onted – Page 5 – Mechanical Sympathy

The New Literacy

I recently became the head of Computer & Information Technology at my high school. To many this might cause confusion, not many schools appear to have a head of digital technology. When recently asked to join up with the other two heads of Comp/Info tech in our region I discovered that there aren’t any, I am the sole head of digi-tech in my area.

A day in the life of that rare creature: the head of info-tech

I was supposed to be meeting up with them to plan our upcoming PD day. Being the resourceful fellow I am, I started putting together ideas for the pd on prezi. In thinking it through, I want to go after three ideas: how we administer computer studies, how computer studies are presented in ministry curriculum (and the problems around that), and what the future of computer studies holds.

The general response I get from teachers around digital technology is that very few know anything about it, but they’re all expected to be comfortable with it. The other response is that the digital natives won’t learn anything from us because they already know everything.

The myth of the digital native is just that, a myth. Student digital fluency is pretty much the same as the general population, except they spend a lot more time doing the same, limited activities in digital space. The digital native is, in many cases, actually the digital serf.

After working my way through thinking about computer studies and how it’s taught in my school (and board), I want to try and change the way computer studies are delivered. The current state of curriculum is that of a still maturing discipline, hogtied to its past. In talking to other computer teachers, they find themselves (variously) under math or business headships as a sub-department. On top of that computer studies are divided into two sections: computer engineering (hardware) which falls within the tech department (along with carpentry and automotive repair amongst others), and computer science (programming), which tends to get swallowed by business or math.

It’s common for computer science teachers to have nothing whatsoever to do with computer engineering teachers. This makes it tricky to develop coordinated curriculum, share resources, plan field trips or even just advocate effectively to hire the vanishingly few qualified computer teachers there are out there.

As I mention in the prezi, this is the equivalent of us teaching music by having a course on maintaining, tuning, building and repairing musical instruments, and then having a completely different course on how to read and write music; theory separated from mechanics. In the case of music, an ancient discipline that has evolved over millenia, we recognize an obviously unified course of study. Computers do not have the benefit of these years of evolution. We need to start unifying these skills.

The division of the discipline results in crushingly small numbers in computer science. When I was in computer science in the 1980s, we ran six sections of senior computer science a year… on card readers! Last year my high school (roughly the same size as the one I attended back in the day), ran a single, mixed (academic/applied) section of computer science at the grade 12 level, and it wasn’t full. Did computers hit a high point in the 80’s and become a less relevant part of modern life? Why on Earth would we teach fewer people how they work now?

Computers are a part of everyday life in 2012. We have come to expect a level of competency in our population equivalent to the universality of literacy or numeracy, but we don’t teach to this need, and it is largely unmet. We are instead producing graduates who teach themselves bad habits on computers and then we fear their apparent familiarity; we wouldn’t dream of teaching literacy or numeracy like this.

A coherent push to unify computer studies would reduce staff technology fears, improve digital pedagogy, build digital fluency in both staff and students and actually prepare people for the digital world that is being built around them. Failure to do this is sending our students into the future without addressing an increasingly urgent and important skillset.

When Your Learning Space is a Loud Close Talker

Originally published Sunday, 21 April 2013 on Dusty World

Tools provided and time to practice the theory learned. Skills are expected to be demonstrated.

A couple of weekends ago I went to Conestoga College and took my motorcycle training course. Other than about an hour on a dirt bike a year ago I’d never ridden a motorbike, but it has been a lifelong dream to do it; I was pretty pumped. Learning to ride was a pedagogically charged process for me, going from near zero to basic competence in a single weekend.

This weekend I’m at the Ontario Google Summit. I’m an advanced digital technology user and I’m attending this conference to look at ways to manage technology and ease adoption for beginners. This isn’t a learning challenging situation for me, but I love the subject area (I teach it) and I’m a trained professional in information technology. I’m keen to see technology use improve in education.

I’m finding myself comparing the two learning experiences. Bike course and Google Summit are both expensive in terms of time and money: both demand your time on a weekend and neither are cheap: motorbike: $18.33/hr, Summit: $17.83.hr. This kind of time and money commitment suggests an intensive, impactful learning opportunity for motivated students. Unmotivated students wouldn’t spend the time and money to attend these things. With that as a foundation I couldn’t have had more different experiences at these two events.

