Edtech – Page 23 – Mechanical Sympathy

Special Education

Near the end of my teacher’s college program, Nipissing put on an assistive learning tools workshop. We were all duly wowed by the latest version of Dragonspeak, the latest in PDAs and how they could be used in learning, and a surprising array of speech, numeracy, literacy and subject specific learning tools. It was an all day seminar, and it really had an impact on me. It also made me question the intent of all of this fantastic equipment.

Over and over, it was targeted at at-risk/below grade students who struggled with whatever the technology was supposed to help them overcome. Dragonspeak, there is no doubt, helps students see language in terms of the written word, but why does it need to be so carefully guarded from the general population? If a student struggling with literacy could use Dragonspeak to gain a foothold on something beyond their reach, couldn’t it just as easily help a group of media students get their ideas down in solid form while they were storyboarding a video? Couldn’t it assist a gifted writer who wants to try a different way of getting over writer’s block? These people aren’t anywhere near failing, but if we’re only using assistive tech to help those failing expectations, I think we’re wasting a valuable opportunity.

Those many learning tools we saw that day impressed upon me just how helpful technology could be in learning, I just didn’t understand why it all had to be so Special focused. Any one of those tools could help anyone learn. Learning isn’t easy, for anyone, it’s a challenge to stay focused, it’s a challenge to make the time and space to write, even if you think of yourself as a writer. It’s a challenge to get work in on time, even if you’re a top student. I watch excellent students in the form of teachers doing their Masters struggling with this very issue all the time.

In my senior year of high school, my grandfather died, our family pet died and shortly thereafter my father was involved in a near-fatal traffic accident. Always a B student (why draw unnecessary attention to yourself), my grades slipped, assignments weren’t handed in and things went from mediocre to worse. My teachers berated me for time management, I was not working “to expectations”. I didn’t tell anyone about what was going on at home, I was trying to hold it (and a shaky family) together as the oldest son. I’d never been special enough to get a special education, and the standard one wasn’t fitting now. I squeaked out of high school and it took me 3 years to get my self together and take another run at it in order to get grade 13 and go to university.

Whenever I have a student, regardless of what their Individual Education Plan does or doesn’t say, suddenly miss work, or class, I don’t start grading them in terms of expectations, I ask myself what’s going on in the other 99% of their lives that has little or nothing to do with my classroom. Sometimes I ask, sometimes they tell me, often they don’t, but I don’t take that as license to grade them to Ministry expectations.

Dealing with the system now as a parent for the first time has only enforced my understanding of how streaming generally works. My son is lucky in having 2 educated, very motivated and able parents who advocate for him strenuously. His challenges at school aren’t overwhelming, but many students face much worse obstacles, and don’t have the support at home to take on the system effectively. On a purely experiential basis, we could as easily stream academic/applied and essential into stable family/broken family/no-visible family, and you’d find a startling correlation between our current “academic” system of measurement and an often ignored key indicator of school success.

Differentiating, student centred learning and assistive technology all aim to produce an education that helps a student on as much of an individual basis as we can manage in a system that often has too many people and not enough money. In a perfect world, we wouldn’t have Special Education, it would all be special education, in the meantime, you have to ask yourself, how often have you had grades dictated by a lack of access to assistive technology or poor student performance due to their circumstances beyond school?

Maybe one day education will just be special, but I don’t see that happening as long as we set up static, specific expectations and expect students to achieve them like automatons. An education has surprisingly little to do with building a better person. It’s a biological process, deeply tied to our physical development, circumstances and opportunities, but we still want to assess it as though it were a Victorian industrial process.

Refresh 1

Computer refreshes approach! An ideal opportunity to reconsider all the bad habits we have in educational technology! @banana29 had the following questions for her admin which might help frame a discussion around where we might go with our edtech:

• What are the conditions under which students in 2013 learn best?

• How will these conditions change by 2033?

• How does the way we organize our school computers resemble/support those learning conditions?

• What are the competencies/values that we want our students to learn?

• How does the way we organize our school computers affect those competencies/values?

Some interesting ideas there. What can we do to present relevant learning situations to our students (how can we begin to join the disparities between the information rich world in which they live outside with the information poor one we present them with in class? What trends are we following into the future? How to we develop useful learning habits in digitally swamped students? How can we organize our digital tools to that optimize learning?

