edchat – Page 8 – Mechanical Sympathy

Enhanced Self Awareness

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.

The Money Trap

I know it’s hard to imagine, but there was a time when money did not dictate your self-value. This seems a foreign concept in the twenty-first Century, but prior to the neo-liberal ideas that we now take for granted, humans valued themselves in very different ways.

Bucky’s quote popped up the other day and got me thinking about self-value. Can you imagine a world where the purpose of people was to push the boundaries of their thinking instead of being forced into servitude to an economic system that reduces them to drudgery?

Rather than battle this kind of reductionist and inhuman economic thinking, education has been struggling to get on board with it (there is nothing worse than looking like you’re out of step with society – it’s never wrong). Pathways to employment is modern education’s reason for being, and it plays nicely into 1% thinking that earning money is all that matters, all that makes you worthwhile.

The rich want you to self-identify with your earning potential, then they own your means of happiness. When your self-worth is tied to your ability to earn a trivial income you are drip-fed your reason for being by people who (according to your own core belief that money is what makes you valuable) will happily starve you for their own ends.

Asking a 21st Century person to believe that their income does not dictate their self value is impossible. This kind of viral capitalism is every bit as limiting to human potential as medieval serfdom, dogmatic church states or god-kings.

People are fond of criticizing history for ideas that seem silly in retrospect. These are the very same people who argue for and justify our current woeful state of being. Our unsuccessful students aren’t high earners. Our successful students go to work for those oil companies. It’s a difficult thing to see past the myths, misinformation and indoctrination of our own culture, but I suspect you’ll never find happiness if you don’t, especially in the early twenty-first Century.

***

It’s the day before classes start again and I’m up at 6am after too many tedious work anxiety dreams (not of being in the classroom, but of being in school. Teaching doesn’t freak me out, the systemic nature of modern education does).

I had a good break, but now I’m back to seeing how far I can encourage free thinking before I crash into The System again. I’m a 20%er at heart. I always tend toward the more difficult road, I get more out of travelling on it but it’s tiring being a minority all the time.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been away from the classroom for a few days, found some perspective and wondered if I’m in the best place to learn. The irony isn’t lost on me.

Master/Journeyman/Apprentice

I’m once again in the additional qualification classroom in order to gain another teachable. This one was a bit tricky. I’d been working in information technology since I graduated with an honours BA in English in the mid ’90s. When I went into teaching, I looked into getting my technical qualifications (I’d spent a fair amount of money on getting IT qualified and wanted to keep a finger in the pie, so to speak). It didn’t happen. The Byzantine rules around what I needed and how I qualified were taking so long to get through, it was easier to just plug in my degree (to a very degree friendly teacher qualification system) and start there.

I did computer clubs and delved into #edtech relentlessly, but didn’t get my computer engineering qualification until now because I needed it for a headship, and they’d recently made changes that cleared up some of the labyrinthine rules around getting the qualification.

So here I am, a qualified IT technician in a computer engineering class. If we’re doing networking, or computer repair, I’m aces, but soldering? Circuit boards? Not so much. The funny thing is we have electrical engineers that don’t know what a registry is or how to reset an IP address, but they are brilliant on a circuit board. I’m starting to realize that computer engineering is another one of those subjects that collects expertise from various disciplines and files it all under the same heading. I’m also beginning to see why some comp-eng teachers’ courses look so different from other comp-eng teachers’ courses.

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.

Authoring Your Digital Self

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.

Bottlenecks

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.

All I needed was a 700kb/sec video feed to run continuously all day. I’ll blame the university for sending us an uncompressed, 640×480 monster of a feed. We could stream youtube or TEDtalks, but not the university live feed. The irony is it was one of the pre-eminent computer science universities in Canada, and they didn’t know how to feed it to us so we could follow it.

After doing backflips all morning trying to fix it, some awesome grade 12 students filled in the afternoon with some presentations on number theory, robotics and computers. It wasn’t a wasted day, but it’s hard to sell technology as a course of study when the guy teaching it can’t make it work.

I’d asked for a priority on the video feed over the 400 facebook accounts that were open, but apparently that’s impossible. I find this frustrating. I had no trouble prioritizing traffic or outright banning it when I was network admining, I’m not sure whether it’s a case of can’t or can’t be bothered. In either case, I’m at the end of a long day trying to make things work that simply won’t because the board won’t adjust bandwidth to need (it’s cheaper) and a university didn’t optimize it’s feed (it’s cheaper).

At the end of it, I got some grade 9s interested in robotics, and considering taking computers further on. I’m not sure that I got through to the half a dozen girls I convinced to come out. We don’t have a single female in grade 12 comp-sci or comp-eng, which I’d really like to fix.

I also wanted to backchannel the heck out of this. I introduced 90% of the students to twitter and showed them how universities use it during seminars, then the university didn’t use it at all, we were the only ones lighting up the hashtags or posting on the facebook page. I also tried running wallwisher.com. This thing could be brilliant. We had it running live on a wall through a projector. Alas, due to bandwidth restrictions, it crashed constantly and wouldn’t refresh at any time.

Until our school board starts taking traffic shaping seriously, the school network continues to be hijacked by facebook junkies and youtubers filling up the bandwidth with noise not remotely related to anything educational.

