I Know It's Just a Number: 30K

I just turned forty four; that's just a number.  A day later Dusty World is going to cross the thirty thousand page view mark.  That's just a number too, but I like it a lot more than forty four.

Blogging started as a bit of catharsis; a chance to reflect on my profession.  I picked up the idea from ECOO a few years ago and hit 5000 page views in February 2012, just over two years after I started posting.  I was overjoyed then.

In June of 2012, just four months later, Dusty World passed ten thousand page views.  Once a backlog of posts builds, people wander in off the internet looking at old posts as well as new.  This is my 168th post.  I tend to stay away from the picture and/or short comment posts.  When I write it tends to be about me trying to develop an idea, usually with graphics and a lot of hypertext to support it.  

I love how blogging has sharpened my voice and I love talking to people about ideas reading a post has sparked in them.  I even love listening to the disagreements; most times I agree with them.  When I write a post, I have to follow the idea all the way down the rabbit hole, it's why I do it.  Blogging has let me shake the dust of my English and philosophy degrees and exercise them.

Posting has become a natural part of my reflective process.  I sometimes don't even necessarily agree with what I end up working out in Dusty World posts, but they always offer me some perspective on what I'm wrestling with.

During the worst of the job action in Ontario this past year Dusty World occasionally wandered into politics. After being bitten by all sides of that dissonance I'm thinking that nothing is to be gained from trying to untangle the nasty politics around education in Ontario.  The interests are so deeply ingrained and self involved that coming out on one side or the other is essentially meaningless if you're interested in supporting education itself.  My energy is better spend focusing on the unnerving, exciting and revolutionary technological change we're going through.  It not only frightens and excites me, but it also makes for a rich source of reflection, especially when I see students being experimented on with it every day.  How technology is changing our society is always a source of interest and something I'd never want to stop looking at.

The bizarre future we're making for ourselves is going to make existing political structures around education increasingly tenuous and inconsequential.  If I have to take a side it would be the side that doesn't exist yet, but it will.  I'm OK with being the villain for thinking in a way that is only just beginning to exist.

Dusty World is going to keep its eye on the prize and speak to the radical changes we're all going to have to adapt to in the coming years.  Meanwhile, thirty thousand is a nice number to think about.

Noon on May 18th!!!

Get off the Bus and Drive

The transition from institutionalized, single platform education technology to a decentralized model is in full swing at our school.  I'm getting blow back from various teachers who want things to remain as they've always been.  I don't think they mean ditto machines, facsimiles and telegrams, but they might.  There is always a tendency to fight advances in technology, it's difficult to change ingrained habits.

The difference between this and previous technological shifts is that we've institutionalized helplessness into educational digital technology.  We've convinced teachers that computers are an appliance and networking is a utility.  We treat internet access the same way we treat electricity or water delivery; it's off loaded to a bureaucracy who guarantees delivery.  As the old guard retires and their traditional thinking around passive technology use fades, we are left with whole generations of teachers who have been taught to do nothing except sit on the institutionally provided bus and go where it takes them.  Complaining about it is about all they can do.

Any decision making about educational technology has long been taken from teachers.  Digital learning tools are seen as remotely operated apparatus that should be dropped the moment they don't perform as expected.

When I suggest that teachers can get off the #edtech bus and drive their own educational technology they get anxious; driving a car takes a lot of effort compared to sitting on the bus.  You not only have to drive it, but you've got to look after it too, make sure it has gas, service it, take ownership of it.  The reward is much finer control over how you travel on your journey.

If you want to get where you're going (making education relevant and useful to your students?) driving your technology will get you there much sooner.  You'll get to decide what vehicle to take, what options to put on it, and even how you want various technologies to enhance your teaching.  Diversification of technology is vital to a better understanding of what it is and how to use it effectively. Digital technology isn't one app or one platform, it is a sea change in how we access and share information.

Driving your own technology usage does take a lot more effort than sitting on the #edtech bus, though it's just a different kind of effort.  All that energy you used to expend on worrying when the bus would show up?  or why it's so old and dilapidated?  You can now spend deciding what to get, what options you want and how you want to implement it.  You get to decide what, when and how your students are using technology to enhance their learning; you get to actually control your digital learning environment.

That last bit is perhaps the most enjoyable part of driving your own technology use; being able to control your #edtech environment is a key factor in customizing 21st Century learning to suit your students.

If we treated classrooms the way we treat digital learning environments, all rooms would be exactly the same, with the same seating plans, the same chalk boards and the same size.  Those classrooms would also be years out of date, and the teacher couldn't move a table or chair if they wanted to, because they'd all be nailed to the floor.  If you dare to ask why the furniture is nailed to the floor you'd be reprimanded with a fear based diatribe on how not keeping everything locked down and the same is potentially dangerous to your students and staff.

