At best, our current government’s interests seem to be driven entirely by making education as cheap as it can be. At worst I fear the intent is to drive public education into such a state of disrepair that private charter schools will suddenly appear as a solution to this managed failure, but privatization produces a whole new set of problems and charter schools often result in poorer performance at greater cost. I always thought Ontarians deserved better, but perhaps we don’t.
Ask any teacher who has done remote elearning and they’ll tell you that a two-thirds credit achievement rate is about as good as it gets – and that’s in a group of students who volunteered for remote learning and all have the ability to access it. Attrition is more common in elearning than learning is, they should call it eAttrition. This is the kind of false economy the repeated demands for mandatory elearning will give us – it’ll look cheap on the surface but high drop out rates will make it more expensive in the long run. The fact that any Ontario students are still engaged at all in remote learning is a testament to the thousands of teachers doing back-flips to try and reach them by any means available in a system that seems intent on doing it poorly.
While all that’s going on, proudly trans-illiterate teachers are still sniping at the situation and blaming everything on the fact that the medium they grew up with isn’t the medium literacy is delivered in half a century later. If you can’t navigate the medium, you can’t fully comprehend the message – this is one of the basic foundations of media literacy, yet there are is a majority of righteous teachers intent on protecting this dated idea of what literacy is. Instead of putting their outmoded concepts of literacy on a pedestal, perhaps it’s time to learn something new and accept that the society you grew up in fifty years ago has moved on significantly.
We’ve always had a hate on for changes in medium, life long learning is just such hard work. Instead of moving with the times, these Luddites will cling to their habits to the end. That they’re usually senior teachers in leadership positions with the most secure jobs and highest pay says a great deal about how well our system is able to adapt and stay relevant in a constantly evolving media-scape.
As we stagger to the end of this absurd year I’m just trying to keep my head above water. I had a momentary sense of traction the other week when we were finally allowed into our school so we could put together some computers that we had sitting in there and get them out to teachers who desperately needed them – over 8 weeks into this remote learning crisis. Getting out and doing something felt good, maybe too good. It reminded me of the multi-dimensional approach to teaching I’d always adopted, doing work both in and beyond the classroom, school and even my board to help improve our practice in as many ways as I can. After getting a taste of it for a day it was difficult to go back to the do less with less mandate of remote learning.
Instead of engaging in this simple and inexpensive solution to minimizing the digital divide on a system wide scale, I’m back at home repeatedly hearing about a digital divide that no one in management seems to want to acknowledge. Only about one third of our staff responded to our short survey of who needed tech at home. Even though we resolved the digital divide for those staff members, two thirds of them in our building may very well be trying to remote teach without the right tools. In other schools across our board and across the province we could be addressing the digital divide in terms of a lack of technology access for staff. Suddenly finding myself back to doing less isn’t how I approach my profession and is a source of constant frustration that I have to let go of less it drive me mad!
Which is where I’m at on this lovely Saturday morning. Not caring eases the anxiety and frustration, but it also means the clowns running this circus get to sell it off to their cousins who happen to be starting up charter schools. In the process we will have sold Ontario’s children to these greedy bastards and made things worse for everyone.
Even though I’m exhausted and feeling defeated by this today, I’ll be back when I’ve had a couple of days away, because I have an important job that it’s important to do well. I may be playing dead right now (and I’m not even doing that particularly well), but I’m just waiting for an opportunity to move when we have a chance of winning Ontario education back from the hands of this circus that a minority of mis-guided people elected.
The mighty Peter McAsh shared a link to Yale’s most popular course: The Science of Well Being, which is designed to address the psychological misconceptions we all labour under that have produced some of the worst depression in human history. Laurie Santos, the professor running the course, describes the course (which has since become Yale’s most popular) as a necessary response to the plunging rates of happiness in her students. It’s free on Coursera right now.
It’s worth your time. Seligman was a pivotal researcher into applying psychology to finding happiness rather than just treating illness. I’ve since been sucked into Dan Gilbert’s The Surprising Science of Happiness. Dan’s book was suggested in the course. In his TEDtalk he’s hard pitching the idea that our reflexive over estimation of outcomes to our choices makes us select things that make us less happy – we overestimate the opportunities choice gives us and it seldom makes us happy. He gives the example of Harvard students who select a course that gives them more choice, but those choices produced a lot of unhappy students. This has some interesting ramifications in a world where choice is considered a sacred right, whether it’s choice of government, partner or anything else. We’ve designed our society around choice, but choice is a mechanism that defies happiness.
If we’re pre-programmed to select for choice (which I suspect is another word for control), and more choice makes us less happy, then we’re pre-set to make ourselves less happy. Our consumerist economic system and our democratic systems are designed to make us less happy – and they’re working.
That I’m looking at this at a time when everyone feels hard done by due to their individual freedoms being curtailed by the COVID19 pandemic is pretty ironic. Perhaps people will find some happiness in their lack of choice, but soon enough that’ll all be forgotten as we struggle to restart all the social systems that are strangling us.
Some post apocalyptic music by Sturgill Simpson helps frame the situation…
I’ve been participating in Learning2Pivot with doctors Bryan Sanders and Verena Roberts and many others online during this pandemic emergency. The people in these talks make a point of trying to see the forest for the trees, which is refreshing after another week in the trenches of a diabolically delivered remote learning program. One of the main ideas in these meetings is to try and work out a pedagogically credible way forward during pandemic emergency remote teaching, so I’m encouraged to give it a go.
I’ve been struggling with our response to COVID19 since it started (which is why Dusty World has been busy – it’s my mechanism for reflecting my way out of the frustration and hopelessness that has accompanied it). Leveraging our considerable resources to pivot effectively is at odds with much of what Ontario has done in this crisis, but but there is still time to build capacity and create a more resilient, digitally transliterate system that would not only work more efficiently face to face, but could also handle remote learning much more effectively.
OSAPAC’s broken and abandoned website – a good metaphor for educational technology integration in Ontario’s school system
When I started thinking about the logistics of actually pivoting to an effective remote learning strategy, I was looking for a way to harness the power of the digital technology at our disposal while also acknowledging the digital divide and the skills gap that has resulted from our refusal to acknowledge that digital fluency is now an integral part of literacy; this transliteracy includes emerging mediums of digital communication. We have to apply the same rigour to learning the digital aspects of transliteracy as we do the traditional concepts we fixate on. If we did, we could rapidly develop a much more effective and relevant education system.
Ontario had a mechanism for integrating digital technology called OSAPAC (Ontario Software Acquisition Program Advisory Committee), but funding just got cut to that even while this same government was inventing positions at EQAO for its failed candidates. Instead of strengthening the very thing that could have provided direction and resources and even help make elearning more of a possibility in Ontario schools, our educational mismanagement has cut that and doubled down on the Educational Quality & Accountability Office, whose only function in this crisis has been to cancel everything they were doing and provide no accountability at all.
What I’m suggesting below might even be attempted as a zero cost game by taking the money being poured into an accountability office that doesn’t account for anything and spending it to recreate and expand OSAPAC into the Education Relevancy & Resiliency Office. Their job would be to put an end to the corporate branding of educational technology in our system (every board is now a Microsoft or Google board) and restore and expand Ontario’s centrally managed and vetted collection of educational technology tools, while also ensuring that the system develops the capacity to effectively use them. ERRO’s first job would be to make this happen by developing platform agnostic access to a vetted ecosystem of digital technology:
If remote learning were a software systems upgrade in a business, Ontario Education would be getting fired.
I worked in IT for a long time before I became a teacher and was reading about current best practices around upgrading software integrated into a business. These kinds of short term contract were my bread and butter for a while in the late nineties and early zeroes, and the do-or-die, it must work-ness of these upgrades made them a pretty edgy area of IT to work in. When you’re upgrading hundreds of machines in AstraZeneca‘s Mississauga facility, and millions of dollars in lost production are on the line if you mess it up, the process you follow isn’t political or decided by people who have no idea what they’re doing (ie: how education is being run in Ontario at the moment), it’s driven entirely by need and effectiveness.
Doing this wrong could cripple a business so it tends to be run with a ruthless effectiveness. When we were doing a JDEdwards upgrade at Ontario Store Fixtures in the mid-nineties, they brought in a retired marine colonel to oversee the update – failure is not an option, and it’s about much more than just making sure the tech works.
