Edtech – Page 31 – Mechanical Sympathy

Moving the Needle

Originally published on Dusty World in May of 2014

There were a number of incisive and critical reviews of both the U.S. education system and the role education technology plays in it at this year’s ASU/GSV Summit in Phoenix. Constance Steinkuehler mentioned data exhaust, which I’ve already mulled over. At a later discussion another speaker by the name of Brandon Busteed stunned the audience with this:

“Educational technology has failed to move the needle on either cost effectiveness or student success in the past ten years…” – Brandon Busteed, Gallup Education

This is an astonishing thing to say at an education technology conference, but he went on to back up his statement with a boat load of facts that fit so well with the anecdotal experiences of the teachers in the room that many were nodding along with him.

With the magic ipad, Google Apps and wifi for everyone we must surely be personalizing education away from that industrialized factory model we all find so abhorrent. In this digital renaissance we are using our newly found access to information to individualize learning and cater to the needs of each child, right? Surely we aren’t using it to create data from standardized testing. That would be like getting one of those new-fangled automobiles and then hooking your horse up to it so you could tow it into town and show it off.

The chart on the left is completely fictitious. After reading Busteed’s quote from my notes I went looking for data that would prove him wrong; I couldn’t find any. What I did find was that in longitudinal analysis PISA results aren’t particularly flattering to an increasingly digitized learning environment.

Pick your country, from strong performers like Finland and Canada to poorer countries struggling to reach the average, it appears Brandon is right, education technology isn’t moving the needle, in fact it may be hurting more than it helps. That PISA numbers are at best inconsistent and at worse show a decline (especially in digitally focused countries) in the past eleven years should suggest that educational technology might not be as revolutionary as we suspect, or that we’re doing it wrong.

There are a number of influences pushing down student scores. Ironically, many of them are also under the influence of the information revolution. Income disparity is increasing in large part because the world is recovering from an economic crisis inflicted on it by Wall Street quants who harnessed newly available digital technology to play an economic shell game on a global scale. Workers displaced in both economic and workplace digital disruption are not able to raise their children in the same socio-economic environment that they were raised in. The middle-class itself is evaporating as the wealthy harness digital connectivity to push wealth beyond the reach of governments; technology is amoral and caters to the needs of those who can afford it without consideration for right action. Socio-economic factors are one of the key indicators in student success and the vast majority of people in the world are poorer today than they were a decade ago.

***

That digital disruption seems to feed economic disparity on a systemic basis should be a cause of concern for everyone, but especially people in an egalitarian social project like education. Is digitization a tool of income disparity? I’m not sure that we’ve answered that question yet, though I’d argue that if we are creating consumers rather than hackers then yes, it is. Passive acceptance and integration of digitization is a recipe for a newly efficient kind of serfdom.

This could as easily be the promise of edtech

The way digital technology disrupts existing industry is very exciting to the people who sell it. They have been so successful in presenting the idea of freedom from industrialization that digital disruption has become a desired expectation, especially for younger people. Expectation becomes inevitability but the results are producing efficiencies where we aren’t looking for them. Instead of individualizing education (like all the digital education tools promise) we are using digital technology to propagate the worst aspects of the industrial system we’re still clothed in, such as standardized testing and data collection. Instead of freeing us from systemic, cookie-cutter thinking, education technology is supporting a political push to re-institute data driven learning on such a wide scale that no one will be spared. The promise of easily manipulable data thrills educational management because it lends an air of credibility to what has always been a difficult to analyze process.

Instead of complexifying and diversifying our understanding of pedagogy, educational technology is supporting a political push to drastically simplify it, and it’s doing it under an onslaught of data and statistics. Had other examples of digital disruption led to that promised land of personalization, self expression and equality for everyone I might have hope, but as it stands, if you’re just using it you’re also just feeding its assumptions.

The art of our times…

When we put technology into the hands of students without expecting them to understand it we’re asking them to internalize and accept all the compromises and assumptions inherent in that technology, and make no mistake, all that complex hardware, software and networking are full of compromises.

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again, unless we teach students how this technology we expect them to use works, we are laying the foundation for a new generation of systemic thinkers that will make factory formatted graduates look like an egalitarian dream. There was still space to be individual among the gears of the old regime, there is no space between the ones and zeroes of the new one.

Dogmatic Digitization

Digital technology thrives on a covenant of radical democracy that promises information for all. The giants of technology market themselves on this egalitarian ideal. From Google’s corporate counter culture to Apple’s fixation on design to empower the user, technology companies are founded and thrive on the idea of a future of individual empowerment. People love them for it and self identify with digital technology companies in a personal way that is quite foreign to other consumer relationships.

