Dusty World – Page 46 – Mechanical Sympathy

Positively Encouraging: Teachers Doing No Harm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Fake News Epidemic

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

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

If you ever want a brilliant parody of the bizarre nature

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Try harder.

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

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

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Facilitators

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Trust

I came across this excellent article by the Harvard Business Review about how trust relates to productivity in business. It turns out trust goes a long way towards creating a productive learning environment with students as well. Trust doesn’t end in the classroom though. Between teachers in a building, across entire school boards and in the education system in Ontario as a whole, trust is the cement that turns us from individuals into powerfully focusedl groups. After reading that article I couldn’t help but wonder at the damage done by the aggressive politics that drive out of date and combative management practices in education.

This week we were handed a remedy for a court case won by teacher’s unions in Ontario. In 2012 the Ontario provincial government decided to ignore the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and deny the right to strike and force a contract on teachers in the province because bankers had tanked the world economy a few years before and the government’s way to fix that was to vilify and then bleed public employees dry.

You couldn’t pick a finer example of broken trust within an organization. After a miserable late 1990s under a tea party style conservative government that was bound and determined to diminish the teaching profession in Ontario, the Liberal party was ushered in and a decade of rebuilding occurred. In that time Ontario shot up the ranks in terms of world education. Suddenly, in 2012, in a desperate attempt to garner conservative votes the Liberal party chose to ignore the Canadian Charter – the document at the foundation of our democratic rule of law – and force a contract on teachers, just to move some money around on ledgers so it appeared that they were more fiscally conservative. The strips to sick days actually cost Ontario more even before the government lost the court case and had to pay restitution. It was a case of desperate and illegal law making and profound mismanagement. The people responsible have never apologized. If your boss did that would you trust them?

Since then trust has been thin on the ground in Ontario’s education sector, yet this article on trust goes to great lengths to underscore how important it is to create a transparent, consistent and reasonable relationship between members within an organization:

“Employees in high-trust organizations are more productive, have more energy, collaborate better, suffer less chronic stress & are happier – these factors fuel stronger performance”

Having worked in the private sector for fifteen years before coming a teacher, I’m often surprised at how unenlightened management practices in education are. Perhaps it’s simply a byproduct of being managed by politics rather than productivity. In any case, the mismanagement of Ontario’s education system over the past few years is neither cheap, nor productive.

I’ve worked for my current employer for over ten years. In that time I only ever asked for a single exception to being expected to come in to work every day. In 2012 my mother committed suicide. I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown as a result but was expected to be in class teaching volatile teenagers. I went to my principal and asked for help. She called HR for me to navigate the process but we were told by a senior manager, “we have people at work who have had a heart attack and have cancer, what makes you so special?” I went back to work with images of mopping my mother’s remains off the floor still floating before my eyes. Can you imagine my level of trust since then?

This month I just got back from surgery. I went back to work 2 days before I should have because we are only allowed 3 days off before needing to contact HR – something I wasn’t going to do. I’d lost so much blood due to this surgery (sinuses, it isn’t a nice one) that I passed out at the end of the school day while stacking chairs in my classroom. I woke up on the floor in a puddle of blood, cleaned myself up and went home and called in sick again. Damaged trust isn’t easily forgotten and can put people in ridiculous situations that need not occur.

Trust looks wish-washy from a conservative mind-set, but it’s actually a fiscally powerful incentive.

Mismanagement has a trickle down effect. Board level administration is required to support and enable Ministry dictates, no matter how politically arbitrary, damaging to learning or asinine. School level administration ends up in a frictional relationship with their teachers as a result of this trickle down distrust. The end result is that people tend to duck and cover. It’s difficult to get people to raise their heads out of their classrooms and collaborate on anything because they doubt the veracity of the people who manage them.

“when people intentionally build social ties at work, their performance improves. A Google study similarly found that managers who “express interest in and concern for team members’ success and personal well-being” outperform others in the quality and quantity of their work.”

