My on going reading has led me through Coupland’s Player One, Saul’s The Collapse of Globalism, and Wright’s A Brief History of Progress. I’m currently on John Birmingham‘s After America, an alternate history novel about what would have happened if a freak event had wiped out almost all of Continental North America on the eve of the Iraq invasion (if you like Tom Clancy, you’ll love Birmingham).
Alternate histories aside, there seems to be a rising sense of urgency in both fiction and non-fiction about the predicament we are getting ourselves into. I’ve long thought that the zombie apocalypse sub-culture (and believe me, there is one – Zombieland and Shaun of the Dead are just the tips of the iceberg) is a subconscious response to the impending Malthusian collapse we face. I saw a version of this at the ROM the other week. How can we not see this ending in disaster? In our lifetimes?
The interdependencies of modern life make it inherently frail. We’re so isolated from the necessities of life that virtually all of us never give them a second thought. Food is never a problem, neither is clean drinking water. These things becomes immediate, panicky concerns when Walmart and all the rest aren’t delivering at the lowest possible price. We don’t have a grasp on what the actual costs of life really are; we are increasingly unprepared for a breakdown.
Human history has lasted for tens of thousands of years. All of those lifetimes were, with precious few exceptions, dependent on the individual being able to contribute to their own and their immediate society’s good. You didn’t get an extended childhood (into your early 20s) or a retirement where you could ‘stop’ working. Civilization grew out of our ability to sustain ourselves through increasingly complex group work, making these moments of non-responsibility possible. But as Wright mentions in “…Progress”, there isn’t a single example of a great civilization that hasn’t collapsed under its own weight. As an experiment in civilized growth, we seem incapable of recognizing our own unsustainability until it is too late. We seem intent on building civilization to the point where it can carry a large number of members who contribute little or nothing, or actively work to take more than they need. Wright’s case studies on Easter Island and the Roman Empire especially ring true – 2 successful civilizations that died under their own weight by destroying their own ecosystems. Wright’s conclusion is that we face a mass extinction when we finally exhaust the ability of the small planet we’re on to sustain the groaning weight of billions.
If we’re ever to truly develop a successful civilization, it must recognize our ability to overcome natural limitations, and it must recognize our need to self limit our own growth, even though that works against every evolved fibre in our animal beings. Some people appear to recognize this, but the vast majority of the human race does not. We will not have a civilization for millenia until we develop the self-discipline at an individual and societal level to recognize what an industrialized human being is capable of. If pursuit of technology and science are a pure goal, this understanding has to be at the basis of it, or else everything built will consume itself.
Nature is a wonderful system because it can balance itself. It can seem cruel (from a self absorbed human point of view), but it is sustainable, and had been for a billion years on Earth in many forms. It is nuanced, non-linear and complex, unlike our ridiculous systems based on simple greed, self-interest and insulated simplicity. Perhaps its time to start taking a serious look at how nature does its business, and create a human civilization that recognizes some fundamental truths.
I read an article in the Economist in which they suggested we can reduce population by increasing standard of living (this has already happened in many industrialized countries). Their solution to world overpopulation? Make poor countries more like rich countries, and they’ll have less babies (and more ipods). China tried this, and it worked… for a while, and now they find they can’t look after a massive bubble of aging population with too few children, and want to relax the one child policy (which is responsible for half a billion less people in the world today). The Chinese are richer than they have been, but in a population crisis. Economics won’t lead to a solution here. Neither will simplistic birth control measures.
So we can’t have less babies or we end up with many older people living much longer while not contributing. We are forced into a continuing growth bubble in a world that is running out of resources and is focused primarily on individual wealth rather than societal good.
Maybe we’ll get it right next time, after the impending crash.
Ever wondered what it would be like to teach a class where all students have their own laptop? Anyone reading this has probably spend some time wondering what it would be like to have internet access and computers for all students. No digital divide…
I’m just wrapping up a semester where I was asked to pilot the elearning version of the Career Studies, grade 10 half semester course. I was teaching all of the career studies in a school of approximately 1500 students. We have a workplace focused high school in our board, but it’s far enough away that most parents opt to keep their children in the community at our school, as a result we have a full spectrum of students, all of whom must take this mandatory class. The students in the open career studies course ran the gamut from highly at-risk and barely literate to students already attending lectures at The Perimeter Institute in Waterloo. The grade range ran from end to end (from 0 to 100%).
