter the classroom teaching experience I’ve had. I’ve worked with classroom specialists who are Jedi masters in terms of classroom and learning management, but they never get a look in on teacher training or reviews. Honouring expertise in education from actually working in classrooms isn’t something that happens, but it should. The education org chart is remarkably rigid and, frankly, quite top heavy. Teachers who pass into support or administration roles can find themselves reviewing and supporting teachers who have done the job for 10x longer than they ever did.

It’s the combination of worsening learning/working conditions and pay cuts for years on end that have driven many away from teaching in Ontario. Smaller caps with even lower limits for classrooms with high needs learners seems like a logical move that would also make destreaming make some kind of pedagogical sense instead of being used as an excuse to stuff more kids into a room in the name of equity. Many students in non-academic streams aren’t less capable, they are struggling with learning challenges, so modifying class caps to focus more teacher attention in classes with these students seems obvious, but has never happened other than in streaming, which we’re in the process of cancelling.

This round of contracts will end up being whatever it ends up being – classroom teachers won’t have much say in it, but it’d be nice if Ontario decided that reasonable funding focused on smaller classes with more equitable learning outcomes for a wider range of students is something we could all get behind. Would I like to just once not get a pay cut thanks to inflation? Sure, but it isn’t likely any time soon. In the meantime, focus resources on improving learning conditions (which are also teacher working conditions).

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Picture Limitless Creativity at Your Fingertips

I recently did a talk with the awesome Heidi Siwak about how educators might understand and engage with emerging artificial intelligence technology rather than doing what education usually does and bury its head in the sand.

A few days later I’m reading WIRED and Kevin Kelly nails down not only a way to migrate into this disconcerting future full of AIs, but also how it works and why everyone shouldn’t be terrified of it:

“Generative AI will alter how we design just about everything. Oh, and not a single human artist will lose their job because of this new technology.”

That’s a pretty daring prediction, but Kelly goes on to explain that most AI generated visual art isn’t being used in traditional places. Instead it’s a deeply person form of visual expression hyper focused on the co-creator (the human working with the AI). As a result, much of the art produced by AI acts as a kind of art therapy. That hyper personal focus is something education systems (based on 19th Century factories) really struggle with, but it’s the future if honouring equity and diversity matter in any real way..

What has me most excited about AI is precisely that it treats people more like individuals than people do. If a future education system has AI teaching assistants that radically individualize instruction, then I consider that a massive win for children and a huge step forward in terms of pedagogical best practice. The only resistance to this individualized, equitable technology enhanced future would be the people managing the current status quo to their own benefit.

Instead of a teacher who barely remembers your child’s name, let alone his reading level or his neurodiversities, an AI that responds to his needs precisely and when he needs it to sounds like the kind of future I want to live in. We’re currently happy with loud attention seekers getting most of the attention in class while the quiet ones fall through the cracks, and by ‘we’ I mean the people running public education.

No humans may lose their jobs with visual arts AIs in circulation, but I suspect some teachers might. The ones making all the noise about banning AI are the very ones Clarke was talking about in his famous quote. A hybrid AI assisted classroom can offer the kind of individual attention that our schools have always struggled to provide, but not if education bans it and hides from this inevitable future for as long as it can.

In the article, Kelly goes on to talk about how AI democratizes visual arts. There is a follow up piece that talks about the 19th Century panic around the emergence of photography (painting is dead!). Each of these technology disruptions put visual mediums into more people’s hands. There was a similar panic when smartphones made everyone a photographer in the early 21st Century. Just because you have a camera in your hands doesn’t make you a photographer, any more than waving a paint brush makes you a painter. There is intentionality implicit in art that technical skill is only a part of. Machines that make it more accessible don’t give the users those esoteric art skills needed to make art, but they do offer a ‘lowercase’ opportunity to visually express your ideas.

Knee jerk reactions to these technological disruptions give Kelly a chance to talk about the ‘tech panic cycle‘. This is another not very flattering mirror for education to peer into. This cycle of panic defines how education has stumbled when facing every emergent technology in the past 40 years.The latest AI panic is just another in a long line of poorly managed evolutionary opportunities. Education has always been more interested in maintaining a self-serving status quo rather than exploring enhancements to pedagogy. The digital skills crisis and flurry of successful cyberattacks we’re in the middle of are the result of systemic failures to teach emerging digital media literacies that stretch back into the 1980s.

