The Tyranny of Paper

Students in my board collect over 17,000 sheets of paper in handouts in their k-12 school careers. Most Canadian schools are probably similar...

Every piece of finished paper has measurable environmental costs: http://bit.ly/p9wpqq

We burn a 60 watt light bulb continuously for 159.1 years so that we can hand out those handouts, one for each student... we burn plutonium to keep them in handouts.

We put 76.5 kilos of carbon into the atmosphere for each student who goes through our system... just so we can give them handouts.

Each student consumes almost one whole tree in paper in handouts from k-12. Think of the tens of thousands of students going through the system. We deforest just to give them handouts.

At 6 cents per copy that's $1020 per student during their k-12 career. Over one thousand dollars spent on EACH student, just so we can give them handouts.

That's all end-product related. The paper industry is one of the most polluting industrial processes we maintain, even giving oil a run for its money: paper pollution.

Last year, the wood/pulp/paper industry produced more particulate pollution than oil production in Canada. Only stone and metal based heavy industry were worse polluters.

In addition to all those handouts, I haven't even gotten into the millions of dollars we spend on the tons of paper in text books, all supporting that polluting paper pulp industry.

I don't doubt an electronic solution has its own problems, but I can't believe that with some intelligent design, we couldn't come up with a dependable, tough tablet device that would take paper and the massive polluting industry out of our schools. A simple reading and data entry device along the lines of a Kobo or Kindle would end the tyranny of paper; we're close to this technologically now.

Individualizing technology in education isn't just more efficient, it's cheaper and more ecological too.

Blended Learning and Relevant Classrooms

I'm feeling the synchronicity of two educational situations at the moment. I'm presenting this on Monday next at our Board's learning fair, and I just went in for an interview for a curriculum leader position in technology/elearning.

The topic of the learning fair is 'student engagement' but I think this is the answer to the wrong question. Engagement implies trying to tailor your teaching to make it palatable for students. Engagement is what you get when you look at the bigger picture and become relevant, it isn't a goal in itself.

I was asked today in the interview what the future is for blended learning. In this case, blended learning implies a hybrid of elearning/in-class learning and technology. I don't think there is a future in it, I believe it is the future, at least if we want to get an increasingly irrelevant (due to the pace of change) school system to recognize the scope of the changes happening in the world around us, and make a meaningful attempt to prepare our students for the deluge ahead.

Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google had a rather profound quote, I use it in the prezi:

"Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003. I spend most of my time assuming the world is not ready for the technology revolution that will be happening to them soon,”

If the world isn't ready, education is even less so.

In the interview I described students' out-of-school life as a torrent of data, like standing under Niagara Falls; it's a stimulating, multi-directional, multi-disciplinary stream of information on many topics delivered in many different formats in rapid succession. We then get them into a class room and dribble information at them, out of a teacher's mouth, out of a text book, all of it stale, uni-directional and non-interactive; then we wonder how to engage them.

In the meantime I'm seeing students mismanage and drop information and connections they should be making because they can't manage the information being streamed at them. They don't know how to make most effective use of their technology, often using smart phones in the dumbest possible ways. They don't know how to effectively vet and prioritize data and find ways to make useful, actionable connections from it.

We certainly don't teach effective data management and analysis in our in-class information dribble of chalk boards, rows of desks and one-person-speak-at-a-time last century classes.

Blended learning, where teachers make use of the sea of data swirling around us and teach students to swim, not sink is the first step towards a relevant education system that actually prepares students for what they are likely to face. But preparing them for the data storm requires that we use the technology being developed to manage it, and the friction is great from a conservative educational standpoint.

When I was a kid, I was big into Astronomy. I memorized the nine planets, and even the big moons. Since August 2011, we've discovered almost 600 planets (even including Pluto's demotion) and average about twelve new discoveries a week. The whole time I was growing up, there were only nine planets, we're on the verge of discovering multitudes. Astronomy is just one of EVERY FIELD OF STUDY that is facing this data onslaught.

Information isn't the limited, simple, permanent, sacred collection of knowledge it was once perceived to be. We have to stop teaching to the book and start teaching to the evolving datasphere.

Mosaika Sound and Light Show | Mosaika spectacle son et lumière

Mosaika Sound and Light Show | Mosaika spectacle son et lumière, a set by Canada's Capital - Capitale du Canada on Flickr.

Caught this by accident while walking around Parliament Hill at sunset the other day. The Ottawa natives were too cool to stick around, but we're glad we did.

I'm an immigrant to Canada, and it took me a long time to get my citizenship, but moments like this laying on the lawn with my son and wife in front of Parliament seeing such an honest and heartfelt expression of the Canadian experience was truly moving.

If you're in Ottawa and are hanging out downtown around sunset, do yourself a favour and go catch this show.

I've got a soft spot for building projection systems anyway, it's architecture made fluid and digital. I'd love to take the cold, institutional grey building bricks of my school and digitize it like this, but the projectors are wicked expensive! When you see something like Mosaika, you begin to realize just how powerful fluid digital architecture and lighting can be.

http://youtu.be/VgJYr6ix29Q

Via Flickr:
Mosaika is the story of Canada – our story. A powerful narrative set against the spectacular backdrop of Parliament Hill, Mosaika takes the audience on an unforgettable journey of sound and light, as we explore Canada’s physical, historical and cultural landscapes.

Don't miss this free, bilingual show. Presented nightly in Canada’s Capital Region. From July 8 through September 12, 2010.