Social norms have changed over the past five years. Where once pulling out a smartphone demonstrated your importance and wealth, it is now a common gesture for pretty much everyone in North America. We’ve passed a tipping point, the majority of people are on a computer connected to the internet all the time. If you don’t believe me go for a walk in any public place and see how many people are operating handheld computing devices.

As the majority adopts digital platforms I’ve seen a consistent dumbing down of digital tools and content in order to reach as wide an audience as possible. This is probably a complaint form many early adopters, but when I see simplicity and limitation rather than functionality and access begin to infect how we use technology in education I have to question the pedagogical value of our educational technology.

In order to cater to as many people as possible educational technology has created systems that hide much of what happens behind simplistic interfaces. Can the promise of radical democratization of information survive when most people want to be spoon fed in the most limited manner possible? Free access to material doesn’t matter when most people only want to use the internet in the same, simplistic way.

Digital technology still presents itself with those early ideals of democratic information access and transparency, but like everything else as it matures it begins to develop a more pragmatic approach. My feeling now is that these egalitarian, transparent technology companies are actually anything but. No one that wealthy feels the need to be transparent, or to educate others. When you are worth billions your goal becomes market share and monopoly.

Educational technology, as an offspring of the digital technology giants, suffers from this dogmatic stiffening of its intent. Rather than focusing on individual empowerment and the promise of de-industrializing the education system they are happy to embrace dehumanizing, data-driven testing, especially if it offers ease of implementation. If education technology isn’t interested in offering users diverse, personally nuanced, highly adaptive, open ended digital learning tools in a transparent and universal access to information, then what hope have the rest of us in a consumer driven digital world? We’re preparing the next generation of drones.

Tweets from the ASU/GSV Summit in Phoenix

We’re in a position as educators and educational technologists to try and direct digitization away from closed systems with limited access to tools and information but the money infects our good intent. Rather than focusing on diversity and acclimatizing students to the radical openness of the internet (something that, like the Wild West, may soon disappear), we preach walled gardens and monopolistic access. We teach students to value limited access in order to train them for a future internet controlled by the rich and we do it because it’s easier, not because it’s better.

For some new tools empower,
but for far too many they create
habitually driven repetiton

That this is all done under the guise of freer information for all is laughable. How can education claim to support the ideals of the early information revolution if it is in bed with pragmatic companies pushing for tiered access to information based on wealth? If the information revolution was ever about ideals it has long since been replaced by moneyed interest.

Between datamining users to support wrong headed standardized testing policies to simply fleecing student data to generate sellable marketing information, the flipside to education technology is complex and not particularly flattering. As a teacher of technology I hope to empower my students with knowledge of how information technology works in order for them to remain independent entities in the brave new world we’re creating. For the other 95% who take no computer studies and yet live on this technology all day every day, I see a future every bit as dogmatic and limited as the industrial one we are now shedding. In fact, it may be much worse because, unlike the punch card factory worker of the Twentieth Century who was reduced to a number for eight hours a day, dogmatic, digitized information demands your undying attention and submission 24/7/365.

If you can’t hack it, it owns you.

Who Owns Your Data?

Tweets from the #edinnovation Summit

There was much hand-wringing over privacy and data ownership at the recent ASU/GSV conference. Serious people in designer suits explained that security is expensive, must be shrouded in secrecy and is never full-proof. Sounds like a great fear-sell for cash infused education systems (sic). Fortunately you can’t really oversee it either because that would be a breach of security; it’s a brilliant piece of hard-salesmanship with minimal oversight.

Listening to the urgency and paranoia in these discussions had me thinking about how privacy and data ownership are framed in digital environments. I’m the first to suggest we be cautious with how student data is shared, but the idea that anything digital can somehow be locked down and owned is ridiculous. I’ve heard ed-tech ‘experts’ go on about walled gardens at length. You can leap over any of those walled gardens with a simple screen capture or text grab, and then it can go viral on the wild internet. Trying to keep data in check is like trying to hold back Niagara Falls with a door, digital data is incredibly fluid, that’s why we can do so much with it.

The second tweet at the top sheds some light on how we are misframing data as an ownable entity. Like your appearance or your reputation, the data you give off is information you emit socially; you can’t own your data any more than you can own your appearance or your reputation. In all three cases you can, of course, influence the social outputs you’re giving, but you can’t own them. Realizing this would stop us from trying to control the uncontrollable and instead let us begin teaching students (and everyone else for that matter) best practices for creating desirable data emissions (there has to be a better word for that, digital reputation? digirep? virtual scent? vBO?).

