Hack The Future

Between questions of how student data is being used and technology monopolists pushing for standardization in edtech, I'm left with an uneasy feeling.  As we reach a tipping point in digital educational technology we simplify and standardize to the point where the people doing the teaching don't know or care what happens behind the curtain.  What is happening behind that curtain is being decided in closed rooms between multi-national corporations and governments.  The bait is a 'free' digital learning system for education.  The payoff is habituated users and data mining on a level unprecedented in history, and we're happy to sell our students and ourselves into it in order to get the freebies.

If this were all happening in the light of day I'd be a lot happier about it.  That it's happening behind closed doors and shouldn't be publicized is something that should concern everyone.

If you're not paying for it you're the product being sold.  Corporations may state that they do no evil but they aren't after what education is after, they are after profit.  That student information is being brokered well beyond the reach of educational institutions by these information merchants should be a cause of concern, but instead I see public educators increasingly branding themselves with corporate logos and shouting their evangelism from the social media rooftops.

Technology is exciting, and digital technology is such an intimate thing because it nestles up to our minds.  Our habit of elastically coupling with our technology suggests that digital-tech is going to become an intrinsic part of how we see ourselves.  People are already describing unplugging as feeling like an amputism, it's only going to become more entwined, especially as we begin to wear our digital selves.

I'm reminded of Kenneth Clark's unsettling end to what many consider to be the best documentary series ever created, Civilisation...

http://youtu.be/waoEyjE_dtU?t=35m31s

Start at 35:30 if the link doesn't take you right there.

That one of the most intelligent observers of human society was pondering this in the year I was born lurks in the back of my mind.  Machines that make decisions for us, many educators seem thrilled with this idea.  You may be all gungho over the latest shiny i-thing or googly-eyed over that app that will revolutionize your teaching, but the true costs of these things are a carefully kept secret.  At the very least, when we adopt a single digital ecosystem (no matter how free it is), we're selling our students (and our own) habitual technology use into a closed environment.

As educators it should be a goal to recognize tools in terms of what they can do rather than how easy they are and how well integrated they come.  And we should never be deciding on a tool that inserts itself into the learning process based on how little we're expected to learn about it.  Technology and the internet aren't Google, and tablets aren't Apple.  Computers aren't Microsoft.  Only by offering students access to all of these things and more are we approaching the teaching of technology in as complete and well rounded a way as possible.

Over the past ten years I've watched education stagger into digitization always hesitant to change old ways, and I've pushed as hard as I can to encourage that change.  Only by catching up to this revolution can we hope to prepare students for the strange world that awaits them.  Now that we're at a tipping point I'm watching what could be a powerful new fluency being boiled down into canned access to technology, always under a single brand.  Instead of teaching technology like it's becoming an intimate part of our lives (which it is), we pass it off with idiotic notions like 'digital native' that allow people who have no interest in learning technology to also off-load the responsibility of teaching our children about technology.  Into that ignorance vacuum corporations have crept, offering you an easy solution, and most people are more than happy to take it even if it means being walled in to a monopoly.

I wrote last on the idea of being a tech-ronin, a digital samurai without a master.  That works for me but I come from a time before data dictated who I am.   I'm worried about my students.  In a world where we've sold them into digital servitude as data sheep (call them digital natives if that makes you feel better), the only way out is to know the system well enough to circumvent it.  Instead of teaching a closed, monopoly limited mindset in technology that serves everyone except my students, I want them to develop a broad understanding of digital tools and how they work.  In a broad edtech learning environment my students will develop a meta-cognitive view of both technology and how they are represented by it.  In a time where we are increasingly defined by our data the only free people will be the ones who have a sense of themselves beyond their student record in the LMS.

My department logo has 'learn how to build the future' on it, but perhaps I need to make a change just to give my students a chance to self-realize beyond whatever data metric they are being sold into.

Rage against the machine

ECOO 2013 Cometh

Last year I was getting primed for ECOO 2012 by constructing a process for transitioning from school provided, generic educational technology to a bring-your-own-device learning situation.  The idea was to assist this evolution toward personalized technology following some sort of pedagogical imperative rather than what appears to be a financially motivated top down drive to minimize school purchased tech.

Digital technology is intensely personal because it interacts with our
most personal selves, our minds...

Critically examining how we make use of technology has always been at the core of my teaching.  As I transitioned from academically focused English to technology orientated computer engineering my willingness to look for easy answers in educational technology has dried up.

Since the last ECOO a couple of events have made me question the branded nature of #edtech.  It began with the Google Education Summit in Kitchener in the spring, and then culminated with the Pearson Summit a week later.  As educators it is incumbent upon us to be technologically agnostic, this is getting more and more difficult as cash strapped teachers and boards look for financial advantage courtesy of corporate offers.  I've been battling my own understanding of this all year.

