Emergency Memo: Post Peak, Nov 2014

GRAND RIVER DSB - EMERGENCY MEMO - Mon, Nov 3rd, 2014

NOTE: This memo is being sent to all staff within the board. Following the upheaval and violence over the summer, and the Federal Government applying the War Measures act on a national scale in August, the combined RCMP/Police/Military presence has restored some order. Fuel is being rationed by the Federal Government and the Provincial Government are being asked to enact emergency measures to normalize the situation and reduce chances of mass starvation and freezing as winter approaches. One of the key aspects of the plan is to normalize and enable basic rights, including the right to education. What follows is GRDSB’s plan...

The sudden, sharp rise in fossil fuel prices (here for information) have forced our board to make some dramatic policy revisions in order to match the new emergency management plan recently presented by the Ministry of Education, Province of Ontario.

A typical school bus run now costs approximately $550 in fuel costs alone, and is expected to become even more expensive, making this option economically untenable. With the various unions, we have tried to maintain the collegial relationship of previous collective bargaining agreements while working to create a sustainable public education system in our area. These changes are brought on by world-wide resource issues beyond our control, and we have to modify our approach to education in order to continue maintaining a sufficient level of service. The followings steps will ensure this:

TEACHERS

1) Teachers are still required to attend the nearest school them, preferably without the use of petrochemicals. Those schools with a sufficient number of local teachers will remain open while being retrofitted with sustainable energy devices. In many cases, if you can see a wind turbine or mini-hydro project being built near you, this will indicate a public school.

Note: This is a provincial and federally mandated program in order to ensure ‘energy islands’ in as many communities as possible. The lack of fossil fuels makes mega-infrastructure such as non-localized power generation unsustainable. All communities will now be responsible for generating their own power.

2) If you live out of the board area, it is suggested that you consider relocation, or contact your local board for employment opportunities. We will do everything we can with neighboring boards to ensure that teachers are able to make this transition. If you do neither, and you are no longer able to able to fulfill your contract, you will be declared surplus and released.

3) If there is no local school within walking distance of your home location you may:

a) Apply to the provincial elearning initiative. With this initiative any household with

children under the age of 18 may receive free wireless high speed internet, meaning many students will take this opportunity to learn online. As an eteacher you would also

qualify for sponsored high speed internet at home. You would then resume your duties

by teaching remotely.

Please click HERE to contact the board elearning conversion initiative.

b) Apply through our board for a provincial grant to open a learning centre. If you own or have access to a building that would provide a suitable environment for a micro-school, and there are enough local students you can consolidate your area students into this structure and initiate your own k-10 program. Since all schools are now k-10 schools, you would be in a very similar teaching environment to your colleagues. LCs will be developed where-ever a 10-1 student-teacher ratio can form.

Please click HERE to contact the board provincial liaison for learning centre creation.

4) Curriculum has been revised and the law altered to reflect our new circumstances. The old standardized tests have been removed and in their place the New Ontario Diploma now exists. This diploma follows previous standards, but offers students earlier departure (students may now graduate between 15-16 years of age) while ensuring that fundamental skills are still evident. The NOD review is highlighted on the updated Ministry curriculum page. It is a two week series of literacy, numeracy, citizenship and general knowledge assessments designed to ensure that a graduating student has sufficient skills to survive in the new economy.

Please click HERE to see the NOD initiative and the new requirements for graduation.

STUDENTS

Ontario curriculum will now be revised and the law changed to reflect our new reality. Students are legally required to be in a virtual or physical personal learning plan until the age of 16. During their 15th or 16th year, students may take the Literacy & Numeracy Review. A mark of 70% or higher in both of these reviews will grant them a NOD (New Ontario Diploma). NOD now takes the place of the OSSD.

Students who fail the NOD at the end of their 16th year are assessed and presented with a Sub-NOD rating. SNOD60 would indicate a student at 60% NOD requirements. SNOD30 would indicate a student at 30% of NOD requirements.

Young adults who have finished school at 16 may choose to return, but like ANOD students, they will be required to support their learning financially.

Following passage of the NOD, students may choose to:

1) WORK: the reduction in mechanization has put a premium on physical labour, and graduates will have no trouble making a living wage in the new economy. Jobs in agricultural and infrastructure labour are not only available but in great demand. One of the key reasons for reducing the graduation age was to fulfill this need. We can no longer afford to hold willing workers in public institutions until they are 18.

2) APPRENTICESHIP: the various trades have made agreements with the Ministry of Education and post secondary institutions in order to encourage and maintain high skill positions. Students may choose, after completing their NODs in their 15th or 16th years to begin an apprenticeship in any one of dozens of trades. These apprenticeships often involve moving away from home. The Ministry will continue to track and support these students until they reach journeyman status (usually in their 5th year of apprenticeship). Regular reviews will ensure students are in productive, safe, learning and working environments.

3) ANODs: students interested in pursuing academic streams may choose to complete their Advanced New Ontario Diplomas. These courses are designed to be completed by a capable student within one year. As a result, funding is only available for the 12 months following successful NOD graduation. Students taking longer will have to fund their own studies, including the costs of energy and school access.

Graduates with ANODs will be able to apply to one of the four remaining universities in the province. Entry into these institutions is very competitive. Only students who complete ANODs on time (or early) with exceptional grades should apply. Courses in post-secondary now tend to be much more applied in nature. Universities are intent on turning out doctors, engineers and teachers rather than unused undergraduate degrees. Students who do not know their major, will find access to university very limited. Students who do not have a working plan for their academic studies will also find post secondary access challenging.

The new streams are designed around an expected distribution of 60% NOD to the workplace, 30% apprenticeship and 10% ANOD graduates. Food production and distribution alone requires this kind demographic.

SUMMARY

The Federal and Provincial mandates recognize that the era of cheap energy is over, and our society needs to adapt in order to maintain and improve our technical skills and preserve the rights found in the Constitution. Public structures such as law and education can ensure that human rights are not being violated and children still have an opportunity to become educated, effective members of our brave new world.

Children and the poor are at risk of being tyrannized as their value as manual labour has increased and the petro-chemical basis of pre-peak social justice is broken. Without a presence in every community, the weakest members of society are at risk of abuse. With this in mind, it is vital that our public education system reassert itself with the support of regionalized arms of the provincial and federal governments.

By normalizing schools and supporting local sheriffs, we hope to rebuild a safe and fair society. Drastic times call for drastic measures. Please consider being part of the solution, it’s time to let go of the past.

Stay warm as the weather is getting cold and ensure that your lodgings are able to withstand a non-chemically heated winter.

Best of luck,

Your Superintendent.

GRDSB

ps: as further information becomes available, and the board network comes back up under its own power, I will continue to email the latest.

