edchat – Page 14 – Mechanical Sympathy

Ebb & Flow

Originally published on Dusty World in March, 2014.

Many moons ago I found myself hiring automotive technicians for Quaker State. There were a couple of odd things I did that helped find people who could survive in our tough working environment. One was toss any résumé that was full of grammar and spelling errors. I didn’t care if a tech had perfect grammar and spelling, but I did care that if given the time they didn’t take pride in their own work. The other thing I did was invent an emergency that interrupted the interview. The whole point of this was to test their initiative and see how they would respond to a change in tempo.

These interruptions became more and more complicated as the other guys on the shop floor got involved. What started off as a, ‘could you help me move a heavy thing’ turned into faked medical emergencies or whatever else struck the fancy of the staff. The guy who just sat there while everyone else shifted into overdrive wasn’t getting the job.

You see this kind of unresponsive stuck-tempo everywhere; employees who work at a walking pace are the new normal and it’s no different with students. This kind of thinking isn’t just found in work or school, but even in sports. People who throw themselves at something with any kind of intensity are becoming vanishingly rare. I suspect this is a response to modern management tactics based around fear and control. Those tactics have also been adopted by education, and students have responded with a similar protective apathy.

This apathy is a combination of digitization, systematization and the business-think that oversees these processes. Current business leadership revolves around creating an unbalanced workplace where fear and uncertainty drive employees into blind obedience. This highly charged methodology is completely unsustainable, but then it doesn’t have to be, there are always more employees to throw on the fire. Realizing potential and maximizing efficiency are irrelevant to a modern manager, the goal is short term gain and control. Digitized, data driven workplaces (and classrooms) are designed systemically to collect data that supports the system; statistics are as opinionated as politics. This Taylorist wonderland is overseen by caffeinated managers whose only approach is to spin their employees into a panic at every turn (those managers themselves are managed in the same way). The permanent engagement approach to learning is modelled on this thinking.

Days of lower energy, contemplative work and periods of off-task behavior are perfectly normal and even beneficial to the development of complex skills, but this is considered a failure in the modern world. When working on anything you should aim for sustainability as well as intensity, but education has followed management thinking in an effort to systematize and control.

A byproduct of this shortsightedness is the inability for students to amp up their focus and overachieve because modern education wants them to be giddily engaged all the time. The only way to achieve the highly agitated state of permanent engagement is to present simplistic, short term learning that offers constant reward. Working toward anything other than immediate gratification is a sure way to turn off the hyper engaged learner.

I have this up in my classroom. Any student that thinks a flurry of activity in the final weeks can make up for weeks of absences and apathy is kidding themselves.

The issue I’m seeing in many students is a benign neglect toward developing complex expertise. I’d argue that the decline in mathematical ability in Canadian students is a result of deemphasizing foundational skills in favour of short term learning strategies. These short term strategies stress engagement and success for all at the cost of building complex expertise.

Expecting students to work towards something other than immediate skill (the kind found in most video games) is becoming a lost art. Long-term, complex skill sets fall apart when we can’t expect students to follow along for more than thirty seconds at a time without some kind of Pavlovian payoff.

There is an ebb and flow to everything we apply ourselves to. For someone seeking mastery, even the ebbs have value, creating a deeper sense of familiarity and comfort. Anyone who has soaked in their discipline without a clear sense of direction knows what I’m talking about. From the confidence that arises out of those ebbs we push beyond boundaries and surprise ourselves with new learning when we are flowing again.

Whether it’s the workplace or a classroom, being hyper-engaged all the time just isn’t that productive, especially if you’re building long-term, complex expertise. If we’re all really just edu-tainers, then I guess we don’t have to worry about that, just be sure to collect the data needed to justify how well the system is working.

Corporate Shills

This is one hot potato on a Sunday morning. #ontsm trended nationally yesterday and attracted a lot of attention, which I suspect was the point. The fact that the attention has a life of its own is probably a concern to people who are used to controlling the message. Ironically, it’s trending again today, driven in large part by people who objected to it for various reasons.

I heard the term shill a couple of times this weekend. It’s not a commonly used piece of language. My favorite moment was when another one of the attendees (and one of the smartest guys I know) said, “yeah Tim, you gotta be careful we don’t turn into corporate shills.” He said it with a glint in his eye, knowing that we were all at a paid for event the week after I’d been criticizing another corporate event; nothing like some tasty irony.

If you want an idea of the conversation around what some are calling a controversy, me writing at you won’t present it well. Go over to the twitter feed and enjoy the diversity of opinion. Some are worried that this is dividing the PLN. The PLN isn’t a single group with a single approach. What you’ll see on the twitter feed (and in other blog posts) are what complex discussion and disagreement could look like online. It doesn’t have to be modeled on a fifteen year old’s idea of flaming. I’ve disagreed with a number of colleagues on there, and that is fine. I still respect them as professionals, and even if we end up agreeing to disagree, I’m still OK with that. Online communication can be deep, nuanced and even contrary without becoming personally inflammatory It’s all good, and I’d much rather the disagreements get aired in public than kept in, or hidden.

