onted – Page 10 – Mechanical Sympathy

Tech Girlz

On a cold, snow squalling Saturday morning I had another PLN twitter moment courtesy of Shadi Yazdan on Twitter. Her link to this New York Times blog has a fantastic video with re-written Beastie Boy lyrics – talk about reclaiming media. That the author takes a very misogynistic song and uses it to empower girls is ironically compelling. This spin only amplifies the message in the video: that girls are groomed to be objects, but they don’t have to listen.

I’ve long agonized at the complete lack of *any* girls in *any* of the senior computer engineering or computer science classes at my high school. We’re in a small town/rural community so the interest in high-technology is pretty limited anyway. If we have high-skills specialist majors it’s in heavy industry or arts. Of course, once they leave our small town high-tech is one of the most in-demand industries to work in, but without the culture to support it I’m finding this a continuing struggle, and one that if I lose does a disservice to our graduates who enter the working world missing imperative digital skills the rest of the world is expecting them to have.

After looking over this article it appears that the number of women in high technology is declining across the sector. Is this because as consumerism becomes our main form of socialized identity we become stereotypes of our gender, age and income? Girls become consumerized princesses, boys become consumerized soldiers? Not so long ago we learned our social roles through complex traditional influences like nationalism and religion. In our brave new border-less world where money is the main defining feature of our social character we become shadowy stereotypes of the consumer data that pours out of us.

Women in Technology by the numbers.
From 37% to 14% in the past 25 years?

Boys and girls both suffer a limited existence in this environment, though the female stereotype carries with it a submissive objectivity that ensures that girls are mainly valued in terms of their appearance, whereas boys are stereotypically the doers, girls are passive.

Of course, this is ridiculous. Your ability to think is your magic power in engineering or coding, your gender doesn’t enter into it. It is only because girls are convinced that boys are ‘tough enough’ to handle the maths or the complexity of engineering and programming that they get shaken out of the field; stereotypes forcing inequality.

It appears my struggle to convince small town/rural high school girls to give computer studies a try goes well beyond the limiting geography and toward a societal trend. That doesn’t mean I’m going to stop, but it does make me consider this from media influence rather than as a primarily local influence.

http://www.ncwit.org/sites/default/files/legacy/pdf/BytheNumbers09.pdf

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/20/a-viral-video-encourages-girls-to-become-engineers/

Professionalism: it’s more than skin deep

Head’s meetings give me a chance to think without constantly having to juggle the needs of dozens of students at once. Our most recent one had us developing a school mission statement. The idea was that if staff develop the mission they’ll be more likely to back it. It was an agonizing process of planning by committee, but we got it done.

In the process of developing this statement one of the more golden heads suggested that focusing on the dress code would reinvigorate a sense of professionalism in the staff. I don’t entirely disagree, dressing appropriately does help present a sense of professionalism, but thinking that an enforced dress code will somehow improve professionalism in staff had me thinking about what is involved in a teacher’s sense of professionalism.

Visual cues like dress codes felt like the crust of something much more complicated, so I went to work on an orange.

If you want a sense of a teacher’s professionalism start with their qualifications. Do they have advanced qualifications (honours, post-graduate, master-technical, etc) in the subject areas that they teach?

Have they expanded their teacher training from what they graduated teacher’s college with? Do they demonstrate the kind of life long learning they claim is so important in their students?

Are they attending subject specific PD to improve their ability to teach this material in the most current and comprehensive manner possible? Do they create curriculum? Serve on their subject council? Work to improve learning in their subject area in other ways?

Have they developed a diverse personal learning network (this doesn’t necessarily have to be digital). Are they known in their school, in their board, in their province, in their country, in their world, as a collaborative and supportive colleague? Do they encourage growth in learning? Do they interact with other educators to improve their craft?

Have they taken on school leadership roles? Are they known in the school as a dependable fixer? A colleague who puts the needs of the school before their own? Do they work in other aspects of the school? Student competitions? Sports? Clubs? School events? Academic initiatives?

Have they ever supported the organization that protects their profession? Volunteering for union work says a lot about how much a professional is willing to put themselves out to protect their profession. It also demonstrates a sense of belonging to that profession.

There is probably much more you could put into the orange, but these many things are what feed the skin of the orange (the appearance of the teacher). Dress codes and appearance do matter, but professionalism is much more than skin deep.

***

At its root professionalism is a self driven desire to improve one’s field of work. Being self driven is the key to professionalism and the major difference between an employee and a professional. The professional takes their work to heart and self-identifies with how they are doing it, an employee just does what they are paid for and no more. Employees require direction. Professionals are self directed. Unfortunately, I know a fair number of teachers who approach teaching as an employee. If you want to resurrect teacher professionalism it doesn’t mean ties for all, it means getting those disaffected employees to approach their profession with a sense of authorship.

