education – Page 18 – Mechanical Sympathy

The Changing Face of Digital Fluency

File types? File management? Yeah, the latest batch of digital natives don’t do that any more.

Last week during a staff meeting one of our administrators said, ‘the kids are so far ahead of us” (technically). The subtext was because they are on their phones all day they are more digitally literate than we old people (anyone over twenty). As someone who teaches digital skills and who knows first hand how ignorant our digital natives are, I verbally disagreed quite vociferously. A week later the digital ignorance we choose to ignore was highlighted once again.

I got a call from a business computer lab saying Photoshop wasn’t opening student .jpg files. Jpegs are a common picture file format and photoshop is more than capable of opening them. This wasn’t a technical failure, it was the much more common human kind. I asked a student to show me how they saved their file as a jpeg. They selected save and then typed in .jpg at the end of the file and saved. Photoshop defaults to save in the .psd file format that is lossless and keeps layering data. It makes for a bigger file, but you keep all your image data. Jpeg is popular because it compresses files quite drastically with an equivalent loss to quality, the result is a much smaller and simpler file that work well online.

PSDs and JPGs are nothing like the same file. Windows only looks to the file extension (the .jpg part of picture.jpg) to see how to open it. If you call a file a jpeg that isn’t a jpeg, you’ve caused the error. This is exactly what these digital natives had done. All they had to do was ‘save as’ and select jpeg for this to work, but they don’t know what they don’t know.

Living in the cloud means more is being taken care of for you, meaning you know even less about what’s happening

This situation points to a larger shift that has become more apparent in recent years. Many of our students now have little or no experience with local file management. The first Chromebooks came out in 2011, when our current high school students were in grade 4. Many of them haven’t lived in anything other than the cloud. When they save files they don’t know where they go because they aren’t familiar with the basic organizational structure of a computer. File naming so you don’t get confused, saving as a file type so your PC knows how to open it, directory structures so you know where to look for files? These kids who ‘are so far ahead of us’ are moving further away from that every day.

Thank goodness for preview icons, otherwise I’d have no idea what was going on.

Local files aren’t something 2017 students generally deal with. If you ask most high school students how many mp3s that they have they’ll look at you like you’re crazy, they don’t do local music any more. Ask them how they organize their photographs and you’ll get the same look of confusion and condescension. Our Board network is currently broken under the weight of all these cloud based students constantly streaming media content from the internet all the time every day. When they can’t find access to the cloud they are more than willing to have their data phished and break board policy by using VPNs (see below) to bypass board restrictions, further clogging up an already overused network. Those ‘free’ VPNs are closely watching a directed stream of personal data; there’s money in that.

It’s frustrating enough when a student says they can’t find you a document they swear they made and then shows you a google docs directory full of something called ‘untitled document’, but the new normal is to expect students to have no idea how or where a computer saves a file. Network dependency and having someone else manage your data is the new normal.

Do you have digital experience or do you just have the same habits repeated over and over?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, we have to build a digital fluency stream into Ontario’s curriculum. We expect students to magically know how to operate technology because they immerse themselves in simplistic, habitual usage for hours a day. That limited experience does not improve digital fluency. If we’re going to expect students to know how to save files, manage their own data and protect themselves from an internet increasingly designed to take advantage of their ignorance, we need to make digital fluency something other than an afterthought, or worse, off load it on ageist stereotypes of technical prowess.

NOTES

Virtual Private Network: they were made so that people away from a corporate network could create a tunnel across the internet to the local network and work as though they were in the building. Any data in that tunnel is very difficult to see. That’s what makes it handy for avoiding blocks – the board network can’t easily read what’s happening in that encrypted tunnel. Needless to say, this also produces a lot of lag and network traffic as everything you access over the network is waiting on VPN relays and contains the data needed to access that VPN as well.

VPNs have turned into fake network addresses with companies offering a remote connection for a price (so you can pretend you’re American and get better Netflix). If it’s free, I imagine they are mining your data in the best case or phishing for passwords and financial information in the worst case – I’m willing to bet none of our students pay for their VPN usage so they’re all playing a dangerous game with hackers. Using a VPN means you’re passing all of your data through an unknown server (unless you set one up yourself – which I’m willing to bet none of our students know how to do).

Since all your traffic is coming from the VPN server address (and these change all the time), blocks to sites like YouTube don’t work because it doesn’t look like you’re going to YouTube. I wonder what the incidents of corrupted credit cards are with our free-VPN using student phones.

from Blogger http://ift.tt/2qjqLlC
via IFTTT

This One’s On Me

Last year at this time I was stunned by our first Skills Ontario gold medal and suddenly found myself on Team Ontario going to Nationals. We’d been battling in Ontario provincial competition for several years before that break through. In the year since I’m surprised by how engaged I’ve been in preparing to compete again. Being hungry after years of failure is in my nature, I’m competitive, but I thought perhaps the win would tick a box and cause me to change direction; it has poured gasoline on the fire. I’m proud to wear that Team Ontario jacket.

This year Skills Ontario has moved to a bigger venue, which was needed. Unfortunately, instead of it being twenty minutes away through the country, it’s hours away through the worst commute in North America. The new venue is great and it fits this huge event, unfortunately it’s located on the Moon – actually the Moon would be easier to get to.

I tried to be creative and cost effective and look for ways to make this impact our competitors as minimally as possible, but the school bus route was a disaster. We were all up at 4am on the day of competition. We were on the road just past 5am and it took us almost three hours of fighting interminable traffic piloted by people with dead eyes to get there. We arrived late, tired and worried that we’d missed check in; not the ideal way to start an all-day nine hours of competition.