This will be resolved, as it was started, transparently and publicly online; the best kind of modelling for a new communication medium I can think of.

Objective Learning, Humility and Real Achievement

I’m re-reading Shopclass as Soulcraft, which begins with Matt Crawford asking what value hands-on work offers. He questions the abstractions in which we all traffic (consumerism, academics, politics) in the information age.

There is value in learning about something external from ourselves, something with absolute requirements unlike the everyone’s a genius in their own way/student success means everyone passes/let students direct their own learning so they aren’t bored mantras you see whirling around edu-speak these days. Crawford is focusing on trade skills in the book, but he’s arguing for any skill that has needs beyond whatever criteria we choose to apply to it. This would apply to languages (you either understand and can communicate in it or not), technical skill (you can rebuild that carburetor so that it works, or not), or even sports (you can ski down the hill, or you can’t). These kinds of skills get short shrift in schools these days because we can’t bend the requirements sufficiently to pass everyone and claim success.

Conestoga’s Motorcycle Training

This past weekend I took a motorbike training course. It was exhausting, and very rewarding, and it had a six and a half percent failure rate. Those people paid four hundred and fifty dollars and were unable to complete the requirements of the course in a road test. They left frustrated, and in some cases angry, but in a very real way they demonstrated that they could not control and place the bike. The instructors were transparent and explained the failed components in detail, but people still left early with high emotions. It’s hard for people who are used to paying and passing to suddenly find themselves having paid and failed. Doesn’t payment equal success? Doesn’t consumerism replace competence? It does in many situations, and increasingly in education. Students become clients (especially in post secondary where they are paying directly for it), but even in k-12 tax payers are the clients and success for all is what they are paying for.

It’s fair to say the test asked us to demonstrate about 60% of what we’d been asked to do that weekend – it wasn’t brutal by any means, but controlling a motorcycle is a tricky business, and some people found the learning curve too steep. Whether it was full body coordination or keeping what you’re doing organized in your head, there was a lot to manage in doing this test. The criteria were clearly explained and had been practiced relentlessly for two full days, there were no surprises yet some people were unable to *do* what was required. Alternatives weren’t offered, differentiation was self directed – by you – while you were learning on the bike, the instructors offered advice and it was up to you to take it or not. Those that failed generally didn’t take it. Riding a bike isn’t like driving a car. You’re alone on it, you don’t have a voice in your ear making suggestions or stepping in with alternate controls, it’s all up to you.

The curriculum was demanding and had specific requirements that couldn’t be ignored. It was physically exhausting and required twenty four hours of your time over a single weekend, early wakeups and hours outside in very changeable April weather. When someone showed up late on Sunday they were dropped out of the course (and seemed utterly flabbergasted at the situation); 100% attendance was required, and in order to see success you had to be there mentally, physically and emotionally. There was a high correlation between failures and people who were always the last to show up. As Crawford mentions in his book, learning an objective skill requires a degree of submission and humility to the task at hand – something that we ironically iron out of schools in order to demonstrate success.

For the rest of us, marks were given and certificates (which include a big drop in insurance costs as well as a direct pass to the next level of licensing) were given out in a ceremony. People who got perfect scores were mentioned, and applauded. Everyone still in that room realized how much work they’d put into their success that weekend. But they’d put in more than effort, they’d also been willing to be taught, to check their pride at the door and learn something challenging and new from the ground up.

There is an important difference between submission and humility. One can be humble and it enhances self worth, and allows learning in the oldest educational context we possess. Submission is about the power of the strongest, humility is about an honest awareness of one’s circumstance. A master at a skill is honoured when their apprentice is humble before the task because they are receptive and teachable, and they are also respecting the skill that the master possesses. That humility allows you develop perhaps the most powerful learning tool available to us, self-discipline, which in turn grants the serious student the ability to master skills that would otherwise defeat a dilettante. You assume the mantle of a serious, even professional student when you are able to apply self-discipline gained through the humble acquisition of meaningful skill. In school we constantly seek ways to amateurize learning in order to satisfy a Taylorist economic logic. We try to streamline and ease student passage, forgiving absence and inattention in a misguided effort to generate successful data. Any statistic you’ve ever seen about education has nothing to do with learning.

This sounds like throw back language, especially in light of the MBA edu-babble popular today. Students teaching themselves in order to stay engaged? Best not done around a band-saw, as Crawford suggests. Students able to ‘pass’ with a 50% average? Or with weeks of absenteeism? They’ve hardly mastered anything. Students given multiple avenues to success with targets that get closer the more they miss? This learning is empty and pedantic, and students recognize that. Reward comes with real effort, and real failure. Guaranteeing success for all? The surest way to a systemic failure of learning.

I hurt all over from this past weekend, but it was profoundly satisfying. I worked hard, didn’t treat it like a joke, gave it my full attention and realized early on that the people instructing know so much more than I do that it would behoove me to be humble before their skill and experience. I think that humility is what led to my success. That success may very well save my life one day. Engagement was never an issue.

