Tag: Edtech

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Infecting The System

If the internet is the nervous system for a new global
culture, should it be artificially limited by human
self interest?

Cory Doctorow ended a harrowing editorial on artificially limited computing in WIRED this month with the observation that the internet isn’t simply an information medium but has, in fact, become the nervous system of the Twenty First Century.

Doctorow begins by questioning why we shackle computers with controls that users can’t overpower, and in many cases don’t even know exist.  He uses the example of the Sony rootkit, that would install viral software on machines whenever a consumer would run one of their music CDs.  The idea was to curb pirating, the result was creating a blind spot in millions of customer’s machines that immediately got exploited by hackers.

Whenever we build a computer that is subservient to anything other than the user, we’re creating blind spots that hackers can exploit.  Whenever our software or hardware is artificially limited to satisfy human values, whether they be government or business or even educationally motivated, we are creating a machine that is flawed.

There is a simple honesty to computing that I find very appealing.  When we’re building a circuit or working with a computer or coding, students will often say that they didn’t change anything but got a different output, or that they did everything exactly right and it doesn’t work.  The subtext is always that computer is up to something.  Whatever the computer is up to, you put it up to it.  Computers don’t make mistakes, humans do.  This is why it’s vital that computers are not controlled by remote interests.  When remote interests dictate computer outputs, you end up with confused users who start to blame the machine.

… because someone programmed HAL to kill.
Machines don’t make mistakes, unless people tell them to.

I’ve long said that computers are merely a tool, but many people see them as intelligent entities with hidden agendas.  If we allow institutions to hard code their interests into our computers then we are intentionally allowing our flaws to infect one of the most honest expressions of human ingenuity.  We’re also creating that confusion around computers as entities with evil intent (we provide the intent).

What goes for our personal devices also goes for our networks.  Unless we are going to continually battle for net neutrality and efficiency over self interest, we’re going to find ourselves with hobbled machines on near sighted networks, seeing only what vested interests want us to see.  In that environment computers and the internet can very quickly move from democratizing force to Orwellian control.  Keeping computers free of human influence is vital to human well being.

I’ve been uneasy about the nature of the modern internet as distraction engine as well as the branding of edtech.  Both examples reek of the infected human influence that Doctorow refers to in his editorial.  Wouldn’t it be ironic if we, as a species, were on the verge of building a more perfect machine that allows us to move beyond our short-sighted selves, but instead of building that wonder we infect it with our own shortcomings and end up using it to create a kind of subservience never before imagined?

I see it every day in machines so locked down that they barely function as computers, with limitations on virtually everything they do.  This is done for ease of management, to satisfy legal paranoia and, ultimately, to ease the burden of digitally illiterate educators, but this approach has me watching whole generations growing up in an increasingly technology driven world having no idea what is is or how it works.  As a computer technology teacher this is difficult to swallow.

The only restriction on a computer should be the laws of physics and the state of the art.  Efficiency and user empowerment should be the machine’s and our only focus.  Everything should be up to the user otherwise these magical machines aren’t empowering us, they’re being used to create dangerous fictions.  Is it difficult to teach students how to use computers like this?  Perhaps, but at least we’d be teaching them a genuine understanding of what digital technology is, and how to wield that power responsibly.  All we’re doing now in education is feeding the infection.

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Emergency Memo: Post Peak, Nov 2014

GRAND RIVER DSB – EMERGENCY MEMO – Mon, Nov 3rd, 2014

NOTE: This memo is being sent to all staff within the board. Following the upheaval and violence over the summer, and the Federal Government applying the War Measures act on a national scale in August, the combined RCMP/Police/Military presence has restored some order. Fuel is being rationed by the Federal Government and the Provincial Government are being asked to enact emergency measures to normalize the situation and reduce chances of mass starvation and freezing as winter approaches. One of the key aspects of the plan is to normalize and enable basic rights, including the right to education. What follows is GRDSB’s plan…

The sudden, sharp rise in fossil fuel prices (here for information) have forced our board to make some dramatic policy revisions in order to match the new emergency management plan recently presented by the Ministry of Education, Province of Ontario.

A typical school bus run now costs approximately $550 in fuel costs alone, and is expected to become even more expensive, making this option economically untenable. With the various unions, we have tried to maintain the collegial relationship of previous collective bargaining agreements while working to create a sustainable public education system in our province. These changes are brought on by world-wide resource issues beyond our control, and we have to modify our approach to education in order to continue maintaining a sufficient level of service. The followings steps will ensure this:

 

TEACHERS

1) Teachers are still required to attend the nearest school to them, preferably without the use of petrochemicals. Those schools with a sufficient number of local teachers will remain open while being retrofitted with sustainable energy devices. In many cases, if you can see a wind turbine or mini-hydro project being built near you, this will indicate a public school.

Note: This is a provincial and federally mandated program in order to ensure ‘energy islands’ in as many communities as possible. The lack of fossil fuels makes mega-infrastructure such as non-localized power generation unsustainable. All communities will now be responsible for generating their own power.

2) If you live out of the board area, it is suggested that you consider relocation, or contact your local board for employment opportunities. We will do everything we can with neighboring boards to ensure that teachers are able to make this transition. If you do neither, and you are no longer able to able to fulfill your contract, you will be declared surplus and released.

3) If there is no local school within walking distance of your home location you may:

a) Apply to the provincial online learning initiative. With this initiative any household with children under the age of 18 may receive free wireless high speed internet, meaning many students will take this opportunity to learn online. As an eteacher you would also qualify for sponsored high speed internet at home. You would then resume your duties by teaching remotely.

