2022 TMC7 Research Symposium: Table Talks and Future Skills

We just returned from Treasure Mountain Canada, the 7th iteration of the Canadian School Libraries national research conference.  Like the best professional development, this was self-directed and therefore relevant and meaningful to the people in attendance.  Library learning commons have been under a lot of pressure despite the fact that these centers for information management are key to getting us though the maelstrom that is our information revolution.  Listening to people on the front lines talking about the challenges and opportunities was enlightening.

Round table discussions based on the many papers submitted for the symposium happened throughout the day.  The first I sat in on was by Lila Armstrong.  She talked about the 'hub and spoke model' as a way to standardize digital skills development in the absence of a comprehensive digital literacy curriculum (Ontario isn't the only province who continues to lag behind in this regard).  Lila is a bit of a unicorn because she has recently moved between elementary and secondary panels, something few teachers do in their careers.  Equity and inclusion play a central role in Lila's research and had me thinking (once again) about how fractured Canada's education landscape is in terms of making its students future ready.

The next table talk was with Melanie Mulcaster, who is now seconded to TVO where she is working on digital content development and curation.  The pandemic chaos highlighted for Melanie how behind many LLCs were in terms of curating online content.  Through rolling lockdowns the lack of credible resources that were easy to navigate became a central issue in library management.  Mel's honest assessment  of our slapdash attempts to make digital content work, and then her choice to engage with building these missing tools, was brutally honest and insightful.

Ontario used to have a comprehensive online set of vetted digital tools and resources called OSAPAC, but a lack of foresight in any recent provincial government (not just the current one), has left Ontario scrambling for online resources on a board by board basis.  This is incredibly inefficient as boards repeat the same work instead of working from a centralized resource; it's a massive failure of vision and leadership.  It also speaks back to Lila's paper on equity in terms of access to coherent digital skills development.  Students fortunate enough to be in a school with a well developed digital skills program were at an advantage, those that weren't are even further behind.

I've struggled with the willy-nilly nature of the educational 'maker space' fad since it was all the buzz at the ECOO conference way back in 2015.  I next sat with Marc Compton, who teaches at a private school in B.C. and has successfully implemented maker spaces into his LLC.  Marc also manages a STEM program so has a better understanding of the engineering design process in terms of creating viable engineering opportunities for his students.  Marc's common sense approach to getting tools that work and then using them is contrary to the usual typical maker-space buy in (get whatever kit was hyped up at that conference you went to and then wonder why it's gather dust in your 'maker space').  It's amazing what a bit of common sense can do in terms of providing viable hands-on learning opportunities for your students.

Just when I thought we were wrapping things up, Carol Koechlin noted that the ideas document we were all working on isn't just about catching up to current best practices, but also a pathway to future digital literacies we haven't considered yet.  This got me thinking about all the emerging technologies we ignore because we still haven't caught up with established digital skills in education.  Here's a quick list off the top of my head:

EMERGING DIGITAL LITERACIES THAT WE DON'T TEACH BUT ARE ALREADY HERE:

Understanding 3d Digital Media

If you can't do this & don't know how 3d modelling
and animation work, you probably shouldn't be
teaching media arts in 2022.

I've been banging the drum about 3d media literacy for years.  Our game development program prepares students for an industry significantly larger than the ailing traditional media industries that most high school media arts programs still cling to.

After attending the FITC conference in 2018, I realized that 3d media awareness goes well beyond creation; inability to comprehend what computer generated imaging can do makes you susceptible to misinformation in advertising.  Understanding 3d CGI is a vital media fluency in 2022, yet almost no one is teaching it.

Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning: human-machine collaboration

We got involved with IBM in 2019 in order to access their IBM Watson AI core.  Watson is the AI learning system that beat the reigning Jeopardy champ, but in our case we got access to a cloud based chatbot program and this gave students their first taste of AI supported coding.  Accessing the Watson core allowed students to create criteria rather than specific values for variables.  Instead of having to list every possible name that a user might enter, using AI, students were able to train the system on the concept of names and then it would automatically assign any name given to that variable.  It's a small step, but understanding how AI and machine learning works allowed students to interact with it more effectively.

