The End of Knowledge

I've just wrapped up a grade 11 university level English class.  I only tend to teach these classes once every couple of years now, so I see real differences in how academic students are evolving with technology use.

This time around we have a Google Apps for Educators system well established and I assumed academically focused students would be very handy with it.  I shouldn't assume these things.  Once again I'm surprised at how habitual digital natives are with their technology use; they know how to do the few repetitive things they use technology for very fluently, but asking them to extend that fluency to other software or hardware results in the same kind of frustration you see in anyone.  Technology use really needs to be a generally taught skill - teaching specific apps on specific hardware doesn't create real understanding of information technology.

Beyond the typical tech-incompetence that we prefer to ignore rather than resolve, there were some deeper implications to technology use that became apparent while marking the final exam.  As a general rule I encourage productive use of online information resources.  I consider a student who can meaningfully and accurately use the internet to enhance their knowledge to be in a good place academically.  I'm starting to rethink that position.

Marking these exams I was surprised at how many of the students I thought were A+ English students couldn't see the figurative implications of a fairly basic piece of satire.  This article from The Onion was included on the exam, but a frustratingly high number of students thought it was about ants.  Those that did pierce the literal barrier more often than not thought it was about the government (?) in spite of me telling them again and again that figurative meaning isn't your opinion, it's there in the text.  Less than 1/5 of the class were able to recognize the obvious references to religion and see that article as a satire about it.

Google doesn't know anything.  The confusion between
information and knowledge is now rampant.  It's
based on misunderstanding how technology works.

I'm left wondering, as I finalize grades in this class, how many students didn't so much understand Macbeth as spout internet revelations about it.  In class students would frequently answer questions from the smartphone Google search in their laps.  I once lamented, "there is no intelligence left, just high speed internet."

Perhaps the future of learning is the opposite of what it has always been.  Instead of internalizing information and creating constellations of meaning within our own minds, we only need know how to find what someone else said about it on the interwebs.  This raises some scary questions around what understanding is.  Complex ideas (like being able to see into figurative meaning in a text) aren't a matter of looking up what to say on the internet.  Skills like these are based on interrelated knowledge and practice.  If it isn't internalized (no matter how tedious digital natives may find that process), you don't know it.

That digital natives, even the really capable ones, are shying away from internalizing knowledge in favour of getting highly proficient at finding other people's thoughts online is a real problem.  General ignorance around how digital technology works allows people to say stupid things like 'Google knows everything!'  Educational technology happily exists in that ignorance, encouraging the use of technology without understanding the hows of it.  Rather than question technology use in learning using epistemology and pedagogy we try to mimic its general use in society where it is driven by market forces.  If the kids are carrying smartphones around with them everywhere, they should be in class too.  BYOD, wifi everywhere, a screen for every student; these things aren't going to necessarily increase learning; when you've got Google in your pocket you end up questioning nothing.

Learning has always demanded the internalization of information in order to form knowledge.  This was due in part to the scarcity of information in the past, but it also developed the kind of self discipline that allowed knowledgeable people to do their own research.  In our information rich world the struggle for knowledge is everything modern education is turning away from.  Student centred learning, 1:1 technology, metacognition, de-emphasis on traditional learning methods: all of this is the new normal.  What was once a demanding, internal process is turning into flat, generic, external fact regurgitation.

Digital natives live in a world of media at their finger tips.  The information revolution is, for them, an entertainment revolution where digital delivery systems create a personalized cocoon of immediate and continuous whim satisfaction. The personalization of media has created the impression that technology is there as either distraction or, at best, a shortcut to easy answers.  When all our knowledge is reduced to information we might be able to spout facts, but we understand nothing.

***

After repeatedly being told verbally and in writing that you can't have an electronic device within reach during a formal exam, one of those grade 11s had his cell phone fall out of his jacket pocket while writing.  He wasn't cheating with it, he just thought all those warnings didn't apply to him because asking him to leave his phone at the front of the room is the equivalent, in his mind, of asking him to pull off his ears.  The digital revolution is fusing itself to our bodies and our minds, and it isn't always an improvement.