Can you imagine if your chalk board had a 'courtesy of Crayola' sign in the top corner?  Or the paper you hand out to students had a 'brought to you by Hilroy' on it?  Yet we don't think twice about branding the digital technology.  A student can't get on to a school machine without getting Delled, BenQed, Microsoft'd, Jinged and Googled, and we actually enjoy that branding, we encourage it.

In only a few weeks I'm talking about our digital selves at ECOO 13.  I'm excited about going to ECOO, doing Minds On Media for the first time (nurture your inner hacker, I'll show you how to code a microcontroller and become your own I.T. support!)  My worry is that I'm finding edtech increasingly owned, controlled and not focused on developing student (and educator) fluency.

I'm still being haunted by Matt Crawford's Shopclass as Soulcraft.  Crawford's description of the consumer as a victim of their own technological ignorance resonates:

"Since the standards of craftsmanship issue from the logic of things rather than the art of persuasion, practiced submission to them perhaps gives the craftsman some psychic ground to stand on against fantastic hopes aroused by demagogues, whether commercial or political."

The scattered, distracted 21st Century human being seems more a victim of digital technology than empowered by it.  When I realize that the 'I'm tech-savvy' high school student doesn't know what a disk partition or an IP address is, or how to boot to external media, I realize that what little expertise they've gained is almost entirely at the hands of commercial or political persuasion, and teachers are no different.  This kind of fluency doesn't suit corporate interests who would rather be able to sell you on marketing rather than engineering.  The kind of ignorance this brews is staggering.

I want to produce a constructive solution to hard pedagogical questions around technology use.  I'm finding this increasingly difficult as edu-tech becomes a managed, mainstream expectation rather than an experimental, fringe element.  The urge to simplify with dictated systems that encourage ignorance has me wondering how education will prevent rather than produce more dysfunctional digital natives.

The perfect platform for teaching students effective use of technology is an open source system that they build from scratch and have to maintain themselves.  The more you do for them, the less necessary fluency becomes.  Technology literacy is a 21st Century fluency that we should be teaching curriculum wide, much like literacy or numeracy.

That ideal technology learning platform is agnostic, varied and offers redundancy and resilience.  Students should never be in a position where the network technology is broken, but the hands on technology shouldn't be done for them.  What I'm seeing in educational technology is completely backwards; everything is locked down and done for students, and it seldom works.  This is a recipe for ignorance and about as far from pedagogically useful as we can get.

There is precious little open source software used in education, mostly because it demands competence and

Don't you wish there were a shared,open source
option for educational technology?  There is,
but there is no money in it and it requires
competence.

responsibility.  Buying a corporate system offers you turn key technology.  We could offer cheap, debranded technology with open source, shared development software, but we don't because we'd rather be consumers than makers.  This is a result of teacher indifference as much as anything else.  Basic fluencies should be attended to and you'd have to be obtuse to think that effective use of digital tools isn't going to be as important as literacy and numeracy in the 21st Century.

I'm still not sure where I'm going with ECOO13...

Coding Is A Hands-on Skill

I'm frustrated at how computer science seems to own coding.  In Ontario it is now an orphaned subject unto itself.  There is no way someone without a degree in computer science can teach coding, though coding isn't computer science any more than auto mechanics is theoretical physics.

This reminds me of the Big Bang Theory when Leonard's car breaks down.  He asks, "does anyone here know how internal combustion engines work?" and all the the scientists in the car laugh and nod.  He then asks, "can anyone here fix a car?" And all the heads go down and they say no.

Computer science is the theoretical end of a spectrum of coding that goes from hands-on hacking through professional coding and into academic research.  That only math quants who were looking for a second teachable pretty much like their first can teach it greatly limits its appeal to the general population.

Code.org agrees with me, as does Steve Jobs, as does Codeacademy, Khan Academy and many other online groups.  These organizations are proliferating because we are not offering our students meaningful access to computer programming.

If we're going to treat coding (as a part of digital fluency in general) like other basic skills (literacy, numeracy), then we need to free up coding from the bizarre limitations placed upon it by the Ministry of Education and computer scientists.

Can you imagine if all the autoshop teachers had to be theoretical physicists or engineers before they could apply that knowledge to repairing vehicles?  It's a ridiculous idea, yet that is precisely what we are doing with coding in Ontario schools.  There are many ways a teacher could approach computer programming, limiting it to an extreme, theoretical end of the spectrum doesn't respect the variety of people who get into coding, and it doesn't offer students that variety in the classroom.  Coding isn't a theoretically biased branch of knowledge, in fact I'd argue that coding has much more in common with stochastic technical skills.

We are killing a vital 21st Century fluency stone dead with arbitrary limitations.  Coding should be a technology course, it should be hands on, and it should work hand in hand with engineering (because that is what it is and what it does).  That it is artificially separated into a null space between mathematics and computer studies helps no one other than old school computer scientists, and there aren't many of them.  The irony is that many of the math teachers with comp-sci as a teachable don't want to teach it because they never kept up with it other than as a theoretical/academic course of study in university; they don't love coding, it was simply an easy way to extend their mathematical degree work.