I got my people signed in and then I could unclench. In IT this year I had the brother of a previous competitor who I think is one of my strongest yet, expectations were high. He ended up getting stuck on something so simple that he was kicking himself pretty much the moment the competition was over, but I think that error was more the result of four hours of sleep, a miserable commute and the stress of getting there late. Under the circumstances I think he did a fantastic job, but I failed to provide the logistics necessary for him to produce his best work.

After the early morning, three hour commute-from-hell in and nine straight hours of competition (my student didn’t feel he could take a lunch and finish in time), we had to wait for everyone to finish and didn’t leave the venue until well past 5pm… straight into evening rush hour. It took even longer for us to fight our way out of the GTA and then we thumped into the twilight along miles of potholed Ontario roads on the leaf sprung school bus. When we finally rolled in well after 8pm I was exhausted, my sciatica was screaming at me and I hadn’t spent nine hours in intense competition; I can’t imagine how the kids felt.

The hardest fought bronze medal you’ll see.

I went home, took Robaxacet and passed out having not eaten anything since lunch. The next morning I was up at 6am to get back on a god-forsaken school bus at 7am to go back to the same place we’d just left for the awards ceremony. It took us nearly three hours to get there through the angry parking lot that is the GTA. Getting to the ceremony late, we sat through the awards in an excellent venue. My IT competitor managed to get a bronze medal, which I think is brilliant (he thought the whole thing was a write off). He must have aced the rest of it considering the single mistake he made meant he couldn’t answer many questions.

Back on the bus again at noon, I took the competitors who hadn’t eaten yet (7am departure) to lunch and we got back to the school at a perfectly reasonable time (no rush hour). I’m already thinking about how to try and manage this next year. My only goal is to deliver my competitors in the best possible shape early and on time to the competition. We looked into hotels, but anything by the airport is twice what it costs anywhere else in Ontario.

There is no doubt that we needed a new venue. They said in the ceremony that Skills Ontario has grown from two hundred to over two thousand competitors, and we’d outgrown RIM Park in Waterloo. It’s unfortunate that the only venue big enough is in the GTA, which gets further and further away from the rest of us in Ontario every year. Having lived in Japan, it amazes me that I could access Tokyo, a city of twenty-five million, with ease, but the GTA with its paltry seven million is infrastructure inaccessible.

At lunch, one of our exhausted students asked why they have to start the competition at rush hour. It’s a good question. Running Skills Ontario next year from 11am to 8pm would save a lot of people their sanity. In non-rush hour times we’re able to get to The Toronto Congress Centre in under ninety minutes. Many of the student visitors don’t get there until past 11am anyway, so it wouldn’t impact that aspect of the show.

I’m disappointed at the results we got this year, but that’s entirely on me. As their coach, my job is to take care of the logistics and deliver them primed and ready to compete. This year had new and difficult circumstances, but I didn’t resolve them sufficiently and it hurt my students’ ability to produce their best work. That guts me. I’ll do better next time.

from Blogger http://ift.tt/2qDPvYu
via IFTTT

Positively Encouraging: Teachers Doing No Harm

In another confluence of events I’m reflecting on just how much of an effect teachers have on a student’s trajectory. A misread tweet on how damaging assessment can be was followed by a post on Google+ and punctuated by a graduated student showing up unexpectedly this week. It all got me thinking about how damaging to students teachers can be.

I got into computers when I was ten years old. By the time I was twelve I’d published code and was writing my own programs. It took a single dismissive remark by my computer science teacher to knock me off that trajectory for years.

I did grade ten computer science on a freaking computer punch card reader and did well. I’m not a mathlete and struggled with the theory, but as a hands on coder I’m more than capable – I sympathize with the machine and understand what it needs. In grade eleven we finally got to move to 286×86 IBM PCs and I was very excited. I’d signed up for grades eleven and twelve in consecutive semesters, but after the math teacher running the program basically turned it into a math course, I didn’t do very well. When I walked into the grade twelve class in semester two he looked down his nose at me and said, “Tim? Really?” I dropped the class shortly thereafter. If you asked him now he’d probably say he was doing me a favour. He did me no favours.

Last week I had a young man drop by who graduated a couple of years ago. He asked me if I remembered what our computer science teacher at the time had said to him in grade eleven. He’d basically done to this kid what my computer science teacher did to me. Jake said he bounced back because I essentially designed our new software engineering course around his suggestions, which encouraged him not to give up on his love of coding; he’s about to finish the programming course at Conestoga and he’s debt free because his game studio is making him enough money to pay for his college. Teachers who have never published anything telling people what they can and cannot do really get on my nerves.

This student and I both tend toward a right-brained approach to things, thinking laterally and often intuitively about problem solving. We’re foreign beasts to predominantly left brained math and science types. That linear, concrete thinking allows left brained teachers to place a lot of faith in grades – they believe that they are something more than a vague, abstraction of a student’s abilities. When these mathlete computer science types look down their nose at you in condescension, they believe that the D they gave you means something. I would posit that their certainty makes them a liability in any classroom.

Becoming a high school teacher was never a goal of mine. With a few exceptions I didn’t enjoy school when I was in it and I certainly wasn’t aiming to make a career of it. Now that I find myself teaching I’m constantly aware of just how damaging those gatekeepers in my own background were.

