ECOO16: Virtual Reality & The DIY School Computer Lab

A chance to see some of my favourite
people and study one of my favourite things!

ECOO 2016 is coming this week.  As a chance to catch up with tech-interested teachers from across the province it's unparalleled.  It's also a wonderful opportunity to see what those people are doing in their classrooms and get tangible information on how to work with technology in a classroom.  I end up with a full brain and a great deal of enthusiasm after a few days at the annual ECOO conference.

I'm beginning the conference on Wednesday by  demonstrating virtual reality to teachers from across the province at Brenda Sherry and Peter Skillen's Minds on Media.  MoM (or in this case MEGA MoM) is a showcase of #edtech in action, and a must see event.  As an emerging technology VR is going to have a profound influence on education in the future.  Having a chance to give people a taste of that future is exciting.  The only reason I've been able to explore VR as it emerges is because of the DIY lab I'm presenting on Friday.

I get to spend the Thursday soaking up the latest in technology and how it can amplify pedagogy.  On Friday I'm presenting on why you should develop your own do it yourself school computer lab and how to do it.

I first presented the concept at ECOO four years ago.  It's taken me that long to develop the contacts and build a program that can do the idea justice.  I've always felt that offering students turn-key no-responsibility educational technology was a disservice, now I'm able to demonstrate the benefits of a student-built computer technology lab and explain the process of putting one together.  I realize I'm swimming upstream from the put-a-Chromebook-in-every-hand current school of thought, but that's my way.

There are a couple of things that have changed over the years that have made this once impossible idea possible.  Our board's IT department underwent a major change in management and philosophy a few years ago.  The old school was all about locking everything down and keeping it the same for ease of management.  The new guard sees digital technology as a means of improving teaching rather than as an end in itself.  They encourage and enable rather than complain and prevent.

The other major change was that my department got reintegrated into technology (it was formerly a computer science based mini-department of its own).  Back in tech I was suddenly able to access specialist high skills major funding and support and found I was able to build the DIY concept - something I could never have done without our board's tech-support funding model.

Thanks to that new, adaptive, open concept IT approach I'm able to access a BYOD wireless network with anything I want.  I don't have to teach students on locked down, board

imaged, out of date PCs.  My computer engineering seniors helped me build what we now have and the results have been impressive.  In addition to students in our little rural school suddenly winning Skills Ontario for information technology and networking, we're also top ten in electronics and, best of all, the number of students we have successfully getting into high demand, high-tech post secondary programs is steadily rising.

When I thought it might be interesting for students to get their hands on emerging virtual reality hardware in the spring it was only a matter of finding the funding.  We built the PC we needed to make it happen and then it did.  We've had VR running in the lab for almost half a year now at a time when most people haven't even tried it.  Because we were doing it ourselves, what costs $5000 for people who need a turn key system cost us three thousand.  We're now producing those systems for other schools in our board.

A do it yourself lab is more work but it allows your students and you, the teacher, to author your own technology use.  Until you've done it you can't imagine how enabling this is.  My students don't complain about computers not working, they diagnose and repair them.  My students don't wonder what it's like to run the latest software, they do it.  Does everything work perfectly all the time?  Of course not, but we are the ones who decide what to build and what software to use to get a job done, which allows us to understand not only what's on stage but everything behind the curtains too.

If that grabs you as an interesting way to run a classroom, I'm presenting at 2pm on Friday.  If not, fear not, ECOO has hundreds of other presentations happening on everything from how to use Minecraft in your classroom to deep pedagogical talks on how to create a culture that effectively integrates technology into education.  

Thursday's keynote is Shelly Sanchez Terrell, a tech orientated teacher/author who offers a challenging look at how to tackle technology use in education.  Friday's keynote is the Jesse Brown (who I'm really looking forward to hearing), a software engineer and futurist who asks tough questions about just how disruptive technology may be to Canadian society.

If you're at all interested in technology use in learning, you should get down to Niagara Falls this week and have a taste of ECOO. You'll leave full of ideas and feel empowered and optimistic enough to try them.  You'll also find that you suddenly have a PLN of tech savvy people who can help, enable and encourage your exploration.  I hope I can be one of them.

If you can't make it, you can always watch it trend on Twitter:



#bit16 Tweets
note:  to make a feed embed on twitter, go to settings-widget-create new and play with it, very easy!

Driving Your Own Learning

This quote was used in a presentation I gave in 2013. The revolution is
sneaking up on us, changing our habits and how we think and learn
without us even realizing it.

