Dusty World – Page 5 – Mechanical Sympathy

The Determined Luddite

They showed this at the Google Summit a couple of weeks ago:

A metaphor for users of technology?

It’s a special kind of learned helplessness, and I see it every day when trying to get people moving on their computers again. There is nothing magical about computers, though many people like to think there is (it gives them an excuse not to engage in learning about them). If we’re going to make digital skills a foundational skill set in the twenty first century (and we certainly seem to be moving in that direction), then we need to integrate digiracy into curriculum in the same way we integrate literacy and numeracy, and we need teachers to be able to demonstrate competence in digital skill in the same way that we expect them to display proficiency in traditional literacies; acting helpless does nothing to move this forward.

Our board is about to take steps toward a BYOD/multi-platform approach to #edtech. This can’t happen until people get off the escalator and figure out how to open a book.

Helplessness, learned or otherwise, isn’t going to lead to the effective integration of technology in the classroom. How we train teachers to become digitally competent is a vital piece to this puzzle. The mini-lab approach with digital coaches assigned to their own tech-cloud is a way to encourage the tech-curious to develop better skills. It also (through collegial interaction with peers) lets the tech-curious spread their enthusiasm and know-how to the less keen.

Build digeracy through scaffolded, objective learning with diverse technology. Opting out is no longer an option. It was an embarrassing approach ten years ago, it’s quickly becoming untenable now.

That people seem to rewind well past where you think reasonable caution may lie in trouble shooting computers is frustrating from a tech’s point of view. If a user has a genuine issue with their computer, or something has actually broken, then we’re generally happy to be of assistance, but when a teacher says a printer is broken when it is simply unplugged, this points to a willful kind of ignorance. When that teacher is also one of the schools computer teachers I want to move to the arctic and give up.

A minimum expectation of digital fluency should be a willingness to address basic, operational issues before evoking support. If schools want to develop digital fluency, an expectation of honest engagement has to be where that starts. If the internet is really becoming that important, then it becomes incumbent upon the user to make that connection as stable and effective as possible. I’d say that 80% of the tech calls I deal with are people unplugging things they shouldn’t be touching in the first place, and then everyone else being too helpless to plug it back in again.

One of my grade 9s shared this as a video to help them out with an introduction to computers (the editing is hilarious): Komputer Kindergarten. MSDOS and the beige 1990s are the reason this sounds so antiquated (and funny). That so many people twenty years down the road still don’t “do that stuff'” is getting to be equally ridiculous. I’m not saying everyone has to be a technician, but everyone should be able to change their own tire, otherwise they shouldn’t be driving. You can’t be expected to operate the equipment effectively if you’re determined to know nothing about it and want nothing to do with it.

Effective teaching with digital tools begins with teachers, and I find so many of them not just reluctant but downright contrary to the idea of learning even the basics of how a computer or network functions. Some of that lies at the feet of teacher unions and school boards who have taught teachers to be helpless through locked, fear driven educational I.T. regimes. Educators who have bypassed these restrictions and developed digital fluency in spite of their union and board’s best efforts are the ones we need to bring back in from the cold now that the school technology cold war is over. Their fluency as digital coaches could create momentum to inflect enough colleagues to adopt a more open approach to learning technology.

The idiotic idea that technology is the realm of the young and if you want to know anything about it, just ask your students, needs to die. Students are the rocket scientists who unplug an ethernet cable to plug into their infected laptop so they can have faster internet. They then leave it unplugged and the next student comes along and instead of plugging the end back into the computer, plugs it into the wall, creating havoc as the network loops itself. Then everyone complains at how slow and unreliable the internet is; it’s not the internet that is slow and unreliable.

As school systems stumble along years behind business and society, they have finally gotten the idea that being online is just a new medium of communication (not bad, only a decade after the rest of us did). As education evolves into a more diverse, open technological environment, perhaps the hardest people to convince will be teachers who have bought into the fear and panic of their unions and employers and have been forced out of step with social expectation as a result.

Gasping For Breath: the lost art of pedagogy in Ontario schools

Written Feb, 2022:

Horses usually get put down when they break a leg. They get euthanized because a three legged horse can’t stand on its own and ends up developing consequent health problems. Keeping a lame horse alive is simply extending its misery. These days, Dusty World feels like a lame horse. I started this blog in 2010 after having attended my first ECOO conference and found it a valuable way to share my own ABL (always be learning) approach to teaching and learning effectively while navigating an information revolution.

Dancing in the Datasphere: thoughts on digital pedagogy from way back in 2011.

I’m sitting here looking at a dozen posts I haven’t published on Dusty World in the past year because I think there is no point. It has been years since we focused on pedagogical best practices in Ontario education. My reflections on this blog have always been focused on that slippery and often ignored concept. Even at the best of times getting our education system to focus on pedagogical best practices has proven problematic, and we’re very far away from the best of times here in early 2022.

I’ve used pedagogical best practices to direct my teaching throughout my career, even when it made me unpopular with management, my union and even colleagues and students (many are happy to do less – learning is hard work). In my mind, pedagogy means I’m focusing on maximizing student learning to the exclusion of all else. The past two years have made so many educational workers (and students, and parents) disinterested in pedagogy to the point where I may be one of the only people left who gives it any thought. Many weren’t into it in the first place, others have bailed for their own survival, and some have even actively attacked the idea of learning as a focus in schools, usually for their own political ends.

Pedagogy in Ontario public education has been set back decades since 2018. These days we’re reduced to focussing on student wellness (usually while being driven to destroy our own) rather than teaching, but good pedagogy leads to student success which also brings with it meaningful (rather than proscriptive) wellness, though that is much more difficult to do than simply tossing learning out the window in favour of proscriptive wellness. I didn’t became a teacher to provide daycare or be an emotional councillor, I got into teaching to teach. In an attempt to survive this ongoing disaster, Ontario education has given up on teaching and learning and has fallen back to wellness as a last raison d’être.

Pedagogical best practices have always struggled to survive in our educational bureaucracy. I’d honestly hoped that a change in government in Ontario would create efficiencies and opportunities in a system too long under single party control, but the new guys are just as (if not more) duplicitous and manipulative as the old guys, and obviously not focused on pedagogy. This loss of faith in our provincial education system is what had me daydreaming about a student bill of rights for all Canadian students. Unfortunately, Canada’s colonial history tends to systemically abuse disenfranchised people (like students under 18), leaving me worried for the safety and efficacy of learning for our children.