… unless you play for Newcastle

The other morning I was watching Premier League Football and heard about how Newcastle has hired an motivational speaker for its players. The millionaire players who never had to grow up and get paid more per week to play a game than I make in a year need motivation? This speaks to professionalism in a big way. Having been coddled and paid ludicrous sums of money since they were teenagers, many of these players have no idea how good they have it playing a game that the rest of us pay to play for leisure. Can you be a professional without a profound appreciation of the importance of the work that you do? This situation does point to a key element of professionalism: an unwavering commitment to your profession and a willingness to seek constant improvement. You’re not a professional unless you’re always on the clock, always ready to perform beyond minimal expectations.

A doctor doesn’t get to say she’s on holiday when someone has a heart attack on the beach where they happen to be vacationing. It is professionalism that drives her to say that she is a doctor and perform her duty. When you see Mike Holmes losing his mind about poor craftsmanship in a home reno you’re seeing a man railing against a lack of professionalism. When Newcastle has to hire a motivational speaker to convince its millionaire players to do their job, you’re looking at a deep lack of professionalism.

Professionalism seems to germinate in people where the work they are doing is valued, valuable and challenging. The professional becomes attached to their profession, self-identifying with it and authoring their approach to it.

Professionalism isn’t conformity, it’s empowerment. Many workplaces use the word professionalism while offering staff no opportunity to critically assess and improve their process. In such dictated working environments professionalism is a catch phrase for doing what you’re told promptly and without question (ie: being manageable). These workplaces have a strange democratic flatness to them – we’re all professionals here at Xmart! Perhaps this is why professionalism is so confused in the modern mind – we have a misplaced idea of what it is.

Out of high school I became I millwright’s apprentice. One of my mentors, Leo, was an older Caribbean gentleman who was incapable of sugar coating things, though his honesty was presented with a Jamaican easy-goingness that made it easy to listen to. One day he told me the story of our department supervisor. This was the guy who used to take night shifts and then roll himself under a truck and fall asleep for hours. He had one of the worst work records in the shop and was known for being the guy you shouldn’t go to see if you were having technical problems. He got promoted off the floor to minimize the damage he was doing there. Leo looked me in the eye and said, ‘that’s what most management is. If they were good at something, they’d still be doing it.’ I’ve tended to approach management with a suspect eye ever since.

Leo was proud of his mechanical skills, he was a master of his trade. He took great pains to perform his job at the highest level and continually looked for challenges to grow his skill and knowledge. That one of the most impactful mentors I’ve ever had wore coveralls while the clown running the department showed up in shirt and tie every day has meant I’ve always preferred to see what people do rather than what they look like before I start to form an opinion about their sense of professionalism.

Between the smoke and mirrors business-appearance sense of professionalism and the demonstrated excellence of the true professional there is a lot of social static. Things are further complicated by organizations eager to use the term professionalism as an adjective to encourage compliance and conformity to corporate norms, but for professionalism to germinate the person doing the work has to have control over their approach to the work – and germination is indeed the process. You can’t force professionalism with a dress code. What you can do is create a fertile environment where people are engaged in their work. Where the work is challenging and complex enough that it makes demands on the worker to continuously develop their own approaches to it rather than being managed into a conformed response. Systematized work environments are the death of professionalism.

In spite of the business blah blah that greets you when you look up professionalism, there isn’t a single, regimented pathway to it unless you’re in business where your can-do attitude and proper attire matters more than any specialized skills you may have. Professionalism blooms out of expertise and works in service to it. Some of the best teachers I’ve ever had wore overalls, many of the worst wore suits. Appearance can be as much a distraction as it can be an indicator of professionalism (unless you’re in business).

NOTES

True Colours offers some real insights into personality types. Being a green / blue I’m not beholden to social expectations or image. The Gold who suggested adhering to dress codes is though. Where she thinks that professionalism can be generated by dressing nicely, I’ve experienced the opposite. I try to keep this in mind when I hear someone suggest something that I have an immediate negative reaction to. What works for them might work for them…

A teacher focused technology initiative

Email intercept: @tk1ng to school admin, 12/9/11

re: tech coaching and tech possies

Dear Administrator,

…I showed an interest in tech coaching, but my real intent lies in empowering the teachers we have in the school who have displayed persistent curiosity and tenacity in developing technology in the classroom.I found that I was able to lob netbooks and other useful tools at tech-keen teachers last year to good effect. One of the main reasons I considered tech-headship again was to retain that access to tools.
Is there anything board side or within school directions that allow us to create a group around technology use in teaching and try to spread the knowledge to our largely disassociated colleagues? The tech-coach position seems like it heads in this direction, but it seems librarian and online research focused exclusively.
With a wee budget and some keen hands we’d be able to show various digital tools at staff meetings, perhaps even during PD days or rotating around PLCs.
We had a tech-council a few years ago, but it never really met or did anything. I’m thinking of more of a grass-roots, teacher focused support group with this, perhaps with shared PLC time and some access to online tools and hardware in order to develop some intelligent digital pedagogy.
Whatcha think?

