stupid is as stupid does

Digital technology has gotten this reputation for curing all our ills as far as student engagement goes. The logic you hear often sounds like, "give the digital natives the technology and sit back! Prepare to be amazed!"

I happened to see "Chalkboard Jungle" on the weekend before my first year teaching in 2004. In the (1955) film the new English teacher is desperately trying to engage his angry and disenfranchised inner city students. He eventually finds that the 'new' film projectors catch their attention. He has a talk with one of the older teachers who asks hopefully if the new technology will cure their students' lack of interest. The young teacher shrugs, but he's not about to put down the one thing he's found that takes the heat off.

The frantic grasping at technology hasn't changed. This week someone kindly tweeted this:

http://www.hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/its-not-technology-stupid-response-nyt-twitter-trap

... and she's right, it's not the technology. It won't make the teaching work, it won't make people wiser or smarter than they are. Our unwillingness to adapt to change is certainly causing chaos, but what might be worse is our belief that technology will somehow make better people.

In 2006 one of my students brought an Orwellian piece of media futurism into our media studies class:

http://robinsloan.com/epic/

The part that stuck with me was:

“At it’s best, edited for the most savvy readers, EPIC is a summary of the world, deeper, broader, and more nuanced than anything ever available before. But at it’s worst, and for too many, EPIC is merely a collection of trivia, much of it untrue, all of it narrow, shallow, and sensational.”

Pretty good description of modern media use, eh? This piece of speculation was originally written in 2004, and whether or not we end up in a Googlezon meganopoly or not, the simple truth that the internet and digital technology looks to empower its user with access to information remains true. Given great access to information, ignorant people will do ignorant things. Stupid people will enable their stupidity in new, interesting and more encompassing ways; digital media gives you what you ask for.

Believe it or not, technology will not magically cure idiocy, or make all students eager, insightful or, in some cases, even vaguely useful. Technology, be it cell phones, computers or even just internet access, has no inherent ability to improve character, or intelligence. While being morally ambiguous it also tends to hand over information with minimal effort, negating attempts to build self discipline and improve mental stamina around task completion. In the process academic skills, especially complex skills that require long developmental times (literacy, logic, etc), become a foreign concept to a mind that has trained itself around short term narcissistic social media navel gazing.

The brain is a very flexible organ. If we train it with asinine navel gazing, it will end up in a feedback loop that develops a very inaccurate sense of our abilities and self value; social media and technology focused around our wants and needs will kill humility stone dead.

The idea that teaching needs to change into facilitation only seems to feed this vacuum. The act of teaching involves a great deal more than making sure students know how to get to information and providing them with technology to do it. Teachers don't just model learning, they also model civil behavior, intelligence in action, and many other traits you hope students will notice and eventually emulate. Left to their own devices (pun intended), many of the digital natives develop habits that make the digital tools we are developing look more like lobotomy instruments rather than tools to maximize human awareness and learning.

Burying your head in the sand at the onslaught of change doesn't help; ignoring this will just make you irrelevant very quickly.

Adopting a pie in the sky belief in some kind of intuitive magic power children have over technology is ludicrous, actually quite akin to the burying your head in the sand (you're really just transferring responsibility to the magic children).

As mentioned in Davidson's article, we need to start recognizing that people are the prime movers and the technology just amplifies the activity, whatever it is. Until we start rationally looking at what is happening in our rapidly evolving mediascape and assigning responsibility to people's choices, we are going to find ourselves creating fictions and blaming gadgets. In rough seas like these, we need to appreciate some hard truths.

The Perfect Interface

Thinking about tablets recently, I've been trying to imagine what the perfect online interface would be. Since getting a smartphone and doing the Web2.0 thing, I'm finding I don't go to the internet like I used to, getting online is now a micro event, not the main event. Web2.0 wants you to pop in and out in social media, produce content and grab information relevant to what you're doing in reality, and that doesn't fit well with a desktop.

If I'm not going to the internet as the main event, but rather as an enhancement to my reality, what would be the best way to access that? You'd want something with you all the time; the legendary wearable computer.

I'm not feeling the desktop like I used to. I still use desktop horsepower to game (which is still an event in and of itself), and to move big photoshop files, but not much else, using the internet as augmented reality doesn't require a monster processor or graphics power. Instead I'm out and about, and wanting to catch a moment and push it online quickly and easily without interrupting what's going on. Facebook encourages this somewhat, Twitter relies on it. What you can share online easily is what makes your digital self. You're mute and half invisible online if you can't interact as your virtual self.

