Like many social trends, hacking came into education late. Decades after the concept reached world wide understanding in technology, education took it up as a great leap forward and a way to catch up with the times, except everyone else has moved on, again.  WIRED recently published an article that demonstrates technology’s evolving relationship with the hacker ethos.  In questioning the value of hacking as a moral and useful way of thinking, this article raises some interesting questions about the many teachers who want to hack the classroom, or teach children the magic of hacking.

Honesty, ethics and scientific method?  Surely it’s much better to be a cool hacker in a classroom, right?

If, as Joi Ito suggests in that article, “the hacker archetype had found its highest articulation in one Donald Trump”, then perhaps it’s time for educators to rethink their hacking fandom.  At its roots hacking is an act of hubris designed to beat a system at all costs.  It is driven by pride and arrogance and the results always justify the means.  A successful hack is a forced, rushed, short-term result that only has value to its user.  Hackers don’t build things, they break things, twisting the intentions of designers and diverting shared resources for their own needs; hacking is an inherently self serving and destructive act.

…but I can hack a fix that will save us in this moment but will take weeks afterwards to undo or everything will fall apart – hacks have nothing to do with sustainable engineering.

In certain circumstances (say, Scotty on the Enterprise jury-rigging together some dilithium crystals to make the warp drive work and save everyone’s lives), a hack might be just what you need, but to base your personal knowledge on hacks, or worse, teach it to many people as curriculum, is madness.  Whenever someone hacks together a solution in a complex system, it weakens the system.  You might get what you want out of it in the short term, but capable people will need to come in afterwards and repair what you’ve done or else the system will eventually fail.


It might seem romantic and exciting to call hands on learning hacking, but it’s also very inaccurate, to the point of being damaging to the students learning it because it doesn’t teach them effective engineering.  It is akin to teaching accounting by showing students how to cook the books, or teaching a sport by showing students how to cheat to win it.  As they mention in the WIRED article, the Russian team’s hacking of the last Olympics shows a staggering lack of understanding; the point isn’t winning at all costs.


As a former IT technician and now technology teacher I’ve always wondered why I find the whole hacker thing so eye-rollingly tedious, but in retrospect it was because I was the one who had built the thing they broke, and then had to fix their ‘ingenious hack’ so that the whole thing would work again.  It’s difficult to see a hacker as some kind of genius when you build and service a complex hardware and software network that serves hundreds of people well only to watch it get broken to serve one selfish person.  Yet many educators hold up hacking as this magical process that lets you beat technology.  Perhaps that’s what’s at the bottom of this, and opportunity to attack the technology that so many people feel is enabling them to belittle themselves.

“There is a trend in software development away from the ‘hacker’ jury-­rigging into a mature field, where things are ‘proven’,”

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These are the big 3 that are somehow branding entire school boards, but the education software sector is a 10+ billion dollar industry beyond even them.  Happy to make money from education, not so happy to pay taxes to provide that education in the first place.

I attended a panel discussion yesterday a #BIT17 between educators and education IT support that jumped up and down on a number of hot button issues.  One thing that’s always struck me about attending a conference like ECOO is the point of view of the support people in education; they don’t seem to get the support piece.  Our function is to educate.  Not provide PD for teachers, or build an IT network.  Those things are there only to support the main function of what we do: educate children.


In the course of this discussion it was suggested by curriculum support people and board IT professionals that teachers should be spending an inordinate amount of their time closely reviewing the legal documentation around software applications and vetting software.  I thought we had people for that.  Having a teacher do that is akin to pulling all your commandos off the front line in a war and having them do paperwork.


Once I got past everyone who doesn’t work in a classroom earnestly telling me I should be doing their job for them (odd that teachers never suggest that of other education employees), we continued to pursue the topic of heightened responsibility – the term that was used to shut down my suggestion of using your online PD community to source new technology ideas for your classroom.  From my point of view, if a number of educators I know personally suggest trying a new app or other piece of educational technology, that’s a fantastic resource.  I was told by a panel member that this stifles innovation.  I always thought it was a source of innovation.  Perhaps this was a misunderstanding in terminology.  I used the term crowdsource to describe my process of vetting a new piece of software.  To the CIO and curriculum experts on the panel, this meant trusting strangers on the internet.  That isn’t my experience with online learning communities at all, it’s anything but dealing with unsubstantiated strangers.  Maybe that’s how they tentatively work online though.  Let’s call that one lost in translation.


Michelle Solomon from the Association of Media Literacy was on the panel and created an awkward moment when she suggested that using even board/ministry sanctioned software like Turnitin.com (a private, for profit company that uses student data to make its money) was morally ambivalent.  The CIOs and curriculum experts were quickly able to compartmentalize that truth and function again within their fiction, but it knocked the floor out of what we were talking about for me.