At the same time our game development class was getting a handle on more advanced enemy AI in the games we were developing.  The introduction to Watson in the junior classes quickly amped up our game based intelligence development in senior classes.

The as yet untaught emerging skillset here is human-machine collaboration.  After we got going with Watson, one of my seniors co-oped with me in the lab and she went after developing a machine learning algorithm that would learn from its mistakes and draw useful data out of massive datasets.  This past spring, when I became aware of Github's Co-Pilot, rather than banning it as many teachers have, I encouraged using it along with assessing its strengths and problems.  One of our seniors took it on for his grade 12 final project, his conclusion?  It helps but if you don't know how to code it often loses the plot.

Familiarity with machine learning is going to become a vital skillset for our grads, but almost no one is teaching it.  In the meantime it's what many students are using to answer poorly designed lessons that many teachers still haven't bothered to update.  None of these AI generated papers will light up a plagiarism checker because it's all original work.  We're so technology-illiterate in education that we don't even know what we don't know.

CODING is not DIGITAL LITERACY

... any more than grammar is all there is to language literacy.  Of course it's a part of it, but just a small part.  The technology stack we're living in starts with basic electronics and works its way up through information technology and networking through IoT and robotics to cloud computing and emergent artificial intelligence.  In that hardware structure there are numerous software offshoots, all of which are viable and important components of a comprehensive digital literacy strategy.  If you think coding is digital literacy then you're probably looking for an easy way out.  What I've discovered about people looking for an easy way out of difficult work is that they'll usually find one.

Cybersecurity

I've saved the scariest for last.  I've been banging the drum for better (or any) cybersecurity education for years.  When I show up at a conference to present on it, educators can't run away fast enough, yet they depend on it everyday to make their networked educational technology enabled lessons happen, and they expose themselves and their students to potential harm when using this connected tech with such willful ignorance.

It seems pretty obvious to me that, if we're going to use networked educational technology in every classroom, it is incumbent upon us to teach cybersafety and privacy to our students from the moment we make them vulnerable.  The idea that cybersecurity is someone else's problem is both naïve and selfish, yet that has been education's approach.

I first got involved with cybersecurity through CyberTitan, Canada's national student cybersecurity competition, which runs in conjunction with CyberPatriot, run by the U.S. Air Force Association in America.  CyberPatriot is now in its fifteenth season and has tens of thousands of students in many countries all learning hands-on defensive I.T. skills and deep cybersafety awareness that will assist them in any future career.  As you may expect, Canada has far too few teams, and many provinces and major centers have none at all.

There are many industry and government organizations that want to bolster cyber-education.  A more cyber-educated society makes for a more protected Canada in an interconnected global economy that isn't exactly stable, yet the reflex in education is to think of this as someone else's problem, even as we become increasingly dependent on networked ed-tech.  Ontario is now requiring mandatory elearning for high school students, but has nothing in place to teach safe use of that mandatory, network dependent technology; we couldn't put the cart any further ahead of the horse if we tried.

In my new role we just ran National CyberDay, which reached over 2000 students nationally - there are almost seven million students in Canada, meaning less than 0.0003% of students participated (in the middle of cybersecurity awareness month), yet almost all of them will be on networked educational technology every day this week.

Cybersecurity education may be the toughest nut to crack, but my recent experiences at conferences on the subject have only intensified my desire to climb this mountain.  Digitally skilled librarians would be a great place to begin this change towards a more secure and digitally literate Canada.  LLCs running CyberDay activities and engaging reluctant classroom teachers in cybersafety and privacy awareness is a great first step.  As awareness builds, librarians taking on CyberTitan coaching roles could introduce emerging cyber-skills to middle and high school students, opening up pathways into a desperately under-served industry in Canada.

There are so many emerging digital mediums.  I haven't touched on the metaverse and how virtual and augmented reality are going to change human interaction in the next decade, or how wearable technology will revolutionize the smartphone yet again... and most people are blissfully unaware of how machine learning and artificial intelligence are already influencing their lives on a daily basis, but these are all emerging elements of digital literacy that we will need to address.

