Category: Dusty World

We just returned from Treasure Mountain Canada, the 7th iteration of the Canadian School Libraries national research conference.  Like the best professional development, this was self-directed and therefore relevant and meaningful to the people in attendance.  Library learning commons have been under a lot of pressure despite the fact that these centres for information management are key to getting us though the maelstrom that is our information revolution.  Listening to people on the front lines talking about the challenges and opportunities was enlightening.

Round table discussions based on the many papers submitted for the symposium happened throughout the day.  The first I sat in on was by Lila Armstrong.  She talked about the ‘hub and spoke model’ as a way to standardize digital skills development in the absence of a comprehensive digital literacy curriculum (Ontario isn’t the only province who continues to lag behind in this regard).  Lila is a bit of a unicorn because she has recently moved between elementary and secondary panels, something few teachers do in their careers.  Equity and inclusion play a central role in Lila’s research and had me thinking (once again) about how fractured Canada’s education landscape is in terms of making its students future ready.

The next table talk was with Melanie Mulcaster, who is now seconded to TVO where she is working on digital content development and curation.  The pandemic chaos highlighted for Melanie how behind many LLCs were in terms of curating online content.  Through rolling lockdowns the lack of credible resources that were easy to navigate became a central issue in library management.  Mel’s honest assessment  of our slapdash attempts to make digital content work, and then her choice to engage with building these missing tools, was brutally honest and insightful.

Ontario used to have a comprehensive online set of vetted digital tools and resources called OSAPAC, but a lack of foresight in any recent provincial government (not just the current one), has left Ontario scrambling for online resources on a board by board basis.  This is incredibly inefficient as boards repeat the same work instead of working from a centralized resource; it’s a massive failure of vision and leadership.  It also speaks back to Lila’s paper on equity in terms of access to coherent digital skills development.  Students fortunate enough to be in a school with a well developed digital skills program were at an advantage, those that weren’t are even further behind.

I’ve struggled with the willy-nilly nature of the educational ‘maker space’ fad since it was all the buzz at the ECOO conference way back in 2015.  I next sat with Marc Compton, who teaches at a private school in B.C. and has successfully implemented maker spaces into his LLC.  Marc also manages a STEM program so has a better understanding of the engineering design process in terms of creating viable engineering opportunities for his students.  Marc’s common sense approach to getting tools that work and then using them is contrary to the usual typical maker-space buy in (get whatever kit was hyped up at that conference you went to and then wonder why it’s gather dust in your ‘maker space’).  It’s amazing what a bit of common sense can do in terms of providing viable hands-on learning opportunities for your students.

Just when I thought we were wrapping things up, Carol Koechlin noted that the ideas document we were all working on isn’t just about catching up to current best practices, but also a pathway to future digital literacies we haven’t considered yet.  This got me thinking about all the emerging technologies we ignore because we still haven’t caught up with established digital skills in education.  Here’s a quick list off the top of my head:

EMERGING DIGITAL LITERACIES THAT WE DON’T TEACH BUT ARE ALREADY HERE:

Understanding 3d Digital Media

If you can’t do this don’t know how 3d modelling and animation work, you probably shouldn’t be teaching media arts in 2022.

I’ve been banging the drum about 3d media literacy for years.  Our game development
program prepares students for an industry significantly larger than the ailing traditional media industries that most high school media arts programs still cling to.  After attending the FITC conference in 2018, I realized that 3d media awareness goes well beyond creation; being unable to comprehend what computer generated imaging can do makes you susceptible to misinformation in advertising.  Understanding 3d CGI is a vital media fluency in 2022, yet almost no one is teaching it

Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning: human-machine collaboration

We got involved with IBM in 2019 in order to access their IBM Watson AI core.  Watson is the AI learning system that beat the reigning Jeopardy champ, but in our case we got access to a cloud based chatbot program and this gave students their first taste of AI supported coding.  Accessing the Watson core allowed students to create criteria rather than specific values for variables.  Instead of having to list every possible name that a user might enter, using AI, students were able to train the system on the concept of names and then it would automatically assign any name given to that variable.  It’s a small step, but understanding how AI and machine learning works allowed students to interact with it more effectively.

At the same time our game development class was getting a handle on more advanced enemy AI in the games we were developing.  The introduction to Watson in the junior classes quickly amped up our game based intelligence development in senior classes.

The as yet untaught emerging skillset here is human-machine collaboration.  After we got
going with Watson, one of my seniors co-oped with me in the lab and she went after developing a machine learning algorithm that would learn from its mistakes and draw useful data out of massive datasets.  This past spring, when I became aware of Github’s Co-Pilot, rather than banning it as many teachers have, I encouraged using it along with assessing its strengths and problems.  One of our seniors took it on for his grade 12 final project, his conclusion?  It helps but if you don’t know how to code it often loses the plot.

Familiarity with machine learning is going to become a vital skillset for our grads, but almost no one is teaching it.  In the meantime it’s what many students are using to answer poorly designed lessons that many teachers still haven’t bothered to update.  None of these AI generated papers will light up a plagiarism checker because it’s all original work.  We’re so technology-illiterate in education that we don’t even know what we don’t know.

CODING is not DIGITAL LITERACY

… any more than grammar is all there is to language literacy.  Of course it’s a part of it, but just a small part.  The technology stack we’re living in starts with basic electronics and works its way up through information technology and networking through IoT and robotics to cloud computing and emergent artificial intelligence.  In that hardware structure there are numerous software offshoots, all of which are viable and important components of a comprehensive digital literacy strategy.  If you think coding is digital literacy then you’re probably looking for an easy way out.  What I’ve discovered about people looking for an easy way out of difficult work is that they’ll usually find one.

