Page 54 – Mechanical Sympathy

Assessment NOT for learning

Exams are in the bag and I’m wondering what the point was. Knowledgeable, capable students did well, incompetent students didn’t, but neither have the opportunity to learn from their exams. It begs the question: what is the point of an exam?

By high school most students think that education is something being done to them. The write-an-exam-get-a-mark approach only confirms this in their minds. If assessment isn’t for learning, what is it for? Beaurocracy? To maintain the teacher as the final arbiter in the classroom? Neither paperwork, nor maintaining hierarchical classroom structures hold much interest for me.

We’re currently being told that if we don’t make formal exams for all classes we’ll lose formal exam days. Good riddance I say! The end of a semester should include a debrief and a chance to review your summatives and assess the state of your own knowledge in terms of course expectations. This would provide a valuable pedagogical bridge between courses and empower students to take responsibility for their own learning.

From a teaching perspective, the debrief would mean that all the heavy, end of course summative assessment actually serves a purpose. It isn’t supposed to be punitive, and your grade in a class shouldn’t be a mystery to you. Assessment should be transparent and functional. Most importantly assessment should provide you with an opportunity to improve your learning; formal exams are none of those things, they are the black hole that learning falls into at the end of a course.

At the end of this course I’m going to get you to write a high stakes, stressful exam that is the same for all of you regardless of your learning styles. It’s going to assume you all have the same writing abilities. I’m then going to surprise you with the results!

I would love to ask the student who left half his exam blank, why did you do that? I’d like to understand where in his thought process he thought doing nothing was the way forward. I’d love to question the student who ignored obvious clues in a text and completely misunderstood its intent. I’m curious to see if, with a nudge, they are capable of seeing what was in front of them the whole time. I’d like to congratulate and confirm for the student who wrote a fantastic final that, yes, you really know this stuff.

There is a time and place in learning to ask the hard question: do you know what you’re doing? The end of course summative could be this reflexive learning opportunity, but not when it’s cloaked in formal exam tradition.

Instead of considering transparent, reflexive course summatives that provide assessment as learning, we’re clinging to formal exam models from the early 1900s designed to produce secretive, teacher dominated results that serve no learning purpose. If the organizational structure of a school schedule isn’t serving learning, what is it serving?

Temporal Prejudices

Recently a friend on Facebook shared this Washington Post article about Winston Churchill. I tend to shy away from hero worship, it isn’t really in me to do, but I am motivated to try and address one of our last blind spots when it comes to prejudice.

I’ve seen people time and again criticize those who lived before them as being immoral and somehow answerable to the laughable ethics of our own time. That article on Churchill, a man who lived at the end of the British Empire and spent much of his career trying to hold the tattered pieces of it together, often using the same kind of bombastic rhetoric you still see today, is no doubt accurate, but the re-defining of statements made over a century ago based on modern values is neither fair nor particularly useful, unless you’re a politician trying to win a point.

There is a real danger in interpreting historical people from a modern perspective. We are all creatures of our time – it dictates our thinking more than our culture, language or economic status does. To criticize someone for a lack of understanding at a time when it didn’t exist is itself a kind of prejudice. A fairer way to judge them would be to consider if they helped move us toward the clarity of thought we think we enjoy today.

This first became obvious to me when a history professor told us the story of his father coming back to university as a retiree. The man was well into his eighties and he thought it would be fun to take early Twentieth Century history since he’d lived through it. He quickly became so despondent with the course that he dropped it. The young students in the class ripped into what they called the rampant racism of the time. He tried to explain to them that racism wasn’t rampant, it was how society functioned back then, but they didn’t want to hear it. It’s hard to understand his point unless you’re aware of just how blinkered you are in your own time. Most people are happily ignorant of these prejudices.

Everyone, as they get older, must experience this strange kind of temporal emigration. We all move away from the values we grew up in. I suspect it’s one of the things that wears out seniors the most, society moves on without you. Newer people change the rules and things change (hopefully for the better, but there is certainly no guarantee of that). I imagine most aging people feel like the world has become a foreign place to them.

