Dusty World – Page 47 – Mechanical Sympathy

Arduinos, Galileos & Edisons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notifications Off

While away in the States recently I turned off notifications in the various apps on my phone to save on data, and then turned off notifications entirely when I got home, I found I was enjoying the silence.

In that silence I started thinking about operant conditioning and just how wired to our personal devices we’ve become. Digital distraction is a cultural phenomenon with people wringing their hands over rising vehicle accident rates and people falling into open manhole covers. We tend to forget that looking at a screen when we should be doing something else is a choice. We’d rather play the victim than accept that kind of responsibility.

The dreaded notification is at the core of this idea of being victimized by digital distraction. There is a simple fix though: turn them off. Your social media is all still waiting there for you, the only thing you’re missing is immediacy, but that urge to respond quickly points to a deluded sense of self importance; despite what you think, most people aren’t pouring over their social media waiting for you to post something.

I didn’t get data while I was away, I figured I’d get by with wifi when I could find it. This quieted the noise even more, making me wonder why I’d want a device constantly demanding my attention in the first place.

The lack of data made me very conscious of the urge to post as events are happening. You see this all the time at sports events. A game winning goal gets scored and instead of cheering people are taking bad photos and spending time putting them online. It happens in concerts too. People spend bucket loads of money and time getting to these events only to view them through a smartphone screen, or ignore it entirely while they create social media posts.

You get this urge when you’re in the middle of something fantastic to want to share it immediately like a live news broadcast, but your social media audience isn’t watching a show, they come and go. Audiences on social media aren’t like audiences on broadcast media, they are never all in the same place at the same time. That sense of urgency is you misunderstanding how social media is different from broadcast media. Sure, take a picture, but if you don’t post it in the next 30 seconds your ratings aren’t going to drop. Your production team isn’t going to be out of a job.

Social media is inherently addictive. It is designed to provide an
unconditioned stimulus response. It doesn’t take long to tie the
notification to that initial, unconditioned response.

Our approach to smartphone use needs to evolve. Having a general purpose, networked computer in your pocket shouldn’t mean you’re on the social media hook 24/7. A good first step is to try and view your social media use from a more accurate perspective, don’t get sucked into a false sense of immediacy with it. Enjoy being where you are, maybe snap a picture to share later when you’ve got a quiet moment. Whatever you do don’t miss what you’re doing because you’re viewing it through a smartphone screen, or ignoring it while you’re making social media updates about it. In spite of what you might think, you’re not a media personality, even if you do have 1000 friends on Facebook.

A good first step is to turn off notifications. It’ll all still be there waiting for you, but you won’t be a Pavlovian experiment in distraction when you interact with it. This will probably upset mobile service providers who are making a mint from over-priced travel packages designed to keep you ‘connected’. You’ll probably also find your interactions take on a more nuanced and thoughtful appearance; something else it would be nice to see more of on social media.

ECOOs1: Nerd Machismo & Other Barriers That Prevent Technology Learning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Collegiality vs Teamwork and Digital Technologies

We re-aligned our computer courses last year. Our school formerly was one of the few with a Computer Studies Department, with computer science and computer technology courses all existing under a single banner. Last year the department was dissolved and computer science was put under the Mathematics Department while computer technology was re-integrated with the Technology Department.

I transitioned from Computer Studies Head to a co-head of Technology, but I’m finding working in such a diverse (we cover everything from metal work to food school to digital design) department challenging. With so many horses pulling in so many directions, I can’t help but feel that digital technologies tends to be a second thought. Rather than feel excluded I’ve been finding ways to develop a stronger digital technologies continuum.

The computer lab has always been next to the design lab, though run by different departments. Now that we’re on the same team so to speak, I’ve been re-thinking how digital technologies, always minimally represented in terms of classes, should work within the school. We’ve been developing an integrated digital technologies curriculum in order to facilitate that.

With the dissolution of Computer Studies the realigning of our school’s digital technologies was inevitable. No longer is Technology Design the lone digitally focused technology course in the department. Combined with Computer Technology, our digital technology courses can now offer a continuum of learning across a wide variety of digital platforms.

I initially felt that dissolving the computer department was going to be bad for the discipline, but now I’m feeling a new synergy.

By drawing together our digitally focused technology courses under the many common threads they share we’re able to offer 9-12 curriculum in a wider variety of areas. For students in a rural area where digital-tech doesn’t have the social impact it has in more urban settings this is a big deal.

