Authoring Your Digital Self

edtech: hobbled and impersonal for your safety

I've written about owning your digital self in previous posts, but how that ownership happens is a function of how capable you are of authoring it.  Developing that authorship requires freedom of choice, you can't make full use of any medium if you don't have creative control.

I'm currently working toward my qualifications as a computer technology teacher, and this technical ability that allows for creative, deep use of technology is on my mind.  The magic of being technically skilled is misunderstanding that I want to move past.  Teaching technology means freeing up our access to it, and expecting anyone who wants to use it to be competent with it.  21st Century skills need to be as ubiquitous as literacy or numeracy skills.

When we are teaching writing, we don't prescribe the type of writing tool or the type of paper.  If a particular pen or type of paper encourages a student to write more, we're overjoyed to use it.  As soon as we can, we have students writing about their experiences using their own style of forming letters (within readability parameters).  We encourage individualization of this complicated process in order to assist students in internalizing these complex skills; their ability to form letters is one of the most unique things they do as a person.

What we do with edtech is the equivalent of only showing students cards with words on them and then declaring them literate when they can string together a sentence of words.  We don't allow them to personalize their learning, and so make it impersonal, simplistic and ultimately forgettable.

A school computer is about as inflexible and impersonal as a computer can be made to be.  If we're going to recognize 21st Century learning as complex, inter-related skill sets that need to be nurtured and developed over time (like literacy itself), then we need to look at how we are presenting digital  learning opportunities in education.

Our students currently teach themselves 21st Century skills outside education.  When they come to school they meet panicky (usually older) teachers and administrators who fear the magic box of lights and discourage any use of them that aren't understandable parallels of familiar analogue activities (word processing/type writer, powerpoint/slide show, etc).  Activities that don't have a pre-digital analogue are morally wrong / intellectually bankrupt / a waste of time... pick one and frown.  Edtech is designed around this philosophy of belittling digital change, and ignoring the development of teaching in technology.

appears every time we open up IE, which forgets
all your settings when you log out again.. #edtechfail

If we want our students to be able to author their digital selves now and in the future, we MUST free up the technology and allow students to customize their digital experiences.  The broken installation of Internet Explorer on my board computers (the only browser of choice) doesn't cut it.  Browser choice (complete with apps, mods and other personalization) makes all the difference in developing a skilled approach to accessing the internet.  It should remember your customizations as well.

This flexibility needs to go deep into software.  A student who has had access to multiple operating systems (Windows, OSx and Linux minimally) immediately has a better sense of how computers work because they are able to develop some perspective around how OSes make use of the hardware they are on, not to mention the software ecosystems each possess.

students all doing the same thing on the
same hardware, in rows...

A truly agile edtech plan also breaks apart the hardware monotony found in every board.  The minilab goes a long way toward addressing this while also addressing the software miasma.  The only time in their lives they will ever be forced to use rows of identical desktops is in school (or a 20th Century factory).  Preparing students for an IT environment that hasn't existed for over a decade is positively backward looking

Educational technology is not about ease of administration for the board's IT department, and it's not about fear mongering about privacy that never existed, it's about teaching students real, usable skills that will serve them in the future.

It would be nice if we started doing that.

You Say You Want A Revolution?

... well you know, we all wanna save the world.

Thoughts from ECOO 2011: 

You say you want a digital revolution in education?  Is your perfect classroom a one screen per child?  Do you rage against the bureaucracy and hate that this isn't happening fast enough?

There is a lot of excitement and optimism around this, much of it centered on the idea that technology will somehow make our jobs as teachers easier.  If you honestly believe that then your optimism is blind.

Technology will give you access to information, and offer you opportunities to differentiate learning and even assess student abilities in much more minute and specific ways, but it won't make your job easier, it will make it much more challenging, especially if teaching for you is a matter of working out a lesson and then repeating it for twenty years until you retire.

If you knew how to direct a plough team of horses in the field, did you really think that a modern machine makes things simpler?  Easier to operate?  Do you have to know less to operate the machine than you did the horse?

At the Ecoo Conference this year, many people focused on specific apps that would replace a specific classroom related paper based piece of work.  This is the equivalent of creating a steam powered horse, rather than designing a train that more appropriately uses the new technology.  Using google docs to replace individual writing is this kind of thinking.  Using prezi to replace a poster presentation is this kind of thinking.  Using Diigo to replace making notes out of an encyclopedia is this kind of thinking. The real power of these tools lies in how they are different, not in how the replace an existing process, and especially in how they create collaborative opportunities.