I find the smartphone sometimes frustrating entering text on (I have the same problem with tablets), but the fact that they are easy to take everywhere is their ace in the hole. My Xperia has an awesome camera, does good video and has a big enough screen to easily share information on, it comes close to being an ideal tether between meat me and virtual me.

My future ideal device has a stylish pair of glasses, shoes and clothes that recharge from bodily motion, or solar power like the awesome Casio I recently got. Having a device that is self powered is where all mobile tech should head. Having a watch/compass/weather station on my wrist that is essentially self-sufficient makes you aware of all the umbillicalage that connects us to our digital selves.

The perfect device only asserts itself as much as it has to in order to complete online interactions. Photos are a quick motion away, interfaces respond to bodily motions (eye blinks, hand gestures, etc). Typing by following eye motion? Typing by looking at any surface with a keyboard imposed on it through the glasses? Speech to text, direct speech and let's drop the textiness?

I guess, somewhere into this, you could be playing an interactive real world/virtually enhanced game with people in which how accurately you create spell gestures dictates how well the spell will work. You'd see people playing in the park, pointing fingers at each other and seeing virtual paint balls. Gym classes would take on a whole new historical context. You could run 100m against Donovan Bailey and actually see him on the course (way) ahead of you.

William Gibson has a fantastic scene in Spook Country, where the main character is looking (through glasses with a digital screen) at the body of a virtual dead River Phoenix lying on the sidewalk where he actually died. Past and present colliding virtually... imagine that field trip to Quebec City, where you're walking across the Plains of Abraham and seeing the battle unfold around you... or you can spend a day at the reconstructed Globe Theatre watching the King's Men preparing to stage Romeo & Juliet for the first time (complete with cast from Shakespeare in Love).

Virtual Reality doesn't offer nearly the nuance and ease of use that augmented reality does. Here's hoping Moore's Law gets us there sooner than later. I want to actually work up a sweat next time I'm doing a dungeon crawl with my party of adventurers.

Tablets are like high heels

I've had an opportunity to use a Motorola Xoom tablet this week and respond to my board about how it might be used in class rooms. I've been crushing on the idea of getting a tablet for a while now. After using netbooks in class last semester, I love the idea of a rotatable screen that lets you read without over-scrolling, the super battery life, instant on functionality and the super small form factor.

Last year at ECOO I got to use an ipad for a day, but the wireless was so dodgey (not the ipad's fault), that I barely got any real sense of how it could work. This time round the tablet was with me at work, at home and everywhere in between.

The Xoom has a higher resolution, wide screen and faster processor than the ipad2, and runs on the Android Honeycomb OS (it's basically a google device). It gets along natively with any google apps and lets you access the MASSIVE android marketplace so that your six year old can play a lot of Angry Birds. It also plays Flash, so you don't get the internet-lite ipad experience.

One of the amazing things about touch screens is how quickly and intuitively people take to them. Said six year old was tossing birds at towers in moments, and skipping through the OS to watch youtube or find new software. As a tool for children, or people new to the world of digital content, tablets make a great opening. Tablets offer a great feel of immediacy, you're actually touching the content. Keyboards start to look like bars on the door to the digital wonderland. Thinking about how poor most people's typing is, this might be a tablet's greatest strength.

The android honeycomb OS works well enough, I occasionally experienced bog downs when trying to type (an agonizing process on a touch screen which I thought would be better than what happens on my touch screen android phone, but wasn't). Its biggest draw back was no Firstclass (school email) android app, so I couldn't see board email, which makes it somewhat useless as a communication device for me at work (the Firstclass web interface stinks). If our board moves to Google, as it looks like it will, Honeycomb will suddenly look like a smart choice though.