What follows is a review of the elearning pilot, with some supporting statistics and observations.
Summary
If I had to summarize quickly, I’d say that doing career studies in a hybrid elearning class was very useful. Students assume they know more about computers than they actually do (partly due to the fact that we keep telling them that they are digital natives). Doing elearning in a hybrid/introductory way does several things:
•it shows many of them how hopelessly addicted to Facebook they are (which created some interesting self-reflexive analysis in the classroom)
Any review of network traffic showed Facebook returning page views at a rate of 50 to 1 over ALL OTHER INTERNET TRAFFIC COMBINED. They are unable to turn it off and are constantly distracted by it. Turning it off at the router caused a minor uprising where they all suddenly appear to have grown Law degrees and a working knowledge of the Constitution.
This broke the myth of the digital native for me. When I asked them to estimate their own expertise on computers, I (like most others) expected this:
The FAKE stat.
… but I got this:
The real stat.
…which looks mighty similar to the ability curve you get in the general population.
This elearning course, the first for all of these students, pointed out a number of challenges:
it makes students aware of how little they know about basic computer functionality (file types and organization, how to edit simple documents, basic network and computer operation, online digital tools that are available – not one of them had heard of Prezi or knew that their hotmail accounts would allow them to save documents online). Less than 1/4 had ever used googledocs.
it makes those students that do have technical literacy appreciate (and be appreciated for) what they know (instead of telling them that they all know it because they are teenagers, when they clearly don’t, which devalues the knowledge). Student tech-wizes are as rare as tech-wizes in the general population, but we belittle their knowledge by assuming they all ‘know computers’.
it gives students a fundamental understanding of the elearning system. A few will see it as an avenue for success (which is good), but many who suddenly find they may need elearning to graduate will see far greater success because of their exposure here.
How the course went:
Doing it as an open/full spectrum course clearly shed light on what I’ve always found to be true; elearning’s self-directed element is what kills it for most at-risk students. It introduces a medium between the student and the material that gives them an excuse not to do work, usually while clearly highlighting their lack of digital skills (which causes embarrasment and some difficult classroom management situations).
I did elearning in Peel, and as far back as 2005, Peel was aiming elearning at University level students who had shown a clear aptitude for self-directed learning and strong computer skills. Without either of these skills (skills I’d argue that are developed much more significantly in academic/university level classes), elearning is likely to result in very poor success rates, specifically in non-academic streams.
Unless we’re going to focus on developing self-directed learning and digital competencies in non-academic classrooms it will continue this way.
As things developed, I had to go through the course, collect together all the summative pieces and print them out on paper for about 1/3 of the students in order for them to complete the required material. They did not have the technical skills to edit documents in a word processor and upload it to the elearning system, let alone keep their digital selves organized enough to find assignments they started (many never named files and copied over previous work with the same default file name). There was little sense of continuity from class to class in these students, most of whom saw it as a Facebook miasma, rather than a course to pass.
A student’s ability to organize becomes much weaker when I would find the vast majority of the machines a student brought to me with a problem running Facebook in the background (it’s hard to stay organized, it’s harder to stay organized when facebook constantly interrupts you with pointless trivia).
Conclusion
I think the real problem is the myth of the digital native. We got shown this last year. Have you seen it? This kind of thinking drives me crazy. Computer skills are taught, they aren’t some kind of natural occurance based on your birth date. What this really is is fear. Older and/or less technically inclined people who feel overwhelmed by technology dress up kids today in this because they see them hop onto a computer without worrying about doing something wrong. Being familiar with something doesn’t indicate skill. If you actually observe what they are doing, you’ll see (as I did during this course) that weak students are digital serfs – they don’t know how to do anything, solve anything or look into new things, they only know how to do one or two things (usually Facebook and youtube: the internet for the dim).
What’s worse is that students who have developed real skill have it belittled when some Luddite says, “yeah, you guys all know this stuff, you’re digital natives.” (subtext: now I don’t have to address it or waste valuable class time trying to teach it to you)
Digital literacy should start in the junior grades, and they should be developing specific skills (data management, media creation, file management). In grade 9 there should be specific digital literacy targets in core subjects, but there aren’t (mainly due to a dirth of teachers who feel comfortable enough themselves to teach it). We expect them to know this stuff intrinsically, which is ludicrous. 21st Century skills will be much more vital to student success than 19th Century skills like sitting in factory organized rows listening to a teacher speak, but we don’t teach them.
