Tag: onted

I’ve just taken over as the tech-support teacher for my high school after a brief absence.  I don’t generate technical problems, so I was right out of this jet stream until I came back in to manage it again.

Our first issue involved our student database system (Maplewood) being programmed to drop inactive students after 90 days of not logging in to the network.  Why 90 days?  No apparent reason.

In semester one you might be taking shop, phys-ed, co-op or food school (amongst many), and find that you are never asked to log in to a school machine in the course of your studies.  Or you might simply have followed the board’s new BYO-device policy and use your own machine.  Semester 2 rolls around and suddenly you don’t exist and are unable to login, and neither do hundreds of your colleagues.  On the first day of class you fall behind.

The emails started on the first day back and didn’t get resolved until three days later.

The purpose of automation is to reduce repetitive, pointless work and make us more efficient.  This particular piece of automation created pointless work and reduced efficiency in teachers and students across the building, not to mention my time and our technician’s time.

Why not set the shut down to six months, safely moving you into semester 2 before doing the automatic account shut-down?  Because the people who set up this system are not educators, they have little or no idea how the schools they service are scheduled.  If you don’t know (or care) how something works, you’re not likely to support it very effectively.

It’s a kind of interdepartmental blindness that results in the left hand having no idea (and no patience) with what the right hand is doing.  This kind of systematization might seem cheap on the surface and satisfy an accountant’s spreadsheet, but it’s hardly efficient or effective.

In order to support a system, the person operating it should have lived with it.  There are plenty of teachers who understand school needs that don’t necessarily want to teach in the classroom.  I’d rather see them managing our network than someone with no ED background who has little or no idea of even simple needs.

Efficiency isn’t always about hiring the least educated (and cheap) person possible.  You can actually save money with quality.

Like everyone else, I got into Facebook. Never the pointless flash games, but as a place to share photos with family and friends, it worked for me. It also allowed me to stay in touch with family and friends who are far away. Recently though, with the constant addition of new ‘friends’ many of whom aren’t, I find myself staring at news-feeds of people I couldn’t care less about, and, in some cases, I wouldn’t recognize if I passed them on the street. One day, after spending ten minutes trying to find a comment from someone I genuinely thought about often, I simply switched it off.

A couple of months ago I started using Twitter at a computers in education conference (ecoo.org). I’d tried Twitter a couple of times and it hadn’t caught – I couldn’t see the point in it, but this conference turbocharged the tweets. Following flash mobs to prizes, getting well researched links and ideas from other teachers, backchanneling in presentations… I got hooked.

Twitter is like facebook in that it’s a social networking tool, but without the social dead-weight. Follow who you want and lurk, or twit away. If people enjoy it, word spreads and you get a posse. Keep grooming who you follow. After a while it’s a steady stream of people you really enjoy reading. Twitter’s not about you in the herd, it’s about customizing a herd FOR you.

The teacher angle has let me build a PLN, personal learning network. Recently, at another conference, I ran into people I’d been tweeting with over several months. It felt like we already knew each other, but only in a certain way. Filling in the blanks was a wonderful experience, and a great opportunity to pick and choose new people to follow.

I’m still only 6 months into twitter. I’ve dropped more people than I now follow, and I suspect that I’ll top out at about 100, and constantly be grooming out filler. I’m interested in following thoughts and developing PLN, not seeing what a celebrity thinks (rare exceptions: @naomiklien, for obvious reasons, @stephenfry because he broadcasts intelligently).

I‘ll come straight out and tell you that I’m an avid video game player, have been since I got hooked on Donkey Kong Jr. when I was ten years old. From dotty eight bit graphics on my first Vic 20 to the Pentium 4 powerhouses and monster video cards on my home network today, I’m a technology junkie of the highest order. A simple decision by my parents set me down the path of intelligent adoption early in my experience: I begged for an Intellivision, they got me a Vic20. Suddenly I’m programming instead of mind numbing button pushing – I’m a creator not just a user. Twenty years later I’m working as a systems trainer and technician.

From that brief biography I give you my reaction to the documentary called “First Person Shooter” I saw on CTV last Sunday (http://www.firstpersonshooter.tv/index.html), created by Robin Benger, a TV producer and film maker. Rather than simply trying to scare you while appearing to keep a semblance of veracity and professional indifference, I’ll try and unpack all of the assumptions and the real intent behind this lightly veiled propaganda. In its desperate attempts to stay on top I find the current popular media (and in this case medium of television itself) taking poorly researched, rather desperate shots at the latest distractions. In the case of “First Person Shooter” the father of a child deeply addicted to a game called “Counter Strike” uses his own medium (he is a television producer and film maker) to analyze and ultimately criticize his child’s dependency on media.