Computer science, like theoretical physics, is a vital subject, but it's highly specialized and how we teach it should recognize that.  Coding is a skill anyone can learn, and should.

Get off the Bus and Drive

The transition from institutionalized, single platform education technology to a decentralized model is in full swing at our school.  I'm getting blow back from various teachers who want things to remain as they've always been.  I don't think they mean ditto machines, facsimiles and telegrams, but they might.  There is always a tendency to fight advances in technology, it's difficult to change ingrained habits.

The difference between this and previous technological shifts is that we've institutionalized helplessness into educational digital technology.  We've convinced teachers that computers are an appliance and networking is a utility.  We treat internet access the same way we treat electricity or water delivery; it's off loaded to a bureaucracy who guarantees delivery.  As the old guard retires and their traditional thinking around passive technology use fades, we are left with whole generations of teachers who have been taught to do nothing except sit on the institutionally provided bus and go where it takes them.  Complaining about it is about all they can do.

Any decision making about educational technology has long been taken from teachers.  Digital learning tools are seen as remotely operated apparatus that should be dropped the moment they don't perform as expected.

When I suggest that teachers can get off the #edtech bus and drive their own educational technology they get anxious; driving a car takes a lot of effort compared to sitting on the bus.  You not only have to drive it, but you've got to look after it too, make sure it has gas, service it, take ownership of it.  The reward is much finer control over how you travel on your journey.

If you want to get where you're going (making education relevant and useful to your students?) driving your technology will get you there much sooner.  You'll get to decide what vehicle to take, what options to put on it, and even how you want various technologies to enhance your teaching.  Diversification of technology is vital to a better understanding of what it is and how to use it effectively. Digital technology isn't one app or one platform, it is a sea change in how we access and share information.

Driving your own technology usage does take a lot more effort than sitting on the #edtech bus, though it's just a different kind of effort.  All that energy you used to expend on worrying when the bus would show up?  or why it's so old and dilapidated?  You can now spend deciding what to get, what options you want and how you want to implement it.  You get to decide what, when and how your students are using technology to enhance their learning; you get to actually control your digital learning environment.

That last bit is perhaps the most enjoyable part of driving your own technology use; being able to control your #edtech environment is a key factor in customizing 21st Century learning to suit your students.

If we treated classrooms the way we treat digital learning environments, all rooms would be exactly the same, with the same seating plans, the same chalk boards and the same size.  Those classrooms would also be years out of date, and the teacher couldn't move a table or chair if they wanted to, because they'd all be nailed to the floor.  If you dare to ask why the furniture is nailed to the floor you'd be reprimanded with a fear based diatribe on how not keeping everything locked down and the same is potentially dangerous to your students and staff.

A Digital Skills Continuum: Differentiation of technology is a key to technical fluency!

If you're teaching using technology you're also teaching technology, and it would behove you to know what's under the hood.  Being ignorant of the machinery you're operating makes you a very bad driver indeed.  You don't necessarily need to be a full-on mechanic, but a tinkerer's mindset allows you to understand and look after your own needs in terms of the technology you use.

There are going to be some crashes with all these new drivers coming onto the road, but each collision will result in a learning experience.  I only hope that teachers who are inexperienced are willing to look past the messiness of their own learning to the possibilities opening up to them in a digital world.  At some point we'll tip over and teachers will accept that competence in technology isn't someone else's job but an integral part of their profession in the twenty-first century, just as it has become a basic fluency in so many other professions.

Forming an ECOO Presentation

There were three key books I read in the past year that have clarified for me a direction we could head in educational technology.  Ideas from each of those books, which at first appear to be in direct odds with each other, helped form the content of my ECOO presentation this year.

After reading The Shallows, Nick Carr's carefully constructed argument held a lot of weight - the internet and how it is being adopted by the general public is actually making people less effective as both thinkers and doers.  As educators, we should all be concerned about this result.  At a conference this year a frustrated, thirty-something CEO said of the twenty-somethings she's tried hiring recently, "I just wish they could finish a thought!  I can't even get them to close a sale because they are checking Facebook!"  This problem goes well beyond education (where any teacher can tell you it's an epidemic).  Everyone involved in education should read this book, especially if they are trying to implement technology in the classroom.

From The Shallows I took a serious concern about technological illiteracy and habitual use of computers actually injuring people's ability to think.

I read Ray Kurzweil's The Singularlity is Near as a counterpoint to Carr's very accurate, and very depressing Shallows.  Kurzweil's giddy optimism in our engineering skills verges on evangelism.  He is a wonderfully interesting and eccentric character.  His belief goes well beyond merely living in a time of transformative change.  The singularity he refers to is a moment in the near future where we are able to develop a greater intelligence than a single human brain, or even a group of them.  He goes into mathletic detail about exponential growth and how this is occurring in computers.  Very soon we'll understand things in finer and more complete detail than we've ever been able to before and our management of the world will take on omniscient proportions.  Technologically enhanced humans exist beyond the technological singularity - living in a world that looks as alien to us now as ours would to someone from the middle ages.

