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Appalachia

What a ride down the Appalachians would look like next summer (for the solar eclipse!)

https://goo.gl/maps/6h2J4cJoXhz

Elora, ON
4 h 19 min (286 km)
Entering the United States of America (New York)
4 h 19 min (286 km)
Entering Pennsylvania
3 h 11 min (224 km)
State College, PA
37 min (40.0 km)
Entering Maryland
Entering West Virginia
Entering Virginia
Passing through West Virginia
Entering Virginia
2 h 59 min (233 km)
Entering Tennessee
1 h 15 min (82.9 km)
Deals Gap
Cherokee, NC
54 min (51.1 km)
Entering Virginia
8 h 6 min (553 km)
Lexington, VA
Entering West Virginia
Entering Virginia
Passing through West Virginia
7 h 3 min (539 km)
Entering Pennsylvania
Williamsport, PA
3 h 38 min (274 km)
Entering New York
3 h 38 min (274 km)
Batavia, NY
Entering Canada (Ontario)
3 h 44 min (243 km)
Elora, ON

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appalachia

https://goo.gl/maps/JeeomohGEPv
with hotel stops

http://www.blueridgemotorcycling.com/destinations/#interactive-map

http://ironhorsenc.com/
might be good for a couple of days in the Smokey Mountains.

home

6 h 29 min (447 km)
1.  Clearfield, PA
5 h 27 min (390 km)
2.  Inn at Mountain Quest
6 h 41 min (518 km)
3.  Knoxville, TN
1 h 34 min (94.2 km)
3.5   Deal’s Gap – Tail of the Dragon
2 h 25 min (162 km)
4.  Ashville, NC
8 h 26 min (581 km)
5.  Harrisburg, VA
5 h 39 min (437 km)
6.  South Williamsport, PA
7 h 3 min (496 km)
home

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Scrambler

I’m enjoying the Ninja and I hope to track day with it this year at some point, but I’m also keen to expand my two wheel experience.  To that end it would be nice to have a bike that is a bit more drop friendly and willing to go off paved road.  In keeping with my ’70s heritage I love the idea of a scrambler: an all-rounder that is stripped and ready for everything from road to off it.

Triumph makes a Scrambler model based on ‘stripped down desert bikes with high exhausts’ (that don’t get blocked in dirt, mud and water).  But if you head over to the Triumph page you get the sense that the new Scrambler is more a hipster man purse than a scrambler in the real sense.

I was hooked on adventure bikes but I’m finding them a bit much.  I got an ADV magazine I hadn’t seen before recently, and after reading the third straight piece about how adventure touring had produced a mystical understanding of reality I threw up in my mouth.  What used to be a Mondo Enduro style lark has turned into pretentious evangelism.  Why do people always have to fuck up what they love with hyperbole?  A DIY scrambler that I can get muddy and fall off of without worrying about plastic is my latest crush.  The video at the bottom with whacky Auzzies giving it the welly in mud is much more my thing.

Building a scrambler by stripping down a street bike and readying it for anything is an appealing project.  I found a 1986 Yamaha YZ Radian for sale.  The Radian is a naked sport bike with a detuned engine with better mid-range power, ideal for working in less than ideal traction situations.  This particular Radian seems well cared for and is only going for about $1000 (Canadian).

I’d strip off the fenders, shorten the seat to a single, lighten up the bike (which is already pretty light) and swap out the lights for LEDs.  I’d also throw some frame sliders and upgrade the shocks for heavy duty use and cover the fronts with dust covers.  I think I’d keep the cool chrome, analogue instruments.  The muffler would get the high mounted low profile scrambler treatment and last but not least would be some somewhat knobbly tires that would work both on road and off road.

With all those changes I think I could strip the bike down to about the 400lb mark. 

Metzeler Tourance tires,
look the part
and go everywhere!


The point of a scrambler is to ride it anywhere and not worry about it.  It hearkens back to days before motorcycles were penned into tiny niches by marketing types more intent on selling a lifestyle choice than a machine you could make your own.  At the very least, it’d be hard for me to make it look like a week long trip has provided me with enlightenment on something so low brow.


Some Scrambler Links:

How to build a scrambler (EXIF)

Aftershock (The Bike Shed)

Aftershock – Sydney from Sydney Cafe Racers on Vimeo.



It’s Better In The Wind – Short Film from Scott Toepfer on Vimeo.

