Tag: onted

Originally published November, 2012 in Dusty World

I’ve been teaching now for eight years so this is my first time experiencing work action.  I’ve had union jobs before, union jobs that went to the wall with job action, but the teacher experience is very different.  When I was a warehouse worker for National Grocers we were fighting for our benefits and pay, but no one in the general public ever thought that they knew what my job was or demanded that I stay after my shift to volunteer to do extra work for no pay; I guess the private sector has it easy.

Then there is the management thing.  If you’ve ever tried to work out a deal with private business, they are cheap and relentless, but they are consistent.  If you can understand what their parameters are in negotiating, you can come to an agreement.  Also, if you do your job very efficiently and make money for them it makes more room for you in negotiation.  At no point in private bargaining situations did I see a deal stopped for political reasons.  You also have the benefit of working for bosses who are experts in the business (because they made it).  I never had to explain to National Grocers management what our job was because everyone at the table knew the business.

Ontario: top 3 in the world, midpack in cost – best bang for the buck in education in the world! If you don’t believe me, believe the freaking UN!

If you’re a teacher in Ontario these days your boss has no background whatsoever in what you do, and even though you produce some of the best results in your field in the world it isn’t acknowledged at all; you still get to hear an unrelenting carcophany in media and the public about how easy your job is and how lazy you are.  Even your boss, a lawyer who hasn’t taught a day in her life, likes to point out that you just took the whole summer off (which you hadn’t).

Ontario’s education system is truly world class, to the point where it is copied around the world.  If you go to an international school there is a very good chance that it will be running the Ontario K to 12 curriculum.  Private schools copy our public school system, it’s that awesome.  If we were building cars, they would be the best in the world, they’d be selling like hotcakes, no one would think to question what we were doing.

So here we are, dealing with a Minister of Education who has never actually worked in Education – ever, a government that is more interested in poll numbers than in resolving serious issues and getting everyone back to work, and it’s all happening while Ontario Education is the envy of the world.  Trying to negotiate in this environment makes very little sense.  It makes me long for the private sector where things made sense.

We threw money at GM so they could stop making crappy cars and become solvent.  We threw money at banks that had purchased bad loans.  If private businesses make bad choices, we cripple ourselves financially to support them.

However, if we create excellence we bitterly attack it, demean it and then use it for shabby political ends.  It’s not hard to see why Ontario is going down the toilet.  We don’t even recognize and protect excellence any more.  And when we’ve let ignorant (dare I say stupid?) loud mouths vent their frustrations at their own failures by blaming teachers for their own short comings while at school, we’re left with a demoralized education system… hardly the kind of place that can compete successfully on the global stage.

Other Notes:
The poor right winger: what you get when laziness and greed replace industry and reward
All Hands on Deck: when politics dictate economics
Death of Vision: where our leadership went
Educational Maelstroms: what it’s like to hear the negativity
Surfed PISA lately?: How fantastic our Ed system is!

At ECOO last year, digital footprints were the focus of many sessions.  The concern revolved around students (and teachers) showing anything of themselves online.  The fear was clear and present, as was the suggestion that we MUST craft a meaningful online presence.  Many were surprised at this year’s conference when our keynote speaker talked about how digitization has gone beyond self presentation and become interactive as a means of self improvement.  Tech doesn’t want to be passive, it wants to interact with us, become a part of us!

At the Educational Computing Organization of Ontario’s conference this week we had Nora Young from CBC Spark talking about how digitization and the proliferation of data is creating a kind of self awareness that is entirely new.  She used examples of bio-metric tools and productivity time assessment software to present examples of this digital mirror.

This is a world that our students are immersed in 18 out of every 24 hours (when school is in session) – and it leaks into classrooms constantly on smartphones.  Trying to address that tide by telliing students to bring their own devices, or go on generic, years behind the times school computers is one of the many places you can see education failing.

Words like relevance and engagement are thrown around in panic.  People start flipping class rooms and attempting to engage students by offering the same un-directed over empowerment that kids receive through digital devices; that’s an arms race that no one wins.  The resulting habitual usage at best offers minimum educational gains, at worst it actually impedes student abilities in other areas.  If you’ve ever watched a digital serf mindlessly copy an essay from the internet to submit, you’re watching undirected digital empowerment in action.

Where Nora was talking about a kind of enhanced self awareness through digital tools, many ‘digital natives’ are blissfully unaware of how public their digital presence is, or where their data goes.  It’s merely a part of their lives, and they don’t think twice about posting material that makes them unemployable because in their minds it is the equivalent of talking to friends.  They haven’t thought twice about publicity settings, it doesn’t occur to them.

On top of that, the data that they might use to become more efficient, or digitally empower their learning, or self-organize are often out of reach because students, as digital natives, are unaware of anything but their self-taught habitual usage.  We certainly aren’t doing much to address habitual usage in schools (a digital continuum would be a start), even going to far as to encourage it with BYO-device BYO-technology initiatives.

