I've been lucky enough to find myself in Canadian classrooms from St John's to Vancouver over the past year. Canada is the only developed country in the world without a national education strategy, so this isn't something many educators get to experience. The only people who do span our country are the edtech companies that have surged into being to resolve a digital skills gap that doesn't look to be going anywhere any time soon.
At its heart the widening digital divide is a inclusion and equity problem. Students who can't afford tech at home lack familiarity and fall behind when schools bring it in with no training for staff or students. It would be more productive if education in Canada did more than talk about DEI, but that would require strategic vision which we lack.
In my travels I've come across many edtech 'solutions'. These often involve off-the-shelf technology that has has been branded to meet a specific need in a 'turn-key' way so learning essential digital skills doesn't actually require any on the part of the instructor or students. The appearance of technology in a classroom is usually the goal, rather than the learning of fundamental digital skills. Of course, this bespoke marketing comes with a huge bump in price. I love seeing $15 open source Arduino microcontrollers paired with $10 in sensors and called a 'climate change' edtech kit, yours for $80! In many cases a hard sell accompanies these kits that are guaranteed to teach the STEM skills you don't have. UNESCO has something to say about this global phenomenon:
UNESCO's 2023 Technology in Education, a tool on who's terms? is well worth a read. With Canada's lack of a national education strategy, we have to find vision elsewhere. Someone asked me if I might do my Masters in Educational Technology and without hesitation I said, "educational technology is the worst kind of technology, why would I want a masters in that?"
The frustration around this has been gnawing at me and when I woke up this morning I had the edtech hockey stick floating in my head, so I made some marketing for it:
It's satire, it's supposed to be over the top or it wouldn't be satire.
The hockey metaphor brings home the absurd nature of the edtech dance we're in. Anyone who actually plays hockey will take one look at this thing and laugh. To someone who knows nothing about hockey it looks like it might work as both a player and goalie stick, but it will actually do neither thing. Edtech works the same way; it's selected and used by people who aren't skilled in technology, so this edtech hockey stick, like so many edtech solutions, is a marketing exercise bereft of pedagogical value that thrives on a lack of technical fluency. There isn't much incentive for edtech companies to address this ignorance, though branded educator 'qualifications' in edtech sure are popular.
The pedagogical solution is to learn digital technologies and media from the ground up instead of implementing simplified solutions like Chromebooks, the edtech hockey 'stickest' of them all. This is a one trick pony that ties learning to a single multi-national's browser and cannot provide any locally processed content. The cloud is where edtech solutions thrive because you can easily monetize access. The hard sell for strapped educational IT departments is that Chromebooks don't give you administration headaches because they can barely do anything, but like the edtech hockey stick they look like they can do just enough to make it look like you're doing something about the digital skills gap.
I am a relentless advocate for bringing real world technologies into our classrooms and showing students how to master them. The results speak for themselves. Whenever I bring the digital skills crisis up in Canadian education someone pipes up with "education is not just about job skills!". Indeed it isn't, but as a poor immigrant kid I can't help but see the privilege that opinion is couched in. Whenever someone suggests that it's their professional obligation to do less, I'm left wondering what they think professionalism is. I'd love to see educational professionals tackle the hard work of digital divide DEI and digital skilling like it matters instead of finding reasons to continue ignoring it while the edtech piranhas profit.
NOTES
There is no such thing as "Canadian Education". The PISA results everyone waves the flag about happen on the back of the four largest provinces. If you're elsewhere in the country you may be below the world average.
"PISA results show each of the Big Four provinces of Ontario, Quebec, Alberta and British Columbia achieving significantly higher average reading scores than all G7 member countries except, of course, Canada. The Big Four also outperformed five of these six G7 countries in math and science (the exception being Japan, which scores below Quebec in math and below Alberta in science)."
"... if we only consider PISA results for the remaining smaller six provinces, Canada fares much worse, placing 17th in reading (below the United States, the United Kingdom and Japan), 18th in science (again, below Japan, the U.K. and U.S.) and 30th in math, just below the OECD average."
That edtech companies are feeding off this siloed inequity is part of a larger problem. Next round of PISA is looking at digital skills (because we're in a global shortage). I'm curious to see how that gets politicised. Wouldn't it be something if we actually did something about our astoundingly poor digital fluency instead of buying for-profit solutions with little educational value?
Back in 2014 I had one of those strange moments when I suddenly found myself freed from the day to day necessities of the classroom and thrust into a space where I had time to think about pedagogy. I once had an administrator tell me, "what does pedagogy even mean anyway? It's one of those words that doesn't mean anything." I've never felt that way but perhaps that's because I've focused my career on teaching rather than getting out of the classroom at the earliest opportunity. Throughout that career I've clung to moments of pedagogical best-practice in a sea of compromises.