Based on the myths Western society is founded on, you’d assume that this is a case of continual improvement with us becoming the shining zenith of civilization, but human history suggests otherwise. We have moments of rationality that become eclipsed by our own darker nature. When that happens you’d better hope there is a Winston Churchill to fend off the Nazis of the world. There are racist imperialists and there are racist imperialists – had the other guy won, the definition of racist imperialist would have ascended to new heights. Starving people in India to feed soldiers during a war is a very different thing to active genocide, which is what you’d have had with Axis occupied India.

There are a number of points made in that article that, while true, ignore the circumstances they were made in. Dresden fire bombings are described as an unmitigated act of terror. In retrospect the Allies won World War 2, but this was by no means a certain outcome. In an all-out war with both sides intent on the complete subjugation of the other, the Allied firebombings not only severely affected the German war machine’s means of production, but it also struck fear into an enemy drunk on its own sense of superiority. You don’t win wars by pulling punches. Was Churchill an imperialist? No doubt, and he shared the racist views of his culture and time period, but to rewrite history to suit your own values without recognizing that cultural influence is itself a kind of prejudice.

We go to great lengths to acknowledge history these days, and I think that’s an admirable thing, but we are still blind to so many circumstances. The recent Oscar ceremony was doing back-flips to acknowledge the rampant racism and sexism implicit in the business, but then proceeded to give a standing ovation to an American soldier who proudly stated that he went to a country half way around the world (Vietnam) to kill the people there for not capitulating with his government. Imperialism is alive and well and we dress up celebrities in fancy dress to give it standing ovations and world wide TV coverage. I wonder what the people of Vietnam thought of that magical Oscar moment. Perhaps all we’ve done in our post-colonial world is hide it behind rhetoric and politics better than we did in the past.

There is something to be said for the clarity of purpose and honesty with which people used to go about the business of empire. At least back then you knew what people stood for. In Canada this looked like outright oppression, religious indoctrination in residential schools and overt colonization. Today all that is hidden behind a quiet racism and just enough prosaic government support to make the people it’s supposed to be helping helpless. In 150 years it might be said that all we’ve gotten better at is the management of colonialism. While all that’s going on we’re removing John A. MacDonald from that embarrassing historical record. At this rate we’ll have history scrubbed clean with our revisionism in no time. Don’t worry though – the racism and cultural inequalities will stay safe and warm under that revisionist blanket.

We often sit up here in the 21st Century criticizing the shortsightedness of the people before us. I wonder what our descendants, looking at us sitting on our high horses while appearing blissfully ignorant about our hypocrisy, will say about us.

We’re burning a hole in the world with fossil fuels, industrial farming the earth into a desert to feed a never ending population explosion, wearing clothes made by third world workers in economic slavery (itself based on the remnants of colonialism), creating the worst economic disparity in human history and proudly supporting martial force when it suits us, which usually means when we need what they have. The only difference between imperialism a century ago and imperialism now is the marketing we put on it. We used to be honest about our imperialist intentions, now we tell everyone we’re exporting freedom.

We’re all blind to the things our time period is unwilling or unable to address. This is as true for Churchill as it is for Mr Tharoor. A good dose of humility is what we need here, not more rhetoric by a politician. A bit more awareness of circumstance and compassion for historical circumstance might also translate into a less judgmental view of our own elderly. Trying to understand someone from a different culture is something we say we value. Recognizing that people from other time periods are essentially from a different culture as well might make us a bit more aware of our own hypocrisy.

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Biological Education & Hot Groups

I’ve been to two Minds On Media events, at ECOO in October and the OELC Conference this past February. Both times I’ve been surprised by the response from teachers regardless of their technical prowess. Tech skills weren’t the arbitrating force, curiosity was. The people who were involved in it found themselves working in their ZPD, and felt supercharged by the experience. So much of schooling involves crowd control rather than trying to get students into that zone of proximal development. So much teaching revolves around control, rather than encouraging self directed learning.

When I first attended MoM, the event reminded me of a gardener creating fertile ground, but having the sense not to micromanage the growing/learning. I suspect there is a truth in this that applies to all education. Whether you want to call it student centred or skills based or what have you, education isn’t a mechanical/mathematical process, it’s a biological one. Events like Minds On Media recognize this by empowering the learners (and the instructors) and giving them the freedom to move within a rich learning environment to where they think they need to be.