From Kurzweil I recognized how technology is evolving in increasingly personalized ways.  This is an argument Carr makes from the other side too.  From external machines, we are on a journey to technological integration.  This integration is going to well beyond smartphones, that's just the latest step in an inevitable trend.  If education does everything it can to present technology as generic and impersonal, it is failing to notice a key direction in technology, it's failing to produce students who will be useful in their own futures.  This is perhaps the most controversial aspect of my BYOD/differentiated technology argument, but I believe it's a fundamental part of our technological evolution.  Computers want to become a part of us.  We're not going to develop a Skynet or Matrix that will take over.  Our technology IS us, and it wants a more perfect union.  This probably scares the shit out of most people.  My argument to that is: if you're going to amalgamate with other systems, make sure you the one directing them effectively.

Matt Crawford's wonderful philosophical treatise on the value of skilled labour goes well beyond simply being handy.  He argues that skilled labour psychically protects you from consumerism and makes management doublespeak and creative economies an obvious joke.  The value he places on objective, quantifiable skills development often savages the feel-good ethos of a lot of educational theory which then sounds like management double-speak nonsense.  I read the book after taking my AQ in computer engineering, and it made me re-evaluate (and recognize) the value of my skilled labour history - something I'd walked away from in becoming a teacher.  I'm loving being a tech teacher this year and working with my hands again.

From Shop Class For Soul Craft I took a recognition of the importance of hands on, skill based learning.  It brings real rigor to learning, and should be a vital part of developing past the poor digital literacy I see around me.  One other experience kicked this up a notch.  In the summer we visited the Durnin farm and Heather talked about how her husband teaches people to use the farm equipment.  He gives them the tools, and expects them to figure it out and get it done.  It's a high expectation, immediate result environment that puts a great deal of expectation on the student; Crawford would approve.  I tell my students, "no one ever learned how to ride a bike by watching someone else riding a bike" - it's an experiential thing that offers real (often painful) immediate feedback... what effective learning should be.

Into that mix of big ideas of warning, optimism and rigor I also mixed in the standard PLN secret sauce.  Concerns over BYOD abound with teachers online.  The idea that BYOD should just be thrown into curriculum struck me as simply wrong.  As Andrew Campbell suggests, it's more about stretching a divide (or Carr would argue intellectually crippling idiots) than it is about increasing digital fluencies.

Teaching competency, flexibility and self awareness on digital tools should be a primary goal of current educational practice.  We're graduating students who are dangerously useless to employers.  The idea of a continuum of digital mastery based on objectively developed skills linked to a gradual loosening of restrictions and access to increasingly diverse tools and online content was the result.

I present on Thursday, and I'm more interested in the discussion that ensues than I am in telling anyone anything.  ECOO is a wonderful braintrust, and usually super-charges my educational technology awareness.  I'm looking forward to the brain soup we create out of this!

Diversifying Edtech: the key to a digital skills continuum

Reclaiming Educational Computing For Learning

Sources for this year's ECOO:
The mini-lab: mobilizing and differentiating the school computer lab
Dreaming of a new media lab: differentiating technology to prevent passive media consumption


I just threw my hat into the ring for ECOO12 proposals.  Last year I did a philosophical look at what the digital future holds with Dancing in the Datasphere.  There was a small but interested group who were honestly curious (and more than a little worried) about where digitized humanity is going.  I enjoyed the talk and got a lot out of it.  


Having become the Computer/IT head at my school this year, I'm constantly bombarded by how inadequate the typical school model is around information technology.  While businesses have mobilized and personalized digital access, education still clings to 20th Century ideas around centralized control.  I think I've found my focus for this year's ECOO: educators reclaiming educational computing for learning.


One problem with this is that many of the digital immigrants at ECOO tend to be platform dependent - they know how to do specific things on specific devices.  This is a great first step, and certainly puts them ahead of anti-tech Luddites or digital natives who barely understand what they are doing, but it shouldn't be the end of their journey.  There are many tools, both software and hardware, that can lead you to a  technologically fluid, collaborative learning place.  Making students access digital learning through limited hardware and software is ultimately self serving to the teacher and damaging to the technical literacy of the student.


My vision for effective computer implementation in education depends on a platform agnostic approach, preferably with a strong open source component.  Information longs to be free, and it won't be as long as you believe a single means of delivery or a single app is the only viable solution.


I write this on a Win7 laptop (that dual boots into Ubuntu too), use an Android phone and have an ipad.  At home I use a Win7/Win8/Linux multiboot PC and an imac, I'm not picky and just enjoy good design, whether it's from Cupertino or Taiwan.  The large, full spectrum display on the Mac makes working on photos a beautiful (and colour accurate) experience.  When I'm doing heavy processor work like video editing I go to the PC with a pile of cores and twelve gigs of memory.  Using the best tool for the task at hand only makes sense.