Recently a number of people have told me something along these lines: "I don't have to remember anything any more, I can just Google it."  I don't necessarily disagree, but this approach to off-loading knowledge does raise some interesting questions.  In a best case scenario we end up with people who have the cognitive freedom to make more diverse and interesting connections, but more often I see the other side of the coin, where people are using technology to reduce their effort and involvement.

With information readily at hand, we still fall back on old
concepts of information management in order to try and
understand it.  Computers don't use file folders, the text we
save on a computer isn't even text, but rather than update
our ideas of how information is being stored, we force it into
paper based memes so we can relate inaccurately..

When knowledge was rare and few people read or owned books the holding of knowledge internally made you powerful.  Being able to learn and retain information was a key focus of education in those days.  That rigorous approach, which was a necessity because of the scarcity of information, produced tough minded academics who could dismiss the unintelligent if they couldn't internalize what was needed.  Our school system today is a historical descendant of that information scarce world - still testing students on information that is readily available to them.

Yet we still value that academic rigour, and for good reason.  A student who develops the mental toughness to internalize and retain information, even if they could just Google it, is building habits that will allow them to tackle increasingly complex materials and processes, especially when that knowledge is implicit to skillsets that demand immediate response.  If you've got to Google how to spell every word in your essay, you aren't going to write a good essay.  If you have no understanding of the French Revolution, including what led to it and what happened after, you'll be hard pressed to create a nuanced presentation about it, no matter how handy you are at Google Presentations and searches.  Using the proliferation of information as an excuse to do less is where we run into problems.

The information revolution has pushed cross curricular
collaboration into overdrive.  Formerly siloed branches of
academia are finding connections through the free-flow of
digital information - a good example of the information
revolution being used to enhance rather than minimize effort

Vehicle based digital control systems offer an interesting parallel to information technology and learning.  In racing the electronic subsystems that have evolved in vehicles aren't used for safety, they are used to increase lap times and allow the vehicle operator to reach limits and stress equipment to levels before unimaginable.  They don't crash less than they used to, and when they do crash they tend to be going faster than before.  Digital enhancement of driving skill is the focus of racing electronics.

Electronic controls on vehicles designed for the general public don't increase operator ability, they leap in and interfere with it.  As a skilled driver I am able to stop a car in snow in a significantly shorter distance than computer controlled anti-lock brakes (locking the wheels causes them to build up snow in front of the tires stopping the car sooner, but anti-lock braking keeps the wheels spinning, preventing that from happening).  For most people who are happy to operate a two ton vehicle with no understanding of vehicle dynamics or interest in improving their skills, anti-lock brakes are a saviour - they prevent those incompetent drivers from having to care.  Most cars come with anti-lock brakes nowadays for that reason.  Instead of improving the humans we developed systems to take over from them.

Google's self-driving car is the logical conclusion of the electronic controls that have been seeping into vehicles over the past thirty years.  For the vast majority of people a self-driving car is a far better way of getting around than them doing it themselves because they do it so poorly.  For the few who are willing to work at it, electronics could amplify their skill, but those kinds of electronics aren't an option in cars sold to the public.  The lowest common denominator (the indifferent human operator) dictates public sales and determines what everyone can have.  The result of this human expectation deflation is to demand less from everyone.  Even those who want to learn more eventually won't because the skills required are obscured by mandated electronics.

I can't wait to get stuck behind one of those when I'm parking.

I need to develop a jammer so I can stop that car and drive around it

The trajectory electronic vehicle controls have taken parallels the path that information technology and learning is on.  If we're not bothering to remember anything any more because we can Google it and not bothering to learn anything any more because a computer can do it, we end up at a pretty dark conclusion.

Ignorance of computers in people who use them constantly gets me so wound up because you can't effectively use a tool if you don't know how it works.  Before school our cafeteria is full of teens using information technology with no understanding of how what they're using works.  I walked by a health class the other day and the teacher said, "you guys and your phones... I'd be happier if you were all just talking to each other (and not doing class work) than I am with you all looking at screens."  Less than 1% of students in my school take any computer courses in order to understand how they work, yet pretty much all of them depend on computers every day all day - and many teachers are expecting them to integrate that same technology into their learning.

Your modern race-car steering wheel has more in common
with a space shuttle console than a wheel.

The race car driver who is tweaking their electronics in order to improve lap times does so because they have an in depth understanding of how the technology at their disposal can improve their process.  You can't use electronics to improve your performance if you know nothing about how this technology works; modern racing drivers and engineers are all electronics experts, modern students are not and neither are the vast majority of their teachers, yet electronics continue to insinuate themselves into learning. Like the intervening vehicle management systems that assume control in order to do a better job than indifferent drivers, so educational technology is stepping in to assume control of learning for indifferent students and teachers.