Cybersecurity

I’ve saved the scariest for last.  I’ve been banging the drum for better (or any) cybersecurity education for years.  When I show up at a conference to present on it, educators can’t run away fast enough, yet they depend on it everyday to make their networked educational technology enabled lessons happen, and they expose themselves and their students to potential harm when using this connected tech with such willful ignorance.

It seems pretty obvious to me that, if we’re going to use networked educational technology in every classroom, it is incumbent upon us to teach cybersafety and privacy to our students from the moment we make them vulnerable.  The idea that cybersecurity is someone else’s problem is both naïve and selfish, yet that has been education’s approach.

I first got involved with cybersecurity through CyberTitan, Canada’s national student cybersecurity competition, which runs in conjunction with CyberPatriot, run by the U.S. Air Force Association in America.  CyberPatriot is now in its fifteenth season and has tens of thousands of students in many countries all learning hands-on defensive I.T. skills and deep cybersafety awareness that will assist them in any future career.  As you may expect, Canada has far too few of them.

There are many industry and government organizations that want to bolster cyber-education.  A more cyber-educated society makes for a more protected Canada in an interconnected global economy that isn’t exactly stable, yet the reflex in education is to think of this as someone else’s problem, even as we become increasingly dependent on networked ed-tech.  Ontario is now requiring mandatory elearning for high school students, but has nothing in place to teach safe use of that mandatory, network dependent technology; we couldn’t put the cart any further ahead of the horse if we tried.

In my new role we just ran National CyberDay, which reached over 2000 students nationally – there are almost seven million students in Canada, meaning less than 0.0003% of students participated (in the middle of cybersecurity awareness month), yet almost all of them will be on networked educational technology everyday this week.

Cybersecurity education may be the toughest nut to crack, but my recent experiences at conferences on the subject have only intensified my desire to climb this mountain.  Digitally skilled librarians would be a great place to begin this change towards a more secure and digitally literate Canada.  LLCs running CyberDay activities and engaging reluctant classroom teachers in cybersafety and privacy awareness is a great first step.  As awareness builds, librarians taking on CyberTitan coaching roles could introduce emerging cyber-skills to middle and high school students, opening up pathways into a desperately under-served industry in Canada.

There are so many emerging digital mediums.  I haven’t touched on the metaverse and how virtual and augmented reality are going to change human interaction in the next decade, or how wearable technology will revolutionize the smartphone yet again, but these are all emerging elements of digital literacy that we will need to address.

There is much work to do, but events like Treasure Mountain Canada are exactly how we’re going to escape our silos and develop a cohesive national approach that is both equitable and scalable.  Nothing else is going to solve the depth and breadth of the digital literacy problems that we face.

The hackneyed approach to digital skills development in education in Canada (and elsewhere) has produced a scarcity of much needed digitally literate graduates. Emergent skillsets such as in cybersecurity are particularly absent.  There is much to do.

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TMC is an opportunity for teacher librarians to escape Canada’s provincial education silos and share common challenges (which are very similar).  By sharing these problems and brainstorming solutions, best practices and future-ready strategies emerge. Wouldn’t it be efficient if the whole country were engaged in this powerful professional practice instead of repeating the work over and over (if at all)? Yet many provinces were not not in attendance. I’m still struck by how there is no such thing as “Canadian Education”, which has lasting implications for equity in our country.  Some provinces have cut teacher librarians entirely from their schools, preventing any of their students or staff from benefitting from these information literacy specialists – and these cuts happened during an information technology revolution when a guiding hand would have been most helpful.

We’re in the middle of an information revolution and your school system wants to remove all the information specialists?  What an odd choice.

I’m not a librarian, but I’m married to an awesome one.  Last time we flew out for a Treasure Mountain conference in BC my son and I went for a long ride up the empty coast of Vancouver Island while the librarians gathered, but this time I was in the room as the paper Alanna and I co-authored was featured in the event.

Treasure Mountain attracts librarians who are working to put school library learning commons squarely in the role of digital literacy development. This event was full of energetic thinkers who were digitally literate and well aware of the ongoing digital skills crisis happening across Canada.

Our presentation was about how using industry standard project management tools and organizational strategies not only prepares students for life after graduation, but also provides them with the organizational tools they need to be both resilient and successful, even when our school systems stagger under the weight of multiple pandemic shut-downs.

Being able select the right tools and move between digital and real-world information allows students to attend class, stay organized and continue to author their own student-led projects no matter how much chaos surrounds their learning.  Digital skills development and knowledge of a swiss-army knife of readily available digital tools could make our education systems pandemic-proof, if only we’d do it.

We shared examples of successes that demonstrated equity and inclusion as well as providing other examples of student-centred empowerment in learning through effective project management.  The tool we used was Trello, based on the academic research Alanna was doing at Royal Roads University in the spring of 2020 when things fell apart.  The project management theory her post-graduate class was studying was applied directly in my game-development class, saving both student-led projects from almost certain disaster; it’s a great example of a cross-pollination of ideas and shows how having a masters-TL in the room can help even a veteran teacher find effective learning tools.

Another example of the many cracks in Canada’s siloed education approach.

The morning keynote by Matthew Johnston, the educational director of MediaSmarts, an organization dedicated to improving media literacy in our students, focused on explaining how things had changed since pre-internet broadcast media.  The multi-directional web of media we now find ourselves in implicitly demands digital fluency, yet we still fail to engage these digital literacies by systemically teaching them.

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The BCTLA conference prior to Treasure Mountain Canada 2022 (where Alanna I were presenting) was challenging in all the right ways.  David Robertson’s opening keynote cajoled the audience with humour and deeply personal insights around why it’s so important to give indigenous authors (ideally through an indigenous press) control of their own stories as a vital part of reconciliation. As a writer myself I’ll go out of my way not to write indigenous characters in, no matter how well intentioned, because that has been happening for far too long.