If we begin to see digital data emissions as a natural byproduct of online interaction (and make no mistake, they are), then the idea that if we throw enough money at it we can make everyone safe gets questioned. You’re never going to hear education technology companies that market based on security suggesting this mindset, there’s no money in it.

The other side of this is privacy. The idea that we can suddenly have privacy now when we’ve never had it before is baffling to me. Before we became industrialized we were mostly geographically locked to where we were born. Without the ease of fossil fuel powered vehicles most of us never travelled more than a dozen miles from where we were born. Do you think anyone had privacy in those circumstances? You were a well established element in a fairly static society. The idea that you could shield your actions from the public eye only really began in the twentieth century. Industrialized anonymity was as much curse as it was something desirable. It was only in the conformity forced on us by industrialization that the illusion of privacy existed.

If the NSA and CIA can’t stop it, do you think that edtech companies can?

We are emerging from that drab, industrial anonymity caused by cookie cutter conformity. The digital world doesn’t expect us to be passive eyeballs counted as ratings in front of a TV screen, it demands interaction and individuality and it restores our voices. As we emerge into an individually empowered, digitally driven world of shared information, expecting privacy is a wish for a poisonous illusion that never really existed.

Privacy isn’t dead, it never existed. Prior to industrialization we had no social privacy at all and during industrialization we were dehumanized into bricks in the wall and given the illusion of privacy because we barely mattered as individuals.

When you’re online nothing you do is private, nothing you do is owned by you. Just as you can influence your appearance by good hygiene or your reputation by performing right action, you can affect your data-appearance by presenting yourself well, but ultimately any data you give off is out there and can spread easily, just like gossip.

The nascent study of digital citizenship addresses a lot of this, but like other digital skills it is an afterthought, never integrated into core curriculum. No wonder men in expensive suits can make lots of money preaching fear and convincing educators to spend their budgets on myth and innuendo. Perhaps one day educators will take the job of understanding and teaching digital skills seriously and ignore the snake oil.

They Know Not What They Do

Yesterday the Waterloo Region District School Board didn’t cancel school due to inclement weather. The response they got on Twitter was, to say the least, shocking. That students don’t understand how the internet works is apparent in how they present themselves online. Some of their comments not only reflected their ignorance but also uncovered a mob mentality that frequently appears online. Students think they are private and anonymous when they are in fact standing on a world-wide stage making fools of themselves.

People outside of Kitchener can see Twitter? Dude!

The fellow on the left is surprised that people not from Kitchener are responding to tweets. The entire world could see these tweets and they’re now a permanent part of the digital record, you can’t take back what was said in anger online. You can only imagine what this does for their digital footprint, not that anyone is teaching them this in school.

My wife suggested that if WRDSB hadn’t let all their elementary librarians go in the last ten years, those librarians might have been there to teach this generation of ‘digital natives‘ how not to make fools of themselves online. I only wish that were true. The vast majority of librarians I’ve met are determined not to address digital citizenship because they feel that technology is a threat to traditional (book based) learning. Alanna herself didn’t get hired recently because she ‘was too digitally focused’. I fear that librarians themselves and the people who hire them aren’t the ones to fix this.

So who does teach digital citizenship? I’ve got a teacher at my school who does it because he feels it’s a vital part of any relevant, modern civics course – he doesn’t even have a full contract. The only people addressing digital citizenship are outliers, though our students (those digital natives) are expressing themselves inappropriately through this technology all the time.

The mob mentality and the righteousness that comes with it.

Take a moment to look over the tweets directed at WRDSB in the last 24 hours and you see students making the common mistake (because the formats are similar) of assuming tweets are like texts. In the student’s mind they are texting directly to their school board but, of course, that is not how Twitter works. You see students unaware they they are publishing death threats publicly, you see students encouraging the mob mentality that had them hurling invective at their school board. You have to wonder what a kid in Rwanda thinks about all of these grammar impaired, spoiled, first world kids commplaining about having to go to school. Yes, people in Rwanda can read your tweets.

So we’re left with an awkward, embarrassing situation here, and not one limited to Waterloo Region. We have students who spend the majority of their time in digital communications without realizing what it is or how it works. We have students who are essentially making themselves unemployable by creating such deplorable digital footprints that no one would touch them. Can you imagine what you’d do if you googled the kid who just asked for a job and found death threats against their school board published online? It shows a startling lack of prudence.