At the motorbike course there were six expert instructors for 26 students for a better than 5 to 1 student/teacher ratio. They moved logistical mountains to provide working technology for all students: over thirty bikes tuned, fueled and ready to use every day along with safe space to use them and a fully equipped classroom with digital media to cover theory. Because a 1:1 student/technology ratio was guaranteed, the focus was all small group, intensive hands-on instruction with lots of one on one instructor feedback. This was vital because the bike course had a theory and practical (road) test at the end, both clearly defined and focused on throughout the course. If you were unable to demonstrate what you knew by Sunday afternoon you just spent over four hundred bucks without getting the license or insurance discount. Attendance was absolutely mandatory, you got dropped for not showing (one guy got dropped Sunday morning after showing up nearly two hours late). You had to bring your own safety kit but the most expensive technology (the bike) was provided, and it got used roughly and dropped by a number of students. You also had to provide your own food and drink and there was time time given to consuming it (we ate during in-class sessions). Intensive, focused and hands on with lots of expert help. A number of of people learned that they shouldn’t be riding motorcycles by the end of the weekend and left very disappointed, but safer for it.

At the end of the weekend you knew what you knew (or didn’t) and had demonstrated qualitative improvement (or hadn’t), resulting in the license and savings. On a more pedantic level, you were provided with the room you needed to learn. You had desk space in a large classroom for learning theory. You had acres of pavement outside for developing hands-on skills in a closely watched and personally assisted learning intensive process. It was a pedagogically credible, physically and mentally challenging process that made demands on you in order to see improvement. My taking the course will probably save my life at some point, as well as saving me money. I left that course having a very clear idea what I’d paid for and no question as to the value of it.

Lecture time! Sit and listen! The ‘educators’ are remarkably lazy about pedagogy. The technology doesn’t seem to be helping.

The Google conference is lecture driven (a necessity of the 100:1 student:teacher ratio). The keynotes have been excellent and the audience response very positive. I’ve greatly enjoyed the keynotes. It’s fallen apart for me in the ‘learning’ sessions though; I’ve been unable to attend the sessions I’ve wanted to because the venue (a high school they presumably got access to for nothing) has classrooms designed for thirty odd students. These rooms often had upwards of fifty people jammed into them, sitting on the floor, standing around the edges, all breathing on each other (yes, I have issues with that). I didn’t have the space I need to be comfortable let alone to learn. The provided internet is the best I’ve experienced at a tech-conference, so that’s in place, but the physical space, other than the auditorium I’ve been in all weekend, isn’t remotely up to the task of learning. As I consider the lecture based, knowledge (rather than experience) learning focus of this GAFE Summit, I’m left wondering why educators do this to each other, and how we hope to improve educational technology when we continue to teach it like a poorly designed academic class instead of a set of demonstrable hard skills.

What is it about professional development that has teachers punishing other teachers in order to learn? Ironically, we spent time talking about the Third Teacher and how the learning environment plays such a vital role in learning. We then demonstrate how not to do it in vivid detail with overcrowded rooms and people sitting on floors in order to desperately hear a bit of knowledge out of the mouth of a sage on a stage who are part of a company that wants to radically decentralize and democratize knowledge for everyone… or just squeeze education for some certification money.

There has been a lot of opportunity for learning at this conference for me. The back channels and keynotes have been very engaging. Oddly, the learning sessions haven’t been where learning has happened. Had this been the bike course, I would have spent that weekend sitting on the floor, jammed between other people, watching someone else riding a bike before I went and rode around on my own without any feed back; not the ideal way to learn is it? You’d think teachers would know better.

note: this is six months later, right after the ECOO13 conference (not a summit?) not to mention EdcampHamilton. My feelings about GAFE have only intensified. GAFE is a money grab, designed to funnel teachers into a branding process with Google. After speaking to others at ECOO I’m more than ever convinced that it is a teacher’s professional duty to not brand themselves and offer their students an unbiased access to any and all technology currently in use. Anything less is a limitation to students and irresponsible on the part of the technology educator.

emotional intelligence

How we remove life experiences from life

I’ve had a tough week. Whenever I thought about a parent dying, I figured I would rationalize my way through it. It turns out you can’t do that at all. The emotional journey I’ve been on has been as rich, complex and valuable as any rational mental exercise I’ve ever experienced, and it’s only just begun. Not having a rational solution has made me realize how much we’re driven to that single mode of thinking. No where is that more evident than in education.

Emotional intelligence is more than ignored, in fact, it’s actively discouraged in school. Curriculum and bureaucratic process do everything they can to take the personal, emotive elements out of education; the fact that we teach kids in factory-like rows demonstrates clearly the singular approach we take to learning. Emotionality is an embarrassment when it happens; it certainly isn’t a a form of human knowing we develop and nurture in modern education. In fact, about the only time we do acknowledge emotional intelligence is when students don’t demonstrate it, then we tend to suspend them.

I went in to school last week for a day in between trying to sort out cremations, services and Byzantine government requirements, not to mention storms of crying, because a senior academic class of mine where contacting me directly asking for clarification on year end assignments. Empathy wasn’t something that could (or should) have been expected. If students aren’t expected to develop it in school, we shouldn’t be surprised if they don’t display it.