In the meantime, boards propagate the myth of the digital native that excuses us from addressing digital literacy as a serious issue (they showed us that video above at a staff meeting).
Familiarity with computers isn’t a developed skill-set. Self-taught digital skills are mostly just habit forming. Watching those careers students struggle with basic issues made me realize that elearning is really only designed for success for the top third of digitally literate students. The rest don’t have the vaguest idea of what they don’t know:
“Hey, I can’t edit this document!”
“You’re looking at it in WORD viewer…”
blank stares…
“I can’t find my file”
“You’ve saved all of your files in the course as the same name and over written it again and again. That is why you have fourteen documents called document(1), document(2)…”
blank stares…
Some Other Observations:
Even though perhaps a quarter of our students come from rural/farming backgrounds, high speed internet penetration is quite good. This is probably due to two main factors: it’s now seen as a requirement for academic success (at home) and prioritized, and long range wireless (wimax, etc) has become standard in the area.
I suspect the real dividing line now is purely financial, which begs the question: when are we going to support students in getting over the digital divide?
When given a choice about whether they could have taken this class as elearning or in a traditional class, almost two thirds opted for the regular class. There was a real lash back against using computers for something productive – it spoiled/interfered with their only purpose (Facebook/Youtube access). It’s hard to convince people that a toy is actually a tool.
As you can see, the same students willing to take the course over again in a hybrid classroom, are also willing to kick the training wheels off and do elearning completely remotely. If they get it, they get it.
An interesting discrepancy between technical skill and willingness to self-direct learning. The whole student centered thing is still pretty new, but getting students to direct their own learning is like pulling teeth. This goes beyond juniors in an open careers class. My university grade 12 computer science students were just as unwilling initially. In their case it was risk aversion. They were so afraid of not getting the numbers they need to go to university that they had no interest in doing open research that wouldn’t lead to a perfect result.
Whether it’s how we’ve taught them to be dependent or how we’ve taught them to be terrified of errors, we aren’t producing self-directed learners, which is a tragedy.
The last one is hardware specific. The netbooks were coveted at the beginning of the course, but their limitations quickly became apparent. I posted the most common complaints (too slow, though this had more to do with the school network than the netbooks, but the digital natives didn’t comprehend that), and the tiny screen. Elearning is set up in long, texty pages. Students who aren’t strong readers go bonkers trying to read it on a 600 pixels tall netbook screen. Stronger readers can deal with it (and remember what they’re looking at), but for the weak readers, every scroll or paging action is another excuse to click on that Facebook tab and get hit by lots of disconnected, pointless information (the way they like it).
The course would have been better served by a device that rotates for reading longways, then rotates back for data entry (or a big square screen, I guess).
The raw data from the student survey is below. This pilot was a very useful program that shed light on all sorts of issues. I was happy to do it and would like to see it continue, but I fear that it uncovers so many holes that it will quietly disappear back into the ether. Here’s hoping it doesn’t.
If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask. The data was collected from 52 students in November, 2010, and 46 students in the second week of January, 2011.
This past week I was taking first aid (again). I’ve been first aid qualified since I first did it in air cadets thirty three years ago and needed to be current to take my cyber-security team to the national finals in New Brunswick next month. As we were wrapping up the course our instructor First aid instructor shared a Will Smith video about surrounding yourself with good people:
It’s a good piece of advice from a talented fellow who has made a lot of conscious decisions to nurture and grow opportunities across many genres; you’d think this is good advice that would apply to everyone, but for a lot of people building this kind of social network is nearly impossible.
I’ve been recently reviewing various situations that have happened to me through an aspie lens. It does a lot to explain why I’ve run into the problems I have. Knowing myself in this way earlier might have helped me understand why I was doing what I was doing and might have led to different outcomes. Being aware of a diagnosis would also have helped others understand why I’m not acting in a way they consider normal.