Ivan Coyote’s closing keynote was equally powerful. I’ve learned that it isn’t a BCTLA keynote unless you cry. Ivan has a magical ability to move between poetry and accessible, colloquial prose that is both jarring and profoundly honest. I’ve long struggled with my own gender and don’t feel comfortable with my pronouns, but I am what I am and, also being autistic, don’t have the social energy or expertise to fight that battle.

The stories of non-cis kids leaving small towns even as those same small towns complain about a lack of doctors and other professionals was both funny and sad, and rang true with my experiences trying to provide safe spaces for ‘atypicals’ in my own small town school where gendered sports teams based on cisgendered norms drive school community in almost every sense.  Ivan’s honesty made me more vocal about my own differences during our presentation and might let me get a bit closer to what I am when I’m not pouring myself into the mould that everyone expects when I’m in the public eye.  That’s a powerful influence from a conference keynote!

In between the keynotes I attended a great engineering design process seminar with UBC’s GeeringUP engineering outreach students.  UBC’s GeeringUP program offers many online STEM resources for students and educators.  Are Ontario colleges and universities doing this kind of k-12 engagement?  If not, why not?  Fortunately, UBC isn’t stingy about sharing its engineering resources.

When I wasn’t in keynotes or seminars I was getting the broken school wifi to work so I could support rookie CyberTitan coaches five time zones away as they took their students through the first round of CyberPatriot.  That a major school system in one of the biggest urban centres in the country struggles to provide basic connectivity says something profound about the digital divide Canada is facing.  There are many components to developing effective digital learning, starting with connectivity and technology access.  If we have trouble making the fundamentals work in a place where there are really no excuses, how are the millions of rural educators and students (including the vast majority of indigenous educators and students) across Canada feeling everyday?  You can’t even begin to address digital illiteracy when there is no connectivity.  There is much work to do.

We wrapped up the BCTLA conference in a state of emotional exhaustion, but with minds brimming with possibilities.  To see librarians taking on these national equity initiatives through ensuring access to books and media by and for the persecuted, often with unclear support from their own school systems (there was much talk about hate-filled attempts to co-opt trustee positions), was both inspiring and frustrating.  Just when you think Canada might wake up from its shadowy, hate-filled colonial history and take a step into a brighter more inclusive future, that darkness reappears as twisted jingoism.

The BCTLA Conference was powerful in many ways, and after only a couple of hours to catch our breaths we were back at it for the Treasure Mountain opening dinner.

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Last week I attended my first conferences in a long time. Someone will have to explain to me why classroom teachers have no access to professional development like this. On Wednesday and Thursday morning I was at SecTor in Toronto, making many new contacts in industry and realizing that the vast majority of companies on the front lines of cyber-defence in Canada are eager to help both the public and public education get a handle on cybersafety and digital hygiene. On Thursday afternoon and Friday I was at the University of Waterloo for their Privacy & Cybersecurity Conference. These were two very different conferences with SecTor clearly focused on industry and sales and Waterloo’s CPI on academic research and strategic thinking, but you’d be amazed how well the two fit together. I really wish they’d arrange things so people could do one and then the other instead of overlapping them, but that failure to look after each other symbiotically is emblematic of a larger problem in Canada.

How Canada is approaching cybersecurity capacity development.

How Israel does it – with trust, interconnectivity and familiarity – no silos, and everyone looking after each other.

An early 20th Century office – you don’t have to think too hard to see what classrooms were modelled on. Teaching tech in one isn’t any fun, especially when you’re buried in massive classes.

If you’re in education you’re probably still teaching ‘the’ industrial revolution.  Our subjects are still siloed and scheduled that way.  There is little different in school organization and planning from how an early 20th Century office operated… and we’re still focused on producing graduates for that non-existent office.  It’s probably just a habit.  Public education was formed in the first industrial revolution and copied many of the forms from that time.  What’s frustrating is that these systems are unable or unwilling to change now.

When I became a technology teacher I quickly learned that there is ‘hard’ tech and ‘soft’ tech.  I found those descriptions amusing because the hard techs often had low expectations and my ‘soft’ techs had more demanding expectations, to the point where my principal told me I had to make them easier.  I preferred using traditional tech and future tech, which turns out is how most of the world sees them.

In traditional tech you’re doing wood and metal working and auto mechanics following Industry 2.0 processes (hands on fabrication).  Having come from millwrighting and spending a significant proportion of my free time working on mechanics, I have a love of working in these traditional skills, but if we’re aiming students at skilled trades we’re decades out of date.

Yep, there are four industrial revolutions, and most of the world is at about 3.2 on their way to 4.0.  In education we’re still rocking Industry 2.0 in most tech classes.

There are inherent dangers with traditional techs.  Industrial machines can cut and burn you if you aren’t careful, especially if you’re going to teach these skills in an Industry 2.0 hands-on way.  As a result, these classes are capped at 21 students and often run with significantly fewer.  My ‘soft’ tech classes, even though we were operating soldering irons and power tools and working with live electricity that could kill, were capped at 31 and ran in a classroom rather than a dedicated technology space.  The icing on the cake was when, during COVID scheduling, all my colleagues went home at lunch to ignore eLearning in the afternoon (because you can’t teach ‘real’ tech like that) while I was teaching my second cohort of students in-class while simultaneously juggling eLearning because there were no other qualified teachers to do it.  This might sound like a lot of moaning but it demonstrates in a systematic way how education is mis-labelling in-demand skills and unevenly distributing limited resources to teach what is actually needed.  It turns out what we were covering in ‘soft’ tech has more to do with manufacturing than most of what was happening in ‘hard’ tech classes.

