Author: Tim

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Why Canadian Education is so Reluctant to Move on Digital LIteracy

Originally published on Dusty World, February, 2023:   https://temkblog.blogspot.com/2023/02/why-canadian-education-is-so-reluctant.html

 

I had a talk the other evening with a Vancouver educator teaching cybersecurity curriculum at his local school board. Like me, Todd has been working alone, offering the local students he has access to the opportunity to learn cyber-skills that would benefit them in any field of study. And, like me, he has helped to launch a few students into careers in this radically underserved career pathway.

Despite being 3 time zones away, Todd is running into the same difficulties I am in Canada’s regionally siloed education systems. When he reached out to other districts in British Columbia they didn’t engage, and so his work remains isolated to his district. Cyber-attacks on education fill the news, yet the vast majority of students have no access to learning this emerging (and essential) digital media literacy.

In 2017/18 we got involved in CyberTitan, the Canadian centre of excellence for the international CyberPatriot competition (the world’s largest student cybersecurity competition). From there we developed a thriving cybersecurity extracurricular program that has since influenced our in-class curriculum in timely and diverse ways., but when I asked a system ‘lead’ if we could help other schools to engage in the same competition I was told, “it’s already running at your school.” Leaving us in the same place that Todd finds himself.

With headlines like these (an extensive list of Canadian education hacks can be found at the bottom of the post) wouldn’t cybersafety training in every school be a good idea?

Ontario school board trying to recover from cyber incident

Personal data of 70,000 students accessed in school board cyberattack

Cyber-education is just the most obvious part of a much bigger digital skills iceberg.

Yet we barely cover coding in public schools, let alone the rest – even though we depend on it in every subject. Digital technology has become integral to learning in 2023, yet no one has a dedicated curriculum to teach the cybersafety and the technical skills needed to use it safely and effectively. It’s why remote learning during the pandemic became an abject failure.

 

Cyber-Education: an educational failure in education

You have to ask yourself why schools aren’t engaging in the cyber-education they should have started when eLearning and other online education technology placed student data and attention in potentially hackable online locations. The answer to this question has eluded me for years, but I’m starting to formulate a theory. It began with seeing yet another example of the rhetoric that public education likes to lean on:

“The lack of robust cybersecurity measures stems from underfunding within schools and #educational groups. Often, they don’t have enough resources or budget to invest in #cybersecurity or train staff and students to practice good cyber habits.”

Why are Canadian schools so vulnerable to cyberattacks?

ICTC-CTIC has been offering free cyber-learning opportunities for years in addition to running CyberTitan since 2017 with the support of the Communication’s Security Establishment (Canada’s cryptography agency charged with securing government communications). It doesn’t get more credible than that this, yet we struggle to engage individual teachers let alone school system ‘leaders’ with these FREE programs. The reticence isn’t about cost, it’s an unwillingness to make time and take responsibility for our rampant use of education technology. But why continue to ignore digital literacy when it’s so obviously necessary?

The vast majority of cyberattacks depend upon user digital illiteracy to succeed and we face a global digital skills crisis, yet education seems determined to do as little as possible to address any of it. The question is why.

No where did our failure to address
digital literacy appear more apparent than
during the remote learning emergency.

Perhaps picking up the baton now would highlight a failure that has been decades in the making. By doing nothing, public education remains the victim of cybercriminals and technology disruption, just like the rest of us.

We should have begun developing this technology media fluency the moment we placed student learning in hackable online spaces. It’s not a flattering analysis, yet moving past this head-in-the-sand approach is essential if we’re going to keep putting student (and staff) information where criminals can exploit it. Our collective ignorance is the cause of the current cybersecurity crisis and the global digital skills shortage; it’s a failure of education… by education!
.

Our Failure to Systematically Teach Digital Media Literacy Even As It Becomes an Expectation in All Subjects

Poor user digital fluency is the result of our failure to teach it in any kind of systemic manner. The cunning plan so far has been to hope parents are doing it at home* (*this link shows that they might be, if they can afford it). Meanwhile parents are assuming a comprehensive digital skills curriculum is happening in schools, and by comprehensive I mean year on year skills development in dedicated subject time using curriculum that results in functional and safe technology users. We obviously don’t have those.

If you see any attempts at digital literacy at all, it’s: ‘hey,
look, we’re doing coding!” Digital media and technology
fluencies are about much more that coding.

The students I see arriving in grade 9 suggest that this is not systemically happening, and where it does happen it is because a single teacher is trying to bridge this gap themselves. The assumption many parents labour under is that teachers are digitally literate, but they are much like the general population.

If we taught digital skills like we taught other foundational skills that are required across all subject areas (literacy, numeracy, etc), we would have periods focused on developing those skills and integrated subject specific digital fluency across all disciplines, but we don’t even cover digital literacy development as comprehensively as we do geography (mandatory k-8 dedicated subject time and a mandatory grade 9 course). There are no mandatory digital literacy courses in any Ontario high school and in K-8 curriculum, where it happens at all, it’s usually fixated on coding which does little to teach cybersafety. The ongoing digital skills shortage and a rash of user ignorance driven cyber incidents suggest that the piecemeal approach we’ve grudgingly adopted isn’t working.

I’ve been pointing to these embarrassing statistics and presenting on the importance of filling this foundational gap in our curriculum for years on Dusty World:

2022 TMC7 Research Symposium: Table Talks and Future Skills

(2020) How to Pivot Ontario Education to Prepare for The Next Wave

(2017) The Digital Divide is Deep and Wide

(2012) The New Literacy

Perhaps now, in a maelstrom of bad press and the potential for real financial damage to staff and students (and their families), education will finally take on systemic transformation to address digital skills and especially cybersecurity awareness. The benefits would go far beyond reducing the number of successful cyber breaches. A more digitally literate society would be able to pivot to remote learning in an emergency and might also offer climate reduction possibilities by reducing the need for face to face schooling. It would even help create a less factory driven/age based system that relies on millions of gallons of diesel to deliver bodies to age appropriate facilities every day.

 

We could have used the pandemic to finally
engage with digital literacy – instead it became
another excuse to play victim to our own
lack of foresight.

Do you know how many times cybersecurity is mentioned in Ontario computer technology or computer science curriculums? Not once – not even in the two specialist subjects it should be covered in. We’ve driven students onto potentially insecure online learning environments for years now and even the compsci students don’t learn how to secure it.

 Nowhere has this failure to address digital literacy been more apparent in emergency remote learning where many students were thrust into online mediums that they have very little understanding of, with unsurprising results. Most students still equate technology with entertainment, which is why implementing it in classrooms has been fraught with problems.