The class I was most worried about, a primarily applied level media arts class, were fantastic. They responded to my request for them to get their work done on their own and were empathetic to my situation. Their response seemed genuine and we all felt better for the talk. The academic classes sent condolences, but weren’t, for the most part, willing to help me by helping themselves. The game they’ve learned to play so well is between them and the system, and their teacher is just the delivery man who should be delivering, regardless of what might be happening to him.

If we defined learning effectiveness in terms of emotional intelligence, I wonder what schools would look like. I suspect a number of teachers wouldn’t be teaching. I suspect a number of teachers who found themselves in trouble for being too passionate in school wouldn’t be suspended for it. I suspect a number of academically proficient students would find themselves disadvantaged. I suspect student engagement wouldn’t be a problem.

Unions are terrified of emotive responses in teachers, and actively discourage them because students aren’t the only ones to lack a developed emotional intelligence. We’re developing a society that is emotionally bankrupt while entirely focusing on rationality. We want students to engage, but be impartial with the process, then we complain when they don’t seem to care enough. We want learning to happen, but we don’t want to let it be messy. We want rational control over emotional engagement.

Boards come at it from the other side, driven by lawyers to reduce lawsuit visibility with their employees. The whole affair is sat upon by societal expectations that press teachers to hold to professional standards (code for do everything at a distance) in all aspects of their lives, whether at work or not. And ultimately to uphold that pinnacle of modern thought: rationalism. If it can’t be measured or calculated, it has no real value, and is dangerous. Modern society won’t create any Picasos or van Goghs or Shakespeares, we’re too busy building data and temples to it, like Google and Facebook.

The whole thing leaves me feeling like, as a teacher or even just a human being, I’m left unable to express my grief, or even expect basic levels of dignity when I try to take time away to deal with my loss. Between the needs of my students, some of those same students yelling at me while I sit grieving in my backyard trying to write a very difficult eulogy on a Friday night, and the calculations of grief in my absences, I feel exhausted by my professional obligations. I can’t even respond as a person when rudely interrupted.

All sides go on and on about the power differential, about how you as a teacher have all the power. I don’t see it. I’m a minor paper pusher in a massive bureaucracy that seems intent on minimizing any professional latitude I once had, and diminishing any opportunity for emotional development with students in order to ensure a clinical and generalized success. Students are distanced from their learning, I can’t blame them for treating me like a thing, they are encouraged to see me as such.

Education has, like everything else, passed through industrialization and been changed into a Tayloresque production line. What used to be a master/apprentice form of learning that was intensely personal and developed over years has turned into a bureaucratically driven production line focused on getting as many people through it in as antiseptic a manner as possible.

Every one of us will face death in our lives, yet everyone seems profoundly uncomfortable with it… like a room of children being expected to figure out calculus. Shouldn’t education be a key part of learning empathy? And anger? And grief? And then learning how to best express it? Emotion ignored doesn’t disappear.

Emergency Memo: Post Peak, Nov 2014

GRAND RIVER DSB – EMERGENCY MEMO – Mon, Nov 3rd, 2014

NOTE: This memo is being sent to all staff within the board. Following the upheaval and violence over the summer, and the Federal Government applying the War Measures act on a national scale in August, the combined RCMP/Police/Military presence has restored some order. Fuel is being rationed by the Federal Government and the Provincial Government are being asked to enact emergency measures to normalize the situation and reduce chances of mass starvation and freezing as winter approaches. One of the key aspects of the plan is to normalize and enable basic rights, including the right to education. What follows is GRDSB’s plan…

The sudden, sharp rise in fossil fuel prices (here for information) have forced our board to make some dramatic policy revisions in order to match the new emergency management plan recently presented by the Ministry of Education, Province of Ontario.

A typical school bus run now costs approximately $550 in fuel costs alone, and is expected to become even more expensive, making this option economically untenable. With the various unions, we have tried to maintain the collegial relationship of previous collective bargaining agreements while working to create a sustainable public education system in our province. These changes are brought on by world-wide resource issues beyond our control, and we have to modify our approach to education in order to continue maintaining a sufficient level of service. The followings steps will ensure this:

TEACHERS

1) Teachers are still required to attend the nearest school to them, preferably without the use of petrochemicals. Those schools with a sufficient number of local teachers will remain open while being retrofitted with sustainable energy devices. In many cases, if you can see a wind turbine or mini-hydro project being built near you, this will indicate a public school.

Note: This is a provincial and federally mandated program in order to ensure ‘energy islands’ in as many communities as possible. The lack of fossil fuels makes mega-infrastructure such as non-localized power generation unsustainable. All communities will now be responsible for generating their own power.