There is much work to do, but events like Treasure Mountain Canada are exactly how we're going to escape our silos and develop a cohesive national approach that is both equitable and scalable.  Nothing else is going to solve the depth and breadth of the digital challenges that we face.

The hackneyed approach to digital skills development in education in Canada (and elsewhere) has produced a scarcity of much needed digitally literate graduates. Emergent skillsets such as in cybersecurity are particularly absent.  There is much to do.

This isn't the first time this subject has arisen on Dusty World:

The Digital Divide is Deep & Wide (from over 5 years ago).

"Overall, people with strong technology skills make up a 5–8% sliver of their country’s population, and this is true across all wealthy OECD countries.

What’s important to remember is that 95% of the general population in North America cannot make effective use of computers in resolving even simple problems or overcoming unexpected outcomes."

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/

Exceptional Times: Using a Pandemic to Close the Digital Divide  (Except we didn't. As soon as COVID pressures subsided we blamed everything except digital illiteracy, and went back to the status quo).

2022 Treasure Mountain 7 Research Symposium & Thinktank: MediaSmarts Keynote & Digital Tools and Expertise for Resilient Learning

The seventh iteration of the Canadian School Libraries Treasure Mountain Canada Research Symposium just wrapped up in Vancouver, BC.  Canada is one of the only countries in the world without a national education strategy, though weirdly we have an international education strategy - just not one for Canadians in Canada.  That is strange, right?

TMC is an opportunity for teacher librarians to escape Canada's provincial education silos and share common challenges (which are very similar).  By sharing these problems and brainstorming solutions, best practices and future-ready strategies emerge. Wouldn't it be efficient if the whole country were engaged in this powerful professional practice instead of repeating the work over and over (if at all)? Yet many provinces were not not in attendance. I'm still struck by how there is no such thing as "Canadian Education", which has lasting implications for equity in our country.  Some provinces have cut teacher librarians entirely from their schools, preventing any of their students or staff from benefitting from these information literacy specialists - and these cuts happened during an information technology revolution when a guiding hand would have been most helpful.

We're in the middle of an information
revolution and your school system
wants to remove all the information
specialists?  What an odd choice.

I'm not a librarian, but I'm married to an awesome one.  Last time we flew out for a Treasure Mountain conference in BC my son and I went for a long ride up the empty coast of Vancouver Island while the librarians gathered, but this time I was in the room as the paper Alanna and I co-authored was featured in the event.

Treasure Mountain attracts librarians who are working to put school library learning commons squarely in the role of digital literacy development. This event was full of energetic thinkers who were digitally literate and well aware of the ongoing digital skills crisis happening across Canada.

Our presentation was about how using industry standard project management tools and organizational strategies not only prepares students for life after graduation, but also provides them with the organizational tools they need to be both resilient and successful, even when our school systems stagger under the weight of multiple pandemic shut-downs.  Being able select the right tools and move between digital and real-world information allows students to attend class, stay organized and continue to author their own student-led projects no matter how much chaos surrounds their learning.  Digital skills development and knowledge of a swiss-army knife of readily available digital tools could make our education systems pandemic-proof, if only we'd do it.

We shared examples of successes that demonstrated equity and inclusion as well as providing other examples of student-centred empowerment in learning through effective project management.  The tool we used was Trello, based on the academic research Alanna was doing at Royal Roads University in the spring of 2020 when things fell apart.  The project management theory her post-graduate class was studying was applied directly in my game-development class, saving both student-led projects from almost certain disaster; it's a great example of a cross-pollination of ideas and shows how having a masters-TL in the room can help even a veteran teacher find effective learning tools.

***

Treasure Mountain is very much a hands-on experience with everyone participating and collaborating on developing ideas.  Those ideas are brought forward by the participants.  This year there were 27 (!) papers submitted on subjects ranging from how to audit your book collection to enhance diversity and how to keep an LLC operational during a pandemic, to how to embrace emerging digital literacies.  In my new role at ICTC I am especially interested in that digital literacy development.