Bottlenecks

It used to be the desktop, but we've got more processing power than we know what to do with nowadays. The real bottleneck is internet access. I spent a frustrating day today in a public high school trying to fit an elephant of a live video feed through the doorway - it didn't fit. If the school was empty, and the network dormant, it ran fine. Unfortunately, I had to share bandwidth with 1500 other people, facebook must go on.

All I needed was a 700kb/sec video feed to run continuously all day. I'll blame the university for sending us an uncompressed, 640x480 monster of a feed. We could stream youtube or TEDtalks, but not the university live feed. The irony is it was one of the pre-eminent computer science universities in Canada, and they didn't know how to feed it to us so we could follow it.

After doing backflips all morning trying to fix it, some awesome grade 12 students filled in the afternoon with some presentations on number theory, robotics and computers. It wasn't a wasted day, but it's hard to sell technology as a course of study when the guy teaching it can't make it work.

I'd asked for a priority on the video feed over the 400 facebook accounts that were open, but apparently that's impossible. I find this frustrating. I had no trouble prioritizing traffic or outright banning it when I was network admining, I'm not sure whether it's a case of can't or can't be bothered. In either case, I'm at the end of a long day trying to make things work that simply won't because the board won't adjust bandwidth to need (it's cheaper) and a university didn't optimize it's feed (it's cheaper).

At the end of it, I got some grade 9s interested in robotics, and considering taking computers further on. I'm not sure that I got through to the half a dozen girls I convinced to come out. We don't have a single female in grade 12 comp-sci or comp-eng, which I'd really like to fix.

I also wanted to backchannel the heck out of this. I introduced 90% of the students to twitter and showed them how universities use it during seminars, then the university didn't use it at all, we were the only ones lighting up the hashtags or posting on the facebook page. I also tried running wallwisher.com. This thing could be brilliant. We had it running live on a wall through a projector. Alas, due to bandwidth restrictions, it crashed constantly and wouldn't refresh at any time.

Until our school board starts taking traffic shaping seriously, the school network continues to be hijacked by facebook junkies and youtubers filling up the bandwidth with noise not remotely related to anything educational.

It's been a long day watching technology not work.

Special Education

Near the end of my teacher's college program, Nipissing put on an assistive learning tools workshop. We were all duly wowed by the latest version of Dragonspeak, the latest in PDAs and how they could be used in learning, and a surprising array of speech, numeracy, literacy and subject specific learning tools. It was an all day seminar, and it really had an impact on me. It also made me question the intent of all of this fantastic equipment.

Over and over, it was targeted at at-risk/below grade students who struggled with whatever the technology was supposed to help them overcome. Dragonspeak, there is no doubt, helps students see language in terms of the written word, but why does it need to be so carefully guarded from the general population? If a student struggling with literacy could use Dragonspeak to gain a foothold on something beyond their reach, couldn't it just as easily help a group of media students get their ideas down in solid form while they were storyboarding a video? Couldn't it assist a gifted writer who wants to try a different way of getting over writer's block? These people aren't anywhere near failing, but if we're only using assistive tech to help those failing expectations, I think we're wasting a valuable opportunity.

Those many learning tools we saw that day impressed upon me just how helpful technology could be in learning, I just didn't understand why it all had to be so Special focused. Any one of those tools could help anyone learn. Learning isn't easy, for anyone, it's a challenge to stay focused, it's a challenge to make the time and space to write, even if you think of yourself as a writer. It's a challenge to get work in on time, even if you're a top student. I watch excellent students in the form of teachers doing their Masters struggling with this very issue all the time.

In my senior year of high school, my grandfather died, our family pet died and shortly thereafter my father was involved in a near-fatal traffic accident. Always a B student (why draw unnecessary attention to yourself), my grades slipped, assignments weren't handed in and things went from mediocre to worse. My teachers berated me for time management, I was not working "to expectations". I didn't tell anyone about what was going on at home, I was trying to hold it (and a shaky family) together as the oldest son. I'd never been special enough to get a special education, and the standard one wasn't fitting now. I squeaked out of high school and it took me 3 years to get my self together and take another run at it in order to get grade 13 and go to university.

Whenever I have a student, regardless of what their Individual Education Plan does or doesn't say, suddenly miss work, or class, I don't start grading them in terms of expectations, I ask myself what's going on in the other 99% of their lives that has little or nothing to do with my classroom. Sometimes I ask, sometimes they tell me, often they don't, but I don't take that as license to grade them to Ministry expectations.

Dealing with the system now as a parent for the first time has only enforced my understanding of how streaming generally works. My son is lucky in having 2 educated, very motivated and able parents who advocate for him strenuously. His challenges at school aren't overwhelming, but many students face much worse obstacles, and don't have the support at home to take on the system effectively. On a purely experiential basis, we could as easily stream academic/applied and essential into stable family/broken family/no-visible family, and you'd find a startling correlation between our current "academic" system of measurement and an often ignored key indicator of school success.

Differentiating, student centred learning and assistive technology all aim to produce an education that helps a student on as much of an individual basis as we can manage in a system that often has too many people and not enough money. In a perfect world, we wouldn't have Special Education, it would all be special education, in the meantime, you have to ask yourself, how often have you had grades dictated by a lack of access to assistive technology or poor student performance due to their circumstances beyond school?

Maybe one day education will just be special, but I don't see that happening as long as we set up static, specific expectations and expect students to achieve them like automatons. An education has surprisingly little to do with building a better person. It's a biological process, deeply tied to our physical development, circumstances and opportunities, but we still want to assess it as though it were a Victorian industrial process.

How Low Can We Go?

Just bumped into another Dad from my street, who no longer comes out to get his kids on the other school bus in the morning. He told me a sad story.

Our local school bus companies were bought up by an American company who promptly fired everyone and rehired them at minimum wage. That didn't bump up the investor returns enough so they also cut staff and combined bus routes. Their 8:30 pickup was becoming more like an 8:55 or 9:10 pickup. This happened for weeks on end. He finally went to the company and they reorganized their buses (again) to try and stabilize pickups. This is the 3rd time this has happened this year. This is why I don't see them in the morning any more.

I wonder if the school board gets back money on this with cheaper rates. I wonder if all of those people who now can't afford their mortgages, car payments or household costs (forget luxuries like having their kids play sports) are happy that the board gets such good rates. I wonder if the publicly funded school boards did anything whatsoever to try and resolve this without people who do a vital job being treated like refugees.

This reminds me of Michael Moore's bit on airline pilots in the States in his last film.

What we appear to have here are publicly funded and operated school systems that seem intent on lowering the standard of living of thousands of people to improve bottom lines Am I the only one this seems absurd to?