These questions lead to some other questions around digitized pedagogy: how can digitization assist in learning? How can it hurt learning? What does good pedagogy look like in a digitally enhanced learning environment? Between the ‘gee-wiz ipad’ crowd and the ‘it’s paper and lectures or nothing’ crowd, there has been precious little consideration of how the digital revolution we’re in the middle of is affecting learning. The forces trying to monetize the process further muddy these waters.

These big questions lead to some awkward realizations. What occurs to me first is that we have adopted educational technology following a business I.T. model rather than pushing for an educational focus. The private businesses that circle education hoping for a quick sale are quick to fill educational CTO positions in school boards. Put another way, find a CTO in Ontario who was ever a teacher. Education has different goals than business. Modelling our I.T. on a business model has created foundations that lead educational technology as a whole in the wrong direction.

A good place to start would be to introduce Chief Technology Officers in school boards who are actually educators. Another good place to start is to begin building educational technology in terms of skills development in a broad sense across many platforms with a focus on general literacy and responsibility of access rather than the paranoid, closed model that has been adopted from private business I.T.. Without a continuum of digital learning that produces students familiar with a variety of tools and responsible for their own access to and presentation of information baked into curriculum, we’ll continue to graduate digital serfs instead of citizens capable of working effectively in digitally networked workplaces.

Alanna asks some good questions that need serious consideration by edtech managers. I consider my side of things in Refresh 2.

Is Simple Better?

Once again Twitter teacher chat raises some interesting educational technology questions. Chromebooks or ipads? Louise’s question had me asking questions about the question. Why have we come to a place where we’re asking which incomplete but branded and popular technology should we buy for schools? Google and Apple have spent a lot of money locking in educators to their brand. To me, that question signals a marketing victory for both of them.

Later in the conversation Julie asked what Chromebooks can’t do. At three hundred bucks a pop I’d hope they can do everything a comparably priced netbook could, but they can’t. They can’t print, they can’t connect to a projector to share a presentation, they can’t install drivers so you can’t use any peripherals on them (one wonders why they have usb ports at all). Want to plug a scanner in to your chromebook? No. Want to plug in an Arduino? No. Want to install a decent graphics editor? Sorry. Want to install a fully fledged word processor instead of frustrating yourself with what g-docs still can’t do? Sorry. Want to install an IDE and do some programming? Nope. Want to try a different operating system, or even dual boot into multiple environments? Definitely not, that is the whole reason ipads and Chromebooks exist, to keep you in a closed ecosystem; you give away usefulness for simplicity’s sake.

It was suggested that Chromebooks are much cheaper than laptops, but this isn’t true either. The much maligned netbook has grown up. What used to be a single core, stodgy little laptop is now a dual core machine that starts with much more memory than it used to. Taking the $300 per Chromebook cost I went looking for a comparable netbook in the fall and found the ruggedized, student ready Lenovo X131 retailing for about $250. For $300 I’d add another 4 gigs of RAM to it and have an 8gb of RAM multicore netbook for the same price as a glorified browser. It’ll run the Windows version of your choice, and any Linux distro you could throw at it all off the same hard drive… oh, and you can install Chrome and still do everything a Chromebook can.

OK, it might be a bit unfair to call iOS a pointy stick,
but calling Linux needlessly complicated isn’t.

I find the limited OSes in tablets and Chromebooks very frustrating. I’ll put up with it in a phone for mobility’s sake, but in a day to day device for learning? I’ll admit, Linux is daunting, but Windows & OSx offer full operating systems with many uses. If we’re evolving into simpler and simpler OSes, what does that say about how we are using (and teaching) our technology?

Code.org is doing their hour of coding this week. I got my nine year old doing it last night. After we gave up on his ipad not being able to run the site we went to… yep, a regular old Windows machine. You can’t even expect an ipad to display a website properly. Won’t that be fun in a class of thirty kids? At least it would have worked on a Chromebook.

During the conversation it was suggested that expecting teachers to understand the basic limitations of technology is exclusionary and doesn’t allow them to focus on teaching. I’d argue the opposite: selecting minimally functional technology to begin with is the problem, especially when we do it through the brand moderated ecosystems offered by Google and Apple. Teachers don’t all need to edit their own kernel in Linux, but they should have an understanding of how various technologies enable and limit their ability to perform basic functions (like opening a website properly), especially in a learning space. Asking for basic digital fluency in teachers isn’t asking too much in 2014. We can then ask for it (by extension) in our students.