Another example of the many cracks in
Canada's siloed education approach.

The morning keynote by Matthew Johnston, the educational director of MediaSmarts, an organization dedicated to improving media literacy in our students, focused on explaining how things had changed since pre-internet broadcast media.  The multi-directional web of media we now find ourselves in implicitly demands digital fluency, yet we still fail to engage these digital literacies by systemically teaching them.

This isn't just a Canadian problem, as code.org states, most schools don't have a computer science program (ours got locally cancelled during the pandemic).  Even though there has been a recent push to put coding into Ontario elementary curriculum, it's being delivered by teachers with little or no technology fluency themselves, and coding is only a tiny part of a much larger and more complex digital/media literacy framework.

Library learning commons are an ideal place to begin this work as (when they're well run) they act as a shared space for engaging with the iterative learning needed to make emerging technology work.  Librarians have always been information management specialists - the mediums may change, but the fundamentals of rigorous inquiry and source credibility assessment don't.  A digitally fluent librarian makes the LLC central in 21st Century learning models that effectively leverage digital tools.

Before the Friday night awards ceremony, Alanna and I did an interview with Dr. David Loertscher, one of the conceptual founders of the learning commons model.  David was curious as to how digital tools could be used to amplify and organize student-directed/inquiry based learning models, and our talk gave us a chance to clarify our own understandings too.  It'll eventually be available on Dr. Loertscher's ALiVE Virtual Library.  It's collaborative opportunities like these that help pave a pathway into the future that will not only make library learning commons relevant to student experience, but will also provide the framework for much needed digital skills system building capacity.

The 2022 BCTLA Conference

 

The BCTLA conference prior to Treasure Mountain Canada 2022 (where Alanna I were presenting) was challenging in all the right ways.  David Robertson's opening keynote cajoled the audience with humour and deeply personal insights around why it's so important to give indigenous authors (ideally through an indigenous press) control of their own stories as a vital part of reconciliation. As a writer myself I'll go out of my way not to write indigenous characters in, no matter how well intentioned, because that has been happening for far too long.

David's talk was full of humour and hope. He wrapped it up by pointing out how far Canada has come in the past two decades. There is still much to do, but librarians making sure books by indigenous authors about indigenous lives are on the shelves is a big step toward helping Canada wake up from its troubled and often hidden colonial past.

Ivan Coyote's closing keynote was equally powerful. I've learned that it isn't a BCTLA keynote unless you cry. Ivan has a magical ability to move between poetry and accessible, colloquial prose that is both jarring and profoundly honest. I've long struggled with my own gender and don't feel comfortable with my pronouns, but I am what I am and, also being autistic, don't have the social energy or expertise to fight that battle.

The stories of non-cis kids leaving small towns even as those same small towns complain about a lack of doctors and other professionals was both funny and sad, and rang true with my experiences trying to provide safe spaces for 'atypicals' in my own small town school where gendered sports teams based on cisgendered norms drive school community in almost every sense.  Ivan's honesty made me more vocal about my own differences during our presentation and might let me get a bit closer to what I am when I'm not pouring myself into the mould that everyone expects when I'm in the public eye.  That's a powerful influence from a conference keynote!

In between the keynotes I attended a great engineering design process seminar with UBC's GeeringUP engineering outreach students.  UBC's GeeringUP program offers many online STEM resources for students and educators.  Are Ontario colleges and universities doing this kind of k-12 engagement?  If not, why not?  Fortunately, UBC isn't stingy about sharing its engineering resources.

When I wasn't in keynotes or seminars I was getting the broken school wifi to work so I could support rookie CyberTitan coaches five time zones away as they took their students through the first round of CyberPatriot.  That a major school system in one of the biggest urban centres in the country struggles to provide basic connectivity says something profound about the digital divide Canada is facing.  There are many components to developing effective digital learning, starting with connectivity and technology access.  If we have trouble making the fundamentals work in a place where there are really no excuses, how are the millions of rural educators and students (including the vast majority of indigenous educators and students) across Canada feeling everyday?  You can't even begin to address digital illiteracy when there is no connectivity.  There is much work to do.

