Navigating a Generational Digital Skills Crisis

Digital transformation has forced unprecedented change in all aspects of our lives, yet digital literacy has remained at best an afterthought in education even as education systems across the world embrace mandatory eLearning and place students in online learning environments from the earliest grades. Our failure to recognize digital fluency as a foundational skillset has resulted in generational global digital skills crisis demonstrating shocking digital habits that are the main cause of an epidemic of cybersecurity breaches. Hiding cyber in a technical bubble is probably both a reaction and the result of this mess.

WEF’s opening remarks in the Unpacking Cyber Resilience white paper describe an expansion of cyber awareness using business language that many educators will use to say, ‘that’s not our job!’ (i.e.: training students for workplace readiness), but this digital illiteracy also damages our democracies by destroying our trust in institutions, creating disinformation echo-chambers that erode public discourse and also preventing us from accessing trustworthy news sources. Surely some of that is the job of public education?

“The digital transformation continuously reshapes and evolves businesses and governments. The primary goals and objectives of organizations are often supported by business processes that are critically reliant on digital technology, commonly without any analogue  alternatives. While primary goals and objectives will differ between organizations, they will always  include the protection of critical service delivery, stakeholder confidence and the principle assets  that underpin value and position in the market. Achieving true cyber resilience is fundamentally a leadership issue, and is paramount to retaining shareholder value.”

– Executive Summary, Unpacking Cyber Resilience

Those ‘business processes’ underlie all aspects of modern life, including those in education. School boards call their operational network domains ‘corporate’ because it’s lifted from the same digital systems that support business and government. Educational operations aren’t digitally distinct from those in the public and private sectors, they’re the same technologies but with higher security needs because they collect the data of minors (and their families) on a massive scale. Putting employees and students onto these systems without teaching them fundamental digital literacy is akin to putting them in a car and hoping they’ll drive it without having an accident.

If we address digital skills at all in education it tends to be a rote coding plug-and-play edtech solution. This one and done approach fails to recognize the complexity of digital literacy.

The Evolution of Digital Information Security

For many even what to call cybersecurity was a sticking point. The good news is that if you don’t like it now, it’s already moving on. From WEF’s Unpacking Cyber Resilience.

One of my favourite early graphics pushing back against the framing of cybersecurity as a purely technical field of study was this one:

Not because it’s complete, but because it reframes cybersecurity in a multi-dimensional manner. Through my coaching of student teams in cybersecurity I’ve found that a mix of talents is much more effective than a group of identical ‘head-in-the-machine’ types deep diving the technical. That skillset in cybersecurity could be parallelled by a lawyer or surgeon who is doing the point work but is surrounded by specialists with varying skillsets that allow the technical resolution of problems to happen. Can you imagine someone saying that the only people in the medical professions are surgeons, or the only legal professionals are lawyers? These more mature disciplines have a wider understanding of what’s necessary to do the work. Clinging to this lone haxor fixation has been one of the mechanisms used to keep cyber a male dominated profession for far too long.

Cyber Resilience Reframing Digital Information Security

CyberTitan Top Defenders in 2021 had diverse and complementary skillsets.

1) The detective process for determining  damage from a cyberattack is remarkably intuitive and the best way to learn it is to watch someone who has developed this intuition display it.

Hundreds of people from dozens of countries all working together on cyber resiliency at the GFCE annual meeting in Washington DC in September, 2024 (I’m on the left).

From talking to the newly minted director of cyber at GAC to presenting on emerging technology disruptions in cyber internationally, I’m more aware than ever of the challenges in creating global connections encouraging cyber resilience. Unless we align our terminology and technical awareness we cannot communicate and collaborate effectively. In our one sided world of digital defence where they only have to get it right once but we have to get it right every time, this is a recipe for disaster. Without collaboration and cooperation there is no way organizations can defend against the asymmetrical nature of cyber attacks, the largest of which have the funding of nation states behind them. 

Hope For The Future

The idea that we can resolve a lack of cyber skills when they hide within a much larger digital illiteracy crisis has caused a lot of frustration in cyber training. Teaching information security awareness when users lack basic digital skills is akin to attempting to teach Shakespeare to people who can’t read.

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*** Simposio de Ciberseguridad de la OEA

Cyber Pirates of the Caribbean. Sorry, couldn’t help myself.