This may all sound anti-Google, but I assure you it isn’t. I’ve had a gmail account since it came out and I’ve got gigs of data in various Google drives (Dusty World is written in Blogger!). I own an Android phone because it offers the most open ecosystem. I value the tools Google offers, but I feel like the Chromebook is a tool designed to close off digital opportunities and drive everyone into a Google-centric cloud. It follows ipad down the same closed-system dead-end that Windows is flirting with now.

When I’m using peripherals I need a computer, not a glorified web browser. When I am setting up a complex document I need a proper word processor. I can’t do graphics and video editing in the cloud, I need a general purpose computer, and your students will too, even if that does mean teaching them how to maintain a more administratively complicated machine.

I’d argue for as big a tool-kit that offers as many digital opportunities as you can afford, something the question, “ipads or Chromebooks” doesn’t begin to consider.

Dreaming Of A Representative Salary Grid

One of the reasons I became a teacher is because it seemed like a particularly credible profession. The process of becoming a teacher appeared to have more in common with an apprenticeship than an abstract degree. My teacher’s college in particular was focused on getting us as much in-class time with a working, mentor teacher as possible. Once in the profession, it takes a teacher twelve years to earn full pay, once again implying that this is an apprenticeship that takes a great deal of time to come to fruition.

I’m in year eight of teaching and life on the ground has been somewhat less affirming. The vast majority of teachers I’ve met do little to expand their teaching skills, unless they are new and so desperate for a position that they spend thousands of dollars collecting additional qualifications. Many older teachers I know still have the two teachables they started with, and in some cases aren’t even actually qualified to teach the subjects they are teaching. A surprising number have never updated to honours specialist so they could top out on the salary grid (though that would be hard to do if you don’t actually have a degree or any background in what you’re teaching).

Having found an online community of teachers who are actually interested in improving their craft (and recognizing the changes digitization is having on education and society in general) has been a saving grace, but I still face comments like, “why in God’s name would I want to talk about teaching when I’m not at work?” or “oh great, another pointless PD day” when I’m on the ground in school.

To that end, I’d like to consider revisions to the much maligned ‘grid’ that determines teacher salaries in Ontario. Ranging from just over forty thousand a year (which isn’t an awful lot when you’ve just spent over one hundred thousands dollars on five years of university), to just over ninety thousand a year more than a decade into working, the grid relies mainly on years in the classroom as a justification for pay raises. The difference between an honours specialist in a subject and a teacher who has never lifted a finger to try and improve is less than 5% of pay at the top of the grid.*

I would suggest that there is a lot more to the craft of teaching than years in the classroom, especially if you’re not one of those very special teachers who like to trot out the same old lesson, year in, year out (one you probably photocopied from someone else in the first place). In the great scheme of becoming a master teacher, your activity both in and beyond the classroom are vital to your understanding of how your profession works as a whole.

Teachers who are active in their professional organizations (ECOO, OHASSTA, OLA, OAME, ELAN, OCTE, and others), are working to enhance their craft by working with colleagues in their various disciplines. How this isn’t a consideration in a salary grid is beyond me.

Teachers who are active in school leadership roles (such as department heads, directions teams members, etc) are currently offered a rather silly little stipend to do what is essentially another part time job. They do this with no time given from regular teacher duties, and for a couple of bucks a day. Why these ‘positions of additional responsibility’ aren’t considered in the salary grid is beyond me.

Teachers who take on student teachers and do one of the most important jobs in our profession? Nothing on the grid.

Teachers who spend time developing school teams and clubs over the long term? Nothing on the grid.

Teachers who spend time developing school events like graduation or grade nine introductory programs? Nothing on the grid.

Teachers who spend their own time and money away from home attending professional conferences to enhance their practice? You got it, nothing on the grid.

I’m not advocating for a pay per-extracurricular approach here, but I am asking for a grid that works from something other than how long you’ve been doing the job. If we graded students the same way we salary teachers, they’d get higher and higher grades the longer they are in school, regardless of what they are doing.

Talk of extending the grid from 11 to 15 years is as myopic as basing the grid primarily on years of teaching in the first place. Seniority has its place in teaching, there is no doubt. How long a teacher has been teaching is an important metric in determining their quality, but it certainly shouldn’t be the key factor in calculating their pay.