2) If you live out of the board area, it is suggested that you consider relocation, or contact your local board for employment opportunities. We will do everything we can with neighboring boards to ensure that teachers are able to make this transition. If you do neither, and you are no longer able to able to fulfill your contract, you will be declared surplus and released.

3) If there is no local school within walking distance of your home location you may:

a) Apply to the provincial online learning initiative. With this initiative any household with children under the age of 18 may receive free wireless high speed internet, meaning many students will take this opportunity to learn online. As an eteacher you would also qualify for sponsored high speed internet at home. You would then resume your duties by teaching remotely.

Please click HERE to contact the board elearning conversion initiative for remote students and staff.

b) Apply through our board for a provincial grant to open a learning centre. If you own or have access to a building that would provide a suitable environment for a micro-school, and there are enough local students you can consolidate your area students into this structure and initiate your own k-10 program. Since all schools are now k-10 schools, you would be in a very similar teaching environment to your colleagues. LCs will be developed where-ever a 10-1 student-teacher ratio can form.

Please click HERE to contact the board provincial liaison for learning centre creation.

4) Curriculum has been revised and the law altered to reflect our new circumstances. The old standardized tests have been removed and in their place the New Ontario Diploma now exists. This diploma follows previous standards, but offers students earlier departure (students may now graduate between 15-16 years of age) while ensuring that fundamental skills are still evident. The NOD review is highlighted on the updated Ministry curriculum page. It is a two week series of literacy, numeracy, citizenship and general knowledge assessments designed to ensure that a graduating student has sufficient skills to survive in the new, post-peak-oil economy.

Please click HERE to see the NOD initiative and the new requirements for graduation.

STUDENTS

Ontario curriculum will now be revised and the law changed to reflect our new reality. Students are legally required to be in a virtual or physical personal learning plan until the age of 16. During their 15th or 16th year, students may take the Literacy & Numeracy Review. A mark of 70% or higher in both of these reviews will grant them a NOD (New Ontario Diploma). NOD now takes the place of the OSSD.

Students who fail the NOD at the end of their 16th year are assessed and presented with a Sub-NOD rating. SNOD60 would indicate a student at 60% NOD requirements. SNOD30 would indicate a student at 30% of NOD requirements.

Young adults who have finished school at 16 may choose to return, but like ANOD students, they will be required to support their learning financially.

Following passage of the NOD, students may choose to:

1) WORK: the reduction in mechanization has put a premium on physical labour, and graduates will have no trouble making a living wage in the new economy. Jobs in agricultural and infrastructure labour are not only available but in great demand. One of the key reasons for reducing the graduation age was to fulfill this need. We can no longer afford to hold willing workers in public institutions until they are 18.

2) APPRENTICESHIP: the skilled trades have made agreements with the Ministry of Education and post secondary institutions in order to encourage and maintain high skill positions. Students may choose, after completing their NODs in their 15th or 16th years to begin an apprenticeship in any one of dozens of trades. These apprenticeships often involve moving away from home. The Ministry will continue to track and support these students until they reach journeyman status (usually in their 5th year of apprenticeship). Regular reviews will ensure students are in productive, safe, learning and working environments.

3) ANODs: students interested in pursuing academic streams may choose to complete their Advanced New Ontario Diplomas. These courses are designed to be completed by a capable student within one year. As a result, funding is only available for the 12 months following successful NOD graduation. Students taking longer will have to fund their own studies, including the costs of energy and school access.

Graduates with ANODs will be able to apply to one of the four remaining universities in the province. Entry into these institutions is very competitive. Only students who complete ANODs on time (or early) with exceptional grades should apply. Courses in post-secondary now tend to be much more applied in nature. Universities are intent on turning out doctors, engineers and teachers rather than unused undergraduate degrees. Students who do not know their major, will find access to university very limited. Students who do not have a working plan for their academic studies will also find post secondary access challenging.

The new streams are designed around an expected distribution of 60% NOD to the workplace, 30% apprenticeship and 10% ANOD graduates. The manual nature of post-oil food production and distribution alone requires this kind demographic.

SUMMARY

The Federal and Provincial mandates recognize that the era of cheap energy is over, and our society needs to adapt in order to maintain and improve our technical skills and preserve the rights found in the Constitution. Public structures such as law and education can ensure that human rights are not being violated and children still have an opportunity to become educated, effective members of our brave new world.

Children and the poor are at risk of being tyrannized as their value as manual labour has increased and the petro-chemical basis of pre-peak social justice is broken. Without a presence in every community, the weakest members of society are at risk of abuse. With this in mind, it is vital that our public education system reassert itself with the support of regionalized arms of the provincial and federal governments.

By normalizing schools and supporting local sheriffs, we hope to rebuild a safe and fair society. Drastic times call for drastic measures. Please consider being part of the solution, it’s time to let go of the past.