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Decompartmentalizing

I know teachers get edgy when considering business theory for use in the classroom, but gamestorming in class seems like a sure thing. The problem with it is the breaking down of conventions around learning. We structure our classes on this stuff. Would a good gamestorm be acceptable in English class, or is it too artsy? Would it be acceptable in art class, or is it too text driven? Would it be ok in a music class if it wasn’t entirely musical? That these questions get asked gives you an idea about how far we have come from playing with our ideas. We’ve cut thinking into arbitrarily compartmented piece work.

I love looking at Leonardo’s sketch books. Write about it when it fits, sketch when it doesn’t. When I look at those, I wonder what a modern Leonardo would do with modern media. Where we used to be limited by word and graphic on paper, we can now create virtual 3d spaces and plaster them with images, sounds, text, video, some, none or all of it interactive. I wonder how well a universal mind like that would operate in such a rich media environment and then finding itself in our school system with it’s little buckets of knowledge, none of which should ever mix.

I know this is beginning to change. Being able to differentiate instruction and accept multiple paths to proof of broader understanding is happening, but slowly, in school. I still see (usually) older teachers resisting the mash up, saying it doesn’t respect the discipline of the… um, discipline.

In the meantime, I keep asking myself; how can I see that they know what they’re doing without falling back into the same old habits? The text trap is the worst of all, it carries with it a patina of academia. If it’s in text, it must be academically rigorous and appropriately difficult. Anyone who still thinks this hasn’t seem the time, energy and creativity my students have put into a media project.
Here is a copy of one of my favorite audio assignments from the beginning of the grade 10 media course. The instructions were loose (1-2 mins, tell an audio story, multiple sound tracks, original content only – no internet pilfering). This is only sound, yet what a story unfolds. This medium is all but ignored in typical school. Imagine being able to read an essay while hearing student spoken comments at various times – or accepting a sound/graphic mashup of brainstorming, instead of just text. The software exists for this to happen now, but the urge isn’t there because we keep retreating to our buckets.
Instead of having the technology push us out of bad habits, why not let some new habits push the technology? We keep seeing tentative steps towards mixed media (I’m thinking Prezi, Ning and Googledocs), but no bold changes in how we think. The ultimate change would be to forget what 200 years of scientific compartmentalizing has done and kick open possibility in thinking.
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Special Education

Near the end of my teacher’s college program, Nipissing put on an assistive learning tools workshop. We were all duly wowed by the latest version of Dragonspeak, the latest in PDAs and how they could be used in learning, and a surprising array of speech, numeracy, literacy and subject specific learning tools. It was an all day seminar, and it really had an impact on me. It also made me question the intent of all of this fantastic equipment.

Over and over, it was targeted at at-risk/below grade students who struggled with whatever the technology was supposed to help them overcome. Dragonspeak, there is no doubt, helps students see language in terms of the written word, but why does it need to be so carefully guarded from the general population? If a student struggling with literacy could use Dragonspeak to gain a foothold on something beyond their reach, couldn’t it just as easily help a group of media students get their ideas down in solid form while they were storyboarding a video? Couldn’t it assist a gifted writer who wants to try a different way of getting over writer’s block? These people aren’t anywhere near failing, but if we’re only using assistive tech to help those failing expectations, I think we’re wasting a valuable opportunity.
Those many learning tools we saw that day impressed upon me just how helpful technology could be in learning, I just didn’t understand why it all had to be so Special focused. Any one of those tools could help anyone learn. Learning isn’t easy, for anyone, it’s a challenge to stay focused, it’s a challenge to make the time and space to write, even if you think of yourself as a writer. It’s a challenge to get work in on time, even if you’re a top student. I watch excellent students in the form of teachers doing their Masters struggling with this very issue all the time.
In my senior year of high school, my grandfather died, our family pet died and shortly thereafter my father was involved in a near-fatal traffic accident. Always a B student (why draw unnecessary attention to yourself), my grades slipped, assignments weren’t handed in and things went from mediocre to worse. My teachers berated me for time management, I was not working “to expectations”. I didn’t tell anyone about what was going on at home, I was trying to hold it (and a shaky family) together as the oldest son. I’d never been special enough to get a special education, and the standard one wasn’t fitting now. I squeaked out of high school and it took me 3 years to get my self together and take another run at it in order to get grade 13 and go to university.
Whenever I have a student, regardless of what their Individual Education Plan does or doesn’t say, suddenly miss work, or class, I don’t start grading them in terms of expectations, I ask myself what’s going on in the other 99% of their lives that has little or nothing to do with my classroom. Sometimes I ask, sometimes they tell me, often they don’t, but I don’t take that as license to grade them to Ministry expectations.
Dealing with the system now as a parent for the first time has only enforced my understanding of how streaming generally works. My son is lucky in having 2 educated, very motivated and able parents who advocate for him strenuously. His challenges at school aren’t overwhelming, but many students face much worse obstacles, and don’t have the support at home to take on the system effectively. On a purely experiential basis, we could as easily stream academic/applied and essential into stable family/broken family/no-visible family, and you’d find a startling correlation between our current “academic” system of measurement and an often ignored key indicator of school success.
Differentiating, student centred learning and assistive technology all aim to produce an education that helps a student on as much of an individual basis as we can manage in a system that often has too many people and not enough money. In a perfect world, we wouldn’t have Special Education, it would all be special education, in the meantime, you have to ask yourself, how often have you had grades dictated by a lack of access to assistive technology or poor student performance due to their circumstances beyond school?
Maybe one day education will just be special, but I don’t see that happening as long as we set up static, specific expectations and expect students to achieve them like automatons. An education has surprisingly little to do with building a better person. It’s a biological process, deeply tied to our physical development, circumstances and opportunities, but we still want to assess it as though it were a Victorian industrial process.
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Extending the Canadian Motorcycle Riding Season: Snow Bikes!