For me, the point of Dusty World is to allow me to transparently reflect on my teaching practice in order to improve it. I have always done this publicly in the hopes that other people might find it useful, but the unpublished posts I’m looking at feel more like hopelessness than they do constructive reflective practice. Every time I post something I get blowback from exhausted people who are trying to make nonsensical system-think work in practice. The best thing I seem able to do as one of the few people left in the system actually interested in effective teaching and learning is to not publish reflections on it, which breaks my heart. We seem to have lost the plot entirely.

***

Systemic Pedagogical Failures Continue…

Not posting anything doesn’t mean there are still major problems in our system. So far this year I’ve had graduates tell me they are in real trouble in post-secondary maths classes. How an A+ high school student can suddenly find themselves failing in post secondary raises very concerning questions about how we are teaching and learning. Other students are able to use their maths like a toolbox to solve problems, but our grads struggle with rote learning that renders them ineffective. My son had a senior maths class last year where the entire class failed unit 5. The teacher said it’s ok, everyone fails unit 5. If we were focusing on pedagogy we’d be trying to solve this.

This past year I had prominent STEM educators tell me that only academic/white collar courses matter. When I suggested we create content for non-academic technology courses I was told that they don’t matter because barely any schools teach them. This STEM is more just S & M thinking is ongoing and obviously inequitable. This is one of those things I’d hoped a change in government might address, but blue collar subjects (and students) are still an afterthought in our degree fixated system. Were we considering pedagogy on a systemic level, this kind of thing wouldn’t come up in conversation.

I’m currently teaching over 70 students in grades 10-12 in computer technology and engineering, four of them are girls and there are no girls in my senior class. Sexism and genderism is still a major problem in our system. My partner had one of our local students in elearning last quadmester and she told the story of how, when she expressed concern about her course selections she was told, “you’re so pretty, you don’t need to worry about that kind of thing.” I want to have trouble believing that this was said, but then I look at how genderized our course selections continue to be and wonder how this kind of systemic genderism can happen.

I’m one of the few that has tried to keep extracurriculars alive in our aimless wander through COVID and have had many difficult experiences and observations about how student performance is affected by long term trauma, but that too can’t be publicly reflected on because it doesn’t matter anymore, and doing so only seems to aggravate the situation. Having an opportunity to reflect, share and talk to other professional educators about my practice has been a valuable ‘breathing’ process for my teaching, but like trying to teach through a mask every day, I’m left gasping for breath.

My current situation (massive classes while trying to teach hands-on engineering skills without the space needed to do it) has always been an issue where I teach, but nothing changes because I’m expected to hurt myself making it work every year, at least until there is an injury then it’ll be my fault. I recently had a student in my post-secondary bound senior computer engineering class (capped at 31, like an advanced calculus class) who is credit poor, essential level/DD and has a history of violence. When I asked guidance why this student was directed into our class I was told that he had selected my course, which begs the question: who is being guided? We have resources set aside for students like this, but when we don’t guide them into those programs we reduce the efficacy of everyone else’s learning.

Speaking as a parent as well as a teacher, I’d like our education system to focus on teaching and learning best practices, which should include gender unprejudiced and level appropriate guidance. I suspect the dearth of maths skills in our grads is also a result of the ‘pick-what-you-like’ (unless you’re female) approach. It’s hard to cover pathway appropriate curriculum when a significant portion of every class has neither the inclination nor background to engage with it. If pedagogy mattered, we’d be resolving these problems instead of ignoring them.

The world has many problems and I feel that pedagogically focused public education is the answer to many of them, but because of politics and circumstance, schools in Ontario aren’t focused on being schools anymore.

Meanwhile, the digital information revolution is, if anything, accelerating, and we’ve thrown hundreds of thousands of staff and students into the digital divide in an attempt to weather the pandemic, all with no time or training to tackle any of it with pedagogy in mind. I’m rejigging my entire curriculum again for the 3rd major change in scheduling in the past 18 months (with no time given). It’s like trying to build a plane while it’s in the air… again.

Inconsistencies have poked so many holes in the fiction that is our public education system that many people are now questioning it in ways they wouldn’t have before. The one-two punch of a vindictive, populist government and this never-ending pandemic has left our schools angry and confused. That loss of faith is hard to recover from. Trying to honestly reflect on pedagogical best practices in this void only seems to aggravate the situation. It might be time to send Dusty World on sabbatical for a while and focus on something where I can give it 100% without other people constantly telling me to do less. I didn’t get into teaching to do it at low intensity, the kids deserve more, but that’s where we’re at.

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Music, millenials and the lost art of curation

The other day I asked my senior class how millennials listen to music when they get their first car. They seemed confused by the question. I’ve noticed that young people don’t like to manage files any more (many grade 9s don’t know how to find files on a desktop), and since music turned into file management around the turn of the millennium, it’s all about file management these days, isn’t it? It turns out it isn’t.

When I started driving near the end of the 80s the couple of cassettes in my pocket turned into a briefcase of tapes. That briefcase contained whole albums by artists, both what they released and B side stuff. When you went to a concert you’d hear the released stuff, but you’d also hear the unreleased songs, and the majority of people in the audience were very familiar with it; they were fans of the artist who had spent a lot of time in a long form medium (the album).

That process continued into the 90s as my tape collection evolved into compact disks. The smaller form factor resulted in flip books of disks. The plastic box with the album art on it got left behind, but I was still listening to whole albums and collecting the works of specific artists in a detailed, long form, album based manner. I was introduced to mixed tapes in the mid-90s by my hot, new girlfriend, so the idea of designing your own playlists have been around for a long time, but albums were the main point. We spent a lot of time curating our collections. You’d discover new artists in friends’ collections, you’d hear unreleased music while in their car. At a concert you knew the words to every song, even the unreleased stuff. What happens at concerts nowadays? They play their released songs only and then do popular covers so everyone can sing along?

I went digital early. From Napster to modern mp3 distribution, I kept cultivating a locally based, artist focused collection of music, but that isn’t the way that the industry has gone. Nor is it the way that teens today relate to music. The gigs of music I’ve curated aren’t the future, it’s me using modern tools to imitate my past relationship with less fluid, physical mediums, but is that a bad thing? I’d argue that my relationship with an artist’s music was deeper and more intimate because of the limitations of our mediums. When you have the collected works of Dire Straits (six original albums plus four live ones) on hand, you are diving deep into what they did. Surely deeper familiarity breeds a more loyal fan.