Until we start treating education technology as an enhancement to learning  rather than a replacement for it we remain headed on the same trajectory as the driverless car. If that is the case we'd be more pedagogically correct to ban digital tools in learning until we've clarified the learner as the race car driver who will understand and use educational technology to amplify their effectiveness, and not the gormless driver on public roads who needs technology to step in and do their work for them.

Scripted Lives

I've been mulling this over on the motorcycle side of things, but the idea runs throughout modern digital life, so I'm going to open it up further here.

Being a computer technology teacher I have a passing acquaintance with software.  I'd even say I'm pretty handy with it, but I don't really like where it's going since it has become an integrated part of modern life.

Since we started carrying networked computers around with us we have become scripted creatures.  Our devices wake us up, tell us what we're doing, and how to get where we're going.  They remove doubts and make memory redundant.  We no longer guess at unknown information, or watch media by accident.  We live in a walled garden of playlists and information at our fingertips, surprises seldom happen.  Technology gives us access to information and media, as well as allowing us to communicate, but it changes how we do it; the medium is indeed the message.

When we connect to The Network we are operating within a script, quite literally, all the time.  Software scripts dictate what we see, how we see it, and how we express ourselves. Complex human relationships are being reduced to scripted simplicity dictated by technological limitations rather than the full range of human ability.  This restriction has begun to redefine what people are capable of doing.

I struggle to find non-scripted moments when software isn't dictating my responses.  You'd think this only happens when you make a choice to connect on a device, but it happens constantly in the world of action.  I can't stop my car in heavy snow as quickly because a computer steps in to keep the wheels spinning, even when I'm making a conscious choice to lock them.  Scripts are written for the largest possible population.  We're all being held to the outcomes of average thinking.

As Kenneth Clark states in Civilisation:
35:36: The obvious: "...our increasing reliance on machines. They have really ceased to be tools and have begun to give us directions..."

... and that was his angle on things in 1969.  Things have come a long way since.  Our brave new world of technology is levelling everyone off.  Individual ability doesn't matter when we are all just variables in an equation.

Students experience education, entertainment and interpersonal relationships through a digital lens whose singular intent is that of continued engagement.  When your world is housed within a simplistic digital process designed to constantly get your attention you have a lot of trouble dealing with your irrelevance in the real world.

How can you do that? They say, it's so dangerous, they say.
Fear driven risk reduction is a big part of why the scripted
world exists.  It's thinking pushed by actuarial accountants.
It isn't real if it's designed to be unfailable, if there is no risk.. 

When prompted into unscripted situations where I am asking them to critically analyze a piece of media, students long for a Google search to tell them what to think.  When given a opportunity to express themselves many students will leap into the same template to organize other people's material they copy off the internet.  When given a stochastic engineering problem with no clear, linear resolution they freeze up and long to return to scripted experience.

Technology is such an enabler, but it's also limited by its capabilities.  If friendship is now understood through the lens of social media then it isn't what it once was, it's less with more people.  More isn't necessarily better even though we're told that it is more efficient.  If communication with a student is primarily through screens then teaching isn't what it once was, it's more information with less learning.  Both friendship and teaching pre-date digital communication and have deep, nuanced social histories, but we are happy to simplify them into oblivion for convenience and the illusion of efficiency.

If you ever find yourself struggling against invisible limitations, fighting to express yourself but finding it increasingly difficult, you're up against this reductive technology.  That freedom of choice you feel when you put aside the digital and reclaim your full range of sense and capability is intoxicating.  It supercharges your mind and allows you to retain your humanity.  That I see so few people having those moments is a real cause for concern.

My son and I searching the tidal pools at Pacific Rim National Park on the edge of the world.  Carefully selected technology (a motorbike - so no digital distractions and out in the world) got us there, and then we put it all down and got lost in the world with no scripts telling us how to interact with it.  When was the last time you were unplugged?

This was such a complicated idea it spawned a number of others, including these thoughts of gamification.  The wise Skillen of the internet also shared this article on distraction prevention by a new media professor, which led to thoughts on distraction.

Dogmatic Digitization

Digital technology thrives on a covenant of radical democracy that promises information for all.  The giants of technology market themselves on this egalitarian ideal.  From Google's corporate counter culture to Apple's fixation on design to empower the user, technology companies are founded and thrive on the idea of a future of individual empowerment.  People love them for it and self identify with digital technology companies in a personal way that is quite foreign to other consumer relationships.