That article highlighted five vital things you need to do if you’re not going screw up a critical business infrastructure upgrade and ensure it’s going to work. We’ve systemically ignored all of them while rolling out remote learning in Ontario in the past six weeks.
Proper planning evidently didn’t happen before schools shut down because this government needed a three week freeze on everything before they were willing to respond at all. What eventually emerged was a poorly supported off loading of all responsibility for this onto teachers in a system that has been drained of capacity over the past year.
There continues to be little or no communication between partners in the system. Our board is continually surprised at whatever the minister decides to roll out at his increasingly oddly timed press conferences. Leaders weren’t on board because they didn’t know there was anything to board – any planning appears to have been done privately and then dumped on boards to try and make happen with little or no support.
The digital transliteracy needed to remote teach in online spaces has never been developed in staff. The digitally fluent ones have had to develop it on their own time and with their own resources. They’ve had to fight to attend events like the ECOO Conference, which had its funding stripped this year much like OSAPAC’s was. This government’s systemic deconstruction of public education has resulted in an atrophied response that wasn’t helped by years ignoring digital transliteracy by the previous liberal government as a vital part of what makes someone literate in the 21st Century.
Our education system has some tough, resilient educators who keep fighting to build system integrity and efficacy, but many have been beaten down by the past eight years of political games. It’s hard to innovate when you’re just trying to find enough space to breathe. All that aside, let’s fix this mess and pivot to a system that has the capacity to remote learn as something other than a political stunt. Here’s how to do it:
STEP 1:
pull the plug on remote learning: As Nam Kiwanuka suggested on TVO, it’s time to stop playing cat and mouse with parents, students and educators and end this round of remote learning. Use May to wind down remote learning, but let’s not waste that time. It can also be used to collect actionable data on the digital divide in our staff and students.
I’ve been collecting data on our staff this week. 24% of our teachers are trying to remote teach on Chromebooks. That’s like trying to play hockey with a four by two.
A digital divide in staff you say? Surely they all have digital technology at home to do this. Well, actually they don’t. Digital transliteracy in the general population is appalling, and most teachers follow that trend. Many don’t have the tech needed to remote teach from home or the digital transliteracy to leverage it effectively.
Instead of trying to assess who has what during an emergency, why don’t we keep information on access to digital technology for all? Knowing this would go a long way to explaining why students (and staff) who struggle in school tend towards poor use of digital tools. How can you be expected to be fluent on a device when you don’t have access to it? This is akin to being angry with a student for not learning to read and write when they don’t have access to any reading or writing material. We really have to expand our sense of literacy to include emerging communications mediums. The printing press fundamentally changed what literacy looked like in society. Our digital revolution is doing the same thing, we simply need to recognize this expanded idea of literacy and act on it.
While we’re wrapping up remote learning 1.0, restart OSAPAC and gather all the boards together. End the corporate branding of school boards and make a centralized agreement with all educational technology companies that gives access to vetted, secure online tools to EVERYONE. Engage the various boards who have all specialized in different systems and bring them together to create a merged digital ecosystem of tools. For the few who have developed best practices around video conferencing and other problematic applications, leverage that experience so we can establish a coherent, viable culture around its use in education.
STEP 2 Instead of cancelling PD make it mandatory for everyone in the education system. June becomes digitally transliteracy training month. Re-orientate on logistics for closing the digital divide in our staff and actually train them in accessing and effectively using a wider range of digital tools that aren’t brand specific.
This isn’t an optional training, it’s mandatory. Everyone is on the clock and we have their attention, time to fix years of lazy assumptions and develop digitally empowered transliteracy in all education staff – that’s everyone from admin support to teaching assistants to building maintenance – everyone becomes minimally fluent in using digital tools to communicate.
For teachers this is a pedagogically driven process. Best practices have been developed by digitally transliterate teachers for years now, and it’s mostly ignored. When digital technology is pushed into a resisting teacher’s practice it’s usually as a substitute (use Google docs instead of photocopies – it’s cheaper!). But digital tools don’t just offer substitution, they offer a different way of doing things. Watching teachers all struggling to gain access to video conferencing simply so they can digitally recreate the out of date lecturing they habitually deliver in school was a fine example of the S in SAMR.
Static lessons and rote student work that is easily plagiarized goes away when educators realize that they are no longer the font of information; we are living in an information rich age. Students don’t need to wait for you to pontificate on a subject, credible information on it is all around us. By pivoting toward student centred learning where teachers are showing students how to access this freely available information rather than disseminating it means a fundamental shift in pedagogy from a rigid, 20th Century, information poor world to the world we live in now. Over this month teachers would not only learn basic technical skills and familiarity with digital learning tools, but also consider a more viable 21st Century pedagogy.
There would be testing in this mandatory training that would be pass fail. Educators who don’t participate or cannot demonstrate understanding of basic principles in digital transliteracy would be expected to retake the course in the summer – they’re not teaching in the fall without it – this is an emergency.
STEP 3
Spend the summer building capacity by working to minimize the digital divide while developing a vetted digital ecosystem for all school boards. There are no more Microsoft boards and Google boards, everyone is both, and more. OSAPAC is back and developing a centralized repository of digital tools. This is an ongoing, responsive process where educators request access to emerging digital tools and OSAPAC does what it always used to do and get Ontario education access to reviewed and relevant technology at a wholesale price.
Over the summer staff would have access to an increasing pool of online learning tools as well as being delivered the technology they need to proceed with an effective remote learning program if it’s needed in the fall.
July and August also gives us time to develop an integrated, grade specific curriculum that focuses students on digital transliteracy. The goal would be to develop a two week intensive curriculum that gives students the awareness they need to proceed with digital tools in a less habitual and more mindful and coherent manner. We’d no longer leave digital transliteracy to chance.
STEP 4
Leverage our transliterate school system. In September, if we’re face to face we still proceed with the opening digital transliteracy crash course, because we don’t know if there will be a second wave and remote learning returns. If it doesn’t, we have a school system that has taken real steps towards being literate in a relevant way, which will improve our learning efficacy while face to face. If we do end up remote learning again, we’ve actually laid the groundwork to do it with a degree of effectiveness we can only dream of at the moment.
STEP 4.1
Have a differentiation plan in place for students (and staff) who are unable to effectively leverage digital tools remotely. These people are the ones that socially distanced in-school learning is prioritized for. We don’t approach this by throwing an elearning blanket over everything. We differentiate and use our school infrastructure for staff and students who need it, while preventing COVID19 spreading vectors. Student need comes before ease of management.
STEP 5
Continue to develop transliteracy with PD for staff that allows them to explore and share online, beyond the walls of their classrooms and schools. Make a point of connecting educators to PLNs (professional learning networks) that have existed online for digitally fluent educators for years now. Expect digital transliteracy in our staff, and encourage its development. OSAPAC becomes a central repository of digital best practices and a place where educators and students can find the tools they need knowing that they are safe. This empowered OSAPAC relevancy and resiliency in digital transliteracy also empowers other groups like ECOO, ACSE and OASBO, all of whom have the history and technical capacity to make Ontario education a world leader in digital transliteracy. Linking up to existing programs like TVO’s TeachOntario could provide online gateways to this material.
STEP 6
Continue to develop transliteracy in our students by inserting skills specific, focused transliteracy learning throughout the curriculum. Make digital transliteracy an inherent part of literacy training in elementary schools. Include basic technical comprehension and skills based digital media development for all students (and staff). Create a mandatory digital literacy course in junior high school that all students must demonstrate proficiency in – better yet, integrate digital transliteracy into literacy, though expecting English teachers to shoulder that burden alone isn’t fair. We use digital tools (badly) in every aspect of schooling now. Imagine how much better that could be if staff and students had more than a habitual grasp of them.
STEP 7
Expand ICT networking infrastructure out of our schools by exploring emerging technologies like Google’s Loon Project which can provide wide spread 3G internet connectivity for everyone. In coordination with the federal government, make Canada’s vanishing digital divide the envy of the rest of the world, and then design education systems that teach and leverage it effectively. Continue to explore and expand Ontario’s OSAPAC to include emerging technologies as they become available on a collaborative, province wide scale.
Did we hit that checklist?