In September I got an invite to sit on a panel at the GFCE’s annual meeting. Then the Organization of American States got in touch and asked if I’d sit on their emerging tech panel at the regional pre-meeting. I guess that went well because they then asked if I’d be willing to cover for their quantum cyber specialist who couldn’t make a Cybersecurity Symposium in the Dominican Republic at the end of the month. My approach to this sort of thing is to always say yes; that’s how I found myself in Ghana last year.

Most people think of Punta Cana and an all inclusive week on a resort when it comes to the Dominican Republic, but I was headed to Santo Domingo which can be a bit rough around the edges. It was an intense week of coming to understand the cybersecurity needs of a region facing the results of climate instability head on while also rapidly developing their digital economy.

Our panel was set to go on the first day, which was good – I like to get them done sooner. Co-panelist Heather happened to be coming in on a flight right behind mine so we met at the airport and shared a cab across the city to the hotel. Having not eaten since 5am, I sat in the empty hotel restaurant and ate a poor club sandwich that cost an eye watering $30USD while wondering what I was doing here. There is nothing like hunger and exhaustion to make you doubt yourself.

I finally got into the room and collapsed for a couple of hours and awoke feeling more like my usual, confident self; food and rest resolves most anxiety. I went for a wander around the hotel and found Heather on the pool deck watching the sun going down (dramatic sunsets in the DR). She works in AI research and we had a good chat about how it’s being used in cybersecurity and both left with enough context to take on the panel in the morning.

Our moderator got switched right before the event but Donavon was agile, knowledgeable and did a great job chasing down themes as they came up rather than following a script. The conversation dove into AI but also left space for IoT and quantum in a cyber context.

I came away from the GFCE event in DC earlier in the month cognisant of the need to keep technical detail out of these kinds of high level talks, especially if you’re talking to most of the people in the room through a translator. The technical side of cyber isn’t necessarily what you need to focus on because it doesn’t really change how most people interact with it. An easier to grasp example might be to ask if you need to have a strong understanding of the metallurgy involved in casting your car’s engine in order for you to drive it. This isn’t to say you need to simplify the the point of absurdity, but getting into the technical weeds tends to be an academic back-patting exercise rather than being helpful to the audience.

On this panel (as I’ve done in all of them), I don’t pretend I’m something I’m not. I’m a teacher, an I.T. technician and a cyber operations instructor and often refer to anecdotal cyber teaching situations to land a point. People seem to appreciate this approach because presenting material as a teacher is something everyone can relate to, and there is enough intellectual intimidation in cyber as it is. There is also enough marketing misinformation that a clear eyed, educationally focused approach resonates.

Our talk mainly focused on artificial intelligence but quantum did get some airtime, though many questions (as at the GFCE) orbited the complexities of trying to teach cybersecurity. As mentioned at the Serious Play Conference in August, teaching a subject that few people have the basic digital media literacy to even contextualize is a challenge. The fear that arises from this ignorance is real and makes teaching cyber especially difficult.

I’m always conscious of the Canadian perspective I bring to an international event like this. Canada seldom participates at the international cybersecurity events I’ve attended. We fund a lot of them (including this one), but finding Canadians willing to make the trip and talk the talk seems difficult. I was the only Canadian on any of the panels at this one too though I’m hoping to change that. If international cooperation is about relationships, having Canadians talking at events like these is paramount.

When asked about IoT threats I brought up two Canadian instances that resonated with the room (I was asked about them repeatedly across the week). One was my visit to the Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity in Fredericton last spring which included a look at their IoT lab. The curiosity this generated has me wondering if an OAS event in Fredericton at UNB wouldn’t go amiss. Does Canada ever host these things?

The second Canadian cyber challenge was the rash of car thefts Canada is experiencing. It’s tempting to define this under traditional criminal activity but these are new vehicles with ‘state of the art’ electronics that are being hacked, making this an IoT cyber problem. When you know enough about cybersecurity you start to think differently about how it’s integrated into your day to day life. My cunning solution is to drive manual vehicles that are ‘pre-smart’. They’re unhackable and also undrivable for most thieves. If you don’t expect technology to do everything for you, you’re not beholden to its weaknesses.