In the past year I've overseen installs on a class set of Kindles, a DD class set of ipads and 3 carts of Windows 7 notebooks, I've also beaten up several old laptops and installed Linux on them, giving them another year or two of usefulness.  The days of static, centrally controlled, singly formatted computers in shared labs are soon to be over.  Instead of the bureaucratic organization of information technology into a department of non-teacher IT experts, education will finally gain control of its own information technology.  Pedagogy, rather than convenience, will become the focus of that new paradigm.


My goal at ECOO?  To point the way towards a freer educational computing paradigm where students and teachers are free to experiment and try a variety of technology in order to  get the tightest fit with their needs and proclivities; a truly technologically differentiated pedagogy.

As Ira Socol says so well, "I'm not 'Platform Agnostic' because I'm a crazed techie, I'm 'Platform Agnostic' because I work in education, and education is about helping students prepare for any possible future, not my particular vision of a future."  

Words to teach by.

What You Don't Know Makes You Smarter

How do you show someone what something really is when they already think they know?

Building digital competency is made harder by the fact that students believe that they already know what they're doing.  Students who think the our networked world consists of facebook, youtube and Google think they know it all, because it's all they know.

If we're going to develop meaningful skill sets in students, we need to break down some long standing habits around believing that computers exist only for recreational use, and show students just how world wide the world wide web really is.

If we can break them out of their habits, and their very limited idea of what computers can do for them, we might be able to break the curse of the digital zombie, and develop some technology savvy students who are able to use technology instead of having technology using them

Operating a computer is like driving a car.  In both cases the technology enhances our natural abilities, and in both cases there is virtually nothing in the way of real understanding of what the technology is doing on the part of most users.  The vast majority of drivers are habitual creatures with little idea of the physics and mechanics behind what they are doing.  The majority of computer users are unimaginative, habitual users of their machines who stay away from experimentation in favour of what they know, mostly for fear of breaking what they know they can't fix.


I used to think I was a dynamite driver, then I took a performance driving course at Shannonville, and realized how little I knew.  Following this up with a couple of years of cart racing in Japan, and I started to develop the craft of driving, rather than reinforcing the habit.

The defeat of habit in developing skill is the key to mastery.  If you can create a sense of perspective and experimentation with what you know, and what you don't, you can learn to develop a set of skills beyond what you've already habitualized.  If your ignorance restricts you to the idea that you know everything, you are unlikely to ever move beyond that false sense of security and ignorance.

Many of our students live in this cave, watching the flickering lights, thinking that the flicking lights are all there are.  Pulling them out of their habitual ignorance is difficult, and I've often found that it's best served by a drop in the deep end.  I've gotten more traction daring students to do something they thought they couldn't than I ever have doing it for them (again and again).

As long as you can hang in the Zone of Proximal Development, you'll be able to make them aware of their ignorance while offering them the tools to overcome it; the real heart of the teachable moment.

The Future of Tech IS Education!

TECH ENHANCEMENT: 2029

THE OPERATING SYSTEM

An open source, education focused OS based on Linux, LinED was used around the world and developed continuously by legions of users.  You couldn't access the school internet without installing LinED.  Students installed it as a second OS on their computers and many ended up using it as their primary system because of all the free/subsidized software they could get on it.  A student could outfit a LinEd machine with a full suite of media, gaming and productivity software for less than the cost of a single corporate production suite.

When on a school network designed for it, LinED feeds a continuous stream of activity to your school profile.  Percentages of time with certain web pages open, applications running, even data on eye movement when reading a screen.  Students have continual access to their own data, allowing them to self-evaluate around productive use of time.  This feed back loop was one of the key events that broke the cycle of digital irrelevancy in schools and prompted students to use digital tools effectively, rather than having website designers using them as business interests saw fit.  Using LinED encourages digital citizenship, and digital learning, keeping the massive distraction engine of the internet at bay while still offering students access to resources.  This could only happen in an open source environment; users have to own their thought space online.


THE SOFTWARE

Within the LinED environment, students have quick and easy access to cloud based tools for learning.  But as a redundancy, these cloud based systems also install on-machine apps that allow students to minimize bandwidth use while maximizing productivity.  Network failure no longer means a loss of access to information. Students often fail to notice long return times on network/cloud apps because the work is balanced between their desktop machine and the cloud in such a way as to make bandwidth issues irrelevant.

An intelligent and responsive network enables much more efficient use of network resources.  Web access uses a complex algorithm to prioritize traffic, thus affecting loading times.  A student with a high social media activity and low performance in learning metrics find social media pages being deprioritized and loading more slowly, eventually stopping if they continued to allow themselves to be distracted.  Students who develop a balance between personal web use and learning never notice a slow down.  Students who prioritize learning on the network were rewarded by stunningly fast bandwidth.

Teacher grading is automatically synced with the student data and can be continuously checked by all interested parties.  Success not only means greater resource availability, but also offers support staff an opportunity to see class activity in a live environment, and intervene earlier in order to help students achieve an effective balance.