I then told him about where our school custodians are. That same school board is intent on cutting back their responsibilities until it can replace them with minimum wage paid contracted cleaning services. Everything I've heard from board politics around who has been hired to perform this, to the ground level response of our own custodians, has supported this explanation. Once again, a publicly funded school board seems intent on lowering the standard of living of hundreds of people in its area in order to lower its bottom line. The fact that minimum wage paid people with no particular on-going interest in their work will be responsible for numerous health and safety issues in schools doesn't seem to be at issue.

As a younger man I was never a fan of unions, until I saw the epic mess that "business" makes of even simple situations. Whereas a union might protect the odd jerk while protecting many honest employees from abuse and exploitation, private business seems to screw virtually everyone in order to pay off a select few of the richest, usually while dismantling a working system in the process. Given a choice, I'd rather see as few honest people get screwed as possible, so union it is.

Private ownership of what should be publicly owned utilities never works out. The businesses squeeze it for as much as they can with no eye for sustainability. They reduce the effectiveness of a service to just below the bare minimum accepted by the public, then try and hold it there for as long as they can, hiring off shore call centres to field the calls at minimum cost. It's been a long time since big business has done even it's own R&D work, let alone truly add anything of value to human civilization.

So here I am, listening to yet another story of Globalization in a world that has proven again and again that it simply doesn't work. Simplifying ownership into multinationals injures regional interests and only benefits a few of the very rich, making everyone else poorer in the process. The big lie is that we're all told that we could be that rich minority if we: try hard enough - are smart enough - know the right people - whatever, but that simply isn't the case.

In the meantime, I'm paying taxes (and working) for a public organization that promotes the povertization of entire sectors of employees that depend on it. Thousands poorer to so a select few can move into a higher income bracket.

elearning and the teacher/student relationship

A little while back I caught a National Geographic show studying human intelligence. In studying various great ape social groups they narrowed down perhaps the most exceptional aspect of human being: our ability to teach each other. Most of the technology we develop is keyed to enhancing this aspect of human civilization.

What began as the transmission of basic skills has evolved into a world wide civilization that has peaked into the heart of matter and seen to the edge of the universe. We suddenly find ourselves holding immense power, and only seek to discover more. The ability to learn and teach are powerful skills indeed.

The fundamental relationship at the heart of this transmission of knowledge: master/apprentice, teacher/student, mentor/mentee, exists in every human (and, it appears, any intelligent animal) society, and is generally acknowledged as one of great importance. Whether you're a Sensei in a dojo, a master craftsman passing on the skills of your trade, or a teacher in a modern education system, the fundamental nature of your job is the same: transmission of knowledge through human contact.

Transmission of knowledge occurs very effectively through these human relationships. When I think about key teachers in my life, they ring true for me because they were people of exceptional emotional honesty, as well as knowledgeable people. They related to me on many levels. I see students cotton on to various teachers in the school because, on many levels, they vibrate at the same frequency. From an administrative point of view, this is why it's vital that schools have many different kinds of teachers who teach in different ways. It's also one of the fundamental problems with trying to systematize the transmission of learning.

We've got the elearning Ontario conference coming up and I'm just coming off a semester where I had to manage no less than 6 elearning courses. Having now taught elearning remotely and in-class, I'm trying to wrestle with the challenges of teaching through the elearning system. In-class, I found good students frustrated because they felt isolated from the teacher (because of the split focus between the online course and the physical presence of the teacher). I found weak students frustrated because of poor computer literacy. They didn't want or seek a stronger relationship with the teacher, but couldn't access the course information or assignments behind a digital veil; anger was often the result.

Over the years I've had some wonderful teachable moments with remote students. Sometimes through text (with exceptional writers and readers in 4U English), but more often through video conference (which doesn't demand a poet's touch for honest, direct contact). A while back, our board set up an Adobe Connect server allowing me to talk to students directly. While still not as immediate as an in-class relationship with a student, the video link does a lot to mitigate the sense of isolation. Unfortunately, the html only elearning system has no intrinsic ability to make this multi-media link possible.

As we begin to move from oil dependence, elearning is going to become a more critical means of delivering curriculum. Being physically present in the same place at the same time will become increasingly expensive. At the moment, elearning does a lot to minimize the personal nature of that teacher/student relationship. Much of this revolves around bandwidth, technology accessibility and lack of experience in both students and teachers. I've been sitting in school waiting 10 seconds for *every* page to load while working through elearning - and those were text pages. In addition to the technical issues, elearning also contains courses not written by the teachers delivering them. Any teacher who teaches other people's material knows how awkward this can be. Elearning is still new, and is having on going problems in its completion rates due to these difficulties.

At home I'm an online game player. I have lists of friends, very few of whom I've met in person, many of whom I feel I know well. We've fought zombies, explored strange wildernesses and worked together through all sorts of adventures. With sufficient bandwidth and technology on site, multimedia information can flow between people in surprisingly complex and meaningful ways. It's still not the same as being in the same place, but it can come astonishingly close. If you ever have a chance to play WoW, or another in-depth online game, you know what I'm talking about.

I'm not in elearning because it will solve all of our problems instantly, that is ridiculous. I'm in it because it is embryonic. Using technology that people couldn't even imagine 2 generations ago, I want to try to find a way to bring the essence of that fantastically ancient learning relationship alive, not just through eyes, vocal chords and ears, but through fibre optics, interactive media and the cybernetics that have become a part of who we are.

It's as close as I can get to sci-fi while teaching. Frustrating? Sure, but I get to "boldly go...", and that is priceless.

Notes:

This is a post from a few weeks ago on that elearning pilot program. It includes a review of the student survey statistics from the end of the course.

Peak oil is all about peak food production

You can't feed six billion people without it. I'm reading The End Of Food right now. The level of societal change we would have to undertake to revert 80% of the population to manual food production would (will) be impossible. The fact that we don't even see it coming is just absurd.

The whole middle east uprising isn't about freedom or democracy at all, it's about food. Prices skyrocketed, wheat yields in Africa collapsed starting 2 years ago, corn is unavailable so Americans can drive pickup trucks, and not even iron fisted dictators can stop a hungry mob. The amount of press afforded the "Arab Awakening" in terms of freedom, democracy or the even more crass "power of social networking" is completely out to lunch.

Middle east uprisings aren't about democracy, or rights, but food prices and cost of living. I read an article on the ug99 crop fungus in WIRED last year. Unconnected? I suspect not.

A verilent new version of a crop disease that almost crippled the world in the 70s (saved by some gene splicing and dna magic) has figured out how to overcome the GM crops designed to resist it - it starts in Northern Africa, causing wheat to all but disappear from the market, corn has since been diverted to ethanol production, making it in short supply... chaos ensues, but we try and say, "it's because they want to be like us!"

Who said colonialism is dead?

