Edtech – Page 38 – Mechanical Sympathy

The DIY Computer Lab

Teaching computer technology has me expanding and
enhancing our program to make it as current and
relevant as possible – the DIY lab is a key to that.

My ECOO16 presentation suggestion:

We’re used to being handed locked down, turn key computer labs by our school boards, but this approach doesn’t teach technological understanding. The future of technology is diverse and individualized and we should be striving to encourage a deeper understanding so that students can find the devices and software that suit their needs. Many boards have suggested BYOD as a solution, but this amplifies socio-economic differences that public schools should be trying to mitigate. There is another way.

I’m a teacher who gave back the lab that was given to me. Over the past two years I’ve developed a digital learning space that is made by students at the beginning of each semester. Students build PCs, upgrade parts and install and maintain software. In doing so they learn how to build current and relevant technology to suit their own needs.

In this presentation I’ll explain the process, costs (and free things!) as well as how the lab works on a day to day basis. DIY computer access offers students a chance to become authors of their technology use instead of being mere users.

Interested? I’ll be presenting on this at ECOO in November. This whole post is pasted out of my application to present.

Learning Goals
– how to make DIY technology work in the classroom
– using current (like, made THIS YEAR!) software in a classroom
– learning technology by building it rather than just using it
– developing technological fluency in students and staff
– exploring educational freeware
– exploring beta software available for free use
– how to source hardware (suggestions based on experience)
– changing students & staff from users to authors of technology

Windows 10, the latest in graphics and processor technology and twice the memory of your typical school PC. What do we do with all that horsepower? We run Unity (professional license given freely by Unity for our educational needs), and build 3d models in Blender. None of this would be possible on existing school board basic Dell PCs.

With flexibility in how we build a lab, we can pursue advanced technology, giving our
students authorship over their technological fluency.

Agility is key if you want to keep up with technology – you’ll never develop it if you’re kept as a pet user.

A Blender model made by one of our grade 12s last year – this kind of experience allowed her to build the kind of portfolio that got her into the heavily contested Sheridan College video game design program

How We’ve Situated Ourselves

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

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

Below are some quotes I’m ruminating on:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neurology: Is it the car, or the car and driver?

We had board PD today (a 3 hour lecture). It was a presentation on neurology in learning and layered curriculum by Kathie Nunley. I’m generally a fan of a nuanced scientific approach to human activity (as opposed to a simplistic approach to things that usually support buying something). Dr. Nunley’s neurological approach to education offered a number of insights to what we’re doing wrong. If we don’t consider biological imperatives in learning we will never be as efficient as we might be.

There was a moment where I came to the end of neurological approach and the ‘ol philosophy degree kicked in. Nunley had a slide stressing the importance of the appearance of choice in learning. She stressed how engaging it is for students when they feel like they can choose their learning.

My knee jerk response was that this was manipulation, which led me down a metaphysical rabbit hole.

Neuroscience, because it’s looking at the brain, comes dangerously close to itemizing our sentience. It also tends to reduce multi-dimensional complexity into simplistic linearity. This idea that the appearance of choice would prompt more efficient learning would encourage any right minded teacher to manipulate their students into thinking they have learning choice in order to harness better retention. No right minded teacher should be manipulating anyone into anything.

An analogy immediately came to mind. Is neuroscience the car or the car and driver? On a neuroscientific level our minds are very complex mechanical devices. Our actions are driven by a brain developed from millennia of evolution. There is no free-will, only complex autonomous reaction. If that is what we are, you should have no trouble manipulating these processes to get a desired result, especially if it’s a good end. School systems should treat the people in them like cogs in a machine, because that’s all they are.

If neurology is the study of the car then we can make immediate and scientifically informed choices that will improve its maintenance and operation. As Nunley suggested in her presentation, dietary and developmental principles can be applied to maximize the functionality of our brains. If neurology is the study of the car and driver then there is nothing else to consider. In addition to the spiritual considerations that a number of people would find difficult to swallow, concepts like ethics or metaphysical ideals beyond the immediately knowable world of science (like honesty) may be ignored. Neurology is the rational tool that justifies treating people like machines because that is all they are.