With our panel in the rearview, I made it a point of understanding the context through which Caribbean and Latin American states are tackling cybersecurity. Our very nice hotel provided bottled water because you’re not supposed to drink what comes out of the taps. It’s astonishing to me that people without available drinking water are going after digital transformation and the cybersecurity that enables it, but if you want to participate in the 21st Century economy that’s the price of admission. Perhaps digitization will solve the water problem too.

One of the first speakers at this event did a deep dive into misinformation and how it is generated using the latest in deepfake technology. Extremists are using this tech in propaganda campaigns. The corrosive effect this has on our shared media is interesting. I had a number of chats with Daniel throughout the conference and discovered that his motivating interest is in the nature of online communities and how they work in terms of social norms and expectations. This kind of decentralized, narrow (as opposed to broad) band media transmission is becoming the new norm, yet no one seems to be teaching how it is influencing society in media theory classes. It’s something I want to go after in terms of updating digital media education in Canada.

The theme of the symposium was, DisruptX:Redefining the future of cybersecurity in Latin America and the Caribbean”, so many of the talks revolved around the impact A.I. is having in cybersecurity. As in most places, it’s a force leveller. People writing phishing emails now write with perfect grammar and spelling, and don’t use form letters anymore because AI can generate targeted, articulate messages specifically for individuals. This enabling of cyber criminals by automated systems targets our existing cyber-illiteracy, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Automated malware as a service can be purchased by anyone who can turn a computer on. The days of technically talented hackers are far behind us as AI serves to elevate anyone looking to cause problems through online communications.

To further complicate the landscape, you’ve got state actors (including world superpowers) performing offensive cyber operations against governments, businesses and even individuals. At this cost-no-object end of the spectrum you’ve got cyber militaries operating on budgets in the billions possibly taking aim at your company or government.  If you’re a developing economy with minimal digital infrastructure, how do you possibly keep it secure against that? The short answer is you don’t, sometimes you just get pwned.

OK, so what do I do, you ask? You’ve got a couple of options when it comes to protecting your internet facing systems (in this case critical systems that make society work and provide things like electricity):

1) Put money up front building the most secure network you can, but this requires talented people who are in short supply (the cyberskills shortage isn’t just happening in Canada). It also means paying up front for something that hasn’t happened yet, and isn’t can’t be guaranteed secure no matter what you throw at it. The case for preemptive cyber capacity building remains a struggle and not just in the Caribbean, it’s a problem in Canada too.

2) The other option is to design full backup systems so you can recover when the inevitable happens, but this too requires technical talent, forethought and a willingness to invest in the future – all aspects of cyber that humans everywhere struggle with.

Like the GFCE event in Washington, a lot of time was given to thinking about governance and policy. These frameworks are vital, especially if we want to push back against the human nature that isn’t likely to invest in anything precautionary, but the nature of the cyber means also needing to be proactive and agile because of the asymmetrical nature of the threats. 

I hope there is room in policy and governance to ensure that there are resources left over to support this kind of agility. This work often happens in companies and government agencies rather than in university research labs and needs to be more accessible to the people on the ground doing the work. So much of the research funding in Canada is tied to post-secondary institutions. Agile action research in cyber by practitioners rather than academics is essential if we’re to retain any ability to deal with emerging threats in a timely fashion.

This confusion around the nature of cybersecurity (is it an apprenticeable skillset or an academic pursuit?) is another one of those evolving understandings still somewhat out of focus as we come to understand what cybersecurity it. It was nice to see one of my favourite cyber graphics come up in one of the first RICET education talks reminding everyone that cyber is a complete field of study ranging from apprenticelike hard technical roles to academic legal and human facing work in subjects ranging from HR to education.

Like any other field of study, cybersecurity is full of nuance.

*** Extracurriculars

Fascinating conversations and an opportunity to network without a schedule or talking points. These ‘extracurricular’ evening events are often the most informative!

The conference had a couple of extracurricular events where I often hear the most enlightening things. A delegation from the South Pacific was attending this event with the thinking they they are facing many of the same challenges that the Caribbean states are. Tim from the Cook Islands and I had many great talks about the sudden change they are going through. About two weeks before the conference Elon flipped a switch and suddenly everyone on the islands could afford high speed internet for the first time through Starlink. The rest of us have been in the digital pot as the heat has been slowly turned up over the past two decades and don’t realize it’s boiling. Can you imagine going from 90’s dial up to 2024’s AI/social media/fake-news cyber-nightmare in one week? Tim’s managing the IT there. Someone should be writing a book about this time travelling digital experiment.