Back in air cadets I went for my pilot’s license. I did well at the training, commuting for the better part of three hours every Saturday to get myself down to where we met at the opposite end of Mississauga; commitment wasn’t a problem. I ended up missing a single meeting due to a work conflict and even though I communicated this, the guy in charge took the opportunity to drop me from the application for the summer flying scholarship course, even though I had the highest score in powered flight that year. I ended up despondent and frustrated by the process, hundreds of hours of volunteer effort disappeared in a moment.
That situation ended up ratcheting up an already awkward relationship with that officer and did much to prevent me from advancing through the ranks. In an organization I’d spent thousands of hours volunteering for, and one that I thought might lead me into a career, I ended up peripheral and bitter. As I got older I began taking opportunities to sabotage situations and undermine the command structure. I didn’t do this out of a maliciousness, I did it out of a sense of disenfranchisement. I was capable, I was dedicated and I was keen but I was dismissed as a kid they neither liked nor trusted because I didn’t fit into the hierarchy and act like everyone else.
In school at about the same time, I was hanging out with a bunch of kids who started to get into teen-related nonsense, from smoking to drugs and other darker experiments. Rather than value emotional connections with people over the nonsense, as everyone else did, I simply walked away. This wasn’t easy, and I was lonely, but it wasn’t in my nature to prioritize friendships first and follow those guys down the rabbit hole.
That approach to things has always made me socially peripheral even though I played team sports throughout my childhood. In many cases I played isolated positions like goalie that further limited my ability to interact with team mates, but then that was never the point of playing for me, as it was with pretty much everyone else. As an adult, I couldn’t hang on to hockey because so many adult teams are friendship based and I was never good at prioritizing that aspect of the game. The mandatory after game beers in any sport seemed like an awkward social moment, but for many of the guys there it was the point of coming out.
In university I managed to alienate a professor I thought was one of the best I’d ever had. He got us to aggressively question the foundations of what we were doing, but in a case of Aspergers gone too far, I ended up questioning the group think he had generated in the class room and in doing so, once again made myself a pariah. I’m a perennially bad joiner.
At work I’ve run into similarly problems. When I moved out of the city and up to a rural small town school I immediately ran into complications. Being a big, white guy, you’d think the all white, all Canadian, mono-cultural class I suddenly found myself in would have felt more comfortable than the multi-cultural classes I’d just left, but the opposite was true. In the previous multi-cultural environment, everyone tended to fall back on a more rational approach to interaction because cultural norms couldn’t be assumed, but in a mono-cultural, rural classroom all sorts of really offensive (to only me apparently) norms were accepted. Students would use terms like, “he jewed me out of five bucks”, and drop the ‘n’ word in class like a password. They were doing this to confirm cultural conformity with each other. It made them feel secure and meant they all believed similar things, it drove me around the bend.
I ended up showing this senior English class the Canadian-written academy award winning film Crash, as a way to make them question their overt racism and discriminatory thinking. It’s a challenging film, but then that was kind of the point. It put an end to kids talking like that in my class, but it also got me removed from the school.
Once again, I’d failed to adopt social norms and conform to group-think and instead went after a moral absolute. People really don’t like that. What people like is when you reinforce their prejudices and act like they expect you to. In this case, one of the students in the class was the daughter of a local church leader and he decided this would be an excellent excuse for a good old fashioned witch-hunt. I got moved out of there by the school board before things got sillier. I’m sure nothing has changed up there and everyone is still more than happy being racist red necks – and this is precisely my problem.
When our teacher’s union lost the plot I couldn’t help but make a stand based on principle rather than supporting the people in the organization no matter what. I’m a staunch believer in unionism – left to their own devices, the rich would happily disenfranchise everyone and return us to the middle ages. An argument could be made that I should have supported the union at all costs considering this ever-present threat to the middle class, but I don’t think that way. When the union broke its own rules around fair voting practices and forced an illegal contract on our members, I fought it tooth and nail. No one had to strike and members got a contract (albeit an illegal one that has since cost tax payer millions), shouldn’t I have encouraged that? I could have complied and ingratiated myself to the powers that be and found myself rising up the hierarchy, but not doing that is precisely my problem. Rising up hierarchies depends on conformity of thought and valuing relationships before principles. This is the single reason why I don’t pursue leadership positions.
