Perception is Reality, except when it isn't

When I'm packing up the computer lab at the end of the school year I usually do it imagining that I won't be back.  For an introvert like me, teaching is an exhausting business.  I don't get recharged by people the way others seem to; people drain me.  The thought of disappearing out the door and not returning is a happy one.

As the year wound down I came to realize that information technology has become like plumbing or electricity: no one thinks or cares about it unless it doesn't work.  Fortunately I'm good at IT and get a a lot of satisfaction out of solving problems in it (not to mention my staying sharp in technology allows me to teach it better), so even though it is nothing I'm contracted to do I still beaver away in the background trying to create a more accessible, current and consistent educational technology platform for our teachers to use.

I find the year end back slapping tedious at the best of times.  Everyone gets well paid to do their job and no one I know in the building stops there, but what some people do above and beyond is considered more important.  While some were having meetings and planning presentations, I was hand bombing over a ton of ewaste out the back door of the school to a local charity.  They have DD adults dismantle electronics and then make enough recycling it to pay for their charity work.  It isn't attention grabbing, but it matters.

The energy other people are willing to spend in order to shine a light on themselves obviously pays off, I'm just not interested in it.  Fixing things that are actually broken holds much greater interest for me.  Changing people's minds is exactly what I don't like doing.  People should be able to make up their own minds based on the facts, not on how convincing I am.

This year has offered me some wonderful moments.  By far the most positive experience was our run at Skills Canada this time around.  Seeing my student's surprise at winning provincials and then our experience at Nationals was awesome.

Another powerful moment was seeing software engineering actually produce viable projects this time around.  That class offers students a chance to experience team based software development and then publish code while still in high school, and it has improved dramatically year on year thanks to a lot of curriculum building.

The least professionally rewarding part of my year was participating in the school leadership team.  The work done seemed pointless and time consuming, and seemed to follow a predetermined process rather than actually being creative and meaningful in any way.  A colleague dropped out of leadership a few years ago and she claims it frees you up to spend your energy on more productive things.  I think I'm following her approach when my headship ends this year.

The summer is for finding my mojo again, and then refocusing on what works best for my students in the fall.  A list is already forming:

• Continue developing curriculum that still challenges and differentiates even when I'm regularly expected to teach five sections of class each semester.  Skills Canada plays a big part in that, allowing exceptional students a chance to see just how good they actually are.  Skills preparation also directs all students towards higher standards.
• Getting equipment in that allows students to learn hands-on, even when I have classes of 31 students in a room.  Have you ever tried to set up a classroom with 31 computers and then arrange additional space for students to safely solder, build electronics and dismantle additional machines with hand tools?  It requires fore-thought (and perhaps some kind of time and relative dimension in space device)
• While all that is going on I'll continue to apply my senior computer engineering courses to school IT support.  This year we repaired 26 chromebooks that would otherwise have been chucked (repair costs were $1250, replacement cost would have been $9100),  Having a genuine engineering challenge in front of students is invaluable to them, saves the school board thousands and keeps the teachers they are supporting in working tech, even if it is thankless work.
• Windows 10 free upgrades end before August, so I have to get into school at some point before July 26th and update all the student PCs in my lab.  Having a DIY lab is a lot of work, but it offers students unique access to software in a building otherwise tied down to out of date board software.  It's $135 a PC otherwise, so I'll go in during the summer and save the board another four grand.

But first, some summer...

Note:  I usually write a draft, edit it once and then publish it on Dusty World.  This got heavily re-written three times with an eye to repairing problems rather than just complaining about them.  The end of the school year often gets me into a rather negative state of mind.

#edtech I.T. Management

Welcome to 2010, kindof...

We're back in school again and it's been a bit of a #edtech mess.  Over the summer our board upgraded to Windows 7 (so now we're only one iteration behind the most current operating system).  In the process the entire network was rejigged to fit this new desktop O.S..

Because doing a massive O.S. install wasn't enough, we also had a major hardware update, moving both models and manufacturers from several years old MDG Intel core two duos to Dell Intel i3s.  If you don't know the nomenclature don't sweat it, the long and the short is that our school technology is basically completely different from what we were running last year; and it isn't working very well.

Managing I.T. is tricky at the best of times.  Managing it in an education environment is more so due to the privacy concerns and complexity of trying to serve people ranging in age from five to sixty five and in computer skill from caveman to cyborg.  To top it off they are all going after radically different uses from physical education to theoretical physics and from pre-university to kindegarten.  Pitching to the middle of this group causes frustration at either end, it's not like running an office where everyone has similar backgrounds, ages and a common focus.