The general issue of addiction can be dealt with in fairly specific terms. Game playing, even in its most chronic form certainly can’t be quantified as a physical addiction. At best it can be described as a reinforced behaviour. What reinforces the behaviour of a chronic player, a need for control, expression, respect? Online playing is not just the wave of the future any more, it is here today. Community, interaction and team building are a huge part of the modern online gaming experience. A child addicted to this is a child addicted to a need to belong; not exactly a damning statement; and one that prompts the question: why are these things so lacking in his non-virtual existence?

What is especially laughable about Mr. Benger’s documentary is that he uses his medium of television to debunk a new and competing medium for media. I wonder if he is more upset that his child is having trouble prioritizing his life or that he isn’t supporting Mr. Benger’s own media infatuation. The question of what benefits television has in attacking a competing medium must be an integral part of this examination.

There is a small step between an addictive personality and an obsessive one and in either case they can lead to amazing, expression or discovery. The price people pay for this kind of infatuation can also lead them to depression and ultimately make them unable to support their need. In short if you’re shooting for a small target like genius you will often miss and the results aren’t pretty. If a child becomes so infatuated something that it consumes their lives, it seems to me the best way to push through it is to assist them in swallowing too much. They’ll eventually force themselves away from it and in doing so their rejection of the infatuation will surely be more meaningful.

In the meantime we’ve got something like video games, that many older people simply don’t accept. They find it threatening, difficult to understand and so place a low value on it. As a gamer (with a fine arts background and an honours degree in English and Philosophy) that gaming has been churning out exceptional pieces of art for many years now. As the technology continues to improve the media presented on it will only become more immersive and meaningful. Whereas once printing allowed for the widespread, sedentary activity of reading for the masses, and movie and television furthered the trend towards sedentary, cerebral entertainment, video gaming has reintroduced the entertainee as an active participant in the process. In doing so it promises to further enhance our ability to express and understand our selves and the reality around us; the goal of any media.

From: http://atking.ca/timothy/index.htm

There has been much talk of gamification as a means of engaging the digital native (sic).  I’ve been a fan of integrating complex simulation into the classroom for a long time now, and I believe that digital tools offer us a great deal of paracosmic power in that regard.  As a means of assessing student ability, nothing comes close to the immersive simulation to see multi-dimensional aspects of student skill, from basic knowledge to how they work under pressure and what their lateral problem solving skills look like (something most assessment is devoid of).

But like the flowery classroom in which no one can fail, the vast majority of games are designed to be entertainment.  The satisfaction you have in finishing them is entirely artificial – the point was for you to finish them.  Sort of like making a big deal of getting a high school diploma… way to get what just about everyone has.  I missed my high school graduation, but I didn’t miss my university ones.  The best part about those degrees where all the people who started with me that didn’t finish.

If we’re going to set up games in the classroom, then they need to be full spectrum experiences (where failure is an option).  If you want to go all the way, actually set up the simulation to put your students in an impossible situation and then assess how they respond rather than how they perform.  If it works for Starfleet Academy in two hundred years, it should work for us now.

One of the most immersive games I’ve ever played was called Planescape: Torment.  I’ll spoil it for you because no one will go looking for a fifteen year old game to play.  You begin in a Memento-esque amnesia in a morgue.  Through the course of the narrative you learn that you are immortal, though you’ve been killed many times (and are covered in scars).  The end of the game has you having to come to terms with a character you’ve come to identify with realizing that he has to die (and spend an eternity in hell – he hasn’t been a nice man) in order to complete the game.  It was a game playing moment where I was completely lost in the story, when it asked more from me as a participant than I wanted to give, but I gave it anyway, and have never forgotten the effect.  Watching a character you’ve struggled to keep alive walk into an eternal battle on the planes of hell was truly epic.  Winning isn’t always about collecting badges.

I’ve had a number of those epic moments while playing Dungeons & Dragons.  I’ve also created some sufficiently complex simulations in the classroom where students have forgotten where they were.  Being a Dungeon Master is excellent training for a teacher.