Any kind of data entry is where I fall down on this tablet thing. I've seen certain (Barkerish) people touch typing on ipads (curious to know what her wpm are), but this seems like a painful transition. My typing on the Xoom alternated between trying to thumb type while in landscape mode and not being able to reach the middle of the keyboard (and I don't have small hands), thumb text typing in portrait mode but the weight of the tablet made this uncomfortable, or trying to actually type from the home keys while it's on my lap or on a table (when it wasn't trying to re-orientate itself). The lack of tactile feedback if you're a touch typer means you're relearning how to assess accuracy (made more difficult when it pauses on you before barfing out a pile of letters). The lack of response and no tactile feed back had me deleting half a line of painfully entered text only to go back and make corrections. Trying to touch the screen and go to the specific error was pretty hit and miss, so I often resorted to the 'screw it, I'll start over again' approach.

I like to make content, especially writing. I can't imagine using a tablet for that. It was even uncomfortable for tweets and social networking, I just didn't like trying to enter data into it. I could work at improving typing on the screen, but I don't think I'll ever come close to how fast I can type on a good, tactile, nicely spaced keyboard with responsive keys, so why bother?

The other contenty side of things for me are graphics. If I'm working in photoshop, I need processing horsepower to move big files (not a tablet forte), and very fine control (a super high dpi mouse minimum, or a very accurate drawing slate). A finger print covered screen that only senses gross motor commands sets of my OCD (I HATE dirty screens, I even clean my car windshield often), and does very little for me in creating graphic content where I want fine control of the environment.

I get the whole tablet thing, I mean, who wouldn't want to look this cool? And tablets aren't without their perks. The battery life is incredible, I ran it all day at school, then it came home and got beaten up on by @banana29 and the mighty Max, often doing very processor heavy tasks - even in that consumptive environment, it took 13+ hours of constant on again off again use before it cried for a recharge.

The instant on functionality is another aspect of that immediacy that must appeal to the old or very young, it removes another barrier to access. All computers should be instant on, no boot time at all, otherwise the web isn't immediate, and becomes a secondary mental realm instead of enhancing our reality. You don't get enhanced reality after a 30 second bootup. Win7 does quite well on new laptops with this, open the lid and it's on, everything should be that instant, or it's just too far away.

As a web browser, the tablet seems untouchable. I wish they could design a laptop screen that would rotate to vertical for reading and writing, then drop into horizontal mode the odd time you need it like that; auto-rotation rocks. I think I'd keep it in portrait mode most of the time, I don't watch high def movies on a laptop, I'm not sure why wide screens are now the norm, I'd prefer a tall one.

The size of this tablet is pretty sweet too. The Xoom would disappear into any kind of bag with ease, and is very light and so thin as to be invisible.

What I've got here is a device that is only good in a few, specific situations, it fits in a very thin place between my smart phone and my laptop, a space that I suspect is actually too small for me to care about now that I've tried it.

I don't care for super small phones, and I'd be just as happy with a big 5 inch smartphone that has tablety qualities than I would with a book sized tablet that works well as a reader, but I can't seem to find another use for. If convergence is what we're aiming for, tablets are an offshoot that will eventually be subsumed by a smartphone evolution (I'd bet on build-in, interactive projectors in phones that make bigger screens moot).

The Xoom and ipad look fantastic, but the touch screen makes me nuts when it gets finger printy, and is sometimes unresponsive (though I must admit having less problems there with the ipad, so maybe that's an Android issue, or just what you get for not having to run any gadgets or flash). You wouldn't type anything meaningful on a tablet, you can't take decent photos or video with it (you'd do far better with a dedicated camera), but it looks fantastic, futuristic and makes the user look very chic.

Like those awesome Tron inspired stilettos, the Xoom is great to think about using, but after 10 minutes, you wouldn't be getting much done and it would just hurt, though you'd still look fabulous!

Tablets are like high heels PART DEUX! (complete with awesome geeky high heels!)

Expectations

In a very hands-on computer technology grade 12 class, we've built our own network from scratch and students have been working through the A+ CompTIA technician's course. The final goal of the course is to get students into the position of actually getting certified as PC technicians. If they go on to college for courses, they'll already have the first certification they need. If they go to work, they'll be able to work in Futureshop, Staples or whatever (all those computer support people must have A+ certification).

The goal was a relevant, purpose driven class with real world value and as much technology as I could possibly provide.

I've spent a lot of time and energy getting my hands on equipment and making space for the students to be able to develop technology from the ground up. I hadn't spent as much time walking students through some very information heavy review, my hope was that the hands on technology would offer us in-class opportunities to review the material.