Social norms have changed over the past five years.  Where once pulling out a smartphone demonstrated your importance and wealth, it is now a common gesture for pretty much everyone in North America.  We've passed a tipping point, the majority of people are on a computer connected to the internet all the time.  If you don't believe me go for a walk in any public place and see how many people are operating handheld computing devices.

As the majority adopts digital platforms I've seen a consistent dumbing down of digital tools and content in order to reach as wide an audience as possible.  This is probably a complaint form many early adopters, but when I see simplicity and limitation rather than functionality and access begin to infect how we use technology in education I have to question the pedagogical value of our educational technology.

In order to cater to as many people as possible educational technology has created systems that hide much of what happens behind simplistic interfaces.  Can the promise of radical democratization of information survive when most people want to be spoon fed in the most limited manner possible?  Free access to material doesn't matter when most people only want to use the internet in the same, simplistic way.

Digital technology still presents itself with those early ideals of democratic information access and transparency, but like everything else as it matures it begins to develop a more pragmatic approach.  My feeling now is that these egalitarian, transparent technology companies are actually anything but.  No one that wealthy feels the need to be transparent, or to educate others.  When you are worth billions your goal becomes market share and monopoly.

Educational technology, as an offspring of the digital technology giants, suffers from this dogmatic stiffening of its intent.  Rather than focusing on individual empowerment and the promise of de-industrializing the education system they are happy to embrace dehumanizing, data-driven testing, especially if it offers ease of implementation.  If education technology isn't interested in offering users diverse, personally nuanced, highly adaptive, open ended digital learning tools in a transparent and universal access to information, then what hope have the rest of us in a consumer driven digital world?  We're preparing the next generation of drones.

Tweets from the ASU/GSV Summit in Phoenix

We're in a position as educators and educational technologists to try and direct digitization away from closed systems with limited access to tools and information but the money infects our good intent.  Rather than focusing on diversity and acclimatizing students to the radical openness of the internet (something that, like the Wild West, may soon disappear), we preach walled gardens and monopolistic access.  We teach students to value limited access in order to train them for a future internet controlled by the rich and we do it because it's easier, not because it's better.

For some new tools empower,
but for far too many they create
habitually driven repetiton

That this is all done under the guise of freer information for all is laughable.  How can education claim to support the ideals of the early information revolution if it is in bed with pragmatic companies pushing for tiered access to information based on wealth?  If the information revolution was ever about ideals it has long since been replaced by moneyed interest.

Between datamining users to support wrong headed standardized testing policies to simply fleecing student data to generate sellable marketing information, the flipside to education technology is complex and not particularly flattering.  As a teacher of technology I hope to empower my students with knowledge of how information technology works in order for them to remain independent entities in the brave new world we're creating.  For the other 95% who take no computer studies and yet live on this technology all day every day, I see a future every bit as dogmatic and limited as the industrial one we are now shedding.  In fact, it may be much worse because, unlike the punch card factory worker of the Twentieth Century who was reduced to a number for eight hours a day, dogmatic, digitized information demands your undying attention and submission 24/7/365.

If you can't hack it, it owns you.

ASU/GSV Summit

I went to the strangest education conference of my career this past couple of days.  Wikispaces invited me down to attend and what a learning experience it was.  Surrounded by a struggling US education system that spends more and produces less than our own, I found it difficult to follow the circumstances they've invented for themselves.

Being a stranger in a strange land I wasn't necessarily trapped by the expectations of the other people in attendance, though I wasn't the only one questioning what I saw.  There seems to be a clear split in American education.  There are the Common Curriculum fans (check out that webpage, ride the hyperbole!), and then there are parents & teachers who are questioning the value of such a regimented, testing focused approach to learning.  Strangely, very few education technology companies seem to be questioning this approach, though they all appear quite interested in education.

The whole thing occurred on the surface of a conference that was more an educational technology trade show than an examination of sound pedagogical practice.  That politics and the business that feeds it drives the US education system rather than sound pedagogy became more apparent to me as the conference went on:

The only time I heard someone actually refer to pedagogical practice, best practices in teaching and learning, was when Michael Crow, the ASU president, gave a thoughtful talk on how we adapt to technology use in changing times.  Everything else was urging people to get on board with the common curriculum (and buy our system that caters to it).  That educational technology in the States is so focused on the politics of testing rather than best practices should concern every Canadian who adopts American technology in the classroom.