The rest of the world has already experienced three industrial revolutions and is now deeply immersed in an emerging forth one.  If you’re going to be teaching skilled trade technologies you need to be focusing on robotics and IT automated systems, and that’s if you’re aiming at the last Industry 3.0 targets.  If you’re aiming to make students ready for the world of work they’re going to enter, you should be teaching machine learning, IoT (internet of things – ie: smart devices with networked sensors) and even AI (also things we cover in computer technology, except it’s all applicable to manufacturing).

Cloud based computing?  Cybersecurity?  Autonomous robotics?  Big data analytics?  IoT?  Augmented reality?  Every single one of these things we covered in my computer technology class.  If education wasn’t stuck in a when-it-was-formed mindset, we’d be able to prepare students for the world they’re going to graduate into.

The nomenclature matters because it’s used to direct funding.  The current government in Ontario is very focused on skilled trades, which is a good thing because our academically run education system isn’t kind to non-academic students, but the definitions it operates with aren’t accurate.  My son just started working at the factory around the corner.  They’re in an Industry 3.0 strance with non-machine learning (programmed) robots doing repetitive work (including welding which is still taught by hand in manufacturing classes like it’s 1960).  They need humans to do the in-between work, but the new factory going in next door will be fully automated and will leverage Industry 4.0 to the point where there will be few manual labourers but many more IT and robotics technicians (if they can find them) along with a plethora of support services such as cybersecurity and cloud services to make this highly efficient process hum.

Guess where all those manufacturing job skills are happening?  In poorly resourced/treated as a second thought computer technology classes.  Ontario needs to wake up and revise its technology curriculums to align with the technology students will be expected to know when they leave the make-believe world of education.

I was talking to the dad of a former student a couple of weeks ago.  His son got into robotics in my program about 5 years ago.  He graduated, went to college for a robotics technician qualification and has never been unemployed since.  He currently works for Toyota Canada and is being sent down to the States to learn the new welding processes their robots will use.  Those are the same robots my son is working with around the corner.  This is pretty thrilling for me as a teacher from a manufacturing pipeline perspective.  I have a former student coding the robots that recent grads are using in their work… in manufacturing.

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The idea of bringing cybersecurity awareness into a public school classroom makes many people uneasy, but as I said in a recent interview, “Cyber is never as complicated as you think it is, don’t let the lingo and media scare you off.”   There are a couple of events happening in October, which is cybersecurity awareness month in Canada, that’ll give you the resources and connections you need to explore cybersafety in your classroom.

CyberDay is the gentle introduction to cybersafety, privacy and cybersecurity.  

It’s happening on October 18th and the Knowledgeflow Cybersafety Foundation has been working like beavers to put together interactive resources and talks with experts that’ll make cyber accessible to everyone.

CyberDay is all online and you can pick and choose what you want to use in your classroom.  It could be a short lesson, a longer activity or even a whole day event depending on how you want to use it.

Sign up is on the site and you can even do some preliminary learning with it by having students submit questions to experts.  If you don’t think you have students in your class who are curious about hacking then you’re not getting where they spend most of their time (it’s online).  In this event students can ask white hat hackers and pentesters about their work.  That might lead more students to consider cybersecurity pathways which are in such short demand that Canada is looking overseas to bring people in because we’re not producing these careers at home.

As they say on the site, “Cybersafety is a team sport”.  You’re not alone in broaching this sometimes unnerving subject, you only need to connect to CyberDay to see how much help is on hand.

In case the ease of access isn’t compelling for you, perhaps the idea that if we’re going to use interconnecting education technology in our classroom, we should be covering best practices with our students will.  I attended a conference last week where Michael Canuel from LearnQC trotted out some current stats that should make you sit up and take notice:

• 

  (a staggering) 98% of data breaches are caused by user error or cyber-illiteracy. If we took steps to improve cybersafety awareness in education, we would all but solve the current wave of cyber-attacks on the education sector.

• cyber-awareness is vital to protecting our critical infrastructure. Canada now considers information technology to be a critical infrastructure (because it also runs all the other ones)
• cyber-skills are part of a collection of digital literacy skills that extend well beyond coding

The need for better cyber-awareness should be self evident, but what isn’t (to me) is why public education seems to go out of its way to ignore it.  While listening to Michael’s talk about the poor state of cyber-skills in Canadian education, I couldn’t help wondering if it isn’t intentional.  Many public education organizations have vested political interests in keeping the status quo.  From a professional perspective I was left desperately hoping that educators aren’t intentionally ignoring privacy and cybersafety skills in order to sabotage eLearning.  CyberDay would be a great first step in proving that skepticism misplaced.

One of the angles I was considering for CyberDay was just how well suited it is as a library activity.  I did a piece for the Ontario Library Association’s Teaching LIbrarian online magazine about how cybersecurity (as a digital literacy) makes a perfect connection with the roll a modern learning commons has in our schools.

Library learning commons are often the first point of contact for emerging technology.  Way back in middle school in 1982, I first laid hands on a computer in our school library when we set up Commodore PETs and saw the neon green wonder of coding for the first time.

I’m hoping I can connect with the OSLA about reaching out to librarians over the next couple of weeks in order to empower them to take on this latest in a long line of emerging digital literacies.  Cyber isn’t as scary as you think, and it’s a great opportunity for iterative and immersive learning.

CYBERTITAN:  Canada’s student cybersecurity competition

CyberTitan has been running since 2017/18 in Canada as part of CyberPatriot, the US Air Force Association’s now international student competition.  If you’re read Dusty World before you know that this contest has not only opened up pathways for my students, but also played a major role in my own professional development.  I’m a huge fan of the competition and would love to see more Canadian educators get on board with it.