When describing themselves and their school boards, the IT people in the room said, “we’re a Google board” and “we’re a Microsoft board” as a means of stating their, what, affiliation?  Their purpose?  You’re public school boards here to promote and deliver public education; what you aren’t is a multi-national media company that undermines democracy and avoids paying taxes anything.


The ‘stop loading malware onto our networks/teachers should be happy with less choice and spend more time pouring over software legalize‘ angle was designed to create a locked down, heavy drag system where innovation and moving with trends in data management would be years behind what everyone else is doing.  I have to wonder just how bad the teachers-installing-malware issue is, because I haven’t heard anything about it.  This invented and absurdly low threshold for software access (watch out, everything might be infected!) then had the blanket of heightened responsibility thrown over it all.  Of course, you know what the answer to all these technically incompetent teachers installing malware is?  Get a corporate system!  Become a Gooplesoft board!


Except, of course, those earnest, well meaning multi-nationals, from their totalitarian labour to expert accountants, aren’t in it for education, they’re in it for money.  You want to talk about malware?  It’s all malware!  Google promises not to advertise to your students while they are in Google Apps for Education, but they can’t stop mining data on what students do in GAFE because Google is a data mining advertising company, it’s how they make their money.  They always serve themselves first.


I left this talk with my head spinning.  I feel like we were talking in circles about a fiction that

doesn’t exist.  We could have a self-built, non-corporate technology foundation for Ontario Education, but it would be hard work and would require technical talent to achieve.  Why do that when we can give in to the hype and Vegas-like allure of the educational technology juggernaut?  Pick your poison, but if you’re going to use educational technology none of it is blameless, it’s all built on shifting grounds undermined by hidden revenue streams.


At one point it was suggested that we need to build media literacy in order to battle this situation.  It needs to start with the educators and technologist working in the industry.  If we’re too busy drinking the koolaid to recognize just how twisted this all is, then there is little hope of graduating students who anything more than consumers.

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The other day I was driving my better half’s car.  I don’t usually drive it and it’s still relatively new so each time is an adventure.  It was a busy day on the main street of our village, so I was parallel parking into a spot with a row of traffic lined up behind me.  It’s a smallish vehicle so this is pretty straightforward, or it would be.  Shifting into reverse I backed in to the spot only to have the emergency warning systems start bleeping at me frantically whenever a car passed by.  This system is supposed to be there to make the car safer, but in interrupting my parking process repeatedly it actually kept stopping me because I thought we were about to have an impending impact.  I’d have been better off without the frantic bleeping and would have parked the car more efficiently, quickly and safely without it.

It’s a pretty thing and very efficient for what it is, but this Buick likes to get in the way of my driving process.

Pulling out after our stop I backed up to clear the car in front and the mirrors aimed down – I presume to make sure I’m not running over any small animals, but when I started driving forward all I could see out of the wing mirror was the ground, which isn’t very helpful when I’m trying to pull out.  I’d have been better off without the squirrel saving rear view mirrors.  I can always actually move my head if I want to see down through the mirror, it doesn’t need to move at all.  The worst part about all of these interrupting technologies is that in addition to actually making driving more difficult, they are also another thing to break over the life of a car.


I’m all about technology assisting a process, I’m happy to use the rear view camera to make centimeter perfect parking, but there is a big difference between interfering and assisting.  When you’re backing a car up and it starts bleeping at you about impending impacts that aren’t happening it isn’t helping, it’s introducing false and interrupting signal to your process.  When your car aims its mirrors at the ground and then leaves them there thus preventing you from using them to assess incoming threats, they are a hazard rather than a help.


This ‘we’ll do it for you‘ technology sets all sorts of dangerous precedents:

This ad doesn’t make me think, gee, I need a Kia so when I’m operating a two ton vehicle like a clueless git it’ll save me from myself!  It does suggest that there should be far fewer people with valid licenses on the road.  Driver intervention tools like this muddy the line between expectations of driver competence and technology’s ability to take care of things.  How often do educational technologies do the same thing in the classroom?

But what about technology like anti-lock brakes that actually outperform most people in emergency situations?  I pride myself on my ability to modulate brakes very effectively, but modern anti-lock systems are so capable that I can’t keep up, and I consider them a requirement on a modern car.  This isn’t an anti-technology rant, technology should be able to help us do things better, but when it doesn’t it drives me around the bend, and it doesn’t whenever it tries to do too much for us, and especially when it starts to assume responsibility for the very human parts of driving (like paying attention), or the very human parts of learning, like demonstrating skills.