One of the reasons I like teaching technology is because students don’t get to work in imaginary value structures. Those would be places where the science of neurology reigns supreme, where the teacher should manipulate students to lead them to success. It’s where a 60% means you’ve done enough. In the world of hands-on experience 60% is as useful as a zero. If you don’t believe me have 60% of your next brake job done and see how that goes.

Teaching technology means I get to take students inured to reality after years of ‘learning’ in a school system and put them in close proximity to what is rather than what we wish. Their discomfort is obvious. They respond with comments like, “it didn’t work, but I tried real hard. Do I get an A?” No, you don’t, and reality is unimpressed with your intellectual resilience and general work ethic. Thank goodness human value structures don’t decide everything.

Fortunately, and despite our best efforts, we don’t live in a reality based on human value structures. The large, unknowable universe that surrounds us makes itself felt constantly. The tiny portion of reality we feel like we have a grip on because of science is only a gross approximation; mathematics and human ideas that roughly simulate reality enough to make crude use of it. Science thinks in terms or breakthroughs and mastery, but neither actually happens. Neuroscience offers us some useful insight into how brains function, but it is still far from understanding our minds; the driver is still safely out of their hands.

I tend toward moral absolutism. One of the reasons I find science so agreeable is because it attempts to tell no lies, but in the case of neuroscience it seems to make some assumptions on how much it thinks it knows about being human. Brains aren’t all we are, even though we use them as a lens to make sense of the world.

I’m going to take many of the suggestions around how to best maintain and maximize brain efficiency from this PD, but I’m not surrendering morality in the process. If I’m going to give a student a choice it’s going to be a genuine choice because I believe those are superior to the appearance of choice. In ways not immediately measurable I know that treating students and the subject I teach honestly creates the kind of fecundity that science is still having trouble quantifying.

Arduinos, Galileos & Edisons

Students create astonishing work with Arduino.
Instead of electronics being something that is
done to them, Arduino lets them author their
relationship with electronics.

I’m a big fan of the Arduino microcontroller. This tiny, inexpensive board plugs into your computer via a usb cable and lets you create circuits for lights, sounds, sensors or pretty much anything else you can think of. You then write (or paste) some simple code into a window on your computer and send it to the board to have the lights flash, or music play, or have sensors sense.

As an introduction to how circuits work it doesn’t get much better. Because the coding you’re doing has immediate physical results, it also makes for a tangible, tactile introduction to programming too. You can find arduino boards for about ten bucks a pop. With another five bucks in LEDs, wiring and other bits and pieces, you’ve got a basic electronics and coding lab that suits both tactile and non-tactile learners. You could put together a comprehensive class set for the price of a single iMac. If your school is chucking any electronics, suddenly you find yourself recycling lasers out of cdroms and wiring out of computers to expand your collection.

Since Arduino is open source, a variety of support programs have popped up around it. Fritzing helps students create professional looking wiring plans, and 123d Circuits lets you create virtual Arduino projects before you plug in a single wire. If you’re wondering how tricky Arduino might be for younger students, 123d Circuits would be a great way to test feasibility for free.

My favorite part of Arduino comes after the introduction (we use Oomlout’s fantastic ARDX introduction projects. Students work through these and get familiar with how the Arduino works and the many components it can work with. The real magic comes when they see how easy it is to try things on Arduino. The summative for the unit is a self directed project where students are encouraged to experiment, fail and document what they’re doing. It’s a great introduction to the engineering process and, for many students, the first time they are rewarded for failure at school (just know why it didn’t work and find a way forward – the engineering process is intellectual resilience codified).

We’ve recently expanded our electronics ecosystem by getting a couple of super-Arduinos. Intel has thrown its might behind the open source movement and created a couple of very interesting Arduino related products.

The unboxing of our Galileo created a big stir
amongst the senior computer technology students.

The Intel Galileo is an Arduino board on steroids. With
Microsoft also throwing itself behind this, you can actually have a version of Windows running on the Galileo! We’ve already done so much with the Arduino, I can’t wait to see what we can put together with the Galileo.

The size of an SD card, the Edison is tiny & powerful

The Intel Edison is the other experimental piece of kit we just got in yesterday. It’s the size of an SD card, but is a multi-core computer with built in wifi and bluetooth. This tiny Edison is at the heart of the Nixie drone – an astonishing wearable/flyable drone camera that looks like magic.