Think I can get a tech-posse going?

A teacher based, grass roots group who are into tech and are willing to take some risks to implement it in class and diversify the monoculture of school board computer access?

A group that can get access to non-standard equipment and try out its use in classroom situations?

A group that could expand our almost non-existent digital pedagogy? Perhaps even in a coherent manner?

With no budget we could beg and borrow board equipment that is otherwise relatively unused. With a tiny budget and some freedom to try the incredible variation in technology available beyond the walls of the school, we could experiment hands on with various tools and examine their application in real learning situations.

***Alas, the board doesn’t have any kind of initiative like that, but our VP is keen to get the tech-posse together and see if we can’t begin to organize a little bit of a digital renaissance within our walls.

Why oh why don’t boards and ministries fund micro-initiatives like this, looking to find and develop potential hot groups, and build PD from the ground up instead of top down?

Perhaps this kind of genuine seed change doesn’t earn you enough political points, demonstrate senior management reach or spend enough of the budget in one place.

In the meantime, I’m going to see if I can’t get the grass burning just a little bit where we are.

Tablets are like high heels

I’ve had an opportunity to use a Motorola Xoom tablet this week and respond to my board about how it might be used in class rooms. I’ve been crushing on the idea of getting a tablet for a while now. After using netbooks in class last semester, I love the idea of a rotatable screen that lets you read without over-scrolling, the super battery life, instant on functionality and the super small form factor.

Last year at ECOO I got to use an ipad for a day, but the wireless was so dodgey (not the ipad’s fault), that I barely got any real sense of how it could work. This time round the tablet was with me at work, at home and everywhere in between.

The Xoom has a higher resolution, wide screen and faster processor than the ipad2, and runs on the Android Honeycomb OS (it’s basically a google device). It gets along natively with any google apps and lets you access the MASSIVE android marketplace so that your six year old can play a lot of Angry Birds. It also plays Flash, so you don’t get the internet-lite ipad experience.

One of the amazing things about touch screens is how quickly and intuitively people take to them. Said six year old was tossing birds at towers in moments, and skipping through the OS to watch youtube or find new software. As a tool for children, or people new to the world of digital content, tablets make a great opening. Tablets offer a great feel of immediacy, you’re actually touching the content. Keyboards start to look like bars on the door to the digital wonderland. Thinking about how poor most people’s typing is, this might be a tablet’s greatest strength.

The android honeycomb OS works well enough, I occasionally experienced bog downs when trying to type (an agonizing process on a touch screen which I thought would be better than what happens on my touch screen android phone, but wasn’t). Its biggest draw back was no Firstclass (school email) android app, so I couldn’t see board email, which makes it somewhat useless as a communication device for me at work (the Firstclass web interface stinks). If our board moves to Google, as it looks like it will, Honeycomb will suddenly look like a smart choice though.

Any kind of data entry is where I fall down on this tablet thing. I’ve seen certain (Barkerish) people touch typing on ipads (curious to know what her wpm are), but this seems like a painful transition. My typing on the Xoom alternated between trying to thumb type while in landscape mode and not being able to reach the middle of the keyboard (and I don’t have small hands), thumb text typing in portrait mode but the weight of the tablet made this uncomfortable, or trying to actually type from the home keys while it’s on my lap or on a table (when it wasn’t trying to re-orientate itself). The lack of tactile feedback if you’re a touch typer means you’re relearning how to assess accuracy (made more difficult when it pauses on you before barfing out a pile of letters). The lack of response and no tactile feed back had me deleting half a line of painfully entered text only to go back and make corrections. Trying to touch the screen and go to the specific error was pretty hit and miss, so I often resorted to the ‘screw it, I’ll start over again’ approach.

I like to make content, especially writing. I can’t imagine using a tablet for that. It was even uncomfortable for tweets and social networking, I just didn’t like trying to enter data into it. I could work at improving typing on the screen, but I don’t think I’ll ever come close to how fast I can type on a good, tactile, nicely spaced keyboard with responsive keys, so why bother?

The other contenty side of things for me are graphics. If I’m working in photoshop, I need processing horsepower to move big files (not a tablet forte), and very fine control (a super high dpi mouse minimum, or a very accurate drawing slate). A finger print covered screen that only senses gross motor commands sets of my OCD (I HATE dirty screens, I even clean my car windshield often), and does very little for me in creating graphic content where I want fine control of the environment.