Some students, once they got the network to a functional level, got very distracted by the fact that it can play networked games. This conversation happened recently when I suggested they needed to be ready to review the entire course because we were running out of time. One student felt that he hadn't been handed the learning on a silver enough platter:

Grade 12 student: "but you're the teacher, shouldn't you be making us learn this?" (instead of letting us play games)

Me: "I've done back flips to get you guys access to multiple A+ courses, material and testing practice. I've also drilled you on the material on a daily basis. When we get done with that, you are given time to read ahead on future material, review what you missed, or apply your theory hands on. At that point I want to help people on a one on one basis. If you choose to play games with that time, it's my job to force you to learn?"

student: "..."

me: "I'm not here to force you to learn, no one can do that. You're senior students on the verge of graduating. If this were a junior class, we'd have more regimented lessons, but it isn't. I expect you to be able to address yourself to what's going on. I'm not about to force your head into the learning water here, if you don't want to drink, that is your choice. It puts you in a bad place in post secondary though, they don't spoon feed at all."

student: "but we're not college students, you shouldn't run the class like that."

me: "you're about to be, at what point would you like to transition into post secondary if not in grade 12? Do you think they are going to spoon feed you next year?"

Not ten minutes later we wrapped up the chapter review and students were let loose on the network. Guess what he did...

me: "After our recent conversation, what you're doing there is quite provocative. Are you trying to aggravate me?"

He didn't stop, he just minimized the window. I feel sorry for the guy.

This class has a truly awesome amount of technology at their disposal, I'm jealous. When I took my certifications, I had to take apart and reassemble the only PC we had in the house, and look at pictures of other ones because I had nothing on hand. I didn't have a certified technician there enthusiastic about experimenting and throwing everything from imacs to netbooks, to laptops to multiple desktop formats into the mix. I also had to pay four times what I'm getting the certs for this group of students for. This guy is spoiled for choice, and all he wants to do is play (fairly lame) old games and whine about not being treated like he's ten years old. I'm not saying they shouldn't take a break and blow off some steam, but they seldom put in the effort to deserve the break.

I've got some good students in that class, but they're all bitten to a greater or lesser degree by their wealth; it makes them complacent and lazy. When I think about what the students in my computer club at my old school in the suburbs would have done with all of this equipment, it makes me sad. Even when you make the learning, meaningful, individualized and pack it with technology, you can't force a spoiled, lazy horse to drink it up.

Spotty Internet & Spoiling The Argument

I'm feeling bad about bad mouthing the board internet now. The last few events I've been to seem to point to continuous and crappy wifi execution at the enterprise level. Does good high usage wifi exist anywhere?

This week at the Mississauga Better Living Centre the wifi was so slow as to be useless. Signal strength was fine, the throughput was nonexistent. When it takes more than 10 seconds to load Google, something isn't right.

The Sheraton Parkway North in Richmond Hill I've been to twice this year. Better than Mississauga's attempt, but still boggy and slow at times, and again, this is regardless of signal strength.

One of the sure-fire killers of tech use in class rooms is boggy internet. Teachers are on tender hooks every time they try something online. If it fails to load, they are stressed and tend to face a lot of blow back from students looking for an out. If you're going to pitch the cloud, online collaborative tools and an alternate to the desktop, you're not going to do it with patchy internet.

Our school wifi system is a monster. It cost a fortune, and, in theory, works very well... until all our traffic gets funneled into the queue we share with 88 other schools for a single internet connection through the board office, then, not so good. I constantly hear students railing against the 'crap computers in this school'. It's not the computers, you'd think the digital natives would know that.

Back in the day when I was learning networking (the computer kind, not the people kind), we were told again and again to design out any SPoFs. Single Points of Failure will kill a network stone dead. They'll kill the use of technology in the class room for any but the most hard core digital evangelists as well. Nobody needs the time wasted, stress and headache of setting up a lesson only to have it fail because the internet wasn't there for you when you needed it.

People always get hyped about technology, I do too. Things like chalk boards and chalk? I've never had that technology fail on me of its own accord. Can you imagine if 20% of the time you went to write on the board and nothing came out? It's certainty is what makes it good technology. Same thing can be said for paper and pen...