Trust creates a bond between teacher and student and student and peer. Knowing you’re working with someone who has your best interests are at the centre of what they do makes learning more effective. A teacher who students can’t trust is a poor teacher. Students don’t know what to expect or what is expected from them. A teacher who surprises students with tests, sometimes on material not comprehensively covered in class, is a teacher students shy away from. For the rest of us who are trying to establish a trust relationship with our students in order to empower their learning, these teachers are a cancer on the profession.

When you think about your favorite teacher I doubt it’s because they gave you a high mark, or because they were hard to figure out. Teachers that enable us are honest, direct and help us to exceed our own expectations of ourselves. Trust isn’t a nice idea in those cases, it is the foundation of the entire process. After reading that article, I now realize that trust is actually a mechanical process hard wired into how humans think; it’s the mechanism that makes us so socially powerful.

Enabled, energized people in an organization, be it a board of education or a classroom, want to engage. Engagement is a big buzz word in education right now. It occurs in high trust organizations naturally. If it isn’t happening in your school or classroom look to how you are developing trust to see why it isn’t happening. Demanding engagement is a sure way not to generate any.

“Once employees have been trained, allow them, whenever possible, to manage people and execute projects in their own way. Being trusted to figure things out is a big motivator: A 2014 Citigroup and LinkedIn survey found that nearly half of employees would give up a 20% raise for greater control over how they work.”

I’m at my best in a classroom when I’m able to define goals, ensure students have fundamental skills in place and then give them the time, space, equipment and positive encouragement to figure it out for themselves. This light-handed approach means that when they get something to work they feel that they’ve figured it out themselves. This is very empowering. Another benefit of this light handed approach is that I’m not so focused on talking at everyone that I’m able to see what individual students need to move forward. I’m happiest when a student learns things they weren’t able to do before and feel that they did it themselves. I know I’m important to the process, but students need to feel engaged and enabled in order to own their learning. Trust powers that process.

My school and board is at its best when we have clear, tangible goals and decisions are made transparently and rationally. The more this happens, the more effective these institutions become as places of learning, and the more I trust the people who are leading me. When I trust my leader there is little I won’t do for them because I feel that we’re all working toward the same goal.

Much of this article drills into the neuro-science of trust. We are social animals hard wired to use trust as a means of working effectively together. If we want to best make use of our powerful social habits, building trust is where we should be concentrating our efforts, especially within the entire educational apparatus.

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Institutionalizing Success and Teaching Millenials

This was shared online this week and it prompts some thinking about how we deal with the generation we teach.

Simon Sinek

Four social circumstances that have millennials struggling:

1) Failed parenting strategies include children being told they are special and can do whatever they want just because they want it. They have won awards their entire lives for simply showing up. This award inflation devalues excellence and embarrasses the failures these children experience. They’ve learned not to strive for excellence because it doesn’t matter.
2) Technology: Millennials are surrounded by filtered social media where everyone appears to have it figured out and puts on a good face. On top of that they have the same relationship with social media as a gambling addict has with a casino, except this addiction is only ever a touch away.
3) Impatience: They want to reach the summit and have a ‘big impact’ but are unaware that the summit lies at the top of a mountain. Is this related to number one?
4) Environment: Companies (and schools?) should be rebuilding the confidence and resilience of this generation by reconnecting them to personal relationships and long term goals. This means stepping up to combat number 1, something that most school administration really isn’t willing to do.

Now imagine standing in front of thirty one of them.

I’ve struggled with the vagaries of the millennial mindset in the classroom many times over the past few years. From the grade inflation of risk averse learners and five-ohs to the complaints of industry, I’m familiar with the millennial challenges Sinek refers to in his interview above.