Instead of embracing digital communications to create a live résumé that would generate job offers for them, they are building themselves a digital ghetto, and this is happening on a massive scale. An entire generation of students are making themselves irrelevant. I wonder how many more times this will happen before we start to integrate digital citizenship into curriculum like it matters.

ASD Heroes and Where To Find Them

Seeing a neuro-atypical hero who resembles yourself is jarring.
Seeing one that defies toxic masculine stereotypes is thrilling,
bad probably for business. People prefer reductive stereotypes.

Throughout my life I’ve been kindly described by friends and family as ‘marching to the beat of a different drummer’. In less supportive circumstances I’ve met people who take an immediate and intense dislike to that difference. When I was younger this often involved a gathering of like minded people and me getting a beating. It persists into adulthood and frustrates many of my attempts at socializing.

As an adolescent I tried to harness the anger I was feeling in those beatings and express it physically but just couldn’t. The thought of hurting someone else while I was in a rage was something I couldn’t bring myself to do. I recall several instances when a part of me was impassionately observing my assailants. The look of sheer, savage joy on their faces was utterly foreign to me; it’s something I couldn’t begin to emulate. Knowing that this kind of viciousness is pretty common in human beings is one of the reasons I’m so cautious with them. I’ve yet, at nearly fifty years old, laid knuckles on anyone else in anger, it just isn’t in me though I’ve often wished it were – it would make being male much easier. I suspect my gender dysphoria is at least in part due to this sense of alienation with what most consider to be appropriate male behaviour.

Being the bottom feeder it is, media is only happy to capitalize on this base, stereotypically reductive male behaviour. Unless your hero is an aggressive sociopath he isn’t a real man. You’d be hard pressed to find any male hero that isn’t written into this bizarre little box and then used as a dimensionless plot device to drive adrenaline fueled violence. For men looking for another way of being male that isn’t founded on this mythology, there isn’t much out there. For a neuro-atypical male the opportunity to see heroes that in any way reflect my experience is pretty much a zero game, I never see anyone like myself on film.

Last weekend we went to see Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, the latest Harry Potter film. I’d almost been talked out of seeing it by CBC’s movie critic Eli Glasner, who seemed to dislike every aspect of the film, but especially the main character, Newt Scamander, who he described as awkward and unlikeable. I don’t disagree with Glasner’s analysis of the plot, I think JK(Rowling – the author) tried to fit too much into one film and it gets a bit jumbled (I’d love to see an edited version that cleans up the plot), but when it comes to Eddie Redmayne’s character Newt I was annoyed at Glasner’s neurotypically prejudiced response to his complex, non-typical heroism. Fortunately, I’m not the only one:

(at 9:12 on): “Newt exhibits the characteristics of someone on the autism spectrum. He’s awkward in social settings. He doesn’t like being touched. He feels intense empathy for others but has trouble connecting to people and making friends… careful viewers will notice his aversion to direct eye contact…. Newt’s social anxieties are not framed in the stereotypical ways we’ve come to expect from Hollywood.”

That description of what ASD can feel like certainly resonates with me. What a stark difference it is to every other male hero you see in film. Newt’s neuro-atypicality allows JK to avoid the toxic masculine stereo-trap while also presenting a viable alternative hero. Many examples are shown in the video above of the kind of sociopathic, violent movie hero we show our boys in film. The majority pick this up quickly and then weaponize it socially as shown in Ontario’s recent boys’ private school scandal or pretty much any sports locker room. Fantastic Beasts has managed to side step the stereotypically male hero, but avoidance may also be its downfall.

I’m glad we didn’t let Glasner talk us out of seeing Fantastic Beasts. His dislike of the main character is in tune with criticism found all over especially North American reviews and another reminder of how hard it is to find a male movie hero who isn’t toxically reductive.

Fantastic Beasts goes well beyond toxic masculinity by actually showing us a nuanced, non-stereotypical ASD hero, which is quite frankly astonishing, and perhaps unique. The instinctive dislike of him by most people (as evidenced in pretty much every movie review you’ll read) reflects my own experience and will be why the franchise fails. It will become yet another reminder to those on the ASD spectrum, or any male that doesn’t want to put on the toxic masculinity society expects of them,of just how peripheral they are. Reductive toxic male stereotypes are the only ones that sell.

We’re surrounded by toxic masculine heroes that trivialize what being male could mean to all men while at the same time encouraging gender driven violence. Fantastic Beasts’ ASD hero sidesteps this trap and breaks these conventions. It’s a shame that it won’t sell to the North American public because it doesn’t pander to their prejudices. Fortunately, it’s doing better on the rest of the planet.

