Dusty World

I Know It's Just a Number: 30K

noreply@blogger.com (Timothy King) — Sat, 18 May 2013 15:50:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Timothy King) — Fri, 17 May 2013 13:24:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Timothy King) — Mon, 13 May 2013 20:46:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Timothy King) — Sat, 11 May 2013 20:14:00 +0000

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

What Does A Self Regulated Person Look Like?

noreply@blogger.com (Timothy King) — Sat, 11 May 2013 15:53:00 +0000

Another one of those why I listen to CBC radio moments this morning. Day Six interviewed Cody Wilson about his 3d printed gun - a weapon that you can manufacture out of plastic on a 3d printer. Here is another example of the internet bypassing governments and regulations while radically empowering individuals with information. If you have a few minutes listen to the conversation, Bambury really tries to get around the subject and Wilson is more than willing to address it head on.

It doesn't matter what information wants,
in a digital world it is free, this is a simple fact

In a world where information is free whether we want it to be or not, and where the former owners of information (governments, corporations) find that they can't regulate, control or censor it, where are we left when the means of manufacturing is removed from the moneyed classes as well?

3d printing is tumbling in price. Wilson posted his gun design online last week only to have to withdraw it this week under a request from the U.S. State Department. Wilson did withdraw the download, but it doesn't matter, it's out there now. Copies of copies of copies spread across the internet. No government can stop it, no corporation can prevent it, the information now has a life of its own online. As Wilson mentions in the interview, this is just information, what people choose to do with it is their choice... and there are many easier ways to get your hands on better guns, especially in America, so if someone is going to use this to commit violence, they are doing it for a very specific political reason.

The "dawn of wiki weapons"

As a philosophical action, posting these plans online asks questions about a not too distant future where you will be able to build anything you like at your desk in much the same way you can print anything you want now. Printing presses, once the domain of industrial giants, became democratized; small item manufacture is about to go the same way. What does the world look like when anyone can design (and freely share) a lethal weapon, and anyone could build it without serial numbers or identifying marks of any kind?

They use a term radical libertarianism in the interview. The digital space is the new frontier, and on that frontier stand the usual early adopters, the same kind of people that colonized North America, with the same mindset; staunch individualists who have moved into the power vacuum of the internet and pushed technology into areas that make traditional powers very nervous.

Is this madness? Is radically empowered individualism nerve wracking? I'd say yes, because the vast majority of people, if given that kind of power, wouldn't do anything good with it. While most of us are waiting to be told what to do with our new found freedom of information, radicals like Cody Wilson are taking what is already at hand and acting on it.

To paraphrase a famous evolutionary biologist, the future is not only stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we can imagine. I don't know what a world where anyone can build whatever they want looks like, but as Wilson said, short of turning off the internet, you can't stop the spread of information, and the internet has quickly made itself essential in this new age. Turning it off isn't really an option any more, and should we want to?

Wired Thinking on Neurodiversity

noreply@blogger.com (Timothy King) — Thu, 09 May 2013 21:56:00 +0000

Wired at 20 years old

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Influence Without Affluence

noreply@blogger.com (Timothy King) — Tue, 07 May 2013 21:33:00 +0000

After a Social Media gathering a couple of weeks ago and a rewatch of We Are Legion I've been pondering what social expectations we're developing in our new digital society. Why would I do this? Since our students are immersed in this radical, unprecedented counter culture it might behoove us as educators to have some idea of what cultural norms are coming out of it. Recognizing what is normative online behavior goes some distance toward explaining the seemingly bizarre responses teachers are seeing in class.

If you think the buttoned down 1950s era teacher had trouble understanding the hippy counter culture student of the sixties, you ain't seen nothing yet. What technology is offering students today is nothing short of an entirely new social medium to inhabit, and what that is doing to early adopters (like teens) is nothing short of a paradigm shift in social behavior.

A number of years ago (2006!) WIRED did a quick piece on GENERATION XBOX, in which they talked about the expectations of gamer culture and how different they are from preceding (non digital) generations. This short list hit the gaming ethos precisely: arrogant, hacking (competitive, results focused regardless of rules), insubordinate... sound like anyone in your classroom? That gaming ethos has done a great deal to influence online presence. The egalitarian nature of the gamer is clearly seen in internet cultures like Anonymous where there is a strong emphasis on your contribution rather than your social standing in the 'real' world. What matters is what you say and how well you say it, not how much money your parents had or who you're the boss of.

You might think this is socialist, but it really isn't, it can be crushingly cruel and direct and has no patience for bullshit or spin. Everyone isn't equal, though everyone does have equal access and ability to contribute. This ties organizations, especially politically powerful ones, in knots, especially when they expect the same kind of submission they can force in traditional media in an open digitized space. I suspect it's hitting a lot of people who are used to the benefits of their social circumstances hard.

If suddenly all of the benefits you had (race, socio-economic status, education, family) are ignored, how do you establish yourself as an alpha? Especially when you're used to having it handed to you. In the last post I tried to push privacy and ownership of information as far as I logically could considering the near friction-less information we find online.

If you can't own information because trying to hold it is impossible when it can be copied and spread with no real effort, and privacy is irrelevant because anyone can copy and paste your information, and almost everyone has a media recording device unimaginable 20 years ago and can capture you at any time regardless of whether you want to be seen or not, regardless of whether you yourself are online or not; how do we understand what is ours? Ownership is at the foundation of how we relate to other people in society. With no ability to own material and with information being so slippery we can't regulate who sees it online, how do we establish social dominance? If we can't flash the car, the house, our jobs, or even our educations at people and expect benefits, what value do these things have?

The tendency would be to fall back on existing power structures, to try and exercise the same protections that advantage us in society in an online milieu, but this has been shown to fail again and again. Digital information does not work in a personal context the way that social status does. The only thing that makes you special is what you're doing right now. Your interaction is your credibility online. If you try to game the system and people can find that data, they can make you look the fool. If you are able to maintain an honest and insightful digital footprint, you come as close as you're ever going to get to being untouchable in the Wild West of the internet.

Someone who puts Ph.D. after their name online is as likely to be made fun of as they are to be respected. If that same person does not advertise their traditional social standing, but produces excellent ideas clearly

and accessibly through an understanding of the tools available, then they will gain online currency. If the approach is one of indirect, politically motivated self interest, then the proliferation of digital information makes it very difficult to game the truth, or play people. That email or DM where you instruct other people to do something that you wouldn't want everyone to know? It'll end up buried in your back. You can't stop the signal. If you've done it online, it's obtainable.

I still maintain that radical transparency is what will evolve out of this startling social evolution. Say what you mean and do what you say, be consistent and don't be afraid. If you make a mistake own it, and if you can't handle what's happening don't advertise it by leaving a permanent record. Lurking is a perfectly reasonable place to back away to online.

I suspect that many of our students lurk online because they are trying to parse the wild west that they see out there. They don't want to make fools of themselves, but they are also wrestling with what they know happens in the real world (you can get away with lying, deceit and social/political games quite easily in a world where information is ownable - especially if you're the beneficiary of racial, social or cultural advantage). Online the powers aren't powers and the socially weak can suddenly become something else if they have the voice and the will to do it.

Being hacked may not be a bad thing if it keeps everyone honest. The threat of hacking is what prevents many of the 'real' world powers from abusing the internet (that and it has insinuated itself into business and society to such a degree that pulling the plug would be a disaster). Marx may not have taken down capitalism, but online society offers the kind of radical egalitarianism that wraps monopolistic capitalists in knots.

The other thing about this radically flat mediascape is that hierarchies that force group think tend to fail. Rather than being threatened into following the crowd, you are free to disappear online. You aren't beholden to social context in the same way you are in the real world. This means you can do things online you'd never do in 'real' life. Like the guy who screams obscenities and gives the finger to others while driving who would never do the same thing while walking down the sidewalk; the person online is removed and empowered in an interesting way by the machines that isolate them from their social context.

I've enjoyed watching the dismantling of these assumptions in a number of large organizations. I've been frustrated by others that claim democracy while really wanting to enforce an existing hierarchy. Online society is the most radically democratic ideal we've ever created. Access is cheaper and more available than citizenship in the first world (arguably the previous means of access to political control). As we miniaturize and mobilize computing and billions more people come online and realize that they are not powerless in their societies (and that they belong to a larger, more pervasive and more powerful online society), the world will change, and the ones who will suffer are those that have benefited from history the most.

Privacy Never Existed & Ownership of Information Is Dead

noreply@blogger.com (Timothy King) — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 16:17:00 +0000

What you do when you try to privatize,
own or control digital content in the C21st

When #ontsm talked about how to introduce social media to students there was a lot of talk about walled gardens and safe places. By creating private digital spaces students could become used to the nuances of online life in a tidal pool before they wandered out into the ocean. It's a nice idea. It's predicated on a myth.

The flaw in this thinking is that privacy exists, that it ever existed. Anonymity is very difficult to maintain, it always has been. This isn't a digital issue. A hundred years ago, people weren't able to move about as easily as they do now. You tended to exist in a much more colloquial and static social group. Your town or village knew who you were because you were contextualized in it by your family, job, religion, culture and friends. Modern cities barely existed at that point. Industrialization and the machinery it produced gave us the ability to migrate individually in the 20th Century, but even that came with a lot of social baggage. If you were out alone on a motorcycle, you were socially classified, even if people didn't know you personally. We do this all the time with race, socio-economic status, even accent; every time we stereotype we do it. Privacy has always been a myth. If anyone lays eyes on you who doesn't know you, their impression of you is what you are socially. Digital information makes a greater mockery of that myth by spreading us across the web, ignoring our geography.