The main purpose of schools is to run a schedule that has students in set places at set times to the benefit of adults. You can call it daycare if you want to, many people treat it like one. Order and regularity are the primary functions of school organization, not learning; hence that astonishing observation from someone who is focused on managing it. Being a teacher committed to teaching has often put me at odds with this reality.
I hesitated to get into education for a long time because I found it a dehumanizing experience as a student.
This is the expectation people have around technology integration - it's supposed to improve learning! But scores continue declining.
Over the Easter long weekend in 2014 I was invited down to the ASU/GSV Summit in Phoenix. Stepping out of the moribund but relatively well funded Canadian education system into the 'breaking bad' of America where teachers live just above the poverty line and everyone is fixated on common curriculum success dictated by standardized testing (you don't get to be the 25th best education system in the world by chasing pedagogy!), I wasn't sure what to expect, but there were a lot critical thinkers at this summit.
One that really rocked me was Brandon Busteed who stated (to the astonishment of everyone present) that, "“Educational technology has failed to move the needle on either cost effectiveness or student success in the past ten years.” He then showed statistically significant drops in literacy and numeracy even as the buzz around educational technology as an answer to everything was at a fever pitch.
You'd think we'd have come around to a sensible integration of digital technology in learning nearly a decade later, but post pandemic things are even worse.
PISA Results from that time show statistically significant drops in learning. Things haven't improved even with accelerated technology use. On top of that, COVID proved that we were unable to leverage ICT even during an emergency to preserve essential learning.
Post COVID we're in a recovery situation because we couldn't leverage technology to work through pandemic lockdowns. We had the tools but most people in education (children and adults) have no idea how to use technology to actually improve (or even provide basic) learning opportunities. On the back of forced rapid technology integration due to the pandemic, our learning outcomes have gotten even worse. Our information revolution has made data so much easier to access and manipulate, but not in education where we used digital to imitate the paper based systems we clung to long after the rest of the world had moved on.
***
Looking back over a teaching career spent in the middle of an 'education technology revolution', I've been frustrated at how technology has been applied in the classroom. Coming out of information technology into education in 2004, I found that classrooms were a decade or more behind the businesses I'd just been supporting. I was even more surprised to see schools going out of their way not to engage with digital learning opportunities - banning them for the longest time before reluctantly adopting them with no training or education (for staff or students) around their use. This delay resulted in educators being LESS digitally literate than the students they serve. As a result, digitally delayed teachers weren't thinking about how edtech could enhance pedagogy because they were some of the least capable of doing so. Delaying digital integration has damaged both staff and students.
We've fumbled one of the greatest opportunities to improve education in the past century and have integrated technology so poorly that it actually reduces student success rather than amplifying it. We turned generic, paper handouts into generic, online documents, ignoring opportunities for collaboration and individualization that fluid digital information systems offer.
That rush to imitate paper based education on screen resulted in a drop in photocopying budgets which thrilled administration, but what we lost in printing costs we more than made up for in having to buy screens for everyone (something we still struggle with). Neither way is particularly environmental, but the screen route produces more waste and uses far more energy while reducing learning outcomes in digitally illiterate classrooms where students taught on home entertainment systems can only see digital devices as toys. This shell game of showing small cost reductions moving away from paper while ignoring the massive costs of edtech has further diminished our ability to focus on pedagogical best practices. Less money in the system is less money in the system.
We're facing a generational digital skills shortage that highlights our failure to engage with digital literacy in a meaningful way. Teachers are less digitally literate than the general public because they've been working in this moribund system determined to ignore the benefits of digitally enhanced pedagogy. We have digitally oblivious teachers depending on students who have been told that they are digital natives and don't need to learn how technology works because they can turn on an X-Box. You don't need to look hard to understand why education makes such a juicy target for cyber-criminals. When I reach out in my current capacity as a cyber-focused educator I'm told by ministries of education across the country that online safety is covered in health class. Yes, you heard that right, phys-ed teachers are covering cybersecurity training for our students (or more likely skipping it).
What we're heading towards if we continue to ignore digital pedagogy! This was made with the Dall-E 2 AI image generator using this prompt: DALL·E 2023-05-23 09.15.26 - artificial intelligence replacing human students and doing their learning for them in pixel art
***
How would this educational technology revolution that never happened have gone down in a better world? We would have started integrating digital technologies as they emerged and we would have taught cross curricular digital media literacy as soon as we began using the technology in classrooms. Rather than offloading digital fluency to home life and creating a skills gap that widens inequity, we would have taken responsibility for the technology as we adopted it in a timely fashion.