It’s been a long day watching technology not work.

Refresh 2

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

In my case I’m the head of computers and trying to focus on keeping as many computers as possible in student hands. We waste a lot of machines at teacher desks to do online attendance and check email, work that could easily happen on an alternate, much cheaper and efficient device than a full desktop system, but even those changes would resolve into a desperate attempt to keep things the same.

I had a couple of my seniors do an inventory of the school. We have over 300 desktops. Each costs about $1500 when you factor in purchasing and insurance on them. We have close to half a million dollars of desktop computers in our building, and every year we squirm to keep as many as we can as we are refreshed down. If we were to drop the cost of those desktops, radically reduce the number of printers in the building (and the subsequent tens of thousands of dollars we spend each year on printing), and remove local server storage, we could easily produce over $500 for every staff member and student in the building; more than enough for a device per person, even if those devices aren’t attached to specific people. Some classes with Chromebooks, some with Windows, some with Macs, some on Linux, some tablets, some laptops, some BYOD. A startlingly wide ecosystem of technology that encourages broad familiarity with many digital tools.

Broad Based Digital Skills Development

We status quo our edtech because change is hard, and we’ve borrowed an educationally uncomplimentary business model of I.T.. We fight to keep antiquated desktops because many teachers barely know how to use a ready made lab, let alone what to do with a variety of hardware with various operating systems and software on them. With digital fluency removed from them by board I.T., many teachers have learned helplessness. Those that struggle against this forced ignorance often disappear into the cloud in order to avoid the stifling local computer environment… a choking environment that should be founded on learning, not on ease of management or paranoia.

I’d love to spring us free from the nineties corporate I.T. model we’ve been slavishly following and begin pushing widespread familiarity and fluency on digital tools of all shapes and sizes. I dream of an experimental, curiosity driven access to technology that encourages timely, relevant learning for our students.

I fear we’ll end up finishing another year still running Windows XP on five year old desktops with an increasingly irrelevant OSAPAC software image. I suspect I’m going to escape into the cloud again to escape that choking simplicity, all while playing the keep-the-desktop-game on the management side.

When the Pupil is Ready, The Master Will Appear

From a Zen Koan, anyone who has attempted to gain mastery
in something has probably experienced this to some degree,
but it doesn’t usually happen in the education system.

I always have my ear to the ground, waiting to hear from a student who wants something more than curriculum. On a good year I’m lucky to find one or two students who are looking for a career rather than a credit.

I came across this saying the other week and it got me thinking about that hope I hold out for ready pupils. Teachers are paid to deliver curriculum whether students are ready or not (though the good ones try to minimize this friction); students are mandated to be there. The option to be formally uneducated isn’t available in Ontario nowadays, we’ve institutionalized education into a mandatory process. This regimented system reduces student readiness to engagement and throws the concept of patiently waiting for student readiness out the window. That patience suggests a process where student learning is the main focus. Have we lost the freedom to patiently wait for student readiness to the systemic efficiencies of regimented grading?

That a teacher will appear when you need them to advance your learning is a wonderful thought. It suggests that teaching is implied in mastery, which isn’t the case nowadays. In a time before mastery was monetized, keeping it alive by passing on skills rather than maximizing personal income was a big part of mastery. Waiting on student readiness also places great value on the student, making their preparedness the priority in learning. Engagement isn’t an issue with the student who seeks a teacher. Perhaps the issue is that we’re buried in teachers nowadays.

That the teacher-student relationship has been subverted by the education system is old news. Historically, learning was an experience unique to each individual, usually prompted by innate skill and desire. Systematizing education might mean more people get educated, but not in with the same rigour and certainly not for the same reasons.

Perhaps the most damaging aspect of systemic education is the externalization and abstraction of learning criteria. By setting standards and holding students to them we create a system that has measurable criteria for curriculum, teacher and standards effectiveness. We do this to create the appearance of academic credibility, so learning is not the focus of this kind of education, system integrity is. This modern approach to learning creates a strange distance in the classroom from learning which has led to such insightful comments as, “Those who can do, those who can’t teach.”

When the Zen koan that kicked this off was written a thousand years ago people who taught did so from their own mastery and were driven to do it to keep their expertise alive. Students were driven to learn from a radical sense of self preservation; their learning was central to their lives and livelihood. Teaching wasn’t considered a skill in itself, but was an important tool to keep mastery alive. When we separate teaching from mastery, as helpful as that is for school systems to generate curriculum, qualify teachers and graduate students, it leads us to a strange place where teaching and learning have little to do personally with the people in the classroom. Education has only evolved into this odd system in the past two centuries.

For the vast majority of human history education has been a bespoke experience, unique to the individual. It didn’t happen on a rigid timeline overseen by bureaucrats, and it often didn’t happen at all. When it did happen it was focused on mastery learning, which couldn’t happen until the student was ready for it. That kind of patience is missing from our classrooms and is one of the main reasons it feels so forced, and fake.

Imagining that pre-industrial intensely personal world of learning from our perspective way up here in the regimented twenty-first Century is difficult, yet it is how human beings learned for millennia. In that long ago world many people were left behind, but for the few who were driven to achieve excellence the master would appear when needed.

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.

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.

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.