The fortress in colonial Santo Domingo at sunset. The DR’s relationship with its past, like Canada’s, is complicated and unfinished.

On the final evening they took us out to the colonial tourist area and a look around Fortaleza Ozama. Being me, I found watching the chaos of the evening commute around the castle distracting. Like the evening social the night before, this was an opportunity to chat with people working in cyber from many different perspectives. I’d run into Franklin from Suriname who I’d met in Ghana last year and we picked up right where we’d left off. Suriname is about to go through some dramatic changes.

When you find yourself having a drink with the head of Mastercard’s security division and the entourage from Columbian cyber, you wonder how you got here. Tim from Cook Island’s wife messaged him asking what he was up to now. His response was, ‘I’m drinking rum at a castle at sunset!” Indeed.

The trip included a projection onto the fortress of the DR’s history. It reminded me of the projection show they were doing on the Houses of Parliament in Ottawa a few years ago and raised some interesting questions about how digital is insinuating itself into island life.

The seemingly incongruous VR experience at the fortress was complimented by animated digital projections throughout, to the point where it was easy to forget you were in a centuries old fortress, which is the point of being there, isn’t it?  A few times in the conference the corrosive effect of AI on regional culture was noted (AI’s fixation on large datasets tends to stamp out anything but the biggest producers of data). I suspect digitization (itself a byproduct of globalization) has a generally corrosive effect on people’s ability to be where they are. We spend an awful lot of our time taking photos to share online instead of being where we are (like the ones in this post? -ed).

*** RICET

The final day switched gears and became RICET, the Regional Initiative for Cybersecurity Education and Training, put on by the OAS and Florida International University. This focus on education and training is essential if we’re to establish sustainable and effective cybersecurity.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the vast majority of cyber incidents are the result of human failure. No matter how you want to frame it, our current cyber woes arise from a multi-generational failure to develop effective digital media literacy of which cybersecurity is perhaps the most interdisciplinary and complex because it’s all about the edge cases. You can’t hack something you don’t fundamentally understand.

We’ve been fixated on coding as a solution to the digital skills crisis, but digital media literacy is about much more than coding. In cyber you need flexible, stochastic approaches with familiarity across a much wider range of digital technology. I’ve met too many compsci specialists who are sidelined by simple technical issues to believe that this is the epitome of digital literacy. I also heard the dreaded term ‘digital native‘ during some of these talks, but I’m not going to get into that nonsense again here. 

RICET panels talked about the usual worries around the lack of talent, though like everyone else they spent much of the time on bandaid solutions like adult retraining instead of looking at strategic fixes like implementing nationwide cyber skills talent discovery and development in public schools that would not only address the user negligence problem, but would also resolve our cyber-professional shortage.

We’ll never resolve this global digital skilling failure with stop gap solutions. We need both short term and long term strategies, but like the funding for seemingly obvious things like network security and data backups, getting anyone to fund that future is a struggle.

Watching these earnest cyber developers working on shoestring budgets trying to make this work while Canadians literally watch drinkable water go down the toilet has me wondering why we face so many of the same challenges they do. On my way back home I messaged a colleague in cyber education and lamented the fact that cyber expertise in Canada seems to be more about marketing than it does cybersecurity. I summarized the problem with genuine cyber-education in simple terms: there’s no money in it.  That observation extends to cyber in general. One of the reasons for the high burnout rate is asking the people who know what they’re doing to do it without needed resources.

I enjoyed learning about the regional challenges being faced in the Caribbean, but what always surprises me about these glimpses into international cybersecurity is just how similar the problems we all face are. In a discipline where the bad guys only have to get it right once but the defenders have to get it right every time, the only hope for cybersecurity professionals is to develop connections, build international cyber-diplomacy and work together. Circling the wagons and sharing intelligence, tools and best practices is the only advantage we have against the cyber pirates (it’s ok, I’m bringing it back) that surround us.  This event was a prime example of that kind of networking. I hope to be a part of future ones.