One of the early myths used to justify this bury-it approach to digital literacy was that of the ‘digital native’ – the idea that students who grew up with digital technology were somehow magically imbued with the ability to understand it technically and use it safely and effectively. This is like saying that because I grew up in the 1970s and was familiar with cars, I already know how a car works and how to operate one. This absurd belief persists in many schools despite being summarily discounted by research.

Being familiar with digital technology means you don’t have to overcome the fear that older people have in making a mistake with it, but I can assure you, students are not immune to making poor technical decisions based on digital ignorance. The rush by students in my school to use ‘free’ VPNs to bypass blocks on social media sites isn’t digital native genius, it’s profoundly ignorant. The criminals offering these services aren’t offering them for free. This gives a fine example of how digitally illiterate school systems are. Blocking content and driving students to put their digital footprints at risk through questionable technology is about where we’re at in education these days. Incredibly, many educators then point to this as an example of just how good the kids are with technology.

Research on the poor state of digital skills across entire populations shows an astonishing lack of capability, even as we increasingly depend on networked digital technologies to support every aspect of public education. When technology fails, the learning stops in 2023..

This isn’t just a Canada problem, it’s worldwide.

Addressing the digital skills gap for future education

A global measure of digital and ICT literacy skills (it isn’t pretty)

“higher socioeconomic status was associated with higher proficiency both within & across countries – student experience of computer use & their frequency of computer use at home were positively associated with proficiency” – Because we off-load this essential literacy because we don’t want to take responsibility for it.

The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think

Nearly 1 in 3 workers lack foundational digital skills

 

Summary 

Cyber-education is the sharp end of this failure to teach digital literacy because of the fear that surrounds the subject and the dire consequences of not addressing it. Convincing educators to engage with cybersafety, cybersecurity and data privacy learning is virtually impossible, especially as most staff are no more digitally savvy than anyone else. You have to be trying exceptionally hard to not be using digital technology in 2023. Your lights are on because of it and your lessons are available to students because of it, yet no one wants to teach it, or learn it as a specific technology/media skill.

Beyond the sharp point of cyber, we have a population that spends an inordinate amount of their time, both professional and personal, in networked technology, yet almost no one knows how it works, what to do when it goes wrong or how to secure it. Younger people aren’t afraid of it, but their bravado creates dangers of a different kind.

If we’re going to use networked technology in every subject, we should have a K-8 curriculum in place with mandatory time given to specifically learning digital skills well beyond coding, and also include digital literacy integration with all subjects. This should begin the moment we put students in online learning.  A systemic approach to this would start with teachers and eventually result in a dramatic drop in successful cyber-attacks as we begin to heal the ignorance that current attacks exploit. Many federal programs exist, but Canada’s chaotic, siloed education landscape means that with no central authority, provincial ministries and local school boards are left with the responsibility to engage with what is an increasing international threat.

Digital skills gaps cost billions in lost jobs and opportunities and exacerbate existing inequalities. By resolving this failure of vision that public education has been central in creating, we might finally assume the role education should have played all along. It doesn’t require lengthy apologies, but it does require some humility before a systemic failure we’ve all played a part in. I only hope the people leading education in Canada are more interested in doing the right thing for students, staff and their families rather than maintaining the expedient idea that digital literacy happens by magical birthright or at home.

 

Yes, it’s a tsunami of cyberattacks on canadian education:

Vancouver Film School hit by paralyzing cyberattack
Attackers say they have deleted data stolen from Ontario school board
School board confirms hack; attacker sent note through photocopiers
Ministry beefing up security after school board ‘cyber incident’
Ottawa french public school board paid hackers ransom after data breach
Teachers and parents urge answers as investigation into school board hack continues
OSSTF confirms current and past members’ information compromised in cyberattack
Former members call out OSSTF for handling of personal information stolen in cyberattack
Maple Ridge-Pitt Meadows school district alerts families of potential data leak
“It’s pretty scary”: TRU students concerned after possible hacking of student aid websites
https://canadatoday.news/ca/vancouver-park-board-to-consider-new-revenue-streams-including-more-restaurants-223298/
https://www.therecord.com/news/waterloo-region/2022/09/15/at-least-three-former-wrdsb-employees-report-identity-theft-attempts-since-cyber-attack.html
https://cupe.ca/statement-crystal-krauter-maki-educational-assistant-and-cupe-4148-president-regarding-ransomware
A failure to educate staff

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The Ontario Library Association Super Conference

I’ve watched my brilliant partner attend and then volunteer at the O.L.A. Super Conference for about a decade now. I’ve long had a crush on libraries (and librarians), but have never attended. In my new role I bring federally funded cybersecurity and digital skills opportunities into classrooms, so attending the OLA Super Conference offered an opportunity to connect and explore with library digital early adopters, of which there are many.

The first time I laid hands on a computer in the early 80s was when my middle school library got Commodore PETs, so in my mind libraries are the spaces where we make first contact with new information mediums and media. When I started teaching it was my school’s librarian who asked me about this new fangled ‘wi-fi’ thing. I helped him set up a router in our library, making us (I believe), the first school in Ontario that offered wifi to those few students with new-fangled Blackberrys and PDAs. Librarians are always looking at emerging information tools that give their patrons/students access to the information they seek.

My team offers fully funded and vetted federal programs that support cybersecurity and digital literacy  that are so desperately needed. We continue to live a time where technology and the media that it delivers gets away from us. Answers exist, but convincing people running public services to engage with them is an uphill struggle, perhaps because they don’t want to take on responsibility for our appalling and on-going digital literacy crisis (research from 2016, still poor in 2021, and still a worry at Treasure Mountain in 2022). It’ll take a full court press by everyone in education to resolve this digital crisis, but I believe librarians are ideally placed to be the first into the breach.

That’s why I was there, but the OLA Superconference became about much more than my work as it asks complex questions about the topics that tie society in knots. Librarians are the ones asked these difficult questions and libraries are one of few remaining safe spaces where people can go to get unbiased information without being treated like a consumer or a political target. Just like the BCTLA/Treasure Mountain national conference last year, the speakers and subjects at #OLASC were designed to challenge assumptions and offer librarians support in changeable times.

Mom at work… a message to our son who was at home doing full time shift work.