If we’re going to overhaul the salary grid, let’s really examine what determines a teacher who is trying to perfect their imperfectable craft, and then make a grid that isn’t solely based on how old you are as a teacher. That grid would be fluid and flexible, with people moving up and down in various elements of it. You’d still enjoy seniority bumps, but a senior teacher who does nothing other than show up and go home, offering no mentor-ship to younger teachers, no direction for their school, no enrichment for their students, and who has no specialization in the subject they teach, wouldn’t be able to make within 5% of the trained specialist who offers up their time to lead departments, train new teachers, or lead subject enrichment.

This kind of grid would encourage the kind of meta-cognition we expect to see in our students, and encourage senior teachers to mentor and improve the craft, rather than closing the door to their classroom five years early while they glide to retirement. It would also support teachers who recognize how changeable the world is at the moment and who take steps to try and prepare students for a future that will be quite unlike the past.

If we’re going to fix the grid, let’s fix it. Seniority is only one (relatively minor) metric in considering how hard a teacher is working at becoming a better teacher.

Note: teacher pay based on student test scores are another American myth that are designed to diminish the profession while cloaking justifications (usually financial) in fictional, statistical validity. Standardized tests are inherently limited, and teachers who teach well to them are probably such compliant, mechanical creatures that they are actually poor teachers. US world rankings would suggest that trying to standardize teaching around this kind of testing is a disaster. A well designed salary grid would recognize the many individual ways that a teacher could improve their craft, without grossly simplifying the metrics for excellence (such as basing the grid almost entirely on seniority).

Dancing in the Datasphere

From the Prezi brainstorming graphical interface: http://prezi.com/mlmks5pq65dz/dancing-in-the-datasphere/

If we live in an increasingly data-rich, but resource poor world, what do we need to do as teachers to give our students a fighting chance?

There is no reason to assume that Eric Schmidt is blowing smoke. If we really are generating this much information, and now have a means of saving, reviewing, organizing, and learning from it, we need to radically re-think how we educate our children. Knowledge itself is now plentiful and accessible, teachers are no longer the font of knowledge.

Traditional classrooms work on a data-drip of information, out of the teacher’s mouth. Many of these teachers are willfully ignorant of the radical revolutions going on in their disciplines as information is no longer confined to the limits of human specialists. Interdisciplinary studies are prompting radical changes in how we understand just about everything. Teaching your twenty year out of date university experience out of a ten year out of date text book makes you about as pertinent as a dodo. Many of our current teaching habits assume nothing is changing, but it is, radically, quickly, meaningfully, everywhere but in the classroom.

When I was a kid I was an astronomy nut. I memorized the nine planets, the meaningful moons, I knew distances, sizes; the universe was a (relatively) small solar system with stars beyond. We currently know of over 600 planets, and discover an average of a dozen a week, every week. We are discovering solar systems so bizarre in nature that they beggar belief; but none of that is in the text book, and most teachers won’t bother with it because accessing the datasphere is too difficult with limited technology access in school (fixable with this).

We are discovering these things with drastically improved sensing technology that has been accelerated by the information revolution. We record this data in abundance using storage technology that has been accelerated by the information revolution. We often fail to access it for years after the fact because we have not yet caught up with our ability to observe and record the universe around us. Fortunately we’re now developing systems that sort their own data, and make connections without human oversight – the data itself is beginning to self organize. The future will be smarter than we can imagine as individuals.

This acceleration is happening in all fields of human endeavor. We are teasing free nuances in archaeology, history, and science. We understand in greater detail how the masters painted five centuries ago, we have seen to the edge of reality and felt the remnants of the explosive expansion that started everything. What we haven’t done is evolved education to prepare our students for this deluge of data. We still mete out information because we define ourselves as holders of knowledge. We’re holding a cup of water as the dam breaks around us.

We drip feed students information in class and then complain that they are unfocused, disinterested. We then agonize over how to make our lessons more engaging. We wring our hands over outright lies and insinuations instead of letting the datasphere show the truth; we cater to myth, habit and tradition of paper based learning.

In the meantime a steady stream of data overwhelms our students from social networks that dwarf in size any their parents or grandparents had. We belittle their circumstance by demeaning their means of communication, and overvaluing our traditional modes of contact. Because they don’t ‘pick up a phone’, they don’t demonstrate meaningful relationships like people of a certain age do (oddly similar to what the phone-people’s parents said about them when they couldn’t be bothered to go and visit people face to face any more). Kids nowadays, their social networks are empty things devoid of real meaning.