The first step was to diversify our high-tech offerings. I argued successfully at Heads for Tech-Design to offer Robotics (our tech design teacher has a background in it). I also argued successfully for a Software Engineering option that would allow students interested in the field to experience industry standard practices around software development rather than the mathematics focus offered by computer science.

From the junior grades students get a wide variety of choice in 11 & 12 around what aspects of digital technology they want to pursue. And even if the student isn’t going into a tech-focused profession, they are at least able to develop the kind of digital fluency that will be handy in any 21st Century workplace. Of course, digital-tech doesn’t end at the workplace. If we’re going to graduate citizens capable of communicating in the 21st Century, they need to have digital fluency.

I always felt isolated as the head of computers with only a part time comp-sci teacher who wasn’t interested in collaborating. Now that I’m the co-head of tech, or perhaps Head of Digital Technologies fits better, I’m able to empower our tech-design as well as my own computer-tech fields and build a more complete set of options for our students to benefit from.

Change isn’t always easy, but in this case I feel like it’s led to a good place where teamwork and a common goal has replaced cold, distant collegiality.

A 9-12 Digital Technologies Continuum with a healthy variety of choice that will develop graduates ready to take on the challenges of the 21st Century:

The layout is so helpful I’ve expanded it out to the Technology Department as a whole:

Gaming Everything

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do What You’re Paid For: the distance between the mediocrity of work and the goals of education

The majority seem to follow the science.

The Weather Network had an interesting poll today. The American Academy of Pediatrics suggested that later start times for adolescents would allow them to function better with their funky circadian rhythms.

It’s a fact of our biology that our sleep patterns change during adolescence. Being a teacher I’ve been aware of this for a long time because my job isn’t to punish students but rather to develop their best expression of skill and ability.

The comments on this poll are your typical internet nonsense. It makes me wonder how most people think (or don’t). The most vocal opponents (a minority in this poll) seem to think school should be about forcing students into alignment with adult expectations, however mediocre, biology be damned.

Some pretty nasty assumptions in these acerbic comments…

Is school about ‘commitment, dedication’ and the benefits you get from these values? Of course it is, but it is also seeking your best work. Unlike the ‘adult’ world where showing up and doing what you’re paid for is the expectation, school is (should be?) about excellence. I don’t want a forced effort and I’m not looking for a pass, though many of my students are. I wonder where they learn those values?

There are jobs and companies that do embrace excellence, but they are a minority. If you’re working for a pay cheque (and the vast majority are), you’re an advocate of the show up on time-do what you’re paid for-and-grow up school of adulthood. For a lot of students school is the last place where they are encouraged to seek their best effort. The rest of their lives are spent venting their spleen and dragging everyone down on internet comment forums.

Top performance isn’t only a matter of effort. I hear a lot of students tell me, “I’ll put in an effort in senior years and get the grades I need to get into university.” They get to grade 12 and suddenly realize what squandering years of foundational skill building really costs. I have that Incompetence poster up in my class. It’s not meant to be cruel, it’s meant to remind students that I’m not there to waste their time or hold them in room for a certain amount of time (like most jobs they’ll have when they graduate). I’m looking for optimal skills building for each student (they’re all different).

One of the reasons so many people enjoy watching professional sports is because you’re seeing people performing at their very best. A pro athlete isn’t just putting in an effort, they are maximizing their anatomy with diet, sleep and hours upon hours of training and practice. You’re seeing their excellence as the tip of a massive iceberg of commitment. The doing of unpalatable things isn’t the point, excellence is, and you don’t reach it by ignoring basic facts of biology.

I worked in private business for fifteen years before I became a teacher. With very few exceptions, work involved being there on time and doing what you’re told. When I attempted to display initiative it was considered difficult to manage. One of the reasons I became a teacher is because I have the professional latitude to produce my best work. I don’t just work to a clock, I work to a higher goal. Rather than aim students at the lowered expectations of the working world, perhaps it’s time to embrace excellence.

A few months ago I read an interesting article on the conflict between capitalism (read: neo-liberal devaluation of human capital) and education systems. These Weather Network poll responses are firmly in that neo-liberal mindset of reduced human capital. You’re a cog in the machine: do what you’re told, be consistent, show up on time… if that’s what education becomes then we truly are lost.