In grade ten I wanted to be an astronomer more than anything else, but a series of science teachers made a point of crushing that dream. I’m hardly stupid, and I was willing, but it was their way or the highway and I don’t bow to authoritarianism very well, especially when my scrappy, experimental approach to problem solving bares fruit. They didn’t like that I struggled to a solution myself rather than following the well trodden path of ‘the right answer’. In retrospect, and with some pedagogy to back me up now, I’d wager that my hard won answer is still with me today while the A+ students who memorized the process have long since forgotten it. Learning is supposed to be messy.

When you think in absolutes you have the potential to do some real harm to children. Every day I make a conscious effort to consider how what I’m saying will encourage genuine learning in my students. I’m not an easy teacher, and often have the biggest friction with the A+ crowd who just want to know what to write so they can do what they’re told and get that A plus they’ve become accustomed to. In those cases I celebrate their efficiency while expanding their resiliency. You don’t need to belittle someone because they do things differently to you.

As teachers we could do a lot worse than following the Hippocratic oath doctors use. If at any point you think you’re helping a student by disciplining them with assessment, you’re not – that was the subtext of my tweet to the Ministry.

If at any point you dismiss a student’s approach to a subject because it’s not the same as yours, you’re helping yourself more than you are your student.

Try and be what you’re supposed to be: the adult in that student’s life who can dispassionately see their potential and then do everything possible to realize it. This can be much harder work than simply attacking kids with numbers because they don’t conform to your process, but it’s much more rewarding.

So many secondary teachers fall into a comfort zone around their familiarity with their subject and are unwilling to see any other way to do it. It might take a bit of lateral thinking, but seeing the value in how a student approaches a subject instead of assessing them based on how closely they follow your methods would be a significant pedagogical step forward. We’d suddenly be assessing how they are grappling with their learning rather than forcing our methodology on them, and that would mean far fewer teachers slamming the door in student’s faces with or without realizing it.

from Blogger http://ift.tt/2ntJ7xx
via IFTTT

The Fake News Epidemic

I’ve often been at odds with how new media makes its billions. People self-identify with new media like nothing else because it is such an intimate part of their lives. The hardware is always at hand and the software makes personal demands on our information and our time that would have felt foreign and invasive twenty years ago, but like a frog being slowly brought to a boil, we haven’t noticed how it’s killing us.

We suddenly feel time compressed like never before because we have become a commodity in an always on attention culture. The tech giants feeding from this frenzy that they have created present themselves as saviours of the people, democratizing media and making the world a better place:

If you ever want a brilliant parody of the bizarre nature

of our digital revolution, you really need to watch Silicon Valley

Yet there is a change in how we are relating to the strange new mediascape we find ourselves in. Facts are no longer facts and the tech companies enabling this, up until recently, were willfully unaware of how damaging that can be, though more than happy to make advertising revenue from it.

The hand wringing helplessness felt over this epidemic of fake news always struck me as odd, like an alcoholic wondering why everything is going to shit when the answer if obvious (it’s the alcohol). Yet the vendors of our hangover kept it paying off until the damage was done.

This was brought into sharp focus for me after reading this article by WIRED. It tells the story of disenfranchised teens in a former Soviet Bloc state who found a way to make silly money by aggregating fake news. Google, Facebook and others were only too happy to make a mint from this process in advertising revenue.

By leveraging the information collection platforms (aka ‘social’ media) they have created to produce targeted ads, these new media advertisers found an avenue for stale marketing budgets. Companies flooded in to Google, Facebook and the rest, desperate to tap a younger demographic unreachable through traditional media. But social media companies offered something more than just the vaunted Millennial crowd, they also offered targeted advertising.

You don’t get Gmail, or Facebook Messenger or any of these other complex, expensive services for free. You get them because they are constantly mining your data and using that information to target ads. Social media companies ARE advertising companies. How powerful is this technology? Last year Facebook made six billion dollars more than the largest advertising agency in the world. Google made tens of billions more.

Tech companies present themselves with noble ideas like organizing the world’s information or giving people the power to share and make the world more open and connected, but they aren’t non-profits, quite the opposite actually. While they might engineer their technology to organize and share, the way they pay for their private jets is to monetize those noble ideas while avoiding paying taxes as aggressively as they are legally able.

Google, Facebook and social media itself is now the largest advertising system on the planet.

That some shifty Macedonian teens made a bit on the side is really an afterthought. What should strike you as most illuminating is that the multi-nationals driving social media were more than happy to make millions from obviously false and plagiarized information that was dressed up as news. If you think this didn’t have any effect, look to the damage done to one of the oldest democracies on the planet.

Google stopped cashing in on fake news when people complained,
not before, and the people who lost money on it were the website
owners, not Google, they kept every penny.

By aggregating bonkers right wing fiction into easily consumable content (usually by stealing it outright and dressing it up as news), those kids made years of salary in a month, but what are pennies on the dollar compared to the profit social media advertisers pocketed? Google and others were not only making a fortune off the fake news epidemic, they themselves were the cause of it, using their customer data collection systems to feed lies back to the people who most wanted to read them.

It wasn’t until the flaming mess of the US election that anyone stopped to consider what the ramifications of this approach were. These tech companies love to claim the moral high ground, but their highest ideals take a back seat to greed. Perhaps Google needs to try a bit harder with it’s motto of ‘don’t be evil’.

Try harder.