Digital information is so fluid, so easy to create and share, that it is frictionless. You don't have to physically share a book to share text any more, you don't have to physically share a DVD to share a video any more. When information is a stream of data constantly flowing, ownership and privacy become impossible to manage in any traditional sense.

If you put student data into a digital format, your 'privacy settings' (an ode to the myth to make you feel better) are set to whomever is the viewer of your content with the least goodwill toward you and the least respect for your privacy. This goes beyond the people you shared it with to anyone at all who can view your information. Any attempts to 'lock down' (another backward looking term designed to make you feel better) digital information is easily bypassed by a screen capture or a cut and paste.

The digital is leaking into the physical world too. If anyone sees or hears you doing anything, anywhere, at any time, and they have a smart phone on them, you are the push of a button away from being published. Stupidity has never been so readily documented; see youtube for a billion examples. If you think you're 'safe' because you're not doing something digitally, the ability to record and publish digitally makes your point moot. Want to go back to report cards on paper? It's one photo away from being on Facebook. Think you're in private because you've closed the door to your classroom? The kid videoing you without your knowing will have you on youtube in thirty seconds, and then copies of copies of copies spread across the web.

The idea of privacy might be a byproduct of industrialization - that machines can insulate us from our social context and offer us a kind of freedom people have never really had before. We leapt into digital machines thinking they would further isolate us from each other and preserve the myth of privacy, but the slippery nature of digital information makes a mockery of the myths of privacy and ownership of information.

Revolutions and Dataspheres

When you can propagate information this easily and quickly, and exponentially like a virus, who owns it? When we stumbleupon material intentionally author intent quickly becomes a secondary influence in media. The viral nature of social media sharing pushes information in a way that used to be the job of publication. It's hard to even introduce traditional publishing into this environment. This is such a chaotic, crowdsourced, place, the idea of a professional publisher (itself based on an industrialized limitation around the costs of printing to paper) becomes almost impossible to justify. Editors give way to crowd wisdom and the results are often indistinguishable. An argument might be made for professional publishing, but if crowd sourced material finds ways to approach the quality of traditional media, and ends up forcing it out of the market, what is left for the professional publisher?

Does the author's intended audience matter? That information takes on a life of its own. Its audience is dictated by its accessibility and how effectively it hooks a viewer's attention. In a medium where people are buried in information, caprice replaces intent, information that captures curiosity is gold.

The shear volume of data in this wild-west is so overwhelming that it couldn't possibly be managed by traditional (industrially designed, limited paper media driven) editorial systems. Machines can try to self organize the data they present, and they are getting better and better at it, but crowd sourcing offers a way to keep a human touch in information flow. It lacks the clarity of purpose of professional editorial work, but given enough time it often produces surprisingly similar results. In fact, it often bypasses the political spin and self interest that traditional hierarchies have always put on the limited industrially defined information they claimed ownership over. Democratization of information means it becomes free from manipulation by the former gatekeepers of it.

If you're making content in this brave new world, don't expect to own or even direct it, once it's out, it may end up in unexpected places. If you're not making content, don't worry, everyone one around you is, and it will end up where you don't want it as well. How do companies and individuals survive in this madness? No one is really sure (I have a guess), but one thing is sure, it won't be boring.

FOLLOW UP:
I was listening to CBC's The Current today as they had Jared Cohen, the head of Google Ideas on talking about what is about to happen to the world. Two billion people are online, another five billion are about to join them. We've already seen the internet bypass governments and ferment revolution in the Middle East, and we've seen Western governments struggling with trying to keep control of information with wikileaks and other hactivism. If you have a few minutes, listen to Cohen on The Current. His ideas about where the world is going are radically transformative. The only part I'd question is his assertion that Google is a force of nature in this process, rather than just the most successful parasite.

Corporate Shills

noreply@blogger.com (Timothy King) — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 15:06:00 +0000

I keep saying that...

This is one hot potato on a Sunday morning. #ontsm trended nationally yesterday and attracted a lot of attention, which I suspect was the point. The fact that the attention has a life of its own is probably a concern to people who are used to controlling the message. Ironically, it's trending again today, driven in large part by people who objected to it for various reasons.

I heard the term shill a couple of times this weekend. It's not a commonly used piece of language. My favorite moment was when another one of the attendees (and one of the smartest guys I know) said, "yeah Tim, you gotta be careful we don't turn into corporate shills." He said it with a glint in his eye, knowing that we were all at a paid for event the week after I'd been criticizing another corporate event; nothing like some tasty irony.

If you want an idea of the conversation around what some are calling a controversy, me writing at you won't present it well. Go over to the twitter feed and enjoy the diversity of opinion. Some are worried that this is dividing the PLN. The PLN isn't a single group with a single approach. What you'll see on the twitter feed (and in other blog posts) are what complex discussion and disagreement could look like online. It doesn't have to be modeled on a fifteen year old's idea of flaming. I've disagreed with a number of colleagues on there, and that is fine. I still respect them as professionals, and even if we end up agreeing to disagree, I'm still OK with that. Online communication can be deep, nuanced and even contrary without becoming personally inflammatory It's all good, and I'd much rather the disagreements get aired in public than kept in, or hidden.

This will be resolved, as it was started, transparently and publicly online; the best kind of modelling for a new communication medium I can think of.

When Your Learning Space is a Loud Close Talker

noreply@blogger.com (Timothy King) — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 16:17:00 +0000

Tools provided, time to do

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, it's been a lifelong dream to do it, so I was pretty pumped. This was a challenging learning process for me, going from near zero to basic competence in a weekend.

This weekend I'm at the Ontario Google Summit. I'm an advanced digital technology user, 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 it's a life long hobby as well as a career.

I'm finding myself comparing the two learning experiences. Bike course and Google Summit are both expensive (time and money: both on the weekend, motorbike: $18.33/hr, Summit: $17.83.hr), suggesting an intensive, focused 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 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). Because a 1:1 student/technology ratio was guaranteed, the focus became small group and individual hands-on instruction. This was vital because the bike course had a theory and practical (road) test at the end. If you were unable to demonstrate what you knew by that time you just spend 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 BYOE (equipment), but the most expensive technology (the bike) was provided, and it got 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).

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 learning hand-on skills. You were hands on in a closely watched and personally assisted learning intensive situation all weekend. It was a credible, challenging and learning intensive process (it was also physically exhausting). My taking the course will probably save my life at some point, let alone save 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 to listen.

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) has classrooms designed for a thirty two students. These sessions often have 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 don'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 the Summit, I'm left wondering why educators do this to each other, and how we hope to improve educational technology when we continue to treat it like an ephemeral idea rather than a demonstrable skill.

What is it about professional development that has teachers punishing other teachers in order to learn? Ironically, we've 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.

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 how to do that, is it?

Is The Digital World A Branded World?

noreply@blogger.com (Timothy King) — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 14:46:00 +0000

Who Is Paying For This?

I'm at the Google Apps for Educators Summit in Kitchener on a Saturday morning. I'm a Google fan. I Android, I use UGcloud for school work, I use Google+. I'm aware that all of these services require a means of income or they'll evaporate, hence the Google ads I see on them; I'm OK with that. In a field that can get grabby and greedy, I think Google is more balanced in how it performs its business than most.

As a teacher I'm a bit more cautious about how online tools are framed in terms of learning. This morning's keynote with Jim Sill asked what kind of world do we live in. I suspect the desired answer is a giddy, Silicon Valley logo filled blurt: I live in an Instagram world! I live in a Google world! I live in a Facebook world! When the question turned to how you access this magical world, it revolved around brand names for apps. Tying brands to information offers you a unique way to infect unrelated material (and learning itself) with your logo and corporate image. Google has done this perhaps better than anyone (though Facebook takes a pretty good run at owning friendship).

Hactivism

Is the 21st Century really an information revolution, or a branding revolution? I watched We Are Legion: The Story of Hactivists last night and I'm feeling the dissonance this morning at a conference that is all about companies branding information and funneling it to eager teachers who want to be relevant to their students. I'm not saying yea or nay to this kind of business, I'm just wrestling with the chaotic freedom the information revolution inspired in hactivists last night and the business of information this morning.

If the information revolution really is about a radical change in how information moves (and I think it is), then talking about apps and brands is akin to focusing on the make of hammer you purchased when you're learning carpentry. It would seem strange if, in learning carpentry, the master carpenter went on and on about the brand of hammer they are using. They might mention why they like it briefly, but they wouldn't start calling carpentry "Mastercraft hammer", that would be odd.

Google: a great tool, but be careful not to brand
learning and information with it

People identify with brands, it gives them a sense of belonging, it offers them a ready-made identity in a field where they might not know much else. Excessive brand loyalty is usually the result of ignorance. I'm less interested in the kind of hammer you're selling and more focused on how the wood is being fitted together. I happen to enjoy using my Google hammer when online, I just don't know that I identify an important revolution in human development with their peppy logo, and I'd hope they'd be OK with that.

Do As I Say

noreply@blogger.com (Timothy King) — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 11:37:00 +0000

Reading Shopclass as Soulcraft a second time has me thinking about the similarities between Crawford's and my work histories. I walked out of high school before I finished. I wasn't failing anything, I was just sick of the officious and arbitrary nature of the place. I wanted to learn how to do *things*, but I was being taught how to sit in rows and do what I was told. I'm not very good at that.

"Teaching takes a back seat to the more socially salient task of sorting, and grading becomes more important for its social consequences than for its pedagogical uses." p 146 Shopclass as Soulcraft

From there I bounced around your typical low income jobs (night time security, Canadian Tire) before finding myself an apprenticeship. This I did for a couple of years before finishing up high school and going to university. It only took me until second year to get into trouble at university, brashly questioning the veracity of my professors. The younger profs tended to want to change your life. I have a great deal of trouble buying in to systems, especially when the people advocating them put themselves in the centre of this marvelous new way of thinking. I've always felt that these Rasputiny types aren't in it for mastery, they are in it to be masters. My skepticism in this has been born out in politics as well.