I've got a lot of notes and ideas I want to chase down from this experience.  In the next week or two I'll write to them after mulling it over.

In the meantime, here are some photos of beautiful Arizona in bloom...

The ASU/GSV Summit Blog Posts:
Data Exhaust
Who Owns Your Data?
Dogmatic Digitization

Hack The Future

Between questions of how student data is being used and technology monopolists pushing for standardization in edtech, I'm left with an uneasy feeling.  As we reach a tipping point in digital educational technology we simplify and standardize to the point where the people doing the teaching don't know or care what happens behind the curtain.  What is happening behind that curtain is being decided in closed rooms between multi-national corporations and governments.  The bait is a 'free' digital learning system for education.  The payoff is habituated users and data mining on a level unprecedented in history, and we're happy to sell our students and ourselves into it in order to get the freebies.

If this were all happening in the light of day I'd be a lot happier about it.  That it's happening behind closed doors and shouldn't be publicized is something that should concern everyone.

If you're not paying for it you're the product being sold.  Corporations may state that they do no evil but they aren't after what education is after, they are after profit.  That student information is being brokered well beyond the reach of educational institutions by these information merchants should be a cause of concern, but instead I see public educators increasingly branding themselves with corporate logos and shouting their evangelism from the social media rooftops.

Technology is exciting, and digital technology is such an intimate thing because it nestles up to our minds.  Our habit of elastically coupling with our technology suggests that digital-tech is going to become an intrinsic part of how we see ourselves.  People are already describing unplugging as feeling like an amputism, it's only going to become more entwined, especially as we begin to wear our digital selves.

I'm reminded of Kenneth Clark's unsettling end to what many consider to be the best documentary series ever created, Civilisation...

http://youtu.be/waoEyjE_dtU?t=35m31s

Start at 35:30 if the link doesn't take you right there.

That one of the most intelligent observers of human society was pondering this in the year I was born lurks in the back of my mind.  Machines that make decisions for us, many educators seem thrilled with this idea.  You may be all gungho over the latest shiny i-thing or googly-eyed over that app that will revolutionize your teaching, but the true costs of these things are a carefully kept secret.  At the very least, when we adopt a single digital ecosystem (no matter how free it is), we're selling our students (and our own) habitual technology use into a closed environment.

As educators it should be a goal to recognize tools in terms of what they can do rather than how easy they are and how well integrated they come.  And we should never be deciding on a tool that inserts itself into the learning process based on how little we're expected to learn about it.  Technology and the internet aren't Google, and tablets aren't Apple.  Computers aren't Microsoft.  Only by offering students access to all of these things and more are we approaching the teaching of technology in as complete and well rounded a way as possible.

Over the past ten years I've watched education stagger into digitization always hesitant to change old ways, and I've pushed as hard as I can to encourage that change.  Only by catching up to this revolution can we hope to prepare students for the strange world that awaits them.  Now that we're at a tipping point I'm watching what could be a powerful new fluency being boiled down into canned access to technology, always under a single brand.  Instead of teaching technology like it's becoming an intimate part of our lives (which it is), we pass it off with idiotic notions like 'digital native' that allow people who have no interest in learning technology to also off-load the responsibility of teaching our children about technology.  Into that ignorance vacuum corporations have crept, offering you an easy solution, and most people are more than happy to take it even if it means being walled in to a monopoly.

I wrote last on the idea of being a tech-ronin, a digital samurai without a master.  That works for me but I come from a time before data dictated who I am.   I'm worried about my students.  In a world where we've sold them into digital servitude as data sheep (call them digital natives if that makes you feel better), the only way out is to know the system well enough to circumvent it.  Instead of teaching a closed, monopoly limited mindset in technology that serves everyone except my students, I want them to develop a broad understanding of digital tools and how they work.  In a broad edtech learning environment my students will develop a meta-cognitive view of both technology and how they are represented by it.  In a time where we are increasingly defined by our data the only free people will be the ones who have a sense of themselves beyond their student record in the LMS.

My department logo has 'learn how to build the future' on it, but perhaps I need to make a change just to give my students a chance to self-realize beyond whatever data metric they are being sold into.

Rage against the machine

One Day Edtech Will Amplify Pedagogy Rather Than Stealing From It

Pedagogy ORIGIN: late C16th: from French pédagogie,

from Greek paidagōgia , from paidagōgos,  

Sometimes etymology can be wonderfully ironic.

This one is complicated.  Trying to work out the relationship between pedagogy, technology and money is the trial of our times.