 Please click HERE to contact the board elearning conversion initiative for remote students and staff.

 b) Apply through our board for a provincial grant to open a learning centre. If you own or have access to a building that would provide a suitable environment for a micro-school, and there are enough local students you can consolidate your area students into this structure and initiate your own k-10 program. Since all schools are now k-10 schools, you would be in a very similar teaching environment to your colleagues. LCs will be developed where-ever a 10-1 student-teacher ratio can form.

Please click HERE to contact the board provincial liaison for learning centre creation.

 4) Curriculum has been revised and the law altered to reflect our new circumstances. The old standardized tests have been removed and in their place the New Ontario Diploma now exists. This diploma follows previous standards, but offers students earlier departure (students may now graduate between 15-16 years of age) while ensuring that fundamental skills are still evident. The NOD review is highlighted on the updated Ministry curriculum page. It is a two week series of literacy, numeracy, citizenship and general knowledge assessments designed to ensure that a graduating student has sufficient skills to survive in the new, post-peak-oil economy.

 Please click HERE to see the NOD initiative and the new requirements for graduation.

  

STUDENTS

 Ontario curriculum will now be revised and the law changed to reflect our new reality. Students are legally required to be in a virtual or physical personal learning plan until the age of 16. During their 15th or 16th year, students may take the Literacy & Numeracy Review. A mark of 70% or higher in both of these reviews will grant them a NOD (New Ontario Diploma). NOD now takes the place of the OSSD.

 Students who fail the NOD at the end of their 16th year are assessed and presented with a Sub-NOD rating. SNOD60 would indicate a student at 60% NOD requirements. SNOD30 would indicate a student at 30% of NOD requirements.

 Young adults who have finished school at 16 may choose to return, but like ANOD students, they will be required to support their learning financially.

 Following passage of the NOD, students may choose to:

 1) WORK: the reduction in mechanization has put a premium on physical labour, and graduates will have no trouble making a living wage in the new economy. Jobs in agricultural and infrastructure labour are not only available but in great demand. One of the key reasons for reducing the graduation age was to fulfill this need. We can no longer afford to hold willing workers in public institutions until they are 18.

 2) APPRENTICESHIP: the skilled trades have made agreements with the Ministry of Education and post secondary institutions in order to encourage and maintain high skill positions. Students may choose, after completing their NODs in their 15th or 16th years to begin an apprenticeship in any one of dozens of trades. These apprenticeships often involve moving away from home. The Ministry will continue to track and support these students until they reach journeyman status (usually in their 5th year of apprenticeship). Regular reviews will ensure students are in productive, safe, learning and working environments.

 3) ANODs: students interested in pursuing academic streams may choose to complete their Advanced New Ontario Diplomas. These courses are designed to be completed by a capable student within one year. As a result, funding is only available for the 12 months following successful NOD graduation. Students taking longer will have to fund their own studies, including the costs of energy and school access.

 Graduates with ANODs will be able to apply to one of the four remaining universities in the province. Entry into these institutions is very competitive. Only students who complete ANODs on time (or early) with exceptional grades should apply. Courses in post-secondary now tend to be much more applied in nature. Universities are intent on turning out doctors, engineers and teachers rather than unused undergraduate degrees. Students who do not know their major, will find access to university very limited. Students who do not have a working plan for their academic studies will also find post secondary access challenging.

 The new streams are designed around an expected distribution of 60% NOD to the workplace, 30% apprenticeship and 10% ANOD graduates. The manual nature of post-oil food production and distribution alone requires this kind demographic.

 

SUMMARY

The Federal and Provincial mandates recognize that the era of cheap energy is over, and our society needs to adapt in order to maintain and improve our technical skills and preserve the rights found in the Constitution. Public structures such as law and education can ensure that human rights are not being violated and children still have an opportunity to become educated, effective members of our brave new world.

 Children and the poor are at risk of being tyrannized as their value as manual labour has increased and the petro-chemical basis of pre-peak social justice is broken. Without a presence in every community, the weakest members of society are at risk of abuse. With this in mind, it is vital that our public education system reassert itself with the support of regionalized arms of the provincial and federal governments.

 By normalizing schools and supporting local sheriffs, we hope to rebuild a safe and fair society. Drastic times call for drastic measures. Please consider being part of the solution, it’s time to let go of the past.

 Stay warm as the weather is getting cold and ensure that your lodgings are able to withstand a non-chemically heated winter.

 Best of luck,

Your Superintendent.

GRDSB

 ps: as further information becomes available, and the board network comes back up under its own power, I will continue to email the latest.

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Tech Cleaning Up Its Own Mess: how to fix misinformation in digital media

I’m having one of those intersectional moments where my recent work in AI, coding and cybersecurity have me thinking about ways we can fix the worst parts of our digital adolescence.  Media like the tweet below are wearing everyone down, but I think this is a digital media problem that digital media can help resolve:

In this case an elected official is claiming to support children with special needs while at the same time doing the doing the opposite behind the scenes, even going so far as to ignore signed contracts and cancelling support.  As I watched this misinformation I wondered why the digital system delivering it (Twitter in this case), couldn’t include links and information to clarify what I’m watching.  Doing so would help users understand when they are being misled.  Can you imagine a digital media ecosystem that actually encourages truth and accuracy instead of what we have now?


From a data management point of view, rhetoric and political spin should bump up against a scientific analysis of fact based initially on volume of data.  Facts tend to have more data behind them (proving things takes time and information).  Attacking this as a big-data computer science project, statements made by politicians could be corroborated by connecting to supporting digital information in real time.  I dream of the day when I’m watching a politician’s speech live online on any browser (this should be baked into every browser) while seeing an AI driven analytical tool that is leveraging the digital sea of information we live in to validate what is being said.