Worst of all, we don’t teach them how to manage the avalanche of data that threatens to bury them; then we criticize them for not managing it well. Many teachers manage it by ignoring it entirely

We spoon feed them vetted data in tiny amounts because we think that is credible, safe and real, but that isn’t the world they are going to graduate into. Being able to manage multiple, often conflicting data, organize information out of the noise and critically analyze material is far more relevant than memorizing the right answers to the same questions we’ve been asking for years.

Until we take our responsibility to prepare our students for the 21st Century seriously, we will continue to think that slowing them down, unplugging them and ignoring the datasphere that continues to grow around us at a prodigious rate is not only the easier (cheaper) thing to do, but it is the right thing to do too.

What we aren’t doing is making them familiar with their likely future circumstances, and we do it because it’s easier to ignore a revolution than recognize it, even if it’s happening all around us.

The End of Knowledge

I’ve just wrapped up a grade 11 university level English class. I only tend to teach these classes once every couple of years now, so I see real differences in how academic students are evolving with technology use.

This time around we have a Google Apps for Educators system well established and I assumed academically focused students would be very handy with it. I shouldn’t assume these things. Once again I’m surprised at how habitual digital natives are with their technology use; they know how to do the few repetitive things they use technology for very fluently, but asking them to extend that fluency to other software or hardware results in the same kind of frustration you see in anyone. Technology use really needs to be a generally taught skill – teaching specific apps on specific hardware doesn’t create genuine understanding of information technology and what it can do for you.

Beyond the typical tech-incompetence that we prefer to ignore rather than resolve, there were some deeper implications to technology use that became apparent while marking the final exam. As a general rule, I encourage productive use of online information resources. I consider a student who can meaningfully and accurately use the internet to enhance their knowledge to be in a good place academically. I’m starting to rethink that position.

Marking these exams, I was surprised at how many of the students I thought were A+ English students couldn’t see the figurative implications of a fairly basic piece of satire. This article from The Onion was included on the exam, but a frustratingly high number of students thought it was about ants. Those that did pierce the literal barrier more often than not thought it was about the government (?) in spite of me telling them again and again that figurative meaning isn’t your opinion, it’s there in the text. Less than 1/5 of the class were able to recognize the obvious references to religion and see that article as a satire about it.

Google doesn’t know anything. The confusion between
information and knowledge is now rampant. It’s
based on misunderstanding how technology works.

I’m left wondering, as I finalize grades in this class, how many students didn’t so much understand Macbeth as spout internet revelations about it. In class, students would frequently answer questions from the smartphone Google search in their laps. I once lamented, “there is no intelligence left, just high speed internet.”

Perhaps the future of learning is the opposite of what it has always been. Instead of internalizing information and creating constellations of meaning within our own minds, we only need know how to find what someone else said about it on the interwebs. This raises some scary questions around what understanding is. Complex ideas, like being able to see into figurative meaning in a text, aren’t a matter of looking up what to say on the internet. Skills like these are based on interrelated knowledge and practice. If it isn’t internalized, no matter how tedious digital natives may find that process, you don’t know it.

That digital natives, even the really capable ones, are shying away from internalizing knowledge in favour of getting highly proficient at finding other people’s thoughts online is a real problem. General ignorance around how digital technology works allows people to say stupid things like ‘Google knows everything!’ Educational technology happily exists in that ignorance, encouraging the use of technology without understanding the hows of it. Rather than question technology use in learning using epistemology and pedagogy, we try to mimic its general use in society where it is driven by market forces. If the kids are carrying smartphones around with them everywhere, they should be in class too. BYOD, wifi everywhere, a screen for every student; these things aren’t going to necessarily increase learning. When you’ve got Google in your pocket you end up questioning nothing.

Learning has always demanded the internalization of information in order to form knowledge. This was due in part to the scarcity of information in the past, but it also developed the kind of self discipline that allowed knowledgeable people to do their own research. In our information rich world the struggle for knowledge is everything modern education is turning away from. Student centred learning, 1:1 technology, de-emphasis on traditional learning methods – all of this is the new normal. What was once a mentally rich and demanding internal process is turning into flat, generic, external fact regurgitation.

Digital natives live in a world of media at their finger tips. The information revolution is, for them, an entertainment revolution where digital delivery systems create a personalized cocoon of immediate and continuous whim satisfaction. The personalization of media has created the impression that technology is there as either distraction or, at best, a shortcut to easy answers. When all our knowledge is reduced to information we might be able to spout facts, but we understand nothing.

