Ontario Library Association Super Conference 2025

I feel great shame. I wrapped up this year's Ontario Library Association super conference a few weeks ago, but my Kawasaki needed me and I've been neck deep in engine heart surgery instead of reflecting on this fantastic conference. Mechanics that my life depends on is sufficiently engrossing.

This reaction is (in part) happening because I have begun the process of separating myself from the my decades long role in Ontario public education. I'm still committed to changing the system but it isn't, and it has processes in place to remove any foreign contaminants that try to change the status quo. I suspect my 'innovative' approach has led to some early constructive dismissal. In talking to other refugees from OntEd who tried to change it and found their return unwelcome, this is a systemic mechanism across all school boards. All that aside, here are my reflections from OLASC 2025...

 

This was my second go at the OLA Super Conference, I last went in 2023. This year, like the former one, was remarkably emotional. You can't help feeling that these are the front line people trying to hold civilization together even as it seems determined to tear itself apart. I'm left dizzied by the size of the fight against them.

Tech billionaire oligarchs are leveraging bottomless resources to direct a biblical flood of idiotic panic mongers who are happy to churn out disinformation that buys political victories. Once in power they have the tools to dismantle the critical thinking based education that we all used to aspire to.

Nothing is easier to incite than ignorant, misinformed, angry people. Our tech overlords have designed systems that encourage propaganda and reduce people to shallow, self-contradicting talking heads. I've been struggling to get pedagogically meaningful digital literacy into more classrooms throughout my career, but I'm beginning to realize that this is contrary to the direction society is going. Swimming upstream against this big money gets tiring in your mid-fifties.

Libraries standing against this political onslaught are having their resources systemically cut because libraries are precisely the institutions we designed to stop this sort of thing. How do you win such a one sided fight? I'm beginning to think that the democratic elections being gamed by this process can't produce governments capable of stopping it, and I'm getting all Asimov-Foundations about it. Perhaps it's time to save what we can for civilization until we start rebuilding again. And yes, these are my thoughts as I watched the Ontario Library Association standing against book bans and funding cuts.

Belief in the mission is one way to keep up the fight, but everyone seems worn thin by the effort. Keeping a strong front becomes difficult when your allies dwindle and everything you've built around literacy and critical information analysis is dismissed as meaningless. We live in interesting times. Being able to tie one on at the evening social with the brilliant women leading this fight was a highlight.

Carol Off's closing keynote was earth shaking. I wish they'd put it out so more people could hear it. Her retirement from As It Happens on CBC coincided with the rise in hate and division we've seen around us. Her talk cut to the quick describing the mechanics of this nastiness in vivid detail. It was a much needed rallying cry even as the barbarians hammer at the gates.

***

I'd signed up to present at the conference because I wanted to demonstrate (rather than just talk about) the importance of government, civil society and industry working together for our mutual cyber well-being. If you think that's not a priority, 2025 is only a few weeks old and dozens of Canadian school boards have already been crippled by cyber-attacks, most of which depend on clueless users to get in. The vast majority of our cyber woes are a human education problem, not a technical one.

While we were at the conference one of Ontario's bigger urban boards was off-line due to another cyberattack. This persistent problem isn't just affecting school boards. The automated nature of cyber attacks these days has clueless criminals with no technical skill buying 'cyber-crime as a service (CaaS) that lets them launch hundreds of cyber-attacks to see which one sticks. This is why you're seeing a rise in attacks on organizations that make no sense, like libraries. As a result, this year at OLASC and in addition to our talk, there were multiple well attended presentations focused on getting libraries and their patrons better cyber-defended. I wish Ontario school boards felt the same way, but they prefer to play victim rather than solve the problem.

In the spirit of cooperation I reached out to many cyber organizations, but the common response seems to be a shrug when you're sitting on a comfortable amount of funding, which isn't very mission driven of them. I did connect with Debra at Knowledgeflow who is nothing but mission driven and she worked tirelessly to help build our collaboration in a country designed against working together. This ended up being our pitch for the talk:

To demonstrate the width of our collaborative approach, Marie at the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security joined our motley crew along with Cheryl from Cyber Legends. This gave us a full complement of cyber expertise from federal government, civil society and private industry. I can only shake my head at the many other not for profits, industry and provincial organizations who weren't interested in participating because they'd rather just do their own thing poorly. Gaps caused by these little fiefdoms are why Canada is considered a prime target in global cyber-crime circles.