I won’t see much of that humility and openness to learning in the diploma factory I’m returning to today, though I’ll try and try to put reality’s demands in front of my students and let them be frustrated by it. It’s real success when you overcome an obstacle and figure something out, especially if you experienced failure in the process. Not so much when people systemically remove obstacles to keep nearly inert objects in motion. As self discipline erodes and humility dries up, the process of learning itself begins to break down.

Are you teaching curriculum today? Or are you teaching how students should passively pass through the Kafkaesque education factory in which they find themselves?

Being taught how to actually do something with objective demands has made me proud, humble and grateful for the skillset I have as a learner. When I see opportunities to approach learning with humility and develop self-discipline missing from so much of what we do in school, it makes it seem an empty, even dangerous place.

Ghostly Distractions & Digital Doppelgängers

Cyborgs are all around us now, and they have trouble finishing a thought

If you popped into a current classroom from any time before the last five years you’d think your students had gone mad, or were in need of an exorcist. Being unfamiliar with the rapid miniaturization and personalization of electronics, you’d be left wondering what it is they are fiddling with on their navels, why they seem to be constantly thinking about something else, and why when you walk into your next class the students there already know what happened to pretty much everyone else in the school (and the ones who skipped) last period.

I was talking to a colleague the other night about this sense of personal dislocation in students, though digital vertigo isn’t a student only issue. The teacher in question won’t even make a Facebook account because he believes (perhaps rightly) that it means the internets will know where he is all the time. He was telling me about a difficult student who was giving him a hard time in class. This teacher has a great rapport with students so many other students leapt in and argued his point for him. Afterwards the difficult student in question seemed overly despondent and would not re-engage in discussion. I suggested that the disagreement in class may not have ended in the classroom but had become virtualized. The idea that invisible forces were emanating from and reflecting back into the classroom was quite upsetting to this teacher.

The fluidity with which teens pass back and forth between physical and virtual space make them very hard to read, at many moments in their day they are literally in two places at once. That uncommunicative student may still be getting hammered on Facebook long after the physical confrontation is over; digital echoes of a verbal disagreement. The moods so common in teens anyway are amplified by these invisible, always on, invasive connections; their volatile minds are wired to always-on drama.

There was a time when you could read a class by the students you had in it. Relationships were obvious and management challenging but straightforward. If you had the nitro and the glycerin in the room you could separate them, you can’t do that any more. You can’t do that if you move them to a different class… or a different school. I’ve had students who moved up to our small town to get out of the GTA and away from a bad influence only to be intimately connected with them on Facebook the moment anyone’s back is turned. Always on, always connected, always being emotionally amplified – that is the modern, connected high school student.

This creates some interesting new psychology in the classroom. That student who used to feel isolated for their poor behavior in class might be experiencing any number of unseen influences. Instead of being able to modify poor behavior by moving a student, or placing them in classes where their bad influences are not, they are always connected. Many of those connections may very well be morally supporting or even inciting them; they never feel isolated in their bad attitude and are always supported in their beliefs, even if it is hurting them. In that sense you might argue for a lack of emotional growth because you never have a chance to get free of a clique or bad influence. In the other direction you’ve got the example above where a group of students may easily create an ad hoc digital mob and go after someone. This can happen so quickly and quietly that it’s almost impossible to consider let alone manage.

Working with the emotionality of high school students is challenging at the best of times, but with the drama-net of Facebook fully embedded in every student’s mind, administration struggles with the more obvious cyber-bullying while the subtle ghostly influences go unnoticed, thought every teacher faces them daily.

As students migrate to Twitter without realizing the very public nature of it (many think it similar to texting), coercive social media becomes even more widely broadcast than just between Facebook friends. Suddenly we have social media as means of large scale slander, creating influence well beyond the intent of the ignorant person thinking their tweets are private.

This is a new social situation that affects early adopters while others remain entirely ignorant. Many teachers don’t consider it at all because they have no experience with social media yet it increasingly influences the students in their classrooms. Kids whose minds are in many places at once, constantly being emotionally tweaked and influenced by social media inputs, not knowing how to manage this pervasive influence in an effective way.

Digital literacy considers media fluency, collaboration and critical thinking, but the extent to which digital media is influencing the minds of our students isn’t really on the table. Their inability to manage their own access (watch a student, they are Pavlovian in their use of social media, they can’t self manage) is only one part of the problem. In the emotionally charged world of high school, social media pours gasoline on that fire, making teaching a challenge in ways that it never was before.

***
had to add a wee update. It’s Monday morning and the internet meme from the weekend that all the grade 10s are talking about is of a girl and her feminine hygiene product on youtube. It sets new (low) standards on what teens are willing to do to get seen online.

This race to the bottom in terms what teens are able to subject themselves to is radically changing how they approach both sexuality and social norms in general. Teens nowadays have seen things that would have been virtually impossible for them to see even a decade ago, and this is entirely a digitized influence.