We wrapped up the BCTLA conference in a state of emotional exhaustion, but with minds brimming with possibilities.  To see librarians taking on these national equity initiatives through ensuring access to books and media by and for the persecuted, often with unclear support from their own school systems (there was much talk about hate-filled attempts to co-opt trustee positions), was both inspiring and frustrating.  Just when you think Canada might wake up from its shadowy, hate-filled colonial history and take a step into a brighter more inclusive future, that darkness reappears as twisted jingoism.

The BCTLA Conference was powerful in many ways, and after only a couple of hours to catch our breaths we were back at it for the Treasure Mountain opening dinner.

Creating A Canadian Cybersecurity Ecosystem

Last week I attended my first conferences in a long time. Someone will have to explain to me why classroom teachers have no access to professional development like this. On Wednesday and Thursday morning I was at SecTor in Toronto, making many new contacts in industry and realizing that the vast majority of companies on the front lines of cyber-defence in Canada are eager to help both the public and public education get a handle on cybersafety and digital hygiene. On Thursday afternoon and Friday I was at the University of Waterloo for their Privacy & Cybersecurity Conference. These were two very different conferences with SecTor clearly focused on industry and sales and Waterloo's CPI on academic research and strategic thinking, but you'd be amazed how well the two fit together. I really wish they'd arrange things so people could do one and then the other instead of overlapping them, but that failure to look after each other symbiotically is emblematic of a larger problem in Canada.

I had a great chat with a colleague at ICTC a few weeks ago where he described his approach as 'serving the ecosystem', which I intend to emulate.  He sees ICTC's role as helping everyone working in Canada's digital skills development space to meet the council's mission, which is to strengthen Canada's digital advantage in an ever more connected and volatile global economy.  This sounds like a big ask but I believe in the goal, and that belief gives me the energy to take on this seemingly insurmountable task.

One of my favourite moments from the Waterloo CPI conference was when one of the audience, after listening to how five universities are connecting to each other, interrupted with a clear and present warning.  He guaranteed that in the next five years Canadians are going to be sitting in the dark after a cyber-attack from a well developed foreign aggressor.  When we're all sitting there in the cold and dark with no electricity, gas or communications, will we think we've done enough?  Intense, right?

Early in the talk that question came up in, the head of TMU's CyberSecure Catalyst was talking about how he headed to Israel to see how they created a world-class cybersecure ecosystem in the most challenging of circumstances.  His takeaway?  The Israeli system is predicated on familiarity, trust and connectivity.  After only a month and a bit observing Canada's approach, it seems we're doing the opposite.  I've stumbled across excellent resources in both government academia and industry, but each one is working from its own funding formula and entirely focused on meeting the targets in that formula.  Even our connectivity is fractured with numerous 'networks' forming independently of each other, all with the idea of uniting us.  It'd be funny if it weren't so absurd.  Here are a few of them:

• https://www.canadiancybersecuritynetwork.com/home
• https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/cyber-security-innovation-network/en
• https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/cyber-security-global-alliance-csga-pleased-announce-launch-castle/
• https://www.universityaffairs.ca/news/news-article/five-universities-supporting-canadas-cybersecurity-strategy/
• http://ncc-cnc.ca/
• https://www.cybersecurecatalyst.ca/actp-overview
• https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/cyber-security-innovation-network/en
• https://www.ngen.ca/cybersecurity
• https://www.digitalsupercluster.ca/programs-projects/programs/
• https://www.cdsn-rcds.com/

They're all doing good work, but they're doing it in silos and in many cases repeating material found in other programs.  It's neither efficient nor is it anything like the Israeli approach of centralized trust, familiarity and cooperative development.  I'm not surprised that, after announcing yet another Canadian network that'll cure our cyber-skills shortage (which is so bad that the government says we need to bring in talent to fill the gap), that guy in the audience lost his patience.

"The siloed approach we know doesn't work anymore. We think it should change and this budget didn't give us the warm fuzzies."