Winging out of Santo Domingo at sunrise on Delta’s A320 Airbus. What a beautiful country. Wish I’d had the opportunity to see more of it…

The Bermuda Triangle on a sunny Friday morning in October.

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 I got an invite to speak on a panel at the Global Forum for Cybersecurity Excellence‘s Annual Meeting last week. It was my first time in DC since I went on a trip there with Air Cadets in the 1980s, so it was an exciting prospect. More so when I saw it was going to be taking place in the Organization of American States’ building.

Attending these things is a high wire act for me as it looked like I was going to have to self fund my way there, but then the OAS’s Cybersecurity directorate got in touch and asked if I’d sit on one of their emerging technology panels for the region of the Americas pre-GFCE meeting too, so I managed to get hotel and flights covered.

I got in on Sunday and my hotel was in Georgetown, so I got out and about and soaked up some Washington area history – the place is thick with it! 

Day 1

The next morning, after breakfast at the Fairmont (!), we walked to the Organization of American States building only to discover it was the wrong one. We ran into Alex from Ghana who was on the OAS panel with me later that morning and he knew where we needed to go, so we all backtracked four blocks ot where we should have been in the first place.

I got there sweaty (DC got up to about 30°C each day) but cooled off and our talk that morning about emerging technology impacting cybersecurity was wide ranging. Kerry-Ann, our moderator, surprised me with a question about how approaching cyber challenges as a technician gives me a different (and valuable thanks to how she framed the question) insight into the rapidly changing state of things.

Talking to engineers and the legal experts doing policy is one thing, but talking to the trades people who do the operational work of keeping the lights on does offer an interesting angle. I’d been expecting to talk about quantum technology emergence, but an opportunity to talk about the value of hands-on, applied skills in the field was appreciated and well received.

Many of the panels focused on the clear and present danger in cyber at the moment: artificial intelligence. From the automation of big data analysis that humans never excelled at on the defensive side to how criminals are leveraging GenAI to produce customized phishing material well beyond grammatically incorrect emails (stretching to include deepfake video, voice, photos and other digital media), these talks were designed to assist policy makers with understanding what has come out of Pandora’s box of AI.

One theme that resonated with me was how people don’t want deep technical explanations of these emerging technologies. What they want is an easy to grasp explanation of how these technologies will affect the digital spaces they work in. This remains a problem in cybersecurity and an even bigger one in the quantum world I just finished my secondment. The urge for academics to obfuscate and complicate their explanations of these rapidly emerging technologies doesn’t make them ideally suited for presenting on them, especially to the operations and policy people who are entirely focused on real world impacts and couldn’t care less how the maths goes.

I’ve gotten a lot of static for how I’ve simplified deep technical details in quantum in order to get concepts across, but you honestly don’t need to start neck deep in linear algebra any more than you need to have knowledge of the metallurgy involved in casting your car’s engine in order to drive it. Guess what background is really helpful in bridging this information divide: 22+ years as a teacher! Early in my career I came across a quote that described teachers as, “public facing intellectuals” and took that to mean we’re not about ivory towers and knowing more and more about less and less, but about democratization of knowledge. Part of that comes with knowing what to keep out of the mix in order to keep people engaged.

My age is also handy. Being a genuine digital immigrant who remembers a time before personal computers and the internet (I got my first PC, a Vic 20, in 1979 when I was 10), I have a big picture outlook that those who have always lived in this chaos find helpful. My other secret weapon is a university background focused on thinking and communications (philosophy & English).

After the OAS event we had an evening meet and greet at the Museum of the Americas right behind the main building, which had a permanent collection of powerful pieces looking at colonialism and culture. Upstairs they had a Spanish diaspora collection featuring the people who fled Spain during the Franco period; powerful stuff.

At the meet and greet I got to introduce Juan to Michelle and Nina from CyberLite, one of my favourite international cyber education organizations. We did an around the world webinar with them for Safer Internet Day in February, but it’s always nice to see people in 3d rather than on a screen, and introductions like this are what GFCE is all about.