The future looks bleak If we want to be teaching useful education, we should be teaching them how to grow their own food, without oil, immediately. Instead we spend a fortune running a school that is, on net analysis, doing more damage to the world than good - and we're in the business of making better people! Imagine what the net worth of a self-serving business is in a world of dwindling resources.

Instead we complain about high gas prices, irrationally saying that they should be lower because that is more convenient for us and go on buying gene-copyrighted crops (that are about to fail wholesale) from Monsanto from the lowest bidder.

Local sustainability should become an immediate local, provincial and national mandate. Globalism has collapsed, but we've become so dependent on a broken system that we are virtually helpless.

We've taught ourselves to be helpless on the eve of the greatest disaster in human history.

an immanent disruption

We're on the verge of a market change due to digital distribution, very similar to what happened in the music industry a decade ago. Just as music changed from a manufactured, industrial medium (CDs) to a digital, fluid medium (mp3s), text books (and books in general, but especially texts because of the ludicris overhead) will begin to 'leak' digitally.

As the means to access digital texts becomes more available, the medium will force a change in how distribution occurs. Because (like the music industry before them) the text book publishing industry has a huge industrial infrastructure they have to try and continually justify, they will not adapt to the new means of text transmission. Disruption is immanent and unavoidable.

The Coming Disruption

"This certainly doesn't mean the end of the traditional textbook, but if the existing publishers follow the footsteps of other industries in trying to resist this disruption rather than adapt to it, expect plenty of angry stories about the evils of internet "piracy," with little recognition that piracy isn't the problem at all."

Already open source publications have started to appear.

The text book publishing industry has fed at great expense from the public (and private) school systems almost since the beginning. The change of transmission medium poses some interesting challenges for teachers, but also many opportunities for authors and editors, especially in locally developed courses. Without having to carry massive printing and shipping costs, and all the sales and marketing infrastructure that has to force it into a high volume industry to stay financially viable, text books could easily be developed at very local levels quite affordably. Ministries could share resources across common curriculum and the results would be locally grown content that fits our specific needs. No more mass market American focused text books that we have no choice but to buy into. The elearning system has already proven the viability of this.

Academics have long peer edited, reviewed, assessed and produced their own literature. Teachers are more than capable of doing the same, and I know many who would happily take a period in a semester to build a new e-text for board or provincial distribution. In house, without the weight of paper publication attached, educational texts could become much more current and specifically designed for student needs, much as the OERB and elearning courses have been written by Ontario teachers for Ontario students. In many cases, that same material could be re purposed to an e-text format without having to reinvent the wheel. Because the material is owned communally and locally, it could easily and often be updated and maintained for continuous consumption. Following the idea of a modular text book, teachers could even assemble specific material in a specific order prior to beginning their class - a digital version of those booklets you used to buy from professors with the selected readings bound in them.

No more 15 year old texts warning of the impending release of Windows XP, no more mold, no more focuses on other countries because our choices simply didn't offer a Canadian equivalent.

This is my kind of disruption.

To push things along, I'm presenting an ereader pilot tomorrow at our heads' meeting. We're hoping to see where the technology is and how etexts might work in the classroom. There's nothing worse than being on the wrong side of the fence when everything changes. Go look up one of the modern history texts in your school this week and find the chapter on the recent collapse of the iron curtain, and you'll see why.

Want to see a future text book? Have a look here. Whether it's ipads, Knos, laptops, PDAs or one of a million variations on the Android tablet, we're on the verge of making digital content easier to access than paper based content. The education system, the main source of income for this fumbling giant, will need to find a better way as it collapses, and collapse it will. No one invested in billions in infrastructure and decades of consistent market place dominance will even know how to begin to adapt, even if what they are doing is wasteful, expensive and self serving.

Lunch in San Francisco

One Whacky Timeline:

12:46am our time: worst earthquake in Japanese history happens.

1:55am Fri Mar 11: woke up before the alarm and got ready. 3.5 hours of sleep, not bad.

2:30: On way with Roy by 2:30,on way to get Oliver

3:00: in Guelph, on our way to Pearson

4:00: at Terminal 1 meeting students and parents

4:30: printing tickets and checking luggage. No one has a phone because we're all worried about horrific stories of cell phone charges from overseas trips

5:30: lined up in customs (no cell phones allowed anyway)

6:15: cleared customs with front end students, got food, went to the departure gate. The United Airlines floor manager is there. He had seen our group on the computer and had gotten out front, trying to find out if flights are still going in and how bad things are.

6:45: Our Narita plane is enroute to San Francisco (SFO) and will be ready to return when we land. We get on the Toronto to San Fran flight because of this.

9:30: Enroute, our (fantastic) flight attendant was on the radio to SFO, they confirmed that Narita is receiving flights, the damage is localized in the north.

Notes from the plane:

Rumours of an earthquake/tsunami in the ticket line – one agent said we were crazy to be taking kids into that, thought she was talking about the quake from a couple of days ago.

Through ticket line and into big customs line, cleared customs, got most expensive food ever and got to the San Francisco flight to see the CBC news images of the tsunami hitting North East Japan. Seemed terrible. Talked to the floor manager who was already there to intercept us knowing our final destination.

At 7am, Narita was open for flights and we were ok to board for the SanFran flight, so we did.

About 2 hours into the flight the attendant came up and told us that our plane wasn't there. Unclear information about what's happening and no access to news.

About an hour later, he came back to say our connecting plane made it out of Osaka and would be there for us in SanFran. It's currently 11:47, about 4.5 hours into the first flight and above the Rockies. Currently we believe that Tokyo is open, Narita is open and we have a plane to take us there. Damage was mainly due to tsunami along the North East coast, and we are heading south after the Tokyo days at the beginning.

Will write again when we're on the ground and know more. Will try to contact school with updated info (get on wireless in SFO).

12:50 (9:50local): We land in SFO and head over to the international gate immediately to find out what's going on. The 747 is fueled and ready to go, Narita is receiving planes, no information whatsoever on damage in Tokyo, other than that the mass transit had been closed for several hours and is now operating again.

1:15 (10:15local): Finally get in touch with our tour group - they have been contacted by the board and we are being recalled. Students very disappointed, tears in the airport. We're trying to balance keeping them on their feet and working out what we're supposed to be doing now (we're told we're flying back, but no one at the airport knows anything about this).

1:45 (10:45local): We have a return flight in 2 hours. I call my wife, Alanna and my VP, Francis and get some clarity. Then I take some students to eat (the flight to SFO did not include a meal - the return flight didn't either).

3:00 (12pm local): We're at the departure gate of the return flight trying to get tickets printed. Computers aren't cooperating, general confusion, but it finally gets worked out and we get the tickets.

4:00 (1pm local): we're on the return flight getting ready to depart.