Battling these frankly bewildering and fictionally driven parenting strategies seems to be a lost cause for most educators. Since banks and multi-nationals decided to burn the economy down and caused years of austerity, education (and governments in general) have taken on business-think in an unprecedented manner (some kind of Stockholm syndrome?). The modern approach seems to be ‘the customer is always right even if they have no idea what they’re doing’. Rather than expecting competence on the part of the student I often find myself defending a failing grade from a student who has never completed any work at grade level and has missed weeks and weeks of class. Parents don’t want to hear that their child is incapable and they certainly don’t want to accept responsibility for that incompetence. Their only goal seems to be finding ways to blame anything else.

We’re not doing a lot of either these days.

Technology is another place where education has thrown in the towel. Students can do whatever they want with their devices. Any attempt to redirect a student away from inappropriate technology use is wasted as these devices are now considered to be a constitutional right. It isn’t uncommon for me to ask a student to focus on what we’re doing and have them tell me they are in the middle of a text conversation with their parents which is obviously much more important than whatever’s happening in class. They’re probably planning a two week absence from school for a holiday – another exciting new millennial parenting tactic that would have been foreign to my parent’s way of thinking. Sinek’s no smartphones in a meeting rule wouldn’t fly in a modern classroom. You can’t helicopter parent without the tether.

How education is becoming less able
to manage these dangers we face.

Patience isn’t lost in all students but even the most capable are dwindling in attention duration. At the beginning of our last unit I showed exemplars of previous projects done over the past few years. The top student in my class asked, “are people getting dumber and dumber?” Good question. They certainly seem to be less and less capable of developing skills complex enough to tackle curriculum level theory and practice. Perhaps if they weren’t taking weeks of unexplained absences and holidays during the semester things would be better. Perhaps if they were expected to attempt all course work to the best of their abilities skill-sets wouldn’t be deteriorating.

In modern high schools students take the courses they want, not the ones they are capable of. Students who fail advanced courses get a variety of options to regain the credit and are seen at the same level next year regardless of how little they’ve proven they can do. Parents demand access to advanced classes for students who barely find time to attend school and are unwilling to actually do anything. If I fail anyone I have to justify the failure, not so the absent, incompetent student. Even trying to offer a range of courses doesn’t work because everyone is an academic all-star who should be getting the most advanced credits.

The complaint from people in post secondary education and the work place is that we’re producing graduates incapable of working effectively in the ‘real world’. Sinek’s comments go straight to this. Any absence or student failure isn’t an administrative issue; the system won’t even address it. There used to be a limit on unexplained absences and then a student was kicked out of a course, that doesn’t happen any more. There used to be criteria for failing late work, that doesn’t happen any more. There used to be requirements for staying within an academic stream, now it’s do whatever you want. When a student is absent or obtuse teachers are told to contact the parents who caused the situation in the first place and work it out. In Ontario this approach has been institutionalized using laws like school until eighteen no-matter-what. By keeping students in school at all costs we’ve effectively removed anywhere to drop out to. With no bottom to fall through, graduation rates are on the rise! We’ve effectively institutionalized failed parenting strategy number one: everyone is a winner!

The internet is full of memes that suggest the approach we’re taking isn’t helping.

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Sharing Interests to Prompt Self-directed Writing

The idea of genuine communication and showing students teachers as people rather than representatives of the education system has appeared several times on the PLN lately. Consequently, transitioning from summer to the school year has me overlapping my writing subjects. This was originally published on Tim’s Motorcycle Diaries…

I’m back in the classroom again and teaching English for the first time in more than a year. I took a senior essentials English class mainly because few people want to teach it (teachers like to teach people like themselves – in this case academically focused English students), and it fit my schedule. Essentials English is just as it sounds. These are weak English students who are getting what they need to graduate and get out into the workplace, they aren’t post-secondary bound and tend to find school pointless.

The trick with students this bullied and indifferent to the school system is getting them to read and write at all. Rather than drag them into a text book or make them watch the department copy of Dead Poets Society in order to prompt some writing, I thought I’d introduce them to my insanity. In a week where we’re all getting to know each other it helps if students see what you’re into. Showing your hobbies and interests is a good way to have them become familiar with you and relax a bit. If they get excited about the idea of planning a trip and it prompts them to write, it’s a many birds with one stone situation.