The idea of a snowmobile conversion for a motorcycle keeps popping up everywhere this winter.  Timbersled makes just such a thing.  It’s seven grand Canadian for the system plus another fifteen hundred for the fitting kit.  The Husqvarna FE501S is a road legal dual sport bike that the kit fits.  They can be found for about twelve grand.  It’s a rich man’s game but that doesn’t stop me from dreaming about it.  For about twenty grand Canadian ($14,900 US) I’d have a year ’round off road specialist that would also get down the road when needed.  The thought of pulling up to a RIDE spotcheck in a blizzard on a plated version of one of these makes me quite happy.  Officer: ‘Uh, what’s that?’


The KLX250 I tried a while back was so slow with me on it that I felt unsafe on roads.  I couldn’t coax it to 100km/hr which meant I had a row of traffic behind me even on country back roads.  The Husky weighs less and has almost three times more horsepower.  Keeping up with traffic on back roads would not be a problem.  Those capabilities mean it’d carry me and some camping gear deep into the countryside in the summer while also being snow-bike convertible in the winter, all for twenty five hundred bucks less than a BMW GS.


A new snowmobile costs sixteen grand or more and only works for a few months of year if you’re lucky.  From that point of view a road ready enduro bike with a Timbersled system looks like a more useful and cost effective approach to riding in the snow (and everything else). 


Timbersled Snow Conversion System
http://ift.tt/2hAnqZr


The Husqvarna FE 501S Dual Sport Motorcycle
http://ift.tt/2hAplNC
http://ift.tt/2iRnSaX
http://ift.tt/2hAddfP
http://ift.tt/2iRdn7t


In the snow!

In the desert!

On forest trails!  All on the same bike.

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MotoGP Technology and Motorcycle Dynamics

Neil Spalding‘s MotoGP Technology is a dense read.  I got it in September and I’m still only two thirds of the way through.  I read a bit, then chase down details so I make sure I’ve got the concepts understood.  This approach isn’t very efficient, but it is thorough, and I’ve got fuck all else to do motorcycle wise over this long, cold, Canadian winter.

 I’ve been an avid watcher of MotoGP for seven years now, including riding down to the last Indianapolis MotoGP race in 2015, but this book has made me literate in the mechanics of grand prix bike racing in a way that I never was before.

 I’ve also spent a fair amount of time coming to terms with motorcycle dynamics and especially how these bizarre machines move around corners.  From watching Keith Code and reading Twist of the Wrist 2, I’ve tried to understand the inputs I need to make to control a bike effectively.

 After all the team histories that kick off MotoGP Technology, Spalding goes after the various technical tricks that make a grand prix bike move like a jet plane, at least in the hands of the maestros.  The last chapter was on reverse rotating crankshafts, which led to a look at the complex gyroscopic effects happening on race bikes.  Spalding suggested looking up Eric Laithwaite and gyroscopic procession, which led me to this!

As Professor Laithwaite describes it, the spinning weight already has a path it wants to follow, he simple lets it follow it.  In doing so what was suddenly a difficult to lift weight becomes effortless.  There are a lot of gyroscopic forces happening on a motorcycle in motion, and Spalding addresses this in the later chapters of the book.

 Curiously, considering it’s 2020 and we have computer technology that can accurately model complex physics, it arises in the book that what’s happening on a motorcycle in extreme cornering is more a matter of educated conjecture than known fact.  Our best guesses are still what drives our understanding of the complexities of motorcycle dynamics, which is an incredible thing to realize.