The other day Alanna was reading a passage about how little technology has affected pedagogy.  Rather than revolutionize how we teach, technology has merely become a new, more efficient medium for the same practices, it's done nothing to advance pedagogical practice.  This got me thinking about the relationship between pedagogy and technology.  As I was pondering those two, money crept in, as it always does.

Pedagogy is a rather terrifyingly open concept, but I've always found its breadth to be its saving grace.  With a sweeping definition like "the method and practice of teaching", pedagogy is applicable to the full spectrum of teaching and learning, and that range is truly staggering.  Pedagogy can be found in everything from the coach who reduces their players to mush after a hard practice to the use of a chalkboard in a math class.  It lives in the first turn of a wrench by a budding mechanic and the circling of a grammar error by an exhausted English teacher.  That pedagogy is in everything related to teaching and learning is its greatest strength, it becomes an ideal in an education system that otherwise exists as a series of compromises.

In our real world of compromise pedagogy often makes uncomfortable demands.  This is where money sneaks in.  When we consider sound pedagogy, we consider best teaching practices to maximize learning.  But we don't go searching for best practices in an ideal environment, instead we attempt as much effective pedagogy as the money allows.  Good pedagogical practice costs money.  Educational technology costs (a lot of) money.  Both are reaching for the same finite, decreasing pot of funding; this can't end well.

Does this mean more money always equals better pedagogy?  Not at all, but pedagogy is one of the first things you see diminish in money challenged situations.  Poor schools tend to lack the student to teacher ratio or basic equipment to provide strong pedagogy.  Rich schools can offer smaller class sizes and better trained teachers, both of which support sound pedagogy.  That these pedagogically proven concepts have to compete with the same funding that feeds ed-tech is where the equation gets more complicated.

Digital technology, an expensive new medium of communication, offers unprecedented access to information and democratizes publication.  There is no doubt that it is important as both a skill to learn and a tool with which to learn other things (though education seldom recognizes that distinction and just assumes digital natives magically know how to make technology an effective tool).

Outside education, digital communication has revolutionized everything from manufacturing to broadcasting.  Inside education it has let students type the same essay assignment they would have done on pen and paper twenty years ago, though it has made plagiarism easier.  Instead of making a poster for a presentation, students can now make digital presentations.  All technology has done in education is to offer a faddish means of producing the same old work we've always done.  That faddishness appears to take care of the dreaded engagement problem, which excites many boring people.

Digital technology hardly seems revolutionary in the school context.  If all we're using it for is as a replacement for paper then it's just a new, more expensive, less environmentally friendly way of doing what we've always done.  If technology doesn't have an additive relationship with pedagogy it's a lost cause, and from what I've seen it doesn't.  It does however take a lot of limited funding away from other, proven pedagogical strategies.

The money creep goes further than stagnant pedagogical practice.  It turns out you can make a lot of money convincing educational systems to buy in to technology.  Even if your teachers aren't considering digital pedagogy, someone still gets rich pushing it.  There is no doubt that money and technology go hand in hand, and with limited funding, as edtech eats more everything else gets diminished by necessity.

When ed-tech eats a big piece of the education pie the assumption arises that the technology itself provides the pedagogy, so you don't need to (that appearance of engagement pushes this thinking).  Giving students already overdosing on habitual, uninspired technology use technology in the classroom is a recipe for pedagogical disaster.  The relationship between technology and the actual process of learning is tenuous at best.  It only gets worse if we assume the use of technology will magically produce engaged, productive learners.  Engaged maybe, productive?  Not so much.  This peaks when the teacher then throws the same assignment they've been doing for fifteen years on a Google-doc and calls it 21st Century learning.  What we end up with is a poor learning environment ripe with distractions that encourages the same habitual use students are already mired in.

The engagement we're so excited about in educational technology is a smoke-screen.  It is little more than us giving addicts access to more of what they already have too much of and don't know how to effectively leverage.

***

What is digital pedagogy?  What does digital educational technology allow us to do better in terms of the actual learning process?  Until we answer this question edtech is nothing more than an expensive environmental disaster that has us producing digital dummies.

To appreciate what technology could do for education it might help to see what it's doing for

The Third Industrial Revolution

everything else.  Manufacturing, once a large scale, capital driven process, is becoming accessible to smaller and smaller concerns.  Where once you had to buy million dollar milling machines and the experts to maintain and run them, you can now manufacture complex parts in a small machine shop using digital tools.  Not only  does this free us from a production line mentality, it also frees us from production line products.  We're moving further and further away from Henry Ford's idea of product customization.  Digitization is allowing for smaller runs of customized parts in more niche workshops.  As the Economist says in the link above, this really is the birth of a third industrial revolution, the re-democratization of craftsmanship and personalization in production.