This information enrichment would do two things.  Firstly, it would create a truth-tendency over time metric that would allow voters to more accurately assess the accuracy of what politicians, news outlets and even each other are saying – a kind of digital reputation.  Secondly, having an impartial analysis of social activity in real time would mitigate and highlight fake news and help social media to resolve its terrible handling of misinformation.

There are layers and layers to digital misinformation.  As we’ve moved from lower bandwidth mediums like text through still images to video, misinformation is keeping up, often under the guise of marketing.  You can’t trust anything you see online these days:



It’s a new form of media literacy that most people are unaware of.  There are plugins attempting to battle photoshopped images and videos that should help stem that tide of misinformation.  Movement on this is fast because parsing image and video data is a more mathematically biased problem, but intentional misinformation either created or shared is also something machine learning systems can get better and better at identifying as they learn the peculiarities of why humans lie to each other.


In the case of something like Vaughan Working Families, a fake organization designed to spread misinformation by wealthy government supporters, the misinformation was fairly easily identifiable by looking into the group’s history (there is none).  That lack of data is a great starting point in training an AI big data analysis system in live response to misinformation – the truth always weighs more because of the evidence needed to support it.


We do IBM Watson chatbot coding in my grade 10 computer engineering class, and it is interesting to watch how the AI core picks up information and learns it.  As it collects more and more information, and supported by students teaching it parameters, it very quickly picks up the gist of even complex, non-linear information.  Based on that experience, I suspect a browser overlay that offers a pop up of accurate, related information in real time is now possible.


In software you have the front end that faces the user and the back end that does the heavy lifting with data.  In the cloud-based world we live in, with people sharing massive amounts of data online, an unbiased, ungameable, transparent AI driven fake news overlay would go miles in restoring the terrible history Facebook, Google, Microsoft and the rest have in interfering with democracy.  This shouldn’t be something squirrelled away and only available to journalists.  It should be a technical requirement for any browser.


With that unblinking eye watching the dodgy humans, not only would politicians be held to a higher standard, but so would everyone.  Those quiet types who happily retweet and share false information are complicit in this information virus.  If your Twitter account ends up with a red 17% accuracy tag because you regularly create and share misinformation, then I’d hope it results in less people being interested in following you, though I don’t personally have a lot of faith in people to do even that.  Left to our own devices, or worse, chasing the money, we’ve made a mess or things by letting digital conglomerates disrupt institutions that took years to evolve into pillars of civil society.  It’s time to demand that they use the same technologies they are leveraging now to fix it.


We’re obviously either too lazy and/or self interested to make a point of fact checking our social media use.  If we’re all on there sharing information, we should all make our best effort in sharing it accurately.  This could help make that happen.  It would also go a long way toward preventing the the cyber-crime epidemic we live in which thrives on this kind of hyperbole and irrational response.


There have been some attempts by charitable organizations and students to create online fact checkers, but the browser creators (Google, Microsoft, Firefox, etc), and social media giants (Facebook, Twitter, etc) don’t seem to be the ones doing it, even though they’ve gotten rich from this misinformation and damaged our ability to govern ourselves as a result.  Law can’t keep up with our technological adolescence and the data avalanche it has produced, but the technology itself is more than able.


https://www.poynter.org/ifcn/anti-misinformation-actions/We increasingly depend on people, often amateurs with little or no funding, to do our online fact checking, but the sheer volume of information, especially when driven by automated processes like bots, makes that unscalable.  This is something that professional  journalists used to do (at least I hope they used to do it, because not many are doing it now).  However, the financial pressure on those institutions due to digital disruption means they are now more than happy to take inaccurate and misleading information and share it if it makes them somewhat relevant again.  The only way to address this situation is by leveraging the same technology that caused it in the first place.

What do you say tech billionaires?  Could we redesign our digital media browsing so it encourages accurate information rather than making it irrelevant?  You might have to actually put some financial support into this since you’ve effectively dismantled many of the systems that used to protect the public from it.





https://time.com/magazine/us/5505429/january-28th-2019-vol-193-no-3-u-s/


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Decentralizing 20th Century School IT Infrastructure

From the Prezi brainstorming digital sandbox: http://prezi.com/h7ms3hw7jx7-/mini-lab/

30:1 student to computer ratios?  It’s too expensive to have a 1:1 student to computer ratio?

This is a load of nonsense.  While the business world has moved on to individualized computing devices and cloud based software solutions, school boards still doggedly hang on to 20th Century thinking about centralized IT with massive, complex software images, difficult to manage intranetworks and remote maintenance of shared machines.

I’ve been on the ground, at class-level watching this fail again and again.  Equipment is vandalized and left inoperable for weeks at a time because no one local bears any responsibility for it.  Technicians are stretched thin between many schools, often not returning for weeks on end.  The already dismal student access to technology becomes even worse.

Labs that contain over-priced, years old hardware are kept under contracted repair long after they have given up every ounce of their residual value and are little more than landfill (and a heavy weight on network efficiency).  Those same labs contain the same, tedious software on the same, tedious hardware; a monotony of labs that offer nothing of the variety and opportunity available in the world beyond school.

The networks are overburdened with file sharing intranets that grind to a halt when many users begin to copy large files to network servers, or overfill limited on-site storage, causing the whole thing to simply stop.  So much focus is placed on intranet software and file sharing that access to the internet itself is through a tiny bit of bandwidth, making access to the largest collection of human knowledge ever assembled jerky, slow or utterly useless.