Stay warm as the weather is getting cold and ensure that your lodgings are able to withstand a non-chemically heated winter.

Best of luck,

Your Superintendent.

GRDSB

ps: as further information becomes available, and the board network comes back up under its own power, I will continue to email the latest.

Everyone Deserves Respect

Bullies are cruel, but demanding respect
from everyone is the worst kind of bullying

According to our newly created mission statement we’re supposed to be producing students who are respectful. I was advocating for responsible but respect got the nod.

Respectful students serve order. Their docility allows a system to exist beyond reproach. If students are respectful they obey authority without questioning it. Respectful students are easy to manage. Any adult in the building doesn’t have to be respectable, they are automatically entitled to it. It’s a good way to ensure that students do what they’re told while the system can do what it likes.

Misuse of respect doesn’t end in organizations, it has also crept out into society as a whole. We’re all supposed to give it to everyone all the time, but you earn respect don’t you? I’ve been told, and it’s printed on the wall of the school to be seen every time I walk in the door, that everyone deserves respect. I find this not only untrue but pathologically wrong headed.

The temptation is to go straight to serial killers and death camp commandants in proving that not everyone deserves respect, but respect isn’t easy to earn even for the mediocre. Anyone who respects mediocrity is probably simple minded, or so desperate to not offend anyone that they appear simple minded. The motivation behind respecting everyone is to not offend anyone, but in the process of putting everyone up on a pedestal, individual effort and excellence is rendered meaningless.

There is a confusion of language around the word respect. People use it to mean being civil or polite, but that isn’t what being respectful means. Being respectful arises from you holding something in high regard. Using respect as a demand instead of a recognition of excellence is manipulative, usually done by an organization that doesn’t want to be held accountable.

Respecting a person comes from you holding their thoughts and actions in high esteem. It doesn’t come from valuing everything they do because they do it Blind fandom or faith is dangerous. Any organization that enshrines respect as a demand should do some soul searching. I can respect a system that strives for respectability. I can’t respect a system that demands it… it’s disrespectful!

The idea that everyone’s opinion matters is at the root of the
vapid everyone deserves respect belief.

People toss around statements like ‘respect your elders’, perhaps this is where schools get the idea to enshrine it in their mission statements. Respecting someone because they are old strikes me as quite irrational. The eighty year old draft dodger who ran away is hardly as respectable as the twenty year old who did his duty. One of the first realizations I had as an adult was that age is a poor indicator of respectability. We demand it in children to make them manageable, but that kind of ageism is little different than racism. We should value people based upon their thoughts and deeds, not on their social status.

Everyone deserves to be treated civilly. Everyone deserves compassion, but everyone does not deserve respect. We like to enshrine it in school language in order to subjugate children into an unquestioning relationship with authority, but that isn’t particularly flattering. Teachers do not deserve respect. They deserve to be treated civilly, and compassionately, but they don’t deserve respect, no one does. I would hope that they earn it with their students, but many don’t, and then issues of classroom management arise. We might try to stamp out the individual assessment of respect, but it’s always there between people regardless of their age or job.

Respect plays an important role in how human beings interact with each other. We should all strive to be respectable and earn the admiration of our fellows, but making respect an expectation belittles us all and encourages, at best, mediocrity. When everyone is automatically assigned respect individual effort becomes pointless.

We should be aiming for more than misdirection and ease of control as educators. We should be encouraging individual excellence in our students, not hammering them all down with false demands of universal respect.

Decentralizing 20th Century School IT Infrastructure

From the Prezi brainstorming digital sandbox: http://prezi.com/h7ms3hw7jx7-/mini-lab/

30:1 student to computer ratios? It’s too expensive to have a 1:1 student to computer ratio?

This is a load of nonsense. While the business world has moved on to individualized computing devices and cloud based software solutions, school boards still doggedly hang on to 20th Century thinking about centralized IT with massive, complex software images, difficult to manage intranetworks and remote maintenance of shared machines.

I’ve been on the ground, at class-level watching this fail again and again. Equipment is vandalized and left inoperable for weeks at a time because no one local bears any responsibility for it. Technicians are stretched thin between many schools, often not returning for weeks on end. The already dismal student access to technology becomes even worse.

Labs that contain over-priced, years old hardware are kept under contracted repair long after they have given up every ounce of their residual value and are little more than landfill (and a heavy weight on network efficiency). Those same labs contain the same, tedious software on the same, tedious hardware; a monotony of labs that offer nothing of the variety and opportunity available in the world beyond school.

The networks are overburdened with file sharing intranets that grind to a halt when many users begin to copy large files to network servers, or overfill limited on-site storage, causing the whole thing to simply stop. So much focus is placed on intranet software and file sharing that access to the internet itself is through a tiny bit of bandwidth, making access to the largest collection of human knowledge ever assembled jerky, slow or utterly useless.