9:00pm: landing at Pearson. Clear customs immediately (unlike US customs, Canada customs actually hires enough people to process passengers in less than two hours).

9:30pm: parents pick up students and we stand there stunned.

Notes:

Watching the news Saturday morning, I have no doubt that Northern Japan around Sendai is a disaster. We weren't going there, but many people think of Japan as one place. If you heard that there was severe flooding in Montreal, would you not fly to Toronto that day?

We tried to act on facts relevant to what we were doing and where we were going. I wish we'd have had more and earlier contact with the tour group, but we were trapped in US customs, surrounded by ABSOLUTELY NO CELL PHONES USE signs, for the better part of 2 hours right when we needed to be in contact with them. Had we been enjoying the efficiency of Canada customs, we probably would never have gotten on the first flight to SFO.

The lack of cell phones on the trip because of all the travel horror stories didn't help. Don't know that cell phone access would have helped, but we're more likely to be able to do this than we are able to ask US customs at Pearson airport to actually respond to the busiest travel day of the year by opening up all of their stalls (less than half were open, the line went on for ever). Their indifference was staggering.

The news is sensational. Watching it the day after, the same pieces of the most exceptional footage. If I see one more stunned English teacher in Tokyo throwing around terms like "melt down" as if they know what they're talking about, I'm going to pop. People keep saying 3 Mile Island or Cherynoble - two nuclear disasters caused by incompetence and poor management. What you're seeing here is just how resilient and safe nuclear plants can be. These were hit by a freaking tsunami and one of the largest earthquakes in history, and they are contained, and any flooding and damage will be managed with Japanese efficiency. I really wish the news would stop skyping with wild eyed idiots with no background or knowledge of nuclear power generation and taking their sketchy opinions as fact, just because they live in Japan.

I suspect that in the next week, this will fall out of the 24 hour news cycle, when that happens no one will care any more. The nuclear plants are locked down and cooling, the damage up north is surreal, but it will get sorted out. I'll be really surprised that if, in a week or two, Japan isn't normalized and life in 95% of the country isn't back to normal.

The field trip being recalled was the right move. You don't bring other people's children into such uncertainty. Ultimately, some students, many of whom hadn't traveled internationally, got the chance to cross the continent, and return. Students were miserable, but perhaps learned the greatest life lesson: through no fault of your own, sometimes, circumstances will take from you what you most want. Learning how to deal with will be one of the most valuable things they ever learn.

DIY Electrical Generation Should Be A Mandated Future

Everyone is wringing their hands over the disaster in Japan, questioning nuclear energy (usually while using it to power their computers to post complaints about it). I'm a fan of nuclear energy, but it does come with risks, especially when you hit well run facilities with a massive earthquake and then a ten metre wall of water. In these circumstances, a disaster is immanent.

If we really want to deal with our electrical dependency, we need to change the way we're using it. We only develop industrial scale electrical generation to keep prices artificially low and hide the costs of generating it. Don't think it's hidden? Do you have a nuclear/fossil fuel fired/wind farm generating system near you? If you do, you don't think it's hidden.

Eventually, what you want is locally generated electricity. If this is done on small, local scales, it doesn't have to be painful. The NIMBYism that surrounds generation is because industrial scale operations are planted in people's back yards. A personal wind collector isn't that big a deal, dozens of three hundred foot tall towers are.

Conservation shouldn't be a choice, it should be a standard. From the existing infrastructure, a cap of 100kWh/person/month in a residence could be a starting point. We need existing infrastructure to maintain this standard for us. That means continuing to use nuclear and fossil fuel generators If you want to generate your own after that, you'd have first dibs on using it (it would be added to your total usable amount). Whatever you don't use in a month is refunded back to you. A family of three who generates 200KWhs a month would be able to live much as we do now (we average about 500kWh a month in a 1700 sq ft house in Canada). A dozen solar panels on the roof would exceed this if well placed and maintained. Our neighbor has just done this very thing, they are making more electricity than they use in a month now. Three houses could share the cost and maintenance of a small scale wind generator and live at current consumption levels comfortably.

This is with existing technology. Future technology in both concentrated solar and lighter than air wind turbines that hang above the boundary layer of air are much more efficient. Focused solar produces stunning amounts of energy in a short time, and the lighter than air wind turbine resolves many of the problems surrounding noise, while at the same time making use of the more constant and efficient air streams above the turbulent air that flows over the ground.

A mandated push into self generated electricity would put an end to industrial scale mega projects (nuclear, wind farm, fossil fuel burning or otherwise). The problem we have is that we want other people to do all the work to generate electricity out of sight and out of mind. We take no responsibility in what we consume and then complain about how it's all being done. In many cases we're completely ignorant of how these systems work, and after reading the panicky comments on the internet this week, I've realized many people are happy to live in fear and ignorance of nuclear power generation, as long as their bills are low. How someone can attack nuclear power generation while using it to power their house and post stupid comments on the internet is an irony or our times. It's time we started taking responsibility for what we are using.

Decentralizing the electrical system means making a system that is less a one way delivery system from industry to consumer, and more a web of interconnected users and generators. This smart grid would encourage and make use of locally developed energy generation. Even if you aren't using your solar at a given moment, you could be using your neighbor's wind or locally developed hydro. By using local sources the losses in transmission fall dramatically. Our current industrial/remote generation model loses about 6.5% of the energy produced to transmission. The further you have to transmit, the more you lose. Those long transmission systems are the sources of failure in ice storms and what over heat when energy use is too much. Transmission is our greatest single point of failure (though generation is giving it a run for its money in the news this week).

Until we take responsibility for generating at least some of the energy we want to use, we will keep making massive, industrial scale power generators that cause local problems. Taking the money spent on new, large projects and applying to locally generated power is a first step. Not forcing industrial scale energy production just because it's sustainable (a question in itself), but truly democratizing energy production. Existing infrastructure could be modernized and eventually downsized as the power grid becomes decentralized, more efficient and a true multi-directional conduit for us to share our power amongst ourselves.

In that future, Japan would have had fewer nuclear power plants operating when the tsunami hit, locals in Wellington county wouldn't be upset over heavy handed provincial plans to force massive wind farms on them, and, ultimately, we'd pour money into the companies that are doing R&D on more efficient solar and wind systems. That future might have solar energy collecting windows in every home, focused solar collectors that rise out of the ground every morning and disappear at night, and turbines hanging in the steady winds hundreds of metres up, constantly generating in a small but sustainable way.

There is no doubt that large scale electrical production still needs to occur. Nuclear systems need to become even more efficient, and eventually lead to fusion and other more advanced energy systems. We learn a lot from generating nuclear energy (more than we do from doing what cavemen did on an industrial scale by burning fossil fuels). What we learn from those big projects might eventually lead us to orbiting energy production and other space based solutions.