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ECOO 2013 Cometh

Last year I was getting primed for ECOO 2012 by constructing a process for transitioning from school provided, generic educational technology to a bring-your-own-device learning situation. The idea was to assist this evolution toward personalized technology following some sort of pedagogical imperative rather than what appears to be a financially motivated top down drive to minimize school purchased tech.

Digital technology is intensely personal because it interacts with our
most personal selves, our minds…

Critically examining how we make use of technology has always been at the core of my teaching. As I transitioned from academically focused English to technology orientated computer engineering my willingness to look for easy answers in educational technology has dried up.

Since the last ECOO a couple of events have made me question the branded nature of #edtech. It began with the Google Education Summit in Kitchener in the spring, and then culminated with the Pearson Summit a week later. As educators it is incumbent upon us to be technologically agnostic, this is getting more and more difficult as cash strapped teachers and boards look for financial advantage courtesy of corporate offers. I’ve been battling my own understanding of this all year.

Can you imagine if your chalk board had a ‘courtesy of Crayola’ sign in the top corner? Or the paper you hand out to students had a ‘brought to you by Hilroy’ on it? Yet we don’t think twice about branding the digital technology. A student can’t get on to a school machine without getting Delled, BenQed, Microsoft’d, Jinged and Googled, and we actually enjoy that branding, we encourage it.

In only a few weeks I’m talking about our digital selves at ECOO 13. I’m excited about going to ECOO, doing Minds On Media for the first time (nurture your inner hacker, I’ll show you how to code a microcontroller and become your own I.T. support!) My worry is that I’m finding edtech increasingly owned, controlled and not focused on developing student (and educator) fluency.

I’m still being haunted by Matt Crawford’s Shopclass as Soulcraft. Crawford’s description of the consumer as a victim of their own technological ignorance resonates:

“Since the standards of craftsmanship issue from the logic of things rather than the art of persuasion, practiced submission to them perhaps gives the craftsman some psychic ground to stand on against fantastic hopes aroused by demagogues, whether commercial or political.”

The scattered, distracted 21st Century human being seems more a victim of digital technology than empowered by it. When I realize that the ‘I’m tech-savvy’ high school student doesn’t know what a disk partition or an IP address is, or how to boot to external media, I realize that what little expertise they’ve gained is almost entirely at the hands of commercial or political persuasion, and teachers are no different. This kind of fluency doesn’t suit corporate interests who would rather be able to sell you on marketing rather than engineering. The kind of ignorance this brews is staggering.

I want to produce a constructive solution to hard pedagogical questions around technology use. I’m finding this increasingly difficult as edu-tech becomes a managed, mainstream expectation rather than an experimental, fringe element. The urge to simplify with dictated systems that encourage ignorance has me wondering how education will prevent rather than produce more dysfunctional digital natives.

The perfect platform for teaching students effective use of technology is an open source system that they build from scratch and have to maintain themselves. The more you do for them, the less necessary fluency becomes. Technology literacy is a 21st Century fluency that we should be teaching curriculum wide, much like literacy or numeracy.

That ideal technology learning platform is agnostic, varied and offers redundancy and resilience. Students should never be in a position where the network technology is broken, but the hands on technology shouldn’t be done for them. What I’m seeing in educational technology is completely backwards; everything is locked down and done for students, and it seldom works. This is a recipe for ignorance and about as far from pedagogically useful as we can get.

There is precious little open source software used in education, mostly because it demands competence and

Don’t you wish there were a shared,open source
option for educational technology? There is,
but there is no money in it and it requires
competence.

responsibility. Buying a corporate system offers you turn key technology. We could offer cheap, debranded technology with open source, shared development software, but we don’t because we’d rather be consumers than makers. This is a result of teacher indifference as much as anything else. Basic fluencies should be attended to and you’d have to be obtuse to think that effective use of digital tools isn’t going to be as important as literacy and numeracy in the 21st Century.

I’m still not sure where I’m going with ECOO13…

Ghost In The Machine

Watching how people drive cars is a study in their true nature. In a car, much like being online, people feel anonymous and powerful. They are less fearful of physical response and more likely to be adversarial, aggressive and greedy. After driving a couple of thousand miles in the past week down and up the crowded east coast of North America I’ve a clearer idea of just how confused we are in this era of human/machine symbiosis.