Most of the PD I experience exists in a mechanical process that alienates teachers and makes them resentful. This approach is used because administration is more concerned with a disciplined environment (that crowd control mentioned above) that ensures full participation even if it is entirely passive, than it is with presenting memorable content. When the learning takes a back seat to crowd control, you know the results aren’t going to be pretty. In fact, they’re going to look at lot like…

The other thing that’s been bouncing around in my head is the idea of hot groups. I know many educators shy away from business approaches, calling them corporate and such, but this one is anything but corporate. Hot Groups recognize a fundamental truth about how people work together. In a hot group members will do work well beyond what is expected or required, simply for the joy of having it received as valuable within the group. In my own case, I recently did a hot group thing for our little cloud working group, I made a group logo and people dug it. It’s an insider thing, only a few will appreciate it, but it builds team and even surprised me with a level of commitment (the fact that everyone wanted a t-shirt was what gave me the biggest buzz about it).

I’ve seen this happen time and again with students. As I type this I have my grade 12s putting together a network of computers using many different OSes. Some of them haven’t done it before, others have, but are unfamiliar with the OSes I’ve provided them with (Red Hat Linux Server, Ubuntu Server, Windows Home Server, Ubuntu Desktop, Win7, XP and Vista). Listening to them talk, they are telling anecdotal stories of failed OS installs, upgrades that led to game failures due to compatibility issues and all sorts of other OS related experiences, all while working through multiple installs. This may look disorganized and inefficient, I’d argue that it’s the opposite. Those students are creating context that I would not have imagined trying in a top down lesson on OS installs, and they’re doing it while creating a sense of group coherence (made even more amazing when you realize that three of the ten of them in there are usually sequestered away in the autism learning class). Those guys came out of there, having installed half a dozen OSes during the period, and they’d also made this (a classic example of a hot group surprise – they were very keen to give me a copy when the class ended).

If you think that has nothing to do with what they were supposed to be doing, you’re determined to force human relationships, and the learning the goes on within them into a linear, mechanical process. Those guys did many things that period that I hadn’t intended, as well as most of the things I had. On aggregate, I’d suggest that they weren’t limited by their teacher’s knowledge of them, their own risk aversion to failure (installing unknown OSes), or a need to overly control the learning. The result is a non-judgmental, rich learning environment that encouraged creativity and constructive peer support. The team building that happened in there today will be something I can continue to develop for the rest of the semester.

If I can create that environment, I do. If a hot group grows out of it, I’m over the moon. You’ll seldom experience a better teacher rush than the one you do when a hot group wows you with what you weren’t expecting.

Motorcycle Media: short films, documentaries & time travel on a Friday night

Friday night had me home alone in the first time in forever. After a rough week at work I was wiped and on the verge of a cold, so it was a low impact night. I went looking for some escapist media and stumbled upon EXIF’s Top 6 Best Motorcycle Films. I’d seen Shinya Kimura in The Greasy Hands Preachers, but I’d never seen the film that set him out as a motorcycle media icon, it’s just shy of three minutes of perfection:

Shinya Kimura: Chabott Engineering

Another one I hadn’t seen before that does a great job of capturing a northern motorcyclist’s winter dilemma is Waiting out the Winter. It’s a short video, but it sets the mood of tinkering while we wait for the snow to recede in the frozen north wonderfully:

Waiting Out The Winter

WAITING OUT WINTER from Andrew David Watson on Vimeo.

Those short films made a great appetizer, but I was looking for something a bit more long form. If you’re ever looking to pass a lazy hour or two in another time and place, Cycles South will take you to the early 1970s. Like the ’70s themselves, Cycles South looses the plot half way through, but discovers itself again before the end. If you’re delicate and can’t handle the very non-politically correct sensibilities of the early 1970s, don’t watch this, but if you can let it all go and are willing to exist in another time, Cycles South makes for a psychedelic road trip (man). The whole thing is on Youtube in 15 minute segments, they connected together automatically with a few seconds of delay between, mercifully commercial free.

Google/Youtube lost its mind after I watched the series in order and started shooting motorcycle themed video at me from all directions. Next up was Fifty Years of Kicks, a twenty minute documentary about two off road motorcyclists well into their seventies. I wasn’t initially hooked, but the quality of filming and the narrative they were building had me after a few minutes. There is something about watching old guys fight the clock that is heroic. It makes me want to celebrate any small victories they have before the inevitable happens.