Vivek Shraya’s opening keynote about how your ‘self’ is always in flux offered some much
needed insight on how to be gentle with yourself in difficult times, but immediately after I attended Cory Doctorow’s talk about his latest book, Chokepoint Capitalism, which I’d been reading when I attended the BCTLA/Treasure Mountain conference last fall. Cory stuffed 2 hours worth of thinking into his hour long talk, riffing on the attention economy trap we’ve fallen into and talking about how individual action to systemic failures aren’t an effective use of your time. He gave the example that if you spent hours trying to find locally sourced markers to make a poster for an anti-Amazon protest, but missed the protest because you spent all your time trying to not use Amazon, you aren’t putting your energy where it might produce a systemic response to a systemic failure.

As a public school teacher who has watched the past five years of education in freefall, this rang a lot of bells, but my problem is that I don’t trust the people or organizations that are supposed to be representing my interests (because they aren’t good at what they claim to be experts in). This too came up in both Cory’s talk and in Elamin Abdelmahmoud‘s closing keynote; the idea that expertise doesn’t matter anymore in a world where everyone is on a mic spouting their opinions.

Staring into the abyss of the many problems we face is something librarians have to do every day when patrons comes in with these difficult questions. Yet relevance and support for programming was a constant theme at the conference. Feather Miracle accepted the OLA’s President’s award for keeping up the fight even as libraries in indigenous communities closed at record rates. As I mentioned online, I missed the part in Truth & Reconciliation that focused on closing community supports like libraries in first nations.

These big problems thematically swirled around this conference in a way that you don’t see in education or technology events. Librarians need to collaborate on these issues because we’re all facing them and library learning commons are where they come up, but the conference also offered me ‘technology stream‘ opportunities specific to my current job.

On Thursday I listened to the Guelph/Wellington Public Libraries (my local) talking about how they worked on the front lines closing the digital divide during lockdown. I was told that our school board was providing connectivity for students in need, but it looks like they just tapped into the hard work that the public library was doing. The room was absolutely packed, suggesting that crossing the digital divide during a pandemic is another one of those systemic problems we’re all trying to solve individually. System failures surround us but individuals keep trying to make it right.

Friday morning started bright and early with Jonelle and Christina’s “Evolution of the LLC:
Building a Future Ready Space” which emphasized how important patron input is in designing diverse learning spaces. Throughout the presentation they offered DIY solutions that save money (whiteboard painted tables!) and suggestions for relevancy and engagement that wouldn’t sound out of place in an entrepreneurship seminar. If you think libraries are where old teachers go for an easy final years before retirement, you’re doing it wrong. A constant focus on streamlining and redesigning your learning spaces to make them engaging and relevant to students is something every TL in Canada should be focused on.

The London Public Library and Crouch Neighbourhood Centres did a talk about how to cross the connectivity in gap by offering connectivity to those unable participate in Canada’s digital economy. The digital divide is deep and wide, but targeted programs like this work. LPL did the initial delivery of connective cellular technology and discovered that most of their devices were being used in cottage country by people who didn’t want to pay their own way in data (at their cottage), but by partnering with Crouch (LPL run a branch out of Crouch), the devices found their way into the hands of people who needed them. Talks like these showed me that there are solutions to these seemingly insurmountable social inequities, but no one to scale them systemically. Systemic failures surround us but individuals keep struggling to try and make it right. If only we had some kind of representative ‘democracy’ that governed in the peoples’ interest, but then maybe most Canadians aren’t bothered with helping those in need.

The closing keynote by Elamin Abdelmahmoud offered an unblinking look at many of the problems that face Canadian society in a decentralized social-media driven culture. Just before he came on a posthumous lifetime award was given to Caroline Freibauer‘s family for her work in Ontario libraries. This really changed the emotional temperature in the room, but rather than roll with what he had prepared, Elamin listened and responded by going off piste and picking everyone up from where they were feeling that loss; it was a wonderfully empathic way to finish the conference.


After attending the OLA Superconference I’m more focused on connecting with public libraries as they also reach children in need, but beyond our struggling public school systems. Every student (home schooled, public schooled, private schooled) students make use of their public libraries, so working with them to help close that digital divide is a new angle I’m keen to develop. It’s nice to know libraries are still working hard to help people manage the information tsunami we’re all trying to swim in – there are lots of opportunities to work emerging digital media literacies in there too.
I watched a number of author talks and book signings while at the OLASC. It’d be really cool to return next year for work, do a presentation on digital skills and cybersafety and then take a timeout to go do an author talk. Bring it on, OLASC 2024!
A World War 2 historical fiction novel coming soon to a bookstore near you!
Under Dark Skies.

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Travel Photography Tech Wishlist

After 25 days on the road across the Iberian Peninsula, I have ideas about what I’m looking for in terms of travel photography tech. The Canon SLR with a bag of lenses is too much to lug around, and the recycled 7 year old Dell laptop doesn’t cut it when it comes to keeping up with modern file sizes. An agile photo tech set also works on two wheels, so here’s what I’d bring along if I were going light but looking for full technical flexiblity in terms of imaging while on the road:



Zenbook S 13 FLIP OLED

An absolutely bonkers sub 2.5lb laptop with 2k of colour corrected display with 100% colour gamut. It folds away to almost nothing, offers the power needed to make high resolution photo and video edits on the road and even converts to a tablet for digital sketching.

$1899


Sony Cybershot RX10Mk4

After lugging the SLR with many lenses around Iberia for weeks on end, I’m looking for a more compact but technically robust option. The Cybershot has a massive sensor, shoots in RAW and outperforms my SLR in pretty much every area. Being smaller and less fussy (just the one do-it-all lens), it does what the best camera always does: makes it easy to have it with you. I ended up leaving the SLR behind towards the end because it was more trouble than it was worth

$2199


Ricoh Theta Z1

Simply the highest photo quality 360 camera you can get. A massive 1 inch sensor means good low light, RAW shooting, a programmable Android based OS that lets you push the limits of this emerging format by creating my own plugins.

I prefer photography to video so the Z1 is the weapon of choice when it comes to 360 photography. The only thing it can’t do is rough and tumble, but I have a plan for that.

 $1349


GoPro Max 360

The rough and tumble option. If I’m riding, in the rain or under water, the Max will do the job and capture the moment. It also handles instant panaramas and many video options, including timelapse.

I prefer the ergonomics of the Theta, but the GoPro is the best at what it does, and for action shots it would be a powerful tool.

$669


Apple iPhone 14 Pro

I got an iPhone 13 last year and the camera on it is good – so good that I found myself leaving the DSLR behind because, for candid snaps, the iPhone is more than up to the job. As good as it is, I’m wishing I’d gone a bit further and gotten a 14 pro with extra lens and that bit more photographic range. I’m still struggling with adapting to iOS after owning an Android from the very beginning, but I’d stick it out for the software integration and quality on the iPhone (Apple’s stance on user privacy is appealing too).