As digital media literacy improved, teachers wouldn't be behind the rest of society in terms of technical fluency and would have worked towards developing digitally empowered pedagogy that uses the benefits of easily accessible and malleable information to create a radically individualized approach to learning that produced truly equitable learning outcomes for all. This targeted approach to digitally enhanced learning then streamlined our industrially inspired education system into a more efficient and agile format.
As cloud based technology emerged, these digitally fluent teachers engage data science to produce deep understandings of each student's learning journey. These personalized data clouds are leveraged to produce bespoke learning outcomes. Instead of using digital technology to imitate class based, low-resolution lessons from the age of paper, we leverage our ICT revolution to take advantage of the fluidity of digital information and engage each learner where they are at in their journey. As we move away from the old, low resolution model we start to see astonishing efficiencies in student learning.
Our schools have evolved in the past two decades from age-based 19th Century storage units to smaller, agile, digitally empowered community education centres where students work towards their own learning mastery. This individualized learning environment empowers students to take control of their own educational journey. School is no longer something being done to them but something that empowers them to better understand themselves. This system also burns a fraction of the millions of gallons of diesel the old system did shuffling students around based on their physical age.
This digitally integrated education system resiliently leverages technology empowered pedagogy to individualize and engage students across all interests and subjects. During the pandemic this education system leveraged its digital expertise to connect students, reduce social anxiety and keep learning alive by using our networked world effectively. The thought of using our digital illiteracy as an excuse to quit never crossed anyone's mind. Our resilient, digitally enhanced education systems were key to keeping students healthy and mentally well during the pandemic.
Rather than being an easy target for cybercriminals, education is fortress of cyber-fluency where staff and students demonstrate exemplary digital awareness and integration. Instead of being the most likely to click on a phishing email, teachers are the least likely to infect their own networks. Schools are community centres of excellence that support their community families and local businesses in terms of cybersecurity.
This digitally transformed education system is agile and responsive, offering learning opportunities and variations in support for every student based on a detailed understanding of their needs. As a result, resources are applied in targeted, financially effective ways Low resolution reporting processes like report cards are a quaint memory. Learning reaches demonstrated thresholds of understanding leading students to graduate through curriculums at their own pace. Parents can access this data in real time and are partners in their child's learning rather than arms-length critics. Some students graduate in their early teens, others later, but everyone would graduate with mastery knowledge of the fundamentals, especially including the digital fluency needed to succeed in the world beyond school. Instead of lamenting a digital skills crisis, Canada grows its own digitally expertise instead of emigrating digital talent in to keep up.
***
To summarize:
Education delayed engaging with digital technology for as long as it possibly could, putting it and everyone in it at a distinct disadvantage in the modern world. This frustrates parents and anyone else outside of education systems to no end.
The delay in digital engagement has resulted in entire generations of teachers and students who are less digitally literate than the general population.
When digital adoption finally took hold, education used it to replicate the same lack of individualization that characterized the paper based learning that proceeded it.
Technology integration in the classroom depends on digital familiarity at home because many teachers are less digitally familiar than the general population and most schools still struggle to provide equitable access to hardware.
The digital divide has grown because of this 'leave it to the parents' approach because some simply can't provide this essential media literacy.
Classroom management headaches due to students misunderstanding that digital technology is a tool and not a toy are the direct result of this approach.
I was listening to CBC's The House a few weekends ago. In it Scott Brison described the federal service as "offering BlockBuster service to a Netflix clientele". We've been Dancing in the Datasphere in an ongoing information revolution for over two decades. Education has missed opportunity after opportunity to meaningfully engage with technology itself and the digitally enhanced pedagogy that should have grown from it. As it falls behind, our schools feel less and less relevant to the society they claim to serve. As Brison suggested on Day Six, education isn't the only government service struggling to integrate technology in a manner that citizens have come to expect. It's particularly impactful in education because we're hurting the people who need digital fluency the most: students facing a future immersed in it.
Instead of developing coherent digitally enhanced pedagogies and designing our schools around them, we use technology to stuff as many students as possible into an eLearning class that most of them don't have the digital fluency to navigate. The eLearning course will likely be created using paper based, classrooms lessons converted to a digital format. If technology is engaged with at all it's usually as a way to save money, but never to rethink how we might produce better learning outcomes.
There are a small number of subject specialists and educators who have worked hard to engage in a meaningful adoption of technology to improve learning, but these people and their organizations are underfunded and vanishingly rare in the educational landscape. In fact, because of the privatization of education technology engagement in schools (when you're digitally illiterate it's easier to hire a for profit company to come in and do it for you), many of these subject specialist organizations are evaporating.