Even at its best, a massive population centre would have trouble keeping up with demand. Businesses are by far the largest energy hogs. Stories last summer about stores leaving their doors open and air conditioning on full blast so customers would be enticed in on a hot day are representative of how businesses don't think about conservation. A 100kWh/1000 sq/ft/month limit, unless they begin to generate their own, would be a start. Having much larger roofs, these stores could easily produce much more electricity if they wished, and perhaps they'd be a bit more reticent about flushing it out the door on a hot day if they were paying properly for it.

If we could begin the process of diversification by demanding legislation that requires an energy network rather than a distribution system (this is already happening), and encourages people to take on the responsibility of at least some of their own energy generation and consumption, then at least we'd be moving in a better direction than our current one of ignorance, fear and NIMBYism.

Biological Education & Hot Groups

I've been to two Minds On Media events, at ECOO in October and the OELC Conference this past February. Both times I've been surprised by the response from teachers regardless of their technical prowess. Tech skills weren't the arbitrating force, curiosity was. The people who were involved in it found themselves working in their ZPD, and felt supercharged by the experience. So much of schooling involves crowd control rather than trying to get students into that zone of proximal development. So much teaching revolves around control, rather than encouraging self directed learning.

When I first attended MoM, the event reminded me of a gardener creating fertile ground, but having the sense not to micromanage the growing/learning. I suspect there is a truth in this that applies to all education. Whether you want to call it student centred or skills based or what have you, education isn't a mechanical/mathematical process, it's a biological one. Events like Minds On Media recognize this by empowering the learners (and the instructors) and giving them the freedom to move within a rich learning environment to where they think they need to be.

Most of the PD I experience exists in a mechanical process that alienates teachers and makes them resentful. This approach is used because administration is more concerned with a disciplined environment (that crowd control mentioned above) that ensures full participation even if it is entirely passive, than it is with presenting memorable content. When the learning takes a back seat to crowd control, you know the results aren't going to be pretty. In fact, they're going to look at lot like...

The other thing that's been bouncing around in my head is the idea of hot groups. I know many educators shy away from business approaches, calling them corporate and such, but this one is anything but corporate. Hot Groups recognize a fundamental truth about how people work together. In a hot group members will do work well beyond what is expected or required, simply for the joy of having it received as valuable within the group. In my own case, I recently did a hot group thing for our little cloud working group, I made a group logo and people dug it. It's an insider thing, only a few will appreciate it, but it builds team and even surprised me with a level of commitment (the fact that everyone wanted a t-shirt was what gave me the biggest buzz about it).

I've seen this happen time and again with students. As I type this I have my grade 12s putting together a network of computers using many different OSes. Some of them haven't done it before, others have, but are unfamiliar with the OSes I've provided them with (Red Hat Linux Server, Ubuntu Server, Windows Home Server, Ubuntu Desktop, Win7, XP and Vista). Listening to them talk, they are telling anecdotal stories of failed OS installs, upgrades that led to game failures due to compatibility issues and all sorts of other OS related experiences, all while working through multiple installs. This may look disorganized and inefficient, I'd argue that it's the opposite. Those students are creating context that I would not have imagined trying in a top down lesson on OS installs, and they're doing it while creating a sense of group coherence (made even more amazing when you realize that three of the ten of them in there are usually sequestered away in the autism learning class). Those guys came out of there, having installed half a dozen OSes during the period, and they'd also made this (a classic example of a hot group surprise - they were very keen to give me a copy when the class ended).

If you think that has nothing to do with what they were supposed to be doing, you're determined to force human relationships, and the learning the goes on within them into a linear, mechanical process. Those guys did many things that period that I hadn't intended, as well as most of the things I had. On aggregate, I'd suggest that they weren't limited by their teacher's knowledge of them, their own risk aversion to failure (installing unknown OSes), or a need to overly control the learning. The result is a non-judgmental, rich learning environment that encouraged creativity and constructive peer support. The team building that happened in there today will be something I can continue to develop for the rest of the semester.

If I can create that environment, I do. If a hot group grows out of it, I'm over the moon. You'll seldom experience a better teacher rush than the one you do when a hot group wows you with what you weren't expecting.

Copyright is sticky business

I read this which led me to this, which made me want to write this: (!)

Copyright is a sticky business. More often than not it isn't the artist that is being protected by copyright so much as the distribution company that owns the rights. The music industry is still trying to get itself out of being a manufacturing and distribution concern, which is where the copyright habits we've developed with music started.

When you've got to justify stamping millions of CDs to make music financially viable, the focus shifts from the artist to the manufacturing/distribution system (where big infrastructure costs exist). In order to protect this distribution system, a robust, aggressive and quite jackassey legal specialization developed that has nothing whatsoever to do with the art it claims to protect.

It seems we've arrived at an age where an artist can be stimulated by influences and then effectively prevent anyone else from evolving ideas out of them. The Beatles, perhaps one of the biggest offenders in this, freely stole ideas and even whole pieces of music from the black R&B musicians in the US that proceeded them. Later in their careers they made art by evolving influences from Indian and other world music as well. They then aggressively locked down the rights to the art they freely took from other people.

It seems that Boomers are unique in many ways, not the least of which is their self-claimed right to take everything that came before them and own it entirely forever. US copyright has led this erosion of artistic license for many years, continually expanding and pursuing the entertainment industry's right to own a piece of music, eventually (they hope) forever.

One of my favorite cautionary tales is Sita Sings The Blues. An artist going through a breakup creates an animated piece that integrates the 1920s music she is listening to at the time with an ancient Indian myth and her own relationship disaster. It's very thoughtfully done. Give it a look if you've never seen it before. The details are on the website, but here's the summary: when she went to get the copyright for the 1920s recordings (long out of copyright) that she wanted, she discovered a copyright law firm (one of many that buy up copyright-passed, older material) contacted her back and wanted a quarter of a million dollars for songs they didn't own by an artist they never represented.

This is the state of copyright nowadays: a savage wasteland of corporate vultures looking to pick the bones clean of any work of artistic merit. It's a completely unsustainable system that stifles art and kills creativity. Had Shakespeare been alive now, he would not have been able to publish any of his work (almost all of which borrowed heavily from proceeding material). Corporate vultures would have swooped in and killed Romeo & Juliet, Macbeth or Hamlet stone dead.

I make no bones about artists being able to make a living from their work, I'm an artist myself. My hope is that digitization of the workflow will free us from the vultures that have been feeding (and killing) the artistic process for the past 60 years.

Many artists are beginning to push content directly to fans. Courtney Love famously once said, "I work for tips" when she was talking about how little she made from CD sales. Doing tours made more, but even live performance requires covering a lot of hangers on.