Any student with a LinED system is able to access apps and software at reduced rates, often free.  Students find that their LinED app ecosystem is rich with resources when compared to the private sector.  Even game companies buy into the system, offering reduced cost or free access to gaming environments tied to educational success.  Good students found themselves with free VirtuWoW and other game accounts on Learning+ servers, where they were able to socially network with other like-minded students, often leading to enrichment and collaboration that further supports them in the classroom and beyond.

This has greatly served to change the definition of student.

By developing a coherent feed-back system between education and technology, students (and teachers) find themselves in a blossoming ecosystem of applications, games and social networks that all benefit and spring from learning focus.  The subtext of learning colours all other opportunities, allowing the idea of continuous erudition to flourish within technology.

Developers quickly find that Learning+ communities online contain highly motivated, engaged and creative individuals, who make ideal Beta communities for developing new media and ideas.  They were willing to test and develop where most vanilla, private users merely wanted to use.  The resource begins to feed itself.

Identifying and rewarding life-long learners goes well beyond what is happening in schools, and has prompted a digital renaissance, eventually outpacing the "limited, short-attention-span, internet for quick gain and empty use" model that preceded it.  Developing interrogative digital citizens was key to this Web3.0 revolution.

THE HARDWARE

The mobilization of technology had already begun prior to the network catching up.  With advances in nano-technology which prompted leaps in quantum computing, mobilization went through a brief period of hyper-miniaturization.  Most computers now consist of small, hands-free devices that linked to interactive holographic displays.  A smartphone sized device now represents the computing power of a typical desktop machine from 2015.  With projected keyboards and screens, the smartphone evolves into the nexus for digital contact without having to carry energy and space intensive peripherals.

All of this was conceptualized prior to the takeoff in nano-technology.  Post nano-tech, manufacture has become a relatively straightforward process and the computer, finally, has become truly personal.  Modern computers act symbiotically with their users, recharging from their activity and enhancing their experiences.  The internet is no longer in cyberspace, cyberspace is now all around us.

In a typical classroom students walk into class with their PCs fully powered (recharged from the compression motion on shoes while walking).  The room's holographic projector links to each device, bringing the student online and showing them their own enhanced reality.  The card-like smartphone descendants students carry now are resilient, networked and self contained, redundant, self-charging and intuitively designed to enhance and focus, rather than distract and commoditize, their user's attention.  An app that distracts a user at a critical moment causing injury or damage is legally liable for their distraction.

It has taken many years of intensive reworking to make laws relevant to a cusp-of-a-singularity world.  In most cases, people prepared to step into the singularity do, though many stay behind to shepherd the lost and confused toward the light.

This was almost disastrous initially.  Until the networks and software became individually serving rather than serving marketing interests, the internet was a very dangerous place to be jacked into all the time.  The push for computer control on the roads came after a sharp upspike in accidents when personal holographics first appeared.

It wasn't until systems like LinED, and the vetted software it allowed, and other systems like VirtuOS that recognized that digital permanency meant that marketing couldn't be continuous and distraction was libelous.

Wearing a computer is now akin to putting on trousers, everyone does it one leg at a time, but everyone does it.

Do you ride the horse, or does the horse ride you?

The idea that technology will somehow make teaching easier (or superfluous) makes me sad... and angry. The idea that it might be making us inferior to previous generations drives me right over the edge.

I've been reading Nick Carr's The Shallows.  If you're a techie-educator, you might disagree with him, but the Pulitzer prize panel didn't.  Neither did the Laptops & Learning research which demonstrated that students retain less information about a lecture when they have a digital distraction on their laps.  Carr's argument that digital tools teach a plastic brain to reorganize in simplistic ways has resonated with many people, usually people that didn't like digital options in the first place.

There is a big backlash against this single minded approach, which I think was addressed at the recent ECOO conference.  If students aren't able to recall details from a lecture, I think I have to start with the sage and the stage.  The idea of passive learning is rapidly losing traction as the most effective way to teach.  Countries that cling to the idea (usually as a cost saving measure and to try and adhere to standardized tests) are tumbling down world rankings in education.

A teacher who talks at their students for an hour will view laptops in their class as an invader who fights them for their (not so) captive audience's attention.  If you want to accept digital tools into a uni-directional, passive classroom environment, they are going to disrupt the learning.

Several of my students came up to me today and asked me how to perform a function in imovie (we're editing videos we've been working on for three weeks).  I told them both that I wouldn't show them.  Following the sage logic, I should have given them an in-depth 20 minute lecture on how to add pictures to credits, and then chastised them if their attention ever seemed to wander to the imacs in front of them.  Instead, I suggested they look at the help information, and then go out into the wild west of the internet if they were still lost.  I not only wanted them to resolve their own (relatively simple) learning dilemmas, I wanted them to feel like they had solved them themselves.  Within ten minutes they both had figured out what to do without being spoon fed the details; they owned that information.  For the rest of the period they were showing other interested parties how to do it.