With some support, students quickly got into planning a trip. 28 days, unlimited budget!

The plan was pretty straightforward: you’ve got four weeks (28 days) starting next Monday. Assume you’ve got an unlimited budget for a road trip (gotta travel on the ground). Where would you go? What would you do? On the second day I gave them some pointers on Google Maps and some planning tools like a calendar and how to make notes online and they were off. At the moment it looks like I’ve got pages of writing from students who generally don’t. The research they’ve been doing also lets me diagnose their reading level.

Needless to say, I bravely volunteered to present first. It doesn’t feel like homework when you enjoy doing it, and mine was obviously going to be a motorcycle trip. I probably could have gone more bonkers on bike choice, but I have a sentimental attachment and some practical necessities that prompted my choice (all explained in the presentation). Rather than go for the South American adventure, I decided to focus on The States, which has tons to offer, especially if you aren’t sweating the budget.

Norman Reedus’ RIDE gave me an idea of where I’d like to go, the question was, could I get to the locations in the show and back home in 28 days?

Here’s what I’m presenting:

I presented this to the class two days before it was due. Seeing an example helps and gave me a chance to explain my own process in putting together the trip (deciding on a vehicle, breaking the trip into sections, etc). Many of them had collected data but were having trouble formulating it into a written project or verbal presentation (their choice).

That photo I doctored of a VFR800 a couple of years ago came in handy!

Another side benefit of something like this rather than a boiler plate reading and writing diagnostic is that is gives students a lot of control over the direction of their writing, which means I get to learn what they’re into, which helps me remember who each person is as well as offering me relevant subjects I can insert into future projects.

I’m hoping they surprise themselves with the results. If I catch some of them in the future staring wistfully at Google Maps instead of playing pointless FLASH games I’ll know that they’ve been bitten by the travel bug too!

It’s a lot to try and pull off in 28 days, but when the budget is unlimited, I want more miles! Literacy weak students often have trouble with basic digital tools – they were all screen grabbing Google Map images by the end of the first day though. This’ll help in all sorts of classes.

Into the Rockies ASAP, then down the coast, across the mountains again, and then up the Appalachians home.

Multiple destinations on Google Maps is a simple enough process if you know how. Everyone does now.

Yellowstone! Riding over a mega-volcano. No one in the class realized we lived so close to this impending disaster. It led to an impromptu Geography lesson.

Death Valley and across the South West to the Twisted Sisters on the way to the Big Easy.

Back north in the Smokey Mountains and Appalachians.

I was thinking maybe an H2R or RC213 in a trailer, but then that meant driving a truck and trailer all over the place.
Better to be on two wheels all the time, and on the descendant of my first bike crush.
Students were very curious about my choices. How you travel says a lot about you.

NOTE: at the end of the course more than half the class chose this project as a summative five minute presentation, and they all exceeded the time, media and planning requirements on it. Who said English projects couldn’t be enjoyable and engaging?

Troughs of Disillusionment

It might seem a bit negative, but this process is anything but. Adopting disruptive technology is a difficult business, those inflated expectations create a lot of hope and enthusiasm (not things we like in education). With experience comes rationalization and a better understanding of how new technology can actually help. It isn’t all sunshine and flowers,but without a bit of heedless optimism, this kind of adoption would be too difficult for most to consider.

Alanna recently put me onto this idea of how the innovation adoption cycle actually works. It’s an interesting way of understanding how innovation ripples across established practices.

Though it’s business focused, it demonstrates how even flexible businesses have trouble effectively adopting and harnessing technological innovation. Education is much more conservative and inflexible, so this process is weirdly distorted in ed-world where many people still think that a chalkboard is sufficient.

In ed-world that technology trigger is usually ignored, along with the hype, excitement and enthusiasm. A kind of wilful ignorance blinkers many educators from even looking at technology, it’s all just a fad. What finally drags them into it is the fact that what they’re doing in the classroom is sadly out of touch with what the rest of the world is doing.