In English I’ve spun mutants v. humans in a Chrysalids simulation that had students who thought the prejudice and violence shown by characters in the book where ‘ridiculous’.  An hour later the simulation had the same students jailing (and worse) the hidden mutants in their classroom, while the mutants tried to hide, then ended up drunk on their own power.  It left many students hyper-engaged, frustrated and introspective about human nature.  I wonder what kind of quiz would have resulted in that mind space?

Immersive simulation is a powerful learning tool – I believe it should be the end game of digitization in education.  A student who has had to experience Brock’s sacrifice or Napoleon’s Waterloo will have a sense of personalized learning that strikes the gaming nerve – they feel like it was a personal experience rather than something told to them.

They do this on the holo-deck all the time in Star Trek.  Janeway has Leonardo Da Vinci as a mentor, Data has arguments with Einstein and Hawking about physics.  Their learning is personal and they are active participants in it, the learning environment is personalized, immersive and offers the mightiest access to information.

Any well designed simulation has to allow for free-play and unexpected outcomes (Data vs. Moriarty is a good example).  If your games are designed for single outcome, or you’re throwing badges on achievement, you might as well go back to photocopying worksheets, you’re not getting what games can do for people.  Unless you take into account player freedom of choice and are willing to address unexpected outcomes, you’re only hanging a badge on the same old linear knowledge attainment.

I’m still struggling with my Mum’s recent, sudden death.  While that is going on, I’m dealing with a previously signed up for teaching qualification in computer engineering, and a series of slanderous attacks on my profession.  I can’t help but be self-reflexive about how I’m dealing with the role of student; I fear I’m not doing it very well.

Culturally, I think I’m on the Ridge

I’ve felt thin since that phone call on June 1st.  The North American manly thing to do is dismiss anything to do with it and proceed with a steady course of denial.  I suppose the stiff upper-lip English thing is to do something similar.  Since being dumped somewhere in the mid-Atlantic as a child, I’m having trouble adopting a social convention to follow.

The thinness I’m feeling has made for some awkward moments with time management.  On the first weekend, when I should have been plugging away on our first big assignment, instead I ended up going to the cottage and passing out on the couch.  It made for a stressful Monday when I returned, but one of the things about being thin is that there isn’t enough butter to evenly cover the toast.

I feel like we’re over the hump in the course now.  I’m finding old habits returning around hard focusing on specific tasks instead of just directionlessly wandering through the material we’re covering.  I’m a good student, even when I’m incomplete.  The deadlines have been difficult to handle, but perhaps their imminence helped me get my mind off subjects it wouldn’t let go of otherwise. The fact that the emotionally turbulent month of June is slowly receding might be helping too.

I’ve had students who have gone through emotional crisis, some of which make mine look like a walk in the park, yet we still come at them with curriculum expectations and demands.  I’ve always tried to step lightly in those cases, out of a sense of compassion.  It’s a difficult thing for a teacher to deal with.  In some cases a student who has gone through trauma is best left with space, but in others, giving them something else to focus on might help move them on emotionally.

No clear answer to this one, I fear.  Some days I’d be driving down to the course with tears rolling down my cheeks because of a song on the radio, right now I’m feeling pretty solid.  It comes and goes.  I guess the one take-away from all this is that you can’t make an algorithm or develop a system for dealing with emotional crisis; each person experiences it differently, and coming at it in a curriculum orientated, systemic manner is a recipe for disaster.

A good teacher will remember their own ups and downs and differentiate not just in terms of what a student is capable of intellectually, but also in terms what emotional focus they can  bring to bear.

In my own case, I’ve been trying to change my mind, but when it runs deep, it’s not always a matter of conscious choice.  In the end, if I can remember where I am now with my students in the future, I’ll be in a better place to respond to their needs.

Nice to see you’ll support pension cuts, shame that was never on the table

I find myself in a bit of an educational maelstrom at the moment.  Government twitter trolls who like to tell me I must be enjoying my summer off instead get sharp replies about my sitting in a computer lab in Milton taking my 3rd AQ in 7 years of teaching.  When I’m done here I’ll have 4 teachables (English, history, visual arts and computer engineering).

I’ve also taught summer school four times.  Since I started teaching in 2004, my summers have been busy, and expensive.  I know there are teachers who don’t do additional training.  I also know that whenever I did training when I worked in the private sector, they paid for it.  Getting lumped in with a brand of teacher who expects more for less makes me angry, I’m not that guy.

I also attend Edcamps, self directed professional development.  I can’t recall ever seeing my private sector colleagues driving an hour out of their way on a Saturday morning to spend the day learning how to do their jobs better.  Then there are the conferences (that take a lot more of my time than just the day or two of school I miss) where I spend a lot of my own time developing educational theory and training for (I hope) the benefit of teachers and students.