With that much difficulty it's not surprising that our board I.T. seems to often lose sight of what their function is.  Supporting effective use of technology in learning shouldn't be far from anyone's mind, but it often feels like the reason for being there gets lost in the complexity.  On top of that, board I.T. often seems strongly coloured by business thinking, which it isn't.  One of our networks is called UGDSBcorp.  I'm not sure at what point our public school board became a corporation, but the naming says a lot about the thinking.

We're in a transitional time in information technology.  What used to be closed systems meant to connect employees internally are migrating to web based services that are meant to offer greater communication, efficiency and utility.  Clinging to the old way of delivering I.T. results in a lot of unnecessary overhead.  An example is our email.  We cling to Firstclass as an internal client but are also running UGcloud (google apps for education which includes gmail).  We're told to check our email each day.  Which one?  Both?  I know which one I can connect to more consistently, and it isn't the internal board one.

With the migration of apps and systems to the cloud it might be wise to push aside the intranet 1990s thinking and consider a resilient network that simply allows easy access to the internet.  Privacy can still be protected on secure web-servers.  If you can do your banking on them, you can certainly store student records on them.  But our board clings to intranet thinking, keeping the vast majority of functionality on local servers and increasing their management work load to such a degree that they can't keep up with basic operations.

I've long held that students (and staff) don't learn responsible use of technology if you hand them hobbled technology.  No one ever got on the tour de France with training wheels.  The internet they see at home or on their phones isn't the training-wheels internet they see at school, and this isn't helpful.  Instead of using the internet as a babysitter in class, teachers need to be in the middle of it, calling attention to misuse and showing best practices.  A school system with less fetters would aid this and make management easier for the people who are constantly short staffed and given too little time to keep it running.

Until we have internet and technology access that rivals the up-time of what we see outside of school we have an uphill struggle convincing reticent educators and poorly trained students to learn best practices, which is supposed to be the whole point.

Refresh 2

@banana29 got me thinking about the computer refresh going on at her school last week.  We're in the same  process at my school.

In my case I'm the head of computers and trying to focus on keeping as many computers as possible in student hands. We waste a lot of machines at teacher desks to do online attendance and check email, work that could easily happen on an alternate, much cheaper and efficient device than a full desktop system, but even those changes would resolve into a desperate attempt to keep things the same.

I had a couple of my seniors do an inventory of the school.  We have over 300 desktops.  Each costs about $1500 when you factor in purchasing and insurance on them.  We have close to half a million dollars of desktop computers in our building, and every year we squirm to keep as many as we can as we are refreshed down.  If we were to drop the cost of those desktops, radically reduce the number of printers in the building (and the subsequent tens of thousands of dollars we spend each year on printing), and remove local server storage, we could easily produce over $500 for every staff member and student in the building; more than enough for a device per person, even if those devices aren't attached to specific people. Some classes with Chromebooks, some with Windows, some with Macs, some on Linux, some tablets, some laptops, some BYOD.  A startlingly wide ecosystem of technology that encourages broad familiarity with many digital tools.

Broad Based Digital Skills Development

We status quo our edtech because change is hard, and we've borrowed an educationally uncomplimentary business model of I.T..  We fight to keep antiquated desktops because many teachers barely know how to use a ready made lab, let alone what to do with a variety of hardware with various operating systems and software on them. With digital fluency removed from them by board I.T., many teachers have learned helplessness. Those that struggle against this forced ignorance often disappear into the cloud in order to avoid the stifling local computer environment... a choking environment that should be founded on learning, not on ease of management or paranoia.

I'd love to spring us free from the nineties corporate I.T. model we've been slavishly following and begin pushing widespread familiarity and fluency on digital tools of all shapes and sizes.  I dream of an experimental, curiosity driven access to technology that encourages timely, relevant learning for our students.

I fear we'll end up finishing another year still running Windows XP on five year old desktops with an increasingly irrelevant OSAPAC software image.  I suspect I'm going to escape into the cloud again to escape that choking simplicity, all while playing the keep-the-desktop-game on the management side.

Shopclass as Soulcraft: IT Idiocy, Management Speak & Skills Abstraction

A brilliant little book by Matt Crawford

I'm currently reading the very meaty and painfully direct "Shop Class as Soulcraft" by Matt Crawford. In the book he laments idiocy in professionals and the vagaries of management language in modern business where there is no objective means of determining an employee's competency. Both of these arguments come together beautifully in the relatively recent field of information technology.