It's never too late to start developing digital mastery in a coherent, curriculum wide context. It'll be an uphill struggle swinging one of the most backwards institutions around to catch the digital wind and sail into the future, but it could still be done...
I had a talk the other evening with a Vancouver educator teaching cybersecurity curriculum at his local school board. Like me, Todd has been working alone, offering the local students he has access to the opportunity to learn cyber-skills that would benefit them in any field of study. And, like me, he has helped to launch a few students into careers in this radically underserved career pathway.
Despite being 3 time zones away, Todd is running into the same difficulties I am in Canada's regionally siloed education systems. When he reached out to other districts in British Columbia they didn't engage, and so his work remains isolated to his district. Cyber-attacks on education fill the news, yet the vast majority of students have no access to learning this emerging (and essential) digital media literacy.
In 2017/18 we got involved in CyberTitan, the Canadian centre of excellence for the international CyberPatriot competition (the world's largest student cybersecurity competition). From there we developed a thriving cybersecurity extracurricular program that has since influenced our in-class curriculum in timely and diverse ways., but when I asked a system 'lead' if we could help other schools to engage in the same competition I was told, "it's already running at your school." Leaving us in the same place that Todd finds himself.
With headlines like these (an extensive list of Canadian education hacks can be found at the bottom of the post) wouldn't cybersafety training in every school be a good idea?
Cyber-education is just the most obvious part of a much bigger digital skills iceberg.
Yet we barely cover coding in public schools, let alone the rest - even though we depend on it in every subject. Digital technology has become integral to learning in 2023, yet no one has a dedicated curriculum to teach the cybersafety and the technical skills needed to use it safely and effectively. It's why remote learning during the pandemic became an abject failure.
Cyber-Education: an Educational Failure in Education
You have to ask yourself why schools aren't engaging in the cyber-education they should have started when eLearning and other online education technology placed student data and attention in potentially hackable online locations. The answer to this question has eluded me for years, but I'm starting to formulate a theory. It began with seeing yet another example of the rhetoric that public education likes to lean on:
"The lack of robust cybersecurity measures stems from underfunding within schools and #educational groups. Often, they don’t have enough resources or budget to invest in #cybersecurity or train staff and students to practice good cyber habits."
Perhaps picking up the baton now would highlight a failure that has been decades in the making. By doing nothing, public education remains the victim of cybercriminals and technology disruption, just like the rest of us.
We should have begun developing this technology media fluency the moment we placed student learning in hackable online spaces. It's not a flattering analysis, yet moving past this head-in-the-sand approach is essential if we're going to keep putting student (and staff) information where criminals can exploit it. Our collective ignorance is the cause of the current cybersecurity crisis and the global digital skills shortage; it's a failure of education... by education!
Our Failure to Systematically Teach Digital Literacy Even As It Becomes an Expectation in All Subjects
Poor user digital fluency is the result of our failure to teach it in any kind of systemic manner. The cunning plan so far has been to hope parents are doing it at home* (*this link shows that they might be, if they can afford it). Meanwhile parents are assuming a comprehensive digital skills curriculum is happening in schools, and by comprehensive I mean year on year skills development in dedicated subject time using curriculum that results in functional and safe technology users. We obviously don't have those.
The students I see arriving in grade 9 suggest that this is not systemically happening, and where it does happen it is because a single teacher is trying to bridge this gap themselves. The assumption many parents labour under is that teachers are digitally literate, but they are much like the general population. Worse actually, because the education itself has dragged its feet engaging with digital transformation resulting in the people in it being less digitally savvy than the general population.
If we taught digital skills like we taught other foundational skills that are required across all subject areas (literacy, numeracy, etc), we would have periods focused on developing those skills and integrated subject specific digital fluency across all disciplines, but we don't even cover digital literacy development as comprehensively as we do geography (mandatory k-8 dedicated subject time and a mandatory grade 9 course). There are no mandatory digital literacy courses in any Ontario high school and in K-8 curriculum, where it happens at all, it's usually fixated on coding which does little to teach cybersafety. The ongoing digital skills shortage and a rash of user ignorance driven cyber incidents suggest that the piecemeal approach we've grudgingly adopted isn't working.