Kids are still into music, but the digitization of the medium has resulted in a much more fluid relationship with it. I frequently watch students randomize YouTube videos as background music and then click through a song in the first ten seconds if it isn’t grabbing them. Their’s is a high input low attention threshold relationship with the artist. You can hardly blame modern artists for producing shallow, catching songs – the cloud based medium that has descended upon us pre-selects that kind of music for success in a fluid, digital landscape.

Laying on a bunk at air cadet camp in Trenton on a hot, un-air conditioned summer night in 1985 and getting lost in Brothers in Arms on a walkman isn’t something millennials consider doing with music, is it? We started doing the skip a song thing on CDs in the 1990s, but it was such a pain on tape that you’d just listen to the song. In doing so you sometimes came around to liking something that didn’t grab your attention in the first ten seconds. At the very least you’re experiencing an artist’s thoughts and music in a more detailed fashion.

When I asked my students what they do when they get a car for the first time they were confused. Spotify was the answer (it turns out Spotify is the millennial answer to any music related question). I get it if you’re swimming in wifi at home or at school all the time. Sure, it’s bandwidth and data ain’t free, but it is if you’re a kid in 2017 for the most part. But what do you do when you’re going for a ride in your first car and have no locally curated music to take with you? I figured they’d all have MP3s on their phones, but they don’t. Spotify premium was the answer. That’s ten bucks a month to listen to whatever you want, and you can evidently save it locally if you’re on the road, but do they? If you’ve never had to manage a local music collection before I suspect it wouldn’t even occur to you to do it this late in the game, it’d feel too much like work.

So the young driver’s solution to the problem of never having cultivated a personal collection of music is to pay for a monthly cloud based service and then now begin cultivating a local music collection? You could just hope your phone is willing and able to bring down all that data in a continuous way, but that’s an expensive prospect in Canada. With some of the highest mobility costs in the world and lots of long car trips in store, Canada isn’t a comfortable place to be cloud dependant for your tunes. If you end up not being able to pay the ten bucks a month for the pro version of Spotify, you lose all your local music. Just when you thought the digital native’s relationship with their tunes couldn’t get any more ephemeral, it gets more so. When you live in the cloud you don’t really own your data, do you?

Another problem with cloud-based digital music natives is the interactivity. When you’re used to constantly inputting changes to infinite cloud based music it’s second nature to go looking for whatever strikes your fancy, or skip through the play list looking for whatever drifted into your mind as a must-listen-to song in the moment. How long are your eyes off the road while you’re doing that? If that’s your relationship with music then you’ve trained yourself over many years to surf through your fluid, digital music with frequent inputs. I wonder how this is reflected in statistics…

Digital distraction for the win.

MADD stats on young drivers.
Young Driver stats on distracted driving
Transport Canada on distracted driving: “the highest proportion of distracted drivers involved in fatal crashes was in the under-20 age group (16%) followed by those aged 20 to 29 (13%)”
NHTSA on distracted driving
It’s a world wide issue, here is Australia

The texting culture is generally blamed for the problem of distracted driving, but I suspect this learned, constant input approach to music has a part to play in it as well, especially with younger drivers.

The long and the short of all this is that the music culture of young people is completely foreign to anyone over thirty. For people who got into music before it got very cloudy in the twenty-teens, curating your own local music means you can jump into a car or go on a trip and never once wonder about access; you own your music. Because of that effort you’ve probably also got a closer relationship with the artists you call your own. For the cloud dependent millennial that move to vehicular mobility produces a number of expensive problems. Of course, since you never really got into any one musician when you were younger because listening to more than one third of a song is boring, maybe you don’t care.

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Wired Thinking on Neurodiversity

Wired at 20 years old

My favorite magazine is WIRED, and I’m a magazine guy. No other magazine dares me to think as widely and as daringly about the times we live in (if you’ve never picked up a copy, give it a go!). Wired will go after interests of mine (internet culture, technology, etc) but it will also introduce me to the leading edge of fields I have only a passing experience in, and make me care about them.

This month they turn 20 years old. They’ve been daringly guessing what will happen next for two decades now, and while they don’t always get it right, they always make you realize what changes are upon us.

As I read a new edition I usually want to link and share the ideas they stir up. This edition is full of them as Wired goes over an alphabet of ideas considered in the last two decades.

Neurodiversity is a topic that hits close to home. With a son diagnosed, I’ve come to recognize how I’ve dealt with ASD myself. One of the reasons I love reading Douglas Coupland or William Gibson is because many of their characters are neuro-atypical, and it’s nice to read about people like yourself; I find much of mainstream media quite alienating.

I’ve struggled with my inability to care about social distinction forever, and I feel for my son while he does. I also think that difference is wonderful. When we heard the diagnosis I said, “excellent! Who would want to be normal!?” I guess the normal people do.

WIRED’s take on all this? Neurodiversity is like biological diversity; it develops resiliency. The neurodiverse might not all be geniuses, but the ones that are (and geniuses by definition are neurodiverse) may very well save the human race. Diversity allows a species to survive in extreme conditions, conditions that we’re making for ourselves. As long as we’re hammering round pegs into square holes, we’re not allowing human beings to be as neurally diverse as we naturally are… and we’re hurting ourselves in the process. Normal people really need to get off their high horses.

I wish I could convince the school system of this as it focuses exclusively on short comings in hopes of making the exceptional ceptional.. If they could improve my son’s image pattern recognition (which is astonishing), his special skills would be enhanced, instead they rush to make him fit a mould. The system presses him to be as widely and flatly skilled as ‘normal’ people in hopes of making him what, normal? Upcoming standardized tests won’t examine his superhuman abilities, they will focus on what ‘normal’ people are expected to do (they have charts). When he fails a literacy test because he’s unable to verbalize what he knows in a manner that suits the testers, we’re left with the pieces.

Some might suggest that alternative school systems might offer a response to this, but I doubt it. Adding money to remove expectations isn’t what is needed here.