Broadcasting has been staggered by digitization.  From a music industry that was forced to change decades of old habits to television that has had to diversify offerings just to remain relevant in a world that can suddenly tell its own stories, digital media and the internet have fundamentally changed how we see ourselves in media.

1920s office, look familiar?

Over the course of the Twentieth Century education has been influenced by industrial methods of production even more than business itself.  The classroom, the school bell, the rows of desks, it all points to a Taylorist love of systematization.  It seeks to quantify and sort people in the most cost effective manner possible.  In order to do that it clings to ideas of standardization because it believes this leads to credibility.  It happily ignores sound pedagogy in a blind charge toward clinical efficiency, it's the most perfect example of a production line ever developed.

What if, as in broadcasting or manufacturing, education were to consider how digital technology could re-individualize education?  Instead of producing modernist widget-students we could use digitization to embrace radical customization.  The systemic methods we use in education - the marking, the timed classrooms, the report cards - are there to process as many students as possible as efficiently as possible.  We reduce them to numbers because we don't have the resources to treat them like people.  What if educational technology solved that problem instead of replacing paper?

A sufficiently complex Learning Management System would assist in assessment and maintain a current and complex analysis of student achievement.  We see this in a very rudimentary way in online systems like Code Academy, where students are able to review their learning and get acknowledged for their achievements but can only proceed when they have demonstrated sufficient understanding.  The immediate benefit is that each student can move at their own pace.  LMSs should be driving toward this level of complexity, instead they are used as replacements for handouts.

Digitization offers us an opportunity to individualize learning once again.  After a couple of centuries mimicking industrial practices education has a chance to reinvent itself as a digitally empowered, personally focused system of learning, like pre-industrial apprenticeships but on a massive scale.

What does a post-industrial, digitally enhanced, individualized education system look like?  In that relationship, technology enhances pedagogy, it doesn't eclipse it.  In that relationship there may be monetary efficiencies, but they are a byproduct rather than the point of technology implementation.  In no instance would pedagogy be financially victimized by educational technology.

If you're still 'teaching' information, you'll quickly find yourself irrelevant in a post industrial education.  In a world where information is abundant, the ability to access it is more important than the ability to afford a teacher to say it to you.  Skills development will still be a vital piece of the education puzzle, and skills based teachers who develop understanding through experience will always have a role, but information delivery is a dying art, assuming we begin teaching effective technology use.

The LMS used in future school is a constantly evolving construct that can access all facets of a student's learning.  This virtual assessment tool doesn't just review a student's ability to retrieve information, but instead looks at them holistically.  In assessing their skills and knowledge, a future LMS would consider learning habits and then suggest individualized tactics for producing best results.  A teacher would be able to see a student's zone of proximal development before trying to assist them (I have a live graphic playing in my head of what this would look like).  Your progress as a learner includes everything from demonstrated writing ability to the most complex numeracy you're shown.  It considers your patterns of absence, when you produce your best work and who you do it with.  That future LMS is actually an learning management system, not a glorified webpage.  It can reach across other systems to see examples of student progress in a variety of ways.  When a student activates their LMS it supports their learning and aids a teacher in both teaching and assessment.  Perhaps the modern, virtual equivalent of a paidagōgos.

Instead of being an onerous task done poorly by time harrowed teachers through a computer system that merely mimics the paper based reporting system before it, post-industrial student assessment is detailed, accurate, holistic and personalized.  The machine assists the teacher in customizing the education of each student instead of just producing neater, printed reports of letters, numbers and generic comment banks.

Wouldn't that be something, if digital technology were to amplify sound pedagogy and revolutionize our industrialized education system into something personally meaningful?  Until we break the mould and begin leveraging digital technology for what it is capable of, we're just diverting money from the task at hand: effective pedagogical practice.

Once more into the breach dear friends!

From thirteen years old in Air Cadets onward I've taken leadership courses.  I think I have a pretty good grasp of the mechanics, though its often hard to see my own shortcomings in the process.  One of those short comings is I tend to leap into the breach rather than direct the battle.  I'd rather be hands-on and leading by example, but this creates its own problems.