You really don’t want even think about what teens do for truth or dare nowadays, they’ve seen things that will make you ill, they dare each other to. The entire nasty world is available to them and influencing them moment to moment. Yet another way that online influence creates a classroom unlike any before.

Stellar work without a bonus?

One of the reasons I love teaching is that the job isn’t about making a fat, old, white guy a bit richer than he already is. Every other job I’ve had has been inherently limited by this focus; the only reason you’re there is to make a one percenter a little bit richer. That raison d’etre infects everything about working in a money focused business. That I hear people refer to this as ‘real work’ always makes me laugh; it’s real work in the same way that prostitution is real honest work – you lay yourself down for the money. The argument that working for money adds real vigor and toughness to a workplace is nonsense. What it actually does is create fearful, simpering employees who believe that sucking up to their boss is more important than the work they do.

Ideas like excellence, originality, creativity and even work ethic are pretty much irrelevant. If they can make more money by tossing out the hardest working, most creative, excellent employee, they will (and do – especially in the short term gains world we live in now). The only time businesses produce excellence is when small groups within the organization are protected from the pimps who are running it. That doesn’t happen often. What usually happens is that businesses take the excellence and research they need from publicly funded universities.

That infectious economic thinking has blighted Ontario education thanks to Laurel Broten’s story telling around fiscal responsibility. Listening to the tragic prostitutes in the private sector telling us to accept their shabby circumstances because of economic necessity is purely the result of Ontario Liberal Party spin, and it has demonized my profession as a result.

Education: a reason to be optimistic about the future!

Teaching in Ontario has achieved real excellence in the past decade. We are truly world class, one of the very best. What made this happen? Bonuses? Financial incentives? No teacher ever got into teaching to make money. No teacher has ever gotten a cash payout for doing their job at a world class level (we’ll leave that for all those excellent bankers out there). If financial reward isn’t the point of performing at such an outstanding level, what is?

Public education is one of the most powerful social movements we’ve ever created. As Ray Kurzweil states his five reasons to be optimistic about the future, we are more educated than we’ve ever been before. We pay ten times what we used to into education as a society, but our post secondary graduation has increased by 280 times. We are making better use of the talent of our people; that is the crowning achievement of public education: social efficiency on a previously unheard of scale. The irony is that this very socialist mechanism, designed to realize the potential of all members of our society, also drives economic growth.

I’m back at school again tomorrow, dropped in to the political maelstrom of a forced contract, listening to blathering idiots whining about how much teachers get paid and how little they do. I’m tempted to get stingy about my work, but I don’t think I can. I didn’t get into this profession for the politics or the economics, I got into it because it’s one of the finest possible reasons anyone could have for going to work; to help human beings recognize their potential.

What I do is the opposite of the pyramid scheme most people find themselves working at each day; it’s a good in itself, economically, socially, personally. I can’t help but want to over achieve, no matter what the lowered expectations around me might suggest.

Five Big Wishes For 2013

2012 has been a challenging year for me as a teacher, a Canadian and an online citizen. My five big wishes for 2013 range from recognizing digital literacy to changing the way we run organizations, but the underlying theme becomes obvious: technology is changing how we interact with and influence each other.

A flattening mediascape means everyone can publish information. From wikileaks to Anonymous to social media induced political upheaval, technology is unhinging how societies control their members. Organizations that used to control their message through limited access, broadcast media are stumbling while whole populations are discovering that they can now speak to more people than multinationals could in television commercials only twenty years ago.

Here are my five big wishes for these interesting times in which we live:

We stop wishing for digital literacy and actually do something coordinated about it.

Students flounder in this strange new world as much as anyone else. We’ve not been very organized about trying to get them up to speed. A Digital Skills Continuum needs to be integrated into curriculum. We need to stop putting our faith in myths like digital natives and BYOD and begin to intelligently address the revolution we’re in the middle of. We do a real disservice to students with the half-assed way in which we deliver digital literacy.

As a teacher I’m worried not only for students I see being graduated into a time of radical change with virtually no preparation from their education, but also for the teachers who seem intent on patently ignoring these changes to both their own detriment and those of their students. If I could get Ontario education leadership to stop playing politics and get back to, you know, education, this is what I’d be begging them to begin taking seriously.

Listening to business types begging us to graduate people who are useful in a digitally enhanced workplace is panic inducing! I really wish we’d start taking this seriously and build it into curriculum so technologically illiterate teachers couldn’t just ignore it.

Ontario politicians stop using teachers in their shabby games.

Watching the Ontario Liberal Party thrashing around in its death throes was been startling, getting black eyes from their their dishonest, manipulative politics has been very disheartening. Ontario has one of the cheapest, highest performing education systems in the G20 and performs favorably when education costs per GDP are concerned with even many third world countries. We don’t pay much for the fantastic results we get. Watching politicians (who get to magically become my boss when they have no background in what I do at all) heap lies on their mistakes and vilify my profession has been very demoralizing.

I’m sorry that I let the divisive nature of this battle turn me on Ontario Catholic teachers. I think the dual nature of our public/Catholic boards in Ontario must enrichen our educational process somehow, and it isn’t breaking the bank as many might have you believe. If we’re this good for this little, just leave us alone to do our work; go play your shabby political games by yourselves.