Back to Will Smith’s advice. I’ve always found it hard to make friends, let alone find supporters who will stoke my fire, though I’ve never lacked for flames. I’m driven and capable, but I find it impossible to put social expectation above rational and moral consideration. An inability to do that means I never develop the deep levels of trust that other people lean on in their careers.
Yesterday at PD we were looking at White Ribbon scenarios and they all seem absurd to me. Cases where teen age boys agree to isolate drunk girls to take advantage of them? Evidently it’s a thing now in Toronto where groups of high school boys are convincing girls to perform sex acts for money. If that’s what neuro-typical, socially focused people end up doing with those tight networks they develop, then I’m glad it’s beyond me, but then so is Will’s empowering social network.
Of course, there are precedents for aspies building great success, but in a lot of cases they don’t do it with a supportive social network, they do it through sheer malicious will. I tend to fixate on creative and technical challenges, people domination isn’t in my wheelhouse. Most business-successful aspies are fixated on that kind of dominance.
Finding people with complimentary skills sets is a way around this impasse. The problem for an aspie is that the people who tend to be very good at social discourse find our lack of it trying and don’t associate with us. In many cases, those are precisely the people who have attacked me socially. It has been the rare socially skilled person who has been able to see past my lack of tact and recognize what lies beneath. Finding a leader who stokes my fire rather than pouring water on my inabilities is a rarity. I long to find people worthy of being loyal to, but they are vanishingly rare. When I do find people like that, I’m the staunchest ally imaginable, as long as we fighting the good fight.
Looking for people to fan your flames is a difficult proposition at the best of times. Without the deep at-all-costs social ties most people leverage, the aspie is left depending entirely on their technical skills to get anywhere. Most people factor in trust when making hiring and promotional decisions. That trust is usually based on their sense of how loyal a person is to them. In almost any management decision this emotional bias means the technical aspie loses out to nepotism – something that has happened throughout my life: don’t expect fair or skills based promotion, expect nepotism. In a world where who you know always takes you further than what you know, this is perhaps the single largest disadvantage this aspie has faced.
Recently, my son was undergoing his IPRC process to enter high school and I’m suddenly privy to how parents experience this aspect of the public education system. The parties at this meeting seemed to genuinely have my son’s best interests at heart, but there are unseen forces in the education system more interested in saving money than promoting pedagogy.
One such area is technology support for IEPed students. The goal here is to provide digital tools that allow students with special needs to keep up with their class work. In many cases this can mean something like a Chromebook, which is essentially a web browsing laptop. I’m not a fan of Chromebooks, they are a corporate means of collecting users into a closed ecosystem. The intent of Chromebooks is to pass any online experience through Google’s corporate lens (Chrome) and to keep people within that singular view in order to benefit what is very much a for-profit business.
Google is a powerful tool, no doubt, but if it’s the only way you ever interact with digital technology then you aren’t particularly digitally fluent, any more than you could call yourself truly literate and knowledgeable if you only ever read one publisher’s books.
The default response from the school board when we began talking about replacing my son’s very old (he takes good care of it) laptop was to give him a Chromebook. Since we only pay lip service to developing digital fluency in Ontario and graduate a large majority of digital illiterates, this seems like a cheap and easy way to hand out tech, but in this case it is a kid who is already digitally skilled and who intends to make computer technology his life’s work. He is already competing in robotics competitions and building computers. The courses he has signed up for in high school focus on digital engineering. Giving him a Chromebook is like giving a carpenter a toy hammer and expecting them to frame a house. It’s neither individually appropriate nor particularly useful.
I have been pushing to get him the tools that he needs to pursue his interests, but I’m speaking for the trees here as well as for my own son. I teach computer technology and have a high preponderance of ASD students who have a great interest in and a neuro-atypical approach to technology that allows them to tackle it in interesting, unique but usually never time efficient ways. Handing any of those students a Chromebook is like giving a mechanic a twelve millimeter wrench and then telling them to disassemble an engine with it, in an hour.
When he is learning electronics next year in grade 9, he’ll need to install Arduino on his computer and then use it to code circuits. It’s free on a ‘proper’ computer running Windows, Linux or OSx, but Arduino can only be done on a Chromebook with a monthly fee (not covered by the school board). If he wants to run RobotC for his robotics classes, he can’t do it on a Chromebook. If he wants to run 3d modelling software? Code in the IDE of his choice? Run the plasma cutter software? Sorry, none of those happen on a web browser. If all we’re aiming to do is teach kids how to browse the internet like the consumers we want them to be and through a single, corporate lens, then we’re doing a great job pitching Chromebooks at them.