$1549

This might all seem pretty expensive (photography isn’t a cheap hobby), but when a single pro 400mm lens costs you about ten grand, this entire $7665 set offers much more flexibility with a powerful all-in-one camera, two 360 specialist imaging tools and a state of the art lightweight laptop for post production, and all while taking up next to no room.


***.


I did alright with the old DSLR (these are wild Portuguese seas), but lugging all that about wasn’t very travel friendly – I think I’m ready to migrate back to a prosumer grade all-in-one superzoom camera. I just need to make sure it beats the SLR with lense and includes the specs I need to improve my imaging (large sensor, full manual controls, RAW file saving, epic lens).


I’m pretty crafty with on-bike pics from the old Ricoh Theta I’ve got, but with newer (and tougher) tech I could push the boundaries there too.

Good example of how capable the iPhone is at photos (and a nice way to get to the beach – on a 90s vintage Africa Twin!). This is cropped in tight from the original and is still high-rez.

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The Smoke and Mirrors of EVs and Electronics Integration in Modern Cars

I’m a couple of weeks into a trip around the Iberian Peninsula with my family. I’d been hoping for a car we can’t get in Canada, but ended up with a Kia but it’s a Kia you evidently can’t get in Canada. This is a Kia Xceed:


We ended up with it because we were driving from Madrid, across Spain and into Portugal, and Lisbon has a low emissions zone where only electric and hybrid electric vehicles can go. Before we left Madrid airport the guy at the rental desk encouraged us to charge it up and use the battery to save gas – but they didn’t include the charging cord with the car, and so began a long series of frustrations with our first hybrid electric driving experience.

We figured we’d just charge at a station but stations don’t provide charging cables, they come with the car (unless they don’t). On top of that, it turns out that the charging cables aren’t standardized, and vary from region to region (I imagine because electricity itself isn’t standardized worldwide); the stupid plug stack I packed to keep our devices charged is testament to that.


Imagine if you had to bring your own gasoline hose with you everywhere you went. Imagine if different cars had different sizes and shapes of holes for you to put gas in, so your car only worked at certain gas stations. We’re a number of years into this ‘electric revolution’ in vehicles. I’ve never been able to afford being early-adopter green, but a lot of wealthy people enjoy the glow of showing everyone they care about the planet (I just keep old, efficient, high mileage vehicles in good repair and on the road, saving all those greenhouse emissions from having to manufacture something new every few years).

I thought the ‘EV Revolution’ would be further down the tracks with standardized ports and cars that actually came with the gear needed to make them work. Many manufacturers are making marketing noises about being entirely electric in the next decade, but after our experiences in Spain and Portugal, I can’t see how this is anything more than marketing. William Gibson’s observation about the future being here, but not evenly distributed rings especially true in the EV shell game.

Not that it mattered because we couldn’t use them anyway, but I recently read that many EV chargers are in disrepair. The reason why again emphasizes green marketing designed to ease climate anxiety rather than recognizing the hard work of changing how we move ourselves around. Many chargers are out of commission because the money to install them was provided, but the money to maintain them was not. Details like this make it difficult to believe the hype, though if it makes you feel high and mighty, I guess it has achieved its true aim.

The appearance of green is more important that the truth of it. We get given an HEV to get into Lisbon’s low emissions zone, but without the charging cable we’re a gasoline powered car carrying hundreds of kilos of battery and an entire secondary drivetrain, all of which reduces the gas efficiency of the vehicle, but we can drive into Lisbon because we have an HEV badge on the the thing; more smoke and mirrors.

We’ve driven over 2000kms in the KIA. It’s the first KIA I’ve driven that has seats that fit me (nice sports seats no less). Like most modern cars, the electronics integrations are nice, but I have concerns about the privacy and cybersecurity of it all. When we got into the car it had a list of all the people who had driven it previously which included their personal device information including their phone name, type, bluetooth details and even what they’d been listening to. I deleted it all and we’ll clean the KIA before we hand it back, but most people don’t.

On the Redcar ride to the airport for this trip the driver was telling us about how there has been a rash of vehicle thefts powered by electronic hacks rather than good old fashioned grand theft auto. If you own a new truck in my neighbourhood, you better be crafty about how and where you store your keys. The guy delivering fliers to your house may be sniffing around to clone your convenient electronic key. Still digging that electronic convenience? Turns out we are behind in vehicle cybersecurity in Canada (and worldwide). My day job is developing cybersecurity education, so I’m not remotely surprised by this. Everyone lives their lives on networked devices but almost everyone is oblivious to how this technology works and how it can be exploited (except for criminals).


One of our last stays has Tesla charging stations at the building, so we’re finally charging the HEV. I’m curious to see what having it charged does to mileage, but I still feel like hauling all that extra weight around is a step backwards. My Mazda back home isn’t HEV, but is lightweight and efficient (getting almost 10 miles per gallon better than the Kia), but it isn’t allowed in a low emissions zone. It’s also over a decade old and ready to do another decade of high efficiency service. That approach is greener, but it doesn’t sell new cars to rich anxious people.


I haven’t gotten into the nasty and exploitive world of lithium battery mining and production in this, but I should have. I’m a big fan of going green in a real way. I suspect that hydrogen fuel cells will offer a solution to burning fossil fuels that the messy world of hybrid and medieval battery technology EVs can’t, but we’re still some way away from creating anything like the infrastructure needed to leverage the most abundant substance in the universe to power our transportation needs.

I also haven’t gotten into the all the data collection around charging systems in Spain and Portugal. If you drive electric you’ll be pumping personal data (including when you’re not home) into online databases from multiple companies. Those online databases are what criminals access to steal personal information, often to sell to other criminals. It’s a worldwide problem and having signed up for multiple ‘apps’, my exposure to potential hacks has increased dramatically – even though none of them actually charged the damned car (which is also collecting my data).

Maybe the fully charged KIA will change my mind today, but I doubt it. The inherent inefficiencies around lugging along spare powertrains and batteries aren’t the solution they’re being made out to be. The hidden dangers to my privacy are the forgotten side of this convenience and green marketing. The real answers aren’t going to be solved by marketing snowjobs that ignore nasty truths about our still terrible chemical battery technologies and vehicle cybersecurity. Hopefully next time I rent a ‘green’ car, it’ll actually be green, and secure.


What moving off burning hydrocarbons might really look:


Cybersecurity in cars (should also include privacy and security around charging!):


Some other observations from driving in Spain and Portugal…

Now that’s efficiency! Over ten times the mileage of your typical HEV… and it looks fabulous!
 