Proper planning preventing poor performance ✔
Communication is key ✔
Get your leaders on board ✔
Train the house down ✔
Build an innovative culture ✔
Yep. This is a plan designed to build capacity and take on the challenges of remote learning, which range from technology access to digital illiteracy. The biggest irony is that many more students (and staff) would be able to participate in elearning in order to diversify learning options for students. Instead of demanding mandatory elearning out of nowhere, developing digital transliteracy in the system would cause it to happen anyway. Of course, we’d have to approach this from a building-capacity-in-the-system angle to make this happen. It looks like that’s not going to happen in Ontario until after June 2, 2022, which means we’ve got more than two more years of misdirection and mismanagement from a government that has no interest in building capacity… unless they can just change their minds
Nam Kiwanuka’s opinion piece on on TVO about why it’s time to cancel the school year highlights many of the problems with technology integration in Ontario’s education system. As a computer engineering teacher in the system I’ve been continually frustrated by Ontario’s lack of focus on developing digital transliteracy in our education system. There are no clear expectations around staff using digital tools and little to no PD around developing fluency in them. Student digital transliteracy is at best sporadic and usually based in if they happen to luck out and get one of the minority of teachers who have personally decided to make themselves literate in 21st Century communications mediums.
Here are some of my reflexive responses to Nam’s article:
“When the government announced its plans for e-learning, I was excited.”
I was not excited, I was frustrated that weeks had gone by with no direction. I was frustrated that at a Ministry level we evidently had no emergency planning in place at all since it looked like it was being made up on the spot. I was frustrated that at a board level we had no idea what digital infrastructure our staff or students had at home. That mismanagement aside, I was worried about what was about to happen. I’ve taught elearning for over a decade and I’m well aware of the challenges involved in it. It came as no surprise that this mandatory elearning government was going to move aggressively in that direction and I knew how unprepared the vast majority of staff and students were to make the move.
“the technology that is being used is problematic. Some of the links the teacher sends work only on certain platforms. So if you’re using a Mac, surprise (!) — you need a PC to access the video. Teachers also send scanned documents that need to be printed, filled in, and then uploaded to Google classroom. So you don’t just need computers and Wi-Fi: you need printers, too.”
There was little or no direction on how teachers should be rolling out remote learning. Other than teachers themselves successfully re-framing this as emergency remote learning instead of elearning (because this is much more than just elearning), we were left in the dark. With the vaguest of directions in terms of hours of work expected (which brutally ignores how students with special needs are supposed to address the work load) and many staff without the necessary tools let alone the skills needed to use them, the best that can be said about emergency remote learning is that it has cast a bright light on our digitally illiterate system.
There are digitally transliterate teachers and organizations who have for years advocated for a coherent development of these skills. The platform dependent work Nam describes above is a great example of digital illiteracy, though I have to admire the teachers in question for trying. It’s like watching someone who can’t read and write scrawl out chicken scratch on a page that no one else can make sense of.
Gary Stager’s principles for teaching online recognizes the limitations of the medium (and the situation) and offers clear and simple steps to making online learning work, but nothing like this was shared with teachers in Ontario. The two weeks of silence following March Break were followed by an announcement that teachers will take it from here. What we were taking and where we were taking it never came up.
“What kids are missing during this pandemic is not homework. What they’re missing are daily interactions with their teachers and their friends.”
The frustration here is that we are actually at a point where our technology could have done this for us, but we’re not literate enough to use it effectively. There are a number of reasons why we can’t leverage technology in education to meet this need.
Firstly there is the digital divide in socio-economic terms. If you fire up your video sharing and get 17 of your 28 students on there I suspect most remote learning teachers at the moment would be giddy with that participation rate, but that’s only about 60% of your students. A number of them won’t have a device that can do it, the bandwidth to see it or the technical skill needed to put all those pieces together, which itself is predicated on access to technology they can’t afford or haven’t prioritized at home.
Let’s say we level the playing field in terms of access. School boards across the province have done back-flips (with no direction or support from the Ministry as near as I can tell) trying to get tech out into student’s hands. A number of years ago I worked with our student success teacher getting refurbished computers out to families in need, but it was a disaster. If you hand people who can’t read a pile of books it doesn’t help them read any faster. All that effort is yet another cart before the horse example of Ontario education’s backwards approach to technology integration.
The second key piece in this is that we haven’t developed the digital transliteracy in our system to make remote digital learning a possibility. Complex tools like video chats require infrastructure and knowledge and familiarity to work. Our board doesn’t enable video chat in our Google apps for Education system for students, so expecting familiarity with it isn’t reasonable. It was difficult enough getting staff up and running on it. The teachers trying to meet that important psychological need Nam mentions are taking huge risks, possibly to their careers, by going cowboy with this.
For those of us comfortable in digital mediums video chat seems like a no brainer, but it depends on complex digital transliteracy and if you don’t have it, you can’t effectively make use of it. In that familiarity lies a hidden third layer that everyone is struggling with. Zoom bombing is another example of digital illiteracy at work and highlights the cybersecurity and privacy considerations that our system is truly oblivious to, even as we drive people into digital spaces. Zoom was a rushed, unencrypted communications tool that used toys to hook people into using it. A digitally transliterate user could set passwords and lock out Zoom bombing, but oblivious users didn’t and a company unfocused on cybersecurity exacerbated the situation.
For all its problems, Zoom does address one glaring issue that many other video chats don’t. The backgrounds you can put into Zoom would mitigate one of the major privacy concerns highlighted so well in this blog post by Alanna King. If a government run school system requires you to video in during remote learning, what are you expected to share? Video chats often show more detail than we’d like. We’ve all seen just how unprepared adults have been to use video sharing tools when working remotely (digital transliteracy is remarkably poor in the general population – which is probably why education is so slow to develop it), but when a government requires minors to show the insides of their homes and themselves remotely it should sound a lot of alarm bells.
A tech-fluent teacher was trying to set up video with his students in the opening weeks of remote learning and wanted to post the videos on YouTube. He was going to show student work on the video in a kind of lecture format. Using digital communications to replicate classroom experiences is one of the biggest failures in education. It shows just how stuck we are in our way of approaching learning, but that aside, are you, as a parent, comfortable with your child’s work being published on YouTube? Are you comfortable with Google making advertising revenue from it? In other cases I’ve seen teachers record video chats with students and publish them on YouTube. The same questions apply, but now they include, are you comfortable with your child and your home life being published on the internet without your say so or oversight? Are you comfortable with Google making advertising revenue from that?
We have the technology to close the gap Nam’s kids are feeling during this pandemic, but we haven’t developed the technical skills or clarified the social expectations needed to do this effectively with adults, let alone children. That all of this technology is trotted out by tax dodging multi-national technology corporations whose main intent is to monetize your attention is just another layer we haven’t bothered to wade through.
“While it’s the right thing to keep schools closed, learning from home is not working for all Ontario students, and that’s why the government needs to follow other jurisdictions, such as New Brunswick, and cancel the rest of the school year.”
I had mixed feelings about this. I’ve hurt myself trying to make this work. My digital expertise is abused and ignored variously and inconsistently because I suspect it has never been valued by the system. I’ve agitated for supports for students and staff based on this complex and evolving situation even as the system has stumbled from one inconsistency to another. My self-selected group of digitally transliterate students are the tiny minority who volunteer to take my optional courses (I teach less than 10% of the students in my school). I don’t have the digital transliteracy issues other teachers are battling with, but then the mental health and socio-economic problems became apparent. Students passing out at work and clocking 50+ hour work weeks while being expected to produce hours of school work seemed cruel and inhuman. Seeing my own family bending under the stress of this ongoing crisis means I can’t do my job as effectively as I usually do as well.
Nam mentions elsewhere the lack of report cards and missed days of school this year. I can’t help but feel that this remote learning caper is just the latest cat and mouse game being played by a government that is still very much intent on dismantling public education so it can sell it off to friends and family in the private sector. Whether it’s driving for elearning contracts with multi-nationals or just crippling our classrooms to the point where private schools seem like a viable option, I’m exhausted by this intentional mismanagement. Maybe pulling the plug on the whole thing is the right way out, but if it is you can bet that Lecce the cat isn’t done playing with us yet. And I hate the idea of giving up. Perhaps, as Nam said, this time could be better spent training and enabling our atrophied digital transliteracy instead of stressing families.