CyberPatriot has a live map of registered teams on their site.  As you can see, compared to the United States, Canada’s engagement with the competition has been… less.  I’m particularly focused on connecting under-represented groups in the competition.  When I coached the first ever top all-female team to the national finals in 2019, I became aware of just how toxically masculine cyber can be.  I’d move mountains to get more female (including non-binary and female identifying) students into it.  I’d move more mountains to get BIPOC and indigenous students on board too.  The finalist teams all tend to come from major cities and specialist schools which tend to cater to socio-economically advantaged youth.  Cyber isn’t an urban/wealthy issue, it’s an all-of-us issue, and rural communities, families and businesses are just as in need of safe and secure connectivity as everyone else.

You can see what the competition is about from this Prezi that the mighty @oksarge and I presented at ECOO summer camp in 2020.  Students learn hands-on defensive IT skills by fixing compromised WIndows and Linux operating systems in virtual machines.

Learning to wrangle virtual machines is a big part of CyberPatriot.  You’ll find this technology to be an incredible tool for teaching computer technology. You can abuse VMs in all sorts of ways that’d make your IT department faint, and when it all goes wrong?  Just close the window.

VMs are simulated computers that happen inside a window, so you could run Apple OSx in Windows, or Windows in Linux using a VM.  Because it’s all virtual there is no chance of spreading malware from inside a VM, which is why they’re used in cybersecurity.  Learning virtualization technology like this is really eye opening for students, and it’s not nearly as tricky as you think it might be.

Our lab goes full disco during a CyberPatriot round.  It’s a six-hour competition window.  Pizza is brought in and snacks are available.  Students dig right to the end, making a mockery of the idea that kids today have no attention span.

The competition is exciting and students genuinely enjoy it and return year after year.  Live world wide scoring pits them against students from around the world, so if they’re competitive they can follow the scoreboard and dig for points, but CyberPatriot can also be played from a purely educational perspective where students still benefit from the teamwork, iterative problem solving and cyber-skills development.  Our junior teams are always reminded that this is a reconnaissance season with no expectation of winning.  Learn the ropes and get into it.  Many become competitive anyway because (here it comes again): cyber isn’t as complicated as you think it is.

Sign up is due by October 5th, but no money is due then (fees are waived for non-male teams) and I’ve always found that SHSM and other student success initiatives are eager to help cover costs (which aren’t due until mid-November).  The swag is excellent (t-shirts, medals!) and once students understand how it all works they always say the same thing (here it comes again), “it’s not as hard as I thought it would be.”  That’s cybersecurity in a nutshell.

Libraries would be another great focus for CyberTitan, where students could access the technology they need and develop their library and librarian coach into a cyber-aware school-wide resource.  My students have used the skills learned in CyberPatriot to help our school with technical support and many went on to support local businesses as well.  The benefits from this are many, we just need to get more Canadian educators to take that step and sign up a team. Once they do, they’ll be back!

It’s still true!  If you’d like to talk about running a high school team, I’ve got lots of experience and would be thrilled to help you get going.  Krista ran a very successful middle-school team in her first year coaching and can talk you through what to expect in that division.

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I’ve been relentless in my own research and development into emerging digital trends since I started teaching computer technology ten years ago – it’s why we’ve won more medals in more different Skills Ontario/Skills Canada categories than any other classroom in the province over the past six years.  Our competition successes in CyberTitan/Cyberpatriot, along with our work in Skills Ontario/Canada is one side of the equation, but where I get a real charge is hearing back from grads.  This is somewhere that public education studiously ignores (collecting data on graduates).  If I had one immediate wish for a change in public education, it would be to collect data on graduate success across all pathways.  We love flying blind in public education, that way we’re not responsible for anything other than a graduation founded on our own criteria.

A colleague is sending her son to college this year and they told incoming students that those who have taken a year off before beginning postsecondary are much more likely to finish their program.  Those who take two years off before returning are even more likely to see success.  This jives with my own post-secondary experience where I, as an adult student who left work after three years to return to school, was one of the few who could be bothered to get in for 9am classes.  It also aligns with anecdotal evidence I’m hearing from my own graduates.  It is strange that I repeatedly hear students being told that if they don’t go straight into post-secondary they’ll probably never do it.  It rates right up there with, “you’re a smart kid, why wouldn’t you go to university?”  When that advice isn’t being tested with success data, this approach seems remarkably flippant and privileged in tone.

I ran into a former student in the spring who went straight into university only to drop out in second year.  He’s now a barista.  Yesterday I had lunch with one of our strongest IT students in the past ten years (he was the only one to earn multiple CompTIA industry certifications while still in high school.  Industry certifications like this are often dismissed by traditional education institutions (mine were by the Ontario College of Teachers who gave me years of static before ‘letting’ me, a certified IT technician with years in the trade, take my computer technology teaching qualifications).  This student is currently in his coop placement in college and is taking a year off because his coop wants to hire him for a contract (in Germany!).  The college isn’t being very helpful about his stepping outside of their program plan either.  Institutions like to make sure they are at the front of the line in terms of benefitting from ‘your’ educational pathways.

I’m not the only one advocating for a less institutionalized approach to learning.

A career support teacher once described my own development through visual arts, millwrighting and IT to university and teaching as a ‘crooked path‘, but there is no straight path.  If you’re on that one it means you’re following institutional convenience and are and educational consumerist rather than a self directed learner.  If you’re a cradle to grave institutional educationalist (k-12 student, university student, teachers’ college student, teacher, etc), you’ve demonstrated a remarkable commitment to institutional thinking, but for those of us who want to combine complex skills across varying disciplines, or who simply would like to direct our own educational outcomes, crooked paths are the ones to enlightenment.