I get the whole tablet thing, I mean, who wouldn’t want to look this cool? And tablets aren’t without their perks. The battery life is incredible, I ran it all day at school, then it came home and got beaten up on by @banana29 and the mighty Max, often doing very processor heavy tasks – even in that consumptive environment, it took 13+ hours of constant on again off again use before it cried for a recharge.

The instant on functionality is another aspect of that immediacy that must appeal to the old or very young, it removes another barrier to access. All computers should be instant on, no boot time at all, otherwise the web isn’t immediate, and becomes a secondary mental realm instead of enhancing our reality. You don’t get enhanced reality after a 30 second bootup. Win7 does quite well on new laptops with this, open the lid and it’s on, everything should be that instant, or it’s just too far away.

As a web browser, the tablet seems untouchable. I wish they could design a laptop screen that would rotate to vertical for reading and writing, then drop into horizontal mode the odd time you need it like that; auto-rotation rocks. I think I’d keep it in portrait mode most of the time, I don’t watch high def movies on a laptop, I’m not sure why wide screens are now the norm, I’d prefer a tall one.

The size of this tablet is pretty sweet too. The Xoom would disappear into any kind of bag with ease, and is very light and so thin as to be invisible.

What I’ve got here is a device that is only good in a few, specific situations, it fits in a very thin place between my smart phone and my laptop, a space that I suspect is actually too small for me to care about now that I’ve tried it.

I don’t care for super small phones, and I’d be just as happy with a big 5 inch smartphone that has tablety qualities than I would with a book sized tablet that works well as a reader, but I can’t seem to find another use for. If convergence is what we’re aiming for, tablets are an offshoot that will eventually be subsumed by a smartphone evolution (I’d bet on build-in, interactive projectors in phones that make bigger screens moot).

The Xoom and ipad look fantastic, but the touch screen makes me nuts when it gets finger printy, and is sometimes unresponsive (though I must admit having less problems there with the ipad, so maybe that’s an Android issue, or just what you get for not having to run any gadgets or flash). You wouldn’t type anything meaningful on a tablet, you can’t take decent photos or video with it (you’d do far better with a dedicated camera), but it looks fantastic, futuristic and makes the user look very chic.

Like those awesome Tron inspired stilettos, the Xoom is great to think about using, but after 10 minutes, you wouldn’t be getting much done and it would just hurt, though you’d still look fabulous!

Tablets are like high heels PART DEUX! (complete with awesome geeky high heels!)

paper teachers

This is another go at the Tyranny of Paper, with a sprinkling of teacher psychology…

Ecology

Trying to balance photocopy budgets.

I recently got my photocopying costs for the computer department for the first half of the spring semester. Every class we teach in computers has a 1:1 student:computer ratio. You’d think there wouldn’t be any photocopying costs.

The one teacher we have teaching computers full time did $273 in photocopying from February to April this semester. I happen to be teaching an English so I get to see their copying costs too. The most expansive copier in English where they have to kill to get computer access and have to actually teach letters on paper? $217. Most of the others were less than half that.

This made me angry. If you have computers in front of every student, why in heaven’s name wouldn’t you use them to communicate with your students? How would teaching computer programming be easier on paper? With a limited budget that requires very specific (and expensive) hardware and software, why would I want to spend 1/5 of my budget so a single teacher can produce thousands of sheets of paper?

A recent analysis of photocopying costs (one of the single largest costs in our school and I imagine most others), was that a typical student collects an entire tree worth of handouts in their k-12 career…
each…
student…

The ecological costs are staggering. Billions a year and entire forests are consumed so students around the world can get handouts. I’m not convinced the return on investment balances the educational advantages with the ecological costs, but education is a conservative beast, and getting it to change industrial era habits isn’t easy.

Psychology

Teacher preparing for class

The ecological disaster aside, I’ve always been curious about this photocopying habit in teachers. In teacher’s college I asked myself why I was lining up for photocopiers all the time. When you’re new, you are terrified that what you’re doing will not take the whole period, so you structure it on a photocopy to slow students from tearing through the work. It also takes the attention off you and puts it on the desk, so you don’t feel like you’re madly tap dancing for the whole lesson. It also means you’ve done much of the organization for students who seem increasingly incapable of organizing themselves. Lastly, it allows you face the students while giving them information, something a new teacher is conscious of every time they turn their back to write on the board.

After using the photocopier crutch for the first couple of years I put an end to it. I use the board if I need to display visually or help students organize information. I trust in my ears and the relationship I’ve developed with my class (which can often involve a Snape like, direct approach to inappropriate action early in the semester) when it comes to helping them learn with my back turned. Watching some of our senior teachers, I get the sense that they never put the photocopying crutch away, in fact, they’ve developed their entire career around it.

I also had the benefit of not being particularly beholden to 20th Century habits around institutional teaching, and leapt at the opportunity to get into elearning and digitally based education early on, further removing me from the pulp and paper teachers. One of the big cultural divides in our school is between the paper teacher and the digital teacher.