“When a board’s solution to a lack of Wi-Fi access to is to advise its students to access it via a school parking lot, maybe that should be reason enough to rethink our government’s e-learning approach.”
Even something as straightforward as this is a roll of the dice. Our board turned it off. Other boards have opened it up to the public. Even with something as clear as connectivity we have no central direction or organization. That sitting in a school parking lot is the best we can do says a great deal about how we approach the digital divide.
“We’ve also made assumptions about teachers. We assume that all teachers are tech literate and have set-ups at home to manage this work.”
Which isn’t remotely true. I stumbled across this OECD computer skills survey a few years ago and was flabbergasted at how poor digital transliteracy is in our population. Being at the top of that chart meant you could do simple things like take dates from an email and make an online calendar entry from them. It wasn’t even coding or IT know-how, just simple computer use, and most people are staggeringly ignorant of it. Teachers follow the rest of society in this regard.
I’m currently talking to other teachers in my school who are trying to navigate remote digital learning with 80+ students on a Chromebook with a 14″ screen. My digital fluency has led me to get the tools I need to interact in digital spaces effectively, but for many others it isn’t a priority and they don’t have the tools let alone the digital transliteracy to make this work. When the system was doing back-flips to get tech out to kids who don’t know how to use it, few efforts were being made to do the same for staff.
Of interest in that survey, it turns out that younger people do have marginally better computer skills, but only slightly. One of the reasons we’ve done next to nothing in developing digital transliteracy in our schools is the asinine myth of the digital native – the idea that if a child is born in a time when a technology is in use, they’ll magically know how to use it – you know, like we all knew how to drive because cars existed in our childhood. This kind of nonsense has been used as an excuse to do nothing for decades now. I teach computer technology and I can tell you that students are as habitual in their use of technology as anyone else. They might be cocky and comfortable with laying hands on tech, but move them out of their very narrow comfort zone of familiar hardware and software and they are as lost as any eighty year old.
This crisis has shown me things I never thought I’d see: proudly digitally illiterate teachers participating in video staff meetings and kids performing feats of endurance for atrophied student minimum wages while being called heroes by the guy who reduced their minimum wage.
After the year we’ve had (and I won’t even get into how our family has had to fight cancer and limp along on partial salaries for months on end waiting for anyone to help us), I think I’m ready to put it down, I only wish this government would too, but I know they won’t.
I said it in response to Alex Couros on Twitter and I’ll say it again. Maybe the best thing that will come of this is that we’ll start to recognize what literacy is in 2020 and begin to integrate technical and media digital transliteracy into our curriculum for all students and teachers. Given time, we could develop a system that is resilient and able to respond to a challenge like remote learning effectively and quickly – completely unlike how this has gone down.
Emergency remote teaching during this COVID19 pandemic is turning out to be quite unsustainable. I staggered to the end of last week feeling stretched to the point of breaking by the endless administrative push to make arbitrary and pedagogically suspect Ministry of Education remote learning expectations happen.
Three hours per class per week might have sounded like a reasonable though random expectation when it was dreamed up a few weeks ago, but it raises a lot of questions. Here are some from me in no particular order:
1) Basic Needs Have to Come Before Curriculum
How can we set an arbitrary time limit on acceptable work when we’re ignoring basic needs?
Trauma causes a disruption in the foundations need to bring students to learning. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs came about in the 1950s. Abraham Maslow, the psychiatrist who invented the concept, uses it to show how complex human thinking, like learning, can’t happen without basic needs being met.
The current emergency situation has damaged our ability to mitigate the shortcomings students may be experiencing while trying to learn at home. Those students who counted on our school’s breakfast program to be fed aren’t being at the moment. Those students who depended on our developed one on one special education support services in school aren’t getting them at the moment. Even students who may have enjoyed physiological security before the pandemic shutdown might now be experiencing scarcity for the first time as parents are suddenly laid off.
With all of that under consideration, dropping blanketed, mandated hourly expectations on all students regardless of their circumstances is callous to an inconceivable degree. Where is the compassion?
The‘this isn’t elearning or even remote learning, it’s emergency response learning” doesn’t seem to have registered with the people who run things, though it certainly has with all the front line education workers in Ontario who are trying to force this square peg into an infinite variety of unique, never before seen student learning circumstances.
I was so wound up about this on Thursday night after a week of communicating with students and parents in various states of crisis that I was up at midnight trying to think my way out of it on Prezi:
That we’ve also piled transliteracy expectations that many staff and students don’t have on top of a decline in the basic needs required to learn makes the circumstances even more untenable. There are no skills based requirements and next to no mandatory professional development for teachers in becoming digitally transliterate. It only happens with our students when they’re lucky enough to get a teacher who spends their own time and money on developing that critical 20th Century literacy.
A coherent, skills based, mandatory approach to digital transliteracy should be a priority when we return. How this is all going down could be significantly different if we were approaching this with digitally transliterate and enabled staff and students. We certainly wouldn’t have wasted the first three weeks trying to find out if our staff and students even have ICT technology at home before moving into remote learning using tools most of them don’t know how to use effectively.
2) Why is differentiation always the first thing to die when the system decides to act unilaterally?
Three hours for one student isn’t three hours for another. Are teachers being expected to design individual work for the dozens upon dozens of students they are trying to direct through remote learning?
Let’s say Maslow’s basic needs were somehow addressed and we ensured that every student in Ontario has food, shelter and the other basic needs required to climb the hierarchy to a point where they can focus on learning. We didn’t come close to addressing it when times were good (actually, the government in charge is actively working against it), so doing it during a pandemic emergency seems even more unlikely, but let’s say we manage it. Let’s say we also suddenly have staff and students who are digitally transliterate (again we’re miles away from this, but let’s pretend). Even in that perfect Ontario the three hours per week per course per week expectation would be startlingly insensitive to how students learn. Wouldn’t it be great if people were all the same? It’s so hard to manage otherwise! It might have been easy to trot out a suggestion like that, but 3 hours of work is different for pretty much every student, and trying to assess that through atrophied and inconsistent digital technologies is nearly impossible, even for a digitally transliterate teacher.
I have one gifted, ASD student who had to back off on the third year university equivalent artificial intelligence project she was working on remotely because she doesn’t have the mathematics foundations needed to comprehend it (she was worried this would hurt her average – it won’t). I have another gifted ASD student whose anxiety has been triggered by this pandemic to such a degree that he’s unable to do anything (he’s also worried about it hurting his average – it won’t, though that’s me, not system-think). That’s happening with two students with similar IEPs!*
* IEPs are individual education plans that all special education students have, though I think every student should have one since they’re all special and many less fortunate students don’t have parents with the resources to weather the IEP process even when they should have one. In Ontario even our spec-ed support is predicated on privilege. We had to put out thousands in testing to get my son’s ASD diagnosis accepted. If you can’t afford that, you can’t access the support.
Now think about the other three dozen IEPs I’m juggling, but because I’m not an insensitive jerk I treat every student like they have an IEP because you never know what’s happening in a student’s life. Trauma like divorce, a death in the family or parental loss of income can negative influence a student’s learning at any time. Like the kid whose dad emailed me this week in response to my contacting them about a lack of weekly engagement (we’re required to pester people every week if they’re not engaged). His grandmother just passed from the pandemic, but this interfered with our systemic 3hr/course/week mandate and the systemic response we’ve built to force, um, I mean support it.
I have over 60 students this semester. Others have over 90! But bigger class sizes are coming because we’re about to agree to a contract under duress that further deteriorates learning environments by cutting funding and forcing more kids into each class – evidently the pandemic emergency means it’s ok for our government to force (another) illegal contract on us using this emergency as the excuse, but I digress.
Am I supposed to custom design 3 hours of work for each one of my remote learners? Or just throw what three hours of work would look like for a fictitious ‘average’ student (there are no average students in a pandemic) at everyone? Even if it might take some of them 10 hours? Even if some of them can’t do it at all in these circumstances?
Three hours per course per week is the worst kind of reductionist system-think. The project work I set up for my students is based on self reporting, but still has expected outcomes because the way this is going, we’ll be asked to assign grades to work, and if I don’t have that work then a student’s grade will suffer. The people who set this as a requirement shouldn’t be working in education.