"The master has no need for the psychology of persuasion that will make the apprentice compliant to whatever purposes the master might dream up; those purposes are given and determinate. He does the same work as the apprentice, only better... for the apprentice there is a progressive revelation of the reasonableness of the master's actions." p. 159

When I worked as a Millwright, I had a number of senior mechanics who taught me the ropes. They taught me by doing the job, showing me the job, letting me do the job while they berated me for doing it badly, letting me do it on my own and if it worked, it worked. It was messy, but at no point did any of the senior guys have to tell me they were the experts and I should do what they say, they let the work demonstrate their expertise. I seldom saw that kind of do as I do, not as I say demonstration of expertise in formal education.

Students are always looking for credible teachers.

Many teachers I know don't practice what they teach. Many business teachers teach business, they've never run one. Many art teachers teach art, but don't make any themselves. Many English teachers teach writing, but don't write themselves. You might make the argument that they teach, and that is what they are good at. I'd argue that this is an abstraction of an abstraction, and whatever it is they are teaching, credibility is in question; student engagement necessarily follows (they subconsciously pick up on a teacher's own doubts). If you've ever shown students your own work, they look like meerkats; they long for credible learning, and showing mastery does that.

Last summer I took my additional qualification for computer studies. I worked in I.T. after university, mainly because objective skill sets pay a lot better than abstract ones. Ask anyone with a Masters Degree in the arts or humanities how the job search is going for proof of that. While in university I worked as an auto mechanic, because it paid way better than the knowledge economy job my arts degree was preparing me for. I've always migrated back to those objective skill sets because it seems like credible work. You don't have arbitrary managers downsizing you based on abstraction, personal dynamics or their own towering sense of self importance.

I love seeing those MBA types on the side of the road, their BMW SUV's tire flat, waiting for someone who can *do* something to come and move them along, back into the clouds they live in.

Crawford makes a compelling argument for respecting those skills that we tend to diminish. Objective, experientially gained mastery is often looked down upon by the academic class which itself rules education with a university-clad fist. Objective mastery isn't up for debate, or the charismatic manipulation of office politics by experts in "human management". If you know what you're doing, reality responds, and no amount of talking is going to change that. I miss that kind of traction in education.

Objective Learning, Humility and Real Achievement

noreply@blogger.com (Timothy King) — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 12:24:00 +0000

I'm re-reading Shopclass as Soulcraft, which begins with Matt Crawford asking what value hands-on work offers. He questions the abstractions in which we all traffic (consumerism, academics, politics) in the information age.

There is value in learning about something external from ourselves, something with absolute requirements unlike the everyone's a genius in their own way/student success means everyone passes/let students direct their own learning so they aren't bored mantras you see whirling around edu-speak these days. Crawford is focusing on trade skills in the book, but he's arguing for any skill that has needs beyond whatever criteria we choose to apply to it. This would apply to languages (you either understand and can communicate in it or not), technical skill (you can rebuild that carburetor so that it works, or not), or even sports (you can ski down the hill, or you can't). These kinds of skills get short shrift in schools these days because we can't bend the requirements sufficiently to pass everyone and claim success.

Conestoga's Motorcycle Training

This past weekend I took a motorbike training course. It was exhausting, and very rewarding, and it had a six and a half percent failure rate. Those people paid four hundred and fifty dollars and were unable to complete the requirements of the course in a road test. They left frustrated, and in some cases angry, but in a very real way they demonstrated that they could not control and place the bike. The instructors were transparent and explained the failed components in detail, but people still left early with high emotions. It's hard for people who are used to paying and passing to suddenly find themselves having paid and failed. Doesn't payment equal success? Doesn't consumerism replace competence? It does in many situations, and increasingly in education. Students become clients (especially in post secondary where they are paying directly for it), but even in k-12 tax payers are the clients and success for all is what they are paying for.

It's fair to say the test asked us to demonstrate about 60% of what we'd been asked to do that weekend - it wasn't brutal by any means, but controlling a motorcycle is a tricky business, and some people found the learning curve too steep. Whether it was full body coordination or keeping what you're doing organized in your head, there was a lot to manage in doing this test. The criteria were clearly explained and had been practiced relentlessly for two full days, there were no surprises yet some people were unable to *do* what was required. Alternatives weren't offered, differentiation was self directed - by you - while you were learning on the bike, the instructors offered advice and it was up to you to take it or not. Those that failed generally didn't take it. Riding a bike isn't like driving a car. You're alone on it, you don't have a voice in your ear making suggestions or stepping in with alternate controls, it's all up to you.

The curriculum was demanding and had specific requirements that couldn't be ignored. It was physically exhausting and required twenty four hours of your time over a single weekend, early wakeups and hours outside in very changeable April weather. When someone showed up late on Sunday they were dropped out of the course (and seemed utterly flabbergasted at the situation); 100% attendance was required, and in order to see success you had to be there mentally, physically and emotionally. There was a high correlation between failures and people who were always the last to show up. As Crawford mentions in his book, learning an objective skill requires a degree of submission and humility to the task at hand - something that we ironically iron out of schools in order to demonstrate success.

For the rest of us, marks were given and certificates (which include a big drop in insurance costs as well as a direct pass to the next level of licensing) were given out in a ceremony. People who got perfect scores were mentioned, and applauded. Everyone still in that room realized how much work they'd put into their success that weekend. But they'd put in more than effort, they'd also been willing to be taught, to check their pride at the door and learn something challenging and new from the ground up.

There is an important difference between submission and humility. One can be humble and it enhances self worth, and allows learning in the oldest educational context we possess. Submission is about the power of the strongest, humility is about an honest awareness of one's circumstance. A master at a skill is honoured when their apprentice is humble before the task because they are receptive and teachable, and they are also respecting the skill that the master possesses. That humility allows you develop perhaps the most powerful learning tool available to us, self-discipline, which in turn grants the serious student the ability to master skills that would otherwise defeat a dilettante. You assume the mantle of a serious, even professional student when you are able to apply self-discipline gained through the humble acquisition of meaningful skill. In school we constantly seek ways to amateurize learning in order to satisfy a Taylorist economic logic. We try to streamline and ease student passage, forgiving absence and inattention in a misguided effort to generate successful data. Any statistic you've ever seen about education has nothing to do with learning.

This sounds like throw back language, especially in light of the MBA edu-babble popular today. Students teaching themselves in order to stay engaged? Best not done around a band-saw, as Crawford suggests. Students able to 'pass' with a 50% average? Or with weeks of absenteeism? They've hardly mastered anything. Students given multiple avenues to success with targets that get closer the more they miss? This learning is empty and pedantic, and students recognize that. Reward comes with real effort, and real failure. Guaranteeing success for all? The surest way to a systemic failure of learning.

I hurt all over from this past weekend, but it was profoundly satisfying. I worked hard, didn't treat it like a joke, gave it my full attention and realized early on that the people instructing know so much more than I do that it would behoove me to be humble before their skill and experience. I think that humility is what led to my success. That success may very well save my life one day. Engagement was never an issue.

I won't see much of that humility and openness to learning in the diploma factory I'm returning to today, though I'll try and try to put reality's demands in front of my students and let them be frustrated by it. It's real success when you overcome an obstacle and figure something out, especially if you experienced failure in the process. Not so much when people systemically remove obstacles to keep nearly inert objects in motion. As self discipline erodes and humility dries up, the process of learning itself begins to break down.

Are you teaching curriculum today? Or are you teaching how students should passively pass through the Kafkaesque education factory in which they find themselves?

Being taught how to actually do something with objective demands has made me proud, humble and grateful for the skillset I have as a learner. When I see opportunities to approach learning with humility and develop self-discipline missing from so much of what we do in school, it makes it seem an empty, even dangerous place.

Meet Your Maker

noreply@blogger.com (Timothy King) — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 19:41:00 +0000

www.arduino.cc

I'm working my way through my second semester with grade nines in computer studies. I've tried to bring as much 'shop' as I can into computer studies. My background was in I.T., so getting into the nitty gritty of electronics has been an expansion of my craft which I've enjoyed as much as the students seem to.

Using Arduino microcontrollers we bridge the gap between hardware and software and get students comfortable with the idea of building circuits as well as controlling it with code. This year I've also gotten a Raspberry Pi up and running as well as building dozens of desktops. A resurgent maker culture has made electronics much more accessible and customizable; it's a good time to be teaching computers.

Maker Culture

This semester we've been pulling apart broken electronics and reusing digital displays, microphones and other components in our Arduino Frankenstein creations. Some of it will work, some of it won't, but the process will make Makers of many of the students.

The real fear in using technology is that many users don't have the faintest idea how things work. When it breaks there isn't a frame of reference of where to begin, fixing anything seems impossible. After breaking apart their first digital clock, or radio, or electronic game, students begin to recognize the components because they're already familiar with the bits and pieces having used them to assemble a dozen Arduino projects already. With the mystery gone, they begin to grasp the power their minds and hands have.

I'm re-reading Matthew Crawford's Shopclass as Soulcraft. It's such a complex read, with so many ideas packed into each page, a second run through will do me good. If you're an educator, and you can take some well intended criticism, reading the first couple of chapters will challenge many of the assumptions we wrongly found current educational theory on. I imagine most educators won't find the criticism comfortable, no matter how well intentioned.

I'm about to get my first motorcycle and I've found myself casting about, trying to figure out who I can get to maintain it for me. A chapter in and this ex-mechanic is getting his hands on a shop manual and doing it himself. One of the reasons I want to begin riding is to develop a closer relationship with the machinery I use. The plastic covered, warrantied cars I drive don't do that. The nakedness of a motorcycle begs for it; I'm looking forward to that quiet, focused mind driving busy hands.

