Author: Tim

Recently, my son was undergoing his IPRC process to enter high school and I’m suddenly privy to how parents experience this aspect of the public education system.  The parties at this meeting seemed to genuinely have my son’s best interests at heart, but there are unseen forces in the education system more interested in saving money than promoting pedagogy.


One such area is technology support for IEPed students.  The goal here is to provide digital tools that allow students with special needs to keep up with their class work.  In many cases this can mean something like a Chromebook, which is essentially a web browsing laptop.  I’m not a fan of Chromebooks, they are a corporate means of collecting users into a closed ecosystem.  The intent of Chromebooks is to pass any online experience through Google’s corporate lens (Chrome) and to keep people within that singular view in order to benefit what is very much a for-profit business.  

Google struggles to treat education and students in particular as anything other than a commodity because people’s internet attention is why Google is one of the richest companies in the world.  Google is very aggressive about maintaining its monopoly which is why I’m reticent about things like GAFE, evangelizing groups like Google Certified Teachers and the Chromebooks.


Google is a powerful tool, no doubt, but if it’s the only way you ever interact with digital technology then you aren’t particularly digitally fluent, any more than you could call yourself truly literate and knowledgeable if you only ever read one publisher’s books.


The default response from the school board when we began talking about replacing my son’s very old (he takes good care of it) laptop was to give him a Chromebook.  Since we only pay lip service to developing digital fluency in Ontario and graduate a large majority of digital illiterates, this seems like a cheap and easy way to hand out tech, but in this case it is a kid who is already digitally skilled and who intends to make computer technology his life’s work.  He is already competing in robotics competitions and building computers.  The courses he has signed up for in high school focus on digital engineering.  Giving him a Chromebook is like giving a carpenter a toy hammer and expecting them to frame a house.  It’s neither individually appropriate nor particularly useful.

I have been pushing to get him the tools that he needs to pursue his interests, but I’m speaking for the trees here as well as for my own son.  I teach computer technology and have a high preponderance of ASD students who have a great interest in and a neuro-atypical approach to technology that allows them to tackle it in interesting, unique but usually never time efficient ways.  Handing any of those students a Chromebook is like giving a mechanic a twelve millimeter wrench and then telling them to disassemble an engine with it, in an hour.


When he is learning electronics next year in grade 9, he’ll need to install Arduino on his computer and then use it to code circuits.  It’s free on a ‘proper’ computer running Windows, Linux or OSx, but Arduino can only be done on a Chromebook with a monthly fee (not covered by the school board).   If he wants to run RobotC for his robotics classes, he can’t do it on a Chromebook.   If he wants to run 3d modelling software?  Code in the IDE of his choice?  Run the plasma cutter software?  Sorry, none of those happen on a web browser.  If all we’re aiming to do is teach kids how to browse the internet like the consumers we want them to be and through a single, corporate lens, then we’re doing a great job pitching Chromebooks at them.



A Chromebook isn’t cheaper than a basic Windows laptop.  It is only a browser whereas the Windows PC can install a massive ecosystem of programs for a wide variety of purposes.  The only advantage is that the Chromebook is easier to manage.  Because you can’t install anything that isn’t a simplistic Chrome extension on it, you have less headaches with software conflicts; it does less, is easier to manage and does a great job of performing it’s primary function:  feeding the Google data mining machine with much needed fuel.  Pedagogy designed to expand digital fluency in our students isn’t the reason why Chromebooks are now ubiquitous.  Management of educational technology is easier if you drink the koolaid and get on the magic Google bus where you don’t have to worry about all that messy digital diversity and the complications of actually teaching students (and teachers) how technology works.  Google (and Apple, and Microsoft) are happy to usher your classroom in to a closed system for your own ease of you, learning how technology works be damned.

In discussing this issue with the school board I was told that my son doesn’t need a full laptop because the specialty classes that require that software will supply it in class.  His IEP specifies that he be given extra time to complete work, but that is impossible if the technology needed to do his class work is only available in a particular classroom.  How does that help him finish his work after school, or on a weekend?  It doesn’t help him if he is trying to do work during his GLE support period either because other students are using the in-class equipment while he is elsewhere.  There is no guaranty that the technology would be available at lunch or before or after school either, so the ‘what he needs will be in the classroom’ answer seems to be intentionally ignoring the extra time his IEP clearly states he needs.


Differentiation of assistive technology with an eye on customizing it to specific student needs is exactly what the IEP (INDIVIDUAL education plan) is supposed to be doing.  If we were going to begin to take digital fluency seriously, assistive digital technology that encourages a diverse digital ecosystem and renders a wider understanding of how technology works would be a great place to start, especially with digitally interested students.  