OSSTF has suggested pass fail, which is a step in the right direction. I’m going to take it a step further, grades or pass/fail. No one is going to have this situation diminish their grades, period. It would be nice if the Ministry mandated that, but if no one making the big bucks can make a compassionate decision that acknowledges the mess that this is, I will.
3) and what about the labour abuse?
If a student is working absurd hours, why are they still being held to arbitrary expectations around time spent in class? Why is no one looking to labour abuse with Ontario’s students?
It’s the ministry of work now. Labour sounded too dignified.
The education system didn’t just passively let this student labour abuse happen, it caused it to happen when it suspended classes. I’m happen to be teaching three graduating classes this semester. I’m hearing from many of them that they are working more than forty hours per week, in several cases over 50 hours per week in their ‘heroic’ emergency services wage slave jobs. I had one fifteen year old tell me he just came off a 44 hour work week and was sorry he couldn’t do the remote learning because he kept falling asleep while attempting it. I’m supposed to put ‘does not meet expectations’ in his work for week three of remote learning because he’s less than three hours on the clock. I’m also supposed to bother him and his parents (who have been laid off during the pandemic shutdown) every week asking why he isn’t meeting remote learning expectations.
Students in Ontario make an even more miserable minimum wage than the Fordnation reduced adult minimum wage. He likes to call them heroes, but he won’t pay them any more to be heroes during an emergency. He just offered a smaller professional group that doesn’t grapple with minimum wage a raise, but not the kids who we took out of school in order to protect them (or at least not be liable for them) so they could go and work in much more COVID-spreadable minimum wage jobs. Step one would be to realize we didn’t shut down schools to protect students, we did it to protect system liability. Step two would be to ensure all students are rewarded for their ‘heroic’ efforts. I think a $20/hour minimum student wage during the pandemic for critical service work is a start. Step three would be to forgive any student working more than the 28 hour a week student limit. I don’t imagine any of those things will happen though. I’m left wondering if many of these students are still being paid student minimum wage, because over 28 hours a week they should at least be making adult minimum wage. Betcha they aren’t. If that isn’t the very definition of child labour abuse, I don’t know what is. It’s shameful.
***
Being asked to deal with student learning difficulties, socio-economic status and even their psychological challenges isn’t new for me as a teacher, but being expected to be their main point of contact through remote learning for all of these things isn’t just overwhelming, it’s emotionally exhausting. I’m occasionally reduced to tears of frustration by the school system, but last week was a new peak – not that teacher burnout is on anyone’s radar.
When a colleague finally forwarded an inactive student to admin for support the other week the first thing they were asked to do was contact them in more ways. I’m sure everyone who isn’t trying to communicate on a strict weekly schedule of expectations with a many classes of students through the limited bandwidth of phones and online communications is very busy having meetings (I was dragged into no less than 4 last week and I’m a front line teacher), but those of us in the trenches would appreciate some immediate pickup rather than an attempt to off load even more onto us.
While I’m spending my own money on technology, heating, electricity, internet, telephone and burning through more sanity than I should in order to ‘be the education system’ for the sixth week in a row, I’m told that we now have a tentative contract because students need stability at a time like this. I’m not sure why they didn’t need stability last year, or why I had to take another strike day pay cut in the face in order to end up agreeing to what was being offered then anyway, but that looks like how it’s going to go. After a year of outright abuse which has included illegal bargaining (good faith bargaining is protected in the Canadian Charter of Rights & Freedoms, and there has been little of that this year) and repeatedly demeaning our profession, this government (when they aren’t making up fictitious stories about supporting students in remote learning) are going to use this pandemic to increase class sizes and cut learning supports. We haven’t heard the details yet. I’m sure we’ll get a very streamlined process designed to force compliance. It’s hard to work in a system where trust has been compromised in so many places. I just have to remember what’s most important: don’t let it hurt the kids, though at some point I’ll have taken so many bullets that I don’t think I won’t be able to take any more.
It hasn’t been a great week three in remote learning during a pandemic.
Remember the first time you went away from home without your family? I’d done scout weekends and that sort of thing, but the first extended time away was when I was heading to Air Cadet Basic Training in Trenton for two weeks in the summer of 1984. Just before I left I saw The Neverending Story. As a creative kid who was neck deep in Dungeons & Dragons and art, and whose dad kept telling him to stop wasting his time and take real courses that led somewhere, it resonated.
It’s been thirty-five years since fifteen year old me saw that film and an awful lot has happened in the meantime. Having just watched it again, I’m stunned by how strange a film it is. What I took as a high fantasy romp when I was a teen is actually a bizarrely meta (physical) narrative that would make a suicidally depressed Hamlet snort with amusement. The film was directed by famed German director Wolfgang Petersen, and boy does das kopfkino it produces lay on the schadenfreude thick.
The film’s message, that your imagination can save you from the banality of existence, suggests that you need something more than rationality to justify your reason for being. Or, back to Hamlet again, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” I find a great deal of comfort in recognizing the complexity of existence, though many people seem terrified of it and go to great lengths to simplify it. The film’s thesis is that imagination allows us to withstand the pointlessness of existence and offers hope. If you turn yourself off from the impossible it prevents you from holding despair at bay. The scene in the film where Atreyu’s horse gives up hope and sinks into the mud of a swamp (of Sadness no less) is one of the most powerful in the film.
The quest that drives the story forward is the destruction of Fantasia, an alternate reality that exists as an expression of human creativity and imagination. It’s being destroyed because people are losing their hopes and dreams, the very things that cause Fantasia to exist.
***
Viewing this film produced one of those strange lateral connections for me that science minded people put down to coincidence but artists thrive on. I’ve just finished reading Michael Crichton’s Travels, an autobiographical book by the popular author where he reflects on his travels, both physical and spiritual. As a hardening atheist (thanks to reading Dawkins’ The God Delusion) I found myself suppressing eye rolls as Crichton attempts new-age spiritualism again and again in search of something tangible beyond the science he started with as a Harvard trained medical doctor. But Crichton’s canny speech at the end of the book offers an approach to the unknowable that I couldn’t help but agree with.
It’s worth reading Travels just go get to to the closing speech that he never gave. It deconstructs a number of scientific prejudices that hard rationalists cling to even though they aren’t particularly logical, such as surgeries carried out to prevent a possibility of illness with no clear scientific benefit, or the long history of fake experimental results that are accepted because they support a current world view rather than the truth of things. Hard rationalism is as susceptible to fantastic thinking as any other human endeavour. Crichton’s final lines highlight the space he has made for human understanding beyond the limitations of rational inquiry:
“…we need the insights of the mystic every bit as much as we need the insights of the scientist. Mankind is diminished when either is missing. Carl Jung said: The nature of the psyche reaches into obscurities far beyond the scope of our understanding.”
Our rational understanding of things allows us to do many relatively mundane things in the real world, but our existence reaches deeper than that, and we ignore what we are capable of if we limit ourselves to the realms of what our remarkable but limited intellects can comprehend. Put another way, there is understanding to be found in our being as well as in our thinking.
Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching had this covered 2500 years ago. We’ve forgotten a lot of that wisdom in our information age.
In addition to critiquing science’s hypocrisy, Crichton also bounces back 2500 years to Lao Tzu (who I have a weakness for) and describes how the founder of Taoism understood how our rational minds and our irrational existence must work together to bring us into a fuller understanding of our place in the universe. It’s powerful stuff, and a reminder that there is no simple (ie: only mind-based) answers to the big questions. It takes all that we are to even begin to attempt answer them. In embracing our existential intelligence we also come to a more balanced understanding of our place in the world.
***
With Crichton’s angle on how we frame the impossible in my mind, I was slapped in the face by The Neverending Story’s strident attack on reductive, ‘feet on the ground’ rationality in the face of the threat of non-existence. The brief scene between Bastion and his father is stark and cruel, but I think it points to something obvious. It’s never mentioned how Bastion’s mother dies, but the father’s unwillingness to acknowledge it in any way suggests a shameful death, and we all know which kind of death is the most shameful and must not be spoken of.
“When a visibly sad Bastian tells his father that he’s had yet another dream about his mom, he responds that he understands, but quickly adds that they have to move on, emphasizing that they can’t let her passing stop them from getting things done. And just when you think he’ll soften up and help Bastian process his pain, Bastian’s father lays into his son for doodling in his notebook during math class.”