A modern business office uses task specific equipment to enable users continuous access to their data and their colleagues.  Phones are used when appropriate, but phones are never appropriate in school.  Tablets and ultralight laptops serve the mobile employee, allowing them to input information and communicate as though they are in the office when thousands of miles away.

Technology in education studiously ignores the needs of the student who must travel from home to school and class to class, carrying bags of massive, out of date textbooks.  Student to student communication is discouraged in most learning situations in favour of discipline and order.  If students do communicate in school (and I assure you, they do), they have to do it in underhanded, devious ways that violate whatever the latest technology-banishing rules dictate.

Information Technology in school is anything but.  Perhaps Lack of Information Technology would be a better title.

The mini-lab idea returns technical literacy to teachers from the star chamber of board based IT.  It places local people in charge of local equipment and drastically reduces the costs of educational technology while dramatically boosting the student to digital tool ratio.  Instead of the monotony of labs of out of date, inefficient, over-priced desktops, staff and students would gain access to an eclectic mix of digital tools and begin to develop meaningful digital fluency in both hardware familiarity and data management.  It’s a first, small step in a diaspora away from centralized board IT and toward differentiated technology access that truly serves our teacher’s and student’s needs in the evolving datasphere.

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Pandemic Protocols: A COVID19 Ready Ontario Education System

COVID19 school early in the pandemic –
all that infrastructure not doing anything.
We can do better.

I’ve been reading the never ending speculation driven by an increasing panic on the part of educators as this school year approaches and this Ontario government seems incapable of planning for it.  When the panic rises too high people start making demands for things that we’ve never had, like a guaranteed safe school.  Teachers have been getting ill at schools since schools began, but this isn’t about that, it’s about managing COVID19 to the best of our scientific knowledge.  The point isn’t to aim at the impossible, it’s to put as many reasonable processes in place as possible to protect the people in the system.


This is about secondary (high) school, which might sound odd because no one is talking about high school COVID19 planning, so I thought I’d give it a shot since no one else appears to be.


From my admittedly layman’s point of view there are two sides to COVID19 management.  One is the social responsibility side, which is something people seem to be struggling with.  The other is monitoring and response.  For me, if the system were to spin up in September following these rules, I think we could get things working as well as possible under the circumstances.




INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY COVID19 MANAGEMENT

  • If your child had been in contact with anyone infected they should be withdrawn from school for two weeks in quarantine.  During this time they are expected to keep up with class work remotely unless they have severe symptoms, in which case a doctor’s note can release them from school work
  • Any child who is screened and discovered to have COVID19 is isolated at school and sent home at the earliest possible opportunity with minimal contact with others.  All schools have an isolated space reserved for this possibility
  • Testing will focus on students and staff who were in contact with any infected person
  • If an outbreak occurs (an outbreak is any traced transmission occurring at a school), the building is to quarantine/close for a period of 1 week during which time instruction will go online
  • Staff and students are to wear PPE when in close proximity to each other.  When social distancing is possible it is the preferred method of management.
  • Any staff or student who does not follow PPE protocols is to be removed from interaction and re-trained
  • All staff are trained in PPE expectations prior to the beginning of school
  • All students are to be trained in PPE usage prior to beginning instruction
  • Heightened cleaning regimes are to be followed in all classrooms, especially focusing on shared work spaces and technology.  All will be sanitized at the end of each period
  • Classes will be quad-mestered to reduce traffic, but secondary schools will be open all day on a regular schedule
  • Lunches are to take place in quad-mestered classes
  • Strict hall-pass protocols are to be in place to minimize wandering and out of class interaction
  • No student has locker access during pandemic protocols
  • Students will be required to wear masks while bussing, but normal bussing loads will occur
  • Students will be trained to minimize physical contact while bussing or transitioning between classes
  • Any student who does not comply with COVID19 safety training will be re-trained
  • Students or families unwilling to comply with pandemic safety requirements are to be withdrawn from physical schooling if re-training proves ineffective and offered remote learning options with credible expectations and work required or credits will not be granted
SYSTEM MONITORING & RESPONSE
  • All staff and students will be subject to random temperature tests
  • Any staff or student who show fever will be spot tested for COVID19
  • If COVID19 is found to be present, the staff or student with it are to be immediately isolated from the school population and sent home for a minimum of 2 weeks quarantine (remote learning is expected to continue unless symptoms are severe)
  • If COVID19 is found through tracing to be transmitting between people in a school then an outbreak shall be declared and the school shall be closed and quarantined for one week and all shared surfaces disinfected.  During a school quarantine class work is expected to continue remotely
  • Upon return all staff and students will be tested for fever and any found will be tested for COVID19
  • Random spot checks for COVID19 testing will continue
  • School boards are responsible for putting testing procedures in place at every location that ensure a minimum of 10% of the school population will be tested for COVID19 each term
  • Any classroom which is so over full that it causes repeated closures is to be reassessed (and really should never happened in the first place because learning in such terrible conditions should never have happened to begin with), and reorganized to be more medically and pedagogically sound
TEACHING PRACTICE MODIFICATION
  • Teachers are to provide all in-class material online
  • Where possible teachers are not to provide material on physical mediums (like paper) which can transmit the virus
  • All teachers are provided with technology that allows them to video any instruction which are then to be shared in online classrooms for any students unable to attend
  • Teachers are encouraged to use blended learning strategies that leverage remote learning systems even when face to face
  • Any shared workspaces or technology must be cleaned at the end of each class
  • Remote learning outcomes are to be assessed using the same criteria as in-class learning outcomes
There are countries in the world who have proven that with appropriate individual responsibility, access to cleaning and personal protective equipment and with regular monitoring and rapid response, COVID19 can be managed effectively.  If we’re going to argue that education is a vital service to society then we need to provide access to schooling to as many students as possible in as safe and transparently monitored an environment as possible.  This suggestion emphasizes the importance of social engineering in managing the virus individually while also making it clear what system responsibilities are in responding to an outbreak.  Instead of being paralyzed by this pandemic we should be applying these practical and effective solutions to managing it.