Looking for something on the history of motorcycles I came across The History Channel’s documentary on Youtube. It’s a bit wiz-bang flashy and over edited, but you get some Jay Leno, and the jet powered Y2K. When they went from that to some Dodge Viper powered thing I began to think this was less about motorcycles and more about bored rich people. I didn’t get to the end of this one.

Have you ever wished you had an old, British uncle with an encyclopedic knowledge of motorbikes who would natter on about them indefinitely? I was afraid Classic British Motorbikes: 100 Years of Motorcycling was going to be an advertisement for a dealership in England, but the big green Triumph Tiger in the opening moments kept me playing it. This video takes place sometime in the early two thousands (hence my model of Tiger sitting in front of the dealership). The idea was to invite in classic bikes and celebrate 100 years of motorbiking in Britain. The camera work is amateur, as is the interviewing, but you’ll still pick up a lot of history from the owners and the knowledgeable interviewer.

I watched until he interviewed the owner of the dealership who seemed entirely disinterested in the whole thing and was apparently running the family business because of his dad’s love of bikes. He made a stark contrast to the enthusiasm of every previous interview. If you’re interested in British bikes and especially their history, you’ll enjoy this one (with a bit of fast forwarding).

It’s amazing what motorcycle media you can dig up on the internet with a bit of luck.

Sand in the Sahara

The other day I was trying to work out how experiential and academic learning interact. In the process I also found myself assuming things about fundamental learning skills that don’t necessarily exist in many modern classrooms:

Foundational skills are changing now that information is no longer scarce

It used to be that literacy and numeracy were the student skills we felt they needed to succeed. Information fluency was less important because the gatekeepers of knowledge (teachers) and the limited nature of published paper meant you didn’t have access to what you needed to know so you needed an expert to direct you. In a world with limited information having a guide direct you to a scarce resource is invaluable.

When I was in high school information was hard to come by. You needed access to a limited number of books and if you had a question a teacher would provide you access to that information. Because of scarcity, verbal transmission of information (teacher’s mouth to student’s ear) made sense. Many teachers still cling to that model because it’s the only one they’ve ever known and they identify their profession through that process. In 2014 they they are trying to sell sand in what has become the Sahara.

Information is abundant and accessible with only a basic understanding of the technology that provides it. A modern student who looks to a teacher to give them facts has been conditioned by teachers to be helpless. Teachers who jealously guard and distribute knowledge in predigital ways are the ones crying about how technology lets students plagiarize or collaborate with each other, or share information – it’s really all the same thing. Students who are able to find, critically assess and organize information are the ones modelling 21st Century skills. The ones who have been taught to be passive receivers in a sea of information are a failure in an education system set on maintaining traditional habits.

Considering how information fluency has changed from a passive to an active pursuit (in much the same way that passive TV watching has evolved into active video game participation), it would behoove the education system to recognize the need to integrate information fluency into early education in order to produce self-directed, empowered learners who are able to leverage the ocean of information that surrounds them. Ignoring this new fundamental skill is producing whole generations of digital serfs.

There is no doubt that literacy, numeracy and the basic socialization of early school is still the foundation, but upon that foundation we should be building information fluency in order to produce people who are not overwhelmed or habituated into a dangerously simplistic relationship with information technology. By the time a student reaches secondary school they should be sufficiently skilled in literacy, numeracy and information fluency to be able to self direct many aspects of their learning. In that environment a classroom teacher would very much be a facilitator rather than a traditional teacher, but it’s never going to happen if we don’t take information fluency as seriously as we do literacy and numeracy.

Building foundational learning skills should result in empowered, self-directed learners who can
survive and thrive in an information rich world.

Motorcycles Trump Racism

Canada is far from free of racism, but it plays at a much lower volume here. Canada’s mosaic approach to multiculturalism and more open immigration policy probably have a lot to do with this. The United States’ melting pot must feel especially hot if you’re not what the ideal American is supposed to look like.

One of the things that always strikes me when I cross the border south is the unspoken friction between black and white Americans. Being a big, white, bald Canadian means I’m often assumed to be an off-duty cop, which doesn’t help things. There is so much history wrapped up in this that it feels heavy, even to an outsider. When trying to strike up a conversation with a black person in the States you are usually met with polite reticence, like they’d just rather not speak to you. It’s more trouble than it’s worth.