Parking in Portugal is an art – this guy stuffed his Range Rover into a wall (cars can just squeeze by).


We off-roaded around a cork farm in torrential rain in this 40 year old Landie. With 6 people on board it was incredibly effective (like a mountain goat!), navigating flooded mud roads and hills.


Joanna, our guide, handled the Landie like a pro: https://www.corktrekking.com/  Highly recommended!


The roads in Portugal are spectacular – but I had two too many wheels (and drivetrains, and fuel systems) to truly enjoy them. Though this was still (by far) the best KIA I’ve driven so far.


Lisboa is a city of bikes…


One of the first cars I ever rode in was my Nana’s Isetta Bubble Car – they had one just like it in the MHAS in Salamanca. 


They has Schumie’s Benetton F1 car in there too!

Best KIA so far…



The efficiency you get from toll roading all of your major highways in Portugal. The only place we’ve slowed down for traffic (hugely inefficient and anti-green, no matter what you drive!) was in Lisbon, and even there the rush hours were like a love tap compared to the daily abuse Torontonians face.

Now that’s my kind of sustainability! A nearly 30 year old Honda Africa Twin that gets almost 50mpg looking fabulous at the beach in Lagos. When it only rains a few days a year, the Algarve is the perfect place to ride year round… and the roads are spectacular! 

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How Cybersecurity Might Become More Diverse, Equitable and Inclusive

One of the benefits of working in the same home office as one of the top teacher librarians in the country is that we’re able to bounce ideas off each other. Making cybersafety awareness a part of every educator’s professional standard of practice isn’t a nice idea in 2022, it’s a necessity, but the industry continues to have trouble attracting talent.  Alanna has listened to me lamenting the lack of diversity in the field for many years but this week she linked the DEI research she has been doing to develop an inclusive information management system with that lack of diversity in cyber.

You might not think that creating a digital media cataloguing system would require much in the way of equity awareness, but it does. How we categorize and deliver data requires a working awareness of DEI or it quickly becomes another means of systemic discrimination. Having used it, Alanna suggested Building Movement Project’s  Social Change Ecosystem Map as a tool for challenging some of the masculine cultural cues that usually define cybersecurity as a discipline.

Considering diverse talents and motivations could work as a way to bring more diversity into the field of cybersecurity.

Characteristics of the Roles

Weavers: I see the through-lines of connectivity between people, places, organizations, ideas, and movements.
Experimenters: I innovate, pioneer, and invent. I take risks and course-correct as needed.
Frontline Responders: I address community crises by marshaling and organizing resources,
networks, and messages.
Visionaries: I imagine and generate our boldest possibilities, hopes and dreams, and remind us of our direction.
Builders: I develop, organize, and implement ideas, practices, people, and resources in service of a collective vision.
Caregivers: I nurture and nourish the people around me by creating and sustaining a community of care, joy, and connection.
Disruptors: I take uncomfortable and risky actions to shake up the status quo, to raise awareness, and to build power.
Healers: I recognize and tend to the generational and current traumas caused by oppressive
systems, institutions, policies, and practices.
Storytellers: I craft and share our community stories, cultures, experiences, histories, and
possibilities through art, music, media, and movement.
Guides: I teach, counsel, and advise, using my gifts of well-earned discernment and wisdom.
Cybersecurity had strong ties to the military early in its development, which attracted the ‘frontline responders’ already working there. Military roles are traditionally male dominated and so cyber began as a predominantly male field, but applying these other roles would open cybersecurity to a more diverse range of interests, skills and motivations, but it requires a significant rethink of the assumptions that surround the subject. If you consider cybersecurity as a combination of security and computer science, both fields have a history of male dominance, though in the case of computer science the patriarchy was a recent event (it happened just as computer science was becoming profitable because that’s how glass ceilings work).
The problem with clinging to this cultural predisposition in cybersecurity is that it continues to create a male focus in hiring. Women may struggle to see how they fit in a field that presents itself with such a masculine bias. Getting away from the military/first responder mindset might be a way to recast cybersecurity in a different light.
Looking at the less represented roles in the social change ecosystem, weavers would bring connectivity and communications to the field – something it currently lacks. Visionaries would bring the perspective and scope needed to move cybersecurity out of its often reactive stance, though that would also mean giving up the unquestioned control that accompanies emergency response; that may be the hardest ask of all.
Recasting cybersecurity in terms of caregiving and healing was where Alanna saw the most gains. Cybersafety is a foundational skill in an increasingly connected world, yet its treated (if it’s acted on at all) as an emergency response after the fact, becoming a self fulfilling prophecy for the first-responder mindset. By finding a place for caregivers and healers on cybersecurity teams, the approach to user training and even post-breach response would be significantly different. Can you imagine cyber support that isn’t emergency response defined? Neither can many of the people in the industry because they can only conceive of it through their own cultural background and motivational approach.
Digital skills remain poor and continue to represent
the most successful avenue for cyberattack.

Other atypical motivators also have a role in cybersecurity. Storytellers and guides are motivated by sharing narratives and teaching complexity and empathy rather than fixating on problem solving. The vast majority of cyber-incidents are the result of user ignorance and error. Most malware ends up on a network because a user mistakenly put it there, not because a ‘super hacker’ got in. If we hope to address this primary form of ingress (atrocious user digital literacy), we need to bring in people who can create meaningful narratives and engage with learning because it’s their primary motivation.

Of course these roles aren’t absolute, no one is just one of them, but by considering the social change ecosystem we might identify biases implicit in cybersecurity culture that disclude anyone but those interested in heroic intervention or technical response. By considering alternate motivations and skillsets, hiring practices in cybersecurity would become more inclusive. That inclusivity does more than check a DEI box. A diverse workforce offers a richer range of approaches to problem solving and prevents blind spots based on privilege that would make this critically important discipline more resilient, accessible and effective.

Resources

The Building Movement: https://buildingmovement.org/ supports and pushes the nonprofit sector to tackle the most significant social issues of our times by developing research, creating tools and training materials, providing guidance, and facilitating networks for social change.

THE SOCIAL CHANGE ECOSYSTEM MAP (2020): https://buildingmovement.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Ecosystem-Guide-April-2022.pdf

A History of Cybersecurity: https://cyber-security.degree/resources/history-of-cyber-security/

Empowering women can help fix the cybersecurity staff shortage: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/09/cybersecurity-women-stem/

Occupational digitalization trends in Canada, 2006-2021: https://fsc-ccf.ca/research/race-alongside-the-machines/

Global Digital Skills Index, 2022: https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/salesforceresearch/viz/shared/NNRKYDH37

Future Skills: https://temkblog.blogspot.com/2022/10/2022-tmc7-research-symposium-table.html

If we would redefine digital skills through a media literacy lens, we would also open up these pathways to a wider variety of learners. Defining digital skills as ‘coding’ is reductive, unhelpful and excludes a number of alternate learning motivations.