Mosaika raconte l’histoire du Canada — notre histoire. Par la magie du son et de la lumière, ce saisissant spectacle, présenté sur la colline du Parlement, nous fait vivre un voyage inoubliable à la découverte des paysages, de l’histoire et de la culture du Canada.

Ne manquez pas ce spectacle bilingue gratuit, présenté tous les soirs, du 8 juillet au 12 septembre 2010, dans la région de la capitale du Canada.

Game Mastery

I misspent an awful lot of my youth Dungeon Mastering. We often spent whole days, ten-twelve hour stretches in a row, playing Dungeons and Dragons in various basements. During the summer it wasn't uncommon for us to do whole weeks of days (or nights) like that.

If you've never played the game before, it's basically a combination of story telling, creative writing, map making, art and random dice rolls. You create a character with a set of statistics and you go out and adventure with them. As you gain experience, you get to improve your statistics and get better chances to survive battles and face greater challenges. The characters develop based on their experiences (and their luck). Over time people get mighty attached to them. The players control themselves, the DM is the story teller, the one who controls the world in which they find themselves. When it's done well, it feels a lot like you're all creating a fantastic narrative together, and none of you knows how it's going to end.

I ended up falling into the role of the DM because I could story tell well, and I learned to roll with the dice, I didn't try to force the story when a lucky dice roll would change my expectations. Early on I'd over-script adventures and then have trouble when the dice allowed characters to do things I didn't expect (or shouldn't have had a statistical chance of happening). It took a bit of practice (and developing confidence) to trust that the story would unfold before us.

In one case I planned to kill off all the characters in the first five minutes, and then have them adventure in the after-life trying to get their lives back. As I mentioned, people get mighty attached to their characters. Dying freaked them out, they fought and fought. Finally, a tiny little hobbit-thief was the last one standing, facing the Grim Reaper himself. I had to give him a chance, otherwise the dice (and game) are pointless, so I said he had to roll a natural 20 (a 20 on a 20 sided dice) to successfully attack death. He actually did it. Right then I had to throw away my plan and go in a new direction. It wasn't as nuanced as what I had prepared, but it mattered more to the players because they were authoring it, rather than having it read to them. Giving players no authorship in the game made it empty, pointless. That game became infamous, as did the Halfling who foot swept Death.

After a while, DMing all came down to world building (those are two of dozens) for me. I didn't worry so much about what they would be facing on a situation by situation basis, as long as I knew where we were and when we were. The more richly we'd develop the world, its politics, religion, history, geography, the easier it was to create a rich, interactive experience around my players (this was a very collaborative thing, players would bring maps, histories, heraldry, costumes and all sorts of other surprises to games).

Our first road trip at 17 years old was an adventure in a rickety Chevette from Toronto to Milwaukee for GenCon, the gaming fair put on by the makers of Dungeons and Dragons. In the '80s, this place was the Mecca for gaming. Tens of thousands of attendees in the largest conference centre in town. We attended lectures on ethics in gaming, integrating history and geology into world creation, and we played tournaments with thousands of others. We met the artists and authors that we loved; a professional conference for geeky seventeen year olds!

We took that richness and turned it over into our game play. Our stories evolved from dungeon crawls for loot, to archetypal quests to modern day parables about the evils people do. At its leading edge one of our games could speak to our own alienation and sense of desperation, while simultaneously giving us a means to exorcise it.

All of this made me aware of how a game works on a fundamental level. If you apply certainty and destroy choice (and chance), you kill it stone dead. If you place one participant in a position of absolute power so that they become a teller, rather than a participant, you've killed it again. You play a game best when you play it within its own context. Any game that breaks the forth wall falls to pieces. Game coherency requires consistency, not to a person's will, but to the circumstances of the game. The best games are flexible enough to become richer as players add their own content (experiences, objects, ideas) to the game.

I've seen players cry when their character dies, but not only in sadness, also with respect. A good death is a good story, it honours the player's efforts, the character's beliefs and the game itself. The nice thing about a game is that sometimes Valkyries can then bring that dead hero to Valhalla, and you never know what can happen from there... good games give you a chance to maximize people's involvement in them using the full spectrum of human emotion and intellect.

This has been percolating since I met another former DnDer (@liamodonnell) at OTF21C a few weeks ago and said, "everything I know about teaching, I learned from DMing." It's the truth.

I wanted to turn this into a rant on gamification in education, but in looking back on this, I realize that these ideas are very important to me. I've always had a great deal of trouble believing, but my years spent as an acolyte of gaming have made me just that, a believer.

I'm going to leave the other bits below, but feel free to stop reading here. I'm happy with clarifying a good idea rather than attacking a bad one.

Notes that didn't make the cut:

Games aren’t ephemeral, if you want them to work, you have to nurture coherency within the game context

Not knowing what was going to happen also, ultimately, made it easier for me as a game master. I got to share in the story instead of telling it. I wasn't a transmitter, I was part of a cast, bringing a story to life.

Any of this sound familiar from a teaching perspective?

If you deliver your teaching with cardboard certainty and inflexible perfection, your students have no authorship in that experience, it means nothing to them. If you teach as a participant, the interaction has life, and everyone involved is authoring it. It might not be as efficient or technically perfect as you'd like, but then I think perfection is entirely overrated.

The real danger is when those cardboard teachers try to use games as if they were a sugar coating you can apply to make something edible. Gamification tries to use game play as a way of getting people to do things, but that is a disaster.

Gold stars aren’t a new idea, but they sound like one if you throw fancy terms like gamification on them.

A good game needs to work within its own limits, but those limits should be deeply embedded within the game dynamics, and they should be designed to be adjustable, games should evolve meaningfully as their players do.