I get that reticence. On a previous trip, out of nowhere, at a gas stop a white guy told us that his parents told him never to put money in his mouth because black people had touched it. I guess we were supposed to laugh and feel a sense of camaraderie with this man, instead my wife and I looked at each other with WTF looks on our faces.

On my first solo trip to the States in the late ’80s my buddies and I walked into a Burger King in Milwaukee and were met with forty black faces looking at us with, ‘what the hell are you boys doing here?’ expressions. It was one of the only times I’ve been stopped in my tracks by that kind of stare (we hesitated and then went in, had lunch and all was good).

MotoGP has riders from all over the world, from Japan to
South America and everywhere between. It’s a multi-cultural
global event that doesn’t cater to racism.

On our recent trip to Indianapolis a young black woman at the counter dealt energetically with the four black people ahead of my son and I, but when we finally got to the counter she gave us a sideways glance and sauntered off in a kind of dance, eventually disappearing into the back, singing to herself. We both stood there wondering what we were supposed to do (it’s hard to pay for gas in the States when you don’t have a ZIP code). A few moments later another girl came out and served us. It’s not easy explaining that sort of thing to your ten year old.

Motorcycles on Meridian has riders of all kinds digging bikes.

That friction began to break down when we were at the Speedway. Suddenly everyone there was a motorcyclist first, even before what colour of American they were. I found it easy to strike up conversations with people regardless of colour. That positive energy followed us to Motorcycles on Meridian, where I once again found the motorcycle community outgunning any sense of racism.

The next morning at Cycle Gear we got into conversations with several groups of black riders coming into town for the Indy weekend. Once again the walls were down and we could just talk bikes. Again in Ohio, Max and I were taking a break in Wendy’s when a group of tough looking black bikers on Harleys came in, on their way from Detroit to Indy. The reticence was there at first (we were far from Indy at that point) but they soon warmed up to me. We exchanged advice on road works and left wishing each other a safe ride. Other people watched the exchange with interest.

Up in Detroit the lovely, young black woman who got our Little Caesars order sorted out had all sorts of questions about the bike and riding. Motorcycling works even if you’re not talking to another motorcyclist. There is something about the vulnerability of riding that encourages people to talk to you. They find it admirable.

The kinship you feel while riding is a very real thing, but motorcycling reaches out into the general public too. If motorcycling can overcome that tiring American black/white friction, it might just be able to do anything.

Welcome to my insanity!

I’m back in the classroom again and teaching English for the first time in more than a year. I took a senior essentials English class mainly because few people want to teach it (teachers like to teach people like themselves), and it fit my schedule. Essentials English is just as it sounds. These are weak English students who are getting what they need to graduate and get out into the workplace, they aren’t post-secondary bound and tend to find school pointless.

The trick with students this bullied and indifferent to the school system is getting them to read and write at all. Rather than drag them into a text book or make them watch the department copy of Dead Poets Society in order to prompt some writing, I thought I’d introduce them to my insanity. In a week where we’re all getting to know each other it helps if students see what you’re into. Showing your hobbies and interests is a good way to have them get to know you. If they get excited about the idea of planning a trip and it prompts them to write, it’s a many birds with one stone situation.

With some support, students quickly
got into planning a trip. 28 days,
unlimited budget!

The plan was pretty straightforward: you’ve got four weeks (28 days) starting next Monday. Assume you’ve got an unlimited budget for a road trip (gotta travel on the ground). Where would you go? What would you do? On the second day I gave them some pointers on Google Maps and some planning tools like a calendar and how to make notes online and they were off. At the moment it looks like I’ve got pages of writing from students who generally don’t. The research they’ve been doing also lets me diagnose their reading level.

Needless to say, I bravely volunteered to present first. It doesn’t feel like homework when you enjoy doing it, and mine was obviously going to be a motorcycle trip. I probably could have gone more bonkers on bike choice, but I have a sentimental attachment and some practical necessities that prompted my choice. Rather than go for the South American adventure, I decided to focus on The States, which has tons to offer, especially if you aren’t sweating the budget.

Norman Reedus’ RIDE gave me an idea of where I’d like to go, the question was, could I get to the locations in the show and back home in 28 days?