I've been pointing to these embarrassing statistics and presenting on the importance of filling this foundational gap in our curriculum for years on Dusty World:
Perhaps now, in a maelstrom of bad press and the potential for real financial damage to staff and students (and their families), education will finally take on systemic transformation to address digital skills and especially cybersecurity awareness. The benefits would go far beyond reducing the number of successful cyber breaches. A more digitally literate society would be able to pivot to remote learning in an emergency and might also offer climate reduction possibilities by reducing the need for face to face schooling. It would even help create a less factory driven/age based system that relies on millions of gallons of diesel to deliver bodies to age appropriate facilities every day. The central problem is that the digitally delayed education system is the least likely place to find this future friendly vision.
Do you know how many times cybersecurity is mentioned in Ontario computer technology or computer science curriculums? Not once - not even in the two specialist subjects it should be covered in. We've driven students onto potentially insecure online learning environments for years now and even the compsci students don't learn how to secure it.
Nowhere has this failure to address digital literacy been more apparent in emergency remote learning where many students were thrust into online mediums that they have very little understanding of with unsurprising results. Most students still equate technology with entertainment, which is why implementing it in classrooms has been fraught with problems. Most teachers have less digital fluency than anyone in a modern office setting.
One of the early myths used to justify this bury-it approach to digital literacy was that of the 'digital native' - the idea that students who grew up with digital technology were somehow magically imbued with the ability to understand it technically and use it safely and effectively. This is like saying that because I grew up in the 1970s and was familiar with cars, I already know how a car works and how to operate one. This absurd belief persists in many schools despite being summarily discounted by research.
Being familiar with digital technology means you don't have to overcome the fear that older people have in making a mistake with it, but I can assure you, students are not immune to making poor technical decisions based on digital ignorance. The rush by students in my school to use 'free' VPNs to bypass blocks on social media sites isn't digital native genius, it's profoundly ignorant. The criminals offering these services aren't offering them for free. This gives a fine example of how digitally illiterate school systems are. Blocking content and driving students to put their digital information at risk through questionable technology is about where we're at in education these days. Incredibly, many educators then point to this as an example of just how good the kids are with technology.
Research on the poor state of digital skills across entire populations shows an astonishing lack of capability, even as we increasingly depend on networked digital technologies to support every aspect of public education. When technology fails, the learning stops in 2023..
"higher socioeconomic status was associated with higher proficiency both within & across countries - student experience of computer use & their frequency of computer use at home were positively associated with proficiency" - Because we off-load this essential literacy because we don't want to take responsibility for it.
"81 per cent of Canadians say they don’t have the resources to learn the digital skills required by businesses today, and 86 per cent say they are not prepared to meet the digital skills requirements of the future."
Summary
Cyber-education is the sharp end of this failure to teach digital literacy because of the fear that surrounds the subject and the dire consequences of not addressing it. Convincing educators to engage with cybersafety, cybersecurity and data privacy learning is virtually impossible, especially as most staff are no more digitally savvy than anyone else. You have to be trying exceptionally hard to not be using digital technology in 2023. Your lights are on because of it and your lessons are available to students because of it, yet no one wants to teach it, or learn it as a specific technology/media skill.
Beyond the sharp point of cyber, we have a population that spends an inordinate amount of their time, both professional and personal, in networked technology, yet almost no one knows how it works, what to do when it goes wrong or how to secure it. Younger people aren't afraid of it, but their bravado creates dangers of a different kind.
If we're going to use networked technology in every subject, we should have K-8 curriculum in place with mandatory time given to specifically learning digital skills well beyond coding, and also include digital literacy integration with all subjects. This should begin the moment we put students in online learning. A systemic approach to this would start solving the educator digital skills crisis and eventually result in a dramatic drop in successful cyber-attacks as we begin to heal the ignorance that current attacks exploit. Many federal programs exist, but Canada's chaotic, siloed education landscape means that with no central authority, provincial ministries and local school boards are left with the responsibility to engage with a problem that operates well beyond their jurisdictions.
Digital skills gaps cost billions in lost jobs and opportunities and exacerbate existing inequalities. By resolving this failure of vision that public education has been central in creating, we might finally assume the role it should have played all along. It doesn't require lengthy apologies, but it does require some humility before a systemic failure we've all played a part in. I only hope the people leading education in Canada are more interested in doing the right thing for students, staff and their families instead of maintaining the expedient idea that digital literacy happens by magical birthright, or at home.
Yes, it's a tsunami of cyberattacks on canadian education:
"44% said that school only taught them very basic computing skills, 37% said that school education didn’t prepare them with the technology skills they needed for their careers. 40% consider learning new digital skills essential to future career options"
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.
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.
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."
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.
As we've been forced to shift online during the pandemic we've been placing demands on Google Apps for Education that it simply isn't capable of. GAFE is, at best, a bunch of cheap software cobbled together by an advertising company in order to collect user data so they can sell things.