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Digital Collars

Originally published on Dusty World in April, 2014:

Wise Europeans have begun enacting legislation to protect people from the relentless onslaught of digital noise.  Coincidentally, I’ve recently had a number people lamenting the digital ties that bind them.  An article on how students can’t hold a conversation any more and a moody French art film on digital alienation followed:


LOST MEMORIES (French, English Subtitles) from Francois Ferracci on Vimeo.

This past weekend I had an elearning student send an email Friday afternoon and then shrilly demand, Monday morning, a response.  I haven’t heard back from them yet, but I did point out they were getting a detailed response to their email the next school day.  Ironically, that student has never logged in on a weekend and has frequently been weeks late handing in work, but perhaps we aren’t all held to the same standards of immediate access.  That people can yank on that digital leash and demand our attention regardless of their own competence is an irritation.

Another teacher mentioned how his smartphone is spoiling his hunting.  He used to get himself up into his hide and then settle down for some meditative and quiet hours communing with nature.  The last couple of times, deep in the woods, he’s been so busy keeping up with texts and social media that he forgot to commune with anything.  

The same teacher also mentioned that he has called students out for answering texts while in the middle of a working machine shop.  They often tell him that it’s their parents texting them.  He takes the phone and texts the parents saying that the student is busy and should be paying attention to what is happening (it is a machine shop).  It seems parental expectations have piggybacked on invasive digital practices.

One of the reasons I enjoy me motorbike so much is that I can’t be doing anything else while I’m on it, though apparently others have found a way.  The operation of the bike occupies my mind and body completely, it’s very therapeutic living completely in the moment like that.  That the information technology around us constantly pulls us out of the present is a problem we need to resolve.  Maybe the French aren’t out to lunch in trying to protect people from this expectation of being permanently leashed to our information stream.

From the frustration of sitting behind a car at a green light because the driver is distracted (thought they aren’t supposed to be), to helicopter parents being constantly in touch with students, perhaps it’s time for educators to start charting a more socially responsible approach to digital intrusion.

Note:  In case you think it ends there, here is another sad ode to social media, it’s becoming a meme!

 

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Educational Bourgeoisie

A couple of months ago Alanna did a podcast with Albert Fong and myself on seminal books from our adolescence. I was all about Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers when I was a teen.  It felt somewhat biographical (I joined cadets because my friend did – like Juan, the main character in the novel), but in retrospect the philosophy in the novel is what really struck home because it emphasized a clarity of purpose that I’ve always found elusive.  At various points in the novel Heinlein goes to great lengths analyzing the failures of Twentieth Century thinking.  When Juan is in officer training he gets to the bottom of why the robotically armoured mobile infantry of the 23rd Century are willing to have themselves launched out of an orbiting spaceship and ‘dropped’ into a terrifying war zone:


“The root of our morale is: “Everybody works, everybody fights.” An M.I. doesn’t pull strings to get a soft, safe job; there aren’t any – all “soft, safe” jobs are filled by civilians; that goldbricking private climbs into his capsule certain that everybody, from general to private, is doing it with him. Light-years away and on a different day, or maybe an hour or so later—no matter. What does matter is that everybody drops.


…many armies in the past commissioned 10 per cent of their number, or even 15 per cent—and sometimes a preposterous 20 per cent! This sounds like a fairy tale but it was a fact, especially during the XXth century. What kind of an army has more “officers” than corporals? (And more non-coms than privates!)


An army organized to lose wars—if history means anything. An army that is mostly organization, red tape, and overhead, most of whose “soldiers” never fight.”(Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers)



I don’t know where we are in Ontario education when it comes to teachers who are teaching versus teachers who are getting paid as teachers but aren’t, but if you factor in all the support positions across the system I suspect that 20% is optimistic.  For every teacher earning a teacher’s salary that doesn’t teach, classroom teachers carry the burden.  When classroom average sizes increase (as they seem to every contract these days), you seldom see support positions disappear.  The education system is much more hierarchical than you might think.

At the school level we’ve already got a number of teachers working in non-instructional roles, but, like the 20th Century military that Heinlein criticizes, the fairy tale of a system with too much support and not enough boots on the ground continues at the board level where you find people earning teacher salaries doing administrative jobs ranging from shuffling health and safety paperwork to managing budgets.  In addition to making teacher pay without teaching, each of these support roles has to be supported by a multitude of larger classes in order to keep a 23 students to each ‘teacher’ average ratio.

The only place the education system ever seems to want to make cuts or create harsh, standardized testing to assess effectiveness is in the classroom.  Meanwhile, there is a hidden bureaucracy that remains untouched by cuts that hurt how children learn.


I’ve had a go at this before on Dusty World, but what kicked it off this time was a writing gig that came up recently.  I took a swing at it and was surprised to get a call back.  Why was I surprised?  These kinds of jobs tend to get passed around in that insular group of educational bourgeoisie who operate beyond the classroom.  Unsurprisingly, I appeared to be the only classroom teacher in the meeting.  I was then stunned when I was told that instead of actually creating subject specific material for this subject council we were going to create material that supported the specialty programming that everyone else in the group ran as their day job.  A guidance councillor who isn’t even qualified in this subject area then stated that we’d be writing support material for other subjects as well.  This got me quite angry.  I thought the purpose of subject councils was to support their subjects.  The long and the short of this very frustrating interaction is that I seem to have been removed from the program.