Here’s what I’m presenting:

I presented this to the class two days before it was due. Seeing an example helps and gave me a chance to explain my own process in putting together the trip (deciding on a vehicle, breaking the trip into sections, etc).

That photo I doctored of a VFR800 a
couple of years ago came in handy!

Another side benefit of something like this rather than a boiler plate reading and writing diagnostic is that is gives students a lot of control over the direction of their writing, which means I get to learn what they’re into, which helps me remember who each person is as well as offering me relevant subjects I can insert into future projects.

I’m hoping they surprise themselves with the results. If I catch some of them in the future staring wistfully at Google Maps instead of playing pointless FLASH games I’ll know that they’ve been bitten by the travel bug too!

It’s a lot to try and pull off in 28 days, but when the budget is unlimited, I want more miles!

Into the Rockies ASAP, then down the coast, across the mountains again, and then up the Appalachians home.

Yellowstone! Riding over a mega-volcano.

Death Valley and across the South West to the Twisted Sisters on the way to the Big Easy.

Back north in the Smokey Mountains and Appalachians.

I was thinking maybe an H2R or RC213 in a trailer, but then that meant driving a truck and trailer all over the place.
Better to be on two wheels all the time, and on the descendant of my first bike crush.

Dangerous Dakar

I know hyperbole sells papers, especially in the infamously hyperbolic British press, but with Dakar winners whining about how hard it is, the whole thing looks to be on the verge of imploding. With all of this negative noise around it, it’s only a matter of time before some enterprising probably American lawyer attempts to shut the whole race down with a liability lawsuit. I”m hoping the cavalier French organization running the Dakar are suitably prepared to deal with that. It would be a crying shame to see the Dakar ended by such mediocrity.

These headlines popped up on Lyndon Posskitt’s Instragram feed. In typical Lyndon fashion he was simply thankful for the attention, you’d be hard pressed to find a nicer guy. That the headlines are so turned up to eleven as to be practically hysterical isn’t anything new. When unprepared playboy racer Mark Thatcher got lost in the Sahara during the 1982 Paris to Dakar rally the British press lost their minds. Rather than wonder why a spoiled rich kid who had forgotten about the race until the week before it began and then managed to navigate his driver almost two hundred kilometres off piste before crashing was in the mess he was in, they questioned this weird, dangerous foreign event. Even the level headed BBC can’t help but describe it as a mental illness.

From a more factual point of view, this Dakar had a 55% finishing rate. I don’t know about the toughest Dakar in years, this year’s event had a better finishing rate than 2009, 2010, 2011, 2014 and 2015 (all years the race ran in South America).

In the almost thirty years the Dakar ran in Africa, only five times did half or more of the competitors cross the finish line. It took until the 1990s to get over half of the starters to the finish for the first time.

Tacking on to the end of Red Bull’s graph there, in 2015 there was a 51% finishing rate. 2016 was a 62% finishing rate and 2017 came in at an all time high 72%. Perhaps the issue is that the race has been catering to the results orientated professional rally teams more and more. With their money and vested interests trying to control the race and maximize participation and therefore advertising revenue, there is moneyed pressure to turn the Dakar into a glorified two week world rally stage. The quick professionals are the biggest complainers. If you’re looking for proof, those inflationary finishing percentages tell a tale. Or perhaps it’s because in 2018 everybody thinks they deserve a medal for showing up.

If anything this year’s Dakar looked like the desert races of old with sand, dunes and savage navigation. What you’re seeing here is Dakar sporting director Marc Coma‘s course design getting better and better. If anyone could take the Dakar back to its roots, it’s the guy who was worried about navigation losing its importance in the first place.

You can take all the press hyperbole fed by professional speed-racer whining with a grain of salt. The Dakar is in good hands and it will remain what it is: the toughest motorsport event in the world.

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#edtech I.T. Management

Welcome to 2010, kindof…

We’re back in school again and it’s been a bit of a #edtech mess. Over the summer our board upgraded to Windows 7 (so now we’re only one iteration behind the most current operating system). In the process the entire network was rejigged to fit this new desktop O.S..