Internet Disinhibition

Last night as we pulled into a parking lot after a long day of driving, a man backed out of his parking spot without so much as a shoulder check and almost t-boned us. When we yelled for him to watch out he became incensed and started screaming back about how it was our fault that he almost ran into us.

This was an interesting reaction. Had he walked into someone on the street he probably would have apologized and backed off, but in his car he immediately went on the offensive, like a small dog barking at someone from behind its owner’s legs.

People do this online all the time, it’s called flaming or trolling. They shoot their mouths off without fear of consequence. Technically this is called the Online Disinhibition Effect; an abandonment of social restrictions and inhibitions because people feel insulated by their anonymity online. They experience the same false sense of empowerment while driving.

There seems to be a dishinhibition effect whenever people identify themselves through technology. This is very odd because human beings are almost always the weakest link in any vehicle being driven or computer being operated. That they hide their inferiority in the power the machine is truly perverse.

We drove miles out of our way to get off the crowded,
angry interstates

Driving out of Virginia Beach on the worst designed freeway I’ve ever been on we were stuck in stop and go traffic for the better part of an hour while people blasted up the clearly marked merging lane to pull in at the front of the line. Their behavior was what was causing the slowdown, though they were the ones most angered by it.

The police ended up pulling up to the front and ticketing people who were driving up the shoulder to further slow down the flow of traffic. People weren’t just making use of the merging lane, they were pulling out into it to pass everyone else and further compress traffic. In their cars these people are immediately willing, in front of a large audience of their peers, to ignore everyone’s best interests in order to serve their own ends. I recently saw a link to self-driven cars and how they will be arriving soon; they can’t arrive soon enough. Human beings aren’t capable of acting in everyone’s best interests, machines are.

I’m about to return to the classroom and teach students how to make effective use of technology in their lives, but there is virtually no examination of the effects on human psychology by these technologies. I see it every day when students do inappropriate things online and are then astonished that they are reprimanded for it – they are used to online spaces being a free-for-all, the wild west. Where they actually are is in a virtual place that is recording their every action.

Whether it’s on the road or online we increasingly identify our selves and our abilities through the machines that enhance us, but the motive power of a car or the communication reach of online tools are not ours to claim, we are merely the ghosts that inhabit and direct these machines, and many people do so poorly without any idea of what they are, how they actually work, and (as a result) how to make them work to best effect.

Humility, civil interaction and a clear sense of our limits seem to be the first victims of our increasingly virtual sense of self. That so many of us, especially younger people, are wallowing in these delusions does not bode well for the future. Technology should offer us insight into our selves, instead we are using it to hide our deficiencies.

ECOO BIT18: Reductionism and Ignorance in Educational Technology

I’ve been ruminating over the latest ECOO conference for a couple of days now. Strangely, this technology conference began and ended for me with others suggesting that digital technology is a dangerous waste of time and that we should step away from it in our classrooms. Looking at my ECOO reflections over the past eight years I’m seeing a clear shift from optimism that we will get a handle on the digital revolution to caution and now a determined luddite push to walk away from it entirely. The now obviously deleterious effects of the attention economy seem to have produced an unprecedented negativity around educational digital technology in 2018, and ECOO book-ended it for me.

These aren’t toys, they’re tools!
Calling them toys says a lot
about how YOU use them.

I opened the conference bringing armfuls of emerging technology to Minds on Media. I’ve long tried to avoid the ‘here’s-a-turnkey-tech-tool’ presentation because it usually comes with corporate compromises. That split focus in a lot of ‘edtech’ means much of it isn’t really so much about learning as it is about data collection or closed ecosystems that drive profitability. Besides, I’ve long advocated for teachers who push technology to actually understand the technology they are requiring students to use. That kind of technical fluency means you don’t get sucked into absurd situations like giving away student data for a ‘free’ service or driving students into expensive, proprietary, closed technology designed to make a profit when it inevitably breaks.

As in previous ECOO MoM demonstrations, I brought a variety of tech from different manufacturers and simply encouraged educators to become aware of an emerging new medium, in this case virtual reality. I have no agenda and nothing to sell. I get nothing for showing the technology and don’t benefit from anyone buying one thing or another. This platform agnosticism means I can talk about the tech without prejudice or hidden agenda. I was happy to be attending another MoM day and looking forward to showing people this emerging medium.