I’m still boiling about this as I look at my upcoming dangerously over-full, under equipped classes. Instead of helping me and thousands of other teachers protect our programs,  this subject council is busy feeding the educational bourgeoisie a second pay-cheque to support what they’re already doing in their day jobs at a board office.

I’m feeling very much a part of educational proletariat right now, but then all I do is actually teach. Heinlein was right, your morale takes a real kick in the head when you realize you’re doing the job others found their way out of as soon as they possibly could.

Were it the 23rd Century and humanity were united in an intergalactic war against insects intent on destroying us, I’d be proud to call myself a mobile infantryman doing a difficult job while knowing the organization I work with and the society it is serving recognizes and supports that difficult effort organizationally. Instead I work in Ontario public education.

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VR: visualizing data and realizing potential

Originally published November, 2016 on Dusty World:  https://temkblog.blogspot.com/2016/11/vr-visualizing-data-and-realizing.html

I spent Saturday morning in the next town over demonstrating virtual reality systems at our board’s Digital Saturday.  We had a line up the whole time and put dozens of kids through their first VR experience.  You get to see their first moments when they realize just how immersive this technology is, and then you get the follow up when they start thinking through the implications of what they just tried.  The next ten years aren’t going to be like the last ten years.


Our choice for first VR experience has always been Google’s Tilt Brush.  Users get used to the 3d experience in virtual space by sculpting with light.  This time I launched the Vive using Google Earth VR, which just came out last week.  If you’re looking for shock and awe Google Earth in VR will do it for you.

There was a moment last week when I was looking for Machu Picchu in Google Earth VR.  I was hovering over the Andes about ten miles up looking at various peaks, trying to isolate the ruins.  I looked up to my right and could see across the curve of the Earth into the Amazon basin.  To my left the Pacific receded into the distance.  Looking up I could see the Andes like a bumpy spine up the back of South America.  I was in this huge space looking to distant horizons in all directions.  People often talk about how intimate it feels being inside a headset but in this case I felt more like an ISS astronaut.  This kind of visualization is thought provoking.  It changes how you conceive and manage complex data.  It changes how you interact with digital information.


The first thing many people do when they first enter Google’s virtual Earth is to go somewhere they long for.  One of our business teachers went to her Grandmother’s house in northern Italy.  I went home to the north Norfolk shore.  We both got quite emotional about getting to go home even if it’s only virtually.  Our sense of place is really just immersion in the literal sense.  Virtual reality mimics that feeling remarkably well.  Don’t underestimate VR’s ability to provoke an emotional response with immersion.  How we manage that emotionally powerful response is important, especially if it’s being used for educational purposes.


While at the recent ECOO conference I gave the Microsoft Hololens a try and was surprised at how effective it was for an engineering sample.  It isn’t a full virtual device like the Vive or the Oculus,  instead it inserts digital information into the world in front of you as augmented reality.  Only the user could see a ballerina dancing on the conference floor or digital information like distance and size overlaid on real objects.  The resolution is surprisingly good and the fact that it’s wireless (battery powered and wifi) is totally next level.  This experience suggests that fully immersive virtual reality and augmented reality might start to move off in separate directions in the future.  The Hololens doesn’t send you elsewhere like the Vive and Oculus do.


What’s next for VR?  I’m not sure, but software is constantly probing the limits of what this new display technology can do.  Having data all around you in resolutions you haven’t seen outside of a 4k display means we’re going to be forging new relationships with the digital world.  The days of accessing digital information through a window (screen) are numbered.

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Paper is so 20th Century

@banana29 is currently taking her Master’s degree. We’re already 500 sheets of paper and a lot of toner and electricity into printouts. All of that paper immediately becomes less accessible once she’s read it and made notes on it; it disappears into a stack of unsearchable ideas. Obviously not ideal for keeping your ideas accessible and developing them. Paper is so 20th Century.
The master’s course is online, but the text book isn’t available electronically. Does this strike you as inconsistent? Why would this university make a course available online and then not offer the text digitally? Money!
I’d love to move her to a digital format, where her content creation and her content consumption is entirely electronic, but text book publishers won’t release their content digitally because they can only respect the money they’ve put into paper publication and refuse to see the digital wave happening all around them. Very similar to what music companies did a decade ago, and we all know how that turned out. Burying their heads in sand is exactly what they shouldn’t do, but it’s what they are doing.
The other side of the problem is a good educationally friendly digital window. Ipads are nice, but they aren’t designed to show text books in their original format. With low resolution and limited screen real estate, ipads work very well as quick digital windows, but long term content contact means lots of page turning through a small 1024×768 window.
I had high hopes for the Kno tablet, but it’s been cancelled…
http://youtu.be/uL-2Egqc1qc : Kno tablet awesomeness that never will be.
Is the idea of an educationally focused computer/tablet that mimics text book layout and offers generous screen real estate dead? Can we get by with an Apple monopoly? It looks like we have little choice. Microsoft has cancelled its Courier 2 screen tablet as well. For the foreseeable future, 1024×768 is the only window you’re going to get into ereading.

Kno is now an ebook presentation software for ipad (ipad dominance destroys potential improvements in hardware before they can even appear). This isn’t an entire loss, a piece of software that lets students organize and access their texts on a single device is great, but I think I’d prefer something web based, so I can get at my content anywhere on anything.