While teachers complain about lining up at photocopiers but won’t consider alternatives, the rest of the world got excited about cloud based documents and moved online. Even as school departments worried over photocopying costs (and forests moaned under the weight of learning the way it has always been done), tech-hype excited businesses were frantically connecting up cloud based solutions and searching out efficiencies. In business, management is often the most agile, forward looking part of the enterprise; the early adopters. Business’s willingness to adapt and seek out efficiencies is usually a lead by example process. Educational leaders tend to get there by towing a conservative line, they’re not interested in actually changing anything.

Without the lead-by-example business approach, technological change in education only seems to happen when there is no other choice. When a disruptive technology is finally so overwhelmingly apparent that educational management is forced to consider it, they aren’t leading by example and the vast majority of the people within their organization don’t want it either. Status quo rather than improvement is the point of education.

When it comes to education, we begin in the trough and usually don’t get out of it:

We ignore the trigger and have none of the hype that encourages people to experiment and explore possibilities, there is no hope for new technology in the educational apparatus. Beyond the classroom there is hope, excitement and possibility before finally dropping into the trough of disillusionment. I’d argue that this range of emotion when exploring new technology allows early adopters a better chance to grasp what a new technology is capable of and allows them to eventually optimize their plateau of productivity.

In education we grudgingly begin in the trough, grumble about the entire process and then pick it up as poorly as possible, never exploring it, never revelling in the possibilities it might offer. When it gets difficult we drop it, having never wanted to do it in the first place. The poor support around embracing new technologies is just another symptom of this.

If you wanted a perfect example of how not to effectively integrate innovative technology, you need look no further than the education system. There are outliers within the system who push against the morass of conservative norms that manage and run education, but they struggle to find support, often having to find indirect ways to explore and integrate new technology.

As long as schools are administrated by the most conservative elements in education (academia loves conservatism), we will always struggle to stay abreast of innovation, whether it be technological or otherwise.

Two Recent Examples

#1: I got an HTC Vive virtual reality headset for the computer lab. It’s an uphill struggle to get any staff to try it (students? No problem). The general comment I get is, “what did that cost?” My standard reply is, “less than your photocopying budget.” The Board is unable to connect the SteamVR software needed to update the drivers and programs on the headset, so I’m trucking the desktop home each week to update it at home.

Even during those rare moments when we do get current technology in, there is no hype, only criticism and doubt. For someone who gets excited about the possibilities of technology, this is a very exhausting environment to be in.

#2: We requested a Glowforge desktop 3d laser cutter in for the tech-design lab. Even though it comes equipped with Hepa air filters and doesn’t require any exhaust, we were stymied by board safety people whose default position is ‘no’, regardless of any facts we could produce.

Perception is Reality, except when it isn’t

When I’m packing up the computer lab at the end of the school year I usually do it imagining that I won’t be back. For an introvert like me, teaching is an exhausting business. I don’t get recharged by people the way others seem to; people drain me. The thought of disappearing out the door and not returning is a happy one.

As the year wound down I came to realize that information technology has become like plumbing or electricity: no one thinks or cares about it unless it doesn’t work. Fortunately I’m good at IT and get a a lot of satisfaction out of solving problems in it (not to mention my staying sharp in technology allows me to teach it better), so even though it is nothing I’m contracted to do I still beaver away in the background trying to create a more accessible, current and consistent educational technology platform for our teachers to use.

I find the year end back slapping tedious at the best of times. Everyone gets well paid to do their job and no one I know in the building stops there, but what some people do above and beyond is considered more important. While some were having meetings and planning presentations, I was hand bombing over a ton of ewaste out the back door of the school to a local charity. They have DD adults dismantle electronics and then make enough recycling it to pay for their charity work. It isn’t attention grabbing, but it matters.