Like eating factory produced meat, driving SUVs or buying sweatshop made products, how we treat the neurodiverse is going to be one of the things that points to our backward (hypocritical) thinking in the early twenty first century. Like the eighteenth century person who thought slavery was perfectly acceptable, this social ignorance makes us look like fools to history.

Fortunately, I don’t really care what most people think about it.

Metacognition Missteps

What Mr. Cleese is so eloquently describing above is the Dunning-Kruger Effect, something that didn’t receive a moment of notice in the metacognitive PD we recently received. Metacognition is often seen as a way to encourage student directed learning, and I’m generally a fan of the idea, but this bias deserves some consideration, especially if we’re trying to improve student learning.

In trying to break this down I came up with the Venn diagram to the right in hopes of understanding what should be a process toward enlightenment rather than a barrier to it.

There is a degree of stupidity so intense that it is self-consuming. People trapped in that tend to reinforce their own ignorance and simply can’t hear alternative points of view, even if they are self evident. These people tend to wallow in limited, habitual action. If you want to see it happening watch most digital natives on a computer. In that kind of stupidity you’re going to be hard pressed to learn anything, let alone expect any kind of accurate self assessment.

Ignorance is bliss, you’re going to be happy if you think you know everything. Anyone who lives in an Earth centred universe and thinks their species the darling of creation is that kind of certain-happy. People like this make a point of surrounding themselves with like minded people.

If you can begin to take in evidence from around you, certain self-evident truths will begin to make you question your beliefs. That would get you out of the stupid vortex and into ignorance. The more you realize you don’t know, the more rapidly you’re able to move toward knowledge. Humility is a vital component in this process, and where metacognition could begin to help.

In the realm of knowledge you may know many things but your experience with them is limited, so while you know theory you are unable to successfully interact with it in reality – this is one of the reasons I enjoy teaching tech so much (reality doesn’t coddle you in your learning). You’ve read about riding a bicycle but you’ve never done the deed. The final step is to do as well as know, only then do you graduate from talking head to doer.

Metacognition is a valuable tool in creating the kind of self-aware humility that can move you from ignorance to knowledge, but applying it too early will push you in the wrong direction. At the early stages of learning you are incapable of knowing what you don’t know, so you’ll think you’re better at something than you are. This appears especially true in mind based, academic work because your math equation doesn’t burst into flames when you do it wrong.

At no point did our metacognitive training suggest that there was a threshold where you should (carefully) begin to implement self-analysis of learning, rather, it was suggested that we do this continually and throughout, which appears to be just what you shouldn’t do if you want to get somewhere with it.

I like the DIY motive here, but getting to “learning to self correct” is a tricky step
that can push you the wrong way if you do it too soon.

Finding a Patch of Sun

As the sun rose on the shortest day of the year our little dog managed to find a fleeting patch of it and opened his solar collector ears to get as much as possible. In a matter of minutes it was gone to be replaced by days of grey fog over Christmas; there was something in that moment.

If you get to fifty without any scars you’re not doing it right, and I have my fair share of scars. I found myself struggling through another Christmas season feeling like the weight of the world was on my shoulders. With a couple of weeks away from the emotional deficit that is Ontario education these days, I got some perspective and decided to try and make a conscious decision to find that patch of sunlight rather than dwell on the darkness.

The return to school started well enough, but you’re not just battling your own negativity, you’re also facing it in your students and colleagues. With the end of the semester approaching and the system under attack from the elected representatives sworn to look after it, everyone is terse, but I was finding that my bonhomie was working. I was able to calm and direct students, and when a colleague was rather unprofessional with my wife, I was able to help her through that too.

Yesterday was an epic shit show though. I got to school only to have my cell – which I’d forgotten in my classroom in a rush to get to the information picket the afternoon before – ringing off the hook. It was my wife saying a snow plow had backed into her. I rushed home to find the back window of the car blown out, glass all over the road and the ‘C’ pillar bashed in. The plow had not only hit her, it had then pushed the car two feet sideways before stopping.

Alanna was ok but the kid driving the plow didn’t say a word. His supervisor showed up and then the OPP. It was all very amiable, but in retrospect this was them trying to manage an obviously at-fault accident. The OPP officer (who never gave us his name) gave us an incident report number and that was that. The township guys shovelled up the glass and I followed Alanna over to the repair centre in Fergus to discover we were already $500 in the hole for a deductible. They then said it might be a week before they even start working on it, and we only have 7 days of rental car coverage. Nice to know our second most expensive car insurance in Canada rates don’t begin to pay for an accident that was in no way our fault.

Even with all that we were getting our sense of humour back as I drove Alanna to school. As we approached the last traffic light before school I was in no rush and doing about 50kmh/hr. I must have seen something in my peripheral vision because I suddenly found myself standing on the brake without knowing why as a mid-sized sedan blew through the red-light perpendicular to us. I think we missed it by about fifteen feet. At 50km/hr we were moving at about 13.9 metres per second. Had I been moving at only a couple of kilometres per hour faster we would have been t-boned by that big, V6 sedan in our small hatchback and our son would have been an orphan.

None of this registered in the moment. We were both already pretty shaken up by the morning and this was simply more nonsense piled on top. We went to school and I got there about half an hour before my first class. I spent most of that time sitting with my wife listening to the discussion with insurance.

With no breaks for the rest of the day I found myself unable to engage with my students effectively. I told my seniors what happened and they went about their culminating projects and tried to give me some space. I didn’t tell my junior classes, but our head of student support dropped by and when I told her what happened she offered to cover my class so I could get some head space. It was nice to hear someone acknowledge how traumatic a morning like the one I had was. I didn’t take her up on it and didn’t pursue leaving. I’m anxious about asking for compassionate leave because I don’t have the greatest history when it comes to getting support while in crisis.

The next day I apologized to my junior students for being so short with them and found my way back onto the beam again. After a weekend of biblical rain the sun rose on Sunday morning and the world had the colour turned up to eleven. I just have to keep working on getting back to that small patch of sun, even when the world seems full of ineptitude and chaos.

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The DIGITAL LENS: How Education Has Ignored A Third Foundational Fluency During The Information Revolution

I’ve been battling against digital illiteracy in Ontario’s public education system for going on a decade now and I’m frustrated at the slow rate of change. I’ve applied for multiple positions at the board and ministry levels and watched as future administrators get moved into these positions and fail to move the needle before they evaporate off into management. Perhaps my mistake is that I want to take on a curriculum enhancement role not to escape the classroom or to get myself into an office but to actually improve system response to an ongoing crisis that everyone else seems to want to sweep under the rug.