The irony in all of this is that the music industry claims to be the protector and savior of music, yet it is the very thing stifling creativity, and it's doing it to protect an archaic manufacturing system that barely exists any more.

Ok, so after all that? I think NerdyTeacher's blog is a great opportunity for Taylor to step into a new era and develop fan based appreciation through Twitter and social networking. Those students, and the people who see the performance will know of her willingness to share her art. What I fear is that she isn't the one to make this decision. A legal firm representing her music industrial complex will make that decision, and it won't go well.

Thanks to @dougpete and @TheNerdyTeacher (and twitter) for the impetus to write!

Decompartmentalizing

I know teachers get edgy when considering business theory for use in the classroom, but gamestorming in class seems like a sure thing. The problem with it is the breaking down of conventions around learning. We structure our classes on this stuff. Would a good gamestorm be acceptable in English class, or is it too artsy? Would it be acceptable in art class, or is it too text driven? Would it be ok in a music class if it wasn't entirely musical? That these questions get asked gives you an idea about how far we have come from playing with our ideas. We've cut thinking into arbitrarily compartmented piece work.

I love looking at Leonardo's sketch books. Write about it when it fits, sketch when it doesn't. When I look at those, I wonder what a modern Leonardo would do with modern media. Where we used to be limited by word and graphic on paper, we can now create virtual 3d spaces and plaster them with images, sounds, text, video, some, none or all of it interactive. I wonder how well a universal mind like that would operate in such a rich media environment and then finding itself in our school system with it's little buckets of knowledge, none of which should ever mix.

I know this is beginning to change. Being able to differentiate instruction and accept multiple paths to proof of broader understanding is happening, but slowly, in school. I still see (usually) older teachers resisting the mash up, saying it doesn't respect the discipline of the... um, discipline.

In the meantime, I keep asking myself; how can I see that they know what they're doing without falling back into the same old habits? The text trap is the worst of all, it carries with it a patina of academia. If it's in text, it must be academically rigorous and appropriately difficult. Anyone who still thinks this hasn't seem the time, energy and creativity my students have put into a media project.

Here is a copy of one of my favorite audio assignments from the beginning of the grade 10 media course. The instructions were loose (1-2 mins, tell an audio story, multiple sound tracks, original content only - no internet pilfering). This is only sound, yet what a story unfolds. This medium is all but ignored in typical school. Imagine being able to read an essay while hearing student spoken comments at various times - or accepting a sound/graphic mashup of brainstorming, instead of just text. The software exists for this to happen now, but the urge isn't there because we keep retreating to our buckets.

Instead of having the technology push us out of bad habits, why not let some new habits push the technology? We keep seeing tentative steps towards mixed media (I'm thinking Prezi, Ning and Googledocs), but no bold changes in how we think. The ultimate change would be to forget what 200 years of scientific compartmentalizing has done and kick open possibility in thinking.

Machine Learning

I listened to the Khan Institute TED talk the other day, and can see how a system like that could be flexible enough to adapt to each individual learner while giving the teacher fantastically accurate feedback on where problems lie and how to address them. A future like that looks bright indeed. Teachers would be free to focus on resolving problems and offering enrichment to basic skill sets, rather than standing in front of a crowd reciting facts. For skills based learning in languages and mathematics, this is revolutionary. This is technology used to differentiate a system that has developed some very habitual and static tendencies.

So, things are looking up, right? Education is slowly adapting to the technology wave and integrating it into a more flexible and responsive form of teaching. Then why do I think that once in place, this would allow governments to automate classrooms and drastically reduce the number of teachers in schools? Why do I think that, ultimately, this will dehumanize education?

I watched Kenneth Clark's Civilisation recently (one of the top rated documentaries of all time, I highly recommend it). This has to be one of the smartest men I've ever listened to pulling no punches on a broad spectrum of Western history. This part (starting at 35:35), in particular, resonated with me about the times in which we live.

I think he's ultimately right; machines do work slavishly for their owners, and those owners tend to be social powers in their own rights. Whether we're talking the technology companies themselves, multi-nationals or governments, technology in general, and computers in particular, do as much (or more) to dictate our responses than they do to free us from conventions. If anything, computers are a more invasive and totalitarian convention than any art medium or the written word ever were. Digital natives aren't people with a magical understanding of computers, they are human beings who have been taught to interface with them on a subconscious level. The industrial revolution started in the physical world and now continues its romp through the mental world, redefining human abilities in terms of how accurately and completely we can relate to digital technology.

Watching my poor grade 10s struggling through the standardized literacy test (in which they are identified by numbers and bar codes) today without their cyborg implants is reminding me just how pervasive cybernetics have become. They looked like ghosts without their constant media streams of video, sound and social connection. Watching them try to deal with 10 minutes of unneeded time at the end of the test without an onslaught of media was astonishing. They looked like they were in rehab.

Perhaps, as we grow through technological adolescence, it will become obvious that, at best, we will have a brave new world, at worst, a 1984. Digital technology will, ultimately, create a more manageable population, one that becomes easier to monitor while also becoming instinctively tuned to the needs of the machines that 'serve' them. A population that knows how to write (as long as it's on WORD), or make music (as long as it's on Garageband). Anyone who has watched a herd of high schools staring at Facebook can speak to its effectiveness as a herding tool.

More worrying is the sameness you tend to get out of student work based on the particular technology they used (we didn't all used to self-identify through the editable parts of our facebook pages). Hand written documents are original in many ways that the boiler plate WORD DOC is not, but you ask students to hand write anything now (or draw anything - why bother when I can google it?) and they immediately ask, 'what's the point?' Presentations have become powerpoints, then prezis, templates replace design, we find ourselves in a spiraling web of more intellectually focused (and limiting) applications; we start to develop an app mentality.

Machines will always favor efficiency over aesthetics, or ease of management over originality, or clear direction over multiple options. Their ones and zeros, by necessity, simplify the world their biological fore bearers created them from.

A few years ago I saw EPIC2014. It made some of my sharpest grade 12 media students cry. Here you have the concept of an individualized media feed, that gives you what you want, and nothing else. For the brightest, it becomes a nuanced, deep information tool, but for most of the population it feeds them what they want to hear: lies and gossip, while reinforcing their prejudices (sort of like Fox News). There might be some truth in that. If you've ever seen how students make use of social media, you can see how the stronger students reign it in, make use of it and control it, while weaker students are ruled by it.

I think that this will be the ultimate deciding factor: will clever people make use of technology to dominate, or will they use it to free us from conventions and allow us to think as optimally as we can? Looking at human history, the answer isn't very flattering, but I hope for the freedom.

Academic Dishonesty: listening to Sunday Edition

I'm sitting here listening to Sunday Edition and listening to an interview with an ethics adviser for a California university. Her description of cheating isn't one of deceit and intent, it's one of accidental opportunism. She argues that students often don't even realize they are cheating.