There is something inherently valuable in being able to fix what you use. I've never had to argue for the value of what we do in computer studies, the learning has inherent worth, is immediately useful, and applicable in a surprisingly wide range of situations. From the insides of an operating system to the flow of electrons around a circuit, these students develop a familiarity and comfort level with something that most people are more than happy to use in blissful ignorance (until it breaks). The tactile nature of the work also draws in even the most reticent. Working with your hands, making something real work through trial and error, offers an experience missing from much of academia. Crawford's philosophical attack on the globalized knowledge economy happens every day in my classroom.

Many of these students will move on to other interests in other fields, but none of them will ever again be at the mercy of their ignorance while working with a computer. I'll have to paste rubrics and marks over all this to make it credible to the establishment, but the moment a student who has been whacking his head against his own bad wiring for half an hour realizes what he's done and fixes it himself, he has developed a tiny bit of independence, and perhaps realized that paying attention is a powerful ally. Learning shouldn't be frustration free, if it were, it wouldn't mean anything. With minds and hands engaged in a battle with realistic demands, the rewards are hard to quantify in a mid-term mark.

Stay On Target

noreply@blogger.com (Timothy King) — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 16:10:00 +0000

Stay on target... stay on target!

You want to talk about extracurriculars? About how teachers should do them for the love of their job? How they should sacrifice their own family lives so that they can 'save the children!' The politics around this are thick, and they do a great job of hiding the real problem.

Education isn't about extracurriculars, extracurriculars are about education. Royan Lee, the education ninja, asked the question that got right to this during TVO's The Agenda, last week. He then blogged about it, which might help all those people so tied up in the politics that they've lost the plot.

We're not in education to enrich those students wealthy enough to enjoy extracurriculars. I didn't do a lot of extracurriculars in school - I had to go to work every day after school from the age of 10 onwards. If you think you're saving the kids by coaching basketball after school, you're only saving the ones that can afford it. The fact that extracurriculars usually cost money (bus costs, equipment, etc) many families can't manage further underlines this unfairness.

Education should offer everyone equal opportunity. It should be the most liberal of social exercises; opportunity for all, regardless of socio-economic status. There is an inherent classism in extracurriculars, but I'm sure all those passionate teachers who are rushing to pick up ECs again don't want to think about that, they just want to win a few games and demonstrate their 'passion'.

The teacher as evangelist isn't helpful in any of this. The martyr teacher only wants to emotionally show how much they care. As a parent, this isn't what I want from my son's teachers. Passion is great, but if that's all you've got, then quite frankly, you're creepy, and ineffective. I'm looking for my son's teachers to be professionals who are always looking to improve their practice. If they are so thick as to believe that doing extracurriculars doesn't impact their ability to maximize classroom learning then they have already demonstrated a lack of understanding around the use of limited resources in a time sensitive environment. Zoe mentioned this in the Agenda show, but was quickly shot down by edu-babble around 'best practices'. There are no 'best practices'. Teaching is a constant development of a very complicated process. When I see teachers throwing out edu-babble to simplify our work and support political motives, it strikes me as a professional failure.

The Spicy Learning Blog

Royan's blog post raises the question of what is so special about ECs. If the list to the left are what make ECs so valuable to students, why aren't these things happening in classrooms? The target of education should be learning. If ECs offer advantages, why aren't they being integrated everywhere?

As I said in the comments of his great post, the education ship is rusty and running poorly. It's covered in barnacles like extracurriculars, standardized testing, reduced professional development, government and union politics, social opinion, poor teacher standards and weak administrative development. While Royan is asking why we don't fix the ship, the other teachers on the show instead go on at length about how important the barnacles are.

Extra curriculars shouldn't be extra. We shouldn't be waiting until after school to offer this enriched learning environment to the few students who can or will take advantage of it. We need to fix the damn boat, not get wrapped up in the union/government politics.

If that Agenda episode showed me anything, it's that teachers are just as caught up in the politics of distraction as the media, government and public are. Stop crying about what the rich kids are missing out on and integrate what makes extracurriculars so fantastic into a public school system everyone can benefit from.

Thank goodness Royan Skywalker got his proton torpedoes on target.

Digital House of Mirrors

noreply@blogger.com (Timothy King) — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 18:35:00 +0000

The digital house of mirrors we all live in.

It's early days, ECOO isn't until next October, and I'm reticent to say what I'm going to present on months ahead of time. The digital learning landscape can change quite significantly in eight months.

My previous ECOO presentations have followed an interesting arc, from philosophy to specific action. My first go with Dancing in the Datasphere talked about fundamental changes happening to us as we transition to a data driven world. The mini-lab followed a year later, the idea there being that we diversify technology in order to develop true digital fluency in students. Last year the final step was to work toward a digital skills continuum. Only by integrating a developing skill set into curriculum will we begin producing students who have the technical skills necessary to survive and thrive in the digital age.

That trajectory, no doubt pushed by my transition to computer studies from English, had me looking at developing greater student familiarity with computing tools because I see a great deal of ignorance in the 'digital natives' I'm teaching every day, but that focus was technically biased.

For those of us who have lived as adults through the last twenty years of technological revolution, we sometimes forget where we've come from because we're so engrossed with where we are. For ECOO this time round I'm thinking about what technology is demanding of us as people. Our selves are being stretched and amplified in ways they never have before. Nick Carr's The Shallows puts us on a pretty stark trajectory towards idiocy with what is happening to us. The digitization of the self stretches us flat, making continuity of thought impossible and turning us all into distracted, simplistic cogs in a consumerist machine designed to turn us all into the lowest common denominator; none of us any smarter than our smartphones.

With the advent of social media we suddenly find ourselves existing in multiple places at once. Our self is no longer geographically focused. Our influence spreads across the internet. We are able to affect change in people and places formerly unconnected to us. The people we communicate with (albeit in a minimalist way) are far flung and many. The people we spend deep, attentive time with are fewer and diminished.

Our digital selves are perceived in many different ways. The aforementioned digital native tends to not differentiate between online and real world action. They often consider social media as just another conversation they are having, and are then shocked when something said publicly is responded to by the public. The generation of kids (our students) growing up in this ongoing social experiment never look at privacy settings, have little idea of the differences between social networks and tend to broadcast online what is on their minds in much the same way they would while hanging out with friends. The veil between the physical and the digital, between public and private, is all but non existent to them.

Digital Footprints & Always On Teacher Faces

A more professional approach to managing the online self is to adopt marketing theory and develop your online brand. Companies and celebrities approach social media in this manner, often using marketing firms to manage and run their social media presence. I can't help but think that this lack of genuine presence games the system and ultimately fails. It's exhausting to maintain if you can't hire marketing monkeys to run it for you, and ultimately, it's fake. I'd much rather read my favourite author's tweets from his own fingers than follow what someone trying to sell me something thinks I should be seeing. Many teachers fall into this trap when tentatively stepping into online presences. Spending your weeknights and weekends being mister or missus Teacher is nothing more than working all the time, forever.

The Cult of Done

If there is a positive future to a digitally enhanced self I'd hope it is through a genuine sense of self expression. We should be aware of what the tools are and how they work, and then we should use them to empower our access to information, our ability to mine deeply into details, to collaborate and develop community, to share our own creativity, interests and sense of discovery. The technology should not only allow us to do these things, it should be pushing us to maximize our effectiveness as thinkers and doers. Any technology that produces distracted idiots will doom the people using it. Evolution should still be eliminating the irrelevant, even in the digital realm.

It's early days in this sea change of how we deal with a digitally enhanced self. In the future the hybrid intelligence of a digitized human will evolve toward a higher order of effectiveness. Those made useless by digital tools will, much like those weakened by an inability to read, become marginalized. Those able to harness information literacy will enjoy those advantages. Those who ignore it will find themselves increasingly unable to compete.

What that effective digital self looks like in students, in teachers, in people in general is where I'm currently thinking about pushing my research this year. How we adapt to these changes now will establish effective habits as the technology rapidly spins out of its infancy and into maturity. There is no better time to consider what a digitally enhanced human being should look like than now, when we're in the process of inventing the very idea.

The idea of Web3.0, or intelligent/self organizing information suggests that the future of digitized humanity will inherently push toward greater effectiveness. The opportunity to be passive or stupid in a digital context will actually work against what the data wants to do for you; you'll learn in spite of yourself, you'll know what you need to know when you need to know it - the data itself will ensure this. It would be interesting to show the evolution of digital humanity over the past three decades, and where it might be going in the next twenty years.

The era of stupid/passive information is ending. The people that it has created will have to adapt to technology that demands more of them, or risk being made irrelevant by it.

Higher Ground

noreply@blogger.com (Timothy King) — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 09:31:00 +0000

AMPA: redemocratizing OSSTF

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Subtle Art Of Learning

noreply@blogger.com (Timothy King) — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 15:26:00 +0000

The transmission of knowledge between people has always been predicated on personal relationships. We come pre-wired to learn, and the way we've always done this is through a mentoring process be it master and apprentice or teacher and student. This deep human experience goes well beyond cultural norms. No matter where you are in the world or in human history, the art of learning is founded on this relationship between people.

Schooling systems look to standardize education so they can more easily assess their management of it, it has little to do with effective learning. In an educational world of standardized marking, testing and curriculum building, the goal is to remove personal connections in favour of more easily quantifiable and less effective teaching tools.

On top of the system pressuring education from a data collection/ease of management perspective, we also find ourselves in a surge of technological advancement that seems determined to insert itself into every aspect of human behavior, including that most sacred of human endeavours: learning. This digitization of human relationships can offer a wider range of connection, but it also tends to flatten those connections. Online relationships lack the dimensions of personal relationships. Anyone who has met online acquaintances in person has experienced this sudden deepening of previously shallow online connection.