Trying to be productive in this environment is infuriating. This cobbled together suite of software has atrocious UI (user interfaces) that my grade 11s could do a better job with. Google has a rep as a software company but they're really an advertising company that buys software companies and then twists them to feed their primary business.
The other day I likened using GAFE as a productivity tool to trying to do the Tour de France on a bicycle made out of soap. Anyone who tells you GAFE is great has probably capped their professional teaching designations with an advertising company's logo and is more interested in selling that than they are in providing you with a working edtech solution. I'm willing to bet none of them have ever used other business based productivity suites and don't know what they're missing.
While chasing this freemium software, education has tied itself to these questionable systems delivered by dodgy advertising companiesthat aren't designed for productivity. This makes one of the greatest expenses in education (the professionals who provide it) less efficient than they otherwise could be. How we got to this point where we hand teachers software that actually gets in the way of teaching is beyond me.
An example of how non-educational the apps-for-edu suite is can be found in the evolution of Google Sites. What was once a relatively modifiable system that even let you write your own HTML has evolved into a drag and drop toy that lets people 'develop' websites without any understanding of what's going on behind the curtain. As a means of teaching web development or even just graphic design, it's about as useful as a slideshow. Google loves to automate things for you to make life easy, but it doesn't do much for you educationally or productively.
If we treated digital fluency, which is a system wide expectation in all aspects of education since the pandemic, in the same way that we treat literacy and numeracy (also expected in all aspects of education), we wouldn't be selecting tools that do things for us to replace our understanding. We don't use tools in literacy and numeracy that just take the hard work out of your hands and do it for you - if we did no one would be able to read, write or do maths.
Our technology stance with digital fluency is the equivalent of teaching spelling by giving all students a word-processor that reads and writes for them while we pat ourselves on the back for a 100% literacy rate. This laziness with digital fluency seeps into all aspects of education where automated digital tools are quickly coming to replace fundamental student skills instead of supporting their development. There are neurologically tested negative results to this kind of digitization, like the inability to recall details when entering new learning digitally. Of course, Google has no interest in you hand writing notes because they can't monetize that. Reconsidering our educational digital technology would not only mean we could teach digital literacy like it mattered, we'd also protect pedagogy throughout the system from systems that have no interest in it.
I still dream of a day where we don't line up to spend tax payer's money on inefficient and questionable educational technology that has no interest in providing the best possible pedagogical experience for our students while maximising teacher productivity and focus on teaching. Working from a credible basis like that, we could build our own open source educational technology (both hardware and software) and develop the kind of deep understanding of digital tools that would make our classrooms relevant and our students world leaders in terms of technology comprehension.
Thoughts from the depths of the COVID19 pandemic: Rather than give in to the digital divide in times of crisis, why not leverage this moment and make moves to resolve it? *** It has been suggested that due to the inequity of access to technology and internet, our education system should shut down during the COVID19 pandemic. Rather than surrender to this inequity why not attempt to address it directly? We could leverage all the digital technology we have sitting fallow in closed schools and sign it out one to one for every student in need. If this goes on longer then connecting with educational technology charities like Computers for Schools would allow us to quickly get technology permanently into the hands of students without it. We could approach this crisis as an opportunity to do something we should have been doing when things were in better shape, working to close the digital divide for all our students on the wrong side of it. At the same time we could offer limited access to our public school library learning commons where students would have access to internet. With appropriate safety precautions (limited numbers allowed, strict hygiene practices, solo seating arrangements), we could take immediate steps to bridge the lack of connectivity and allow some form of education to continue for students across Canada. At a time of isolation, our poorest students are doubly so because they can't get online Simply turning off the education system for months at a time will cause lasting damage for millions of students. In the meantime, the ones who have always suffered on the wrong side of the digital divide are in even worse shape. This is a measured and logical approach to resolving the digital divide (a lack of educational technology access to all students) that has long plagued education. Rather than having this pandemic make it worse, why not leverage it to make it better?
Handing out one to one technology for students in need so we can keep moving everyone forward educationally wouldn't be as expensive as you might think and the alternative is significantly more costly. Our public schools have developed the network infrastructure necessary to provide internet, so limited access to that infrastructure could still address the needs of social distancing while providing connectivity that is vital to us battling this pandemic as a collective. Those students aren't the only ones who would benefit, their entire families would, and so would society itself.