I’m immensely proud of Ontario’s education system, and don’t see it as a political pawn to be used in a game that has more to do with financial shell games than anything real.  I’m a liberal who can’t vote liberal any more.  Worse, I’m a voter who doesn’t know what the point is any more, because political parties in Ontario only stand for re-election, they don’t actually stand for anything else.

I haven’t mentioned the department headship I took on with minimal notice and then was attacked for taking on in a full time capacity; working with teachers can be very tiring.  I haven’t mentioned the sixty or so hours I spend each year coaching soccer.  I can’t understand why my own government is intent on generating public hatred at my expense for their own ends.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/story/2012/04/30/bank-bailout-ccpa.html

I’m not sure what I did wrong.  Looking at any metric you care to apply, we do more at less cost than just about any education system in the first world.  Our cost to performance ratio is excellent.

Instead we get strung up, vilified and turned on by the very government that won office by scare mongering the electorate away from the blue myopia.

Ontario will bail out poorly run businesses because they live in the ‘real world’ and are meaningful, tough, manly ways to make a living?  They drive the economy?  If that were the case, we’d still be in a destitute market that eats itself to pay 1% of the population.  If you think private business will do anything other than the least it has to while feeding itself, you’re naive, and dangerous.  The economy is like a cockroach, let it pick up the scraps, you don’t feed it steak.

Thank goodness we have higher standards in education, health care, and other services.  If we ran the province like GM, or American banks, or Blackberry, we’d be in real trouble (though we would have a small group of hospital administrators and school superintendents who were immensely wealthy).

I guess that’s where we headed, because if we’re gonna stink, we might as well all stink equally.

I’m currently reading the very meaty and painfully direct “Shop Class as Soulcraft” by Matt Crawford.  In the book he laments idiocy in professionals and (at another point) the vagaries of management language in modern business where there is no objective means of determining an employee’s competency.  Both of these arguments come together beautifully in the relatively recent field of information technology.

I’ve been working in IT, both in the private and public sectors, for going on fifteen years now.  I’ve worked in small offices, and on massive installs, in engineering shops, manufacturing concerns, universities, schools, and in offices.  With a certain breadth of experience comes a pretty good bullshit detector.  Crawford’s ideas around professional idiocy and manager-speak appear to have, unfortunately, come together in a perfect storm of hidden incompetence in information technology.

THE IDIOT

Crawford talks about Robert Persig (the author of Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance – another great read)’s idiot mechanic, who is more intent on appearances and action than submitting himself to the truths the bike is trying to tell him, and what that means to his public role as a professional mechanic.  The kid ends up butchering Persig’s bike while taking no time to actually try and diagnose what the problem is; he’s all hands and no brain.  Crawford describes the idiot:

“Persig’s mechanic is, in the original sense of the word, an idiot.  Indeed, he exemplifies the truth about idiocy, which is that it is at once an ethical and a cognitive failure.  The Greek idios means “private,” and an idiotes means a private person, as opposed to a person in their public role – for example, that of motorcycle mechanic.  Persig’s mechanic is idiotic because he fails to grasp his public role, which entails, or should, a relation of active concern to others, and to the machine.  He is not involved.  It is not his problem.  Because he is an idiot…  At bottom, the idiot is a solipsist.” (p98)

That lack of involvement should spark a memory with any teacher reading this.  The student who refuses, at all costs, regardless of the differentiation you throw at it, to do anything whatsoever, is an idiot in the technical sense of the word.

From the IT angle, I see people like Persig’s idiot mechanic every day.  You know the type, they know just enough to be dangerous (and have tools on hand).  They tend to make grand assumptions, usually based on a non-existent knowledge base, and then act on them to make the situation worse.  They talk loudly, and use a lot of word whispers (“you know?”, “right?”, “know what I mean?”, etc) to make sure you agree with them (it’s a handy way to externally monitor what’s going on when you have no idea yourself, and dovetails nicely with the idea of management speak presented later).

The disengaged idiot fits especially well with information technology because it’s a dark art to the vast majority of people.  You can talk out of your ass to 95% of the population and they have no idea what you’re saying, freeing you to say pretty much anything you want.  The bigger the words the better.  And because most people are users, they’re more than happy to sit in on the tech talk, and participate at the same level as the disengaged idiot.