***

After repeatedly being told verbally and in writing that you can’t have an electronic device within reach during a formal exam, one of those grade 11s had his cell phone fall out of his jacket pocket while writing. He wasn’t cheating with it, he just thought all those warnings didn’t apply to him because asking him to leave his phone at the front of the room is the equivalent, in his mind, of asking him to pull off his ears. The digital revolution is fusing itself to our bodies and our minds, and it isn’t always an improvement.

Thoughts on how information becomes knowledge. We simplify a complex process that demands focus and self discipline
when we infect human knowledge with machine fact.

Why bring a prototype technology to an #edtech conference?

I’m just wrapping up this conference in Toronto and it’s another week before we’re back at it in class. This is a small conference where you get to meet and talk to many of the participants. By the end of the three days you’re familiar with a lot of faces, which doesn’t happen at the bigger events.

I was invited to demonstrate virtual reality research my students and I have done in class over the past year. Bringing all the kit involved in setting up multiple VR sets is like bringing all you’d need to project a movie… in 1930. These are the heaviest, most awkward VR sets people will ever experience and it took a car load of tech to set up two headsets.

This ‘state of the art’ technology that is a pain to set up and far from perfect might seem like an odd choice to bring to a teacher technology focused conference. Where everyone else is showing off cloud based software tools or simple electronics, I’m here with this astonishingly complex and expensive technology that clearly isn’t for everyone, but that’s why I brought it.

If you’d have shown up at an education technology conference in 2008 with a touch screen tablet that could run apps, create digital media and replace 80% of the work you do on a desktop computer, you’d have looked a bit mad. Everyone there would wonder why you’re showing off this stuff from Star Trek since it’ll never be used in a classroom. Eighteen months later Apple would produce the first ipad and everyone’s mind would change.

When I first tried the latest evolution in virtual reality last spring I was surprised at how accessible it had become. From bespoke systems that cost tens of thousands of dollars we suddenly saw Oculus and then HTC Vive appear with thousand dollar headsets that would run on a decent desktop computer. It’s not often you see an evolutionary leap that drastic and effective in computer technology (think ipad levels of advancement over a PDA). The prices have since dropped again to under $600.

Bringing VR as it is now (big, awkward, complex) to an educational conference on technology was an opportunity to show people where we’ll be in the next five years. Heavy, hot, wired and expensive VR sets with lots of setup and complication won’t be how many people first experience VR, but it’s important for educators to be ahead of mass adoption and think about how media is evolving so that we’re able to effectively harness it when that ipad moment happens.

VR is evolving so rapidly that it has reached a kind of critical mass with research and development support. Money that used to go elsewhere is being focused on VR development which is further accelerating an already hot technology sector. This means you’ll be using VR in your classroom a lot sooner than you think. Wouldn’t it be something if teachers knew something about it before that happens?

I had a lot of people walk up to the station and ask me what company I’m with, even though this was a Minds on Media event and that means it’s run by teachers for teachers. There is a lot of subtext in the question. The assumption that I had to be some kind of engineer with a VR company comes from a place where teachers assume they aren’t experts on tech, but many are and we should make a point of recognizing those skills as they are a key to improving technical fluency in Ontario education. The other assumption became apparent when people asked me how I could possibly have put this together in an Ontario classroom.

I’m lucky there. My school board makes a point of exploring emerging technologies with the Specialist High Skills Major program. Without that support my expertise as a former IT technician is wasted, but with that support we have an example of an Ontario classroom exploring the leading edge of emerging technologies. The first thing we did after figuring out how to get VR working (and this was a team effort with myself, our board IT department and my senior computer engineering students) was to begin building and setting up VR sets for other schools. This capacity building led to one of my students returning to his elementary school as a coop student and assisting them with their VR research which in turn led us to becoming an ICT SHSM program for the first time. There is a virtuous circle when we enable the technical skills of Ontario teachers and use it to actively engage with evolving educational technology rather than waiting for it to surprise us.

I tend to shy away from turn-key digital substitutions of existing class work. If it is relying on computers and networks you’ve introduced so much complication into something that achieves the same learning goal more simply that I don’t bother. If a poster making session in class would do it, why bother going digital? But there are moments with technology where it offers you something so profoundly different from what you could do in an analog classroom that it begs you to use it. VR did that for us with an opportunity to build digital 3d models and design software for VRspace.