Considering the metaphysical message of this film and that strange dialogue between father and son, I was left hanging on the edge of tears. My Mum was upstairs the last time I saw this film. She’s been dead six years this time around, but that sense of loss is always surprisingly quick to surface. Her life as an artist was frequently derailed and undervalued, and her end was, I suspect, similar to Bastion’s mom’s. The Neverending Story suddenly took on a resonance that it didn’t have before.
The evil that is destroying the world in The Neverending Story is The Nothing. It is quite literally non-existence. Bastion’s father’s brusque ‘move on and keep your feet on the ground’ advice suggests (quite obviously I think) that his mother commited suicide. The entire narrative in Neverending Story is based around Bastion trying to summon his imagination to battle this existential disaster, something that Lao Tzu and Michael Crichton would both agree can’t be done with reason alone. The film’s only weakness is it’s reductive imagination is the answer philosophy. Imagination is vital in bringing you to a place beyond the rational, but populating it with make believe isn’t the goal once you get there. Imagination is what allows us to see beyond the world around us and plumb those existential mysteries. ***
From Kermit the Frog pondering Rainbow Connections to Alice looking down rabbit holes, there is a lot of art that seeks to explore the limitations of rational inquiry and how it fails to answer the big questions. Creativity is hard enough without tying your hands up with rational absolutism, so I can appreciate why many artists lean more heavily on the hidden intelligence found in existentialism for their inspiration; there is power in our being that cannot be easily explained.
Our ability to reach down into our selves and gain inspiration and insight makes us powerful in a way that thinking never can. For the Bastions of Neverending Story, travelling Crichtons and other artists out there, it’s something we should never let the hard rationalists of science ever try and trivialize away as flights of fancy. There are truths in our being that can’t be found through rational inquiry.
Imagination by itself is a fine thing, but when it’s used as a means of opening the door to existential comprehension it really comes into its own. Crichton describes how measurement always misses the quiddity of a thing, it’s inherently reductive to say anything can be completely understood through its measurements. A wholistic, existential understanding, along with specific, rational comprehension, is the most complete way a human being can relate and understand the world. Crichton’s closing lines encouraging us not to ignore and belittle the irrational – something that The Neverending Story also argues, though it gets lost in imagination for imagaination’s sake.
Valuing both rational and irrational human comprehension offers us a more balanced and effective way forward, and gets us into the vicinity of answering the big questions. The trick is not to get carried away with imagination or rationalism and end up treating either one as the answer to everything. As in all things, balance offers more insight.
Other notes:
Atreyu: If you don’t tell me, and the Nothing keeps coming, you will die too, both of you! Morla, the Ancient One: Die? Now that, at least, would be *something*.
Urgl: I like that, the patient telling the doctor it’s all right. It has to hurt if it’s to heal.
From a 2018/the sky is falling/we’re-all-illiterate-because-of-technology point of view, the book keeper’s scorn when talking to Bastion, the pre-teen main character way back in 1983 (over two decades before smartphones) is interesting: Koreander: The video arcade is down the street. Here we just sell small rectangular objects. They’re called books. They require a little effort on your part, and make no bee-bee-bee-bee-beeps. On your way please.
… and reminds me of the Socrates quote and that we’re most prejudiced with our own children. It’s also a timely reminder that the tech of our time doesn’t define us any more than video arcades did in the ’80s. I grew up in them and it didn’t make me illiterate.
The other week Alec Couros asked for predictions on what will come of this pandemic remote learning situation. I find myself straddling this divide. On the one side you have the powers that be who have no interest in changing a status quo that has put them in charge. On the other you have technology multinationals and the branded teachers who support them wanting to use this situation as an opportunity to push a more technology dependent evolution in schooling. In between them all are working teachers who are just trying to make this work.
Six years ago I found myself in Arizona at the Education Innovation (sic) Summit at the invitation of Wikispaces (who have since evaporated). I say sic because it had very little to do with education or innovation and a lot to do with market share and the rollout of an inflexible digital delivery system (or LMS if you prefer). There were a couple of comments from that conference that are resonating with me during this pandemic emergency response. I overheard a senior VP at a multi-national tech company you’d have heard of that likes to ‘certify’ and brand teachers say, “with the new common core curriculum and the charter school push, this is our moment to strike!” You could almost hear the drool hitting the floor from the predators who filled up this ‘education innovation’ summit. This should sound strangely familiar to Ontario educators after this past year.
An opposing moment came as a round table of Ph.Ds talked about data exhaust and tracking the vast improvements that have happened in education and learning thanks to our adoption of digital technology. The problem is that there is no such data. Countries that adopted digital technology in learning early on show little or no statistical change in learning outcomes. This is what happens when we adopt digital technology primarily to reduce photocopying budgets instead of applying pedagogy to leverage new communication mediums.
In the six years since that conference I’ve watched our school systems lurch toward the stake I claimed on the digital frontier, adopting wireless and cloud based technologies and expanding general student access to edtech, but the learning outcomes are seldom different because we have done little to improve digital transliteracy. Students who struggled before tend to actually struggle more in the poorly understood digital cesspool of conflicting mediums. Now that I’m teaching computer technology full time I see it happening on a province-wide basis; technology isn’t the great equalizer, it’s either hugely reductive or an invitation to chaos. Instead of adapting and engaging with new mediums and developing transliteracies around them, we’ve reduced digital technology to a cost saving measure that doesn’t actually save any money. We don’t teach digital fluency, we just magically expect it, and in the meantime we’re buying mounds of technology that almost no one knows how to leverage effectively.
At the end of 2019 a novel virus that we’ve never seen before began spreading across the world. Unchecked it would kill millions and overwhelm our austerity riddled medical systems. After a year of bullying Ontario education with absurd threats of mandatory elearning courses for all, COVID19 suddenly delivered the perfect opportunity to prove that it’s possible. What’s happening with remote learning right now isn’t designed to deliver the best possible learning outcomes using the all of the digital tools at our disposal, it’s a marketing exercise.
I’m in a position where I teach digital technology to a self selected group of students who are much more likely to be connected, have their own technology AND (most importantly!) know how to use it. In our first week of remote learning I’ve got eyes on every one of my students and a 100% engagement rate across all classes, but to use this as proof that elearning might work is the worst kind of skulduggery.
When this all kicked off I was keen to move quickly, take initiative and demonstrate what our digital fluency could accomplish. While the rest of the system lost initiative in two weeks of silence, I had a number of students who were already crushing what would become the radically reduced expectations that the Ministry eventually worked out.
Three hours of remote learning per week per course? We spend over six high bandwidth face to face hours a week in class and senior students usually drop another couple of hours in on top of that. Three hours of remote learning is a tiny fraction of this. How tiny? The introduction to networking piece we usually do in a blended online LMS and F2F grade 10 class on Cisco’s Netacademy takes one week to finish – I’ve given my remote learning grade 10s an entire month to do the same thing, and many won’t manage it, in some cases because the locked down Chromebooks they were shipped won’t install the software, in other cases because of a lack of space or time, and in others because without an adult present some students just won’t do anything. There are so many reasons why this shouldn’t work, but we keep adding more reasons on top.
If we prove this works at all (and many are having trouble reaching even that lowered target), we’ve proven that remote learning is only fractionally as effective as face to face learning, which was why so many teachers fought this government’s callous mandatory elearning push in the first place, and that’s not even getting into digital divides, equity and digital illiteracy. In a perfect case with carefully selected students with the tech, connectivity and skills required, remote learning is 25% as effective as what we usually do. In reality it won’t even come close to that.
***
My ‘let’s floor it and show everyone what digital fluency can do’ approach changed dramatically over the first few weeks as remote learning finally rolled out. Colleague Diane‘s comment in the union portion of our first online staff meeting (another impossibility – our union is famously anti-tech) began a shift in my thinking; this isn’t an opportunity to push elearning, it’s an emergency response. How we name it might sound pedantic, but it isn’t. Names carry implications, and even though Ontario’s emergency response remote learning is pretty much entirely elearning based, it shouldn’t be, as this article from the Broadbent Institute suggests…
“To roll out what has been a specialized program serving a minority of students to the majority of students in an emergency — sets up expectations against which we are poised to fail.”