Self driving cars are on the horizon.  For many people this will be a great relief.  Those who hate driving and do it poorly will all be better off for it, and so will the rest of us when they are no longer operating a vehicle.  I have no doubt that for the vast majority self-driving cars will drastically reduce accidents, but they also mean those of us who are willing and capable lose the chance to learn how to do something well.  The fact that I can toss pretty much anything into a parallel parking spot (I did in in a van… in Japan… with the steering on the wrong side) is a point of pride and a skill I took years to develop.  If machines end up doing all the difficult things for us, what’s left for us to do well?  If machines end up demonstrating our learning for us, what’s left for us to learn?


Based on what I’ve seen recently, I’m more worried that machines will unbalance and panic us while they are taking care of us.  I don’t look forward to that future at all.  Perhaps clueless, bad drivers won’t notice any of this and will do what they’re doing now, minus the actually controlling the car part.  Perhaps poor learners will happily let AI write their papers and answer their math quizzes, and never have an idea if what they’re doing for them is right or not.


I often frustrate people by second guessing GPS.  Mainly it’s because I know how hokey the software is that runs it, so I doubt what it’s telling me.  When GPS steers me up a dead end road I’m not surprised.  Maybe I’ll feel better about it when an advanced AI is writing the software and it isn’t full of human programming errors.  When that happens maybe it won’t matter how useless the people are.  There’s a thought.


I’m a big fan of technology support in human action, but it should be used to improve performance, not reduce effort and expectation.  It should especially not damage my ability to operate a vehicle effectively.  The same might be said for educational technology.  If it’s assisting me in becoming a better learner, then I’m all for it, but if it’s replacing me as a learner, or worse, interfering with my ability to learn, then the future is bleak indeed.

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The revive old post plugin on WordPress is great (and random) , and gets you re-reading old reflections. Learning Expert and the Skilled Master shone a light on the PD I was about to walk into that morning.

Things keep happening at work that I’ve just had surface online.  The resonance between ideas from years ago and now always makes me wonder about the progression of education.  The more things change the more they stay the same, I suppose.

Last week before our first PD day of the year I was re-reading a three year old post comparing learning experts with skilled mastery (when you’ve been blogging for six years you get to see a lot of old ideas remembered).

Learning experts are like chameleons, perfectly camouflaged by their quick minds.  They’re able to effectively consume large amounts of information and present it effectively in an academic setting.  They’re who you want to explain to you how an internal combustion engine works, but they aren’t who you want fixing one.  Learning experts tend to have a finger in a lot of pies.  They don’t focus on developing a single set of skills because they prefer the rarefied air of pure learning; they tend to be informational creatures.

By contrast the skilled master is someone who has spent a lot of time honing stochastic skills though trial and error in the real world; their’s is a situated intelligence.  They might have an encyclopedic knowledge of their specialty but they tend to shy away from theoretical recitation in favour of relying on personal experience.  Their expertise is in the particular, not the general.  They are able to demonstrate that expertise concretely.  Learning experts shy away from that sort of tangible skills demonstration.

High school teachers are expected to have mastery of their subject area, but you’d be amazed at how many English teachers don’t write and how few science teachers do science.  In fact, in my experience, the vast majority of high school academic specialists don’t practice their specialty in any discernible way.  They come dangerously close to making that annoying Shaw quote look accurate.  One of the exceptions I’ve found is in the technology department where our chefs chef, our technicians repair and our materials experts do carpentry and metal work, every day.  Constant examples of their expertise pop up all over the school.

We spent PD last week doing the learning expert thing as we always do.  We began by being given statistics so laughably incomplete as to be essentially useless and were then asked to suggest sweeping changes to our school based on them.   After being handed a Ministry document so dense in edu-speak as to be practically incomprehensible (which isn’t a problem if tangible results aren’t a requirement), we were asked to apply whatever it was to how our department teaches.  We then spent time touching so lightly on mental health as to barely register our presence before ending the session blasting off into the school as the resident experts on it, ready to develop deep personal connections with all the students who least want that.  In the afternoon we learned how to make our own statistics to justify any course of action we choose.  At the end of the day all the learning experts felt like they’d done many things, I felt like I’d been desperately treading water for eight hours.

Tangibles from the day?  Nooooo.  We don’t do tangibles.

NOTES:
The sub-text of our data driven morning was that our school doesn’t do enough to support our essential and applied students.  Seeing as we’re not sectioned to run those courses and have to squeeze them into existing classes, it’s little wonder they aren’t being served well.  Rather than trying to pry this open with insufficient statistics why not talk to the actual problem (our essential sections are given away to a school miles away)?

Since then there has been some top down pressure on making open courses easier.  Essential and applied students don’t need easier, they need curriculum delivered to their needs.  It’s hard to do that when we prioritize running a dozen half empty grade 12 university bound science courses but barely any non-stacked essential classes.  I’m guessing because these stats weren’t given, but we spend more than half our class sectioning to satisfy university bound academic students who compose less than 30% of our student population.