Running Tiltbrush for art teachers from elementary to senior high school always prompted the same result. Artists get excited by a new medium and this is that. If you’ve never sculpted with light before, you can in VR. Using something as immersive and tactile as VR is much better than explaining it. After explaining VR many asked me what the point of it was. After trying VR most of them were lit up by it, suddenly imagining all the possibilities, and that’s what I was there for. I’m not selling you on a platform, or a company, or a carefully designed analog replacement, I’m offering you a glimpse into the future. If you left full of excitement at the possibilities, and pretty much everyone did, then my job was done.

VR offers 3d, immersive interaction with a digital world we’ve only been able to peer through a 2d monitor at before. This will change everything, again.

Dozens of links and lots of information on how to get started in VR in your classroom, check it out!

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Dream Apps

Over the last couple of days I’ve been wishing for a couple of Apps…

Idea #1:

Don’t you wish you were a fly on the wall?

FLY ON THE WALL: an app that lets you share live video from webcams at a conference you couldn’t attend in person. You get a flavour of a conference by following the twitter feed, and you can even interact with it, but you miss the moment to moment ideas, and you’re ultimately limited to what other people consider important.

Fly on the wall creates a live stream that people can watch, similar to the Edupunk spreecast we did the other day. This doesn’t need to be a huge bandwidth deal, and multiple streams from the same location can be upvoted if they are better situated. If people wanted to see the conference through the eyes of a friend, then their choice to stay with them would keep the feed active. People could even offer voice overs or supporting commentary as part of their feeds.

The benefits to conferences would be obvious, they could even tier attendance and offer a discount rate through an official fly on the wall feed to conference presentations. Virtual presence in conferences would become a regular part of the process.

Anyone want to have a go at this with me?

Idea #2:

I’m the sun!

Gravity: a web3.0 app that shows me as the centre of the system and social networking comments in orbits that are closer if they are more important to me.

Tweets that mention me are closer than general tweets, tweets that refer to demonstrated interests orbit in closer. Over time this app would get a sense of what my interests are and float in ‘interest comets’, making suggestions on items that should suit me. Facebook, twitter, Linkedin and Google+ (as well as other social networks) would be synced though Gravity to push objects of interest into your orbit.

A well trained Gravity system would feed you the must see and keep out the flotsam of your social networking feeds.

Idea #3:

Deep Reader: A web app that blocks distractions while you adopt a deep, meditative reading pose with online material. The interwebs are a distraction engine. Trying to read online is a difficult process with constant interruptions. Deep Reader holds off the onslaught while giving you the time and mental space to really grok an author’s thoughts as you used to on paper.

The problem with deep reading isn’t reading a screen, as any Kindle or Nook will show you, it’s trying to read while being in a medium that encourages a shallow surfing of information.

Deep Reader gives you a space to read as you are meant to.

I’d love to see those three. Got any more you’d love to see?

Is Always On Exhausting or Exhilarating?

In a recent conversation with a techno-phobic (or at least reticent) colleague she was bemoaning the constant state of connectedness that modern technology forces upon people. I’ve heard this complaint from a lot of people who struggle to remain unplugged.

The conversation:

she: I choose to remain present and not in a state of constant inattention!

me: It’s more of a oneness with the datasphere, you’re never alone, a living cell in a massive organism… a heightened state of awareness, the world is all around you, information conducted by you…

she: Wow…sounds almost like Zen Buddhism. Ohm.

One of the reasons this onlineness isn’t work for me is because it’s cathartic. I never feel like I’m doing work, it feels more like self expression. I’m the one who directs it, it’s empowering.

What I find exhausting is sitting in traffic, fascism , traffic lights, current Canadian politics, indoctrination and standing in lines. If I had to do that 24/7, I’d go mental, yet millions of people accommodate these things as the necessities of daily life. When I’m online I’m orchestrating my interests, communicating with people I enjoy and feeding my mind. How would I ever get tired of that?

And as for information overload…. well…

Digital Serfs

This topic has come up before, but I’ve been rehashing it in my mind over the past day or two after having a twitter-talk with @innovativeedu.

She posted a blog on using Facebook in class. Before last semester, I would probably have read it, nodded, and moved on.

Last semester I found myself teaching career studies (a grade 10 compulsory credit to prepare students for the work place). It isn’t a challenging course, so our board decided to use it as a pilot to introduce students to elearning. I thought this was a great idea. Our completion rates in elearning aren’t good and introducing students to the technology before they have to go live with it alone and online is a solid step towards fixing things. (I initially wrote about that pilot here).