Many moons ago, right out of high school, I found myself working in a Canadian Tire shop.  One day one of the mechanics burned himself on Fuego.  He proceeded to flip out and run up a bill of unneeded repairs to the order of a thousand dollars; a good example of the moral failure of the idiot, and one I see all the time in IT, especially when dealing with older customers to whom the dark art seems positively Satanic.

MANAGEMENT SPEAK

Crawford also does a brilliant dissection of the ‘peculiarly chancy and fluid’ life of the corporate manager (substitute administrator or educational consultant for equal value here).  In a world with no objective means of assessing competence, the manager lives in a purgatory of abstraction, using vague language “…staking out a position on all sides of a situation, so you always have plausible deniability of a failure.”   Crawford goes to great lengths to point out that this isn’t done maliciously, but rather as a means of psychic protection for the people trapped in this morass.  At any point an arbitrary decision can make you redundant (shown brilliantly in Up In The Air – many of the people in the interviews are real people who have actually been downsized), regardless of your own abilities or actions.

In a world of meaningless language, actual technical competency is devalued with every spoken word (a central theme in Crawford’s book).  Objective competency is ignored in favor of MBA wording that allows the initiate of globalized business speak to survive regardless of what decisions they might have made.  In fact, the very making of decisions is discouraged.  In places where reality matters, your opinion is not as important as it has been socially projected to be.  As Crawford so cuttingly notes: “This stance toward ‘established reality,’ which can only be described as psychedelic, is best not indulged around a table saw.”

One of the many reasons I’m looking forward to ‘teaching tech’ this fall; there is no doubt of the student’s focus, ability and honesty of effort when reality is judging them.  If you made it, ignored lessons, examples and process, and it didn’t work, no amount of ‘but you’re still fantastic’ student success talk will mitigate a failure staring everyone in the face.  The fantasy of ‘everyone’s a hidden genius’ so popular in education today is best not indulged when reality (and the objective assessment implied in it) are judging the results.  Do or do not, there is no good try in tech… and that’s not a bad thing, unless you’re trying to peddle a new ed-theory on zero failure.

Management speak, based on the the surreal, ‘psychedelic’, entirely provisional world of business became popular along with globalization (itself founded on many hidden assumptions).  Grown out of the initial industrially driven abstractions of Taylorism in the early 20th Century, modern business is so far from the witness of truth (like the stock market it has spawned) that it has more in common with Alice in Wonderland than it does with a shop manual; the best you can hope for are some vague metaphors to describe it.

The IT Idiot Management Babbling: Making An Objective Technical Skill Abstract

Information technology is a new technical field.  It began and grew in a well established, Taylorist, globalized, MBA driven, entirely fictional world.  The language around IT maintenance is often clouded in mysticism, grown from the same vague, plausibly deniable language of modern business and finance.  We feed that fire with talk of digital natives, people who magically have technical skills because of their birth date.  In education, we ignore this new, vital fluency in favor of magical realism; our adherence to business speak serves our students poorly.

I’m not saying every student needs to be a qualified information technology technician, but it is safe to say that every student graduating at the moment should be familiar enough with digital technology that they don’t get white washed by an idiot’s babbling, or convinced by the parochial and intentionally misleading language surrounding information technology.  Auto shop is often taught this way – as a means of delivering a basic familiarity to students so they aren’t bamboozled by an idiot.  IT should adopt the same position as this older, wiser tech.

IT is a measurable skill.  I take great pleasure in offering up the A+ certification practice test to the resident experts in senior computer engineering.  When the best of them barely get half right, and realize that they are 30% away from a pass, it sets the stage for a systemic, meaningful learning of a technical skill they’ve always been told they magically gained by being born in the nineties.

I wonder if people born in the 1900s were magically imbued with the ability to fix the new automobiles just coming out.  What we do is absurd, and it feeds misinformation and empowers the idiot.  It’s bad enough when we purposefully remove objective standards from academic classes (and I’m not talking about standardized tests – they are about as far from objective standards as you can get, just another fiction), but to actively discourage objective standards in a technical field?  That gets downright dangerous, and expensive!

An article by a conservative think tank, disseminated by a conservative media outlet:

http://m.torontosun.com/News/1304708716881

“Teachers have also seen very decent raises — 12.55% between 2008 and 2012 (10.4% for public elementary teachers) — while the rest of us have lost jobs or are just treading water.“

Facts by the government:

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/subjects-sujets/cpi-ipc/cpi-ipc-eng.htm