If I had saged that whole thing, digital tools would have appeared to be a detriment to thinking and learning; nothing but a distraction.

The other side of this is the idea that teachers no longer teach, they simply facilitate, like trainers on a bench.  This usually plays to the 'technology will make my life simple' crowd, and it isn't remotely true.  To begin with, many students haven't learned to use digital tools in productive ways.  When they turn on a computer it means hours of mindless, narcissistic navel gazing on Facebook.  Students in my class are expected to use the computer as a source of information, a communication tool and a vehicle for artistic expression.  They aren't going to be the players if they don't even know the game.  I have to model and learn along side them, I have to demonstrate expertise on the equipment, and more importantly, expertise as an effective, self-directed learner.  If I do this well enough, I can eventually step back, but I'm more the weathered veteran on the bench good for a few more pinch shifts when I'm really needed, than I am a towel jockey.

A good teacher challenges, and  then is able to recede, but even that recession is a carefully modulated choice that balances student ability with student independence.  This is never going to be anything but a challenging dance that you will always be leading, even if you're not necessarily in front.  We CANNOT assume that students know how to use digital tools effectively, any more than we can assume they will intuitively grasp band-saws, or nail guns.

If you're into tech in education because you think it's an easy way out, it's time to realize that there are no short cuts, and that your job will constantly change, and you better be mentally lithe enough to keep up with it, or else the digital natives will use the tech in the most simplistic, asinine ways imaginable, and Nick Carr's Shallows will become the truth.

Blended Learning and Relevant Classrooms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

back from the future

Ever wondered what it would be like to teach a class where all students have their own laptop? Anyone reading this has probably spend some time wondering what it would be like to have internet access and computers for all students. No digital divide...

I'm just wrapping up a semester where I was asked to pilot the elearning version of the Career Studies, grade 10 half semester course. I was teaching all of the career studies in a school of approximately 1500 students. We have a workplace focused high school in our board, but it's far enough away that most parents opt to keep their children in the community at our school, as a result we have a full spectrum of students, all of whom must take this mandatory class.  The students in the open career studies course ran the gamut from highly at-risk and barely literate to students already attending lectures at The Perimeter Institute in Waterloo. The grade range ran from end to end (from 0 to 100%).

What follows is a review of the elearning pilot, with some supporting statistics and observations.

Summary


If I had to summarize quickly, I'd say that doing career studies in a hybrid elearning class was very useful. Students assume they know more about computers than they actually do (partly due to the fact that we keep telling them that they are digital natives). Doing elearning in a hybrid/introductory way does several things:

• it shows many of them how hopelessly addicted to Facebook they are (which created some interesting self-reflexive analysis in the classroom)

Any review of network traffic showed Facebook returning page views at a rate of 50 to 1 over ALL OTHER INTERNET TRAFFIC COMBINED. They are unable to turn it off and are constantly distracted by it. Turning it off at the router caused a minor uprising where they all suddenly appear to have grown Law degrees and a working knowledge of the Constitution.


This broke the myth of the digital native for me.  When I asked them to estimate their own expertise on computers, I (like most others) expected this:

The FAKE stat.

... but I got this:

The real stat.

...which looks mighty similar to the ability curve you get in the general population.


This elearning course, the first for all of these students, pointed out a number of challenges:

• it makes students aware of how little they know about basic computer functionality (file types and organization, how to edit simple documents, basic network and computer operation, online digital tools that are available - not one of them had heard of Prezi or knew that their hotmail accounts would allow them to save documents online). Less than 1/4 had ever used googledocs.
• it makes those students that do have technical literacy appreciate (and be appreciated for) what they know (instead of telling them that they all know it because they are teenagers, when they clearly don't, which devalues the knowledge).  Student tech-wizes are as rare as tech-wizes in the general population, but we belittle their knowledge by assuming they all 'know computers'.
• it gives students a fundamental understanding of the elearning system. A few will see it as an avenue for success (which is good), but many who suddenly find they may need elearning to graduate will see far greater success because of their exposure here.

How the course went:

Doing it as an open/full spectrum course clearly shed light on what I've always found to be true; elearning's self-directed element is what kills it for most at-risk students. It introduces a medium between the student and the material that gives them an excuse not to do work, usually while clearly highlighting their lack of digital skills (which causes embarrasment and some difficult classroom management situations).

I did elearning in Peel, and as far back as 2005, Peel was aiming elearning at University level students who had shown a clear aptitude for self-directed learning and strong computer skills. Without either of these skills (skills I'd argue that are developed much more significantly in academic/university level classes), elearning is likely to result in very poor success rates, specifically in non-academic streams.


Unless we're going to focus on developing self-directed learning and digital competencies in non-academic classrooms it will continue this way.