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One Man Caravan: Motorcycle Travel History

You can pick up a reprinted copy of One Man Caravan on Amazon for about sixty bucks, but I did a bit better. For ten bucks I discovered an original 1936 edition in a used book jumble when we went to Pelee Island over Canadian Thanksgiving. The spine is cracked and the pages are stained with almost a century of smoke, coffee and whiskey – intrigued yet?

When you take on a read like this it drags you out of your own context and into a world substantially different from the one we live in, Many people have trouble navigating this time culture shift (they like to bring their current values and fixations with them – it’s a kind of temporal colonialism), but not me, I like the dissonance.

One Man Caravan is the story of Robert Fulton, an American student living in Europe who shoots his mouth off at a dinner party, saying he’s planning to ride a motorbike around the world. (Un?) Fortunately for Robert, one of the people at the party owned the Douglas Motorcycle Factory and offered him a free bike to do it on. It reminded me of Charley Boorman shooting his mouth off about doing the Dakar… and then having to do it.

Another familiarity with moto-travel history is similarities to Ted Simon’s Jupiter’s Travels. Fullerton describes his decision to go with a motorbike: “I had considered the matter from various angles, only to arrive at the conclusion that there must be some better method of seeing that world than by the standard processes. On foot and carrying a knapsack? That would be too slow. By motor car? Too expensive. A bicycle? Too much work. A motorcycle?”  Simon says something similar in Jupiter’s Travels when he talks about what it takes to ride around the world.

The world Fullerton navigates feels like another planet to most modern readers. No digital anything, nothing like today’s transport infrastructure, and industry has yet to force everyone into similar lifestyles. We often forget how much industry defines our lives, but Fullerton comes face to face with that in 1932. The other oddity for the modern reader is just how different the immutable facts of life (like countries) change over time. The world was a very different place in 1932…

The emerging chancellor in Germany was taking it into the future (Fullerton talks about how well ordered and future facing Germany is – unnerving, right?) ! I had to look up Waziristan (modern day Pakistan).

Robert blitzes across continental Europe before pressing on into Greece and finding his way to the ‘edge of civilization’ in Turkey.


You’ll come across a very colonial view of the world because that’s how it operated in 1932, but if you can get past your temporal prejudices, this old book does a fantastic job of bringing that lost world to life. Robert finds himself in kinship with Bedouin camel train drivers who live their lives on the road (at least when he isn’t being thrown in jail – the preferred way to house an itinerant motorcyclist passing through in the 1930s). He has frequent altercations with local law enforcement and the various ‘agents of empire’ he comes across, though his American citizenship gives him a useful separation (and a healthy irreverence) for those government interests.

Like many around-the-world stories, the trip itself changes Robert as he travels. His early, furtive forays in Europe are accompanied by a rueful, self-mocking tone, but once he gets into the grind, especially as he’s navigating Middle Eastern deserts without roads or even a clear idea of where he’s going, you start to get a  sense of how much of a grafter this guy is – he certainly isn’t afraid of hard work.


By the time Robert has navigated to India he is in the zone, pushing on into Afghanistan even though every possible barrier is thrown up against him. It’s in these places beyond the comforts of civilization where his fixation on trying to capture these disappearing cultures really comes into focus. Robert is very aware of how the industrial revolution is shrinking the world and remaking it in a single image. His observations about being offered tiger cubs for two dollars in Indo-China (a motorbike isn’t the best place for a tiger cub) speak to the process of ‘civilizing’ these places.

Another quality that comes across as Robert’s confidence (and writing voice) improve is his sense of humour. He starts off having a healthy respect for the status quo, but by the time he is navigating his way out of China to Singapore with no money, he is fast and loose with how things should work and much more likely to absorb the lessons the road is delivering to him.

His description of how the Chinese measure distance (in terms of ease of travel vs. distance) is particularly funny and insightful and shows you how far he’d come in terms of simply listening to the world rather than judging it:

“…the Chinese method possesses one distinct advantage over all others. It does not deal in distances but rather in ‘going conditions.’ For example the distance from Kaifeng to Tungkwan might be two hundred li, while from Tungkwan to Kaifeng measures only a hundred and fifty. The reason? Simple enough. It’s down-hill coming back.”

If you want a feeling of this lost world buried in the history of the past 90 years, the photos in the book will take you there…
 
Riding the streets of Shanghai in 1932…


Robert’s mechanical inclinations kept him in motion (he went on to invent the skyhook system you see in James Bond and Batman films!)


In Saigon, the ‘Little Paris of the East’


Whether you’re a motorcyclist, a historian or a lover of travel, finding a copy of One Man Caravan is a wonderful opportunity. If you can find a survivor like I did for a song, then good for you. Right now, the only hard cover original edition available is going for $934USD (eek!).

The best follow-on is that all that film that Robert lugged around the world (and got into all sorts of trouble trying to develop along they way) is out there somewhere as Twice Upon a Caravan. I’ll have to do some digging to see if I can find the complete package, it’d be something to see.



The fascinating life of Robert Fullerton:

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Digital Disruption, The Collapsing 4th Estate and Foreign Inference in Canadian Media

Toronto’s traffic misery means I don’t fight my
way into The Six as often as I might, glad I
did on this occasion though.

We battled our way into The Six last night to attend TVO Today Live’s: Can Democracy
Survive the Collapse of Media? The documentary is the story of the Toronto Star as it struggles to survive in our diverse mediascape. Digital disruption came to newspapers at the same time the change from broadcast to the individualized, 2-way media access (aka, the internet) unhinged other traditional media giants. Many newspapers are hanging on by their fingernails as they struggle to develop a business model that would allow them to survive in the 21st Century.

The documentary raised difficult questions around the importance of an independent press as a means of holding government and business to account. It follows The Star as reporters exposed the many failures by the Ontario government during the COVID pandemic. By the end of the documentary it was hard to argue against the importance of an independent press as a pillar of democracy, though how they operate can no longer assume that they are the ‘information celebrities’ they were in the broadcast age.

The premier took place on the
UofT Campus, just south of
Yorkville, which is surreal at
the best of times.