The fact that they are trying to force the paper based text industry into providing etexts is also invaluable. They are forcing the change that is coming anyway. Until we can pry text content control from an industry solely focused on paper based money streams, the option to adopt an etext is very limited.
“What a student needs, according to Kno’s research, is something that faithfully reproduces a full-size textbook, without compromise. In contrast, the attempt to cram a textbook onto a smaller screen is a primary reason that previous trials with replacing textbooks with e-readers such as the Kindle DX were abject failures.“

I love the idea of a dual screen tablet that folds like a book. The screens are protected while in a bag, it can be opened into a 2 screen or 1 screen layout (by flipping it over) and one screen could be used as a full(er) sized keyboard, the benefits of a short interface ipad like device or a longer term dual screen interaction with content (that doesn’t require all books to be reformatted).

I also love the idea of a transformable tablet, so here is my wishlist for that ideal education tablet:
  • a tablet that can be purchased like Lego pieces: one screen, two screen, three screen, keyboard, whatever: you can keep joining them together and configuring depending on what you need
  • the ipad2 has nice dimensions, but a huge bezel! And the resolution is too low.
  • Keep the dimensions for length and width but lets aim for 5mm thick (so 2 folded together are only slightly thicker than a current ipad), and 500g (so 2 folded together still only weigh about a pound and a half)
  • instead of a 9.7 inch display, an 11.8 incher would all but eliminate the MASSIVE BEZEL, making for an almost seamless dual (or more) display.
  • 1400×1050 resolution on that bigger screen
  • when you link multiple screens the systems work in sync to offer you a multicore, networked machine, more screens equals better performance
  • yeah, it should run FLASH, and HTML5, and offer an open source, community driven OS (so I guess Apple and M$ are out)
ipad3? Not without Jobsian control. Asus, are you into this? Google? You could partner up for the OS, Honeycomb is awesome! I’d ask Blackberry but they’d take 3 years to get it finished.

In the meantime, reams of paper get printed and paper text books get delivered. Living in a hybrid time period kinda stinks. Twentieth Century, will you end already?
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One Day Edtech Will Amplify Pedagogy Rather Than Stealing From It

Originally published on DUSTY WORLD, February, 2014:  https://temkblog.blogspot.com/2014/02/one-day-edtech-will-amplify-pedagogy.html

 

Pedagogy ORIGIN: late C16th: from French pédagogie, from Greek paidagōgia ,
from paidagōgos,  Sometimes etymology can be wonderfully ironic.

This one is complicated.  Trying to work out the relationship between pedagogy, technology and money is the trial of our times.

The other day Alanna was reading a passage about how little technology has affected pedagogy.  Rather than revolutionize how we teach, technology has merely become a new, more efficient medium for the same practices, it’s done nothing to advance pedagogical practice.  This got me thinking about the relationship between pedagogy and technology.  As I was pondering those two, money crept in, as it always does.

Pedagogy is a rather terrifyingly open concept, but I’ve always found its breadth to be its saving grace.  With a sweeping definition like “the method and practice of teaching“, pedagogy is applicable to the full spectrum of teaching and learning, and that range is truly staggering.  Pedagogy can be found in everything from the coach who reduces their players to mush after a hard practice to the use of a chalkboard in a math class.  It lives in the first turn of a wrench by a budding mechanic and the circling of a grammar error by an exhausted English teacher.  That pedagogy is in everything related to teaching and learning is its greatest strength, it becomes an ideal in an education system that otherwise exists as a series of compromises.

In our real world of compromise pedagogy often makes uncomfortable demands.  This is where money sneaks in.  When we consider sound pedagogy, we consider best teaching practices to maximize learning.  But we don’t go searching for best practices in an ideal environment, instead we attempt as much effective pedagogy as the money allows.  Good pedagogical practice costs money.  Educational technology costs (a lot of) money.  Both are reaching for the same finite, decreasing pot of funding; this can’t end well.

 Does this mean more money always equals better pedagogy?  Not at all, but pedagogy is one of the first things you see diminish in money challenged situations.  Poor schools tend to lack the student to teacher ratio or basic equipment to provide strong pedagogy.  Rich schools can offer smaller class sizes and better trained teachers, both of which support sound pedagogy.  That these pedagogically proven concepts have to compete with the same funding that feeds ed-tech is where the equation gets more complicated.

Digital technology, an expensive new medium of communication, offers unprecedented access to information and democratizes publication.  There is no doubt that it is important as both a skill to learn and a tool with which to learn other things (though education seldom recognizes that distinction and just assumes digital natives magically know how to make technology an effective tool).

Outside education, digital communication has revolutionized everything from manufacturing to broadcasting.  Inside education it has let students type the same essay assignment they would have done on pen and paper twenty years ago, though it has made plagiarism easier.  Instead of making a poster for a presentation, students can now make digital presentations.  All technology has done in education is to offer a faddish means of producing the same old work we’ve always done.  That faddishness appears to take care of the dreaded engagement problem, which excites many boring people.

 Digital technology hardly seems revolutionary in the school context.  If all we’re using it for is as a replacement for paper then it’s just a new, more expensive, less environmentally friendly way of doing what we’ve always done.  If technology doesn’t have an additive relationship with pedagogy it’s a lost cause, and from what I’ve seen it doesn’t.  It does however take a lot of limited funding away from other, proven pedagogical strategies.

The money creep goes further than stagnant pedagogical practice.  It turns out you can make a lot of money convincing educational systems to buy in to technology.  Even if your teachers aren’t considering digital pedagogy, someone still gets rich pushing it.  There is no doubt that money and technology go hand in hand, and with limited funding, as edtech eats more everything else gets diminished by necessity.