A modern business office uses task specific equipment to enable users continuous access to their data and their colleagues. Phones are used when appropriate, but phones are never appropriate in school. Tablets and ultralight laptops serve the mobile employee, allowing them to input information and communicate as though they are in the office when thousands of miles away.

Technology in education studiously ignores the needs of the student who must travel from home to school and class to class, carrying bags of massive, out of date textbooks. Student to student communication is discouraged in most learning situations in favour of discipline and order. If students do communicate in school (and I assure you, they do), they have to do it in underhanded, devious ways that violate whatever the latest technology-banishing rules dictate.

Information Technology in school is anything but. Perhaps Lack of Information Technology would be a better title.

The mini-lab idea returns technical literacy to teachers from the star chamber of board based IT. It places local people in charge of local equipment and drastically reduces the costs of educational technology while dramatically boosting the student to digital tool ratio. Instead of the monotony of labs of out of date, inefficient, over-priced desktops, staff and students would gain access to an eclectic mix of digital tools and begin to develop meaningful digital fluency in both hardware familiarity and data management. It’s a first, small step in a diaspora away from centralized board IT and toward differentiated technology access that truly serves our teacher’s and student’s needs in the evolving datasphere.

Marketing Education / Marketing Your Subject

Advertising for publicly funded education.

The other week I was sitting in a local movie theatre before the latest round of The Hobbit when an advertisement came on for our local Catholic board. It strikes me as odd that they allot money for advertising, but I guess that’s what you have to do in a publicly funded system that competes against itself.

The idea that we have to market our educational choices might seem mercantile to academics, but it’s not always a bad idea.

The poor appearance of our departments on our school webpage came up at a recent heads meeting which tailed into a big discussion about how we lose a number of students in grade 9 to our (marketing focused) catholic competitors. Evidently most are back by the senior grades because spending ten hours a week on a bus for what turns out to be a better advertised, if not necessarily better education, doesn’t add up. Our poor showing in marketing our public school for local consumption raised questions of what we should be focusing on, advertising, or, you know, education.

I might not understand the benefits of funding two redundant public systems that then pay to advertise against each other, but the need to market your subject area in a high school is vital for a successful program. If we don’t get students signing up, we don’t get sections, so any teacher, especially one in a non-mandatory subject area, should probably spend some time ensuring that students know they are out there.

***

Tonight is grade 8 parent’s night. We have a large group of excited, nervous parents and students touring the school. Each department is expected to set up a booth and ply their wares, encouraging next year’s new grade 9s into taking what they teach. I’ve been spending the semester beating the bushes to put computer studies in its best light. You’d think that computer studies would be an easy sell in 2014, but not so much in rural Ontario.

I used to treat grade 8 night as just another time grab, but it’s silly to ignore marketing your subject area, especially if it can help you get sections and run a more complete program. In the case of computer studies I’m straddling the need for school-wide fundamental computer literacy as well as offering specialized courses that will prepare students for post secondary and beyond in programming and engineering. I’m beginning to think Ontario should split its focus on computer studies and offer general technology fluency as well as specializations.

As many of the celebs mention below, a working knowledge of computers is vital to life in the 21st Century, whether you’re looking to be a career computer nerd or not.

Grade 8 night was a successful evening. With robots, quad-copters and other technology on hand, I put the department on the map. With any luck we’ll get an uptick in computer studies sign ups next year and be able to run a more complete program as a result. You’d think a healthy computer department in any high school in 2014 is addressing an important 21st Century fluency, but if students and parents aren’t aware, they won’t sign up.

Here are some of the pieces I put together (thanks to code.org for the quotes):

Taken from the code.org quotes & Will.I.Am’s webpage

Everyone should know the basics of a technology if they are going to live submersed in it every day.

Just one of the smartest guys in the world, feel free to ignore the opinion.

I did a number of posters for the department.

Extra-curriculars are a good way to support student interest in your subject.

Even if you’re not headed for a career in computers, they are
becoming a vital soft skill. If you work anywhere and can
provide your own tech-support, or can problem solve even
basic coding, you have made yourself vital to the 21st Century
workplace. Computer studies: not just for nerds any more!

Paper is so 20th Century

@banana29 is currently taking her Master’s degree. We’re already 500 sheets of paper and a lot of toner and electricity into printouts. All of that paper immediately becomes less accessible once she’s read it and made notes on it; it disappears into a stack of unsearchable ideas. Obviously not ideal for keeping your ideas accessible and developing them. Paper is so 20th Century.

The master’s course is online, but the text book isn’t available electronically. Does this strike you as inconsistent? Why would this university make a course available online and then not offer the text digitally? Money!