Both the Galileo and the Edison are about $100 (about 10x the cost of a basic Arduino board), so we’re going to see if they are ten times as awesome. I suspect they will both tax senior computer tech students as they try and understand what these new boards can do.

There hasn’t been an easier time to get into basic electronics. With the open source movement creating lush ecosystems of compatible components, you’ll find it easier than ever to put tangible electronics experiences in front of students. In a world where electronics are something being done to society, wouldn’t it be nice to teach students how to author that influence?

ECOOs1: Nerd Machismo & Other Barriers That Prevent Technology Learning

Nerdismo works like any other kind of machismo,
insecure boys belittle others and make the most
of what little they know to establish a social
space they can control.

I attended an excellent talk by Anne Shillolo on how to engage girls in technology at the ECOO Conference this year.

I’ve been struggling for a number of years to convince girls to hang in there in senior computer classes. In the grade nine introduction course I have a number of girls who are often front runners in terms of skills and ability to learn tech, but they all drift away in the senior grades.

Anne covered the systemic and social issues around this in great detail during her presentation. Hopefully those issues will begin to resolve themselves now that many tech companies are conscious of the problem. As much as I’d like to I can’t model being a woman in technology, but there are some other angles I can pursue.

In grade nine, especially in semester one, you tend not to get a lot of attitude because they are all fairly terrified to be in high school for the first time and are cautious. As students become acclimatized to their new school they look for where they are strongest and tend to establish dominance in those areas; the jocks own the gym, the drama kids rule the stage, etc. I was dismissively told by a university professor once that tribalism is dead as a theory of human socialization, but that guy was an idiot. In the world of high school (and pretty much everywhere else, including online) tribalism is alive and well. Computer society is more tribalistic than most.

In the senior grades the (mostly male) computer geeks do to computer lab what the jocks do to the gymnasium, they establish dominance. I’ve seen a number of girls begin a senior computer studies course only to bail after the first week because of all the posturing. The most frustrating was a coding prodigy whose parents were both programmers who vanished to take an alternate course online where she didn’t have to put up with the drama. This nerdismo ends up damaging the field of computer studies in all sorts of ways, not the least of which is choking it of sections in high school because the vast majority of students feel ostracized by the culture of the students in the room.

Anne’s girls missing out on technology presentation led me to consider just how insular computer culture can be. The idea of barriers to learning mathematics, sciences and technology came up in Anne’s presentation. As someone who wanted to be an astronomer before he almost failed grade 10 physics (and did fail grade 11), I know that it takes a fair amount of effort by the alpha-nerds of the world to shake otherwise interested right-brained kids out of ‘their’ fields of study. From the science teachers who seemed to take great joy in pointing out that this wasn’t my thing to the computer science teacher who watched me drown in mathematical abstraction with an absent smile on his face when all I wanted to do was tinker with code, I’ve experienced those barriers first hand.

As a non-linear/tactile/intuitive/experimental thinker I was intentionally bludgeoned by numbers until I couldn’t care less about computers. Watching the tribe of like-minded students (many of whom were good friends) form around those teachers and pass beyond that semi-permeable membrane into the math/science/tech wonderland scarred me.

My tactile nature eventually paid off when I got back into computers (years later – scars heal) through information technology, but I’ve never forgotten how those left brained mathletes made me doubt myself and turn away from the computer technology I loved. I went from being the first kid in our school to publish code and own his own printer to going to college for art (and dropping out) because that was what I thought was left to me. There was certainly nothing like code.org leading a charge for greater accessibility in learning coding (Anne showed this in her presentation):

I can’t help but wonder how many kids we shake out of technology because they don’t approach it in an orthodox manner, or don’t fit the stereotype of what we think a person in tech is. It might be slowly changing, but the gateway to learning technology is guarded by your stereotypical computer geek, and they are as fierce about guarding it as any athlete in a locker room.

When I see teachers putting students in silos because of this kind of thinking, or worse, punishing students who don’t follow their discipline in the same way that they do, I can’t help but remember that I was once that kid who ended up dropping out and walking away.

Everyone can learn coding and computers. Anyone who says, “I’m no good at that stuff” (including all the teachers I hear say it daily) are responding to the barriers that surround it. Exclusivity driven by arrogance has defined how many people see the computer field. Digital technology is so big now that any kind of thinker and doer can survive and thrive in the field, but we need the traditional computer experts to tone down the nerdismo.