The energy other people are willing to spend in order to shine a light on themselves obviously pays off, I’m just not interested in it. Fixing things that are actually broken holds much greater interest for me. Changing people’s minds is exactly what I don’t like doing. People should be able to make up their own minds based on the facts, not on how convincing I am.

This year has offered me some wonderful moments. By far the most positive experience was our run at Skills Canada this time around. Seeing my student’s surprise at winning provincials and then our experience at Nationals was awesome.

Another powerful moment was seeing software engineering actually produce viable projects this time around. That class offers students a chance to experience team based software development and then publish code while still in high school, and it has improved dramatically year on year thanks to a lot of curriculum building.

The least professionally rewarding part of my year was participating in the school leadership team. The work done seemed pointless and time consuming, and seemed to follow a predetermined process rather than actually being creative and meaningful in any way. A colleague dropped out of leadership a few years ago and she claims it frees you up to spend your energy on more productive things. I think I’m following her approach when my headship ends this year.

The summer is for finding my mojo again, and then refocusing on what works best for my students in the fall. A list is already forming:

Continue developing curriculum that still challenges and differentiates even when I’m regularly expected to teach five sections of class each semester. Skills Canada plays a big part in that, allowing exceptional students a chance to see just how good they actually are. Skills preparation also directs all students towards higher standards.
Getting equipment in that allows students to learn hands-on, even when I have classes of 31 students in a room. Have you ever tried to set up a classroom with 31 computers and then arrange additional space for students to safely solder, build electronics and dismantle additional machines with hand tools? It requires fore-thought (and perhaps some kind of time and relative dimension in space device)
While all that is going on I’ll continue to apply my senior computer engineering courses to school IT support. This year we repaired 26 chromebooks that would otherwise have been chucked (repair costs were $1250, replacement cost would have been $9100), Having a genuine engineering challenge in front of students is invaluable to them, saves the school board thousands and keeps the teachers they are supporting in working tech, even if it is thankless work.
Windows 10 free upgrades end before August, so I have to get into school at some point before July 26th and update all the student PCs in my lab. Having a DIY lab is a lot of work, but it offers students unique access to software in a building otherwise tied down to out of date board software. It’s $135 a PC otherwise, so I’ll go in during the summer and save the board another four grand.

But first, some summer…

Note: I usually write a draft, edit it once and then publish it on Dusty World. This got heavily re-written three times with an eye to repairing problems rather than just complaining about them. The end of the school year often gets me into a rather negative state of mind.

Skills Canada Nationals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Team Ontario at Hopewell Rocks in The Bay of Fundy

Pointe-du-Chêne

Dinner at Catch 22 in Moncton

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

Driving Your Own Learning

This quote was used in a presentation I gave in 2013. The revolution is
sneaking up on us, changing our habits and how we think and learn
without us even realizing it.

Recently a number of people have told me something along these lines: “I don’t have to remember anything any more, I can just Google it.” I don’t necessarily disagree, but this approach to off-loading knowledge does raise some interesting questions. In a best case scenario we end up with people who have the cognitive freedom to make more diverse and interesting connections, but more often I see the other side of the coin, where people are using technology to reduce their effort and involvement.

With information readily at hand, we still fall back on old
concepts of information management in order to try and
understand it. Computers don’t use file folders, the text we
save on a computer isn’t even text, but rather than update
our ideas of how information is being stored, we force it into
paper based memes so we can relate inaccurately..

When knowledge was rare and few people read or owned books the holding of knowledge internally made you powerful. Being able to learn and retain information was a key focus of education in those days. That rigorous approach, which was a necessity because of the scarcity of information, produced tough minded academics who could dismiss the unintelligent if they couldn’t internalize what was needed. Our school system today is a historical descendant of that information scarce world – still testing students on information that is readily available to them.