I’d love to move her to a digital format, where her content creation and her content consumption is entirely electronic, but text book publishers won’t release their content digitally because they can only respect the money they’ve put into paper publication and refuse to see the digital wave happening all around them. Very similar to what music companies did a decade ago, and we all know how that turned out. Burying their heads in sand is exactly what they shouldn’t do, but it’s what they are doing.

The other side of the problem is a good educationally friendly digital window. Ipads are nice, but they aren’t designed to show text books in their original format. With low resolution and limited screen real estate, ipads work very well as quick digital windows, but long term content contact means lots of page turning through a small 1024×768 window.

I had high hopes for the Kno tablet, but it’s been cancelled…

http://youtu.be/uL-2Egqc1qc : Kno tablet awesomeness that never will be.

Is the idea of an educationally focused computer/tablet that mimics text book layout and offers generous screen real estate dead? Can we get by with an Apple monopoly? It looks like we have little choice. Microsoft has cancelled its Courier 2 screen tablet as well. For the foreseeable future, 1024×768 is the only window you’re going to get into ereading.

Kno is now an ebook presentation software for ipad (ipad dominance destroys potential improvements in hardware before they can even appear). This isn’t an entire loss, a piece of software that lets students organize and access their texts on a single device is great, but I think I’d prefer something web based, so I can get at my content anywhere on anything.

The fact that they are trying to force the paper based text industry into providing etexts is also invaluable. They are forcing the change that is coming anyway. Until we can pry text content control from an industry solely focused on paper based money streams, the option to adopt an etext is very limited.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/tags/kno/:

“What a student needs, according to Kno’s research, is something that faithfully reproduces a full-size textbook, without compromise. In contrast, the attempt to cram a textbook onto a smaller screen is a primary reason that previous trials with replacing textbooks with e-readers such as the Kindle DX were abject failures.“

I love the idea of a dual screen tablet that folds like a book. The screens are protected while in a bag, it can be opened into a 2 screen or 1 screen layout (by flipping it over) and one screen could be used as a full(er) sized keyboard, the benefits of a short interface ipad like device or a longer term dual screen interaction with content (that doesn’t require all books to be reformatted).

I also love the idea of a transformable tablet, so here is my wishlist for that ideal education tablet:

a tablet that can be purchased like Lego pieces: one screen, two screen, three screen, keyboard, whatever: you can keep joining them together and configuring depending on what you need
the ipad2 has nice dimensions, but a huge bezel! And the resolution is too low.
Keep the dimensions for length and width but lets aim for 5mm thick (so 2 folded together are only slightly thicker than a current ipad), and 500g (so 2 folded together still only weigh about a pound and a half)
instead of a 9.7 inch display, an 11.8 incher would all but eliminate the MASSIVE BEZEL, making for an almost seamless dual (or more) display.
1400×1050 resolution on that bigger screen
when you link multiple screens the systems work in sync to offer you a multicore, networked machine, more screens equals better performance
yeah, it should run FLASH, and HTML5, and offer an open source, community driven OS (so I guess Apple and M$ are out)

ipad3? Not without Jobsian control. Asus, are you into this? Google? You could partner up for the OS, Honeycomb is awesome! I’d ask Blackberry but they’d take 3 years to get it finished.

In the meantime, reams of paper get printed and paper text books get delivered. Living in a hybrid time period kinda stinks. Twentieth Century, will you end already?

Biological Education & Hot Groups

I’ve been to two Minds On Media events, at ECOO in October and the OELC Conference this past February. Both times I’ve been surprised by the response from teachers regardless of their technical prowess. Tech skills weren’t the arbitrating force, curiosity was. The people who were involved in it found themselves working in their ZPD, and felt supercharged by the experience. So much of schooling involves crowd control rather than trying to get students into that zone of proximal development. So much teaching revolves around control, rather than encouraging self directed learning.

When I first attended MoM, the event reminded me of a gardener creating fertile ground, but having the sense not to micromanage the growing/learning. I suspect there is a truth in this that applies to all education. Whether you want to call it student centred or skills based or what have you, education isn’t a mechanical/mathematical process, it’s a biological one. Events like Minds On Media recognize this by empowering the learners (and the instructors) and giving them the freedom to move within a rich learning environment to where they think they need to be.