I struggled in public education as a student, dropping out of my grade 13 year and then following college, apprenticeship and then university pathways as I found my way to what I was supposed to be (author, artist, technician, teacher).  These decisions were often based on socio-economic difficulties (being a poor immigrant often excluded me from academic opportunities).  Something else those institutionalized pathways are is steeped in privilege.  The kids whose parents were paying for it all were also the ones who couldn’t be bothered to wake up for those 9am classes.

I’ve always considered my first-hand knowledge of the many different pathways available to students to be of great benefit as a teacher.  I can speak to students about the benefits and challenges of workplace, apprenticeship, college and university routes without having to refer them to boilerplate descriptions usually written by academics fixated on championing the institutional pathways they themselves have marched.  I’m proud of how many of my students have gone in many different directions and found success.  My own son just graduated high school and is just starting his first full time job in manufacturing in a state of the art factory and I couldn’t be prouder (he’s also making twice what the barista is and isn’t paying off student loans that never produced anything).  One of our CyberTitans from 2021 is in the process of applying directly to the Canadian Navy after working for a year (he is facing similar economic difficulties to what I faced as a young man).  I’m as proud of those students as I am of the grads who have toughed out challenging post-secondary academic programs.  Those crooked pathways aren’t easier, but they are richer experientially and no one handed them to these kids, which results in a different kind of educational empowerment.

There are forward thinking organizations out there who aren’t interested in maintaining traditional educational power structures so much as they are in empowering individuals so that they can leverage this information technology revolution we find ourselves in.  We live in a time of unique opportunities where learning could be more accessible, less restrictive and more individualized than it has ever been in history, but only if we can reduce the institutional drag we’re currently hauling with us into the future.

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This quote is 12 years old now, but it’s more true than ever, and our technology is about to take another leap forward that will make our current passive information /screen based approach to digital information look as outdated as a fax machine.

Way back in 2011 I made one of my first presentations for a provincial education conference (Dancing in the Datasphere).  Leveraging years in IT prior to teaching, I tried to edge teachers closer to an understanding of how the rest of the world had moved on in terms of their digital engagement.  Stepping out of IT in 2003 to become a teacher felt like time warping back 20 years, so out of date was the use of technology in education.  In 2019 I attended Cisco Live and discovered that the rest of the world has moved on again, leveraging cloud based systems in a way that no one in education is, so the anti-tech habits of education are still there.  The need for online/cloud based systems in education is apparent (especially since the pandemic began), but poor cybersecurity management is often used as an excuse to stay out of it.  We’re still the only school in South Western Ontario doing CyberTitan and one of only five in the province with any kind of cyber-focus.

In the past decade education has staggered into the 21st Century, though Ontario has gone out of its way to fear and shun it until all the tech-haters suddenly desperately needed it during the pandemic.  The past two years have forced a recognition of the importance of digital fluency, though there are still no mandatory digital literacy courses in any Ontario high school.

On To The Future, Ready or Not…

With all that in mind, what’s coming next offers some exciting possibilities, not that education will leverage them before I retire.  Machine learning and the artificial intelligence growing out of it is already offering students a silent AI partner for coding with Github’s Copilot.  The GPT-3 OpenAI system Copilot runs on is already producing original text, and perhaps even some of the original essays that teachers think are written by students.

As systems become smarter information falls to hand more readily and old habits become irrelevant (like memorizing phone numbers).  With all that in mind, I’ve had grade 10s building IBM Watson AI powered chatbots for several years now, and this past semester several of my seniors used Copilot to make their culminating coding projects.  Being able to communicate effectively with ML & AI is going to become increasingly important in the next decade.

But what really excites me about intelligent machines is how they’re able to simulate activities with human users in order to streamline and improve the human-machine interface.  Last week we were watching FITC’s Spotlight UX, an online conference about the multidisciplinary field of User Experience (UX) based on digital design, ergonomics and user interfaces.  UX opens things up to consider all aspects of digital design from a user’s point of view; it has a lot in common with student centered learning in education.  The opening speaker was formerly an ethnologist before getting into UX and her background allowed her to dismantle many of the assumptions that alienate users, especially in online systems that may be designed in one country and used many others.

At the same time I was reading Guy Huntington’s piece on The Coming Classroom Revolution.  One of the things he covers is the concept of a virtual-self personal learning assistant.  Guy is looking at the AssistBot from a legal/privacy perspective in the article, but a complex digital model of a students’ learning habits offers some interesting possibilities.  What if the virtual student could be run through simulations using various software?  User interface issues could be recognized even before a student picks up a new device or software for the first time.  Interfaces that have been refined by AI driven user simulations would feel intuitive in a way they never have been before because each user would be interacting with digital information on an interface that was custom designed for them based on thousands of hours of simulation prior to them ever picking it up for the first time.

The learning benefits should also be apparent if everyone is walking around with a digital doppelganger in tow.  A teacher might pitch a lesson into a simulation space and the virtual student-bots would be able to show where it does and doesn’t work for them, and the lesson could then be customized for each student as needed prior to them ever seeing it for the first time.  Classrooms would become radically personalized after over a century of factory conformity and low resolution information sharing.

A buzzword flying about at the moment is ‘metaverse‘, especially after Facebook rebranded itself Meta.  In the last post I talked about my long involvement with interactive and immersive virtual reality, and after years of development we are close to finally making it happen on a system-wide scale, but it’s going to happen while the systems themselves are becoming intelligent and the web itself is attempting to evolve itself past the attention merchant economy that web2.0 became.