The people who build the digital world we inhabit have as much swagger as a professional athlete does nowadays, and it starts in high school with insecure boys chasing everyone who isn’t like them out of the lab. Until we take steps to open up technology to more diverse learners it’ll continue to chase the girls and atypical thinkers out of this left brained, male dominated industry.

Perhaps I can convince more girls and alternative thinkers to keep learning technology into senior high school by not being an arrogant git, but I’m also fighting this well established conception of what a computer geek is. Until I can tone down the nerdismo in the classroom, I fear that preconceptions and the aggressive nerdismo in the computer lab will dictate who takes my courses. The field of computer studies would greatly benefit from an influx of creative/alternative thinkers, but until the geeks loosen their grip, nothing will change.

Gaming Everything

Via NBCnews: the glory of the hardcore video gamer. Not
the kind of thing that’s ever going to challenge the Olympics
for public attention I think.

I’ve had a lot of trouble playing video games lately. My problem seems to be around that idea of scripted experience. If I’m playing a video game I’m working through a narrative someone else created. I enjoy narratives but what irks me about video games is they pretend to have an element of choice in them when in fact they don’t. They suggest that they are the next evolution in entertainment but the interactivity they offer is so limited that it’s really just a hidden script that you follow under the illusion of choice. Gamification in general seeks to use this illusion to hook people into otherwise tedious situations.

The first step away from video gaming occurred when I found I couldn’t get into single player games anymore. Even the good ones with epic narratives felt banal. I went to multi-player games for several years hoping that the human element would create choice, but I find that these too are scripted, and worse, they force players into scripted responses to the point where you can’t tell the players from the bots. When a game is so restrictive that it makes the people in it act like machines it’s not a game I care to play.

There is a particular situation in which we’re happy to turn people into bots if the illusion of engagement is preserved. That situation also happens to be seen as quite tedious by many of its participants. Education is eager to digitize if it ensures engagement, even if that engagement mimics the dimensionless engagement found in online activity. Standardized testing feeds this thinking, producing learning outcomes that are easily quantifiable as data even as they fail to demonstrate learning. Deep contextual human activities (like learning) are lost in simplistic digital data.

Doubt is cast on an individual teachers’ ability to teach a subject. Consistency is demanded in modern education as a result of this doubt and the slippery nature of digital information encourages this by eroding the space between classrooms and lessons. This is shown as some kind of great step forward in terms of fairness, but what it really does is reduce teaching (as it has done with many other human activities) to a vapid exchange of information, incidentally what digital machines do best.

We fill in templates, teach centralized material and are encouraged to sync how we teach it. Proof of success is found in standardized test scores. There is little interest in assessing teaching or learning in any other way.

This digital infection also carries the parasitic idea of gamification, usually championed by video game evangelists who believe that the structure of gaming can overcome every obstacle. Teachers are encouraged to design student success through scripted outcomes pretty much like a video game does. If the game you’re playing is designed to have you eventually win it isn’t much of a challenge and certainly isn’t something you can be proud of, but then modern learning isn’t about challenge, it’s about engagement. The idea of gamification makes me uneasy for this very reason. When we gamify situations that aren’t games I’m afraid that we pollute complex situations with the implied success found in most gaming outcomes. If education is supposed to prepare students for the world beyond school this isn’t going to do it.

Gaming the game has a long and storied history in geek culture. Can you suspend your disbelief if you’re always looking to subvert the delivery method?

If you offer open ended, ‘real’ experience many digital natives shy away from a situation where the rules can’t be gamed for advantage. The hacking mindset implies that the system is more important than the content. Perhaps that’s why I can’t play video games anymore. It’s hard to get lost in a narrative when you’re constantly looking at ways to subvert the delivery method.

Wilful suspension of disbelief is lost in the digital age. This is the root of the pessimism and disengagement you see in many students. When education becomes another process you hack to guaranty your own success it becomes increasingly impossible to do anything useful with it.

This grew out of Scripted Lives which itself grew out of Unscripted Moments. I’m pulling at a lot of threads here. I’ve been a fan of RPGs since I got into D&D when I was 10. I love sports and would describe myself as a serious gamer. I’ve spent most of my life learning digital technology so I’d hardly call myself a tech-hater either, but watching digital technology and gamification aiming for society wide acceptance has made me very uneasy.