A Digital Skills Continuum: Differentiation of technology is a key to technical fluency!

If you're teaching using technology you're also teaching technology, and it would behove you to know what's under the hood.  Being ignorant of the machinery you're operating makes you a very bad driver indeed.  You don't necessarily need to be a full-on mechanic, but a tinkerer's mindset allows you to understand and look after your own needs in terms of the technology you use.

There are going to be some crashes with all these new drivers coming onto the road, but each collision will result in a learning experience.  I only hope that teachers who are inexperienced are willing to look past the messiness of their own learning to the possibilities opening up to them in a digital world.  At some point we'll tip over and teachers will accept that competence in technology isn't someone else's job but an integral part of their profession in the twenty-first century, just as it has become a basic fluency in so many other professions.

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.

Edcamp Hamilton: Let It Flow

I attended edcamp Hamilton this past weekend.  It was my first cross country trip on my newly minted motorbike license as well as a chance to meet and self direct my professional development with colleagues from beyond my own board.  I got there heavily oxygenated and cold; the Starbucks on tap helped warm me up and then we were into sessions that the edcampers themselves suggested.

With over 140 people interested in education showing up on a Saturday morning just to talk shop, it was a busy, energizing affair.  The first session I attended started off a bit stiff, but quickly loosened up as the bar was raised on the pedagogical reflection.  Peter Skillen pitched some critical thinking on technology use in learning, and it wasn't all the gee-wiz thinking from a few years ago.  We are such chameleons in our ability to change ourselves to fit our technology.  Peter asked some hard questions about how we're making students connect to technology.  Educational technology seems to have reached a stage of maturity where we can ask hard questions about it.  Jane Mitchinson also brought up the idea of multi-tasking (or more accurately, rapid task switching) in terms of the information overflow students face when using digital tools.  Getting information from the internet is like drinking from a fire hose  you'll get a face full, and it won't be graceful or particularly useful.  Learning how to use these tools is something we're still not very good at.  As an opening discussion it got everyone moving and for the newer edcampers it got them realizing how a single person isn't running any of the sessions; this is a truly an open, democratic process.  It can't be directed.

An awful lot of people meeting on their own time to discuss their profession,
I wonder how many politicians do that.

I got restless in the seconds session because it seemed to belabor a point that wasn't going anywhere.  After listening to a bit of talk around how to keep your idealism in the current educational environment, I started getting quite negative, so I went for a wander to think about what was said and do one of the best things you can do at an edcamp - wander by rooms and stumble across awesome conversations.

In that session I left, Carlo Fusco said, "the education system was designed to sort people into jobs in order to fit them in to the new industrial model.  Education is there to sort people."  I suspect he was being Socratic and pushing an idea so that others could question it, but my cynicism knows no bounds after the past year teaching in Ontario.  Others took a stab at it before I commented that I find it impossible to remain an idealist in the current Ontario educational climate.  With unions, governments and corporations playing games with education for their own benefit, I said I find it hard to believe in anyone's best intentions.

The wandering broke up my negativity as I stumbled across wonderful, critical discussions about  gamification, online learning tools and what a twenty first century student needs to know.  One of the nicest things about an edcamp is that you want to be there (or you wouldn't be).  No one is holding you to one mode of learning or thinking.

Earlier edcamps I attended had very few people in upper administrative roles attending, it was a real grass roots movement of teachers, student teachers and onsite admin, the people who work with students directly every day.  It was nice to see more senior administrative types at edcamp Hamilton, though their predilection for telling people how they should be thinking might get in the way of what edcamps are really about.  If  asking big questions settles my value theory and allows me to do my job better, then I'll do it at an edcamp because that is where I get to direct my own professional development.  Suggesting limitations on what people should be allowed to talk about in order to promote an administrative objective strikes me a missing the point.  This has me thinking about educational leadership in a twenty first century context.  If we're moving toward more self directed, less hierarchical ways of directing PD, how does an education leader move people in the direction they want them to?  We talk about student centered learning as an ideal to move towards.  Edcamps do that for PD, but not if we're going to start drawing lines around what people can and can't talk about.

I ended the day with some very interrogative discussions with people I have fundamental disagreements with about recent events in the Ontario PLN community.  This too was great PD because it allowed me to understand their point of  view and be less reactionary to it.

The last session of the edcamp still had larger groups meeting, but many smaller groups spun off and talked about what they needed to.  Ah, the freedom to not be told what to think; if only other PD had more of that.

I'll call #EdCampHam another excellent EdCamp experience.  Thanks to the EdcampHam organizers for a wonderfully immersive day of thinking about my profession.

Some other Ed-blogs on EdCampHamilton:
Karen
Michelle
Jane
Sue
Mark
Heidi
Stephen
Aviva