Perhaps begin by not bailing out giant multinational banks and lousy car makers.

Teachers vocalize how difficult their job is

Part of the political angle played against teachers is that they are overpaid and under-worked. This plays to an uneducated idiot’s view of the profession – I’m surprised by how many people swallow this, and it isn’t helped by many teachers not saying anything in response.

I don’t doubt that there are a few that do as little as they can while milking the system, but in my experience these people are a tiny minority. The vast majority of teachers I know put in sixty hour plus weeks while in school, and still spend hours a week working on preparation and research when not actually in class.

I recently did the math, if you look at the time I put into my job, I make about $15/hour… and I need two degrees, first aid qualifications, a clean driver’s license, a clean criminal record and years of experience to make that much. Starting teachers make less than minimum wage if they are also doing the requisite extra curriculars and extra class work.

Watch any teacher who is active online and you’ll see how much time they spend collaborating on lessons and building good pedagogy. If we judged every profession by the 5% who bottom feed, no one would be looking very good.

I wish more teachers would open their mouths and explain to friends and family what it is they do. The chance to spread this information far and wide lies at your fingertips.

No more charter school American education consultants brought up here at great expense in order to tell us how to do something we’re already much better than them at

I’ve been begging Canadians to put away their be-polite mantra and recognize what we are doing well. Apparently being proud about hockey is as far as we’re willing to go. Watching (evidently) cash strapped boards throwing out thousands of dollars to push bankrupt American philosophy makes me financially, culturally and educationally sick. If we do something well, recognize it and bring in the local talent that is making us world class. I’d love to see more Canadian content in the educational conferences I’m attending. I’d love to see more Canadian educators publishing and presenting on what we are doing; the rest of the world would benefit from it… especially the Americans… even the Charter school ones.

Radical transparency in our institutions… all of our institutions.

Social media is wreaking havoc on the status quo. Organizations used to a hierarchy based on one sided media transmission are floundering. The signal is no longer owned by the few rich, anyone can now publish information to the world.

An active democratic population isn’t what most of these organizations want though. They are far happier with an apathetic electorate that hands them sufficient power every few years and then does what they are told. This came home to me not just with the Ontario Liberal nonsense, but with my own union’s nonsense too. It’s a tough thing to have two organizations that are supposed to be representing you instead threatening you for exercising your voice.

After making mistakes that would make any individual blush, these ‘leaders’ are incapable of a simple apology, which only indicates the arrogance still found in the crumbling halls of power. Many of these people in positions of power still feel that they are superior human beings to the rest of us. I’m all about the healthy dose of humility coming their way.

The democratization of media is forcing a democratization in organizations too. I tried to do this in my union and was demonized for it. At least the inevitability of progress is on my side with this one. With individuals having more voice than ever before, the idea that organizations can force their members into a lockstep, parroting the company/union/government line is an old idea whose time has passed.

Democracy is messy, loud and boisterous; forcing a single voice in this noise is factory thinking. As is said in Radical Transparency, “Radical transparency means you don’t have to stand up and read a script, you don’t have to wonder how the numbers will play out on a new policy… you know your beliefs and you act on them.”

Leaders who are managers and don’t stand for anything shouldn’t be leading. I’m looking for people who believe in what they say, and say it consistently Clever people who think they can manipulate people to their own ends? Those people have an uphill struggle in a flattening mediascape. The leader who is transparent and direct in their communications? That person need never fear many voices, their transparency is their strength.

Wrap Up

What I’m really wishing for is a digitally literate population who makes effective use of our new ability to speak loudly to each other without being pushed to distraction by it. The weak link in our current digital maelstrom are the people using it. If we could manage:

Social media that respects and empowers its users without hypocrisy
Digital tools that clarity and amplify their users rather than obfuscate and distract them
Technology companies that respect user effectiveness, and aren’t solely purposed to get in the way
Educational systems that produce technically and socially competent students, especially in the middle of a digital revolution

we’d be able to begin to exercise the real power of a global village. Classrooms that range across the world, world wide democratic voices empowered by free information, transparent organizations that prevent abuse by being only what they are, publicly… that’s all I’m wishing for in 2013.

Radical Transparency

Mr Universe Knows!

I just read an email from our union lamenting the lack of control when it comes to presenting our contract information to us. In the 36 hours OSSTF took to put together a two page comparison of our deal with the one the Catholic teachers had land on them, details leaked to the press and were already flowing around social media before that.

When we finally got ‘official’ information it was formatted entirely in comparison to the OECTA deal – we don’t get to see actual details, we get a selection of facts designed to look better than the pile of manure OECTA provincial executive signed off on for their members (none of whom have ratified it) last summer. I’m having trouble seeing the democracy through the political machinations.

Watching the government, the forth estate and our union trying to manipulate the flood of information in an increasingly flat mediascape is rather tragic to watch. These lumbering dinosaurs try to breach holes or spin facts, only be swamped by crowd-sourced social media. They want to harness the crowd for their own ends only to find their carefully laid plans designed to manipulate results thrown into the weeds.