It’s a nice idea to imagine digital tools offering us data that helps to make us better people (Wired did a cool article on this a while back).  The digerati will do this to great effect, once again empowering themselves in ways that Luddites will lack.  As a teacher my concern is that the digital native is as incapable of grasping these tools as the tech-hater.  It takes technological fluency to grasp these kinds of digital self-awareness opportunities.  Unless we’re developing those fluencies, this is just another 21st Century opportunity lost to on our students.

Other than cutting networking cables, running them and installing hardware, I’m not really a nuts and bolts of electronics kind of guy, but after taking this AQ, I will be.  When I was a kid I got into cars and stereos and did some wiring then, it’s nice to get hands on with components again.  My experience has all be around making it (IT) work for business, after taking this AQ, I get the sense that I’m going to end up delving more deeply into maker culture, something I’ve wanted to do for too long.

Getting my head back into wiring diagrams felt impossible in the first few days.  I’m finding the tools available, especially Arduino and Fritzing to be invaluable in bridging gaps in knowledge.  I know I won’t be a Jedi knight at circuitry by the end of the course, but the 1-2-3 system our instructor has been using has recognized the varieties of skills in the room and allowed people to focus on what they want to improve in, and improve I have.

I’m looking forward to hitting my tech-class in the fall and getting my hands dirty.  In the meantime, I just started Shop Class As Soulcraft, suggested by our instructor on the last day of class.  Some mechanic’s philosophy will help fill in the gap I’m feeling between my academic background, and my urge to work with my hands again.

I’ve written about owning your digital self in previous posts, but how that ownership happens is a function of how capable you are of authoring it.  Developing that authorship requires freedom of choice, you can’t make full use of any medium if you don’t have creative control.

I’m currently working toward my qualifications as a computer technology teacher, and this technical ability that allows for creative, deep use of technology is on my mind.  The magic of being technically skilled is misunderstanding that I want to move past.  Teaching technology means freeing up our access to it, and expecting anyone who wants to use it to be competent with it.  21st Century skills need to be as ubiquitous as literacy or numeracy skills.

When we are teaching writing, we don’t prescribe the type of writing tool or the type of paper.  If a particular pen or type of paper encourages a student to write more, we’re overjoyed to use it.  As soon as we can, we have students writing about their experiences using their own style of forming letters (within readability parameters).  We encourage individualization of this complicated process in order to assist students in internalizing these complex skills; their ability to form letters is one of the most unique things they do as a person.

What we do with edtech is the equivalent of only showing students cards with words on them and then declaring them literate when they can string together a sentence of words.  We don’t allow them to personalize their learning, and so make it impersonal, simplistic and ultimately forgettable.

A school computer is about as inflexible and impersonal as a computer can be made to be.  If we’re going to recognize 21st Century learning as complex, inter-related skill sets that need to be nurtured and developed over time (like literacy itself), then we need to look at how we are presenting digital  learning opportunities in education.

Our students currently teach themselves 21st Century skills outside education.  When they come to school they meet panicky (usually older) teachers and administrators who fear the magic box of lights and discourage any use of them that aren’t understandable parallels of familiar analogue activities (word processing/type writer, powerpoint/slide show, etc).  Activities that don’t have a pre-digital analogue are morally wrong / intellectually bankrupt / a waste of time… pick one and frown.  Edtech is designed around this philosophy of belittling digital change, and ignoring the development of teaching in technology.

appears every time we open up IE, which forgets all your settings when you log out again.. #edtechfail

If we want our students to be able to author their digital selves now and in the future, we MUST free up the technology and allow students to customize their digital experiences.  The broken installation of Internet Explorer on my board computers (the only browser of choice) doesn’t cut it.  Browser choice (complete with apps, mods and other personalization) makes all the difference in developing a skilled approach to accessing the internet.  It should remember your customizations as well.

This flexibility needs to go deep into software.  A student who has had access to multiple operating systems (Windows, OSx and Linux minimally) immediately has a better sense of how computers work because they are able to develop some perspective around how OSes make use of the hardware they are on, not to mention the software ecosystems each possess.

A truly agile edtech plan also breaks apart the hardware monotony found in every board.  The minilab goes a long way toward addressing this while also addressing the software miasma.  The only time in their lives they will ever be forced to use rows of identical desktops is in school (or a 20th Century factory).  Preparing students for an IT environment that hasn’t existed for over a decade is positively backward looking

Educational technology is not about ease of administration for the board’s IT department, and it’s not about fear mongering about privacy that never existed, it’s about teaching students real, usable skills that will serve them in the future.

It would be nice if we started doing that.

It used to be the desktop, but we’ve got more processing power than we know what to do with nowadays. The real bottleneck is internet access. I spent a frustrating day today in a public high school trying to fit an elephant of a live video feed through the doorway – it didn’t fit. If the school was empty, and the network dormant, it ran fine. Unfortunately, I had to share bandwidth with 1500 other people, facebook must go on.

@banana29 got me thinking about the computer refresh going on at her school last week.  We’re in the same  process at my school.

Broad Based Digital Skills Development

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.

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.

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:

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.