We are trapped by our preconceptions...

Those preconceptions also feed into fears.

The collaborative nature of online tools freaked out many people at ECOO.  The heel digging around using social media (twitter and others) to expand personal learning networks was consistent across many of the seminars I attended.  Many educators still accept group work in class, but believe online collaboration is a form of plagiarism and cheating, or even worse, it somehow causes children to be preyed on by making them public.

If the classroom is really going to bleed out of the factory inspired buildings we call schools and infect a student's life in a more permanent way (ultimately creating curious life long learners), then we need to continue to develop access to collaborative online tools that don't frighten people, and act assertively to clarify new media and calm down the analogue population.

I had a knee jerk response from an invite I sent out on school email this weekend asking if anyone who hadn't PLN built before might be interested.  The teacher (a self described dinosaur) said, "I don't want to be tweeting or any of that other social media stuff.  If I want PD, I'll read a book."  I pointed out to her that most of the discussion online revolves around books we've read.  The key difference between her enriching her own teaching and the PLN doing it online is that more than one person benefits; collaboration is what super charges it.

The foundation of all this anxiety is the spectacular example our digital native students make of social media, which is usually displayed as the most asinine waste of time ever devised.  Older teachers who are techno-phobic find the idea of using digital tools for productivity as foreign as clueless fourteen year olds do.  The blind leading the blind.

I keep trying to shed some light on this, but people get very cranky about it.

The Perfect Interface

Thinking about tablets recently, I've been trying to imagine what the perfect online interface would be. Since getting a smartphone and doing the Web2.0 thing, I'm finding I don't go to the internet like I used to, getting online is now a micro event, not the main event. Web2.0 wants you to pop in and out in social media, produce content and grab information relevant to what you're doing in reality, and that doesn't fit well with a desktop.

If I'm not going to the internet as the main event, but rather as an enhancement to my reality, what would be the best way to access that? You'd want something with you all the time; the legendary wearable computer.

I'm not feeling the desktop like I used to. I still use desktop horsepower to game (which is still an event in and of itself), and to move big photoshop files, but not much else, using the internet as augmented reality doesn't require a monster processor or graphics power. Instead I'm out and about, and wanting to catch a moment and push it online quickly and easily without interrupting what's going on. Facebook encourages this somewhat, Twitter relies on it. What you can share online easily is what makes your digital self. You're mute and half invisible online if you can't interact as your virtual self.

I find the smartphone sometimes frustrating entering text on (I have the same problem with tablets), but the fact that they are easy to take everywhere is their ace in the hole. My Xperia has an awesome camera, does good video and has a big enough screen to easily share information on, it comes close to being an ideal tether between meat me and virtual me.

My future ideal device has a stylish pair of glasses, shoes and clothes that recharge from bodily motion, or solar power like the awesome Casio I recently got. Having a device that is self powered is where all mobile tech should head. Having a watch/compass/weather station on my wrist that is essentially self-sufficient makes you aware of all the umbillicalage that connects us to our digital selves.

The perfect device only asserts itself as much as it has to in order to complete online interactions. Photos are a quick motion away, interfaces respond to bodily motions (eye blinks, hand gestures, etc). Typing by following eye motion? Typing by looking at any surface with a keyboard imposed on it through the glasses? Speech to text, direct speech and let's drop the textiness?

I guess, somewhere into this, you could be playing an interactive real world/virtually enhanced game with people in which how accurately you create spell gestures dictates how well the spell will work. You'd see people playing in the park, pointing fingers at each other and seeing virtual paint balls. Gym classes would take on a whole new historical context. You could run 100m against Donovan Bailey and actually see him on the course (way) ahead of you.

William Gibson has a fantastic scene in Spook Country, where the main character is looking (through glasses with a digital screen) at the body of a virtual dead River Phoenix lying on the sidewalk where he actually died. Past and present colliding virtually... imagine that field trip to Quebec City, where you're walking across the Plains of Abraham and seeing the battle unfold around you... or you can spend a day at the reconstructed Globe Theatre watching the King's Men preparing to stage Romeo & Juliet for the first time (complete with cast from Shakespeare in Love).

Virtual Reality doesn't offer nearly the nuance and ease of use that augmented reality does. Here's hoping Moore's Law gets us there sooner than later. I want to actually work up a sweat next time I'm doing a dungeon crawl with my party of adventurers.