I've seen technology do magical things in teaching, and I've long be a proponent of pushing technologically assisted experimentation as far and as fast as it will go, but I've never thought to swap technology for the personalized process of teaching and learning, yet that is what I see many people suggesting.

Whether it's a rabid excitement (usually managerial or worse, financial in scope) over MOOCs or the latest gadget that will 'revolutionize' how we do things, or simply the drive to make students the centre of all things and reduce teachers to facilitators, there seems a constant pressure to depersonalize and grossly simplify the relationships that are the ecosystem for the art of deep, human learning.

If you see learning as the transmission of information then all these gadgets and systemic processes must seem like magic bullets that will solve all problems, that belief is probably selling your books. With good management, letting students learn whatever strikes them as interesting, and enough money for toys, you'll be able to educate everyone for almost nothing! Oh, the efficiency.

The problem with learning is that it tends to be very non-linear. A good teacher calls this a teachable moment - adapting to an unexpected circumstance in order to teach a memorable lesson. These lessons often appear to have nothing to do with the curriculum or even the subject you're teaching. A good teacher will bend to the needs of the moment, giving the learning momentum, and keeping in mind the development of bigger ideas in a context lost on students.

A couple of years ago we made a Minecraft server in our computer engineering class. One of the students quietly spent his lunches over the semester building up enough dynamite in the game to equal the Hiroshima bomb - he'd learned about it in his history class. At the end of the semester he announced that he was going to set it off. Everyone was freaked out, they'd spent a lot of time building things on that server and were afraid the virtual world would be destroyed, or worse, the server would crash. He set it off, the class watched the server churn through the processing, and finally it rendered a massive crater. We spent some time in a computer engineering class quietly looking at historical websites of Hiroshima after that. We eventually got to examining what happened with the server trying to process the blast, but not at the cost of the obvious historical and human context in front of us.

In my second year of teaching I was doing Macbeth with some grade 11s. I happened to mention that my parents were in the middle of a divorce, which prompted an impromptu round table by the distressingly high number of kids in the class who were either going through something similar or already had. Learning about how to deal with being a child of a divorce by more experienced people (who happened to be my students) demonstrates the two way nature of that teacher/student relationship.

I'm not saying there shouldn't be some structure to our school system, and I'm not saying that technology and addressing student directed learning isn't important. What I am saying is that learning is a complex process that develops most effectively through meaningful human relationships. The more dimensionally complex that relationship is, the better the learning. It is often non-linear, and at its best, it is predicated on a level of trust between teacher and student that allows for exploration and development in unexpected directions. The artistic nature of learning must drive (North American) education managers around the bend.

Human learning, this effective use of relationships we've evolved to teach and learn from each other, is best served by setting high standards for teachers and then giving them discretion in teaching. Micromanagement is a sure way to kill the teachable moment. Standardized testing offers simple lies to a complex truth. Ontario has also found new and interesting ways to damage this relationship in the last year. It's remarkably easy to interfere with and poison the learning relationship.

Technology isn't a solution, it's, at its best, an aid, and one that should be used to support rather than replace proven pedagogy. When combined with the hard capitalist bent of most educational technology companies (themselves happy partners with US driven for profit charter schools), effective learning takes a back seat to profit margins, market gain, fictionalized standardized testing scores and quarterly statements. Technology offers some interesting opportunities in education, but it should never be at the cost of learning.

Systemic micro-management only serves accountants. If you're managing education you need to consider how best to improve the quality of your teachers on a macro scale, and that quality isn't based on their student's standardized test scores.

If you recall your moments of deepest learning you'll recognize how subtle and profound the circumstances around your eureka moments are. A good teacher is more like a gardener than a source of information, creating the circumstances that lead everyone involved in the learning process to greater realizations. We recall the teachers who create and share these fecund moments fondly because we recognize, on a fundamental level, how they are helping us realize our own potential in a uniquely personal and human way.

Some other philosophy of learning entries:

Elearning & the student/teacher relationship: personal contact in an increasingly edtech isolated world
What is learning?: what we are pre-wired to do
Speaking with dead voices: how your best teachers taught you to teach

Rumour & Innuendo In The Age of Information

noreply@blogger.com (Timothy King) — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 13:32:00 +0000

TVO's Agenda did a diligent job this week of fact checking following the round table discussion they had with teachers. In retrospect, what this discussion did was bypass the political spin of teacher unions and the government and give Ontarians an insight into how teachers themselves are seeing this on-going mess. What I found unnerving was how insular and, in some cases, inaccurate our thinking is.

In post-show fact checking it was shown that some of the commonly held beliefs by teachers were not exactly true. The bankruptcy lawyer story had been circulated out of the union all year. Paikin seemed surprised that all the teachers there knew of it, but it was loudly repeated by our unions as a way of framing this disagreement prior to 115 coming in. In fairness, these lawyers do deal with bankruptcies and they were unfamiliar with education negotiations and were aggressive in their demands, but to call them bankruptcy lawyers shows a use of absolutist language aimed at polarizing union members in order to make them feel victimized. It's this kind of manipulation that makes me uneasy.

That the KW bi-election was a reason for the ridiculous piece of legislation called Bill 115 appears to be a matter of record. That Kathleen Wynn can say it was a cynical, Machiavellian move to win a bi-election while having voted for it still makes me question her credibility and these 'social justice' values she seems to have branded herself with. In the meantime our unions are still funding the OLP, even as they encourage us to demonstrate in front of their leadership convention. I'm not sure who is on what side any more. With four parties involved in this (the provincial government, grassroots union members, union provincial executive who seem out of touch with the members they've tried to direct, and school boards), it's murky at best.

The followup research on the sick days/leave issue indicates just how deeply the political spin of this has cut teachers.

"...it's strange that they would seem to think the province would just leave them in the lurch in terms of short-term disability. It either shows a colossal failure of communication on behalf of the government or on behalf of the union to its members. It certainly illustrates that the level of distrust of teachers with the government is extremely high, which is just very, very sad."

The negativity itself around 115 created such momentum that the provincial executives who were pushing it suddenly found their members turning down contracts they wanted passed. Executive was building up this fervor as a bargaining tool, but the anger was genuine, and now the rifts between teachers, the government and internally in their unions are deeper than ever. There hasn't been a lot of honesty with how this has been managed. How a teacher couldn't feel manipulated in this by all the parties involved is beyond me. Trying to get a clear eye on the issues is almost impossible with all of these giants hurling boulders at each other.

I was ardently against Bill 115, I'm still astonished that it got passed - it is one of the most offensive pieces of 'law' ever put into the books. I was more than willing to go to the wall over fighting it, I still believe we should have walked immediately when it was passed. As one of the wiser heads in my school said in a staff meeting, "it's a bad law, you fight bad laws or we lose everything."

Watching those teachers on the Agenda line up behind the vitriolic rhetoric of our unions when I find union interests focused on the political self interest of certain (older) members makes me question much of what I'm hearing. I certainly no longer feel represented by the people who lead us, and while I don't agree with all of the fact checking done, it does make me question the accuracy of what I'm being told.

I find myself a teacher who is very uncomfortable with how this has been handled, the mess in my own district aside. The Agenda's round table only emphasized for me how insulated and groomed our thinking around the turbulence in Ontario education is.

Refresh 2

noreply@blogger.com (Timothy King) — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 17:11:00 +0000

@banana29 got me thinking about the computer refresh going on at her school last week. We're in the same process at my school.

In my case I'm the head of computers and trying to focus on keeping as many computers as possible in student hands. We waste a lot of machines at teacher desks to do online attendance and check email, work that could easily happen on an alternate, much cheaper and efficient device than a full desktop system, but even those changes would resolve into a desperate attempt to keep things the same.

I had a couple of my seniors do an inventory of the school. We have over 300 desktops. Each costs about $1500 when you factor in purchasing and insurance on them. We have close to half a million dollars of desktop computers in our building, and every year we squirm to keep as many as we can as we are refreshed down. If we were to drop the cost of those desktops, radically reduce the number of printers in the building (and the subsequent tens of thousands of dollars we spend each year on printing), and remove local server storage, we could easily produce over $500 for every staff member and student in the building; more than enough for a device per person, even if those devices aren't attached to specific people. Some classes with Chromebooks, some with Windows, some with Macs, some on Linux, some tablets, some laptops, some BYOD. A startlingly wide ecosystem of technology that encourages broad familiarity with many digital tools.

Broad Based Digital Skills Development

We status quo our edtech because change is hard, and we've borrowed an educationally uncomplimentary business model of I.T.. We fight to keep antiquated desktops because many teachers barely know how to use a ready made lab, let alone what to do with a variety of hardware with various operating systems and software on them. With digital fluency removed from them by board I.T., many teachers have learned helplessness. Those that struggle against this forced ignorance often disappear into the cloud in order to avoid the stifling local computer environment... a choking environment that should be founded on learning, not on ease of management or paranoia.

I'd love to spring us free from the nineties corporate I.T. model we've been slavishly following and begin pushing widespread familiarity and fluency on digital tools of all shapes and sizes. I dream of an experimental, curiosity driven access to technology that encourages timely, relevant learning for our students.

I fear we'll end up finishing another year still running Windows XP on five year old desktops with an increasingly irrelevant OSAPAC software image. I suspect I'm going to escape into the cloud again to escape that choking simplicity, all while playing the keep-the-desktop-game on the management side.

Refresh 1

noreply@blogger.com (Timothy King) — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 20:33:00 +0000

Computer refreshes approach! An ideal opportunity to reconsider all the bad habits we have in educational technology! @banana29 had the following questions for her admin which might help frame a discussion around where we might go with our edtech:

• What are the conditions under which students in 2013 learn best?