Most of the PD I experience exists in a mechanical process that alienates teachers and makes them resentful. This approach is used because administration is more concerned with a disciplined environment (that crowd control mentioned above) that ensures full participation even if it is entirely passive, than it is with presenting memorable content. When the learning takes a back seat to crowd control, you know the results aren’t going to be pretty. In fact, they’re going to look at lot like…

The other thing that’s been bouncing around in my head is the idea of hot groups. I know many educators shy away from business approaches, calling them corporate and such, but this one is anything but corporate. Hot Groups recognize a fundamental truth about how people work together. In a hot group members will do work well beyond what is expected or required, simply for the joy of having it received as valuable within the group. In my own case, I recently did a hot group thing for our little cloud working group, I made a group logo and people dug it. It’s an insider thing, only a few will appreciate it, but it builds team and even surprised me with a level of commitment (the fact that everyone wanted a t-shirt was what gave me the biggest buzz about it).

I’ve seen this happen time and again with students. As I type this I have my grade 12s putting together a network of computers using many different OSes. Some of them haven’t done it before, others have, but are unfamiliar with the OSes I’ve provided them with (Red Hat Linux Server, Ubuntu Server, Windows Home Server, Ubuntu Desktop, Win7, XP and Vista). Listening to them talk, they are telling anecdotal stories of failed OS installs, upgrades that led to game failures due to compatibility issues and all sorts of other OS related experiences, all while working through multiple installs. This may look disorganized and inefficient, I’d argue that it’s the opposite. Those students are creating context that I would not have imagined trying in a top down lesson on OS installs, and they’re doing it while creating a sense of group coherence (made even more amazing when you realize that three of the ten of them in there are usually sequestered away in the autism learning class). Those guys came out of there, having installed half a dozen OSes during the period, and they’d also made this (a classic example of a hot group surprise – they were very keen to give me a copy when the class ended).

If you think that has nothing to do with what they were supposed to be doing, you’re determined to force human relationships, and the learning the goes on within them into a linear, mechanical process. Those guys did many things that period that I hadn’t intended, as well as most of the things I had. On aggregate, I’d suggest that they weren’t limited by their teacher’s knowledge of them, their own risk aversion to failure (installing unknown OSes), or a need to overly control the learning. The result is a non-judgmental, rich learning environment that encouraged creativity and constructive peer support. The team building that happened in there today will be something I can continue to develop for the rest of the semester.

If I can create that environment, I do. If a hot group grows out of it, I’m over the moon. You’ll seldom experience a better teacher rush than the one you do when a hot group wows you with what you weren’t expecting.

Blended Learning and Relevant Classrooms

I’m feeling the synchronicity of two educational situations at the moment. I’m presenting this on Monday next at our Board’s learning fair, and I just went in for an interview for a curriculum leader position in technology/elearning.

The topic of the learning fair is ‘student engagement’ but I think this is the answer to the wrong question. Engagement implies trying to tailor your teaching to make it palatable for students. Engagement is what you get when you look at the bigger picture and become relevant, it isn’t a goal in itself.

I was asked today in the interview what the future is for blended learning. In this case, blended learning implies a hybrid of elearning/in-class learning and technology. I don’t think there is a future in it, I believe it is the future, at least if we want to get an increasingly irrelevant (due to the pace of change) school system to recognize the scope of the changes happening in the world around us, and make a meaningful attempt to prepare our students for the deluge ahead.

Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google had a rather profound quote, I use it in the prezi:

“Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003. I spend most of my time assuming the world is not ready for the technology revolution that will be happening to them soon,”

If the world isn’t ready, education is even less so.

In the interview I described students’ out-of-school life as a torrent of data, like standing under Niagara Falls; it’s a stimulating, multi-directional, multi-disciplinary stream of information on many topics delivered in many different formats in rapid succession. We then get them into a class room and dribble information at them, out of a teacher’s mouth, out of a text book, all of it stale, uni-directional and non-interactive; then we wonder how to engage them.

In the meantime I’m seeing students mismanage and drop information and connections they should be making because they can’t manage the information being streamed at them. They don’t know how to make most effective use of their technology, often using smart phones in the dumbest possible ways. They don’t know how to effectively vet and prioritize data and find ways to make useful, actionable connections from it.

We certainly don’t teach effective data management and analysis in our in-class information dribble of chalk boards, rows of desks and one-person-speak-at-a-time last century classes.

Blended learning, where teachers make use of the sea of data swirling around us and teach students to swim, not sink is the first step towards a relevant education system that actually prepares students for what they are likely to face. But preparing them for the data storm requires that we use the technology being developed to manage it, and the friction is great from a conservative educational standpoint.

When I was a kid, I was big into Astronomy. I memorized the nine planets, and even the big moons. Since August 2011, we’ve discovered almost 600 planets (even including Pluto’s demotion) and average about twelve new discoveries a week. The whole time I was growing up, there were only nine planets, we’re on the verge of discovering multitudes. Astronomy is just one of EVERY FIELD OF STUDY that is facing this data onslaught.

Information isn’t the limited, simple, permanent, sacred collection of knowledge it was once perceived to be. We have to stop teaching to the book and start teaching to the evolving datasphere.