We might have evolved into Web2.0, but it is also causing a more democratic means of understanding the world and ushering in a Democracy2.0 wherein people have access to more information sources and are no longer held captive by traditional organizations and the big media that served them. The Arab Spring, Occupy, Anonymous and many other social movements are happening because governments and corporations don’t own the signal any more. Anyone with an internet connection can publish to the world, find information and create community with like minded people.

How is a political organization to survive in a time where they can’t control their own message? Perhaps by putting out a message that doesn’t need controlling in order to be accepted. This would mean un-spinning and de-lawyerizing your organization and simply being direct and consistent with what you stand for. Being accessible and open about communicating wouldn’t hurt either – if you’re working behind closed doors, you’re not getting the point..

Your political party shouldn’t be trying to win elections, it should have a clear vision of what it stands for and then never waiver from that goal in word and deed. If you’re consistent, radical transparency and the flattening mediascape doesn’t frighten you, it empowers you. If you’re a shifty, manipulative organization that is used to getting its own way by having direct access to big media, your days are numbered.

Radical transparency means you don’t have to stand up and read a script, you don’t have to wonder how the numbers will play out on a new policy, and you never have to come back to an interview and say, wow, we really screwed that up. You don’t have spin doctors telling you what to think about issues, you know your beliefs and you act on them.

As insane as I think Tim Hudak’s tea party Conservatives are, at least they are consistent in their insanity. The NDP are also consistent in their left winged-ness. The Liberal party (whom I used to vote for and was considering membership in after I became a Canadian citizen) are something unique to Canada, but in trying to be centrist they have ended up being worse than the right wing bullies; a manipulative party that only stands for being in power, consistency be damned.

I’m having trouble being unionist at a time when my union seems to be playing the same kind of Liberal game, of speaking out of both sides of their faces. One moment the offered contract is a disaster and we’re ordered to go on work action; the union is overjoyed at the crowd sourced support they are seeing online and myself and others are more than happy to vocally convey the unfairness of the situation. In the next we are suddenly accepting a similar contract. Communication has stopped and online voices have turned from supportive to hurt and confused.

I’m a creature of this flattened mediascape. I cannot understand or condone the backroom politics or spin. I don’t want to be manipulated, I don’t want to be treated like an idiot who can’t know details, I want the facts, and if I’m not given them, they are easily enough found online.

The ideal digital learning tool

I’m thinking about what the ideal digital tool would be for student learning.

It has to offer strong reading and browsing abilities as well as data entry. I want the benefits of a passive consumption device (like a tablet) with the benefits of an active media production device (like a laptop). My ideal device must have a keyboard and mouse pad, but also offer touch screen functionality. It’ll also rotate to use the screen more effectively as a reader/tablet.

It also has to be ruggedized (I have no misconceptions about how hard kids are on electronics). It would also be built like lego (compartmentalized and accessible to easily replace failed parts). The goal weight would be under 3 pounds. At three pounds we’d be providing a device that can easily carry all the student’s text books, binders and loose paper without injuring them or destroying the planet.

Some devices I’d shamelessly steal brilliant design ideas from:

Dell’s latest round of ultrabooks with a flippable screen offer the kind of flexibility I’m looking for – the benefits of a rotating tablet screen (allowing you to turn a widescreen to a tall screen for reading), light weight, flexible, powerful…

In fairness (and because I have one), HP has been making touch screen/tablet laptops for years.

I don’t care which technology gets used (which ever is more durable), but the idea of a lightweight touch screen reader AND a laptop that allows for full media creation is vital!

Horizontal wide-screens are designed for entertainment, but reading only happens well when you’ve got continuous text you don’t have to constantly scroll through a narrow window. These learning tools MUST allow for the most accessible e-reading experience – meaning a device that can mimic a tablet.

The end result has at least a 128GB solid state drive (SSD), that allows for multiple OS installs if a student wants them. The hardware would be able to run CHROME OS, LINUX, OSx and Windows (depending on student experience, preference and ability). The choice to upgrade on-device storage would be easy because the SSD it comes with would be a standard 2.5 inch laptop hard drive bay that would take any of many choices of hard or solid state drive.

Basic connectivity to the device would be through USB3 and video out – mini-dvi (for sharing presentations). No manufacturer specific connectors (Apple, I’m looking at you and your weird dongle fixation).

The screen would be a 13 inch unit with a standard resolution of 1366×768, though a student who wants a higher (retina) level display could always upgrade to one (since they bolt on, this would be a matter of standardizing monitor connectors and offering variations in resolution and colour quality based on cost and need.

While we’re standardizing things, these digital tools would use standardized screws and fasteners that make repairs easy (are you still listening Apple?). Any high school would have its own genius bar/nerd cave where students in senior computer engineering can repair and upgrade equipment at minimal cost.

