Royan's Delemma

Royan Lee's Spicy Learning Blog (it's in my list of favorites on the side of Dusty World), asks some hard questions as digital technology matures and reaches mass appeal...


My response...

There is something about mass adoption that shifts a market from focusing on literate early adopters to the willfully ignorant masses.  When the herd finally adopts a technology it becomes a race to reach the widest range of people (including the lowest denominator).

When they started manufacturing automobiles in the early 1900s each one was hand crafted, almost unique and required either your own personal mechanic or you were the mechanic.  As automobiles became more popular, the landscape changed, systems became synchronized, the car became a cookie cuttered piece of mass assembly designed in more complicated

ways to ask less of the driver - the only sense of individuality was found in the frantic marketing.  The technology itself matured into operator simplicity in order to get even the most incompetent people behind the wheel.

Sound familiar Microsoft?  Google?  Apple?  Fanboy/girlism is one of the clearest signs that we've moved past the early adopter stance on digital technology and are now catering to the main stream (I say that in the most derogatory way possible) where marketing dictates sales because the majority of people have no idea how the technology works.  It's in this environment that giant legal documents creep in to user agreements and business finds more insidious ways to make use of the ignorant consumer.

If you put this in a modern
owner's manual, people
wouldn't buy it

If you look at manuals from long ago, they were full of technological information on how the product worked (so you could fix it).  Nowadays you get legalese and idiot diagrams designed to hide the inner workings.  They are even put together intentionally to prevent you from repairing them.

The only real way to save yourself from the vapid consumerism and accompanying ignorance that drives mass adoption is through the hacking ethos of maker culture; this has never died.  Cars are being stamped out for the unwashed masses by multi-nationals but there has always been a thriving underground of maker/hackers who ignore the rules designed for the ignorant and come to relate to the technology in a direct, more complete way.

If you want to save your (and your student's) minds from this ignorant, simplified relationship with technology, reignite their inner hackers.  Get into the nuts and bolts, bend technology to your will.  Freedom is only a hack away!

Some reading to save your mind:
http://www.matthewbcrawford.com/  a brilliant, modern attack on consumerist thinking and the power of your hands to save you
http://www.harpercollins.ca/author/authorExtra.aspx?isbn13=9780688002305&displayType=readingGuide  a classic on how modern people relate to technology
http://www.brepettis.com/blog/2009/3/3/the-cult-of-done-manifesto.html  a hacker manifesto

Don't give up!  Just don't follow the road more traveled (even if it's paved for you by people determined to monetize you)...

MediaSmarts: Battling Consumerism

Stay On Target

Stay on target... stay on target!

You want to talk about extracurriculars?  About how teachers should do them for the love of their job?  How they should sacrifice their own family lives so that they can 'save the children!' The politics around this are thick, and they do a great job of hiding the real problem.

Education isn't about extracurriculars, extracurriculars are about education.  Royan Lee, the education ninja, asked the question that got right to this during TVO's The Agenda, last week.  He then blogged about it, which might help all those people so tied up in the politics that they've lost the plot.

We're not in education to enrich those students wealthy enough to enjoy extracurriculars.  I didn't do a lot of extracurriculars in school - I had to go to work every day after school from the age of 10 onwards.  If you think you're saving the kids by coaching basketball after school, you're only saving the ones that can afford it.  The fact that extracurriculars usually cost money (bus costs, equipment, etc) many families can't manage further underlines this unfairness.

Education should offer everyone equal opportunity.  It should be the most liberal of social exercises; opportunity for all, regardless of socio-economic status.  There is an inherent classism in extracurriculars, but I'm sure all those passionate teachers who are rushing to pick up ECs again don't want to think about that, they just want to win a few games and demonstrate their 'passion'.

The teacher as evangelist isn't helpful in any of this. The martyr teacher only wants to emotionally show how much they care.  As a parent, this isn't what I want from my son's teachers.  Passion is great, but if that's all you've got, then quite frankly, you're creepy, and ineffective.  I'm looking for my son's teachers to be professionals who are always looking to improve their practice.  If they are so thick as to believe that doing extracurriculars doesn't impact their ability to maximize classroom learning then they have already demonstrated a lack of understanding around the use of limited resources in a time sensitive environment.  Zoe mentioned this in the Agenda show, but was quickly shot down by edu-babble around 'best practices'.  There are no 'best practices'.  Teaching is a constant development of a very complicated process.  When I see teachers throwing out edu-babble to simplify our work and support political motives, it strikes me as a professional failure.

The Spicy Learning Blog

Royan's blog post raises the question of what is so special about ECs.  If the list to the left are what make ECs so valuable to students, why aren't these things happening in classrooms?  The target of education should be learning.  If ECs offer advantages, why aren't they being integrated everywhere?

As I said in the comments of his great post, the education ship is rusty and running poorly.  It's covered in barnacles like extracurriculars, standardized testing, reduced professional development, government and union politics, social opinion, poor teacher standards and weak administrative development.  While Royan is asking why we don't fix the ship, the other teachers on the show instead go on at length about how important the barnacles are.

Extra curriculars shouldn't be extra.  We shouldn't be waiting until after school to offer this enriched learning environment to the few students who can or will take advantage of it.  We need to fix the damn boat, not get wrapped up in the union/government politics.

If that Agenda episode showed me anything, it's that teachers are just as caught up in the politics of distraction as the media, government and public are.  Stop crying about what the rich kids are missing out on and integrate what makes extracurriculars so fantastic into a public school system everyone can benefit from.


Thank goodness Royan Skywalker got his proton torpedoes on target.