Media Arts Course webpage (NING)

I still occasionally have to make copies, typically for tests and such, but I try and minimize that too. When compared to department averages, I typically produce about 1/10th the copies. When I’m given a computer lab, I typically produce no copies at all. Course webpages, wikis and shared documents are the means of information transmission. In media arts I’ve had students submitting shared docs (google or skydrive) and prezis when they need to show a presentation. The entire course takes place on a private social network (Ning).

The past couple of months we’ve had a Canadian copyright foundation watchdog asking people to write down what they’re copying to ensure fair distribution of copyright funds. How very 20th Century of them, but I guess a modern high school is just the place to monitor people still doing what they were doing twenty years ago.

hiding behind photocopies

paper teacher
copies of a copy

Digital House of Mirrors

The digital house of mirrors we all live in.

It’s early days, ECOO isn’t until next October, and I’m reticent to say what I’m going to present on months ahead of time. The digital learning landscape can change quite significantly in eight months.

My previous ECOO presentations have followed an interesting arc, from philosophy to specific action. My first go with Dancing in the Datasphere talked about fundamental changes happening to us as we transition to a data driven world. The mini-lab followed a year later, the idea there being that we diversify technology in order to develop true digital fluency in students. Last year the final step was to work toward a digital skills continuum. Only by integrating a developing skill set into curriculum will we begin producing students who have the technical skills necessary to survive and thrive in the digital age.

That trajectory, no doubt pushed by my transition to computer studies from English, had me looking at developing greater student familiarity with computing tools because I see a great deal of ignorance in the ‘digital natives‘ I’m teaching every day, but that focus was technically biased.

For those of us who have lived as adults through the last twenty years of technological revolution, we sometimes forget where we’ve come from because we’re so engrossed with where we are. For ECOO this time round I’m thinking about what technology is demanding of us as people. Our selves are being stretched and amplified in ways they never have before. Nick Carr’s The Shallows puts us on a pretty stark trajectory towards idiocy with what is happening to us. The digitization of the self stretches us flat, making continuity of thought impossible and turning us all into distracted, simplistic cogs in a consumerist machine designed to turn us all into the lowest common denominator; none of us any smarter than our smartphones.

With the advent of social media we suddenly find ourselves existing in multiple places at once. Our self is no longer geographically focused. Our influence spreads across the internet. We are able to affect change in people and places formerly unconnected to us. The people we communicate with (albeit in a minimalist way) are far flung and many. The people we spend deep, attentive time with are fewer and diminished.

Our digital selves are perceived in many different ways. The aforementioned digital native tends to not differentiate between online and real world action. They often consider social media as just another conversation they are having, and are then shocked when something said publicly is responded to by the public. The generation of kids (our students) growing up in this ongoing social experiment never look at privacy settings, have little idea of the differences between social networks and tend to broadcast online what is on their minds in much the same way they would while hanging out with friends. The veil between the physical and the digital, between public and private is all but non existent to them.

Digital Footprints & Always On Teacher Faces

A more professional approach to managing the online self is to adopt marketing theory and develop your online brand. Companies and celebrities approach social media in this manner, often using marketing firms to manage and run their social media presence. I can’t help but think that this lack of genuine presence games the system and ultimately fails. It’s exhausting to maintain if you can’t hire marketing monkeys to run it for you, and ultimately, it’s fake. I’d much rather read my favourite author’s tweets from his own fingers than follow what someone trying to sell me something thinks I should be seeing. Many teachers fall into this trap when tentatively stepping into online presences. Spending your weeknights and weekends being mister or missus Teacher is nothing more than working all the time, forever.

The Cult of Done

If there is a positive future to a digitally enhanced self I’d hope it is through a genuine sense of self expression. We should be aware of what the tools are and how they work, and then we should use them to empower our access to information, our ability to mine deeply into details, to collaborate and develop community, to share our own creativity, interests and sense of discovery. The technology should not only allow us to do these things, it should be pushing us to maximize our effectiveness as thinkers and doers. Any technology that produces distracted idiots will doom the people using it. Evolution should still be eliminating the irrelevant, even in the digital realm.

It’s early days in this sea change of how we deal with a digitally enhanced self. In the future the hybrid intelligence of a digitized human will evolve toward a higher order of effectiveness. Those made useless by digital tools will, much like those weakened by an inability to read, become marginalized. Those able to harness information literacy will enjoy those advantages. Those who ignore it will find themselves increasingly unable to compete.

What that effective digital self looks like in students, in teachers, in people in general is where I’m currently thinking about pushing my research this year. How we adapt to these changes now will establish effective habits as the technology rapidly spins out of its infancy and into maturity. There is no better time to consider what a digitally enhanced human being should look like than now, when we’re in the process of inventing the very idea.