There was a lot of blame in both the documentary and the round table discussion afterwards aimed at ‘tech’ companies like Google and Facebook. While those companies depend on new digital media delivery systems, they seldom engineer their own tech. Google and Facebook aren’t tech companies, they are advertising companies who have exploited digital disruption in order to eat traditional media company’s lunches.

The fall-back position of the Fourth Estate (professional journalism) is that they provide an important balance in any country claiming to adhere to democratic principles. Transparency isn’t something that comes easily to people when they gain money and power, which tend to get used to gain more privilege and power. This is a difficult truth to dispute, though how the professional press operated in the time of broadcast media when profit margins were huge and they were the only voice to be heard came with its own problems.

I found the documentary interesting in terms of tracking our dance into the datasphere two decades into our information technology/media revolution. The problems from clinging to an out of date business model (predicated on privilege and a lock on the media people see), were clearly defined, but what prompted me to get up and ask a question in front of Toronto’s intelligentsia was the ignoring of foreign influence in this imbalance.

Next week I’m attending KnowledgeFlow & NATO Association of Canada’s DEFUSE project focused on how to battle disinformation in Canada’s fractured mediascape, and I’ve spent the last month attending cybersecurity conferences that made Canada lack of cyber-resilience when facing foreign cyber-powers terrifyingly apparent. Listening to reporters blaming advertising companies for how unfair it is that they share their journalism without any economic support pales in comparison to this more clear and present danger. 

We live in an increasingly interconnected world, much of which does not place any value in the balancing act of a functioning democracy. I’d go so far as to say many of these unfriendly governments see Canada’s unregulated approach to online media as an opportunity to spread disinformation and fracture political cohesion. These unfriendly powers tend to focus on developing massive military cyber operations, some of which are larger than the entire Canadian military.

What finally got this introvert on his feet was Senator Pamela Wallin’s repeated statements that the Canadian government has no place in supporting an independent press. The question that sprang into my head was, why is the Canadian government so worried about staying out of influencing media when so many unfriendly foreign governments are actively engaged in spreading disinformation in Canada?

The Senator’s feelings are understandable as she used to work as a professional journalist and deeply believes in keeping government influence out of an independent press, but that ignores all those other governments who are already spreading misinformation in our country. Canadian professional journalists have to adhere to legal codes of conduct that anonymous, foreign backed social media ‘influencers’ and the new-media advertising ‘tech’ companies who deliver them to every Canadian blithely ignore.

There are a couple of ways the Canadian government could protect professional journalism, assuming the battered fourth estate can get past its own privileged past and focus on journalistic best practices rather than chasing the same advertising that the tech giants are. Funding with no editorial influence for news outlets that are providing fact-based, Canadian information is a good place to start. That funding should come directly from the new-digital advertising delivery services (Google, Facebook and the rest) who distribute professional journalism without supporting it in any way. By requiring the online advertisers to pay Canadian content creators for their journalism, this could be an influence free source of stability for the fourth estate. It would also help Canada moderate foreign influence in social media by enabling more transparent, Canadian made, fact-checked information online.

Bolstering fact-based Canadian journalism means Canadians are more likely to be seeing vetted information rather than foreign backed disinformation, but we also need to aggressively pursue anonymous sources of funding. The fourth estate could help there to. Transparency of online information funding should be another priority. By providing data on social media funding, the federal government would be publicizing data on information transparency that would assist academic and journalistic research into foreign influence in Canada.

In response to my question, the Senator emphasized the importance of understanding and preventing foreign influence, making specific reference to China’s worldwide disinformation campaign. She wrapped it up by noting that education is the key, which makes me happy as a cyber-educator, but it isn’t enough. We need intelligence apparatus that is providing much needed transparency into how social media is twisting our national conversation, otherwise we’re at the mercy of well funded, organized unfriendly foreign governments who are already neck deep in twisting our national media.

https://freedomhouse.org/report/special-report/2020/beijings-global-megaphone
Canada is up against giants, and our unregulated online media makes for easy access to  Canadian politics by governments who happily leverage our lack of awareness for their own ends. Canadian journalists can’t get paid for producing fact-checked local content, but the lunatic fringe gets paid by enemy states to flood Canadian screens with disinformation. There is clearly a role for the federal government in Canada’s media engagement.

Tax this and then use the funds to support fact-based, Canadian journalism.

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The Week That Usually Isn’t: Riding in November in Canada

We don’t usually get a lot of two wheel time in November.  We often get years where the snows start at Hallowe’en and don’t let go, but not this year.  Temps in the teens had me out exercising both bikes with their new winter-oil change in before they hibernate.

Photos taken with a Theta 360 camera on a flexible tripod attached to various parts of the bke.

Once the snows fall and the long wait starts, the Bonneville project calls…

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2022 TMC7 Research Symposium: Table Talks and Future Skills

We just returned from Treasure Mountain Canada, the 7th iteration of the Canadian School Libraries national research conference.  Like the best professional development, this was self-directed and therefore relevant and meaningful to the people in attendance.  Library learning commons have been under a lot of pressure despite the fact that these centres for information management are key to getting us though the maelstrom that is our information revolution.  Listening to people on the front lines talking about the challenges and opportunities was enlightening.

Round table discussions based on the many papers submitted for the symposium happened throughout the day.  The first I sat in on was by Lila Armstrong.  She talked about the ‘hub and spoke model’ as a way to standardize digital skills development in the absence of a comprehensive digital literacy curriculum (Ontario isn’t the only province who continues to lag behind in this regard).  Lila is a bit of a unicorn because she has recently moved between elementary and secondary panels, something few teachers do in their careers.  Equity and inclusion play a central role in Lila’s research and had me thinking (once again) about how fractured Canada’s education landscape is in terms of making its students future ready.

The next table talk was with Melanie Mulcaster, who is now seconded to TVO where she is working on digital content development and curation.  The pandemic chaos highlighted for Melanie how behind many LLCs were in terms of curating online content.  Through rolling lockdowns the lack of credible resources that were easy to navigate became a central issue in library management.  Mel’s honest assessment  of our slapdash attempts to make digital content work, and then her choice to engage with building these missing tools, was brutally honest and insightful.

Ontario used to have a comprehensive online set of vetted digital tools and resources called OSAPAC, but a lack of foresight in any recent provincial government (not just the current one), has left Ontario scrambling for online resources on a board by board basis.  This is incredibly inefficient as boards repeat the same work instead of working from a centralized resource; it’s a massive failure of vision and leadership.  It also speaks back to Lila’s paper on equity in terms of access to coherent digital skills development.  Students fortunate enough to be in a school with a well developed digital skills program were at an advantage, those that weren’t are even further behind.

