Consumerist Edtech has us all living in Hotel California

If you work in education and leverage technology (so that'll be anyone in any classroom these days), give this a read and see if it doesn't make you a bit uncomfortable.

The Metaverse Is Simply Big Tech, but Bigger

Perhaps you're thinking that your particular edtech provider isn't like that, but they're all coming at it from the same angle:

Apple is into it.

Google is into it.

Microsoft is into it.

And what angle is that?  Marketing for the attention economy, of course.  Big tech's focus on a 'total service environment' is there to make sure you never leave:  whether it's #tech or #edtech, we're all living in Hotel California;  you can check out any time you like but you can never leave.

Platform agnosticism has been a recurring theme on Dusty World since it began.  I've been barking at the moon about this for years because we don't leverage educational technology to teach how technology works, we just let it insinuate itself into all our learning while being illiterate in terms of how it influences us through media and medium; we predicate technology use in education on media illiteracy.

Dreaming of 'free range' open source
technology access in 2013.

If we taught digital fluency, anyone who became digitally skilled in our education system would be much better at identifying fake news and managing their digital presence.  If we taught platform agnostic digital literacy instead of depending on consumerism to do it for us, students would understand how digital mediums influence their thinking.  Instead we just turn out blinkered consumers primed for engagement with the technology provider their education system chose for them.

Imagine if our language and social studies teachers got certifications by certain book publishers and then only taught from that publisher's collection in the way that their particular publisher provided; that's what we've done in educational technology over the past two decades.

"In a social-science class last year, the students each grabbed a Google-powered laptop. They opened Google Classroom, an app where teachers make assignments. Then they clicked on Google Docs, a writing program, & began composing essays."

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/13/technology/google-education-chromebooks-schools.html

We use edtech to indoctrinate students in closed digital ecosystems designed to monetize their attention.  It doesn't matter which multinational edtech 'solution' your board uses, they're all the same, and they're all playing the #metaverse marketing game: "marketing spin on Big Tech’s increasing reach and power. It’ll be Big Tech—just as problem-riddled as now—but bigger."

Wouldn't it be something if we required and taught platform agnostic access to all technology in our classrooms instead of acting as a marketing arm for rich, tax dodging corporations?  These organizations are parasitic, our kids deserve better.

The 'drink from the firehose' approach to edtech doesn't end when we're told what we have to teach with.  Many teachers then brand their practice with corporate logos.

The point of that article is that a true metaverse (a shared, non-partisan online space) hasn't existed since the dawn of the internet.  Once the attention merchants got a hold of it they subverted democracies around the world and created a privacy and security nightmare, including in education.

Perhaps the saving grace in this might be that if any of them could get past their greed, educational technology would be the place to make this non-partisan metaverse happen.  Instead of demanding control of the technology narrative to generate users, wouldn't it be something if the technology giants and school systems around the world worked together to create an educational metaverse that was platform agnostic and open to all?

Even Hollywood can only envision a corporate owned future mind-space.  The solution at the end of RP1?  A CEO swap.

Infecting The System

If the internet is the nervous system for a new global
culture, should it be artificially limited by human
self interest?

Cory Doctorow ended a harrowing editorial on artificially limited computing in WIRED this month with the observation that the internet isn't simply an information medium but has, in fact, become the nervous system of the Twenty First Century.

Doctorow begins by questioning why we shackle computers with controls that users can't overpower, and in many cases don't even know exist.  He uses the example of the Sony rootkit, that would install viral software on machines whenever a consumer would run one of their music CDs.  The idea was to curb pirating, the result was creating a blind spot in millions of customer's machines that immediately got exploited by hackers.

Whenever we build a computer that is subservient to anything other than the user, we're creating blind spots that hackers can exploit.  Whenever our software or hardware is artificially limited to satisfy human values, whether they be government or business or even educationally motivated, we are creating a machine that is flawed.

There is a simple honesty to computing that I find very appealing.  When we're building a circuit or working with a computer or coding, students will often say that they didn't change anything but got a different output, or that they did everything exactly right and it doesn't work.  The subtext is always that computer is up to something.  Whatever the computer is up to, you put it up to it.  Computers don't make mistakes, humans do.  This is why it's vital that computers are not controlled by remote interests.  When remote interests dictate computer outputs, you end up with confused users who start to blame the machine.

... because someone programmed HAL to kill.
Machines don't make mistakes, unless people tell them to.

I've long said that computers are merely a tool, but many people see them as intelligent entities with hidden agendas.  If we allow institutions to hard code their interests into our computers then we are intentionally allowing our flaws to infect one of the most honest expressions of human ingenuity.  We're also creating that confusion around computers as entities with evil intent (we provide the intent).

What goes for our personal devices also goes for our networks.  Unless we are going to continually battle for net neutrality and efficiency over self interest, we're going to find ourselves with hobbled machines on near sighted networks, seeing only what vested interests want us to see.  In that environment computers and the internet can very quickly move from democratizing force to Orwellian control.  Keeping computers free of human influence is vital to human well being.

I've been uneasy about the nature of the modern internet as distraction engine as well as the branding of edtech.  Both examples reek of the infected human influence that Doctorow refers to in his editorial.  Wouldn't it be ironic if we, as a species, were on the verge of building a more perfect machine that allows us to move beyond our short-sighted selves, but instead of building that wonder we infect it with our own shortcomings and end up using it to create a kind of subservience never before imagined?

I see it every day in machines so locked down that they barely function as computers, with limitations on virtually everything they do.  This is done for ease of management, to satisfy legal paranoia and, ultimately, to ease the burden of digitally illiterate educators, but this approach has me watching whole generations growing up in an increasingly technology driven world having no idea what is is or how it works.  As a computer technology teacher this is difficult to swallow.