The compartmentalization is vital to this tool. The screen needs to detach logically and easily for replacement, same with the memory, hard/solid state drive, CPU, battery and keyboard. Compartmentalization allows for much cheaper upkeep. I’d also like all the pieces to be easily recyclable as well as replace/up-gradable.

The end result would be an easily upgrade-able, component replaceable device that is operating system agnostic, highly adaptable and tough.

The idea of an environmentally sensible laptop isn’t a pipe dream.

Google could easily make this happen working with their hardware partners (an Edu-Nexus?) – Microsoft and Apple seem intent on closed eco-system models, even for education, but I live in hope.

It’s already the end of 2012. I’d love to see the silicon valley geniuses recognize that digital literacy is vital for education (and for the future of industry too – we’re not producing digitally literate graduates!).

If we could get our hands on that modular, easily upgrade-able/maintainable, ruggedized transformable laptop/data creation, tablet/content consumption device, we’d be one giant step closer to helping students grasp opportunities for digital literacy.

I think we could mass produce these things for $300 for a basic one up to $600 for a tricked out one. The revolution is well underway, it’s time for someone to give us the classroom tools we need to teach it.

Digital Skills Continuum

I’ve recently thrown my hat in with a rough bunch of commando teacher types (@stevewynen, @mrmarnold) who have applied for TLLP

funding. My wife, Alanna (@banana29), saw my ECOO presentation on integrating BYOD into a digital skills continuum (instead of just instituting the policy randomly with no thought to pedagogical need). The idea of doing some action research into developing a digital skills continuum was the foundation of the application the four of us have forwarded.

One of the arguments I made was that bringing your own device to class does not imply technological skill, and may ultimately hurt a student as much as help them. It certainly does nothing but disrupt learning in a class if no one in the room actually knows how to problem solve and/or effectively use the device – especially a device where familiarity is founded upon its entertainment value – using that device for a previously unexpected purpose is perilous indeed! Students who own their own device but have very little actual facility with it aren’t served by trying to include it, unsupported, in an effective learning environment.

From the student who got the two thousand dollar camera and was going to return it because ‘it took bad pictures’ (it was set on web-sized 600×800 pixels, it was a 24 megapixel DSLR…), to the student with the new laptop that only has stolen games, videos, pornography and oodles of viruses on it, unstructured BYOD is a technological (and learning) quagmire in the making. The assumption that because someone owns a digital tool that they know how to effectively use it is just that, a huge assumption; not exactly sound pedagogical practice.

How we assess and teach digital fluency lacks any cohesion at all, yet everyone is itching to throw ipads at students. The problem goes well beyond student technological prowess to include many teachers as well. If we’re going to produce students ready and relevant to future workplaces then we really need to get a handle on our expectations around effective use of digital technology.

To that end it is well past time to begin developing a digital skills continuum – an objective, mastery based learning continuum (no, 50% is not a pass). You either know how to use digital tools effectively, or you don’t, and it’s time to figure out who knows what.

It’s early days yet, but it seems to me that digital fluencies break down into two fundamental areas, like the technology itself. One side is communication/data driven and involves effective management of information in digital environments. The other side is the technical/hardware side of the equation and how fluent you are with using technology to access digital information. Both sides can be broken down further…

Any one of these particulars may be further developed to create a more nuanced understanding of a person’s digital fluency. Even regular users might be surprised by their lack of breadth in this area. Knowing how to do one thing, over and over again on a specific (single) device well does not make you an expert.

Many years ago when I went for my Comptia A+ and Net+ certifications, I became aware of what the differences between a keen amateur and a professional were when it comes to computer technology. The first time I took a practice exam I was stunned to be getting in the forty percents, I thought I was an expert. That testing process is grueling and requires a 75% pass rate. You don’t get to call yourself an expert by getting it half right (why we think 50% is a pass is beyond me). I’d like to bring some of that objective credibility to this digital skills continuum. People need to be able to articulate and demonstrate what they know. Guessing is where we are now, we need to move beyond that.

I’d also like to hook up differentiation of and access to technology based on how people are able to demonstrate their digital fluency. A teacher with low digital fluency can access a supported lab, but the more advanced teacher can access diverse mini/mobile labs or even, eventually, a bring your own device model of learning, but only if they have clearly demonstrated the mastery needed to make that quagmire actually work.

BYOD – MINILAB – SCHOOL LAB: diversified technology digital skills continuum

We’ve painted ourselves into an ineffective corner when it comes to teaching digital literacy, and as a result we’re graduating students who are having a great deal of trouble transitioning to the twenty first century workplace. This technology change is happening so quickly that society and the education system that serves it, is having trouble keeping up. Digital fluency (where it exists at all) has generally been self taught, and as a result it is unevenly distributed and almost impossible to quantify; it’s all quite magical. Teachers who don’t have much in the way of digital fluency aren’t being assisted to improve it, meanwhile the rogue, commando types are just going off and doing it on their own. Classrooms within the same department in the same building appear completely different in terms of teaching digital fluency.