I’ve struggled with how these companies have insinuated themselves into education, branding teachers and even information itself with their logo. Looking over nearly seven years of Dusty World I can see myself slipping from a technology evangelist into an increasingly uncomfortable relationship with these companies. As they’ve become richer and more influential, their ability to make decisions based on the public’s best interests seems to have steadily deteriorated. Nowhere is this more apparent than this latest social hack: design a system that feeds lies to the people who most want to believe them, and then make a profit from it. They’re making it mighty difficult to like them, let alone admire them.

Meanwhile Britain Brexits and the US government can best be described as a maelstrom. At least some poor kids in Macedonia made a bit of money in a world were it’s usually the super rich who make something from nothing. Maybe social media systems are blameless in all of this. After all, they only give us what we want. If we’re too stupid to educate ourselves, perhaps it’s what we deserve. Is it still propaganda if we’re doing it to ourselves?

from Blogger http://ift.tt/2o6krzG
via IFTTT

Facilitators

This provocative article was shared on Facebook recently. Teachers sharing and talking about education during March Break, I know, crazy, right?

There is an technologist slant to this article that, like everything else people do in the age of information, reduces complex human interaction into a simplistic informational exchange. We fall into this trap in every age we live in. When society was church based we defined ourselves as souls and saw ourselves as intangible spirits in a material world. When we industrialized people started to see themselves as machines. In the information age, unsurprisingly, we treat ourselves like computational nodes in a network. We always seem trapped in our sense of self by the reflection our society casts casts back at us. In every case we’re taking what we are and reducing it to the limitations of the flawed technology we are producing.

By forcing our definition of people to fit the technology at hand we make humans an integral and exploitable part of that technology. If you can reduce complex human social interaction into simplistic social media exchange and centralize the profits from those interactions you’ve made a fortune. The same companies doing this do everything possible to avoid paying taxes to support the societies providing that data. This is one of the best examples of business leaching off society (other than the stock market itself) that I can imagine.

The fortune to be made reducing students to data is often dressed up under the guise of happier more engaged children, but in my experience the self directed learning suggested by the author of this article is neither efficient nor particularly engaging. Self directed learning requires the kind of focus, self discipline and appreciation of future benefit that most children are incapable of because they haven’t developed that bit of their brains yet.

Many adults are equally stymied by self-direction. For most, getting into a directed course of action means happily surrendering free will in order to work out of habit. This a much less stressful way to live a life. Developing routines and sticking to them means you get to off-load responsibility for the outcomes of those routines onto the people or devices that manage them. Being able to complain about this while taking no responsibility for what is happening (you’re a helpless cog in the system) is one of the most cathartic things your typical human being does in modern society. Schools are a favorite target of the lazy or aimless; an easy institution to hate because they are trying to develop you into a more fully functioning human being against your every effort.

The brave new world of self directed child geniuses being monitored by cheap, non-professional facilitators that require no special training get a lot of neo-liberals excited about the cheap and engaging de-institutionalized future of education. In the coming age of machine intelligence computers will do all of the thinking and management. Human beings won’t have to do anything more than assimilate with those machines… and complain about them.

Perhaps this writer has a point. In 20 years when AIs are doing the jobs of most of the non-specialized workforce, why waste money educating them? Students can go to school and perform the same mind numbing habitual activities they do at home. Once we’ve achieved this nirvana we will have taken the final step toward becoming nothing more than the technology we create.

from Blogger http://ift.tt/2mUioLI
via IFTTT

Skills Canada Nationals

I’ve never been on a provincial team before, it’s quite the experience. In addition to the unnatural process of leaving school, getting on an aeroplane and flying away from the classroom in early June, it also puts you together with all the other gold medalists, some of whom you lost against in other categories, except now you’re team mates.

There are a lot of different students on Team Ontario, from the quietest introverts to the loudest extroverts you can imagine, yet they have all demonstrated advanced skills in their particular field of study and are proven craftspeople. They range from cocky and arrogant to nervous and uncertain; there is no typical Skills Ontario gold medalist.

There are a lot of different ways to coach a Skills competitor as well and the teachers here reflect that, but the one thing they all have in common is engagement – I’ve yet to see a shrug of indifference from anyone. I’ve been accused of not always playing well with others, but when the others are this capable and willing, it’s hard not to get caught up in it all.

We did a solid day of sight seeing yesterday (photos below) and today we’ve had the day off before the opening ceremonies in a couple of hours. I’m studiously taking notes so I can understand this new part of the process we haven’t done before.

I’ve brought the most experienced IT/Networking student I’ve had to date. It occurred to me the other night that IT, like many other stochastic technology skills, depends largely on experience driven intuition to overcome unclear problems in complex systems. A student who was willing to try and fail many times ended up developing into my best candidate because of that resiliency. I’ve brought students more skilled in academics to Skills Ontario, but never seen them break through because everything had to be just so. You can’t clarify a problem let alone solve it if you aren’t willing to flounder around in the dark trying things first. If you read any modern text on how to teach, floundering around isn’t favourable to a transparent, linear process of problem resolution. If everyone else keeps doing that, we’ve got an edge.

If you’re involved in Ontario education at all, the hashtags to follow on twitter are #teamON and #teamOntario, and the National Skill Competition hashtag #SCNC2016. Re-tweets of Team Ontario are appreciated (there is a team spirit award based on social media participation).

Later today and tomorrow we’ll be knee deep in the competition, and then I’ll be able to assess how well we prepared for this unknown. Until then, isn’t New Brunswick beautiful?