Considering Ontario’s current state of affairs, I’ll probably have to wait until after June 2nd for us to get a government interested in doing anything other than torturing our exceptional public education system into submission in order to hand a charter system for their donors. When Ontario comes to its senses (if it doesn’t, I think we’re moving), I’d really like to see us address digital illiteracy, but not just for the societal benefits it would provide – my actual interest is in developing a cyber-awareness curriculum that improves Canada’s ability to survive in a networked world while also clarifying this hidden pathway for students capable and interested in pursuing it.

Unfortunately, cyber and information security aren’t foundational digital abilities, they are advanced, complex skillsets that are developed on top of more simple fluencies. An academic comparison would be writing a complex essay of a challenging piece of writing in English class. In order to tackle the dreaded Hamlet essay, a student would need advanced reading skills with the ability to tackle complex vocabulary and grammar that includes an understanding of both poetic syntax and the chronological difficulties inherent in reading something over four hundred years old. This contextual challenge alone would stress most people’s language skills. On top of all that, the writing itself is a complex set of skills developed on top of simpler abilities. Students would need to understand spelling and grammar, and sentence construction and paragraph construction and argumentative theme development across the entire paper – it’s a staggeringly complex ask that we can only attempt in high school because we’ve placed literacy as a foundational skillset in our education system.

That was in 2010 – over a decade later Schmidt is still
trying to get people to understand the digital
revolution that is happening around them.

With that perspective in mind, I thought I’d try and take a run at infographicking how our
analogue education system has digitized over the past twenty years. This digitization of education has ramped up dramatically in the past decade – much of what I’ve written in Dusty World has orbited around this sea-change in digital teaching and learning.

The suddenness of this change has left many people behind. There are administrators and ‘curriculum experts’ in our system who have never used the cloud-based learning systems we’re now required to use in every lesson. I’m up the pointy end of digitally fluent educators in the province. I applied for a system IT support role last year and didn’t get it – I suspect mainly because the system is incapable of understanding and appreciating digital fluency on anything but a puerile level; it’s a case of illiterate people failing to value and understand what literacy looks like; I’d really like to change that.

If we consider the education system I grew up in 1980s in Ontario, it was a very analogue place. Teachers hand wrote notes on the board, which we copied by hand onto paper (which many students promptly lost, assuming they made the notes in the first place). I can remember vindictive teachers doing a whole 76 minute period of note taking to ‘ready us for university’. Nothing prepares you for university like claw hand! These ‘lessons’ weren’t about how to take quality notes, they were about how to copy everything that was on the board as exactly and quickly as possible. In retrospect they did nothing to prepare me for university, but they were and example of the entrenched lessons we all experienced about creating analogue content; we never had a problem with teaching analogue skills because they hadn’t changed for generations. In the past two decades we’ve revolutionized information recording and access but we’ve also all but ignored learning best practices in these new mediums for teachers and students.

Analogue learning materials, analogue formative learning note taking leading to analogue communication of learning – and we drilled students on how to do each of these analogue exercises in order to create these skillsets. We assume the same skills in digital spaces rather than teaching them.

My generation has been described as ‘digital immigrants’ as we arrived at the current state of affairs from a time that would seem completely alien to anyone currently under forty years old. Along with the framing of us as digital immigrants comes the absurd framing of kids who have grown up in digital abundance as ‘digital natives‘. If you’re read Dusty World before you know what I think of this concept (it’s absurd – just because I grew up in a time with cars didn’t mean I magically knew how to drive!). What this lazy observation did was absolve education of the responsibility for teaching digital communications as a foundational skill, even as it became the basis for how we teach and learn. When I tried to replicate the 20th Century Teaching & Learning above with how 21st Century Teaching & Learning has become digitized, it quickly becomes apparent that digital skills aren’t just needed to communicate your learning (it’s even how we run the literacy test now!), they are also inherent in the learning materials you receive and the formative learning you are documenting. Many parents struggle with the new digital means of communications from their schools (online reporting and such) because of their own digital illiteracy. If you aren’t digitally fluent, you aren’t capable of learning in an Ontario classroom in 2022. You aren’t capable of teaching in one either, though that’s the new expectation in our on again off again emergency remote classrooms.

Learning materials are now almost entirely digital. Even if a textbook is used it’s often digitized first so that the information in it can be shared more fluidly in digital spaces. Staff and students need to know how to research and find information online (including curating their own which many can’t or don’t do). Formative learning is documented (when it’s documented at all) on digital notes taken in cloud based documents, though more often than not it doesn’t happen at all because we’ve lost note taking as a skill during the digital ~~devolution~~ revolution. Communicating learning is now also digital with most students incapable of writing by hand legibly (part of what has killed off formative note taking). We’ve replaced all those lessons about analogue skills with INFORMATION, because information is so readily available to us (though apparently only a minority can critically assess its value).

That digital lens is now between everything we do in education, including the traditional foundational skills of literacy and numeracy. If you require digital fluency to teach and learn literacy and numeracy in a 2022 classroom, doesn’t that make digital fluency itself a foundational skill? Perhaps you’re curious as to how many mandatory digital fluency programs Ontario teachers have to take? None. Know how many mandatory digital fluency classes there are in Ontario high schools? None. Know how many classes you need digital fluency in to best teach and learn? All of them. That is how messed up things are as 2021 ends in an ongoing pandemic that has pushed us into fully digital learning for months at a time. Fluency is but one part of this equation. The digital divide also includes equity issues around bandwidth and devices, but we only talk about equity when it doesn’t cost us anything. Our ignoring of digital fluency has been a socio-economic/equity issue from the start (kids with access to tech and connectivity are obviously going to be more comfortable with it). You might say that our lack of movement on digital fluency is simply a way to hide inequity behind something complex and difficult to deal with while still spouting about how equitable we have become.

I’m live in hope that our education system is put back on the rails and a we stop our oblivious approach to digital skills development in both teaching and learning. If we’re going to use networked digital tools like we are, it is incumbent on every teacher to become fluent enough with it to teach best practices to their students. Our blind leading the blind approach isn’t viable or safe and never should have happened in the first place. Had we been working on this like we should have in the decade leading up to the pandemic, the desperate lunge into emergency remote learning could have been much more equitable and functional and done a lot to reduce the strain on families being mulched by the pandemic.