If this pandemic has shown anything, it's that our ICT infrastructure is more vital than ever if we're going to move against this crisis in a coordinated manner; communication is key. There are existing technologies we could apply to extend school and municipal wireless networking out into the communities that surround them. With fundamental networking infrastructure in place, some innovative final mile solutions (like Blimpernet - an idea that my students and I came up with last year) could make the internet available to many more Canadians just when we need it. Google is already well down this road with their #LOONproject, which works right now and could provide emergency connectivity for almost every Canadian for up to 100 days at a time. We could eradicate a problem that has been plaguing us as a society since the majority of us went online; getting everyone connected.
Seems like a no brainer with so few planes in the sky, no?
Wouldn't it be something if one of the lasting legacies of this pandemic was that it helped us close the digital divide and improve equity through access to technology in our schools and society in general? That it would also allow our education systems to continue in a limited capacity instead of shutting down is a consequence that would benefit all Canadians. *** I sent this to a number of MPs as well as the PM. I only hope a measured, reasonable response is still in the cards. If you feel the same way, forward it to your elected representatives.
I've been ruminating over the latest ECOO conference for a couple of days now. Strangely, this technology conference began and ended for me with others suggesting that digital technology is a dangerous waste of time and that we should step away from it in our classrooms. Looking at my ECOO reflections over the past eight years I'm seeing a clear shift from optimism that we will get a handle on the digital revolution to caution and now a determined luddite push to walk away from it entirely. The now obviously deleterious effects of the attention economy seem to have produced an unprecedented negativity around educational digital technology in 2018, and ECOO book-ended it for me.
These aren't toys, they're tools! Calling them toys says a lot about how YOU use them.
I opened the conference bringing armfuls of emerging technology to Minds on Media. I've long tried to avoid the 'here's-a-turnkey-tech-tool' presentation because it usually comes with corporate compromises. That split focus in a lot of 'edtech' means much of it isn't really so much about learning as it is about data collection or closed ecosystems that drive profitability. Besides, I've long advocated for teachers who push technology to actually understand the technology they are requiring students to use. That kind of technical fluency means you don't get sucked into absurd situations like giving away student data for a 'free' service or driving students into expensive, proprietary, closed technology designed to make a profit when it inevitably breaks. As in previous ECOO MoM demonstrations, I brought a variety of tech from different manufacturers and simply encouraged educators to become aware of an emerging new medium, in this case virtual reality. I have no agenda and nothing to sell. I get nothing for showing the technology and don't benefit from anyone buying one thing or another. This platform agnosticism means I can talk about the tech without prejudice or hidden agenda. I was happy to be attending another MoM day and looking forward to showing people this emerging medium. At least I was until Peter went around the room having the stations introduce themselves. It all went well until we got stuck on one station that repeatedly described what everyone else was doing in the room as 'playing with toys' while describing their own noble pursuit as being 'real' and technology free (though without ICT infrastructure they couldn't have done what they were doing at all). This attitude isn't new. A surprising number of educators refuse to leverage digital tools to make their teaching more effective, but to hear someone shit can what everyone else is doing at this edtech conference was shocking. There was no opportunity to call her out on it then, but I can now:
This Minds on Media presenter monopolized the microphone to suggest anything digital was essentially meaningless (a toy) and that when people were ready to stop playing with their toys here she was ready to show them something real. As a technician who trains engineers and technicians to run the world we live in, this made me angry, especially considering it was done at an educational technology conference that should be advocating for technical fluency across our education system in order to understand and effectively participate in the world we live in. This didn't put me in a great frame of mind to start the conference, but I soldiered on.
I did two other presentations during the conference. Both were presenting on platform agnostic technology opportunities that would teach students and teachers about a critical infrastructure (cybersecurity) and addressing our collective ignorance of 3d media. In both cases I was advocating for not-for-profit digitally powerful learning opportunities that would enable Ontario educators and students to leverage the digital TOOLS at their disposal. This is the opposite of the reductive and now recessive thinking I kept experiencing.
There is now a two pronged attack on digital technology in the classroom. The corrosive ra-ra edtech crowd seems increasingly determined to brand themselves behind proprietary corporate systems designed to deliver technology with no understanding required (and with lots of hidden profit centres), while the increasingly loud anti-tech crowd rises up against them, advocating that we receded from technology because it's a distraction and a waste of time. Both sides seem determined to ignore a simple fact: we're supposed to be TEACHING students how this all works, not branding them or hiding them in a cave. What edtech there is seems determined to follow consumerism into the most simplistic and ignorant relationship with digital tools possible. In 2018 you can get branded or abstain from tech entirely and then feel mighty righteous about it. Is anyone left just, ya know, teaching it any more? There are technicians and engineers all around the world who provide digital infrastructure that we all depend on. These people understand this technology and are much less likely to act like the sheeple who stare slack-jawed at their phones for hours on end. To digitally literate people this technology is a powerful tool that is enabling us to do everything from gene editing diseases and linking disparate areas of study to creating more efficient critical utility systems. Digital technology has become a vital part of the infrastructure around us, yet the vast majority of us, including many teachers, are completely ignorant of it. For some baffling reason we seem intent on ignoring the actual teaching and understanding of these powerful digital technologies in favour of using them with the same perverse ignorance, and now fear, as the general public. What is our role as educators in terms of technology if we aren't producing technically competent graduates who can successfully navigate and participate in the digital world around them? By the way, our ignorance of digital technologies is staggeringly bad. If you haven't followed any of the supporting links in this so far, follow that one.