The idea of Web3.0, or intelligent/self organizing information suggests that the future of digitized humanity will inherently push toward greater effectiveness. The opportunity to be passive or stupid in a digital context will actually work against what the data wants to do for you; you’ll learn in spite of yourself, you’ll know what you need to know when you need to know it – the data itself will ensure this. It would be interesting to show the evolution of digital humanity over the past three decades, and where it might be going in the next twenty years.

The era of stupid/passive information is ending. The people that it has created will have to adapt to technology that demands more of them, or risk being made irrelevant by it.

Straddling the Divide

I usually blog here to work out my thinking on a variety of education and technology situations I come across. This one is no different. I just read a series of suggestions for dismantling computer studies at our school. I’m honestly curious as to the intention behind these suggestions, but in the meantime I’m trying to get the bees out of my head on this subject…

My school is odd in that it has a computer studies department. This department is a combination of technology focused computer engineering credits (ICE/TEJ) and theoretical/math focused computer science (ICS) credits. That our school combined these two very different disciplines into a single department has been both challenging and very forward thinking.

There is a push on now to align our headships with those of other schools. Since the idea of a department that combines all aspects of computer technology under a single headship hasn’t happened anywhere else, the urge is to dismantle computer studies. The thinking behind this doesn’t show a great understanding of what the computer subjects are (it was suggested the whole department just get put into business studies – a department that neither side of computer studies has anything to do with). WIth so few people understanding what the fundamental computer subjects are, it makes it challenging to explain how things might evolve. Ignorance drives many management decisions around digital technology education.

Trying to run computer studies has been a tricky ride. Our computer science teacher only comes to our school for a semester, so the courses only run in the second half of the year. On top of that other teachers aren’t lining up to teach comp-sci. Computer science would be better served in our school by being placed in our mathematics department and being taught by a variety of teachers, but then those teachers qualified in it should want to teach it and I get the sense that very few do.

Computer science has been held captive by some strange teacher scheduling. Attaching it to a larger department would be healthy for it. I’ve tried to make moves in how and who teaches it, but nothing seems to have worked. I’m frustrated and ready to hand it off.

Computer engineering is a hands-on technology course, much like auto-shop or manufacturing programs. This course of study focuses on electronics and information technology. Compared to computer science it’s much more of a hands-on building and experimentally focused subject; it would logically belong with other technology credits.

The argument that we should re-align our headships with other schools feels like a step backwards to me though. In five or ten years would our students be better served by a strong, comprehensive computer department, or by a traditional and arbitrary split in the subject? Unfortunately, combining abstract mathematically focused computer programming with real-world engineering isn’t easy, especially with how Ontario has handled teacher qualification in the subject.

Up until the past decade, computer science was the only computer qualification. Like the guys in Big Bang Theory, the vast majority of computer science teachers have very strong theoretical backgrounds in the mathematics behind programming, but little experience in actually making computers work. When computer studies was established as a technology course those theoretical computer science teachers were grand-fathered in as computer engineering teachers, though many of them had never installed a CPU in their lives and would have no idea where to even begin. Asking them to provide onsite information technology support would be an impossibility for many of them.

That tech-ed certification took a mountain-load of paperwork
including industry certifications and proof of years of industry
experience. If you were comp-sci when they brought it in, you
just got the certification…

So here we are in 2014 with many computer studies teachers who actually have little or no experience with the mechanical side of computing, though they have been given the OK to teach it. This will eventually go away as those grand-fathered comp-sci teachers retire and future teachers will be expected to actually have an industry technology background in computers if they want to teach engineering. In the meantime we’ve further muddied an emergent subject area that holds the key to producing technologically fluent students who can function in the modern workplace.

What I suspect will happen with our forward thinking computer studies department is that it will be split and sent to math (comp-sci) and technology (comp-eng), and the onsite fix-it teacher role will not be considered a headship even though it manages just as much budget and far more equipment than any single department head. This might be better for comp-sci, which has been dead-ended in our school as far as scheduling goes. I don’t think comp-eng will be hurt by moving to the tech department, so the splitting of the subjects into other areas doesn’t really bother me, though it does make me wonder if we’re moving in a direction opposite to social expectation.

I’ve been thinking about computer studies in terms of a specialization as well as a general fluency. Perhaps future computer studies streams will include general technology fluency credits as well as specializations in engineering and coding, but I doubt it. With computer fluency being a school (society?) wide expectation as well as the traditional fracture between computer science and computer mechanics, I fear that management energy will be spent on dividing and diminishing a subject that should instead be taking a central place as an integrated, adaptive department that produces 21st Century fluent graduates.