The presentation Heidi and I put together gives examples of how two teachers focused on evolving pedagogical best practices have explored AI in our classrooms. In my case we got into it five years ago when a parent who happened to be on the IBM Watson team offered to get us going on coding AI powered chatbots. We found this so easy to do that it ended up being part of our grade 10 coding curriculum along with web development. At the same time my game development students were discovering that we needed to get a handle on enemy AI scripting in Unity or our games wouldn’t play well (stupid enemies are boring). The introduction to AI had students learning about intents and thinking about coding in a collaborative rather than dictatorial way. This not only enriched our game development scripting, but it also led to seniors exploring adaptive algorithms in large data-sets and exploring GitHub’s CoPilot. This approach has had us learning ‘AI Whispering’ years before it became an emergent media literacy…

“Behind this new magecraft is the art of prompting. Each artist or designer develops a way of persuading an AI to yield its best by evolving their prompts. Let’s call these new artists AI whisperers, or prompt artists, or promptors. The promptors work almost as directors, guiding the work of their alien collaborators toward a unified vision. The convoluted process required to tease a first-rate picture out of an AI is quickly emerging as a fine-art skill.” – WIRED

 Heidi leapt into ChatGPT when it first arrived and has done the hard work of building this new media literacy of ‘AI Whisper’. From there she early adopted Education CoPilot, which promises to be a time saver for teachers who want to spend more time individualizing their students’ learning rather than making tedious, one-size-fits-all lesson plans. The majority of our presentation had Heidi walking teachers through how ChatGPT works and showing examples of how Education CoPilot can produce excellent highly-stylized materials (like lesson and unit plans).

Reading Kelly’s article focused on AI visual design a week after doing that AI in the classroom presentation resonates. The one time I was allowed to teach visual arts in high school, I was given a grade 9 curriculum that was so prescriptive that the projects in it sounded like directions for an AI: ‘Make an acrylic painting using the techniques practised in class in the style of the Group of Seven’. ‘Using perspective drawing techniques, draw a picture of a room in your house’. I understand the need for these skills focused assessments, but the opportunity to create wasn’t something grade 9s were being encouraged to do. The entire course was entirely focused on lowercase creativity making it very easy for an AI to do the work. Maybe the seniors got to explore uppercase creativity, but I never got a look in at any of those classes. This raises difficult questions around how we’re going to develop skills when AI keeps stepping in to do work that students only see as busy work.

The other thing this visual arts department fixated on was photography, which they described as ‘real’ photography complete with dark room and chemicals. The follow up WIRED art history piece on the 19th Century photography panic casts a poor light on that thinking. Photography was considered the ‘end of painting’ when it first appeared, but nothing of the sort happened. What the new medium of photography did was create new influences that enriched both painting and the emerging medium. AI visual design will likely follow a similar path. What doesn’t work is clinging to an old way of thinking rather than encouraging this enriching influence.

Dall-E AI generated future makerspace

I took photography as a unit in art college and it bankrupted me. I loved it and I was good at it, but ‘real’ photography seems to be a be-spoke, privileged medium that the idle rich seem to find their way into. The cost of it caused me to eventually drop out because I couldn’t juggle 40+ hours of night shift work a week with full days in class. At the time I believed this was a great personal failure on my part, but with the benefit of hind-sight, I’m amazed at how much my immigrant socioeconomic status defined my access to and success in education, and especially in the arts.

I found my way back into photography when we lived in Japan after I graduated from university with massive student debts (another economically dictated decision). Digital cameras were just coming out in Japan in the late 90s and I got my hands on them early. This technology democratized photography and let me get back into it without bankrupting me. Hearing an arrogant gatekeeper-to-the-arts telling me that what I did wasn’t real photography was difficult to take. This approach to the arts is quite common in high schools.

Dall-E AI Generated: future classroom

Kelly suggests that AI supported visual arts won’t stop human made art because it serves a different need. In this way, like photography before it, AI visual co-creation will bring the ability to produce visual  representations of their thinking to more people – providing we start teaching this new media literacy of ‘AI whispering’. AI art generation is a fascinating new combination of language skills, visual media and technology, and utilizing it will bring visual expression to more people. The only ones getting angry about it are those who are guarding the privileged gateway to it.