A good example  of this networking was running into Christina from Global Affairs Canada. From our talks I’ve come to understand the complexities and difficulties of international cyber policy. I’m also particularly aware of how important it is to shed better light on the work our federal government does internationally. Some of this needs to be kept on the down low for security reasons, but much of it (and especially on the diplomacy side) needs more media coverage so Canadians better understand the work that their representatives are doing on their behalf. Being purely insular and defensive doesn’t work in sport and it won’t work in cybersecurity either. If we can help other countries develop better cyber capacities, we all win, and that starts by developing trust..

Day 2

The next day we were up early again and this time took an Uber to the right building (kind of, it still took us to the wrong one first), and began the Global Forum for Cybersecurity Expertise Annual Meeting.

Our panel came up quickly and Juan brought in a fantastic angle focusing on the Global South and the formation of a ‘quantum divide’ that will, like the digital one, further separates developed countries from everyone else. I’ve seen this happening with tightening restrictions on public facing quantum education resources. In some cases this may be under the auspices of national security, but the end result remains: countries that have the resources to develop quantum technologies will have capabilities that the others can only dream of.

After our panel, which was quantum focused and couldn’t have happened without a secure internet because our moderator was virtual in Europe and one of the Panelists was in Central America, I showed Juan the William Gibson quote about the future already being here, but not evenly distributed.The idea of a growing quantum divide is another indicator of the state of maturity of rapidly improving quantum computers. I’m motivated to continue building ‘technology literacy for all’ which includes quantum and AI because no one should make the technologies that have the best chance of saving ourselves from ourselves proprietary. I also have a nagging urge to help everyone reach their maximum potential regardless of how much they have in their bank accounts.

The end of day event on day two was both fantastic (it was a retirement party for founding
GFCE president, Chris Painter), but also profoundly insightful. When someone with extensive, top draw international research resources tells me that they aren’t worried about AI taking us down because climate collapse will get us first, I listen. Moments like this make me vividly aware of just how fragile the house of cards we’re standing on is.

This observation wasn’t helped by the book that a colleague suggested that I’m two-thirds through. The idea of long term thinking in a world that only rewards short term gain is a challenge, but the most recent chapter is about how all civilizations collapse. Historically this happened regionally (Roman Empire, etc), but the global civilization we’ve build this time is going to crash harder, and when it collapses we’re going to be wishing we had made some of Asimov’s Foundations in order to recover more quickly (assuming we don’t make our only habitable planet uninhabitable in the process). That’s the thing about attending a GFCE event – it makes you reflect on the big things.

Day 3

All of the delegates from dozens upon dozens of countries coming together in DC to make digital transformation secure and accessible to everyone.

Day three began with the women in cybersecurity breakfast. The moderator at our table told hair raising stories of her being the first female cohort in engineering in South Africa and the overt sexism they faced. I told them about Canada’s tragic history with this kind of sexism, which the table found astonishing – Canada is considered forward thinking until we’re a bit more forthcoming about the dark currents in our history. I also told the story of the quiet sexism that made founding the first all-female cybersecurity team in our school so difficult. It amazes me that half our population still experiences these systemic prejudices and that equality isn’t something we’ll get to before the 22nd Century.

These GFCE events are thick with insights and opportunities that lift your head out of your personal context and prompt you to consider the big problems we face. I’ve tried to cover the main pieces here, but there are so many more that I’m still subconsciously noodling on.

The emerging tech panel on AI towards the end of the day was another of those eureka moments. The policy expert from France’s advanced technologies department had a good response to my question about how we devise policy for near future AIs that will have the agency and resources to ignore them, not out of spite, but because even considering them isn’t in their programming. She referenced the US Section 230 law that let social media run rampant and pointed out that if we recognized this cautionary tale we’d be able to better direct AI use now. A sharp response, but I think the AI horses are out of the barn and will shortly have the capabilities to do real damage to our digital infrastructure. I remain curious as to when AI policy to try and restrict development turns into defensive policies designed to mitigate the damage that self-directed AIs will do to our piecemeal digital infrastructure.

I ended the event having lunch with Abdul, my swimming buddy from Accra, and Juan, my co-conspirator. What do you talk about at a Nigerian/Canadian/Mexican table? Abdul told me he is in ‘legacy mode’, which is a great way of framing your closing professional years. I enjoyed our talks in the pool at Accra City Hotel because Abdul always seems to see beyond the horizon. Taking a minute to soak up that wisdom is never wasted time. He was going to see his friend’s grave and visit his cousin after the event. These seemingly technical meetings can be profoundly human, if you let them be.