As things developed, I had to go through the course, collect together all the summative pieces and print them out on paper for about 1/3 of the students in order for them to complete the required material. They did not have the technical skills to edit documents in a word processor and upload it to the elearning system, let alone keep their digital selves organized enough to find assignments they started (many never named files and copied over previous work with the same default file name).  There was little sense of continuity from class to class in these students, most of whom saw it as a Facebook miasma, rather than a course to pass.


A student's ability to organize becomes much weaker when I would find the vast majority of the machines a student brought to me with a problem running Facebook in the background (it's hard to stay organized, it's harder to stay organized when facebook constantly interrupts you with pointless trivia).

Conclusion

I think the real problem is the myth of the digital native. We got shown this last year. Have you seen it? This kind of thinking drives me crazy. Computer skills are taught, they aren't some kind of natural occurance based on your birth date. What this really is is fear. Older and/or less technically inclined people who feel overwhelmed by technology dress up kids today in this because they see them hop onto a computer without worrying about doing something wrong. Being familiar with something doesn't indicate skill. If you actually observe what they are doing, you'll see (as I did during this course) that weak students are digital serfs - they don't know how to do anything, solve anything or look into new things, they only know how to do one or two things (usually Facebook and youtube: the internet for the dim).

What's worse is that students who have developed real skill have it belittled when some Luddite says, "yeah, you guys all know this stuff, you're digital natives." (subtext: now I don't have to address it or waste valuable class time trying to teach it to you)

Digital literacy should start in the junior grades, and they should be developing specific skills (data management, media creation, file management). In grade 9 there should be specific digital literacy targets in core subjects, but there aren't (mainly due to a dirth of teachers who feel comfortable enough themselves to teach it). We expect them to know this stuff intrinsically, which is ludicrous.  21st Century skills will be much more vital to student success than 19th Century skills like sitting in factory organized rows listening to a teacher speak, but we don't teach them.

In the meantime, boards propagate the myth of the digital native that excuses us from addressing digital literacy as a serious issue (they showed us that video above at a staff meeting).

Familiarity with computers isn't a developed skill-set.  Self-taught digital skills are mostly just habit forming. Watching those careers students struggle with basic issues made me realize that elearning is really only designed for success for the top third of digitally literate students. The rest don't have the vaguest idea of what they don't know:

"Hey, I can't edit this document!"

"You're looking at it in WORD viewer..."

blank stares...

"I can't find my file"

"You've saved all of your files in the course as the same name and over written it again and again.  That is why you have fourteen documents called document(1), document(2)..."

blank stares...

Some Other Observations:

Even though perhaps a quarter of our students come from rural/farming backgrounds, high speed internet penetration is quite good. This is probably due to two main factors: it's now seen as a requirement for academic success (at home) and prioritized, and long range wireless (wimax, etc) has become standard in the area. 


 I suspect the real dividing line now is purely financial, which begs the question: when are we going to support students in getting over the digital divide?

When given a choice about whether they could have taken this class as elearning or in a traditional class, almost two thirds opted for the regular class. There was a real lash back against using computers for something productive - it spoiled/interfered with their only purpose (Facebook/Youtube access).  It's hard to convince people that a toy is actually a tool.

As you can see, the same students willing to take the course over again in a hybrid classroom, are also willing to kick the training wheels off and do elearning completely remotely. If they get it, they get it.

An interesting discrepancy between technical skill and willingness to self-direct learning. The whole student centered thing is still pretty new, but getting students to direct their own learning is like pulling teeth. This goes beyond juniors in an open careers class. My university grade 12 computer science students were just as unwilling initially. In their case it was risk aversion. They were so afraid of not getting the numbers they need to go to university that they had no interest in doing open research that wouldn't lead to a perfect result. 


Whether it's how we've taught them to be dependent or how we've taught them to be terrified of errors, we aren't producing self-directed learners, which is a tragedy.

The last one is hardware specific. The netbooks were coveted at the beginning of the course, but their limitations quickly became apparent. I posted the most common complaints (too slow, though this had more to do with the school network than the netbooks, but the digital natives didn't comprehend that), and the tiny screen. Elearning is set up in long, texty pages. Students who aren't strong readers go bonkers trying to read it on a 600 pixels tall netbook screen. Stronger readers can deal with it (and remember what they're looking at), but for the weak readers, every scroll or paging action is another excuse to click on that Facebook tab and get hit by lots of disconnected, pointless information (the way they like it). 


The course would have been better served by a device that rotates for reading longways, then rotates back for data entry (or a big square screen, I guess).

The raw data from the student survey is below. This pilot was a very useful program that shed light on all sorts of issues. I was happy to do it and would like to see it continue, but I fear that it uncovers so many holes that it will quietly disappear back into the ether. Here's hoping it doesn't.

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask. The data was collected from 52 students in November, 2010, and 46 students in the second week of January, 2011.

The raw data can be found here (Excel format):

https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B53Xb3MP_t-cOGYxZjI1NzItNjExZS00YzQwLTllMjYtNWJkMzgyMmE3YzUy&hl=en&authkey=CLqC08kH