“The provincial “Learn at Home” approach draws not only on a fantasy of eagerly connected students with ample resources, but also on a fantasy of home free from conflict and space constraints, supported by caregivers who can and will provide structure, motivation, and mediate learning between the teacher and their child.”
There is a lot of fantasy in how this is all unfolding. Over the years I’ve often found myself surrounded by perfectly operational computers that were destined for landfill. At one point I got our student success person on board and built free, Linux based computers to hand out to families in need – it was a disaster. When you hand out unfamiliar technology that people don’t know how to use, they don’t know how to use it – how’s that for a stunning revelation? We’ve just done logistical backflips on a system wide scale in Ontario during this remote learning crisis to do exactly that. How bad is digital fluency in Canadian society? Worse than you think. The belief that ‘digital natives’ who are familiar with habitual use of technology somehow have mastery of it is just another fantasy we can’t be bothered to dispel.
The remote learning push will be what it will be, and what it ends up being will be nothing remotely close to what it could have been thanks to our wilfully oblivious approach to digital divides and transliteracy. We’ve done what we always do: drastically simplify a complex situation for appearances, but it’s to be expected when a critical service like education is run by politics. Handing out books to illiterate people isn’t going to prompt a lot of reading – but that’s exactly what we’re expecting with our sudden onset elearning plan.
Other pedagogically focused educators I look to when reflecting and adjusting my teaching have also emphasized the importance of re-framing this situation away from a digital technology marketing opportunity. Zoe and Brenda have both emphasized the importance of a compassionate, considered approach rather than driving for curriculum consumption. Alanna’s blog post on social media distancing with students changed my mind about trying to recreate a classroom environment by driving for video chat access. Knowing that my students are digitally skilled and connected, I was frustrated when I didn’t have quick pickup from my seniors, only to discover that the quiet ones had suddenly been pressed into 40+ hours a week of reduced minimum wage work and were sorry for not doing the 3 hours per class that private school Stephen, who didn’t need a job in high school and most certainly never balanced a full time reduced minimum wage job during a pandemic, has decided is appropriate.
***
Would I like to see us adopt a coherent digital skills curriculum with specifically identified and developed skills? Yes, I would. I’d like us to become authors of educational technology rather than just consumers or branded representatives of multi-nationals. I seek a nuanced, transliterative use of digital technology and an adaptive, self-aware pedagogy that leverages these new mediums of communication to maximize learning outcomes for everyone. I’ve been advocating for a digital apprenticeship for our students and staff for over a decade and I don’t see that changing, but using an emergency situation to push that agenda is inappropriate, and what we’ve done in terms of expecting miracles from it has cast a harsh light on our myopic approach to digital transliteracy to date.
The irony of this crisis is that it has improved digital transliteracy in one of the hardest to crack bastions of the education system. I’ve seen staff who I would never have imagined on video chats, and doing that while they’re also having to integrate unfamiliar digital tools in a live learning environment (such as it is). If Alec is still looking for a bright side in this, maybe this will be what comes of it; that more educators begin to understand the possibilities of digital transliteracy in learning. Maybe then enough educators will know enough about it to create a sea change in how we approach our digital divides, because it sure ain’t coming from the top down.
We started exploring virtual reality almost two years ago in my senior computer technology classes. In that time we’ve completed a Ministry of Education research grant, presented at severalconferences and built over a dozen VR sets for other schools in our board. VR checks a lot of boxes for me:
it’s technically demanding in both hardware and software so it challenges my students with real world problems they wouldn’t otherwise get to see
it’s a new medium that has yet to be defined, so there are no established rules or right ways to do things. You can’t ask for much more as a media creator and teacher.
it’s rapidly evolving and because we early adopted we are playing a part in that evolution
With all that going for it, I’ve enjoyed the past could of years working out how best to get it to work, and we’re not remotely done.
In October Microsoft blundered into VR with their fall Creator’s Update. Up until that point Microsoft had been quietly developing its very expensive Hololens (we tried it last year at the 2016 ECOO conference) while others went to market. We settled on the HTC Vive as the best of the first wave of classroom ready fully immersive VR systems. I’ve since put hundreds of people through their first experience with it and 99.9% of them come out of it amazed. It never gets old watching someone experience VR for the first time.
Last year building our Vive VR kits meant building a reasonably strong spec desktop computer (a fairly simple ask for my seniors) and then installing the SteamVR drivers and updating all the firmware on the Vive before installing software. After that we had stable, ready to roll systems that knocked out astonishing VR experiences. Headaches were few and once up and running the systems have performed flawlessly, which isn’t always the way with emerging technology.
This year Microsoft added all sorts of VR ready software to this Creators Update which has made our fall roll-out of seven VR sets for other schools a massive headache. What once took ten minutes of installing mature, stable SteamVR drivers is now an hours long odyssey of trying to untangle immature Windows 10 VR kits that try and run the Vive as a Microsoft Mixed Reality headset (which it isn’t). I’m sure this is no accident. If Microsoft can destabilize HTC’s market dominance with the Vive by making the running of it a misery on Windows, then they would (and did).
My frustrated seniors and I were doing multiple re-installs and trying all sorts of driver voodoo to get things working. Microsoft’s sudden interest has borked our VR installs on non-Microsoft gear, but guess what works? Microsoft’s new Mixed Reality headsets. Coincidence? Probably not.
Having a dedicated VR pilot at home lets me test all sorts of software and systems!
We got a Lenovo Explorer last week when it was on sale at the suggestion of a very VR experienced teacher in our board. It’s pretty lousy using the Microsoft mixed reality software (there is barely anything there and the drivers are immature), but running it on STEAM has been reasonably problem free (the odd tracking issue with the handsets but otherwise OK).
Today I tried out Space Pirate Trainer, probably the most demanding interactive title we’ve tried, on the Lenovo Explorer using Windows Mixed Reality and it works a treat. That’s a $400 kit doing what an $800 HTC Vive kit with external sensors does almost as well with much less set up. It’ll only get better as those Microsoft drivers mature.
As it stands now we build a VR ready desktop for about $1400 and then get the enterprise version of the Vive for another $1500. For three hundred bucks less we could buy the equivalent Samsung Microsoft Mixed Reality Headset and compatible laptop. That’d be a kit that is mobile (laptop and no external sensors means easy transport and setup), and similar in resolution.
It bothers me that Microsoft has used its operating system monopoly to elbow out an existing system, but it’s also a step down the evolutionary chain by not having the external sensors of the older Vive system. That’s what you get for not being first in with an emerging technology, you get to edge them out with an evolved product.
With all the driver headaches some of my students (and myself) had moments when we wondered why we’re doing this to ourselves. I finally said, “hey, if you wanted it easy you’d stick to the established technology that everyone else uses. If we want to work with emerging tech, we’ve got to be ready for a fight.”
The fight continues, and Microsoft’s one-two punch of a simpler but effective platform and aggressive monopolistic software has got me thinking about moving on to a better solution. Sometimes doing what the Sith Lord wants is the best way forward.
It’s already gotten more diverse than it was when we presented this at ECOO last month.
Microsoft is pretty cagey about the specs for Mixed Reality. They say any typical laptop or desktop can do the business, but our school’s Dell i5 laptop wasn’t sufficient. If your ‘typical’ desktop costs north of $1500 and your ‘typical’ laptop costs beyond two grand, then yeah, you’re ready to experience mixed reality. They also require Bluetooth which most desktops don’t have, so add that in there too… and the controllers need AA batteries, which the Vive doesn’t.
The wise, Jedi-like Colin Jagoe posted a link about how the COVID19 pandemic is very much like being at war. This got me thinking about how our behind-closed-doors / business-as-usual approach to managing this crisis has been… minimalist. This shouldn’t be about maintaining the organizational status quo, it should be about building a resilient, transparent and responsive approach to dealing with an unprecedented social engineering challenge.
The following reflection highlights how a transparent, communicative, engaged leadership approach helps mitigate one of the truths of fighting a war: “No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.” In the fluid and rapidly changing situation we find ourselves in, it might be wise to lean on some military wisdom in our response.
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I was an air cadet in the 1980s in Mississauga. One of the major pillars of that program is teaching leadership. I took summer courses on it and spent at least dozen hours over and above school each week working through cadet syllabus on it. It’s safe to say air cadets was a seminal experience for me in that it not only showed me how I can best fit into an operational structure, but also how to run one effectively in a changeable environment.