This past couple of years I've been working as Head of Computer Studies.  I inherited that job and the rather unique responsibilities that came with it, but rather than moan about it I stepped up and did everything I could to make it work.  While I was running one of the only remaining integrated computer studies departments in the board I was also managing an increasingly complicated IT budget (which I had suggested in the first place).

Ten years ago there was one kind of printer in our school and it was tightly integrated into a closed, wired board network.  In the past three years especially, our board (in a very forward thinking move) began to diversify technology beginning with wifi a couple of years ago.  This has peaked with the introduction of a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) initiative that has caused a diaspora of technology in our school.  Where once we had a single kind of printer, now we

You need to be wearing this shirt yourself

have dozens.  Where once everyone was on the same kind of desktop on the same operating system with access to the same applications, now we have hundreds if not thousands of combinations of hardware and software in the school.  I think this is a good thing, but it asks a lot of questions of teachers when they are expecting students, who aren't as digitally native as you might think, to get work done.  Many of those teachers aren't interested in being their own technology support either.

While all this has been happening, due to politics beyond their control, our IT budget has been slashed and the amount of support we get has dried up.  Where once we could expect our centralized board IT department to support a monolithic technology environment, we now have a diverse technology wilderness.

Into that wilderness I tried to maintain the level of support our staff and students had become accustomed to.  Being 'mixed' into a headship, our key computer teacher position was at best vague, and as the undercurrents in technology trends and support became clear, the job became heavier and heavier, to the point where I was taking days off from teaching to move labs around because IT couldn't manage it.

One of the reasons I'm good at this sort of thing is because I throw myself into it, body and soul.  With that emotional energy I get a lot done, and it stings when it isn't recognized or appreciated.  As the headship restructuring occurred it was hard not to take the dismissal of any role I had at the table personally.  That is one of the short comings of my approach to work, lots gets done, but I take it personally.

My main concern is successfully engaging staff and students with vital 21st Century digital fluencies that our graduates will need outside the walls of our school.  Perhaps plugging in network cables for people isn't the best way to achieve that goal.  One of the problems with being a go-get-em type problem solver is I tend to have a myopic view of the bigger picture, especially when circumstances conspire to bury me in tech support.

When I came into teaching in 2004 I was shocked at how far behind education was compared to the business environment I'd just been an IT coordinator in.  In 2003 we'd already moved most staff to one to one technology (laptops) and our ordering system was accessible online.  In 2004 teachers were still filling in bubble sheets for attendance and having a secretary run them through a card reader (like it was 1980).  What few labs there were old desktops running six year old versions of windows that barely had any network functionality.

I started a computer club at my first school in Brampton and we put a wireless router into the library - the first one in the board as far as I know.  Students immediately began using it and our librarian was overjoyed, he could suddenly supply internet to all sorts of students.  That would be BYOD and wifi, in 2004 in an Ontario public high school.

I've pushed and pushed to connect education to more current information technologies, and there has been constant if slow improvement.  We've now caught up with 2004, we're probably well into 2007 by now.  Of course, when students graduate they aren't going to be expected to have a firm knowledge of 2007 digital workflow, so I'll keep pushing.  

One of the reasons young people look so out of touch with business need is due to our outdated handling of technology in their education; it's tough keeping up with a revolution in a system as conservative as education.

... but not until you've done due diligence, check the plugs,
check Google - tech support starts with you!

This matter of technology support is something I've got to reconsider, especially if we aren't going to make a space for it locally.  The goal was never to do everything for everyone, the goal was to teach people how to perform basic troubleshooting themselves in order to make digital tools available when they need them; I'm not sure how that will happen in the future.  I don't think a strong central support role is something that will return.  We need to find a way to integrate digital fluencies, including a basic understanding of how to get computers working, across the curriculum so that all teachers and students feel responsible for their own tech-use.  The idea is to see an acceleration in how current educational technology compares to what happens outside of the walls of a school.  This disparity causes tensions in both graduates and students who strain at the differences between school-tech expectations and how they are experiencing technology in the rest of their lives.

I'd make the argument that if you're going to drive a car you should know how to change a tire and take care of basic maintenance, but many people can't be bothered (though they are quick to complain about how much it costs to have other people do these things for them).  The same thing happens with computers.  Not everyone needs to be able to rebuild a computer from the ground up, but if you want to use one you should be able to do basic troubleshooting in order to have the technology work when you need it to.  How to create that self sufficiency is the question.

I'm not sure how that's going to happen in the future, but I'm still determined to create an educational experience that produces digitally relevant graduates.  Rather than leaping into the breach and doing onsite technology support I have to find another way of getting more people technologically self sufficient.