I hope that we are not just looking for faster network speeds, but also resiliency in our networks. I'd love to see my next gen wifi receiver using whichever band is offering the best throughput (N, G, B, I don't care; they never get near their theoretical bandwidth limits anyway). I'd love to see a school network that never reaches bandwidth limits because it shapes and prioritizes traffic to ensure smooth operation (Facebook packages low priority please), and I'd love to see wifi networks intelligently and resiliently dealing with traffic crush, traffic sharing and shaping to push data not necessarily as quickly, but as efficiently as they can.

I fear in the headlong rush for faster transfer speeds, we are forgetting to build any kind of resiliency into our networks, which will make things like Chromebooks look little more than curiosities. No one is interested in a computer that won't work as often as the poor wifi I've seen implemented.

Setting the Stage

I somehow managed to fanangle my way into an Edtech symposium this week on the sustainable development of digital technology in education. Amidst former deputy ministers of education, board CIOs and other provincial education types I got to see the other side of the equation.

This year as head of Computers/IT has been good for this actually, getting my head out of the classroom context and seeing the bigger picture. I've been able to attend imaging committee meetings at the board level and gained an understanding of why everyone can't have whatever they want. At this past meeting I tweeted that I felt like a sergeant from the trenches who suddenly found himself in a 5-star strategic planning meeting; it was engrossing.

From Hamilton-Wentworth's awesome curriculum push into 21st Century Fluencies to what New Brunswick has been doing to get ahead of the game, I found the board and provincial interest in pushing ahead with our use of technology in the class to be... a relief!

During any battle to use digital technology in the class room (getting access, getting it to work, getting students over their jitters), I often feel like I'm losing ground. I'll take one step forward in implementing a new piece of technology in a lesson or on a school wide basis, and get knocked back two steps by angry senior teachers who feel out of step with what's going on, or lack of access to equipment, or failure of the tech, or OCT/board restrictions that seem panicky and unfounded, or the union telling of a horror story that seems to justify panicky and unfounded restrictions...

One of my preliminary thoughts before I went was to ask about how to beat the malaise of that feeling; how not to give up. I've heard from colleagues about how they burn out trying to push that envelope, and ultimately just disappear back into their classrooms and do their own thing. John Kershaw had an honest and helpful response to the question:

During his talk he spoke of a big set back where the winning party in an election used his one laptop per student policy as an example of government waste, and won on it, after telling him that they supported the program. This is exactly the kind of thing that brings idealists to their knees. His solution was pragmatic: work on your environment. Set the stage so that what you're doing becomes a certainty, if not now, then eventually.

In the case of the laptop plan, he'd done groundwork with business groups (who were onside for more digitally literate graduates), the general public (who wanted their children more literate with technology), and the school system (who wanted to better prepare their students for their futures). That groundwork meant that even though the politics turned on him in the moment, the plan eventually went through, and he got what he thought was important; a New Brunswick education system that actually mattered in a 21st Century context.

I've been thinking over his for a few days now. If you're on the right side of history, if you know you're fighting a good fight, you've got to shrug off the knock backs. If you keep working to create the environment you're aiming for, and you know you're part of a wave of change, have some faith in the fact that the truth of what you're trying to do will eventually win out.

Simulation In Education: DM as teacher

Simulation in education is going under many names nowadays. Gamification is a gross simplification of the application of game play to learning. You can't gamify lessons and expect the students to have a genuine experience, yet gamification has been the catch-word educators have picked up on in trying to access gaming culture.

You can't throw badges on completion tasks and call it a game. Game play requires a coherent internal system of interaction that rewards contextual, interactive play. Even meta-game play (hacking, working the system, etc) should be integrated by the game creator. The more complete the contextualization of a game, the more effective it is as a game and the more immersive (and genuine) it is as a learning experience.

Simplifying game play/in-class simulation as an add on to existing, simplistic lessons is certain to fail. You might have success the first time you do it based student response to a new, novel approach to learning, but repeating a simplistic gaming pattern will quickly cause students to drop out of the simulation. The game has to have enough complexity and contextual development or it will be too easy for students to step out of the game, it needs to be encompassing.

Some thoughts on sims in education:

- Teacher as referee rather than resource, puts focus on student to figure out material. Sports do this well, creating an apparently certain context (it's all made up, buy you couldn't convince a hockey player of the arbitrary nature of the rules they are playing in)

- “The point of economic policy in a game isn't to simulate reality; it's to make the synthetic scarcity so entertaining that the truly scarce good (the players' time) goes toward solving problems in the game, not in the outer world.” Geekonomics. Simulation should be designed around maximizing player’s experience within the game context.