At least I was until Peter went around the room having the stations introduce themselves. It all went well until we got stuck on one station that repeatedly described what everyone else was doing in the room as ‘playing with toys’ while describing their own noble pursuit as being ‘real’ and technology free (though without ICT infrastructure they couldn’t have done what they were doing at all). This attitude isn’t new. A surprising number of educators refuse to leverage digital tools to make their teaching more effective, but to hear someone shit can what everyone else is doing at this edtech conference was shocking. There was no opportunity to call her out on it then, but I can now:

Too bad we don’t teach it like it matters. Critical Infrastructure. Jobs in ICT.

This Minds on Media presenter monopolized the microphone to suggest anything digital was essentially meaningless (a toy) and that when people were ready to stop playing with their toys here she was ready to show them something real. As a technician who trains engineers and technicians to run the world we live in, this made me angry, especially considering it was done at an educational technology conference that should be advocating for technical fluency across our education system in order to understand and effectively participate in the world we live in. This didn’t put me in a great frame of mind to start the conference, but I soldiered on.

Cybersecurity in our classrooms.

I did two other presentations during the conference. Both were presenting on platform agnostic technology opportunities that would teach students and teachers about a critical infrastructure (cybersecurity) and addressing our collective ignorance of 3d media. In both cases I was advocating for not-for-profit digitally powerful learning opportunities that would enable Ontario educators and students to leverage the digital TOOLS at their disposal. This is the opposite of the reductive and now recessive thinking I kept experiencing.

3d media in marketing & learning

There is now a two pronged attack on digital technology in the classroom. The corrosive ra-ra edtech crowd seems increasingly determined to brand themselves behind proprietary corporate systems designed to deliver technology with no understanding required (and with lots of hidden profit centres), while the increasingly loud anti-tech crowd rises up against them, advocating that we receded from technology because it’s a distraction and a waste of time. Both sides seem determined to ignore a simple fact: we’re supposed to be TEACHING students how this all works, not branding them or hiding them in a cave. What edtech there is seems determined to follow consumerism into the most simplistic and ignorant relationship with digital tools possible. In 2018 you can get branded or abstain from tech entirely and then feel mighty righteous about it. Is anyone left just, ya know, teaching it any more?

There are technicians and engineers all around the world who provide digital infrastructure that we all depend on. These people understand this technology and are much less likely to act like the sheeple who stare slack-jawed at their phones for hours on end. To digitally literate people this technology is a powerful tool that is enabling us to do everything from gene editing diseases and linking disparate areas of study to creating more efficient critical utility systems. Digital technology has become a vital part of the infrastructure around us, yet the vast majority of us, including many teachers, are completely ignorant of it.

For some baffling reason we seem intent on ignoring the actual teaching and understanding of these powerful digital technologies in favour of using them with the same perverse ignorance, and now fear, as the general public. What is our role as educators in terms of technology if we aren’t producing technically competent graduates who can successfully navigate and participate in the digital world around them? By the way, our ignorance of digital technologies is staggeringly bad. If you haven’t followed any of the supporting links in this so far, follow that one.

The closing keynote ended the conference by banging the same drum as that ‘when you’re done playing with these toys come and do something real’ comment that kicked it off. This time one of the engineers of the attention economy that is causing so much damage earnestly suggested that we need to recede from digital activity in order to preserve not just learning but our very humanity! Rather than acknowledge the potential for digital technology to enhance learning, his entire talk was aimed at retreating from it.

This particular group of Silicon Valley architects now wants to save the consumers they got wealthy commodifying. I get the impulse. If I had a bank account full of blood money like that I’d feel bad about it too, but as a means of resolving this technological adolescence we’re all living in, it won’t work – they can’t see past the mess they’ve made and they certainly aren’t approaching it from an educator’s mindset – but then neither are the educators.

There was not a single example of how digital technology might amplify or improve learning outcomes – a decidedly odd way to wrap up an edtech conference. Our speaker went on to encourage the removal of personal technology from the hands of students and get back to a pre-digital time when everything was better. As a digital immigrant I know that there was no such time. If you think students weren’t distracted in class in the 1980s you weren’t a student in the 1980s. These Silicon Valley wolves can’t see people as anything other than the consumer sheep they used to prey on. I’d hope that teachers see much more potential in their students than these attention peddlars do, but I’m starting to think that vapid consumerism is the only relationship we’ll ever have with digital technology.

Invent a crisis and then offer a solution
to it. American business in action.

From an educational perspective digital technology offers a powerful tool for learning, but it doesn’t work if the teachers, administrators and government driving it are ignorant of how it works. If the teachers and parents can’t manage the tech, then we can hardly expect students to. I’d hope that ECOO and other curriculum support organizations would understand that and advocate for understanding and the development of broader technical fluency rather than encouraging willful ignorance.