So much technology use is hobbled by the politics of education. Black and white politicizing means unions paint technology as teacher replacing evil, which gives politicians interested in pushing education into private hands exactly what they need to do that. When no one is focused on improving pedagogy, we all lose. What education should be focused on is using every means at out disposal (technological, social or otherwise) to individualize and amplify student learning. Sometimes that might mean technology supplants a teaching position, but more often it should mean we are reorganizing how we do things to produce better learning outcomes though intelligent use of emerging technologies.

AI will certainly shake the foundations of education. The dinosaurs fixated on taking us back to the good ‘ol days of rote learning and mono-cultural absolutism where all students learn rigorously in the same way should be far behind us, but those are the days every anti-technology educator longs for – when things (like photography) were ‘real’ and inaccessible to the proles.

The thing I’m most looking forward to with AI in education? It so quickly makes what we’re doing in our low resolution factory-designed classrooms look poor that it will turn over the apple cart and force public education to reboot into a more individually focused,  student-success driven model.  In those future schools students will experience mastery learning based on their own abilities and will be supported individually. Students able to may graduate high school at 15 years old, others may need it until they are 20. Learning would be hyper personalized and teachers would be conducting an orchestra of supports and data rather than overseeing a low-resolution classroom where individuals matter less than their age. 

Education will focus on making this not true for as long as it possible can, but it shouldn’t.

From an artist’s point of view, Kelly doesn’t explain the place of human made art in a future where ‘lower case’, ‘rote’ art, ie: what is evidently taught in most schools, will be machine created. This raises some interesting questions about how we teach complex skill sets (like photography or painting) in a world where the skills are expressed by machines rather than people. If machines are reading to you and writing for you, do we need to know how to do those things either? Chasing that goal would lead to dire consequences. There are real benefits to human beings learning complex, tangible skills, both psychologically and economically.

When I take my decade old SLR out and catch a moment in nature because its talking to me, I’m not
chewing through processing resources so that a machine
intelligence with no understanding of nature creates an inherently abstract representation of what I’m experiencing. I take photographs to catch the light and make a moment permanent, so you can float in it. Technology assists me in doing that by helping me collect and share the data from that moment, but that data has a realness to it that no AI abstraction, no matter how well generated, will manage – because the AI and the media it creates is implicitly not in the world experiencing it directly.

When I was out in the polar vortex, I discovered that the ice crystal structures forming were incredibly complex compared to what I usually see, so I started working the macro lens as though I were seeing Joan Miro paintings. Imperfections and unconscious details render a natural truth in the photograph. Technology assists, but doesn’t replace the subject.

Dall-E understands macro photography and ice and creates a credible copy, but its always going to be inherently ethereal because it is an abstraction rather than a moment. Even well worded, maximum-AI outputs are going to lack an inherent realism until the AI itself is put into contact with nature directly – which too will eventually happen!

 I’m also not tied to the internet
while I’m out in the world photographing. At its very best, an AI might be able to imitate
getting close to nature, but it could never actually do it because of
what it is. In the same way that a spectacular CGI effect in a film is
almost too realistic, a good old-fashioned stunt with IRL effects offers
nuance that makes it feel more genuine (because it is).
No matter how good AI gets, it’ll always be imitating that immediacy until it gets to experience it directly and then express its understanding of that experience.

 

Is having machines do it all for you really good for you?

Kelly also doesn’t mention what all of this accessibility to visual expression for everyone is costing us in terms of resources. AI will get better in terms of energy consumption, but it isn’t a very efficient way to do simple things that people are too lazy to learn how to do themselves (like draw). If we’re going to keep off-loading work people are more than capable of doing in a world where we have more and more people and fewer resources to burn, does pouring billions into AI make any sense for anyone but billionaires looking for even cheaper labour?

I (like WIRED) still fall on the side of exploring and integrating emerging technology if it means better learning outcomes for students. One of our greatest underused resources are all those humans we’ve got out there struggling to make ends meet. A dozen of them are the Einsteins we need to solve the global problems we face. If AI can help us realize more students’ potential, then surely we should always be coming down on that side of things, even when it’s scary and involves us changing old habits.

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