You might think that school boards are 'doing' cyber education locally, but the material I see (if there is any at all) is reductive, outdated, performative and not at all pedagogically valid in terms of teaching skills. Most of the cyber awareness stuff being trotted out locally looks to be made by people with no background or experience in cybersecurity. In many cases the cringy media they produce doesn't look like it was made by anyone with an instructional background either.

Cybersecurity education needs to be developed by qualified people and delivered with best pedagogical practices in mind if we're to get at the prickly subject of digital safety. A reasonable expectation would be that this outreach produces a demonstrable improvement in real world cyber-safety skills in both students and staff as evidenced by a substantial drop in the neverending reports we're getting about school boards being hacked. You can tell what we have isn't working by simply looking at the headlines.

Until we stop handing this off to "a guy in IT" or a relative of administration who is "good with computers", we're going to keep making these headlines.

Debra has this slide up in our presentation and suggested that these kinds of systemic failures aren't something that individuals can influence, but I disagree. If the vast majority (research suggests over 80%) of breaches are caused by someone clicking on something they shouldn't and letting criminals in past otherwise effective defences, then a skills based approach to cyber-education would also reduce these kinds of headlines!

Our talk can be found here: https://knowledgeflow.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/OLA-Conference-Cybersecurity-Isnt-a-Scary-Word.pdf and includes piles of material designed by cyber specialists. Whether you're working with post-secondary, K-12 or even with adults, you will find credible material designed to teach actual cyber skills rather than questionable performative marketing material that checks a box.

The talk went very well in front of a full house and many stayed afterwards to get contact information and talk about next steps. This kind of outreach is essential if we're to turn the tide. I wonder were all the other catalysts for cyber in Canada were that morning.

***

After our talk I popped over to a presentation on the role of AI in student research:

DIana and Kim took on a subject that alternately instills fear and provides hope for a better education system. The fact that we're turning to machines to create a better educational outcomes is (I would suggest) because the humans doing it have given up on that responsibility themselves - which speaks to my main concern with AI: if we let it replace us it will, and that won't be better.

 

Kim and Diana started with a look at how relationships with AI have changed over time through media, and then got into the nuts and bolts of critical uses in process driven learning. If every educator approached teaching with the same lens we wouldn't be worrying about AI's influence on an education system that has remained mired in a pre-information revolution mindset. The humour and honesty was much needed and helped clear away all the edtech marketing clutter which has become a roar in the last year.

The inconsistencies in the edtech AI sell are difficult to make sense of. No AI for students, but teachers can happily use it to replace even core human activities like reporting on student learning? This is going to end well.

If you think the solution is to ban AI you've missed the boat while also putting your students in real cyber-peril. The 'free' VPNs that students use to get around blacklisted sites on school board wifi are anything but free. The shady organizations (mainly criminal) that pay for this bandwidth get a chokehold on a user's data. Imagine school boards saying they aren't going to run buses any more but at the same time a stranger in a white van pulls up and offers them free rides. Schools do nothing to stop the white vans lining up at the front of the school day in and day out; same thing.

Students *are* using AI in their school work and I think they should if your assignments are still final product nonsense stuck in the idea that information is difficult to find (like it's 1985). If you're assessing process, AI is a powerful tool for enriching student thinking. If you're still handing out assignments that only describe the final product you're looking for that students can drop into an AI that will spit out an answer you think is real, then AI plagiarism is what you deserve. There was a moment in this year's Davos talks about it:

Go to 40:52 if the video doesn't automatically.

The worst thing we can do is ignore AI or think that board IT that can't stop breaches can stop AI from being used. This head in the sand thinking is exactly why we're in a multi-generational digital literacy crisis that is crippling democracies and making it impossible for young people to find work. Reaching for an emerging technology like AI that demands so much inter-disciplinary digital infrastructure to operate (none of which most people have a first clue about) is like reaching for a nuclear reactor when you're learning how to start a fire, but that's exactly what we're doing.