When ed-tech eats a big piece of the education pie the assumption arises that the technology itself provides the pedagogy, so you don’t need to (that appearance of engagement pushes this thinking).  Giving students already overdosing on habitual, uninspired technology use technology in the classroom is a recipe for pedagogical disaster.  The relationship between technology and the actual process of learning is tenuous at best.  It only gets worse if we assume the use of technology will magically produce engaged, productive learners.  Engaged maybe, productive?  Not so much.  This peaks when the teacher then throws the same assignment they’ve been doing for fifteen years on a Google-doc and calls it 21st Century learning.  What we end up with is a poor learning environment ripe with distractions that encourages the same habitual use students are already mired in.

The engagement we’re so excited about in educational technology is a smoke-screen.  It is little more than us giving addicts access to more of what they already have too much of and don’t know how to effectively leverage.

***

What is digital pedagogy?  What does digital educational technology allow us to do better in terms of the actual learning process?  Until we answer this question edtech is nothing more than an expensive environmental disaster that has us producing digital dummies.

http://www.economist.com/node/21553017
The Third Industrial Revolution

To appreciate what technology could do for education it might help to see what it’s doing for everything else.  Manufacturing, once a large scale, capital driven process, is becoming accessible to smaller and smaller concerns.  Where once you had to buy million dollar milling machines and the experts to maintain and run them, you can now manufacture complex parts in a small machine shop using digital tools.  Not only  does this free us from a production line mentality, it also frees us from production line products.  We’re moving further and further away from Henry Ford’s idea of product customization.  Digitization is allowing for smaller runs of customized parts in more niche workshops.  As the Economist says in the link above, this really is the birth of a third industrial revolution, the re-democratization of craftsmanship and personalization in production.


Broadcasting has been staggered by digitization.  From a music industry that was forced to change decades of old habits to television that has had to diversify offerings just to remain relevant in a world that can suddenly tell its own stories, digital media and the internet have fundamentally changed how we see ourselves in media.

 

1920s office, look familiar?

Over the course of the Twentieth Century education has been influenced by industrial methods of production even more than business itself.  The classroom, the school bell, the rows of desks, it all points to a Taylorist love of systematization.  It seeks to quantify and sort people in the most cost effective manner possible.  In order to do that it clings to ideas of standardization because it believes this leads to credibility.  It happily ignores sound pedagogy in a blind charge toward clinical efficiency, it’s the most perfect example of a production line ever developed.

What if, as in broadcasting or manufacturing, education were to consider how digital technology could re-individualize education?  Instead of producing modernist widget-students we could use digitization to embrace radical customization.  The systemic methods we use in education – the marking, the timed classrooms, the report cards – are there to process as many students as possible as efficiently as possible.  We reduce them to numbers because we don’t have the resources to treat them like people.  What if educational technology solved that problem instead of replacing paper?

A sufficiently complex Learning Management System would assist in assessment and maintain a current and complex analysis of student achievement.  We see this in a very rudimentary way in online systems like Code Academy, where students are able to review their learning and get acknowledged for their achievements but can only proceed when they have demonstrated sufficient understanding.  The immediate benefit is that each student can move at their own pace.  LMSs should be driving toward this level of complexity, instead they are used as replacements for handouts.

Digitization offers us an opportunity to individualize learning once again.  After a couple of centuries mimicking industrial practices education has a chance to reinvent itself as a digitally empowered, personally focused system of learning, like pre-industrial apprenticeships but on a massive scale.

What does a post-industrial, digitally enhanced, individualized education system look like?  In that relationship, technology enhances pedagogy, it doesn’t eclipse it.  In that relationship there may be monetary efficiencies, but they are a byproduct rather than the point of technology implementation.  In no instance would pedagogy be financially victimized by educational technology.

If you’re still ‘teaching’ information, you’ll quickly find yourself irrelevant in a post industrial education.  In a world where information is abundant, the ability to access it is more important than the ability to afford a teacher to say it to you.  Skills development will still be a vital piece of the education puzzle, and skills based teachers who develop understanding through experience will always have a role, but information delivery is a dying art, assuming we begin teaching effective technology use.

The LMS used in future school is a constantly evolving construct that can access all facets of a student’s learning.  This virtual assessment tool doesn’t just review a student’s ability to retrieve information, but instead looks at them holistically.  In assessing their skills and knowledge, a future LMS would consider learning habits and then suggest individualized tactics for producing best results.  A teacher would be able to see a student’s zone of proximal development before trying to assist them (I have a live graphic playing in my head of what this would look like).  Your progress as a learner includes everything from demonstrated writing ability to the most complex numeracy you’re shown.  It considers your patterns of absence, when you produce your best work and who you do it with.  That future LMS is actually an learning management system, not a glorified webpage.  It can reach across other systems to see examples of student progress in a variety of ways.  When a student activates their LMS it supports their learning and aids a teacher in both teaching and assessment.  Perhaps the modern, virtual equivalent of a paidagōgos.

Instead of being an onerous task done poorly by time harrowed teachers through a computer system that merely mimics the paper based reporting system before it, post-industrial student assessment is detailed, accurate, holistic and personalized.  The machine assists the teacher in customizing the education of each student instead of just producing neater, printed reports of letters, numbers and generic comment banks.

Wouldn’t that be something, if digital technology were to amplify sound pedagogy and revolutionize our industrialized education system into something personally meaningful?  Until we break the mould and begin leveraging digital technology for what it is capable of, we’re just diverting money from the task at hand: effective pedagogical practice.