Team Ontario at Hopewell Rocks in The Bay of Fundy

Pointe-du-Chêne

Dinner at Catch 22 in Moncton

9lb lobster is watching you – 9lb lobster is unimpressed

Emotionally Charged Engagement

Pettis‘ manifesto demands the freedom needed to make things work. Educators might get excited about Maker philosophy like this, but it isn’t what they want in classrooms.

This talk of Making at ECOO had me thinking about my own process of building, repairing and creating.

My engineering process is closely related to my creative process. Creativity came first as a toddler mainly because I found visual art intuitive to step into. Engineering followed shortly thereafter (about 6 years old?) when I found myself dismantling bicycles and toys, sometimes for creative purposes but mainly driven an intense desire to understand how things work. My mother was an artist, my father is an engineer; my behavior wasn’t a happy accident.

Both my processes have evolved and entwined, and both demand absolute ownership. I find myself fully committed to my process which makes the idea of going to committee abhorrent. If what I’m doing ends up not working it’s on me and me alone. That focus and responsibility is what allows me to work through frustrating, stochastic, non-linear builds and repairs that would cause most people to shrug and give up.

I prefer to work alone. If I’m going to seek help, I will initiate it. Being forced to accommodate collaboration prevents me from doing what needs to be done to make the thing work. Lateral thinking never works well when you’ve have to constantly explain every intuition, it breaks your flow.

How much faith do I have in my process? I drove my wife and newborn son home in a car I rebuilt the brakes on. I ride a motorcycle (with my son on the back) that I rebuilt from scrap. If I did it, it’s done properly, I regularly bet my life on it. This is what competency looks like when making something work is the priority; mechanical mastery can’t exist in any other circumstance.

intuition works best in silence

When I’m working on an engineering problem or a creative project I am radically engaged (fixated?) with what I am doing. This isn’t the kind of directed, controlled engagement that teachers encourage in classrooms. Being interrupted by a well-meaning teacher who wants to make my process transparent antagonizes the hell out of me.

Teacher interruptions in my process are vexing. I don’t seek an expert to do it for me, that doesn’t teach me anything. I’d prefer to ask another capable student who is struggling with similar issues and figure it out with them rather than ask a teacher who has done it a hundred times before. This is what mastery learning is and why it seldom happens in a classroom.

This all comes from my first post-secondary learning experience as a millwright apprentice. I left high school before graduation because it felt like a holding tank rather than a learning opportunity. In that apprenticeship I didn’t have teachers assessing my learning, I had people who were invested in it because it meant less work for them. That we were all doing the same work went a long way toward me valuing their expertise.

Collaboration isn’t the point of any engineering activity. It shouldn’t remove the focus from a project, it should amplify it. When teachers say things like, “we’re going to be makers, but what the kids are really learning is collaboration!” I would expect to see a group of frustrated students and a pile of newly purchased Arduinos and Raspberry Pis gathering dust in boxes. You’ve got to respect the skill and focus needed to make things work first.

My favorite kind of teacher is the one I try to be. I encourage skills development and provide expertise if asked (though I am reluctant). I provide materials and offer multiple avenues into how to get it done, but then I get the hell out of the way. What I hope to see is a student lose themselves in their process and improve as a result of this intensive engagement. You learn more in the doing of a thing than you ever do in the theory of it.

I observe, I offer help if it’s asked for, but I also allow students to fail if they refuse to take risks and engage in a meaningful engineering process. In the best cases I’m able to look at a finished prototype that shows resiliency, creativity, and works. That last bit is important, I’m not grading how hard they tried, or how well they get along with each other, I’m grading engineering. The student who built a working prototype feels a genuine sense of achievement because they went through real struggle to resolve complex, non-linear (non-textbook) problems. They seldom worry about what kind of mark they got, the value is self-evident.

Assumptions and cultural influences won’t get you far in mechanics – you need to be stringent and respect reality because it doesn’t care about your perceptions. This is the reason why two mechanics from opposites sides of the world with no shared language can still effectively communicate with each other. Reality is a shared language.

A highlight of a recent unit was watching a student who found the process of building Arduino circuits very challenging. In his presentation of a partially working prototype he angrily said, “… and it didn’t work again, until I realized, like a n00b, that I hadn’t plugged the power wire into the rail.” He was absolutely right, he is no longer n00b, and he should be frustrated with having made such a rudimentary mistake. His emotional engagement with his failure was telling – he is beginning to take pride in his skills.

Emotional engagement is at the root of my work with machines. Radical engagement makes my process an emotional one (or is it the other way around?). The sometimes stochastic, often non-linear and usually frustrating nature of building and repairing complex machinery requires an emotional edge. That edge is what powers my resiliency. I refuse to let a complication derail me, sometimes not giving up even when I should. If it continues to not work, emotion not only powers my resiliency but also my imagination, driving me to think laterally around problems.

Class bells, rubrics, teachers showing you how and assigned groups are the antithesis of my kind of radical engagement. Schools seem designed to prevent this kind of focus and break learning up into an arm’s length, carefully managed chunks. Learning is an organic process until you see it diced up into curriculum and fed to students who have no idea what it is they are supposed to be learning or why. The education system might work for basic skills but mastery isn’t what its set to produce. Education elbows its way between student curiosity and their natural tendency to learn in order to manage the process. The ultimate purpose of the education system is not to teach but to produce grades which everyone believes are an expression of student learning but are actually entirely fictional.

Radical emotional engagement is the antithesis of the clinical, rational engagement educators look to manage, but this emotional engagement is at the root of my empathy with machines, Education spends a lot of energy encouraging collaboration, linear consumption of curriculum and a cold kind of empathy between students, but ignores (stamps out?) human emotional engagement in order to retain control.