A Chromebook isn’t cheaper than a basic Windows laptop. It is only a browser whereas the Windows PC can install a massive ecosystem of programs for a wide variety of purposes. The only advantage is that the Chromebook is easier to manage. Because you can’t install anything that isn’t a simplistic Chrome extension on it, you have less headaches with software conflicts; it does less, is easier to manage and does a great job of performing it’s primary function: feeding the Google data mining machine with much needed fuel. Pedagogy designed to expand digital fluency in our students isn’t the reason why Chromebooks are now ubiquitous. Management of educational technology is easier if you drink the koolaid and get on the magic Google bus where you don’t have to worry about all that messy digital diversity and the complications of actually teaching students (and teachers) how technology works. Google (and Apple, and Microsoft) are happy to usher your classroom in to a closed system for your own ease of you, learning how technology works be damned.
In discussing this issue with the school board I was told that my son doesn’t need a full laptop because the specialty classes that require that software will supply it in class. His IEP specifies that he be given extra time to complete work, but that is impossible if the technology needed to do his class work is only available in a particular classroom. How does that help him finish his work after school, or on a weekend? It doesn’t help him if he is trying to do work during his GLE support period either because other students are using the in-class equipment while he is elsewhere. There is no guaranty that the technology would be available at lunch or before or after school either, so the ‘what he needs will be in the classroom’ answer seems to be intentionally ignoring the extra time his IEP clearly states he needs.
Differentiation of assistive technology with an eye on customizing it to specific student needs is exactly what the IEP (INDIVIDUALeducation plan) is supposed to be doing. If we were going to begin to take digital fluency seriously, assistive digital technology that encourages a diverse digital ecosystem and renders a wider understanding of how technology works would be a great place to start, especially with digitally interested students.
A Chromebook should be the last thing suggested. This, or course, begs the question: if Chromebooks aren’t any cheaper and don’t improve digital fluency, why are we using them at all? Well, it makes our monopolistic corporate overlord, um, partner, happy while not being any cheaper and doing less, but it sure is easier to manage.
Whoever this is a win for, it isn’t providing my son with the technology he needs to succeed. It also puts pedagogy of promoting an understanding of the technology we’ve made an intrinsic part of our classrooms on the back foot. As near as I can tell, other than feeding a corporate partnership and rolling out something so simple it can’t really break (or do much), there is little to recommend the Chromebook, especially as an assistive device for a student who will need things it can’t do in his classes next year.
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’,”
You don’t have to advocate for technological terrorism to get into teaching science & technology, you just need to spend some time understanding it. It isn’t magic, it’s knowable and teachable.
That mature field is called engineering. It doesn’t have the gung-ho and catchy mythology of hacking, but it’s what builds space shuttles, Internets and makes the rest of modern society possible. It is a creative and powerful expression of human thought made tangible and something that everyone should have at least a passing experience in otherwise they are ignorant of how the Twenty-First Century works.
If you want to have Maker Spaces and encourage hands-on learning I’ll be the first to applaud the effort, but you don’t need to dirty the name of technical creation with hacking, because it has nothing to do with it. You’re encouraging a cheating-to-a-solution-at-all-costs mentality when you use the term hacking. Engineering is a collaborative act of creation with a result that is beneficial to many people. The reason hacking isn’t is because it has little to do with creation and is usually motivated entirely by selfish need, that’s why it’s usually a solo effort. Is that really what you want for your students? Ruthless, deterministic and selfishly motivated hands-on learning?
As educators I think we can do a bit better than that.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
File types? File management? Yeah, the latest batch of digital natives don’t do that any more.