When I was halfway through my cadet career we went up to Base Borden for a March Break training exercise. Pete Rudin was my flight sergeant and as experienced as a cadet can get being only a couple of months away from retiring. I was a very keen new corporal. Our flight consisted of about 35 kids ranging in age from brand new 13 year old recruits up to savvy 18 year old veterans like Pete. We got put into a capture the flag game against other flights, but Pete did something no one else did.
While all the other flight sergeants split their groups up into the standard squads (one experienced NCO leading 4-5 very excited and inexperienced younger cadets) and ran things top down, Pete differentiated his leadership approach based on the human resources he had at hand. His plan was to create a massive group of all the new recruits who were anxious and a bit freaked out and move into the exercise with this slow moving but unstoppable unit. He knew he had a few experienced and gung-ho junior NCOs who wanted to run, so rather than hold them back in the big group he told us to recon where the other teams were and report back.
You can imagine how that felt. When your flight sergeant acknowledges your esprit de corps and gifts you with a special assignment, your already gung-ho approach steps up another gear. Things went as you might imagine. The other junior NCOs and I ran off into the woods full of adrenaline and immediately began finding those little homogeneous squads. As soon as we made contact we’d run back to the hive, usually with that squad chasing us thinking we were an easy kill… then they’d come over a hill and find dozens of excited youngsters swarming around our flight sergeant, and get retired from the game. We began hoovering up squads and about an hour in I stumbled across the other team’s flag – the one we had to capture that would end the game. I barely got out of there alive (if they pulled the flag off your arm you’re considered retired), they had two of their most experienced squads on defence. I managed to get away and ran back breathless to tell Rudin where the flag was. Ten minutes later it was all over as our hive swarmed over the hill into the dell where their flag was hidden. The two squads they’d put on defence couldn’t believe what was coming at them. Our youngest, tiniest new cadet took the flag and ended the game (I think Pete made a point of that).
Afterwards, I asked Flight Sergeant Rudin how he came up with this bizarre approach. He said something I’ve never forgotten: “I figured if I tried to keep you guys back with the big group you’d be hard to manage and it wouldn’t help things. We’d perform better if I didn’t have to micromanage when you wanted to be doing something else that would produce better results for all of us anyway. The little ones looked terrified, so I wanted to keep them with me and build their confidence.”
We were the younger team in that capture the flag, with less experienced NCOs – the other team was cocky and confident because they had many ringers. Rather than open up the rule-book and follow homogeneous protocols designed around top-down control that would have ended up with us losing, Pete differentiated his leadership approach and gave each of his people just what they needed to succeed. He also arranged things so that everyone was in contact with everyone else and made communication easier by giving us a clear focus to return to, it really was a brilliant piece of planning beautifully executed.
I never forgot that lesson. In retrospect, it was the centralization of resources, clarity of the planning (it was all done out loud with us all standing around Pete as he elicited ideas and worked out what we were going to do), and the focus on communication that allowed it to succeed like it did. Everyone knew what we were doing, why we were doing it and how to let the group know if it was or wasn’t working. When we caught the fourth squad who had no idea that three others had been caught by our big hive, I began to realize what that lack of communication was doing to the other teams. No battle plan may survive first contact with the enemy, but designing a plan transparently and reflexively with clear communications channels allows your organization to respond to surprises quickly and effectively.
I ended up retiring a sergeant in cadets. Others have suggested that only making it half way up the command structure is somehow a failure, but I don’t see it that way. I finished my career as Rifle Guard Commander and Colour Party Commander and occupied a specialist role in our large organization. The metacognitive awareness of how I can operate most effectively in a large organizational structure was another invaluable result of my time in cadets. I’m very much a sergeant – good at dealing with tangible, immediate issues in small groups collaboratively and imaginatively (handy classroom teacher skills, eh?). Given latitude I liked to exercise initiative and move quickly – did this sometimes get me into trouble? Yep, but the leaders I had recognized those skills and made a point of leveraging them. That made me feel like a valued member of the organization, rank wasn’t the only thing that defined me.
I was good friends with many of the younger cadets who ended up in charge of our squadron – many of them attended my 50th birthday party last year (we’re all old now, so those year or two differences don’t matter any more – but then they didn’t back then either). They didn’t make rank about exclusion, privilege and control and they acknowledged their cadets’ expertise and experience by making productive use of them by differentiating the roles they assigned.
This collegial and transparent approach to leadership allowed us to execute the cadet syllabus with precision and flair. It also allowed us to revise and respond to the unknown quickly and effectively when on exercises, contact with the enemy be damned. I’m really proud of the things we learned and work we did. This experience has aided us all in our professional lives as adults. This transparent, communicative approach has informed much of my teaching practice. If you asked my students what they find most compelling about my classes, I think many would say that sense of agency – I acknowledge their strengths and honour them by differentiating their work.
I’m missing that transparency, clarity of purpose and engagement now, even though not one of the teens I just described had a post graduate degree in leadership. If we are indeed at war as Colin suggests, then we need to quickly engage and develop effective communications and a clarity of common purpose, or all of those secret plans being developed behind closed doors won’t survive first contact with an enemy we’ve too often underestimated. Initiative is lost, but it’s never too late to try and get it back.
Thoughts from the depths of the COVID19 pandemic: Rather than give in to the digital divide in times of crisis, why not leverage this moment and make moves to resolve it?
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It has been suggested that due to the inequity of access to technology and internet, our education system should shut down during the COVID19 pandemic. Rather than surrender to this inequity, why not attempt to address it directly? We could leverage educational technology manufacturers and create one to one technology access for our student populations on the wrong side of the digital divide.
At the same time we could offer limited access to our public school library learning commons where students would have access to internet. With appropriate safety precautions (limited numbers allowed, strict hygiene practices, solo seating arrangements), we could take immediate steps to bridge the digital divide and allow some form of education to continue for students across Canada. Simply turning off the education system for months at a time will cause lasting damage for millions of students.
This is a measured and logical approach to resolving the digital divide (a lack of educational technology access to all students) that has long plagued education. Rather than having this pandemic make it worse, why not leverage it to make it better?
Handing out one to one technology for students in need so we can keep moving everyone forward educationally wouldn’t be as expensive as you might think and the alternative is significantly more costly. Our public schools have developed the network infrastructure necessary to provide internet, so limited access to that infrastructure could still address the needs of social distancing while providing connectivity.
If this pandemic has shown anything, it’s that our ICT infrastructure is more vital than ever if we’re going to move against this crisis in a unified manner; communication is key. There are existing technologies we could apply to extend school and municipal wireless networking out into the communities that surround them. With fundamental networking infrastructure in place, some innovative final mile solutions (like Blimpernet – an idea that my students and I came up with last year) could make the internet available to many more Canadians just when we need it.
Wouldn’t it be something if one of the lasting results of this pandemic was that it helped us close the digital divide and improve equity through access to technology in our schools? That it would also allow our education systems to continue in a limited capacity instead of shutting down is a consequence that would benefit all Canadians.
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I sent this to a number of MPs as well as the PM. I only hope a measured, reasonable response is still in the cards.
While all that’s going on, proudly trans-illiterate teachers are still sniping at the situation and blaming everything on the fact that the medium they grew up with isn’t the medium literacy is delivered in half a century later. If you can’t navigate the medium, you can’t fully comprehend the message – this is one of the basic foundations of media literacy, yet there are is a majority of righteous teachers intent on protecting this dated idea of what literacy is. Instead of putting their outmoded concepts of literacy on a pedestal, perhaps it’s time to learn something new and accept that the society you grew up in fifty years ago has moved on significantly.
Instead of engaging in this simple and inexpensive solution to minimizing the digital divide on a system wide scale, I’m back at home repeatedly hearing about a digital divide that no one in management seems to want to acknowledge. Only about one third of our staff responded to our short survey of who needed tech at home. Even though we resolved the digital divide for those staff members, two thirds of them in our building may very well be trying to remote teach without the right tools. In other schools across our board and across the province we could be addressing the digital divide in terms of a lack of technology access for staff. Suddenly finding myself back to doing less isn’t how I approach my profession and is a source of constant frustration that I have to let go of less it drive me mad!