The only restriction on a computer should be the laws of physics and the state of the art.  Efficiency and user empowerment should be the machine's and our only focus.  Everything should be up to the user otherwise these magical machines aren't empowering us, they're being used to create dangerous fictions.  Is it difficult to teach students how to use computers like this?  Perhaps, but at least we'd be teaching them a genuine understanding of what digital technology is, and how to wield that power responsibly.  All we're doing now in education is feeding the infection.

Cultivating Genius & the Zen Teacher

A recent issue of WIRED has an article on student directed learning called: The Next Steve Jobs, which asks some hard questions about teaching and learning during an information revolution.

The idea of regimented learning in rows in classrooms is so obviously indicative of 19th Century factory thinking that it begs for change, but many traditional education organizations have so much invested in the status quo that they will spend all our time and money hammering people into system-serving standardized thinking.  Instead of developing the skills vital for learning in an information revolution, we cling to politics and habits.  Nowhere was this more obvious than in a poor Mexican school that wasn't serving a genius in their mix.

You have to wonder how many of our students are marginalized and never see their own potential because we are wringing our hands about how not-average they are and how they don't respond appropriately to being indoctrinated by an archaic education system.

The article leans on technology, brain science and student centred and directed learning to bring out real genius in a student who was otherwise disengaged.  The brain research is fairly straightforward (though ignored by most education systems):

“The bottom line is, if you’re not the one who’s controlling your learning, you’re not going to learn as well,” says lead researcher Joel Voss, now a neuroscientist at Northwestern University.

Neuroscience has proven this again and again, but education stubbornly holds to an information limited, rigidly programmed learning system because these traditions support the political makeup of that education system.

“If you put a computer in front of children and remove all other adult restrictions, they will self-organize around it,” Mitra says, “like bees around a flower.”

Mitra's research still assumes a teaching presence that will bump students along when they run into repetitive habitual patterns.  The key is a good leading question and then that dogged support as students find their own way to an answer.  The urge to interfere in this process in order to make learning clinical and exact is great, and many teachers do this with the best possible intentions, but what they are actually doing is taking away the student's opportunity to internalize learning.

Learning is a messy process, at its best teaching is a subtle presence focused on producing a fecund environment for fearless experimentation and research.  An idea is only learned when it is internalized by the learner and that can only happen experientially.  Any time you see a teacher talking at students there isn't any learning happening.

Faith in the self direction of a learner is something we've tried to remove from every aspect of the education system.  The system becomes the intent rather than the learner's learning.  Words like curriculum, assessment and standardized data become watchwords for how effective the system is as a system, it all has nothing to do with learning.  

Many of the fads we embrace in education around self-directed learning are little more than smoke and mirrors - the appearance of self-direction in order to fool the student into engagement with otherwise rigid systemic need.  This is exactly why a genius in a poor Mexican school couldn't engage enough to show her talents until her teacher threw away the paradigm.

Wired Thinking on Neurodiversity

Wired at 20 years old

My favorite magazine is WIRED, and I'm a magazine guy.  No other magazine dares me to think as widely and as daringly about the times we live in (if you've never picked up a copy, give it a go!).  Wired will go after interests of mine (internet culture, technology, etc) but it will also introduce me to the leading edge of fields I have only a passing experience in, and make me care about them.

This month they turn 20 years old.  They've been daringly guessing what will happen next for two decades now, and while they don't always get it right, they always make you realize what changes are upon us.

As  I read a new edition I usually want to link and share the ideas they stir up.  This edition is full of them as Wired goes over an alphabet of ideas considered in the last two decades.

Neurodiversity is a topic that hits close to home.  With a son diagnosed, I've come to recognize how I've dealt with ASD myself.  One of the reasons I love reading Douglas Coupland or William Gibson is because many of their characters are neuro-atypical, and it's nice to read about people like yourself; I find much of mainstream media quite alienating.

I've struggled with my inability to care about social distinction forever, and I feel for my son while he does.  I also think that difference is wonderful.  When we heard the diagnosis I said, "excellent! Who would want to be normal!?"  I guess the normal people do.

WIRED's take on all this? Neurodiversity is like biological diversity; it develops resiliency.  The neurodiverse might not all be geniuses, but the ones that are (and geniuses by definition are neurodiverse) may very well save the human race.  Diversity allows a species to survive in extreme conditions, conditions that we're making for ourselves.  As long as we're hammering round pegs into square holes, we're not allowing human beings to be as neurally diverse as we naturally are... and we're hurting ourselves in the process.  Normal people really need to get off their high horses.

I wish I could convince the school system of this as it focuses exclusively on short comings in hopes of making the exceptional ceptional..  If they could improve my son's image pattern recognition (which is astonishing), his special skills would be enhanced, instead they rush to make him fit a mould.  The system presses him to be as widely and flatly skilled as 'normal' people in hopes of making him what, normal?  Upcoming standardized tests won't examine his superhuman abilities, they will focus on what 'normal' people are expected to do (they have charts).  When he fails a literacy test because he's unable to verbalize what he knows in a manner that suits the testers, we're left with the pieces.

Some might suggest that alternative school systems might offer a response to this, but I doubt it.  Adding money to remove expectations isn't what is needed here.

Like eating factory produced meat, driving SUVs or buying sweatshop made products, how we treat the neurodiverse is going to be one of the things that points to our backward (hypocritical) thinking in the early twenty first century.  Like the eighteenth century person who thought slavery was perfectly acceptable, this social ignorance makes us look like fools to history.

Fortunately, I don't really care what most people think about it.