A ministry initiative to develop a continuum of learning around the digital skills of everyone involved in the learning process would be a great place to start. I hope our board and the ministry itself recognizes what an important and timely piece of pedagogical development this is and gives us a chance to further develop it.

Between a rock and a hard place

Imagine you’re the head of the English department at a high school. Your job is to support the English teachers in your department, help develop consistent and meaningful curriculum, buy department supplies and act as your teachers’ voice at school directions team meetings. It’s one of the biggest departments in the school, you may have up to a dozen teachers, some teaching English full time and some part time, all of them with clear qualifications in their field. You have the benefit of all those varied opinions, but you also have to try and get them moving in roughly the same direction too. You’ve got your school’s library of novels and other texts to maintain, all the time knowing that every student in the school is going through your program which teaches vital literacy skills. Students cannot graduate without demonstrating those literacy skills. Your job isn’t an easy one, but its importance is self evident.

I am the head of computer studies at my high school. I’m a department of one, which makes developing consistent and meaningful curriculum for my subject area rather difficult (and lonely). I don’t have a collection of professionals to bounce ideas off. I have to maintain text books, and equipment, but for vanishingly few students – computers just aren’t on the must-take list at my school (there’s no future in them?).

There’s a twist to this headship though: when you’re the head of computers, you’re not just the head of a small, unimportant department, you’re also responsible for your subject area school-wide, and it’s a growing, vital piece of modern educational practice. Internet failures now begin to look a lot like power failures in the last century.

***

Imagine you’re that head of English again, except now you’re not just responsible for your department, but for English usage in the entire building.

Every time a student or teacher makes a grammar mistake or needs some reading material or writing stationary, you’re the one they turn to. You’ve got your department to run, but you’ve also got to oversee the execution of your discipline throughout the entire building. You spend your time correcting people’s reading, buying them pens and paper, and proofreading and correcting their mistakes.

They don’t hand this to you because they want to be illiterate, they do it because the school board wants to retain control of their stationary – which means its better to read and write everything for people than it is to let them learn how to become literate themselves; control is more important than learning.

The school population is capable of learning how to read and write, but remain illiterate because their employer finds that easier to manage. In that building of illiterate people, your ability to read and write raises you to otherworldly status, people seek you out to do the impossible and read the printed page.

This isn’t entirely without historical context. There was a time when reading and writing was a mystery of the learned class, a means of separating knowledge from the proles. Whole alphabets were conceived around the idea of making it more difficult for commoners to become literate, churches kept literacy from the masses. Knowledge is power and literacy is the key to knowledge.

I fear something similar is happening with computers now. There is little doubt that they are becoming intrinsic to the functioning of modern life, but a smaller and smaller group is able to grok computing. Overcoming intellectual barriers like this should be the primary directive of public education, yet we’re falling into the gap between the digerati and the rest.

***

It sounds ridiculous, but enforcing enforced ignorance is what I’m facing as the Computer Studies head. I have almost no time to actually nurture the anemic department I’ve inherited because I’m looking after the people who have been taught to be helpless by their employer. I spend most of my time managing the budget of school IT, ordering equipment and repairing or passing along problems to board tech support. My own department is an afterthought, the actual teaching of computers to students is an echo of what I experienced in the 1980s when we barely had any computers. My time is spent supporting a system that encourages ignorance, and it’s a system that is insinuating itself into education practice more completely every day.

This is a headship like no other.

I was thinking about this as I was doing my weekly ‘fair share’ of extra duties and covering the library so the librarian could go to lunch. I haven’t had an uninterrupted lunch since school began. I haven’t had an uninterrupted prep period since school began.

***

I’m feeling pretty down on the job, but it’s more a matter of appreciation for the work involved than it is the work itself. I genuinely enjoy technology. I’ve had my hands in computers since I was a child, it was one of my first serious hobbies. When people say things like, “computers are making people stupid” or, “computers are making people autistic” I get angry. Ignorance injures people, tools are only helpful in skilled hands, otherwise they can injure as easily as assist.

Computers are one of the most powerful tools we’ve invented, up there with harnessing electricity as a means of empowering us. How we teach computers directly influences how well we’re able to grasp a better future, I honestly believe this.

Watching the taught helplessness of the school computer lab makes me fear for that future. Just as we teach drivers the responsibility of operating an automobile, so we should be teaching both teachers and students how to grasp and manage the powerful computing tools we now have at our disposal. We all need to be responsible for the technology we wield.

Fire can save you, or burn you…

Students (and educators, and education systems) who view computers as a distraction instead of an empowerment, who enforce simplistic, habitual use instead of exercising human/computer potential are more than a tragedy, they are the genuine threat that Nick Carr suggests.

It’s a tough situation, being trapped between what appears to be an increasingly vital skillset and an education system intent on not teaching it.

The frustration at not having your work recognized is one thing, but when that work only reinforces a system founded on spreading ignorance, the whole thing gets quite unbearable.

I hope one day we wake up and change how we use computers in schools. I guess my way forward is to keep pushing for what I think should be a self evident truth: if you don’t learn how to use the technology, the technology will learn how to use you.