Yet we still value that academic rigour, and for good reason. A student who develops the mental toughness to internalize and retain information, even if they could just Google it, is building habits that will allow them to tackle increasingly complex materials and processes, especially when that knowledge is implicit to skillsets that demand immediate response. If you’ve got to Google how to spell every word in your essay, you aren’t going to write a good essay. If you have no understanding of the French Revolution, including what led to it and what happened after, you’ll be hard pressed to create a nuanced presentation about it, no matter how handy you are at Google Presentations and searches. Using the proliferation of information as an excuse to do less is where we run into problems.

The information revolution has pushed cross curricular
collaboration into overdrive. Formerly siloed branches of
academia are finding connections through the free-flow of
digital information – a good example of the information
revolution being used to enhance rather than minimize effort

Vehicle based digital control systems offer an interesting parallel to information technology and learning. In racing the electronic subsystems that have evolved in vehicles aren’t used for safety, they are used to increase lap times and allow the vehicle operator to reach limits and stress equipment to levels before unimaginable. They don’t crash less than they used to, and when they do crash they tend to be going faster than before. Digital enhancement of driving skill is the focus of racing electronics.

Electronic controls on vehicles designed for the general public don’t increase operator ability, they leap in and interfere with it. As a skilled driver I am able to stop a car in snow in a significantly shorter distance than computer controlled anti-lock brakes (locking the wheels causes them to build up snow in front of the tires stopping the car sooner, but anti-lock braking keeps the wheels spinning, preventing that from happening). For most people who are happy to operate a two ton vehicle with no understanding of vehicle dynamics or interest in improving their skills, anti-lock brakes are a saviour – they prevent those incompetent drivers from having to care. Most cars come with anti-lock brakes nowadays for that reason. Instead of improving the humans we developed systems to take over from them.

Google’s self-driving car is the logical conclusion of the electronic controls that have been seeping into vehicles over the past thirty years. For the vast majority of people a self-driving car is a far better way of getting around than them doing it themselves because they do it so poorly. For the few who are willing to work at it, electronics could amplify their skill, but those kinds of electronics aren’t an option in cars sold to the public. The lowest common denominator (the indifferent human operator) dictates public sales and determines what everyone can have. The result of this human expectation deflation is to demand less from everyone. Even those who want to learn more eventually won’t because the skills required are obscured by mandated electronics.

I can’t wait to get stuck behind one of those when I’m parking.

I need to develop a jammer so I can stop that car and drive around it

The trajectory electronic vehicle controls have taken parallels the path that information technology and learning is on. If we’re not bothering to remember anything any more because we can Google it and not bothering to learn anything any more because a computer can do it, we end up at a pretty dark conclusion.

Ignorance of computers in people who use them constantly gets me so wound up because you can’t effectively use a tool if you don’t know how it works. Before school our cafeteria is full of teens using information technology with no understanding of how what they’re using works. I walked by a health class the other day and the teacher said, “you guys and your phones… I’d be happier if you were all just talking to each other (and not doing class work) than I am with you all looking at screens.” Less than 1% of students in my school take any computer courses in order to understand how they work, yet pretty much all of them depend on computers every day all day – and many teachers are expecting them to integrate that same technology into their learning.

Your modern race-car steering wheel has more in common
with a space shuttle console than a wheel.

The race car driver who is tweaking their electronics in order to improve lap times does so because they have an in depth understanding of how the technology at their disposal can improve their process. You can’t use electronics to improve your performance if you know nothing about how this technology works; modern racing drivers and engineers are all electronics experts, modern students are not and neither are the vast majority of their teachers, yet electronics continue to insinuate themselves into learning. Like the intervening vehicle management systems that assume control in order to do a better job than indifferent drivers, so educational technology is stepping in to assume control of learning for indifferent students and teachers.

Until we start treating education technology as an enhancement to learning rather than a replacement for it we remain headed on the same trajectory as the driverless car. If that is the case we’d be more pedagogically correct to ban digital tools in learning until we’ve clarified the learner as the race car driver who will understand and use educational technology to amplify their effectiveness, and not the gormless driver on public roads who needs technology to step in and do their work for them.