• How will these conditions change by 2033?

• How does the way we organize our school computers resemble/support those learning conditions?

• What are the competencies/values that we want our students to learn?

• How does the way we organize our school computers affect those competencies/values?

Some interesting ideas there. What can we do to present relevant learning situations to our students (how can we begin to join the disparities between the information rich world in which they live outside with the information poor one we present them with in class? What trends are we following into the future? How to we develop useful learning habits in digitally swamped students? How can we organize our digital tools to that optimize learning?

These questions lead to some other questions around digitized pedagogy: how can digitization assist in learning? How can it hurt learning? What does good pedagogy look like in a digitally enhanced learning environment? Between the 'gee-wiz ipad' crowd and the 'it's paper and lectures or nothing' crowd, there has been precious little consideration of how the digital revolution we're in the middle of is affecting learning. The forces trying to monetize the process further muddy these waters.

These big questions lead to some awkward realizations. What occurs to me first is that we have adopted educational technology following a business I.T. model rather than pushing for an educational focus. The private businesses that circle education hoping for a quick sale are quick to fill educational CTO positions in school boards. Put another way, find a CTO in Ontario who was ever a teacher. Education has different goals than business. Modelling our I.T. on a business model has created foundations that lead educational technology as a whole in the wrong direction.

A good place to start would be to introduce Chief Technology Officers in school boards who are actually educators. Another good place to start is to begin building educational technology in terms of skills development in a broad sense across many platforms with a focus on general literacy and responsibility of access rather than the paranoid, closed model that has been adopted from private business I.T.. Without a continuum of digital learning that produces students familiar with a variety of tools and responsible for their own access to and presentation of information baked into curriculum, we'll continue to graduate digital serfs instead of citizens capable of working effectively in digitally networked workplaces.

Alanna asks some good questions that need serious consideration by edtech managers. I consider my side of things in Refresh 2.

Ghostly Distractions & Digital Doppelgängers

noreply@blogger.com (Timothy King) — Sat, 19 Jan 2013 14:50:00 +0000

Cyborgs are all around us now, and
they have trouble finishing a thought

If you popped into a current classroom from any time before the last five years you'd think your students had gone mad, or were in need of an exorcist. Being unfamiliar with the rapid miniaturization and personalization of electronics, you'd be left wondering what it is they are fiddling with on their navels, why they seem to be constantly thinking about something else, and why when you walk into your next class the students there already know what happened to pretty much everyone else in the school (and the ones who skipped) last period.

I was talking to a colleague the other night about this sense of personal dislocation in students, though digital vertigo isn't a student only issue. The teacher in question won't even make a Facebook account because he believes (perhaps rightly) that it means the internets will know where he is all the time. He was telling me about a difficult student who was giving him a hard time in class. This teacher has a great rapport with students so many other students leapt in and argued his point for him. Afterwards the difficult student in question seemed overly despondent and would not re-engage in discussion. I suggested that the disagreement in class may not have ended in the classroom but had become virtualized. The idea that invisible forces were emanating from and reflecting back into the classroom was quite upsetting to this teacher.

The fluidity with which teens pass back and forth between physical and virtual space make them very hard to read, at many moments in their day they are literally in two places at once. That uncommunicative student may still be getting hammered on Facebook long after the physical confrontation is over; digital echoes of a verbal disagreement. The moods so common in teens anyway are amplified by these invisible, always on, invasive connections; their volatile minds are wired to always-on drama.

There was a time when you could read a class by the students you had in it. Relationships were obvious and management challenging but straightforward. If you had the nitro and the glycerin in the room you could separate them, you can't do that any more. You can't do that if you move them to a different class... or a different school. I've had students who moved up to our small town to get out of the GTA and away from a bad influence only to be intimately connected with them on Facebook the moment anyone's back is turned. Always on, always connected, always being emotionally amplified - that is the modern, connected high school student.

This creates some interesting new psychology in the classroom. That student who used to feel isolated for their poor behavior in class might be experiencing any number of unseen influences. Instead of being able to modify poor behavior by moving a student, or placing them in classes where their bad influences are not, they are always connected. Many of those connections may very well be morally supporting or even inciting them; they never feel isolated in their bad attitude and are always supported in their beliefs, even if it is hurting them. In that sense you might argue for a lack of emotional growth because you never have a chance to get free of a clique or bad influence. In the other direction you've got the example above where a group of students may easily create an ad hoc digital mob and go after someone. This can happen so quickly and quietly that it's almost impossible to consider let alone manage.

Working with the emotionality of high school students is challenging at the best of times, but with the drama-net of Facebook fully embedded in every student's mind, administration struggles with the more obvious cyber-bullying while the subtle ghostly influences go unnoticed, thought every teacher faces them daily.

As students migrate to Twitter without realizing the very public nature of it (many think it similar to texting), coercive social media becomes even more widely broadcast than just between Facebook friends. Suddenly we have social media as means of large scale slander, creating influence well beyond the intent of the ignorant person thinking their tweets are private.

This is a new social situation that affects early adopters while others remain entirely ignorant. Many teachers don't consider it at all because they have no experience with social media yet it increasingly influences the students in their classrooms. Kids whose minds are in many places at once, constantly being emotionally tweaked and influenced by social media inputs, not knowing how to manage this pervasive influence in an effective way.

Digital literacy considers media fluency, collaboration and critical thinking, but the extent to which digital media is influencing the minds of our students isn't really on the table. Their inability to manage their own access (watch a student, they are Pavlovian in their use of social media, they can't self manage) is only one part of the problem. In the emotionally charged world of high school, social media pours gasoline on that fire, making teaching a challenge in ways that it never was before.

***
had to add a wee update. It's Monday morning and the internet meme from the weekend that all the grade 10s are talking about is of a girl and her feminine hygiene product on youtube. It sets new (low) standards on what teens are willing to do to get seen online.

This race to the bottom in terms what teens are able to subject themselves to is radically changing how they approach both sexuality and social norms in general. Teens nowadays have seen things that would have been virtually impossible for them to see even a decade ago, and this is entirely a digitized influence.

You really don't want even think about what teens do for truth or dare nowadays, they've seen things that will make you ill, they dare each other to. The entire nasty world is available to them and influencing them moment to moment. Yet another way that online influence creates a classroom unlike any before.

What Do You Take With You?

noreply@blogger.com (Timothy King) — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 15:51:00 +0000

Part 1: What do you take with you into the future?

We live in a time of radical transformative social change. One generation's experience is markedly different from the next. How we communicate with each other dictates our social structures, and we are in the middle of a communications revolution. In times like this many traditions and habits fall by the wayside. If you have to cling to an ideal in order to ensure it survives this sort of disruptive evolution, what ideal do you cling to? After hearing a colleague describe themselves as unionist, and experiencing my own fall from grace, union isn't what I choose to protect at all costs. In fact, like many other institutions founded at the dawn of industry, unions and local boards are beginning to appear less and less able to deal effectively with our times.

I didn't become a teacher to support unions, I became a teacher to support educational excellence and hone my profession. Protecting education means protecting educational workers, but protecting educational workers does not necessarily mean protecting education. I was initially hesitant to become active in my union because of their blanket coverage of all members, regardless of competence. The occupy movement and the radicalization of economics in the past few years pushed me into action; at least unions offered protection from this short sighted narcissism. So many people are happy to give away their rights in order to dream of being rich while being made serfs. My union offered me a political mechanism to fight that idiocy.

I don't join things easily, I tend to skepticism, but OSSTF claimed moral high ground on so many issues that I couldn't help but become a believer. What's not to like about an organization that claims democracy and is founded on the idea that wealth should be fairly divided and members should consider the common good before their own?

When times were good accounts were managed well. Grievances were dealt with, expectations of the membership were minimal, people focused on the important work at hand. In the past year we've come face to face with a government that appears to have no moral centre whatsoever, and a public that is more than willing to be lied to in order to become incensed with us. The resultant mess has me asking some hard questions about the antiquated organizations involved in our education system.

There is a lot of history tangled up in how we manage education in Ontario, and I don't think it's creating a transparent, representative system. We've got local boards that don't actual bargain with their employees anymore, we've got local unions that don't actually bargain for their members anymore, we've got a College of Teachers who got chucked into the mix the last time a psychotic government decided to play fast and loose with education, we've got a Minister of Education who has more in common with Mussolini than John A. MacDonald, and carnage across the province with strike days, almost strike days, crippled extracurriculars and frustrated citizens on all sides. If you think this has been well managed by any of the combatants involved, you must be crazy. I argue that this is the result of a tangled, historical organizational mess, and it's time to move Ontario's education system out of a Victorian mindset.

In what follows I'm considering alternatives that actually protect education workers (what we have now obviously does not), and puts the focus on our profession rather than the antiquated political structures around it.

Part 2: Behind The Times

The stumbling approach to this last round of bargaining suggests that unions are having real trouble dealing with twenty first century realities. From social media causing a surprise grassroots movement that bypassed provincial executive plans to a stubborn refusal to change their ancient communications habits, unions in general and mine in particular have looked like confused Victorian gentlemen at a rave.

Local boards, like union locals are in even more trouble. They have been made redundant, looking on as the provincial ministry directly bargains with provincial union organizations. There is no local bargaining in Ontario any more. With so many vestigial political interests around the table it's no wonder that Ontario's education bargaining has been a mess this year. Perhaps it's time for a historical cleanup.

I'm now wondering what Ontario education would look like without local political interests like boards and unions, assuming that we can find other ways to protect this vital resource in a centrally bargained environment. The old players certainly aren't protecting quality of education, in this past round of bargaining they haven't done anything at all except watch as provincial heavy weights speak over their heads.