- Christyn Cianfarani CEO Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries

Christyn is exactly right, Canada's initial approach of jumpstarting as many programs as it could to try and cover the cybersecurity shortfall doesn't scale well now that cybersafety is a part of everyone's lives from individuals and small businesses all the way along to multi-national corporations and federal governments.  COVID only accelerated our dependence on digital connectivity yet we continue to lag behind in terms of cyber capacity, especially in education.

At the conference, Ontario's Ministry of Economic Development representative kept describing Ontario's many cyber-focused companies and educational organizations as an ecosystem, but a lot of potted plants all sitting in the same area are not an ecosystem, which is exactly Canada's problem.

How Canada is approaching cybersecurity capacity development.

How Israel does it - with trust, interconnectivity and familiarity - no silos, and everyone looking after each other.

Canada needs to work together to create a national focus on cybersecurity skills development starting in elementary school with integrated digital hygiene and cybersafety learning that leads to middle school access to programs like CyberTitan that introduce students to hands on I.T. skills that demystify the subject and open up pathways.  In high school everyone should be learning essential digital skills (which are atrociously poor - more than 80% of successful cyber-attacks are the result of user ignorance) as a mandatory course. Students interested in pursuing cybersecurity should have early access to coop and STEM programs that will set them on the right track for post-secondary - no adult upskilling required.  This is also where we need to address how our high schools genderize pathways, knocking many girls out of these opportunities.

If we can demystify cyber in k-12 we will be able to graduate cyber-safe students who are able to operate in our interconnected digital economy in every pathway.  Digital fluency and access to cyber-opportunities is, of course, also an equity and inclusion issue; these opportunities aren't just for wealthy, urban boys, though they continue to dominate the industry.  Emerging digital careers tend to be more future proof and higher paying, and everyone deserves a crack at them.

Canada is the only major federation and one of few countries in the world without a national education standard, leaving our minors open to wildly differing political influences and support in our schools; there is no such thing as 'Canadian Education'.  Rather than start with central administration, I think Canada should start with a canadian student bill of rights to protect minors from these changeable winds, but I digress.  Canada's fractured approach to education (like its fractured approach to cyber) means that we need to reach a critical mass with government and industry partners in order to break into the siloed world of canadian public education.  But with no central authority to get onside, a win in Ontario does not mean a win in Quebec, or anywhere else in the country.

Canada's patchwork approach to governance along with its challenging geography means we're facing barriers that Israel and other world leaders in cyber have never had to contend with, which is precisely why we need to pool our resources, grow an interconnected ecosystem of pubic and private cyberskills supporters and then take on this seemingly insurmountable task.

Cybersecurity might sound like an esoteric reason for this big of a challenge, but cyber lives at the pointy end of a pyramid of digital infrastructure needs that Canada is still sorely in need of developing.  Focusing on cyber means we're also focusing on equity and inclusion by connecting everyone, including remote northern communities, new Canadians and people who can't afford Canada's monopolistic telecom infrastructure, to the digital economy.  To get to cyber we need to get through device accessibility, network connectivity and digital skills development, which is why it's a worthy strategic goal. 

The trick is going to be getting all these disparate interests to unite in order to tackle Canada's unique and challenging geography and history - otherwise we're all going to be sitting in the cold dark in a few years wondering why we didn't do more when we could have.

***

UPDATE:  News from the frontlines of 21st Century war, which includes cyber:  

"Collaborating, exchanging information, assisting one another — this is the best way to thwart cybercriminals."

"All told, cyber resiliency relies on collaborative efforts from the global community, he said. Addressing the corporate audience, he underscored the importance of investing in and building a cybersecurity system as a strategic method to improve the cyber resilience of the state."

https://venturebeat.com/security/ukraine-cybersecurity-head-speaks-at-blackberry-summit-says-cyberwar-affects-us-all/

The importance of collaboration in cybersecurity, including in education and user outreach, is more obvious than ever as the Ukraine conflict continues.  One day Canada will be in the crosshairs, will we be ready?  Or will we have dozens of competing interests all producing redundant content?