When that hope is realized I want to go after the hardest part of this in-the-land-of-the-blind skillset: cybersecurity skills. This skillset assumes advanced ICT (information & communication technology) hardware and software skills and then, like that Hamlet essay, goes after complex, esoteric skills far beyond where most people will operate. I want Ontario to develop a cyber-awareness curriculum that brings all users of networked technology (that’s pretty much everyone in the province) up to a point where their digital illiteracy is no longer a detriment to the province. Illiterate users are still the biggest threat in cybersecurity and I’d like to get everyone to the point where they aren’t oblivious to how the digital world they’re living their lives in works so that they can not only learn and teach more effectively in our digital systems but also better protect their data privacy and online presence.

I’d also like to clear away the obstructions our digitally illiterate education system has placed in front of the most digitally adept students and clear pathways into jobs in critical ICT infrastructure, most especially in cybersecurity. If we don’t take steps to secure our digital infrastructure, everything else fails (electricity, water & gas all depend on IT).

We should be producing graduates with the digital fluency needed to confidently make their way in our brave new world while also clarifying pathways for those students willing and able to protect everyone else from an increasingly threatening threatscape.

HOW TO ENGAGE EDUCATION WITH CYBERSECURITY

https://prezi.com/view/7pqMzlLdfOFltD78ILP6/

Over the past couple of years I’ve done a fair bit of writing for various provincial and national agencies around cyber-education. In every case they seemed to be looking for an in-and-out, short duration of work online course they could post that teachers and students would magically flock to. Having presented on cybersecurity education in the classroom both face to face pre-pandemic and online once it kicked off, I became aware of just how fearful most staff are in engaging with this subject that jumps up and down on their digital doubts while also threatening them with horrible outcomes that they don’t understand. Throwing up an online course isn’t going to bridge this fear/illiteracy gap.

Having worked with CyberTitan and Field Effect (an Ottawa based cybersecurity provider) on a joint federal government/private enterprise/public education presentation at the NICE K-12 Cybersecurity Education Conference this past December, we presented on how with industry expertise, federal vision and provincial public education community outreach we could make cyber-pathways available to all pathways interested students while also offering immersive and meaningful cloud-based simulations that are equitably available to all.

ICTC did an ICT Teacher Champion Day pre-COVID where they provided interested and engaged teachers with resources and support. I think this approach is how you bypass the fear and get staff and students to engage with scary-cyber on a basic fluency level. It would also present competition opportunities that clarify pathways for the most cyber-interested. By finding local champions who are willing/able to engage others in cyber-skills development, we could connect and walk people through some of that dormant online material and actually produce a change in how we’re doing things. This requires boots on the ground and a longer term commitment than throwing together an online course.

As digital fluency becomes a mandatory part of our public school experience and we begin producing more digitally fluent teachers and students, we can up our game in advanced digital areas like cybersecurity and emerging technologies like machine learning and 3d modelling and create digitally skilled graduates who aren’t self-taught and potentially dangerous young adults who put our economy and communities at risk.

There is much to do. I’m looking forward to being part of an Ontario that is ready to take on this challenging future even as it hatches around us.

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Digital Footprint 2.0

SOURCES

The source(s) of this post (and a good example of the richness of thinking you can get out of an online PLN):

@MzMollyTL’s Digital Footprint discussion from ECOO last year that stirred up the new teachers in my AQ.

@melaniemcbride’s comment on the sweatshop mentality of the always on teacher:

https://twitter.com/melaniemcbride/status/230841214180683779

@dougpete’s blog on edublogging:
http://dougpete.wordpress.com/2012/08/03/this-week-in-ontario-edublogs-27/

…which led to some interesting questions about online presence:
http://dougpete.wordpress.com/2012/08/05/dont-hurt-yourself-with-social-media/

Phew! That is a lot of build up! Here I go…

DIGITAL FOOTPRINT 2.0

I think we’re ready for an evolution in what our expectations are around this. Diana’s original presentation suggested that teachers need to familiarize themselves with online media, and that is still true. However, since that presentation there have been political upheavals supported by social media, underground poltical movements powered by social media, and I’m currently watching the ‘Twitter Olympics’: the first really social media powered Olympic games. Even the forth estate is grudgingly trying to manage the tidal wave of social media. Merely familiarizing yourself isn’t going to cut it anymore. Ignoring it will make you irrelevant to your students with astonishing speed.

Social media is becoming mainstream and there are increasing expectations that people know how to use it. Only in extremely staid, conservative situations (educational administration) is social media being shunned. Even the very conservative family reunion I attended recently wanted to start making use of social media to keep in touch, and these were people who play banjos. Social media is becoming ubiquitous, even unhooking the Ontario government’s ability to manipulate media into justifying its agenda. This is a powerful force, not something to be trifled with or poked at tentatively. If you’re going to do it, do it honestly, and be yourself. You’ll find the ability to expand your interests online empowering if you don’t try and game it.

POCKET NETWORKS

The social networks we see spring up like mushrooms in the rain are being prompted by the miniaturization of computer hardware. Smartphones are increasingly common, and since 2010, the vast majority of ‘phone’ use has been in data, not voice. We use our mobile computers as interconnected computers, not as phones. Our students do it, we do it, even boomers are doing it. Like the telegraph, then the telephone after it, this is a revolution in how we communicate with each other, and almost everyone is carrying around the means in their pockets.

Our classrooms have more processing power in the pockets of students than desktop labs did ten years ago. Their ability to communicate is unparalleled in history, and disregards geography like no other telecommunications system before it. Just hoping that everyone considers doing something with their online presence is no longer enough, and ignoring or banning the hardware that is causing this is turning a blind eye to a profound shift in social communications. Schools that ban smartphones should be banning other new inventions, like electricity, telephones, televisions… which very quickly starts to look backward.

GENUINE ONLINE PRESENCE

Being online offers you an opportunity to be anonymous, but this requires a great deal of work on your part. The nature of the internet means you’re always leaving digital bread crumbs about how and where you’re communicating from. Anti-web types will use this as an excuse to harp on privacy issues, but when have we ever been able to communicate privately? Gossip has always been and always will, and what you say has always followed you, it just follows you in an amplified manner now. Social media allows you to broadcast gossip. If you were a gossip before, you’re a digitally enhanced gossip now. It’s never been more important to be the best person you are in public; there is a record now, and I’ve seen students constantly bitten by this as their Facebook updates land them in the VP’s office.