Individual Education Plan

Many moons ago as I was finishing up my B.Ed. at Nippissing U. we got invited to an educational technology symposium for special needs students. We were shown the (then) cutting edge Kurzweil speech to text software, fantastic education tools to use with Palm Pilots and other PDAs (!) and even early online access to text books. I thought it was all wonderful, but I couldn’t help but wonder why this technology was reserved for special education students, wouldn’t everyone’s learning have less friction with these tools?

Except you’re not, are you? Some of you get individual
education plans, the rest get the system.

Today I’m going to the latest IEP meeting for my son. As a teacher I’ve never understood the individual education plan in Ontario education. Like that technology all those years ago, wouldn’t every student benefit from an IEP? Doesn’t every student deserve one? Aren’t they all individuals?

I’m gong to argue for my child’s special needs again today and wonder why I have to do that. Is it so the school can do well on standardized testing? Is it so my child isn’t run over by a teacher who is determined to get him to conform to bench marks decided by the Ministry? Is it so he can conform and be more easily manageable? My son is not rude, or nasty, or dangerous, he is a delightful fellow who thinks laterally the way most people think linearly. His problem isn’t that he can’t do things, it’s that he does them differently from how most people do them. Watching the education system try to force his circle into a square hole isn’t easy.

As a parent I’m even more baffled by education than I am as a teacher.

A number of years ago my fearless wife demanded an IEP review. It was grudgingly given, and after some expensive private psychological review (that many families would not be able to afford) a formal IEP was prepared. At first I was against the idea, but as I continued teaching and saw the number of times a student is held academically accountable by teachers for circumstances beyond their control, I started to realize that an IEP is nothing more than a shield against a system intent on enforcing conformity; protection against teachers who think they are producing widgets instead of people. Our nineteenth century school system is still building human cogs designed for production lines. The fact that there aren’t a lot of people working on production lines any more seems to have slipped their minds.

In these IEP meetings my son’s educators are facing off against two parents with all sorts of familiarity with the system and credentials that help them deal with it. What happens to the child who should have an IEP but doesn’t because their parents are intimidated by the panel of ‘experts’ in front of them? What happens to the student who doesn’t have a parent who can get to those interviews? Who wouldn’t even think to ask for one because they are a single parent working sixty hours a week?

What about the student who is going through a nasty divorce at home? The student being abused? The student who has to work a full time job outside of school to support themselves? The student who has fallen into drugs? No IEP for them, though they need individual education plans every bit as much.

If every student in Ontario had an IEP what would it look like? How would that change the process of teaching? Instead of trying to catch students out or stream them for post secondary, what if every student was using an IEP to reach their maximum potential? What if there were no standardized tests but individualized education was put at the forefront of everything we do? What if there were no streams? We’re not in the factory business any more, almost no one is. Robots do a lot of that work now.

The nail that stands up gets the hammer.

Years ago in Japan a student told me about a Japanese saying when I asked about conformity and how it’s viewed there. They told me, “the nail that stands up gets the hammer.” That kind of brick in the wall thinking might have served Western education in the last millennium, but it’s a foreign way of thinking in a post-industrial world.

I’m going to walk into the education factory today and ask them to not hammer my son into a slot that he doesn’t fit into. Fortunately the IEP shield is in effect, so he’s protected from the worst of the hammering (he just has to suffer the small day to day whacks).

I wonder what happens to all those kids who aren’t individual enough to be entitled to an individual education plan.

Followup: posted by a very forward thinking Ontario Educator this morning:

“The most effective way to provide enrichment to every student at a school is already in front of us. All children, in all schools, should have an IEP. Grade levels in classes should be eliminated. High stakes testing should be dropped. Lockstep schooling should be eliminated [to end comparison thinking] There would no longer be “third grade” or “tenth grade”. All students should work toward mastery learning. When they have mastered a skill they move on to the next one. When they finish the required and elective curriculum, they graduate. Slower learners are never “held back” . . . There is no grade to be in. . . . They learn at their own pace, moving through the learning at the pace at which they can show they have mastered the curriculum.” (189).
Jensen, Eric. (2006). Enriching the brain: How to maximize every learners potential.
San Francisco, USA: Jossey-Bass

You Say You Want A Revolution?

… well you know, we all wanna save the world.

Thoughts from ECOO 2011:

You say you want a digital revolution in education? Is your perfect classroom a one screen per child? Do you rage against the bureaucracy and hate that this isn’t happening fast enough?

There is a lot of excitement and optimism around this, much of it centered on the idea that technology will somehow make our jobs as teachers easier. If you honestly believe that then your optimism is blind.

Technology will give you access to information, and offer you opportunities to differentiate learning and even assess student abilities in much more minute and specific ways, but it won’t make your job easier, it will make it much more challenging, especially if teaching for you is a matter of working out a lesson and then repeating it for twenty years until you retire.