- Immersion is a powerful thing! Rewarding a student’s immersion in a game by rewarding their efforts within the simulation is key.

- What is better? Intrinsic or extrinsic motivation (intrinsic is, extrinsic is transient)

- Must develop an intrinsic motivation! It's better to have a ‘good in itself’, summum bonum,or some fecundity (both much more motivating) or else players are just jumping through hoops, the teacher won't get their best work, students don’t get best learning.

- Is curriculum motivating in itself? No, just a set of arbitrary government rules. At best it offers a Foursquare like badging system (grades), or a sudden, harsh result (post secondary options). Grade leveling is eased all the way until they hit the wall of trying to access post secondary (something that seems far away in the teenage mind). Wouldn't it be interesting if we could gamify the student experience? "You're a level 11 writer and a level 6 hockey player? Cool."

- What makes a motivated student? Relevance of material? Control of the situation? Social interaction? Non-confrontational relationship with teacher? Strong interpersonal relationship with teacher? Sense of self-direction? Self confidence?

- Immersive simulation adapts to each student experience, (must) offers contextual, supporting material, develops confidence because the student's experience prompts the learning, develops a supportive, non confrontational relationship with the teacher.

Simulation development has to go well beyond the Khan Academy approach, it has to offer an immersive, meaningful, personalized experience, and you can't do that by adapting lessons, you need to begin with big ideas and work the lessons into that coherent whole.

Mobilizing Technology Access in Schools

I've long been a fan of mobile technology. My first 486 (and colour screen) was an Acer laptop, and I've owned a steady stream of laptops and even one of those LCD word processor only writing machines. The idea of mobile computing has always felt like the future of technology; if computing is ultimately an extension of ourselves and our abilities, then it should obviously not be chained to a desk. A human/machine future of cyborg coolness isn't going to happen if we have to orient ourselves to a desk.

In education, we are still very much in a 20th Century mindset about technology access. Expensive, breakable desktops in shared labs with little over sight and high breakage rates. In a way, we're training students to be office workers by sitting them in these areas modeled on cubical land. In addition, these labs use a lot of electricity (more when most teachers walk out of them without requiring students to turn them off - often over a weekend, or a March break) and generate a significant amount of heat that we deal with by turning up the air conditioning.

Mobile tech offers us a low energy consumption, agile access that can be grafted to specific teachers and departments (giving us that needed oversight of the equipment). Mobile tech tends to be tougher by nature, having been designed for movement and use in multiple environments; it's not nearly as fragile as its desktop alternative.

My future school would leave full desktop labs only where actually needed (CAD design lab, media arts lab, that's pretty much it). The other labs get re-made into general purpose learning spaces and the massive budget that went into creating them goes towards creating department responsible mobile labs and improving poor school network bandwidth. These charge carts are under the eye of specific people and can be lent out within departments as needed. The end result is tougher tech with better oversight.

This isn't all about tablets either. In some instances (research, light text work on the web, media viewing and generation) something like the ipad excels. But as a long form text entry device it does not. These mobile labs would consist of ipad class sets, netbook class sets. At 6 to 1 (ipad) or 7 to 1 (netbook) cost ratios to full desktop systems, this means roughly a three to one ratio (counting in charge carts and wireless printers etc - it's a new infrastructure needed to get away from the holes in the wall and the world of desks).

Coming to think of it, I'd love desks on rollers, completely mobile spaces, that encourage changes in formation and function. If the technology can do it, why not the furniture?

A quick fact sheet to end it:

• ipads cost about $250 a piece, 60 ipads (almost 3 class sets?) cost about $34,000 (including charge carts etc).

• desktop PCs cost about $1800 a seat. A typical lab of 24 pcs costs about $45,000. We average about $300 a week in repairs to these shared labs.

• each one of those desktops uses 15x more electricity than an ipad, and the ipads can charge at off peak times, further lowering electrical overhead and stress on the grid.

• because of the lower voltages, heat generation is much less of a problem, so you don't need to air condition over it

• at end of life, an ipad results in 600 grams of waste, and Apple goes to great lengths to reduce toxic materials in their products. A typical PC results in 1-3 kilograms of electronic waste (6-10 times as much).