Back in April I watched FITC’s big early conference and they had Jared Ficklin keynoting about how web3 (driven by blockchain encryption) might give us back control of our own data and change the paradigm we’re stuck in online with multi-nationals selling our data as if they owned it.  It was a thrilling talk and I’ve since come across similar thinking in WIRED.

Web3’s a bit of a dog’s breakfast thanks to crypto and the mess it has made, but the possibility of individuals owning their online presence is a thrilling return to what the internet once was and might be again.

Combining all of these converging ideas into a viable technological future is ambitious, but it’s something worth pursuing because if you don’t push for the best outcome for the most people we end up with what we have now.

Could the internet provide us with secure interaction and storage without abusing our information?  Could we move past the low-resolution two dimensional windows that we all peer into the datasphere with now?  Could we leverage machine intelligence to treat each other in a more human way than our ‘superior’ one teacher to 30+ student brick-in-the-wall classrooms continue to do even now?

Imagine if you will a future where you are able to move in and out of digital information at will without it ever distracting you from the real world as it does now.  Peripheral user interface ergonomics will drastically improve as we get clear of the smartphone myopia we’re currently stuck in.  When deep diving into digital data you’ll be able to do it using complex multi-dimensional interfaces that make our current screen fixation look positively archaic.  Haptic IoT devices mean you’ll interact with data with more than your fingers, allowing for much more nuanced control of your digital interactions.  Your awareness of that environment will also be dimensionally greater than peering through a 2d screen.  Moving three dimensionally in digital data offers you a much richer connection to your digital self.

A better interface with digital information is already here and will only improve, and though Web3 struggles to make sense at the best of times, the idea that we could bring our shared network back to a user-centric experience where our privacy and personal information is owned and controlled by users points to a possible future beyond the tyranny of the attention economy.  But what’s most exciting to me is the idea that we can have virtual versions of our habits that we can run simulations on in order to produce software experiences unlike any we’ve had before.  The efficiency in that combined with all these other converging technologies points to a digital future much richer than the step we’re stuck on now.

Imagine opening up a brand new app to discover that it intuitively makes sense to you because it was designed using thousands of simulated hours with your digital avatar.  This also offers some interesting security opportunities because no two interfaces would be the same since each would be tailored to its user.  Combined with a more privacy friendly web, multi-dimensional user interfaces and machine learning that enables us to refine the human-machine connection even before first use, the cybernaut of the future will be doing things in digital spaces that will challenge what we think is possible, which is vital because we will interacting with more and more complex artificial intelligences when digitally connected and if we don’t refine and improve our ability to operate in digital spaces, we’ll rapidly lose touch with what these automated intelligences are doing.

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I got into virtual reality way back in 2015, to the point where my secondary computer engineering program was making VR systems for other schools in our board and we developed a board-wide Ministry funded research project on it.  Having worked with this emerging technology from the very first commercially viable system, I’ve watched with interest as the field matures and it has me thinking about how we can move beyond the prejudices in our very conservative education system and toward a mindset where the ‘e’ in elearning stands for ‘enhanced’ rather than ‘electronic’ and is considered a necessity for a superior pedagogical experience rather than an evil to fight against or an excuse to cut funding.

Back in 2017 the only way you could do VR was with the processing power of a desktop computer.  We built those machines to spec and then set up a variety of fully interactive, high resolution headsets on them ranging from HTC Vives to Microsoft supported setups by Samsung through our board’s SHSM program.  I’m still providing hardware support for those machines years later.

We travelled to other schools and conferences around the province demonstrating immersive VR for students, parents and other educators.  In most cases they got stuck on the games, but games are often the early adopters, like the first-returners after a forest fire, they push technology and create systems that are adopted by later industries, like education.  Many people turned their noses up at VR even as they were stunned by how immersive and engaging it could be simply because it’s ‘all about gaming’, but (of course) that isn’t the case.

At Skills Canada Nationals in Moncton in 2016 I wandered the floor while our IT & Networking finalist duked it out in competition.  I came across a VR training system to operate one of the all-in-one lumber cutting systems (the kind that grabs the tree, cuts it, trims it and stacks the finished poles for transport).  These complex mechanical systems cost millions and the only way to train on them was to train on them, before VR got involved.  The VR training system they had cost upwards of $80,000 to put together, so it was far from cheap, but what it did was allow the company to train operators prior to putting them on the real multi-million dollar equipment and it reduced user-error in new operators by over 80% when they finally got into the real machine.  The end result was millions saved in broken equipment and lost productivity.

In applying immersive VR in our classroom I’ve come across instances where students with special needs could suddenly express their genius and I’ve had students produce complex VR based games that gave them the portfolio they needed to move on into high-demand post-secondary digital media programs.  It has also reframed for me how 3d modelling and emerging digital media have their own literacy requirements that many people are oblivious to.  This ongoing work culminated this year when we won Skills Ontario provincials in 3d animation and then went on to win Skills Canada nationals to become the top 3d animation school in the country.

All of these experiences and development feels like it’s leading somewhere, and that somewhere is beginning to come into focus.  A digitally enhanced classroom offers many benefits and improvements to pedagogical practice, but it requires staff and students who are fluent and proficient with the technology.  This is an ongoing problem in an education system that diminishes the potential of technology and clings to old ways, usually to the benefit of the organizations involved in public education.

Things have been, let’s say ‘rough‘ during COVID as the system fell into repeat rounds of remote learning without any kind of plan or expectations of success.  The new normal became to just do and expect less as the limited and atrophied format of elearning became evident to all, but any educator who approaches the job from that angle should probably be looking elsewhere for work.  As things come back toward some kind of normal I’m hoping we can explore virtual and digitally augmented learning without the entrenched prejudices surrounding webpaged based/screen delivered elearning because this emerging media offers some powerful opportunities.