The difference between how I and many others learn, and the mono-cultural, rationalist’s philosophy of education is why you seldom see radical engagement in a classroom. It’s why you see outliers, especially highly engaged ones, do poorly in school. Education is designed to hit the medium, the comfortable middle class child who requires no emotional connection because they have it elsewhere. Deviants, whether they are eccentrics who want radical engagement in something they are fixated on, or students who need more from a teacher than grades, aren’t a good fit with the system.

The difference between applied and academic students has
a lot more to do with family dynamics and the need for
emotional engagement than it does with intelligence.

Education’s discomfort with emotional engagement lies at the root of Ontario’s high school streaming system. Applied students tend to come to school from less stable home lives and look for more emotional engagement with their teachers. This freaks out the academics who teach them. Academic students (and the teachers they turn into) prefer to treat school at arm’s reach – rationally and emotionally distancing themselves from it because information is all they require from a classroom. To these academics school is a job, one they have figured out and are good at. These are the students who get mad at you when you saddle them with a problem that may not have a solution.

This distance between student need and teacher approach is probably the single largest difference between academic and applied students. Some of the smartest kids I’ve ever taught have been applied level students. Teachers willing to support emotional engagement with learning often find these students are the ones who make the biggest leaps in high school, but they are challenging and often emotionally exhausting, especially when the rationalists who run the system think 30+ students in a classroom is manageable (and it is if you don’t treat students like people).

Ironically, all of those teacher movies that educators so love are the ones that emphasize this emotional learning connection but it just doesn’t happen that often in the real world. At a recent Heads’ meeting a rule was put up saying that people have to be rational and unemotional when making suggestions. They can’t be emotionally engaged in any debate. That’s how ed-quants like it in the classroom too. What a sure way to make something tedious, distant and uninspired.

Radical engagement is powered by emotion. It makes for a messy, demanding learning environment, but it’s also a vital key to differentiating learning that the vast majority of educators don’t just ignore but actively seek to stamp out. The doorway to mastery is one you have to walk through yourself, and you’ll never manage it if you’re dependent on the advice of others. It takes resiliency, courage and a lot of work to become that kind of proficient. Emotion is a powerful ally in getting there.

The Ebb & Flow of Pedagogy in Education

The intention of Dusty World is to work through ideas I’m having around teaching. Since I’m a technology teacher, a lot of those ideas are tech-focused. This week, after years of forced contracts and an unbelievably rough round of negotiation, my union has voted to accept an austerity contract that was bargained virtually at gun-point. Since our last bargained contract we’ve been wage reduced, had benefits striped and work load increased. By the end of this contract we’ll be looking at more than a 10% reduction in take home income when inflation is considered.

The politics of the agreement aside, what does something like this do to my work environment? Instead of focusing on pedagogy and excellence in learning, I find myself performing damage limitation. Knowing that my employer focuses on finances rather than pedagogy is difficult to hear, but when the school board association walks into negotiations demanding dictatorial control over teacher time, stripped benefits and wage reductions, you can’t help but come to that conclusion.

Teaching is a human activity, and I am the human face at the end of a large, faceless, increasingly politically driven bureaucracy. I’m supposed to be teaching my students how to manage digital technology so it doesn’t manage them, but increasingly I find my time being spent trying to protect my students from a system intent on doing less for less. When I’m cobbling together 8 year old computers just to give students a chance at hands on learning, or trying to calm agoraphobic students in overcrowded spaces, or sourcing fans to keep the classroom temperature from boiling because we have thirty two old machines huffing away in there, quality of instruction is obviously not the goal.

The education system goes through changes in focus all the time, and the effectiveness of learning waxes and wanes depending on the political climate. I began teaching in Ontario in 2004 and my early years were in a system in recovery from Mike Harris‘ “unprecedented disinvestment in public education, which destroyed a historical competitive advantage in the space of a decade.”

Ontario’s public education system, under reasonable management, saw huge steps forward in terms of effectiveness. Before the cuts began in 2012, Ontario’s education system was top 5… in the world, and, with BC, led Canada up the charts. You can imagine how satisfying it must have been to work in an environment like that. I’d often find myself developing lessons or reading about teaching techniques on a Saturday night. I didn’t take a summer off in my first eight years of teaching, taking many additional qualifications (at my own expense) and teaching online to expand my skills. With the amount of time I spent at it, I was probably dancing with minimal hourly wage, but I didn’t care because I threw myself into my profession and my profession looked after and encouraged me.

That sort of intensity appeals to me, I enjoy the challenge and get a lot of satisfaction out of doing a difficult thing well, but it depends on support. Anyone doing anything well does it because they have good support around them. If you don’t believe me watch any professional sport. When you suddenly find yourself losing common sense arguments around class sizes based on safety and access to tools, you start to wonder whether going all in is that productive, or healthy for you.

One of the best bits of advice I got at teacher’s college was,
“always be ready to go to work again tomorrow.” I didn’t
used to get frazzled running hard, but now I do.

It was nice to start my career in a time of such positive pedagogically driven education. I got to do that because the teachers before me suffered through a decade of cheap nastiness. We’ve swung back to the cheap nastiness now, but rather than fight it we vote for it. I was willing to fight for better, but the vast majority of secondary public teachers are ok with less. How will that translate to their work in the classroom?