 As has often happened when reading MotoGP Technology, the suggestions for finding online resources to better understand a problem lead to other online resources that weren’t necessarily part of the original search (which might be part of the reason why it’s taking me so long to read the book!).  In talking about gyroscopic forces acting on the bike I ended up stumbling across this information packed piece by CanyonChasers.net on how to ride more quickly safely:


Recently I’ve become increasingly frustrated by the sheer amount of shitty media there is online, but this is a good example of a well edited, erudite video that doesn’t waste my time with other people’s inanity.  Just because the majority of people online are a waste of time (read any comments anywhere), doesn’t mean there aren’t gems out there.
Speaking of which, Neil Spalding’s MotoGP Technology is super current (just got updated in the summer), written by an expert with decades of experience and insider knowledge, and delves deep not only into recent MotoGP technical history, but also into the physics that this technology is up against.  If you’re interested in taking your understanding of one of the most extreme sports on earth to the next level, MotoGP Technology will help you get there.

With mysterious physics happening underneath them, what do MotoGP riders do?  They drift 250+ horsepower prototype racing machines… with their elbows AND knees on the deck!  MotoGP Technology will take you a step closer to wrapping your head around this genius.



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Refresh 1

Computer refreshes approach!  An ideal opportunity to reconsider all the bad habits we have in educational technology!  @banana29 had the following questions for her admin which might help frame a discussion around where we might go with our edtech:


• What are the conditions under which students in 2013 learn best?
• How will these conditions change by 2033?
• How does the way we organize our school computers resemble/support those learning conditions?
• What are the competencies/values that we want our students to learn?
• How does the way we organize our school computers affect those competencies/values?

Some interesting ideas there. What can we do to present relevant learning situations to our students (how can we begin to join the disparities between the information rich world in which they live outside with the information poor one we present them with in class? What trends are we following into the future? How to we develop useful learning habits in digitally swamped students? How can we organize our digital tools to that optimize learning? 

These questions lead to some other questions around digitized pedagogy: how can digitization assist in learning? How can it hurt learning? What does good pedagogy look like in a digitally enhanced learning environment? Between the ‘gee-wiz ipad’ crowd and the ‘it’s paper and lectures or nothing’ crowd, there has been precious little consideration of how the digital revolution we’re in the middle of is affecting learning. The forces trying to monetize the process further muddy these waters.

These big questions lead to some awkward realizations.  What occurs to me first is that we have adopted educational technology following a business I.T. model rather than pushing for an educational focus. The private businesses that circle education hoping for a quick sale are quick to fill educational CTO positions in school boards.  Put another way, find a CTO in Ontario who was ever a teacher.  Education has different goals than business.  Modelling our I.T. on a business model has created foundations that lead educational technology as a whole in the wrong direction.

A good place to start would be to introduce Chief Technology Officers in school boards who are actually educators.  Another good place to start is to begin building educational technology in terms of skills development in a broad sense across many platforms with a focus on general literacy and responsibility of access rather than the paranoid, closed model that has been adopted from private business I.T..  Without a continuum of digital learning that produces students familiar with a variety of tools and responsible for their own access to and presentation of information baked into curriculum, we’ll continue to graduate digital serfs instead of citizens capable of working effectively in digitally networked workplaces.

Alanna asks some good questions that need serious consideration by edtech managers.  I consider my side of things in Refresh 2. 
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It Has Begun!

MotoGP starts this weekend in Qatar.  Maverick Viñales has launched his first season on the championship capable Yamaha with zeal, topping the time sheets in early free practice.

This year’s shakeup, with new riders in many teams, promises to stir in some chaos.  Marquez doesn’t seem to be able to catch Viñales and this tends to make the volatile Spaniard crashy and dangerous.  A newer, more mature Marques appeared last year more intent on getting points than always being out front, but that was tempered by him actually being out front sometimes.  If Maverick runs away and Marc gets frustrated, this could make for a very interesting season.

I think Lorenzo will only improve as he develops the Ducati into the instrument he needs it to be.  He might be a surprise on Sunday.  I’m a Rossi fan through and through, but unless he can sort out the bike (and if anyone can the Doctor can), he will be an afterthought.  Speculation is already rife around that, but don’t give up on the old dog yet, he’s still got some new tricks I think.