I made a point of attending talks on cyber attack recoveries to understand how mature public library policies are around dealing with them (rapidly improving because they had to is the answer). Of interest was a comment from the Toronto Public Library head of IT who mentioned that their outage resulted in a huge spike in users accessing their terminals when it finally came back on, underlining the important role public libraries play in helping many Canadians cross our widening digital divide.

There is still room to improve though, and even when an organization recognizes the need for a cyber skilled approach to breach management they seldom want to consider putting anything towards cyber in a preventative manner.

A heartwarming moment on day two was seeing Joseph Jeffries and Jennifer Casa-Todd recognizing the yawning digital skills gap in our education systems and tackling digital skills head on with the Canadian School Libraries. Seeing this happening across provincial lines gave me hope as this doesn't often occur in the true north siloed and regionally self-interested.

Though they had a first thing in the morning slot they brought together a room full of educators from coast to coast and got everyone thinking about the many skills that fall under the auspices of digital fluency. For a long time there was a reductive approach that believed that putting coding in the curriculum would solve all our digital woes, but this is like studying grammar and spelling closely and then assuming it will produce literate people. There is a reason why we call it digital literacy and not digital skill. The latest fad is computational thinking, but again this is reductive.  The skills needed to build a network, train an AI on big data, program an IoT sensor or resolve a breach are very distinct.

Like traditional literacies, digital literacies are interdisciplinary and complex. Some are more technical than others and some are more media adjacent, but they all have to be developed if we want to start producing digitally fluent graduates. The OSLA/CSL digital skills toolkit will be a good step in that direction, especially as we're all fixated on grabbing the latest magic fruit to fall from the digital tree.

No regrets about attending OLASC this year. It was heartbreaking and warming all at the same time. If we ever see the superconference quietly disappear, civilization is sure to be next.

The Ontario Library Association Super Conference

I've watched my brilliant partner attend and then volunteer at the O.L.A. Super Conference for about a decade now. I've long had a crush on libraries (and librarians), but have never attended. In my new role I bring federally funded cybersecurity and digital skills opportunities into classrooms, so attending the OLA Super Conference offered an opportunity to connect and explore with library digital early adopters, of which there are many.

The first time I laid hands on a computer in the early 80s was when my middle school library got Commodore PETs, so in my mind libraries are the spaces where we make first contact with new information mediums and media. When I started teaching it was my school's librarian who asked me about this new fangled 'wi-fi' thing. I helped him set up a router in our library, making us (I believe), the first school in Ontario that offered wifi to those few students with new-fangled Blackberrys and PDAs. Librarians are always looking at emerging information tools that give their patrons/students access to the information they seek.

My team offers fully funded and vetted federal programs that support cybersecurity and digital literacy  that are so desperately needed. We continue to live a time where technology and the media that it delivers gets away from us. Answers exist, but convincing people running public services to engage with them is an uphill struggle, perhaps because they don't want to take on responsibility for our appalling and on-going digital literacy crisis (research from 2016, still poor in 2021, and still a worry at Treasure Mountain in 2022). It'll take a full court press by everyone in education to resolve this digital crisis, but I believe librarians are ideally placed to be the first into the breach.

That's why I was there, but the OLA Superconference became about much more than my work as it asks complex questions about the topics that tie society in knots. Librarians are the ones asked these difficult questions and libraries are one of few remaining safe spaces where people can go to get unbiased information without being treated like a consumer or a political target. Just like the BCTLA/Treasure Mountain national conference last year, the speakers and subjects at #OLASC were designed to challenge assumptions and offer librarians support in changeable times.

Mom at work... a message to our son who was at home doing full time shift work.

Vivek Shraya's opening keynote about how your 'self' is always in flux offered some much needed insight on how to be gentle with yourself in difficult times, but immediately after I attended Cory Doctorow's talk about his latest book, Chokepoint Capitalism, which I'd been reading when I attended the BCTLA/Treasure Mountain conference last fall. Cory stuffed 2 hours worth of thinking into his hour long talk, riffing on the attention economy trap we've fallen into and talking about how individual action to systemic failures aren't an effective use of your time. He gave the example that if you spent hours trying to find locally sourced markers to make a poster for an anti-Amazon protest, but missed the protest because you spent all your time trying to not use Amazon, you aren't putting your energy where it might produce a systemic response to a systemic failure.