Last week during a staff meeting one of our administrators said, ‘the kids are so far ahead of us” (technically). The subtext was because they are on their phones all day they are more digitally literate than we old people (anyone over twenty). As someone who teaches digital skills and who knows first hand how ignorant our digital natives are, I verbally disagreed quite vociferously. A week later the digital ignorance we choose to ignore was highlighted once again. I got a call from a business computer lab saying Photoshop wasn’t opening student .jpg files. Jpegs are a common picture file format and photoshop is more than capable of opening them. This wasn’t a technical failure, it was the much more common human kind. I asked a student to show me how they saved their file as a jpeg. They selected save and then typed in .jpg at the end of the file and saved. Photoshop defaults to save in the .psd file format that is lossless and keeps layering data. It makes for a bigger file, but you keep all your image data. Jpeg is popular because it compresses files quite drastically with an equivalent loss to quality, the result is a much smaller and simpler file that work well online.
PSDs and JPGs are nothing like the same file. Windows only looks to the file extension (the .jpg part of picture.jpg) to see how to open it. If you call a file a jpeg that isn’t a jpeg, you’ve caused the error. This is exactly what these digital natives had done. All they had to do was ‘save as’ and select jpeg for this to work, but they don’t know what they don’t know.
Living in the cloud means more is being taken care of for you, meaning you know even less about what’s happening
This situation points to a larger shift that has become more apparent in recent years. Many of our students now have little or no experience with local file management. The first Chromebooks came out in 2011, when our current high school students were in grade 4. Many of them haven’t lived in anything other than the cloud. When they save files they don’t know where they go because they aren’t familiar with the basic organizational structure of a computer. File naming so you don’t get confused, saving as a file type so your PC knows how to open it, directory structures so you know where to look for files? These kids who ‘are so far ahead of us’ are moving further away from that every day.
Thank goodness for preview icons, otherwise I’d have no idea what was going on.
Local files aren’t something 2017 students generally deal with. If you ask most high school students how many mp3s that they have they’ll look at you like you’re crazy, they don’t do local music any more. Ask them how they organize their photographs and you’ll get the same look of confusion and condescension. Our Board network is currently broken under the weight of all these cloud based students constantly streaming media content from the internet all the time every day. When they can’t find access to the cloud they are more than willing to have their data phished and break board policy by using VPNs (see below) to bypass board restrictions, further clogging up an already overused network. Those ‘free’ VPNs are closely watching a directed stream of personal data; there’s money in that.
It’s frustrating enough when a student says they can’t find you a document they swear they made and then shows you a google docs directory full of something called ‘untitled document’, but the new normal is to expect students to have no idea how or where a computer saves a file. Network dependency and having someone else manage your data is the new normal.
Do you have digital experience or do you just have the same habits repeated over and over?
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, we have to build a digital fluency stream into Ontario’s curriculum. We expect students to magically know how to operate technology because they immerse themselves in simplistic, habitual usage for hours a day. That limited experience does not improve digital fluency. If we’re going to expect students to know how to save files, manage their own data and protect themselves from an internet increasingly designed to take advantage of their ignorance, we need to make digital fluency something other than an afterthought, or worse, off load it on ageist stereotypes of technical prowess.
NOTES
Virtual Private Network: they were made so that people away from a corporate network could create a tunnel across the internet to the local network and work as though they were in the building. Any data in that tunnel is very difficult to see. That’s what makes it handy for avoiding blocks – the board network can’t easily read what’s happening in that encrypted tunnel. Needless to say, this also produces a lot of lag and network traffic as everything you access over the network is waiting on VPN relays and contains the data needed to access that VPN as well.
VPNs have turned into fake network addresses with companies offering a remote connection for a price (so you can pretend you’re American and get better Netflix). If it’s free, I imagine they are mining your data in the best case or phishing for passwords and financial information in the worst case – I’m willing to bet none of our students pay for their VPN usage so they’re all playing a dangerous game with hackers. Using a VPN means you’re passing all of your data through an unknown server (unless you set one up yourself – which I’m willing to bet none of our students know how to do).
Since all your traffic is coming from the VPN server address (and these change all the time), blocks to sites like YouTube don’t work because it doesn’t look like you’re going to YouTube. I wonder what the incidents of corrupted credit cards are with our free-VPN using student phones.
ourselves into. I’ve long thought that the zombie apocalypse sub-culture (and believe me, there is one – Zombieland and Shaun of the Dead are just the tips of the iceberg) is a subconscious response to the impending Malthusian collapse we face. I saw a version of this at the ROM the other week. How can we not see this ending in disaster? In our lifetimes?