I've been working in IT in both private and public sectors for going on twenty five years now. I've worked in small offices, and on massive installs, in engineering shops, manufacturing concerns, universities, schools and in offices. With a certain breadth of experience comes a pretty good bullshit detector. Crawford's ideas around professional idiocy and manager-speak appear to have, unfortunately, come together in a perfect storm of hidden incompetence in information technology.  There are few places more managed by people who have no technical background in it than there are in information technology.

THE IDIOT

Crawford talks about Robert Persig (the author of Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance - another great read)'s idiot mechanic, who is more intent on appearances and action than submitting himself to the truths the bike is trying to tell him and what that means to his public role as a professional technician. In the book, the kid ends up butchering Persig's bike while taking no time to actually try and diagnose what the problem is; he's all hands and no brain. Crawford describes the idiot:

"Persig's mechanic is, in the original sense of the word, an idiot. Indeed, he exemplifies the truth about idiocy, which is that it is at once an ethical and a cognitive failure. The Greek idios means "private," and an idiotes means a private person, as opposed to a person in their public role - for example, that of motorcycle mechanic. Persig's mechanic is idiotic because he fails to grasp his public role, which entails, or should, a relation of active concern to others, and to the machine. He is not involved. It is not his problem. Because he is an idiot... At bottom, the idiot is a solipsist." (p98)

That lack of involvement should spark a memory with any teacher reading this. The student who refuses, at all costs, regardless of the differentiation you throw at it, to do anything whatsoever, is an idiot in the technical sense of the word.

From the IT angle, I see people like Persig's idiot mechanic every day. You know the type, they know just enough to be dangerous (and have tools on hand). They tend to make grand assumptions, usually based on a non-existent knowledge base, and then act on them to make the situation worse. They talk loudly and use a lot of word whispers ("you know?", "right?", "know what I mean?", etc) to make sure you agree with them.  It's a handy way to externally monitor what's going on when you have no idea yourself and dovetails nicely with the idea of management speak presented later.

The disengaged idiot fits especially well with information technology because it's a dark art to the vast majority of people. You can talk out of your ass to 99% of the population and they have no idea what you're saying, freeing you to say pretty much anything you want. The bigger the words the better, and because most people are users they're more than happy to sit in on the tech talk and participate at the same level as the disengaged idiot.

Many moons ago, right out of high school I found myself working in a Canadian Tire shop. One day one of the mechanics burned himself on a Fuego. He proceeded to flip out and run up a bill of unneeded repairs to the order of a thousand dollars; a good example of the moral failure of the idiot and one I see all the time in IT, especially when dealing with older customers to whom the dark art seems positively Satanic.

MANAGEMENT SPEAK

Crawford also does a brilliant dissection of the 'peculiarly chancy and fluid' life of the corporate manager (substitute administrator or educational consultant for equal value here). In a world with no objective means of assessing competence the manager lives in a purgatory of abstraction using vague language "...staking out a position on all sides of a situation, so you always have plausible deniability of a failure." Crawford goes to great lengths to point out that this isn't done maliciously but rather as a means of psychic protection for the people trapped in this morass. At any point an arbitrary decision can make you redundant (shown brilliantly in Up In The Air - many of the people in the interviews are real people who have actually been downsized) regardless of your own abilities or actions.

In a world of meaningless management language actual technical competency is devalued with every spoken word, a central theme in Crawford's book. Objective competency is ignored in favour of MBA language that allows the initiate of globalized business speak to survive regardless of what decisions they might have made. In fact, the very making of decisions is discouraged. In places where reality matters your opinion is not as important as you've been taught to think it is.  I see this with students all the time.  They attempt poorly planned, grandiose engineering projects and then are frustrated by the simplest physical problems.  They aren't used to the absolutism of reality.   As Crawford so cuttingly notes: "This stance toward 'established reality,' which can only be described as psychedelic, is best not indulged around a table saw."

One of the many reasons I'm looking forward to teaching tech this fall is because there is no doubt of the student's focus, ability and honesty of effort when reality is judging them. If you made it, ignored lessons, examples and process, and it didn't work no amount of 'but you're still fantastic' student success talk will mitigate a failure staring you in the face. The fantasy of 'everyone's a hidden genius' so popular in education today is best not indulged when reality (and the objective assessment of it) is judging the results. Having no safety net in your learning isn't necessarily a bad thing (it focuses the mind) unless you're trying to peddle a new ed-theory on zero failure.