I’m going to have to reconsider my survival strategies. If I throw myself all in and then get slew footed by a lack of support, I tend to get emotional about it. Rather than do that, perhaps a little distance is the better way; a less passionate, more circumspect approach to the classroom. How do you think that will play with students?

If I want to test myself by finding excellence in what I do, the Ontario classroom isn’t where that’s going to happen. In 2015 it has become a political wasteland of compromise and an excuse to do things cheaply for political gain. I’ll do what I can to protect the students I am given, but the goal isn’t excellence in learning any more, it’s do less with less.

Fortunately, I have a lot of hobbies. I’ll find other aspects of my life to throw myself into with abandon.

Implications of a Situated Intelligence in Learning

One of the big shocks I got in philosophy was reading Bertrand Russell’s Analysis of Mind. If you can get through it you come to the startling realization that we are barely conscious at all. Russell does a thorough job of demystifying how our minds work.

With The Singularity looming a number of films attempt to
imagine what a super-human intelligence would look like.

If you can imagine a being with the mental capacity to be constantly self-aware and conscious you begin to see just how different from us it would be. We have flashes of self awareness, moments of conscious consideration, but more often than not we fall back on instinct and autonomic processes. An always on intelligence would never surrender a decision to involuntary reflex, but we do it all the time. Basic processes aren’t the only thing at stake here. If you’ve ever found yourself in your driveway but unable to remember the drive home, you’re performing complex mental and physical processes without conscious thought.

That always on, aware intelligence is able to consider and respond in non-reflexive ways to all physical and mental challenges. Repetition is what we use to manage our limited ability to attend to the world around us. With sufficient muscle memory from repetitive action we are able to do pretty amazing things with our limited attention spans, but we have to offload cognitive capacity to our muscles and the world around us to achieve it.

The idea that we are dislocated minds that exist metaphysically is one of the last remnants of pre-Enlightenment thinking. From souls to Descartes’ ghost-in-the-machine, we’ve long cherished the idea that our selves exist beyond the mundane world in which we find ourselves. But the very idea of a self only happens because it is situated in reality. Context, rather than self awareness, is what gives us the continuity required to acquire a sense of self. Your ‘youness’ isn’t a magical property that exists in the ether, it’s a consequence of your mind interacting with the world around you. The circumstances you find yourself in are created by past action. People around you treat you as they do because of past action. What you think of as your mind is actually a series of circumstance that expand beyond your head and through your body into the world around you.

A skilled person recognizes this process and ‘jigs‘ their environment, using their surroundings to support their work. You see this in everything from a scientist’s lab to a short-order cook’s kitchen, to a teacher’s classroom; they all design their work environment to allow them to do their jobs better (assuming they are good at what they do – jigging an environment to perform well is a sign of mastery). In extremely performance focused jobs, like professional sports or acting, this jigging takes on talismanic power that look like superstitions to the uninitiated. Our psychology can be very sensitive to how immediate surroundings support or detract from our performance. The pre-game ritual of an athlete before a game or the actor before going on stage both reflect this. Our intelligence leaks out into the world, forming it to our will in order to get ‘our heads on straight’.

I take the concept of jigging my work space very seriously.

Jigging of their environment is a window into student learning. You can see how thoroughly a student understands a process by how well they manipulate their environment. The student who can’t find the right tool for the job probably doesn’t understand the job very well. My father always used to give me a hard time for leaving his workshop in a mess; I get it now. If you can’t find a tool when you’re in the middle of a complex task you won’t be able to perform the task well. Your continuity of thought is broken by poor workplace planning. My father’s assessment of the dirty shop was actually an assessment of my understanding of the craft of the mechanic.

True mastery learning requires an advanced practitioner to
jig their working environment to produce complex work.
This isn’t that.

The stock classroom is a Cartesian throwback to the disassociated minds myth: our minds are magical buckets which we can fill with information. Of course they aren’t, they are fractured, non-continual biological processes designed to interact with the world around them. A human mind only blossoms in the presence of an interactive reality. You have to shed the myth of a Cartesian mind in order to see the absurdity of the typical classroom.

If education is going to adapt to this simple truth it needs to recognize that learning isn’t confined to mental processes. Even cognitively focused courses of study like mathematics are recognizing that tangible representation improves student learning. If you teach students like brains in boxes you don’t get very far.

Recognizing tangibles in teaching concepts is only the first part of this incorporation of an accurate philosophy of mind in learning. The real power comes in creating adaptable learning environments that encourage student control. If you’re teaching anything sufficiently complicated then allowing students control of their learning environment will only improve their chances of mastery. If they can’t control their work space (or worse, it’s handed to them complete), they are being robbed of the opportunity to own their learning. Environmental control also allows teachers a vital insight into how well a student understands the material they are learning. If a student designs a non-functioning work space it shows you just how far from understanding the basic concepts of what they’re trying to do they are. It is a common occurrence for the least capable students to walk up to me days before the end of a two week engineering project and tell me they are missing key components to finish it. This is a valuable insight for both myself and the student into just how ignorant they are. The worst thing we can do is what we do now: put students in institutionally designed spaces that demand conformity and tell them to do it in their heads. A key aspect of mastery learning is recognizing how expertise is rendered in the world around us, and then using that information to assess understanding and improve learning.

NOTES

Bertrand Russell, On Mind
Finishing off Descartes’ ghosts
Rene Descartes, ghost in the machine
If we can’t have souls, we can have magical, metaphysical minds!
Matt Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head
A modern dismantling of Enlightenment ideology that has run wild
I recently attended Stratford’s Possible Worlds.
It plays on a conceit that you see in a lot of drama (Jacob’s Ladder, Inception, The Matrix), that we would be incapable of realizing that the world around us isn’t real. This conceit trivializes reality and sends us back into that superstitious state of magical minds.