We wrapped up our time at the OAS HQ, but we weren’t quite done yet. At the museum event Monday night we met a Spanish attaché and that prompted an invite to the embassy for a Wednesday evening networking event. It was a short walk from the hotel and I talked to a lot of people but really got into it with Jose Manuel who runs telecoms and startups in Spain including a new one that helps you park your boat in a marina you haven’t visited before. We also had a good chat about the innovative quantum key distribution research he is a part of. I’m hoping to follow up and develop some transatlantic partnerships to move us all forward there.

***

I must have covered 20+kms on foot over the week (in dress shoes!), but I have no regrets about the schlepping or having to self fund some of this. Hope is hard to find in 2024, but the GFCE exhales it like plants give off oxygen. Just as Ghana did last fall, my mind is left turning over the complex challenges and opportunities that this meeting highlighted. If you’re looking for organizations that improve your practice, expand your context, and challenge you to take on the seemingly insurmountable global issues we face, meeting the OAS and experiencing my second GFCE event has done just that.

DC looking like a post card on the ascent out of Reagan Airport.

Just over 500kms as the crow flies from DC, I was back in The Six before I knew it!

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The Serious Play Conference took place in August at University of Toronto’s Mississauga (Erindale) campus. Even though I’d fallen off the end of my secondments, gamification has also been a central tenant of my teaching practice and I’ve been actively researching cyber-education using immersive simulations for the past four years, so I took this opportunity to present what I’d found.

Paul Darvasi runs this conference. I met him last summer when we did a quantum training week together at UBC in hopes of building a quantum game that takes the academic privilege out of how the subject is presented. That hasn’t yet come to be, but I did manage to recently get our quantum arcade idea funded (from Finland because finding that kind of support for emerging technology education in Canada isn’t easy). Canada likes to be surprised by emerging technology in education rather than getting in front of it.

Quantum Arcade Pitch Deck for Unitary Fund.pptx

Games have played a central role in my life. I got into Dungeons & Dragons in a big way in my teens and my first long distance road trips were with friends to GENCON in Milwaukee in the late 1980s (where I got to play a tournament round of D&D with Gary Gygax!!!). As a result my teaching practice has always been informed by those early years dungeon mastering. If I have an opportunity to create a simulation or immersive gaming experience in my classroom, I’ll go out of my way to arrange that rather than falling back on worksheets of one way knowledge transmission. My experience has shown me that suspension of disbelief can be a powerful learning tool if the gamified learning experience is pedagogically viable.

My presentation at Serious Play was specifically about how immersive simulation can help learners tackle subjects that might scare them into disengagement. By using suspension of disbelief, subjects like cybersecurity can be approached without out the risk aversion prompted by worries about breaking technology almost no one understands because we seem to have given up on modern media literacy about two decades ago.

I’ve put students on Field Effect’s Cyber Range in classrooms across Canada. In some cases they were competitive CyberTitan teams containing students with the top 1% of digital skills in the country, but in most cases it was with the other 99% who had never touched cybersecurity at any time in their learning journey. With the right scaffolding and support even the newest of n00bs can get their hands dirty iteratively learning essential cyber skills in this digital sandbox:

Engaging Canadian education with cybersecurity remains an uphill struggle, but cyber sandboxes like Field Effect’s Cyber Range offer a solution.

The Serious Play Conference had a wide range of educators working in digital and analogue simulation across a staggering range of subject areas. From museums engaging patrons to a think tank designing war games for the Canadian Forces, it was a tour de force of what immersive simulation and gaming can do to engage and teach in pretty every learning context.

I was absolutely thrilled to learn that our all Canadian made simulation that offers a key to cyber-education – one that is more advanced than the systems we use when our CyberTitans take part in CyberPatriot south of the border because it allows for interactive networking between virtual machines instead of just putting students into isolated desktop VMs – won the gold medal for K12 immersive learning simulation.

ICTC and Field Effect have worked hard to get this world class immersive learning opportunity in front of Canadian students. The trick now, as it has always been, is to get insular Canadian education systems who have taken a head-in-the-sand approach to cyber education to pick up this federally funded, world-class tool we’ve built and use it to get past their own fear and ignorance and begin teaching essential defensive 21st Century digital skills.