In the time we’ve been in pandemic-limbo VR technology has moved along.  Those 2017 ‘coming soon’ stand alone systems are no longer lower resolution options and they are now pretty much where a desktop top driven wired system was in 2016, for one quarter the price.  The evolution toward fully interactive, high-resolution virtual reality will continue and education needs to get over it’s e-prejudices to better understand and leverage it.

My son gave the Hololens a go back at the ECOO conference in 2016.  It was very much a prototype-proof-of-concept device, but the idea of eye glasses sized headsets is where VR is headed.  Along with a pair of haptic gloves and other IoT type sensors, we should be seeing portable, capable, fully interactive systems in the next couple of years that continue to expand the bandwidth between us and our rapidly expanding digital infrastructure.  Interacting with digital information through a two dimensional low-resolution/screen will look as archaic as dot matrix printers in a decade.

During the pandemic I got to try Meta’s latest Oculus Quest 2 headset.  These are completely wireless, have school-day long battery life and offer interactive, immersive digital media access for close to the price of a Chromebook.  Early adopting programs (like mine) will be able to offer VR experiences much more easily with this gear, but it’s the next step that is most exciting:  the convergence of virtual, augmented and mixed reality into a readily accessible digital media-scape for most subjects of study.

“Education will be transformed into something far more vivid. History teachers will transport their students to the beaches of Normandy or the Cu Chi tunnels of Vietnam. In biology class, the entire room will become the inside of a mammalian cell.”

– https://futureof.org/sports-2016/ar-vr-roadmap/2025-arvr-convergence/

We’re getting to the point now where the hardware engineering isn’t the limitation.  The next few years will be about developing the software engineering in this new medium because having the tech in hand doesn’t help when the media isn’t there to make use of it.  The focus I’ve placed on our game development program has always included a big push beyond games as students develop increasingly complex digital portfolios.  It’s why we’ve crept into animation and 3d modelling in our engineering as well, because these skills are going to be in short supply to fulfill the needs of this emerging medium.

Our success with Skills Canada this year in 3d animation lies very much in the realm of digital media as this kind of 3d media is exactly what is needed for both virtual and augmented reality experiences to work:

Made over 2 days (2×6 hours), our team of 2 had to storyboard, script and animate an 11 second video.  They were allowed to pre-model and rig 3d character models (the loon and the beaver) but the metal pot was a wild-card model that had to be made in the competition window.  All sounds were prescribed for all teams, so the animation is storyboarded to fit them.

Our success at Skills (and the fact that it was 2 grade 11s who achieved it) means we’re integrating 3d animation into the game development training curriculum next year.  This all grew out of me pushing for better narrative structure in last year’s game, Rigged.  That led to several students (including our Skills competitors) branching off and forming animation teams to better frame the narrative in the game:

All the modelling, animation and sounds in that video were made from scratch in our classroom by grade 11/12 students in our TGI3/4M Software Engineering/Gamedev class.  We were unable to develop a VR based game as we have in previous years due to COVID restrictions, but I’m hoping to get back to it sooner than later.

It won’t be too long until you see teachers asking students to take out their headsets and join a virtual classroom where avatars allow students to be whatever they wish and the level of interactivity means teachers will be able to know whether or not a student is engaged and present.  Many online teachers during the pandemic experienced the ‘logged-in-but-absent’ student.  That kind of low-resolution online interaction would be rendered obsolete once Meta and the rest of the industry has education-ready virtual reality ready to go.  If you’re inhabiting an avatar online you can’t hide behind privacy as an excuse to not participate, and an inactive avatar in VR would look like an inactive student in class, making avoidance much more difficult.

This also means that the idea of a brick and mortar classroom as we know it is going to quickly become irrelevant and our schools as we know them will require rethinking – something that the drag-inducers in education (the vested interests in how things run right now) aren’t going to want to cooperate with.  I fear the public education system in Ontario is going to need a hard reboot to make this happen.  That may be the only way to break our ties with a past that makes little sense in the 21st Century and craft a ‘world class education system‘.  Thinking that the way things were is the pinacle we need to get back to is a big part of the problem.

Instead of passive information delivery, interactive, immersive learning opportunities mean students will experience history, science and literature first hand, bringing formerly static information to life and allowing them to explore it rather than have it land on them.  Living Lord of the Flies is much more memorable than reading it.  I did a role play of it over a decade ago in an English class and former students still talk about it today.  Interactivity is the key to engagement with modern students as this is the mediascape they live in when not in class.  They will no longer be forced to step back a decade in terms of media in the classroom if we can engage with emerging digital mediums.

In the book (and film) Ready Player One, after the collapse of an oil based transport economy virtual reality becomes the default schooling option.  A better future would be a bit less apocalyptic but the idea that VR would augment learning and help teachers produce engaged classrooms with interactive and powerful learning opportunities also suggests that we don’t need to burn tons of diesel every day transporting students to remote schools since any local school could provide digital enhancement.  Even in augmented situations where students are building in technology classes or experimenting in science, augmented reality could offer insight and direction that would enable far more students to enjoy success while also making our schooling more green; yet another aspect of our ‘perfect’ system that never was.

From the early days up until now, virtual/immersive/interactive digital tools have offered the hope of a future that finally removes us from a static relationship with information and offers radical differentiation of learning for all students.  In our increasingly information rich (or overwhelmingly information overloaded world, depending on how you look at it) we need to find better ways to find and make effective use of the information at our fingertips, and this augmented, virtual mediascape will be the key to that as well.  That it also offers a solution to our current wildly unsustainable educational transport habits is icing on the cake.  Now it’s just a matter of getting a system mired in political self interest to move forward.

RESOURCES

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