Trying to be someone else is exhausting!

The genuine self as an online presence offers an opportunity to meet others beyond your geographic situation that share your interests. You quickly find yourself a part of an online community that reflects your predilections and offers you a sense of collaborative discourse that might be missing in your workplace, or your immediate geography. If you’re genuine in expressing your interests, you’ll create a genuinely satisfying social media ecosystem. If you fabricate yourself, or limit yourself to specific identities (your teacher self comes to mind here), you won’t be exploring the actual usefulness of this new medium.

The other advantage of being genuine online is that you attract meaningful dialogue. If you’re one dimensional, you tend to attract n00bs, marketing interests and bots (who are also one dimensional). If you’re genuine and human in your presentation of self, you’ll attract a richer class of connection, one that offers powerful insights regardless of where you are in relation to each other on the planet. You’re harnessing the true potential of social media when you are multi-dimensional and human in your approach to it.

Developing a digital footprint is no longer about simply participating, or creating a cardboard cutout of your professional self, it’s about honestly expressing your own views in a genuine manner. The myriad of apps and means of communicating in a social network allow you to express yourself in simple (twitter), complex (blog) or focused interests (Google+, Facebook) ways. Knowing how to use the tools effectively is key.

If you’re fabricating a professional appearance, well, that’s just work, and doing it all summer, 24/7 is not going to do you any real good. Ultimately, you’re doing an awful lot of work and not exploring this new medium effectively, probably because you’re scared of it.

School Leadership 2.0

Several school administrators made comments in Doug’s blog about the need for restraint. In a leadership role, you’re not free to fly off the handle whenever you have an opinion. You always need to consider the working relationship you have to foster. Having said that, George’s comment about social media being a useful tool in fostering a team based on real knowledge of each other suggests that social media can be a means of allowing people who might not otherwise to know each other better.

The tendency has been for management (union, board, ministry, and any other ed-based management you can suggest) to shy away from social media. They fear the de-centralization of power, and see it as a threat to their dominance. It’s nice to know some administrators are fighting this tendency, but I’ve heard of many more who don’t hire the best candidates because their online presence creates unease, and in worst cases not considering hiring a teacher at all because they are familiar with the social web that most students spend their lives in. Why they think that hiring belligerent, intentionally irrelevant teachers is a good idea is beyond me.

What I love about social media is that it is democratizing information. No longer do we have to succumb to the broadcast media’s idea of what is true. Twitter told me about Bin Laden hours before broadcast media would, or could. As a social media-ist, I’m responsible for vetting my own information feed, and broadcasting my own truth. As both a leader, and a professional, this means not being a jackass, but being a meaningful social mediaist requires this from the get go. If you’re going to do social media well, being a gossip, spreading untruths, will eventually turn the crowd on you. Generating drama and controlling spin doesn’t work very well in a democratized information medium; the truth just bypasses you.

Social media is an opportunity to build a more ideal information medium, one without favoritism or fabrication, one that does not favor the status quo in order to maintain it; the crowdsourced truth is dangerously unmanageable… and free from spin.

As a member of that tribe I try not to let invective and one-up-man-ship dictate my actions, I try to be collaboratively engaging. This isn’t contrary to any professional or leadership role I may have; in fact, it should enhance those roles. When you broadcast your actions, it behooves you to it well.

CONCLUSION: THE REVOLUTION IS HAPPENING, REGARDLESS

The social media revolution has harnessed mobile electronics and the internet to produce a democratized media frenzy. Old-school, forth estate media is floundering, trying to manage their loss of broadcasting monopoly, but still seeing it as an immanent threat. Other power structures are also frustrated by this decentralization of voice. Where once a hierarchy could dictate the message, now social media swirls around these old-school broadcasting roadblocks.

Unions are watching members broadcast their opinions directly, without being able to dictate a unified response. Governments and corporations are finding that the dictatorial control they once had over traditional media is weakening, because traditional media matters less. As social media responses bypass traditional censorship, we once again see the many assert their power.

There is no doubt that these changes will force a fundamental shift in how we work with each other. This kind of radical, data driven transparency gives control freaks a nervous breakdown, but in the end, I can’t believe that freeing the signal from the self-involved interests of the powerful isn’t better for everyone; that it will result in fairer, transparent, more effective organizations.

As educators, we have to try and get a grip on this ourselves, and then be ready to try and (usefully) assist our students in effectively navigating this exciting, historical change. It’s no longer enough to pay some attention to what your digital footprint is. It’s no longer enough to do the minimum necessary. If we’re going to teach future generations how to survive in the rough sea of democratized data we’ve made for them, we need to adapt and master the waves ourselves.

A relevant educator is recognizing the radical nature of these changes and is doing their best to create a genuine online persona, one that accurately reflects the public persona they demonstrate in their physical life. What’s private isn’t at issue here, but our public selves are changing, and it doesn’t do anyone any good to try and game social media by making cardboard cutouts of themselves online.

Some things to consider:
Dancing in the Datasphere: a philosophical look at where we are going
The Singularity: an inside look at what Silicon Valley believes is coming

Don’t kid yourself, you’re living in the middle of a revolution!

Higher Ground

AMPA: redemocratizing OSSTF

I shouldn’t write about politics. As a field of human endeavor it demonstrates some of our most unflattering qualities, but AMPA approaches and I can’t pass up another opportunity to seek a higher standard of conduct from my union.

We were fooled once in District 18 by what might be described kindly as a disorganized vote, but what I fear was a Machiavellian attempt to withhold information in order to secure the desired ‘yes’ outcome. In seeking to redress this wrong we tried contacting Provincial Executive only to have our concerns fall on deaf ears. We attempted to make an AMPA resolution only to have it gutted.

Since then we’ve begun an OLRB complaint that is now moving into a review phase. Throughout this process OSSTF has lawyered up (a profoundly satisfying use of our dues), and has been completely unwilling to even talk about the obvious problems around the ratification of our contract. The fact that we had to go to the OLRB, and the fact that it’s gone this far is both sad and distressing. Wouldn’t it be nice if our union had internal oversight? Wouldn’t it be nice if our union actually addressed member’s concerns (and not by the people who caused the concerns in the first place).