Join the competition and sign up student teams of 4-6. There are middle and high school divisions and community groups are also welcome to participate.

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I tried to get AI in front of Ontario teachers at the ECOO Conference in 2019, but it was a pretty empty room.

I’ve been working with generative artificial intelligence with students in my computer technology program since 2018 when we were fortunate to get a new grade 9 whose dad was on the team that brought IBM Watson to Jeopardy. That got us connected to IBM cloud and building AI chatbots five years before the “AI revolution” everyone has been caught out by.

That wasn’t our first point of contact with AI though. I’d been keeping an eye on AI dev as far back as 2015 because we launched our gamedev course in ’15 and getting handle on building intelligent responses to player actions in our games immediately became our biggest challenge. Thanks to Gord and IBM we were able to get our juniors familiar with AI prior to asking them to take on significant software engineering challenges with it in the senior grades.

I presented on AI use in the classroom at the ECOO conference pre-COVID in fall of 2019. Gord from IBM even came all the way down to Niagara Falls to offer world class suppport. The room was all but empty:

This is how many Ontario educators (already interested in edtech because this is ECOO!) you get in an introduction to gnerative AI in 2019 (yes, it was four in an otherwise empty room). Ahead of our time (again)? Four years later it’s an emergency and suddenly there are education AI experts everywhere. I wonder where they were in 2019.

If you ever wonder why education always seems two steps behind emerging technologies that will have profound impacts on classrooms, here’s a fine example. Except you won’t even see four people sitting in an empty room in 2024 because all edtech conferences like ECOO focused on teacher technology integration have evaporated in Ontario.

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OK, so I’ve been banging my head against pedagogically driven AI engagement in education for almost a decade only to see it swamp an oblvious education system anyway, so what’s happening now? I’m ressearching the leading edge of this technology to see if we can’t still rescue a pedagogically meaningful approach to it.

In the summer Katina Papulkas from Dell Canada put out a call for educators interested in action research on AI use in learning. I’ve been talking to Aman Sahota and Henry Fu from Factors Education over the past year looking for an excuse to work on something like this, so I pitched this idea: De-blackboxing AI technology and using it to understand how it works.

Our plan is to use the Factors AI engine that Henry himself has built and Aman administrates to build custom data libraries that will support an AI agent that will interact with students and encourage them to ask questions to better understand how generative AI works. As mentioned before on Dusty World, GenAI isn’t intelligent and it’s important that people realize what it is and how it works to demystify it and then apply it effectively. Getting misdirected by the marketing driven AI tag isn’t helpful.

So far we’ve built modules that describe the history and development of AI, how AI works and the future of AI. In the process of doing this I’ve come across all sorts of public facing research material that breaks down generative AI for you (like Deep Learning from MIT Press), but it’s technically dense and not accessible to the casual reader.

During the last week of August Factors had a meeting with interested educators through UofT OISE (their AI system came out of the OISE edtech accelerator). I demonstrated in the presentation how the AI engine might be used to break down a complex article for easier consumption through agent interaction. The example was WIRED’s story on how Google employees developed the transformers that moved generative AI from a curiosity to real world useful in the late teens. I picked this one because it explains some of what happens in the ‘blackbox’ that AI is often hidden in.

With some well crafted prompting and then conversational interaction, students can get clear, specific answers to technical details that might have eluded them in the long form article. The reading support side of GenAI hasn’t been fully explored yet (though WIRED did a recent interesting piece on cloning famous authors to become AI reading buddies as you tackle the classics which is in the ballpark).

What have I learned from working directly with building an AI library of data and then tuning it? AI isn’t automatic at all. It demands knowledgable people providing focus and context to aim it in the right direction and maximize productive responses with users. An interesting example of this was finding documents that provided focused data on the subjects we wanted the AI to respond to. When I couldn’t find specific ones Henry suggested using Perplexity, an AI research tool that coalates online sources and then gives you concise summaries along with a bibliography of credible sources.

I thought I was being perverse asking them to design an AI that expalins AI using AI, but Henry’s always a step ahead. He wants to use an AI to build a library of information to feed the AI engine that then uses AI to interact with the user… about AI. It’s turtles all the way down!

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