As a public school teacher who has watched the past five years of education in freefall, this rang a lot of bells, but my problem is that I don't trust the people or organizations that are supposed to be representing my interests (because they aren't good at what they claim to be experts in). This too came up in both Cory's talk and in Elamin Abdelmahmoud's closing keynote; the idea that expertise doesn't matter anymore in a world where everyone is on a mic spouting their opinions.

Staring into the abyss of the many problems we face is something librarians have to do every day when patrons comes in with these difficult questions. Yet relevance and support for programming was a constant theme at the conference. Feather Miracle accepted the OLA's President's award for keeping up the fight even as libraries in indigenous communities closed at record rates. As I mentioned online, I missed the part in Truth & Reconciliation that focused on closing community supports like libraries in first nations.

These big problems thematically swirled around this conference in a way that you don't see in education or technology events. Librarians need to collaborate on these issues because we're all facing them and library learning commons are where they come up, but the conference also offered me 'technology stream' opportunities specific to my current job.

On Thursday I listened to the Guelph/Wellington Public Libraries (my local) talking about how they worked on the front lines closing the digital divide during lockdown. I was told that our school board was providing connectivity for students in need, but it looks like they just tapped into the hard work that the public library was doing. The room was absolutely packed, suggesting that crossing the digital divide during a pandemic is another one of those systemic problems we're all trying to solve individually. System failures surround us but individuals keep trying to make it right.

Friday morning started bright and early with Jonelle and Christina's "Evolution of the LLC: Building a Future Ready Space" which emphasized how important patron input is in designing diverse learning spaces. Throughout the presentation they offered DIY solutions that save money (whiteboard painted tables!) and suggestions for relevancy and engagement that wouldn't sound out of place in an entrepreneurship seminar. If you think libraries are where old teachers go for an easy final years before retirement, you're doing it wrong. A constant focus on streamlining and redesigning your learning spaces to make them engaging and relevant to students is something every TL in Canada should be focused on.

The London Public Library and Crouch Neighbourhood Centres did a talk about how to cross the connectivity in gap by offering connectivity to those unable participate in Canada's digital economy. The digital divide is deep and wide, but targeted programs like this work. LPL did the initial delivery of connective cellular technology and discovered that most of their devices were being used in cottage country by people who didn't want to pay their own way in data (at their cottage), but by partnering with Crouch (LPL run a branch out of Crouch), the devices found their way into the hands of people who needed them. Talks like these showed me that there are solutions to these seemingly insurmountable social inequities, but no one to scale them systemically. Systemic failures surround us but individuals keep struggling to try and make it right. If only we had some kind of representative 'democracy' that governed in the peoples' interest, but then maybe most Canadians aren't bothered with helping those in need.

The closing keynote by Elamin Abdelmahmoud offered an unblinking look at many of the problems that face Canadian society in a decentralized social-media driven culture. Just before he came on a posthumous lifetime award was given to Caroline Freibauer's family for her work in Ontario libraries. This really changed the emotional temperature in the room, but rather than roll with what he had prepared, Elamin listened and responded by going off piste and picking everyone up from where they were feeling that loss; it was a wonderfully empathic way to finish the conference.

After attending the OLA Superconference I'm more focused on connecting with public libraries as they also reach children in need, but beyond our struggling public school systems. Every student (home schooled, public schooled, private schooled) students make use of their public libraries, so working with them to help close that digital divide is a new angle I'm keen to develop. It's nice to know libraries are still working hard to help people manage the information tsunami we're all trying to swim in - there are lots of opportunities to work emerging digital media literacies in there too.

I watched a number of author talks and book signings while at the OLASC. It'd be really cool to return next year for work, do a presentation on digital skills and cybersafety and then take a timeout to go do an author talk. Bring it on, OLASC 2024!

A World War 2 historical fiction novel coming soon to a library near you!
Under Dark Skies.