It’s cold outside, but it’s warm in bed with the OLP

Many of the Provincial Executive who were the architects of our vote, people who tossed out our own constitutional codes of conduct either through sheer incompetence or malicious intent, are now running for positions at AMPA. When I read their advertising, how they claim to support the grass roots membership, how they stand for the highest ideals of OSSTF, I wonder when they had the change of heart. Was it after misleading and withholding information from D18 members prior to our constitutionally invalid vote? Was it after deciding to donate money to the Ontario Liberal Party even while encouraging members to demonstrate out front of the leadership convention? Was it after deciding to throw out what little political action we’d been able to muster around extracurriculars based on nothing whatsoever from the new Premier?

I desperately hope AMPA delegates remember these things when considering what direction our union should go from here. OSSTF is the membership. Apathy and an overly friendly relationship with this government have resulted in some embarrassing, un-OSSTF like behavior from the very people who are supposed to be the face of our organization. Here is hoping that AMPA restores some much needed credibility, transparency and humility to our union.

I’m a Hacker!

Every year we get grades 9s who waft into our high school believing they are god’s gift to computing. In the vast majority of cases I discover that they’ve learned how to do one or two things, but the moment you move them out of their area of ‘expertise’ (which is usually so small you couldn’t really call it an area so much as a corner), things fall apart.

We have such a genius in this year’s grade 9 cohort. When the class was given CyberPatriot‘s Unity OS security simulation to play, he didn’t know how to open a zipped file and get the game running. When I queried him about it, the conversation went something like this:

“You told me you’re this great hacker, but you can’t open a zipped archive?”

“Well, this isn’t what I usually do.”

“You told me you’re this great hockey player who can score goals from anywhere on the ice, but when I ask you to show me how you skate, stick handle and shoot you can’t do any of it, which makes me wonder what it is you think you’re good at.”

Taking a script that you found online and running it doesn’t make you a hacker, it makes you an idiot.

The student in question has proudly boasted of swatting people, which I’d describe less as hacking and more as criminal harassment that wastes limited emergency services. This clarifies the difference between a hacker and a criminal in simple terms anyone can understand. One is focused on complex skills development, the other is focused on finding shortcuts.

hacker noun

hack·er | \ ˈha-kər

1: one that hacks
2: a person who is inexperienced or unskilled at a particular activity; a tennis hacker
3: an expert at programming and solving problems with a computer
4: a person who illegally gains access to and sometimes tampers with information in a computer system

#2 comes very close to what this guy is in terms of being a hacker, though he’d be popular with actual criminals if he’s thick enough to run scripts that he doesn’t understand; he’d be the perfect trigger man. If we’re applying the term in computer studies, a hacker is generally someone who is expert at solving problems with a computer or getting into systems. In either case this skillset has traditionally required years of complex skills development including a challenging apprenticeship of trial and error learning on the wilds of the internet. Criminals seldom have the kind of patience and intelligence to develop these skills; it’s part of what makes them criminals.

Malware is being sold as a service: the
‘hackers’ running it are plain old criminals

What has happened recently is that cybercriminal activity has become professionalized. Many of the people doing the ‘hacking’ now have no idea what they’re doing (like this grade 9). They buy malware as a service software from professional criminal organizations (many of whom have ties to state cyber-warfare actors) and then run a dashboard that provides them with ready-made hacking tools that do the thinking for them. Some of these MaaS systems even provide IT support! No genuine hacker would ever want nor need IT support, they’d provide it themselves.

I’m currently re-reading Matt Crawford’s The World Beyond Your Head in which he makes a
strong philosophical argument for developing complex skills rooted in real world experience. Crawford goes to great length to describe how these hard-earned skills often develop a corresponding moral character in the majority of practitioners; reality is a consistent and demanding teacher and it demands rigour and focus.

I have students who have developed deep, complex digital skillsets in the course of our four year program and I would proudly acknowledge that they are hackers in the correct sense of the word, but what most would-be hackers are is really script kiddies who run other people’s code simply to perform malicious acts.

Script kiddies exist in the first place because we go out of our way not to teach digital literacy and cyberfluency in our schools. In the absence of any direction, some of the blunter tools wander into this kind of self-identification. Students have to take 8 years of geography and history in elementary and then have mandatory geography and history courses in high school too, but there are no mandatory digital fluency courses in any Ontario high school – even after we’ve forced everyone into a remote learning stance due to COVID. Many of the problems that have arisen during emergency remote learning are a result of the terrible digital skills many educators and students possess. Script kiddies are just another symptom of our digitally illiterate education system – a system that depends increasingly on digital tools and networked information to operate.

This grade 9 may well sort himself out and become a hacker in the real sense, though I find the most boastful ones tend not to have the wherewithal to develop complex skillsets such as those required by a genuine hacker.

At the CyberTitan nationals in 2018, one of our team members (then valedictorian then University of Waterloo Computer Science student), became intrigued with the idea of pentesting as a career. Penetration testing is something that has evolved quickly as networked cybersecurity best practices have evolved. The thinking is basically this: if you want to understand how best to respond to the rapid evolution of cyberattacks, have a skilled pentester come in and probe your network for weaknesses and then assist your defensive team in sealing up any gaps in your system. Now THAT is a hacker!

White hat hackers used to do this as a kindness, though most recently it has also become a bounty hunting situation, and now a lucrative profession. Top pentesters are in high demand and make good money. What they don’t do is download and run scripts they don’t understand and then not know how to perform even simple tasks on a computer – that would be a good way to lose any credibility with their employer.

I’m in the awkward position of seeing this happen in another class. Were it me, I’d be leaning on this student hard to see what it is they actually think they know. Being at arm’s length in this scenario, my biggest worry is that this student will use our technology to hurt someone else (I fear this has already happened). If we had a student come into the school who had been convicted of vehicular manslaughter, I doubt we’d put them in an automotive technology class, yet we don’t think twice about taking a potentially digitally dangerous student and dropping them into computer technology?

This is a tricky situation to navigate. I’m actually hoping this student has genuine potential and we can get him engaged with doing more than running scripts he has no understanding of. In learning the rigours of operating in cyberspace, he will also most probably become less of a braggart as he aligns himself with the reality of the situation.

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