Not to wish ill on anyone, but if Maverick can knock the cocky Marques back a step,  Lorenzo sorts out his Ducati and Rossi does what he always does and remains relevant against all odds, this could turn into a four-or-more-way run at the championship across at least three manufacturers.  That would be epic.  If Dani and Iannone could find form and the rookies (especially Zarco, I love Zarco) keep nipping at their heels, this could be a perfect storm.

… and there’s always Cal Crutchlow to shock and awe when no one thinks he will.  This year might be one for the history books.

Marc has put me off and I’ve always found it difficult to like Lorenzo, but Maverick is much like Dani Pedrosa. I’d be happy with either of these gentlemen winning a championship, though it looks like Maverick is leading the charge.

 

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Is Simple Better?

Once again Twitter teacher chat raises some interesting educational technology questions.  Chromebooks or ipads?  Louise’s question had me asking questions about the question.  Why have we come to a place where we’re asking which incomplete but branded and popular technology should we buy for schools?  Google and Apple have spent a lot of money locking in educators to their brand.  To me, that question signals a marketing victory for both of them.

Later in the conversation Julie asked what Chromebooks can’t do.  At three hundred bucks a pop I’d hope they can do everything a comparably priced netbook could, but they can’t.  They can’t print, they can’t connect to a projector to share a presentation, they can’t install drivers so you can’t use any peripherals on them (one wonders why they have usb ports at all).  Want to plug a scanner in to your chromebook?  No.  Want to plug in an Arduino?  No.  Want to install a decent graphics editor?  Sorry.  Want to install a fully fledged word processor instead of frustrating yourself with what g-docs still can’t do?  Sorry.  Want to install an IDE and do some programming?  Nope.  Want to try a different operating system, or even dual boot into multiple environments?  Definitely not, that is the whole reason ipads and Chromebooks exist, to keep you in a closed ecosystem; you give away usefulness for simplicity’s sake.

It was suggested that Chromebooks are much cheaper than laptops, but this isn’t true either.  The much maligned netbook has grown up.  What used to be a single core, stodgy little laptop is now a dual core machine that starts with much more memory than it used to.  Taking the $300 per Chromebook cost I went looking for a comparable netbook in the fall and found the ruggedized, student ready Lenovo X131 retailing for about $250.  For $300 I’d add another 4 gigs of RAM to it and have an 8gb of RAM multicore netbook for the same price as a glorified browser.  It’ll run the Windows version of your choice, and any Linux distro you could throw at it all off the same hard drive… oh, and you can install Chrome and still do everything a Chromebook can.

OK, it might be a bit unfair to call iOS a pointy stick,
but calling Linux needlessly complicated isn’t.

I find the limited OSes in tablets and Chromebooks very frustrating.  I’ll put up with it in a phone for mobility’s sake, but in a day to day device for learning?  I’ll admit, Linux is daunting, but Windows & OSx offer full operating systems with many uses.  If we’re evolving into simpler and simpler OSes, what does that say about how we are using (and teaching) our technology?

Code.org is doing their hour of coding this week.  I got my nine year old doing it last night.  After we gave up on his ipad not being able to run the site we went to… yep, a regular old Windows machine.  You can’t even expect an ipad to display a website properly.  Won’t that be fun in a class of thirty kids?  At least it would have worked on a Chromebook.

During the conversation it was suggested that expecting teachers to understand the basic limitations of technology is exclusionary and doesn’t allow them to focus on teaching.  I’d argue the opposite: selecting minimally functional technology to begin with is the problem, especially when we do it through the brand moderated ecosystems offered by Google and Apple.  Teachers don’t all need to edit their own kernel in Linux, but they should have an understanding of how various technologies enable and limit their ability to perform basic functions (like opening a website properly), especially in a learning space.  Asking for basic digital fluency in teachers isn’t asking too much in 2014.  We can then ask for it (by extension) in our students.

This may all sound anti-Google, but I assure you it isn’t.  I’ve had a gmail account since it came out and I’ve got gigs of data in various Google drives (Dusty World is written in Blogger!).  I own an Android phone because it offers the most open ecosystem.  I value the tools Google offers, but I feel like the Chromebook is a tool designed to close off digital opportunities and drive everyone into a Google-centric cloud.  It follows ipad down the same closed-system dead-end that Windows is flirting with now.

When I’m using peripherals I need a computer, not a glorified web browser.  When I am setting up a complex document I need a proper word processor.  I can’t do graphics and video editing in the cloud, I need a general purpose computer, and your students will too, even if that does mean teaching them how to maintain a more administratively complicated machine.

I’d argue for as big a tool-kit that offers as many digital opportunities as you can afford, something the question, “ipads or Chromebooks” doesn’t begin to consider.