I’ve struggled with the willy-nilly nature of the educational ‘maker space’ fad since it was all the buzz at the ECOO conference way back in 2015.  I next sat with Marc Compton, who teaches at a private school in B.C. and has successfully implemented maker spaces into his LLC.  Marc also manages a STEM program so has a better understanding of the engineering design process in terms of creating viable engineering opportunities for his students.  Marc’s common sense approach to getting tools that work and then using them is contrary to the usual typical maker-space buy in (get whatever kit was hyped up at that conference you went to and then wonder why it’s gather dust in your ‘maker space’).  It’s amazing what a bit of common sense can do in terms of providing viable hands-on learning opportunities for your students.

Just when I thought we were wrapping things up, Carol Koechlin noted that the ideas document we were all working on isn’t just about catching up to current best practices, but also a pathway to future digital literacies we haven’t considered yet.  This got me thinking about all the emerging technologies we ignore because we still haven’t caught up with established digital skills in education.  Here’s a quick list off the top of my head:


EMERGING DIGITAL LITERACIES THAT WE DON’T TEACH BUT ARE ALREADY HERE:

Understanding 3d Digital Media

If you can’t do this don’t know how 3d modelling
and animation work, you probably shouldn’t be
teaching media arts in 2022.

I’ve been banging the drum about 3d media literacy for years.  Our game development
program prepares students for an industry significantly larger than the ailing traditional media industries that most high school media arts programs still cling to.  After attending the FITC conference in 2018, I realized that 3d media awareness goes well beyond creation; being unable to comprehend what computer generated imaging can do makes you susceptible to misinformation in advertising.  Understanding 3d CGI is a vital media fluency in 2022, yet almost no one is teaching it

Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning: human-machine collaboration

We got involved with IBM in 2019 in order to access their IBM Watson AI core.  Watson is the AI learning system that beat the reigning Jeopardy champ, but in our case we got access to a cloud based chatbot program and this gave students their first taste of AI supported coding.  Accessing the Watson core allowed students to create criteria rather than specific values for variables.  Instead of having to list every possible name that a user might enter, using AI, students were able to train the system on the concept of names and then it would automatically assign any name given to that variable.  It’s a small step, but understanding how AI and machine learning works allowed students to interact with it more effectively.

At the same time our game development class was getting a handle on more advanced enemy AI in the games we were developing.  The introduction to Watson in the junior classes quickly amped up our game based intelligence development in senior classes.

The as yet untaught emerging skillset here is human-machine collaboration.  After we got
going with Watson, one of my seniors co-oped with me in the lab and she went after developing a machine learning algorithm that would learn from its mistakes and draw useful data out of massive datasets.  This past spring, when I became aware of Github’s Co-Pilot, rather than banning it as many teachers have, I encouraged using it along with assessing its strengths and problems.  One of our seniors took it on for his grade 12 final project, his conclusion?  It helps but if you don’t know how to code it often loses the plot.

Familiarity with machine learning is going to become a vital skillset for our grads, but almost no one is teaching it.  In the meantime it’s what many students are using to answer poorly designed lessons that many teachers still haven’t bothered to update.  None of these AI generated papers will light up a plagiarism checker because it’s all original work.  We’re so technology-illiterate in education that we don’t even know what we don’t know.

CODING is not DIGITAL LITERACY

… any more than grammar is all there is to language literacy.  Of course it’s a part of it, but just a small part.  The technology stack we’re living in starts with basic electronics and works its way up through information technology and networking through IoT and robotics to cloud computing and emergent artificial intelligence.  In that hardware structure there are numerous software offshoots, all of which are viable and important components of a comprehensive digital literacy strategy.  If you think coding is digital literacy then you’re probably looking for an easy way out.  What I’ve discovered about people looking for an easy way out of difficult work is that they’ll usually find one.

Cybersecurity

I’ve saved the scariest for last.  I’ve been banging the drum for better (or any) cybersecurity education for years.  When I show up at a conference to present on it, educators can’t run away fast enough, yet they depend on it everyday to make their networked educational technology enabled lessons happen, and they expose themselves and their students to potential harm when using this connected tech with such willful ignorance.

It seems pretty obvious to me that, if we’re going to use networked educational technology in every classroom, it is incumbent upon us to teach cybersafety and privacy to our students from the moment we make them vulnerable.  The idea that cybersecurity is someone else’s problem is both naïve and selfish, yet that has been education’s approach.

I first got involved with cybersecurity through CyberTitan, Canada’s national student cybersecurity competition, which runs in conjunction with CyberPatriot, run by the U.S. Air Force Association in America.  CyberPatriot is now in its fifteenth season and has tens of thousands of students in many countries all learning hands-on defensive I.T. skills and deep cybersafety awareness that will assist them in any future career.  As you may expect, Canada has far too few of them.

There are many industry and government organizations that want to bolster cyber-education.  A more cyber-educated society makes for a more protected Canada in an interconnected global economy that isn’t exactly stable, yet the reflex in education is to think of this as someone else’s problem, even as we become increasingly dependent on networked ed-tech.  Ontario is now requiring mandatory elearning for high school students, but has nothing in place to teach safe use of that mandatory, network dependent technology; we couldn’t put the cart any further ahead of the horse if we tried.

In my new role we just ran National CyberDay, which reached over 2000 students nationally – there are almost seven million students in Canada, meaning less than 0.0003% of students participated (in the middle of cybersecurity awareness month), yet almost all of them will be on networked educational technology everyday this week.

Cybersecurity education may be the toughest nut to crack, but my recent experiences at conferences on the subject have only intensified my desire to climb this mountain.  Digitally skilled librarians would be a great place to begin this change towards a more secure and digitally literate Canada.  LLCs running CyberDay activities and engaging reluctant classroom teachers in cybersafety and privacy awareness is a great first step.  As awareness builds, librarians taking on CyberTitan coaching roles could introduce emerging cyber-skills to middle and high school students, opening up pathways into a desperately under-served industry in Canada.



There are so many emerging digital mediums.  I haven’t touched on the metaverse and how virtual and augmented reality are going to change human interaction in the next decade, or how wearable technology will revolutionize the smartphone yet again, but these are all emerging elements of digital literacy that we will need to address.

There is much work to do, but events like Treasure Mountain Canada are exactly how we’re going to escape our silos and develop a cohesive national approach that is both equitable and scalable.  Nothing else is going to solve the depth and breadth of the digital literacy problems that we face.


The hackneyed approach to digital skills development in education in Canada (and elsewhere) has produced a scarcity of much needed digitally literate graduates. Emergent skillsets such as in cybersecurity are particularly absent.  There is much to do.


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