Because doing a massive O.S. install wasn’t enough, we also had a major hardware update, moving both models and manufacturers from several years old MDG Intel core two duos to Dell Intel i3s. If you don’t know the nomenclature don’t sweat it, the long and the short is that our school technology is basically completely different from what we were running last year; and it isn’t working very well.

Managing I.T. is tricky at the best of times. Managing it in an education environment is more so due to the privacy concerns and complexity of trying to serve people ranging in age from five to sixty five and in computer skill from caveman to cyborg. To top it off they are all going after radically different uses from physical education to theoretical physics and from pre-university to kindegarten. Pitching to the middle of this group causes frustration at either end, it’s not like running an office where everyone has similar backgrounds, ages and a common focus.

With that much difficulty it’s not surprising that our board I.T. seems to often lose sight of what their function is. Supporting effective use of technology in learning shouldn’t be far from anyone’s mind, but it often feels like the reason for being there gets lost in the complexity. On top of that, board I.T. often seems strongly coloured by business thinking, which it isn’t. One of our networks is called UGDSBcorp. I’m not sure at what point our public school board became a corporation, but the naming says a lot about the thinking.

We’re in a transitional time in information technology. What used to be closed systems meant to connect employees internally are migrating to web based services that are meant to offer greater communication, efficiency and utility. Clinging to the old way of delivering I.T. results in a lot of unnecessary overhead. An example is our email. We cling to Firstclass as an internal client but are also running UGcloud (google apps for education which includes gmail). We’re told to check our email each day. Which one? Both? I know which one I can connect to more consistently, and it isn’t the internal board one.

With the migration of apps and systems to the cloud it might be wise to push aside the intranet 1990s thinking and consider a resilient network that simply allows easy access to the internet. Privacy can still be protected on secure web-servers. If you can do your banking on them, you can certainly store student records on them. But our board clings to intranet thinking, keeping the vast majority of functionality on local servers and increasing their management work load to such a degree that they can’t keep up with basic operations.

I’ve long held that students (and staff) don’t learn responsible use of technology if you hand them hobbled technology. No one ever got on the tour de France with training wheels. The internet they see at home or on their phones isn’t the training-wheels internet they see at school, and this isn’t helpful. Instead of using the internet as a babysitter in class, teachers need to be in the middle of it, calling attention to misuse and showing best practices. A school system with less fetters would aid this and make management easier for the people who are constantly short staffed and given too little time to keep it running.

Until we have internet and technology access that rivals the up-time of what we see outside of school we have an uphill struggle convincing reticent educators and poorly trained students to learn best practices, which is supposed to be the whole point.

Night Rider

We’ve already had a couple of frosts up here and there was another one on Thursday night when I had to get over to Erin, a 90km round trip from home. It was a cool day, but sunny and the fall colours were coming on strong. I make the monthly trip over to lodge in Erin from September to June, and try to ride whenever I can. This might be my last time on two wheels for a while.

Waiting out the winter is never easy, and the coming snows tend to urge me onto two wheels even more as the darkness arrives. The ride over was cool but spectacular: a blood red sunset across some astonishing trees. I stopped in the hlls of south-west Erin at a horse farm and took a picture.

It was about 8°C (46°F) on the ride over. The Tiger takes this in stride. The only part of me that gets cold are my hands, and the hand guards and grip warmers had me covered.

I got back out at about 9:45pm. The temperature was hovering just above freezing. I had the fleece zipped up and the leathers on over top. That combination does a remarkable job of retaining heat and stopping the wind from getting in.

I pulled out onto the empty, streetlighted road and headed into the darkness. The moon was waxing gibbous and cast long shadows across the road. Any exposed skin would have been instantly frozen, fortunately I didn’t have any.

I stopped in the dark and snapped that picture on the left. Best I could do with a smartphone. I want my next smartphone phone to be a camera with some smartphone on it rather than the other way around.

A single car drove by while I was stopped and asked if I was OK, which was nice. Back on the bike I thundered through the frozen moonlight, weaving my way down empty country roads back home.

When I got in my hands were still working even though I’d only wornn normal leather gloves. My core temperature was low, but it didn’t take long to warm back up. Next time I’m out in that kind of weather I’ll try out the winter gloves. I’ll keep going until the snow flies and the roads are salted. At that point I’ll clean up the Tiger one last time and let it hibernate under a blanket until spring.

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