Even at high academic levels (pre university English is what I’ve taught on elearning), we typically have a 50% dropout rate. Last time through I had a 60% completion rate and I was over the moon about it. Part of the problem is how guidances place students into elearning – it seems to be a ‘you’ve exhausted all other options so we’ll dump you there’ situation for many students – not an ideal way to cull candidates for a technically challenging, lonely learning experience. After doing these recent in-class/hybrid elearning classes I now think the failure rate has to do with digital literacy; very few people have it.

Part of the problem is an educational assumption (usually based on ignorance, age based ludditism and/or fear of technology), that young people have some kind of magical connection to technology that allows them to immediately understand and make effective use of it. We dress them up in terms like ‘digital native‘ and sit there complacently, happily waiting for them to wow us with their, um, digital nativity.

When you’re teaching elearning remotely, you’re not seeing what they’re doing first hand, you just get a (digital) window into what’s going on (which is often nothing). When work does come in, it’s often a jumbled mess. Students ignore things like file format (.rtf please, nothing else, then you get everything else). Students ignore file naming conventions (everything handed in is called document.doc, and is usually not what they thought it was because by mid-way through the course they have a documents folder filled with document(1) document(2) .doc files).

When you do finally get something as (technologically) simple as an essay, they often show little or no understanding of how the word processor they used actually works. They don’t know how to format simple things like line spacing and margins, let alone more complex layout issues like APA citations. There isn’t a lot of room in the grade 12 university bound English curriculum for teaching grade 7 computer skills.

This all leads me to the realization I had in that open grade 10 careers class. In a class of 25 (I taught 4 such classes, they all played out similarly), ten students took to the elearning environment like fish to water. They had the technical chops to manage uploads, file management and the various IT issues that arose. Ten or so had enough computer experience to push their way through the course and be successful. Five or so students in each class had very limited computer knowledge. They were comfortable doing only very specific things with a computer. They had no idea what file types were, how to upload things to the internet or stay focused on what they were supposed to be doing. These students were constantly, and I mean constantly, staring at Facebook.

What’s interesting about that distribution is that it’s pretty much the same across the general population. Teens don’t have a magical insight into technology any more than boomers do. The willingness to learn and understand computers is not age specific.

I should add that all students were on Facebook at various points (including the student who finished with a 100% in the course). The difference between the technically literate ones and the digital serfs were telling though. The serfs weren’t doing this because they were bored, they were doing it because they literally don’t know how to do anything else with a computer.

In working with them I noticed big differences in their Facebook profiles as well. Strong students had media rich walls with many links, comments and discussions with a wide variety of contacts (many of whom were family members); they were media generators and social networkers. Weak students tended to have empty walls, minimal written contact with people (virtually all peers, most of which was appallingly low brow and often related to pictures that would turn their parents’ hair white). They didn’t know how to use the internet to add interesting content, they were users, not makers, and they were not in peer groups that encouraged more effective use of technology.

The more confusing part was that the vacant Facebookers would sit there for hours, looking at pictures, there was very little reading involved. This reminds me of a video I saw the other day. Put simply, many people will not self-direct their learning, even in a media rich, technologically plentiful environment where the entire history of human development is laid open before them. If the gap between what a student knows and what they are being asked to do is so great, the preferred solution is to ignore the situation entirely by pretending it doesn’t exist; Facebook is the ideal go-to in these situations.

These students don’t know what they don’t know, and think they know a lot that is, in fact, wrong (just like those in that video). This is a Zone of Proximal Development issue. Their ignorance is so great that they can’t even begin to realize how little they actually know. Their knowledge is akin to belief.

The internet, for many, is a vacuous, narcissistic waste of time. Their habitual use of very few (often two: youtube and facebook) websites has made them new media illiterate. They know virtually nothing about computers, navigation or using the net to provide resources, to the point of begging even common sense.

“It doesn’t work”

“it’s unplugged”

“I can’t edit this file”

“You’re looking at it in WORD viewer”

“The internet doesn’t work”

“You haven’t connected to the wireless” (this after 3 weeks of doing this)

I’ve had colleagues working with grade 12s who have no idea, not one of them in a class of thirty, about how to create a hypertext. They were supposed to be developing google docs about a piece of literature, but she’s teaching them simple hypertext because none of them have any idea how the internet works.

Until we start taking digital literacy seriously and begin to develop the necessary skills in a coherent manner throughout school, we’re throwing students into the digital sea with very unfair limitations, often based on family circumstance and technology access.