LINKS:
consumerist learning: less challenging classes aren’t what students are looking for.
proliferation of fifties:  we already pass students we shouldn’t.  How low should we go?
situated intelligence:  it’s the only real kind we have. Everything else is politics.

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Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?

…and the counterpoint: Ignore The Bullshit: iPhones Are Not Destroying Teenagers

Is this another panicky article by The Atlantic about how digital technology is killing us?  (Remember is Google Making Us Stupid?  I do.)


The general complaint is that youngsters tangled up in emerging technology won’t have the same beatific childhood we have all nostalgically invented for ourselves.


Nostalgia is a dangerous thing at the best of times.  It’s a fictional invention by its very nature.  Our own childhoods weren’t magical bliss.  Depending on how old you are, that magical family trip you took when you were a child was done in a gas guzzling, emissions belching nightmare of a 1970s car.  We’re all suffering from the results of your magical childhood road trips.  This isn’t to say that those trips weren’t wonderful, but they are hardly the placed on a pedestal, this is the way we should all be all the time ideas that nostalgia amplifies them into.


The distance between generations is very similar socially to the distance between races and cultures.  Especially with our rapidly evolving technology, one generation to the next might have significantly different lived experiences.  Just as racists like to emphasize differences in culture and patriots like to wave their flags over the perceived superiority of their countries, ageists like to belittle generations other than their own for their differences.  Sometimes that ageism turns into something worse.


This week in Canada the elementary teachers union in Ontario created a debate about the country’s first prime minister, John A. MacDonald.  This discussion squared off people who tend toward staunch nationalism with people who tend toward staunch political correctness.  It reminded me of a story one of my history professors once told us about his dad.


In his late eighties, this professor’s father thought it would be nice to begin attending university classes.  The prof was delighted at the idea and encouraged his dad to give it a go.  In the first semester this elderly gentleman found himself in a class full of twenty somethings learning about the early Twentieth Century – something he had first hand knowledge of.  As they learned about suffrage (both gender and race) the ever-so-proud of their place in history young people in this class began throwing around words like sexist and racist.  The prof’s dad was very upset by this.  He tried to explain that the vast majority of people at the time weren’t consciously racist or sexist, but were becoming aware of how things had to change.


This is a huge realization that I think most people seem incapable of.  Our place in history is perhaps our largest single prejudice.  Those twenty-somethings in university in the 1990s were throwing around these judgments from a temporal place of perceived superiority, but I wonder how history will represent them.  Can you sit there wearing clothes made in sweatshops and burn fossil fuel to get to class and really feel that superior?  Can you live in a country that only exists as a result of aggressive colonialism and cast disparagements at the people who did the dirty work of creating it?  They could.


This feels like a people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones kind of thing, but it’s human nature to grasp for and exploit any perceived superiority it can; political correctness is founded on the idea.  Humility and honesty are hard work.


When I was doing teacher’s college I came across a grade 8 history text book that had a drawing of the day of Confederation on Parliament Hill in 1867.  In this picture that I’d describe as more propaganda than anything else, were black, Asian and native people all walking hand in hand with white Canadians and all dressed in appropriate Victorian dress.  None of the women and most of the men in that picture couldn’t vote and had nothing to do with Confederation.  If they weren’t dying from smallpox they might have been building a railway or were recent refugees from the underground railroad who were now experiencing the quieter racism of British North America.  If you want a final victory for colonialism this was it – a children’s history text that had rewritten history to make Canada look like something it never was (but would eventually evolve towards).  Burning books and rewriting history has a long and dark history.


Canada has a messy history.  Less messy than The States, but messy still.  Revising it isn’t a way of fixing that, it’s a way of hiding it, which isn’t cool.  Any schools named J.A.M. should remain so – talking about history remembering the context of the time is why the study of history is so challenging, but it’s something we should do or we’re doomed to repeat it; I suspect we are anyway if we’re not willing to ask the hard questions and fix the social inadequacies we currently exploit.  It’s a good thing people in the early Twentieth Century were willing to fight for equality of access to democracy, because I’m not sure people today would.


There is little difference between George Washington owning slaves and a 21st Century North American buying sweatshop clothes from Walmart.  In fact, I’d say the only difference is that Washington did his own slave owning rather than farming the work out to multinationals.  The modern ‘First World‘ has never paid for what things actually cost.  What was once nationalist colonialism has simply been hidden in Globalized economics.


Judging newer generations who are struggling with technology change just as we all are is equally prejudicial.  As I said above, other than teens being able to publish their self involved drama, I’m not sure much has changed other than the ability to publish it, so panicking over the end of civilization because of smartphones seems a bit bombastic, but I’m sure it’ll sell magazines.

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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.

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.

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.

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

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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.

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.

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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.

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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:

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?

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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.

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