Hiding digital tools and telling people to ignore the way the world works is a poor way to run an educational system, unless your goal is to produce ignorant consumers. Instead of running away from the digital revolution that is driving innovation and increasingly managing the infrastructure around us, we should be teaching self regulation of personal technology and comprehension of how it all works in order to generate a genuine understanding the world we’re creating. Teaching effective digital fluency means we’re less likely to be taken by the consumerist wolves and are able to effectively use digital tools rather than being used by them.

I’m all for being challenged in my thinking and often go out of my way to try on difficult ideas just to see how they fit. I’ve weathered Nick Carr’s The Shallows and watched society wobbling under the weight of the robber barons of the attention economy. Now I’ve attended an educational technology conference that began and ended with an ignorant and frankly dangerous dismissal of digital technology as a toy for idiots that should just be taken away. Meanwhile digital infrastructure made that very event happen. It fed the people who attended it and provided them with the resources they needed to travel to it, yet it isn’t worthy of teaching in our schools? And teaching it is precisely the problem. We pick up edtech and apply it without teaching it to staff or students, and now we’re shocked that it isn’t working well? Sometimes I wonder how educationally aware our education system is.

I’ve been banging my head against this call for technology fluency for so long that I can’t help but feel like this dismissal of technology both by participants and the conference itself in that closing keynote is a betrayal of what I thought were shared values.

I first attended ECOO in 2010. I joined Twitter, began meeting other technology interested teachers, started blogging and became part of a vibrant online PLN as a result of attending. Over the years ECOO has given me ideas and offered me a platform to present my own. What I’d always hoped was an evolution towards greater understanding of the digital revolution we are all living through has faltered now. We don’t want to learn how the world we’ve built works. Pro-edtech educators want to keep the curtain firmly in place and leave the understanding and management of technology to others while the increasingly noisy anti-tech crowd are advocating receding from it entirely. Our only contact with digital technology is through the lens of vapid consumerism and the only response we can have to that other than participating is to run and hide.

I’m frustrated, tired and losing hope in our ability to manage an understanding of the digital revolution that surrounds us. Education seems particularly incapable of seeing their way out of this digital hole we’ve dug for ourselves. The answer has always been to teach technological fluency, but ironically, I’m finding it harder and harder to find anyone who wants to.

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Is The Digital World A Branded World?

Who Is Paying For This?

I’m at the Google Apps for Educators Summit in Kitchener on a Saturday morning. I’m a Google fan. I Android, I use UGcloud for school work, I use Google+. I’m aware that all of these services require a means of income or they’ll evaporate, hence the Google ads I see on them; I’m OK with that. In a field that can get grabby and greedy, I think Google is more balanced in how it performs its business than most.

As a teacher I’m a bit more cautious about how online tools are framed in terms of learning. This morning’s keynote with Jim Sill asked what kind of world do we live in. I suspect the desired answer is a giddy, Silicon Valley logo filled blurt: I live in an Instagram world! I live in a Google world! I live in a Facebook world! When the question turned to how you access this magical world, it revolved around brand names for apps. Tying brands to information offers you a unique way to infect unrelated material (and learning itself) with your logo and corporate image. Google has done this perhaps better than anyone (though Facebook takes a pretty good run at owning friendship).

Hactivism

Is the 21st Century really an information revolution, or a branding revolution? I watched We Are Legion: The Story of Hactivists last night and I’m feeling the dissonance this morning at a conference that is all about companies branding information and funneling it to eager teachers who want to be relevant to their students. I’m not saying yea or nay to this kind of business, I’m just wrestling with the chaotic freedom the information revolution inspired in hactivists last night and the business of information this morning.

If the information revolution really is about a radical change in how information moves (and I think it is), then talking about apps and brands is akin to focusing on the make of hammer you purchased when you’re learning carpentry. It would seem strange if, in learning carpentry, the master carpenter went on and on about the brand of hammer they are using. They might mention why they like it briefly, but they wouldn’t start calling carpentry “Mastercraft hammer”, that would be odd.

Google: a great tool, but be careful not to brand
learning and information with it

People identify with brands, it gives them a sense of belonging, it offers them a ready-made identity in a field where they might not know much else. Excessive brand loyalty is usually the result of ignorance. I’m less interested in the kind of hammer you’re selling and more focused on how the wood is being fitted together. I happen to enjoy using my Google hammer when online, I just don’t know that I identify an important revolution in human development with their peppy logo, and I’d hope they’d be OK with that.

Ghostly Distractions & Digital Doppelgängers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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