I’d argue that our existence actually precedes and produces our intelligence. We wouldn’t be what we are if we were brains in boxes being fed information; reality defines our intelligence. I had a lot of trouble getting into Possible Worlds because it used science and tech babble to lead the audience through a fractured dreamscape, depending on our belief in magical minds to suspend our disbelief.

How We’ve Situated Ourselves

I’m wrapping up Matt Crawford’s The World Beyond Your Head, and it’s leaving a lot of questions around education.

Throughout the book Crawford questions the hyper-individualized nature of our post-enlightenment selves. He does it in the context of skilled manual labour, which does a lot to refute the ideal ‘generic/flexible intelligence’ we all value nowadays. Skills situated in real-world demands are immune to academic flights of fantasy.

Below are some quotes I’m ruminating on:

“…manufactured experiences promise to save us from confrontations with a world that resists our will.”

Anyone teaching modern teens feels the strain of trying to haul them out of the digital trance they prefer. I teach computers and this is acute, like trying to teach pyromaniacs how to be firemen. Many of my students are incapable of seeing the machines they are supposed to be learning about as anything other than entertainment. Computers are a digital window into a world where you can always be capable and rewards are continuous and timely.

The proliferation of fairly terrible flash games on the internet indicates that many students would rather exist in digital Pavlovian response environments than deal with the pesky real world. The game play is so bad that I’m astonished anyone plays them, but play them they do, for hours at a time. Crawford has a section on machine gambling that strikes startling (and terrifying) similarities with how I see students playing these digital games (most of which are thinly veiled advertisements).

Between an isolated and hyper-intensified (almost sacred) sense of self, and the nature of digital economics, people are immersed in a society that has quantified and actively seeks their attention for monetary gain. Crawford describes this as the enlightenment ideal of a free self taken to bizarre extremes – but these extremes feed nicely into the neo-liberal/globalized digital economy we’ve created for ourselves.

Distraction is seen as a problem of technology, but it is actually one of political economy: “in a culture saturated with technologies for appropriating our attention, our interior mental lives are laid bare as a resource to be harvested by others.”

Hack the future – or be used by it. Digital technology has
evolved into the shiny gateway to an attention economy
that is as relentless as a casino in catching eyeballs..

Worries about digital-distraction have long been tied to education and technology, but Crawford does a good job of uncovering the economic foundations of that problem. My concern has always been that poor implementation of educational technology simply feeds students into this harvester.

If we’re delivering a single branded approach to educational technology, we aren’t teaching fluency so much as dependence. This is why technology multi-nationals are so willing to ‘work with education’. With students already walking into class having been digitally branded on a personal level, education has jumped on the bandwagon by following student trends (kid’s love ipads!) rather than pedagogical imperative. If we’re going to recover students’ ability to navigate (rather be navigated by) the digital economy they are immersed in, we can’t be driven by the same processes.

If the only point of education is to put more bricks in the wall, then we should just keep on doing what we’re doing. If we want to teach students to survive in a voracious economy that sees their attention as a commodity then we need to teach them what the technology is and how it works. Open source software and un-locked, non-brand specific hardware would be a good place to start, but you’re not going to see lots of ads for it.

“the advent of hyperpalatable mental stimuli… raises the question of whether the ascetic spirit required for education has a chance. The content of our education forms us, through the application of cultivated powers of concentration to studies that aren’t immediately gratifying. We therefore had to wonder whether the diversity of human possibilities was being collapsed into a mental monoculture – one that can more easily be harvested by mechanized means.”

Student directed learning: the kind of thinking
being embraced by Ontario’s education leaders
at this summer’s conference. This kind of nonsense
ignores how education has worked for millennia.

The “ascetic spirit” of education is long dead. If it isn’t fun and engaging, it isn’t a correct lesson plan according to modern educational thinking. Students treat marks as a score, demanding them immediately and ignoring feed-back. There is no delayed gratification in modern education. Teachers have to justify (up front) any teaching – it can never lead toward a goal that is out of sight. Where ever possible we are asked to be as transparent and immediately gratifying as possible. The more forward-thinking, extreme view is that teachers are no longer needed at all. In an information rich world (conveniently delivered on closed platforms by multi-nationals), students can learn on their own with no direction. All you need is an I.T. guy to keep everyone connected.

If we’re producing generic-intelligence graduates that are able to work anywhere for minimum wage with no real expertise other than a can-do attitude, then we’re doing a great job. Crawford’s focus on skilled labour neatly sidesteps the ideal of the liberally educated university student who can’t do anything but is ready for everything (as long as it doesn’t involve reality). Reality makes demands on skilled trades that most academics find beneath them.

The danger in digital technology exists in its ability to latch onto and modify our very plastic thinking processes. A skilled-trades approach to understanding digital technology can elevate us from being users to being architects. Nick Carr does a good job of criticizing this in The Shallows. Crawford goes further by explaining that technology isn’t the issue, it’s the cannibalistic economics that drive it that we should be protecting students from.

By pulling back the curtain and revealing the machinery that feeds this relentless economy we enable students to dictate the terms of their digital experience. What happens instead is that we present digital technology as if it’s just another educational tool, which allows the underlying economy to seep into education unseen, feeding students into a mechanism that wants to commodify their very thoughts.