The closing keynote ended the conference by banging the same drum as that 'when you're done playing with these toys come and do something real' comment that kicked it off. This time one of the engineers of the attention economy that is causing so much damage earnestly suggested that we need to recede from digital activity in order to preserve not just learning but our very humanity! Rather than acknowledge the potential for digital technology to enhance learning, his entire talk was aimed at retreating from it. This particular group of Silicon Valley architects now wants to save the consumers they got wealthy commodifying. I get the impulse. If I had a bank account full of blood money like that I'd feel bad about it too, but as a means of resolving this technological adolescence we're all living in, it won't work - they can't see past the mess they've made and they certainly aren't approaching it from an educator's mindset - but then neither are the educators. There was not a single example of how digital technology might amplify or improve learning outcomes - a decidedly odd way to wrap up an edtech conference. Our speaker went on to encourage the removal of personal technology from the hands of students and get back to a pre-digital time when everything was better. As a digital immigrant I know that there was no such time. If you think students weren't distracted in class in the 1980s you weren't a student in the 1980s. These Silicon Valley wolves can't see people as anything other than the consumer sheep they used to prey on. I'd hope that teachers see much more potential in their students than these attention peddlars do, but I'm starting to think that vapid consumerism is the only relationship we'll ever have with digital technology.
Invent a crisis and then offer a solution to it. American business in action.
From an educational perspective digital technology offers a powerful tool for learning, but it doesn't work if the teachers, administrators and government driving it are ignorant of how it works. If the teachers and parents can't manage the tech, then we can hardly expect students to. I'd hope that ECOO and other curriculum support organizations would understand that and advocate for understanding and the development of broader technical fluency rather than encouraging willful ignorance. Hiding digital tools and telling people to ignore the way the world works is a poor way to run an educational system, unless your goal is to produce ignorant consumers. Instead of running away from the digital revolution that is driving innovation and increasingly managing the infrastructure around us, we should be teaching self regulation of personal technology and comprehension of how it all works in order to generate a genuine understanding the world we're creating. Teaching effective digital fluency means we're less likely to be taken by the consumerist wolves and are able to effectively use digital tools rather than being used by them. I'm all for being challenged in my thinking and often go out of my way to try on difficult ideas just to see how they fit. I've weathered Nick Carr's The Shallows and watched society wobbling under the weight of the robber barons of the attention economy. Now I've attended an educational technology conference that began and ended with an ignorant and frankly dangerous dismissal of digital technology as a toy for idiots that should just be taken away. Meanwhile digital infrastructure made that very event happen. It fed the people who attended it and provided them with the resources they needed to travel to it, yet it isn't worthy of teaching in our schools? And teaching it is precisely the problem. We pick up edtech and apply it without teaching it to staff or students, and now we're shocked that it isn't working well? Sometimes I wonder how educationally aware our education system is. I've been banging my head against this call for technology fluency for so long that I can't help but feel like this dismissal of technology both by participants and the conference itself in that closing keynote is a betrayal of what I thought were shared values. I first attended ECOO in 2010. I joined Twitter, began meeting other technology interested teachers, started blogging and became part of a vibrant online PLN as a result of attending. Over the years ECOO has given me ideas and offered me a platform to present my own. What I'd always hoped was an evolution towards greater understanding of the digital revolution we are all living through has faltered now. We don't want to learn how the world we've built works. Pro-edtech educators want to keep the curtain firmly in place and leave the understanding and management of technology to others while the increasingly noisy anti-tech crowd are advocating receding from it entirely. Our only contact with digital technology is through the lens of vapid consumerism and the only response we can have to that other than participating is to run and hide. I'm frustrated, tired and losing hope in our ability to manage an understanding of the digital revolution that surrounds us. Education seems particularly incapable of seeing their way out of this digital hole we've dug for ourselves. The answer has always been to teach technological fluency, but ironically, I'm finding it harder and harder to find an educator who wants to.