This questioning began when @banana29 shared this article that questions the value of unions in Ontario education. If you can get past Wente's heavy handed right wing propaganda in the first few paragraphs, the piece asks some hard questions about the role of unions in maintaining status quo in an education system that struggles to keep up with our times. Her intent is to dismantle public education and infect it with market interests (it is the Globe & Mail), my intentions are quite different.

Part 3: Wente Article Response:

Technology In Education and institutional drag

Wente makes some pretty simplistic arguments for technology in education. If you think Khan Academy is the future of education then you're about as pedagogically sophisticated as a donkey. Having said that, technological implementation in education has been slowed at every turn by boards and unions, both of whom have frantically told teachers not to use new communications mediums to communicate with and teach students. Running at the speed of the slowest adopters of technology is no way to run a relevant education system.

Technology being used in classrooms lags years behind what students experience everywhere else, and doesn't begin to prepare students for the rapidly changing world they are graduating into. Teachers struggle to engage students on antiquated software and hardware, and no one wants to consider what a teaching job beyond concrete walls looks like. It behooves the unions and boards to keep school in the classroom where the have a lock on how to manage education as a production line. Ask any teacher who has done elearning how their non-standard work hours become a real problem to both boards and unions.

Not only does this luddite thinking infect the classroom, but also the management of both unions and boards. Communication with members remains firmly stuck in the last century. Video meetings? Shared online resources? Social media? These things are adopted hesitantly or actively discouraged by parochial thinking. Teachers using them then bypass local roadblocks because that is what modern communications are capable of. From unions trying to control a message to boards trying to limit student access to communications - information is flowing around these road blocks on smartphones and social media, yet they don't realize how irrelevant their control mechanisms have become.

Instead of encouraging teachers to experiment with new technology, local interests tend to parrot panicky, unfounded broadcast media ideas about them. We are ruled by ignorance and paranoia when it comes to technology in education. The question is, how do we create an education system that can experiment and advance at a reasonable rate without being slowed by the insular thinking of its slowest adopters?

Can you protect education without a union?

In spite of its shortcomings Wente's article did make me wonder, what would education look like in a future without a union/board system? I speculate on this not as a means to dismantle, demean or weaken the profession. I am under no illusions, teaching needs to be protected from short sighted business-think, but after watching McGuinty's Liberals gut years of collective bargaining I wonder if unions are the right social mechanism to protect us anymore. Could education prosper and even improve without union/board paradigms?

Centralizing control is happening already. Modern communications will continue to force this change whether unions or boards like it or not. If we're going to evolve from a parochial, historically restrained system to something adaptive and forward thinking, we need to think of a new way to organize and manage the vital social service that is education in Ontario.

Part 4: Education: an essential service

Vital is exactly what education is. A first rate education system means that all the other essential services (police, medical, fire) have less to do because the populace isn't feral and desperate. A properly run education system means the vast majority of the population comes closer to expressing their potential. It means that socioeconomic status isn't the prime breeder of crime and poor health; failure is less an excuse of circumstance. Good education means less people in jails, greater economic output and interested, active citizens powering our democracy. In this context, how could anyone not see education as an essential service?

Education should be declared an essential service. This automatically guarantees third party arbitrated contracts, which would mean that bargaining isn't the wild west that it is now, and governments couldn't simply bypass it with cynical, undemocratic laws like Bill 115. It would also mean that militant unions aren't necessary because the system in place would be implicitly fairly bargained.

Arbitrated bargaining would also take the unionized target off teachers' backs and let them adopt a more professional aspect in the public eye. Education workers would still be protected, but the system itself would be the protection. Depending on militant unions hard bargaining with local boards didn't work and has evolved into unrepresentative (OECTA) or misrepresentative (OSSTF) provincial bargaining. Our process of bargaining is a broken, divisive, old fashioned habit that antagonizes the general public, vilifies our profession and makes hay for cynical governments.

Part 5: Freeing ourselves from history

local vs. provincial bargaining

When union locals used to bargain individually with their school boards each area's special interests were baked into contracts. This made sense because of Ontario's vast size and the unique and isolated nature of its many settlements. If you travel around Ontario now you'll see the same Justin Bieber haircut everywhere. Clinging to isolationist thinking in an information revolution is asinine. Communities are no longer isolated, they no longer need individual contracts. If you don't believe me, believe union provincial executives who (foolishly I think) agreed to align all contracts in the province resulting in this past round of failed provincial negotiations.

The fictional professional association for education professionals
in Ontario (except it shouldn't be fictional and we shouldn't be
running education on socialist ideals, it's a profession!)

If we can bargain provincially (and it appears we do), why not have an Ontario Educational Association (modeled on the Doctor's OMA) bring in elected representatives from across the province every four years to iron out a contract with the government while a neutral, third party arbitrator ensures the process is fair. This is a far less dramatic, adversarial process, but I think everyone in education (except the ones who profit from the fighting) would like to see less hurtful public drama and more focus on the profession itself.

Unions themselves have made their locals irrelevant by focusing their own membership through isolated, politicized provincial leadership. The result has been confusion and a failure to represent member's interests. OECTA agrees to contracts without even asking its members, OSSTF has the rug pulled out from under it by a grassroots social media movement. Unions have centralized power and are then astonished when their remote members aren't thrilled.

It's time to give up the idea of locally defined educational organizations, both boards and unions, and begin a process of creating a democratic, less politically tangled system of educational representation. This isn't so much a matter of amalgamating existing districts as it is a rethinking of how best to represent educational interests in the province. A system based on current cultural divisions (rural-natural, rural-agricultural, small town, suburban, urban) would certainly allow us to continue to address regional differences without carrying the weight of a redundant, regionally defined historical system.

how many public school systems do we need?

If we're trying to free ourselves from history, it wouldn't hurt to stop funding semi-private, religious schools that are only willing to serve a specific population.

Once again, this made sense in Ontario a long time ago when Catholics and Protestants had to agree to live together, but Muslim, Hindu, atheist and every other stripe of religious belief must all wonder what this is all about when they first arrive in Ontario. These people constitute the vast majority of new Ontarians, it's time to recognize that in a representative, equal for all public education system.

Part 6: Removing politically inflicted value in our education system

I've always had trouble with how unions favor (and reward) seniority over any other contribution to the profession; at best this is simplistic, at worst it encourages disengaged senior teachers to interact less as their careers mature (check out who is doing extra-curriculars in any school for confirmation of this). We are one of the few professions that, as one colleague once put it, "have all the colonel level people sitting out of leadership positions, we're led by lieutenants." This is entirely the result of union value theory, and it harms the profession.

The basic job of teaching, if grossly simplified, becomes a person doing minimal hours of work, with nothing value added, using the same lessons year in and year out. Ultimately this hurts the learning environment for everyone. Unions and boards protect the (small minority) of teachers who approach the profession in this appalling manner more than they do teachers who push boundaries and attempt positive change. Status quo thinking defines most educational leadership.

We need to recognize all the ways that education workers add to the learning process. This usually falls short when management attempts to grossly simplify the work in order to quantify it. If we're in the job of marking students in creative, individualized ways, we have to do that for educators too, but too often teacher assessment is simplistic or made meaningless in order to simplify book keeping or to protect union members at all costs.

Leadership positions in teaching also need to be made meaningfully. Forty bucks a week doesn't cut it (yes, that's what many department heads get for management work in teaching). I'd also want to recognize teachers who do extracurriculars, if not financially, then at least through minimizing their required duties. The teachers who do little else could do oncalls and caf duties, those that are knocking themselves out to make their schools a learning community shouldn't be ignored for it.

The desired result in all this would be competition for headships and extracurriculars (and administration positions) with top candidates selected. You seldom see more than a single sacrificial person dropped into any of these jobs - not exactly the way to get the best candidates. Lineups for leadership, coaching and non-classroom school activities would be a powerful way to move us forward. It's sad year in year out hearing the teachers trying to run these things begging for people.

There is a climate of apathetic mediocrity in our unionized system. Members tend to be indifferent to their union and uniformed as to their work situations. They are encouraged to do as much or as little as they please, knowing that the money will always increase; hardly an environment that fosters engagement and improvement. If we want to continue to focus on improvements in education, we should be considering what is needed to put education first, not what is needed to keep the status quo.

Conclusion

Protecting education means protecting education workers, but protecting education workers does not necessarily mean protecting education. It is vital that Ontario's public school system continue to improve its high standards and fight for relevancy in a rapidly changing world, but the old paradigm of this happening only on the back of unions and boards is dying; their failure is indicated by their inability to protect and support their members.

A mandated, transparent, less politically charged, non-localized organizational structure would result in less drama and better representation for everyone involved. Advances in communication mean that we no longer need to think locally in geographic terms. It would also remove the stigma of unionization from teachers and allow them to adopt a more professional aspect in the public eye.

Walmarting the profession to U.S. standards will result in U.S. standards. You'll end up with business wanting to intervene with Charter schools, which aren't really public at all. Equality of access to education is vital to any democracy, Ontario citizens must not lose access to a fair, open, world class public education system. Never suspect that a system with a for-profit middle-man will outperform a public system founded on excellence. You'd have to be an economic idiot (or con artist) to suggest that this is possible.

It's vital that public education be protected from the short-term gain crowd. Unions have performed this function for many years, but in recent times, and like so many other institutions founded before our age of communication, they are being bypassed by their own member's new-found ability to communicate directly with each other.