If you knew how to direct a plough team of horses in the field, did you really think that a modern machine makes things simpler? Easier to operate? Do you have to know less to operate the machine than you did the horse?

At the Ecoo Conference this year, many people focused on specific apps that would replace a specific classroom related paper based piece of work. This is the equivalent of creating a steam powered horse, rather than designing a train that more appropriately uses the new technology. Using google docs to replace individual writing is this kind of thinking. Using prezi to replace a poster presentation is this kind of thinking. Using Diigo to replace making notes out of an encyclopedia is this kind of thinking. The real power of these tools lies in how they are different, not in how the replace an existing process, and especially in how they create collaborative opportunities.

We are trapped by our preconceptions…

Those preconceptions also feed into fears.

The collaborative nature of online tools freaked out many people at ECOO. The heel digging around using social media (twitter and others) to expand personal learning networks was consistent across many of the seminars I attended. Many educators still accept group work in class, but believe online collaboration is a form of plagiarism and cheating, or even worse, it somehow causes children to be preyed on by making them public.

If the classroom is really going to bleed out of the factory inspired buildings we call schools and infect a student’s life in a more permanent way (ultimately creating curious life long learners), then we need to continue to develop access to collaborative online tools that don’t frighten people, and act assertively to clarify new media and calm down the analogue population.

I had a knee jerk response from an invite I sent out on school email this weekend asking if anyone who hadn’t PLN built before might be interested. The teacher (a self described dinosaur) said, “I don’t want to be tweeting or any of that other social media stuff. If I want PD, I’ll read a book.” I pointed out to her that most of the discussion online revolves around books we’ve read. The key difference between her enriching her own teaching and the PLN doing it online is that more than one person benefits; collaboration is what super charges it.

The foundation of all this anxiety is the spectacular example our digital native students make of social media, which is usually displayed as the most asinine waste of time ever devised. Older teachers who are techno-phobic find the idea of using digital tools for productivity as foreign as clueless fourteen year olds do. The blind leading the blind.

I keep trying to shed some light on this, but people get very cranky about it.

Technology As Distraction

Tech In Ed link

We have more computer access now than we’ve ever had before, both in and out of school. We have more internet access now than ever before, both in and out of school. This is all simple fact…

The full non-twitterized quote was, “Great, I couldn’t find a computer lab to book, now I won’t get my marking done.” Implication? You book a computer lab so the kids have something to do while you catch up on work. You don’t teach using computers, they are a way to keep students amused, distracted.

Anecdotally speaking, the vast majority of labs I walk by on any given day contain a teacher studiously ignoring their students, either on a computer themselves or frantically marking, while their students wander the internet looking for entertainment, the room aglow with the moderate cobalt blue of Facebook.

Last week we had a teacher angrily emailing because the labs he’d booked while he was absent had been double booked. Implication? I can book a lab while I’m away so the students have something to do. Presumably there was work attached to the lab booking, but once again there was no teaching involved in it. You book a lab so a supply teacher doesn’t have to teach either.

This does a couple of damaging things. First of all, it reinforces in student’s minds that computers are only for entertainment. If the teacher isn’t actively involved in the use of computers in the class, if computer access isn’t intrinsic to what students are learning, then we only reinforce the idea of technology as an entertainment/time waster.

I teach media arts in an Apple lab. It seems like a dream technical teaching situation, but the difficulty in trying to get students cultured to vegetate in front of a screen to recognize all that they don’t know, and use a computer for productive and/or creative purposes is agonizing. It’s like trying to get a morphine addict to recognize how small measured doses can actually help someone manage pain; they don’t care, they just want to keep overusing it for their own amusement.

I want to thank all those teachers who use school computer labs as a distraction that encourages these bad habits.

Another problem is teacher computer literacy. This is a major problem in the general public, and in teachers as well; people generally know how to do only a few things, and have no idea how what they use works, they certainly aren’t experimental with their usage. Teacher lack of familiarity with computer and internet use makes them poor facilitators in digital learning environments, and they aren’t going to get much better at it if they treat computer lab time as an excuse to do work irrelevant to what students are doing.

If we’re going to develop digital pedagogy, we need to be recognizing how digital tools can become vital components in learning and not merely a replacement for analogue options (ie: poster board/PowerPoint, pen & paper/word processor) that you can leave students with in a lab while you catch up on marking.

Left to their own devices (and they almost always are), students on a computer revert to simplistic habits: Facebook lurking, Youtube staring or the dreaded pointless online game/time-waster. This disconnect also produces the vast majority of school computer vandalism, something that actively prevents us from buying more computers (because we have to keep repairing the under supervised labs we have instead of having cash on hand to develop diverse educational technology).

These are usually the first teachers who complain about lack of access, because they can’t find themselves a period off. As a teacher that has technology baked into their curriculum, these people make my job that much harder than it already is.