Management speak based on the the surreal, 'psychedelic', entirely provisional world of business became popular along with globalization, itself founded on many hidden assumptions. Grown out of the initial industrially driven abstractions of Taylorism in the early 20th Century, modern business is so far from the witness of truth (like the stock market it has spawned) that it has more in common with Alice in Wonderland than it does with a technical manual.  The best you can hope for are some vague metaphors to describe the massive fiction of modern commerce.

The IT Idiot Management Babbling: Making An Objective Technical Skill Abstract

Information technology is a new field of study. It began and grew in a well established, Taylorist, globalized, MBA driven, entirely fictional world. The language around IT maintenance is often clouded in mysticism, grown from the same vague, plausibly deniable language of business and finance. In education we feed that fire with talk of digital natives, people who magically have technical skills because of their birth date. In classrooms we ignore this vital Twenty-First Century literacy in favour of magical thinking about divine digital birthrights.  Education's adherence to the vagaries of business speak serves our students poorly.

I'm not saying every student needs to be a qualified information technology technician, but it is safe to say that every student graduating at the moment should be familiar enough with digital technology that they don't get white washed by an idiot's babbling, or convinced by the parochial and intentionally misleading language surrounding information technology. Auto shop is often taught this way - as a means of delivering a basic familiarity to students so they aren't bamboozled by an idiot. IT should adopt the same position as this older, wiser technology.

IT is a measurable skill. I take great pleasure in offering up the A+ certification practice test to the resident experts in senior computer engineering. When the best of them barely get it half right it sets the stage for systemic, meaningful learning of a technical skill they've always been told they magically gained by being born in the nineties.

People born in the 1900s weren't magically imbued with the ability to fix the new automobiles just coming out. What we do in failing to teach digital literacy is absurd as it feeds misinformation and empowers the idiot. It's bad enough when we purposefully remove objective standards from academic classes (and I'm not talking about standardized tests - they are about as far from objective standards as you can get, just another fiction), but to actively discourage objective standards in a technical field? That's just downright dangerous and expensive!

Part 2: Tech Fetishes and Digital Horcruxes

I just wrote about the spell casting nature of technical support when the Harry Potter metaphor extended itself.


In a grade 12 academic English class we were talking about 1984 and Brave New World.  The idea of a technological dystopia seemed very immediate for those seventeen and eighteen year old students.  They felt trapped by their technology, dependent on it, desperate for it, addicted to it!

One student mentioned that he forgot his smartphone on a recent trip and was beside himself not knowing what was going on.  I told him, "that used to happen in the old days, we called it blindness."  It was said partly in jest, but the conversation turned to the idea that technology is becoming a part of us and when you leave a piece of personal electronics behind you actually suffer withdrawal.  Any modern teacher who has watched students in exams fidgeting and anxious will know the truth of this.


That student didn't just feel like he'd lost a sense while he was away from his Blackberry.  The physical aspect of that very personal piece of electronics was like a missing body part; he even had phantom pains, reaching for it constantly when it wasn't there.


With the Harry Potter spell casting through technology thing floating around in my head, it seemed a logical next step to look at his smartphone as a horcrux.  These personal pieces of electronics give us senses and abilities that a few years ago would have seemed magical.  


In the case of personal devices like smartphones, tablets and even laptops, especially the really fetishy ones that Apple is famous for (though not exclusively), our tech has become as much a part of who we are as our clothing or other worn, personal icons.  If our personal technology defines us, then it's a small psychological step from identifying with a physical object to believing our self-worth is an aspect of it.


The difference between passive items like clothes and our interactive tech is that the tech touches our minds as well as our bodies, it feels like a piece of how we think.  From there it's a small step to feeling like they are part of our core being; a piece of our souls.


When I was a teen, I wanted a car more than anything in the world, it meant freedom and mobility.  I had no interest in cars before I was able to drive, and then I was infatuated with them.  My encyclopedic knowledge of everything build in the '80s and '90s is a result of that infatuation (as well as my entirely dodgy string of vehicles).  I've been all about anthropomorphizing mechanical devices since I was a kid watching Lost in Space.


The relationship with personal electronics seems destined to eclipse the earlier affection we had for our mechanical devices.  The nature of these electronics means a mental as well as physical interaction, and our adaptable brains are more than ready to accomodate the change.


Voldemort put his soul into horcruxes to prevent his own destruction, much as Sauron did in Lord of the Rings.  The idea of off-loading or decentralizing ourselves to external devices isn't a new one.  Looking at the involuntary and constant connection to smartphones in today's teens, it appears to already be happening on a massive scale, and they themselves realize how different it makes them from the people who came before them.


You've got to wonder though...  why did these authors always have the villain do this de-humanizing thing for their own self-aggrandizement?