We keep slipping into an inevitable future, and we're often only able to bring what we hold most dear to us across the threshold. Many assumptions and traditions are slipping by the wayside as society and technology continue dancing at an increasing tempo. If I have to cling to a belief and have it survive this transformative time, it isn't unionism, localized education or even a political belief, it's an axiomatic declaration about the power of public education:

Equally accessible, professionally driven and maximized public education is vital to our future success. It allows everyone to realize their potential regardless of their socio-economic circumstances and creates a population that is capable of responsible democracy, meaningful economic output and reasoned problem solving; without it we are lost. The society that protects and enhances public education is the society that produces active citizens whose eyes are wide open, and who are capable of dealing with the challenges technological, social and personal, that we will all be facing in the difficult decades ahead.

I would protect that belief before I worried about keeping the politics of tradition. I would have my profession managed and led on the basis of excellence and engagement rather than nineteenth century, socialist, union ideals. By protecting and encouraging excellence, we could rejuvenate Ontario's tattered education system under a reasoned, unpoliticized, professional ideal.

Stellar work without a bonus?

noreply@blogger.com (Timothy King) — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 03:31:00 +0000

One of the reasons I love teaching is that the job isn't about making a fat, old, white guy a bit richer than he already is. Every other job I've had has been inherently limited by this focus; the only reason you're there is to make a one percenter a little bit richer. That raison d'etre infects everything about working in a money focused business. That I hear people refer to this as 'real work' always makes me laugh; it's real work in the same way that prostitution is real honest work - you lay yourself down for the money. The argument that working for money adds real vigor and toughness to a workplace is nonsense. What it actually does is create fearful, simpering employees who believe that sucking up to their boss is more important than the work they do.

Ideas like excellence, originality, creativity and even work ethic are pretty much irrelevant. If they can make more money by tossing out the hardest working, most creative, excellent employee, they will (and do - especially in the short term gains world we live in now). The only time businesses produce excellence is when small groups within the organization are protected from the pimps who are running it. That doesn't happen often. What usually happens is that businesses take the excellence and research they need from publicly funded universities.

That infectious economic thinking has blighted Ontario education thanks to Laurel Broten's story telling around fiscal responsibility. Listening to the tragic prostitutes in the private sector telling us to accept their shabby circumstances because of economic necessity is purely the result of Ontario Liberal Party spin, and it has demonized my profession as a result.

Education: a reason to be optimistic about the future!

Teaching in Ontario has achieved real excellence in the past decade. We are truly world class, one of the very best. What made this happen? Bonuses? Financial incentives? No teacher ever got into teaching to make money. No teacher has ever gotten a cash payout for doing their job at a world class level (we'll leave that for all those excellent bankers out there). If financial reward isn't the point of performing at such an outstanding level, what is?

Public education is one of the most powerful social movements we've ever created. As Ray Kurzweil states his five reasons to be optimistic about the future, we are more educated than we've ever been before. We pay ten times what we used to into education as a society, but our post secondary graduation has increased by 280 times. We are making better use of the talent of our people; that is the crowning achievement of public education: social efficiency on a previously unheard of scale. The irony is that this very socialist mechanism, designed to realize the potential of all members of our society, also drives economic growth.

I'm back at school again tomorrow, dropped in to the political maelstrom of a forced contract, listening to blathering idiots whining about how much teachers get paid and how little they do. I'm tempted to get stingy about my work, but I don't think I can. I didn't get into this profession for the politics or the economics, I got into it because it's one of the finest possible reasons anyone could have for going to work; to help human beings recognize their potential.

What I do is the opposite of the pyramid scheme most people find themselves working at each day; it's a good in itself, economically, socially, personally. I can't help but want to over achieve, no matter what the lowered expectations around me might suggest.

Five Big Wishes For 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Timothy King) — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 16:51:00 +0000

2012 has been a challenging year for me as a teacher, a Canadian and an online citizen. My five big wishes for 2013 range from recognizing digital literacy to changing the way we run organizations, but the underlying theme becomes obvious: technology is changing how we interact with and influence each other.

A flattening mediascape means everyone can publish information. From wikileaks to Anonymous to social media induced political upheaval, technology is unhinging how societies control their members. Organizations that used to control their message through limited access, broadcast media are stumbling while whole populations are discovering that they can now speak to more people than multinationals could in television commercials only twenty years ago.

Here are my five big wishes for these interesting times in which we live:

We stop wishing for digital literacy and actually do something coordinated about it.

Students flounder in this strange new world as much as anyone else. We've not been very organized about trying to get them up to speed. A Digital Skills Continuum needs to be integrated into curriculum. We need to stop putting our faith in myths like digital natives and BYOD and begin to intelligently address the revolution we're in the middle of. We do a real disservice to students with the half-assed way in which we deliver digital literacy.

As a teacher I'm worried not only for students I see being graduated into a time of radical change with virtually no preparation from their education, but also for the teachers who seem intent on patently ignoring these changes to both their own detriment and those of their students. If I could get Ontario education leadership to stop playing politics and get back to, you know, education, this is what I'd be begging them to begin taking seriously.

Listening to business types begging us to graduate people who are useful in a digitally enhanced workplace is panic inducing! I really wish we'd start taking this seriously and build it into curriculum so technologically illiterate teachers couldn't just ignore it.

Ontario politicians stop using teachers in their shabby games.

Watching the Ontario Liberal Party thrashing around in its death throes was been startling, getting black eyes from their their dishonest, manipulative politics has been very disheartening. Ontario has one of the cheapest, highest performing education systems in the G20 and performs favorably when education costs per GDP are concerned with even many third world countries. We don't pay much for the fantastic results we get. Watching politicians (who get to magically become my boss when they have no background in what I do at all) heap lies on their mistakes and vilify my profession has been very demoralizing.

I'm sorry that I let the divisive nature of this battle turn me on Ontario Catholic teachers. I think the dual nature of our public/Catholic boards in Ontario must enrichen our educational process somehow, and it isn't breaking the bank as many might have you believe. If we're this good for this little, just leave us alone to do our work; go play your shabby political games by yourselves.

Perhaps begin by not bailing out giant multinational banks and lousy car makers.

Teachers vocalize how difficult their job is

Part of the political angle played against teachers is that they are overpaid and under-worked. This plays to an uneducated idiot's view of the profession - I'm surprised by how many people swallow this, and it isn't helped by many teachers not saying anything in response.

I don't doubt that there are a few that do as little as they can while milking the system, but in my experience these people are a tiny minority. The vast majority of teachers I know put in sixty hour plus weeks while in school, and still spend hours a week working on preparation and research when not actually in class.

I recently did the math, if you look at the time I put into my job, I make about $15/hour... and I need two degrees, first aid qualifications, a clean driver's license, a clean criminal record and years of experience to make that much. Starting teachers make less than minimum wage if they are also doing the requisite extra curriculars and extra class work.

Watch any teacher who is active online and you'll see how much time they spend collaborating on lessons and building good pedagogy. If we judged every profession by the 5% who bottom feed, no one would be looking very good.

I wish more teachers would open their mouths and explain to friends and family what it is they do. The chance to spread this information far and wide lies at your fingertips.

No more charter school American education consultants brought up here at great expense in order to tell us how to do something we're already much better than them at

I've been begging Canadians to put away their be-polite mantra and recognize what we are doing well. Apparently being proud about hockey is as far as we're willing to go. Watching (evidently) cash strapped boards throwing out thousands of dollars to push bankrupt American philosophy makes me financially, culturally and educationally sick. If we do something well, recognize it and bring in the local talent that is making us world class. I'd love to see more Canadian content in the educational conferences I'm attending. I'd love to see more Canadian educators publishing and presenting on what we are doing; the rest of the world would benefit from it... especially the Americans... even the Charter school ones.

Radical transparency in our institutions... all of our institutions.

Social media is wreaking havoc on the status quo. Organizations used to a hierarchy based on one sided media transmission are floundering. The signal is no longer owned by the few rich, anyone can now publish information to the world.

An active democratic population isn't what most of these organizations want though. They are far happier with an apathetic electorate that hands them sufficient power every few years and then does what they are told. This came home to me not just with the Ontario Liberal nonsense, but with my own union's nonsense too. It's a tough thing to have two organizations that are supposed to be representing you instead threatening you for exercising your voice.

After making mistakes that would make any individual blush, these 'leaders' are incapable of a simple apology, which only indicates the arrogance still found in the crumbling halls of power. Many of these people in positions of power still feel that they are superior human beings to the rest of us. I'm all about the healthy dose of humility coming their way.

The democratization of media is forcing a democratization in organizations too. I tried to do this in my union and was demonized for it. At least the inevitability of progress is on my side with this one. With individuals having more voice than ever before, the idea that organizations can force their members into a lockstep, parroting the company/union/government line is an old idea whose time has passed.

Democracy is messy, loud and boisterous; forcing a single voice in this noise is factory thinking. As is said in Radical Transparency, "Radical transparency means you don't have to stand up and read a script, you don't have to wonder how the numbers will play out on a new policy... you know your beliefs and you act on them."

Leaders who are managers and don't stand for anything shouldn't be leading. I'm looking for people who believe in what they say, and say it consistently Clever people who think they can manipulate people to their own ends? Those people have an uphill struggle in a flattening mediascape. The leader who is transparent and direct in their communications? That person need never fear many voices, their transparency is their strength.

Wrap Up

What I'm really wishing for is a digitally literate population who makes effective use of our new ability to speak loudly to each other without being pushed to distraction by it. The weak link in our current digital maelstrom are the people using it. If we could manage:

Social media that respects and empowers its users without hypocrisy
Digital tools that clarity and amplify their users rather than obfuscate and distract them
Technology companies that respect user effectiveness, and aren't solely purposed to get in the way
Educational systems that produce technically and socially competent students, especially in the middle of a digital revolution

we'd be able to begin to exercise the real power of a global village. Classrooms that range across the world, world wide democratic voices empowered by free information, transparent organizations that prevent abuse by being only what they are, publicly... that's all I'm wishing for in 2013.