In another section of the interview a university student says that it isn't the student's fault, they are victims of the ease of technology. These two ideas are closely linked; accidental cheating and technological access to information. In both cases, ethical choice is removed from the 'victim'. This is a pretty weak ethical argument. Because something is easy and readily available, it should be done? If you see a person put an ipad on a park bench and then get distracted for a few minutes, do you walk off with it? According the this victim mentality you would have no choice. The fact that all of your friends have stolen ipads from the park only makes it more acceptable.

When I think about my own university experience, it didn't even occur to me to cheat, because of my sheer awesomeness. My arrogance ensured that I would never even consider putting in someone else's work for my own, but then I was there to develop my own thinking. I'd walked away from a lucrative career in order to push my limits. Most of the kids I was in university with (typically 4-5 years younger than I was, many of whom dropped out) were there because they couldn't think of anywhere else to go. You didn't get a clear sense of who the real learning disciples were until third or forth year.

Later in the same episode, they mention that the vast majority of students in university now are there because they want a higher standard of income, they're there for the payoff at the end. If university is really all about the money, then perhaps their victim mentality is simply the best way to morally justify taking everything you can while doing as little as possible. University should, perhaps, follow SNL's angle from so long ago and simply accept what it is becoming.

The College Experience

The Media/Design Schools at Conestoga College had a forum on Wednesday, April 6, 2011.

Some notes:

College isn't what it used to be. Since grade 13 was removed from Ontario schools, colleges have stepped in to assist students in working out pathways, especially if they lacked direction and/or maturity in high school. Maturity came up continuously throughout the day. Many students do not do poorly in high school because of anything the high school process did or didn't do, they do poorly because they are not yet mentally mature enough yet to recognize the importance of the (poor) choices they were making.

Tim note: You can try and base this on brain development, but history would prove you wrong; we are capable of maturing more quickly than we do, we choose not to. We teach and parent to discourage maturity (taking responsibility for our decisions) because:

1) it's cheaper to create a factory school environment if you limit personal choice. Personal choice doesn't fit well in a small room with 32 students crammed into it.

2) the school system does as much to fight unemployment as anything in society - keeping students in school until they're 18 isn't necessarily for their own good, but it's a great way to keep a disenfranchised age group out of the work force and away from voting citizen's jobs.

3) we spend a lot of money trying to prevent people from making mistakes they choose to make, it looks like we're saving money if we're keeping a high risk population in semi-lockup

Legal note: I reserve the right to play with ideas in writing that I may not entirely agree with just to see what they look like on paper.

Notes Continue:

A number of students were on hand for an open, panel discussion, many of them seemed to support this belief (needing maturity and time to get on track - the fundamentals programs offer them this space in a guidance/portfolio building course of study).

Bachelor of Arts students, in the vast majority of cases, never recoup the costs of their degree program in terms of costs and earnings lost. Colleges focus on job preparedness and marketable skills. To that end, they aim to serve a much wider range of students than universities do.

Conestoga was careful not to vilify universities, they merely serve a different sort of post secondary student.

Tim note: I didn't go to university to gain marketable skills, I went to university to gain a deep understanding of my disciplines. I quit a lucrative job to go to university, a job that provided me with an apprenticeship, marketable skills and on-the-job training. Do businesses not do this any more? When did employee training get downloaded onto the employee through government sponsored college programs? Do businesses do *ANYTHING* other than serve their own profitability any more? Yet another example of how business keeps removing itself from anything remotely socially redeeming, but I digress...

Another theme that came up again and again was: Realistic Goals & Expectations.

In all Conestoga courses there is a zero tolerance for lateness and absence. Most degree/diploma programs have very low (under 10%) drop out rates. The fundamentals courses, courses they put students into who did not meet the requirements for specific diploma courses they had applied to, have higher dropout rates (about 1/3 don't finish).

A diploma specific course (graphic design, advertising, etc) typically receives 2-300 applications for 35 positions. If students meet academic requirements (65/55 in Eng4C/4U for fundamentals courses, 70/60 in Eng4C/4U English for diploma courses) they are invited for a 10 minute interview in which they show 15 diverse pieces from their portfolio. Top students gain admission.

Tim note: Interesting student story (I paraphrase): "I didn't pass the academic requirements, so I had to take an admissions test, I failed it by a couple of percent each time (I'm curious at what level the test is pitched). I could have done better in English, I just kept skipping and couldn't be bothered."

Hey sparky, the test scores suggest that you couldn't have done better in English, I'm assuming you actually showed up and tried on the college entry tests. You failed a standardized admissions test... twice, know why? Because you don't get better at English by suddenly deciding to try. It's a set of skills built up over many years. Student who tell me in 3U/3C that - Oh, I'll just turn it on next year - don't have anything to turn on, they don't know what they're doing... which reminds me of this.

Something to keep in mind: if you give a student a 60% in Eng4C, you've just denied them direct access to even fundamentals programs at the college level. They would have to take make up courses to gain admission. I suspect most students have no idea what the expectations for access are.

Setting a real world standard of competency allows Conestoga to focus resources on committed students. What a wonderful world they live in. And students (even the dropouts) pay cash for this process.

Students all said that they wished: "high school teachers had taught them better time management... had pushed for strict time limits and deadlines..."

Tim note: this initially made me angry with the lala land that we deliver to high school students. We are not allowed/are heavily restricted in how we can grade according to time management competency. I often see teachers being required to mark projects months late, sometimes after the course has actually ended. They usually stink, which makes the whole process even worse. After some reflection, I realized that college can pitch like this because their mandate allows them to shake out the weak/uncommitted students.

From a high school point of view, we don't get the luxury of getting to shake out the bottom third of students and then focus our resources on the top two thirds. Like college, we'd have a much higher technology to student ratio and a fantastic pass rate if we could do this, but we need to serve the entire population.

IT Management and technology access at the college was very impressive, what you wished you had in public school really. Teachers have detailed and specific control over internet access. They can block sites, time access (only full access for the first 20 minutes, then the system focuses on the software and web access you need to do class specific work. Mac labs were at least as common as PC labs in the media wing, no Window-centric/simplified public school IT going on here.

Tim note: by the time it was over I was trying to get a grasp on what education looks like in Ontario in 2011. That may not be entirely accurate, but based on what I've seen, it's certainly the direction we appear to be going.

One of the comments made was, "we try to do these events so that teachers, many of whom have never been on a college campus, know what it is that the next steps are for the majority of students they work with." A nice way to say that having a school system run almost entirely by people invested in the least popular form of post secondary education might not be the best idea. I really hope teacher's colleges and the profession in general starts to look a ways to find good, flexible candidates from many life experiences that can provide more than just a primary focus on academics.