A Chromebook should be the last thing suggested.  This, or course, begs the question:  if Chromebooks aren’t any cheaper and don’t improve digital fluency, why are we using them at all?  Well, it makes our monopolistic corporate overlord, um, partner, happy while not being any cheaper and doing less, but it sure is easier to manage.  


Whoever this is a win for, it isn’t providing my son with the technology he needs to succeed.  It also puts pedagogy of promoting an understanding of the technology we’ve made an intrinsic part of our classrooms on the back foot.  As near as I can tell, other than feeding a corporate partnership and rolling out something so simple it can’t really break (or do much), there is little to recommend the Chromebook, especially as an assistive device for a student who will need things it can’t do in his classes next year.

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Like many social trends, hacking came into education late. Decades after the concept reached world wide understanding in technology, education took it up as a great leap forward and a way to catch up with the times, except everyone else has moved on, again.  WIRED recently published an article that demonstrates technology’s evolving relationship with the hacker ethos.  In questioning the value of hacking as a moral and useful way of thinking, this article raises some interesting questions about the many teachers who want to hack the classroom, or teach children the magic of hacking.

Honesty, ethics and scientific method?  Surely it’s much better to be a cool hacker in a classroom, right?

If, as Joi Ito suggests in that article, “the hacker archetype had found its highest articulation in one Donald Trump”, then perhaps it’s time for educators to rethink their hacking fandom.  At its roots hacking is an act of hubris designed to beat a system at all costs.  It is driven by pride and arrogance and the results always justify the means.  A successful hack is a forced, rushed, short-term result that only has value to its user.  Hackers don’t build things, they break things, twisting the intentions of designers and diverting shared resources for their own needs; hacking is an inherently self serving and destructive act.

…but I can hack a fix that will save us in this moment but will take weeks afterwards to undo or everything will fall apart – hacks have nothing to do with sustainable engineering.

In certain circumstances (say, Scotty on the Enterprise jury-rigging together some dilithium crystals to make the warp drive work and save everyone’s lives), a hack might be just what you need, but to base your personal knowledge on hacks, or worse, teach it to many people as curriculum, is madness.  Whenever someone hacks together a solution in a complex system, it weakens the system.  You might get what you want out of it in the short term, but capable people will need to come in afterwards and repair what you’ve done or else the system will eventually fail.


It might seem romantic and exciting to call hands on learning hacking, but it’s also very inaccurate, to the point of being damaging to the students learning it because it doesn’t teach them effective engineering.  It is akin to teaching accounting by showing students how to cook the books, or teaching a sport by showing students how to cheat to win it.  As they mention in the WIRED article, the Russian team’s hacking of the last Olympics shows a staggering lack of understanding; the point isn’t winning at all costs.


As a former IT technician and now technology teacher I’ve always wondered why I find the whole hacker thing so eye-rollingly tedious, but in retrospect it was because I was the one who had built the thing they broke, and then had to fix their ‘ingenious hack’ so that the whole thing would work again.  It’s difficult to see a hacker as some kind of genius when you build and service a complex hardware and software network that serves hundreds of people well only to watch it get broken to serve one selfish person.  Yet many educators hold up hacking as this magical process that lets you beat technology.  Perhaps that’s what’s at the bottom of this, and opportunity to attack the technology that so many people feel is enabling them to belittle themselves.

“There is a trend in software development away from the ‘hacker’ jury-­rigging into a mature field, where things are ‘proven’,”

Virgil Griffith

You don’t have to advocate for technological terrorism to get into teaching science & technology, you just need to spend some time understanding it.  It isn’t magic, it’s knowable and teachable.

That mature field is called engineering.  It doesn’t have the gung-ho and catchy mythology of hacking, but it’s what builds space shuttles, Internets and makes the rest of modern society possible.  It is a creative and powerful expression of human thought made tangible and something that everyone should have at least a passing experience in otherwise they are ignorant of how the Twenty-First Century works.


If you want to have Maker Spaces and encourage hands-on learning I’ll be the first to applaud the effort, but you don’t need to dirty the name of technical creation with hacking, because it has nothing to do with it.  You’re encouraging a cheating-to-a-solution-at-all-costs mentality when you use the term hacking.  Engineering is a collaborative act of creation with a result that is beneficial to many people.  The reason hacking isn’t is because it has little to do with creation and is usually motivated entirely by selfish need, that’s why it’s usually a solo effort.  Is that really what you want for your students?  Ruthless, deterministic and selfishly motivated hands-on learning?


As educators I think we can do a bit better than that.

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