Thoughts on how information becomes knowledge.  We simplify a complex process that demands focus and self discipline
when we infect human knowledge with machine fact.

ECOO 2013 Presentation: Harness your nerdist ways

Still thinking about ECOO in a couple of weeks.  I've already taken a run at on Dusty World once.  There is a lot in this, I'm still curious to see how it will unfold.

http://lanyrd.com/2013/ecoo13/schpzd/

We live in a time of profound change. The very definition of who and where we are is constantly changing. Never before in history have people been as connected to so many different people and places as they are now. Trends suggest it will only intensify. Are we doomed to a half existence in many places, constantly distracted, unable to complete a thought? Or will the person on the other side of this technological adolescence be multi-dimensional in ways we can't currently imagine?

Come with me on an examination of recent history and future trends. How can we integrate or separate technology to better facilitate learning? How can we prepare students for the strange world they are about to graduate into? How can we survive and thrive in these times of profound change ourselves?

What started this line of thinking was a post in Dusty World in the spring called Digital House of Mirrors.  In that post I was trying to describe how digital technology is changing our sense of self:

"Our selves are being stretched and amplified in ways they never have before.  Nick Carr's The Shallows puts us on a pretty stark trajectory towards idiocy with what is happening to us.  The digitization of the self stretches us flat, making continuity of thought impossible and turning us all into distracted, simplistic cogs in a consumerist machine designed to turn us all into the lowest common denominator; none of us any smarter than our smartphones."

http://www.robinsloan.com/epic/

Way back in 2006 a student showed me the video on the right.  That it was made so long ago is quite prescient.  They didn't have the future exactly right, but they come surprisingly close in many ways.  The part that stuck with me the most is this quote: 

“At it’s best, edited for the most savvy readers, EPIC is a summary of the world, deeper, broader, and more nuanced than anything ever available before. But at it’s worst, and for too many, EPIC is merely a collection of trivia, much of it untrue, all of it narrow, shallow, and sensational.”

If that doesn't describe the experience of most 'digital natives' online, then I don't know what does.  This is exactly the kind of habitual ignorance I find in technology use.  Children who have been immersed in digital technology have only learned to do what pleases them and know nothing about the technology itself, they aren't generally literate.  They are like self-taught readers who have memorized a single comic book.

Whereas digital immigrant ignorance arises out of fear or pride, though they do still have some sense of what they don't know.  The digital native is blissfully ignorant of what they don't know, though they spend most of their lives now in that virtual world they know nothing about. 

That technology could retard our ability to think is a dangerous consideration that a number of people are concerned about.  I don't doubt that digital tools can enhance us as human beings, I'm writing this and you're able to read it entirely due to digital technology.  Digital tech lets people work around authoritarian governments and democratize media.

I occasionally see people who are able to harness technology as a personal amplifier, but for far too many it is a source of distraction, habitual time wasting and a net loss for them.

A book I half read a while back was The Nerdist Way by Chris Hardwick.  I wasn't able to get through the self help bit at the back, but the first half was an interesting autobiography of a guy immersed in technology to such a degree that it derailed him.  His philosophical change allowed him to regain control of his career and put what he describes as his nerdist ways to productive use.   Rather than spending eight hours a day playing World of Warcraft, Chris chose to focus his nerdly powers of concentration on productive activities.  He describes a nerd as someone who is able to hyper focus on minutia that fascinates them.  He broke his habitual use of technology by demanding that his fixations serve him instead of the other way around.  If it can work for a nerd (and we're all nerds according to that definition) then it'll work for everyone.

Is always on exhausting or exhilerating?  Is it functionally better to be connected?  What is the golden ratio for communicating f2f or remotely?  How could technology itself assist us in optimizing our presence both physically and virtually?  How can we highlight ineffective use of technology, analyze it and resolve it?

I suspect this is going to become a timeline.  With a bit of perspective I might be able to make some reasonably accurate predictions about where we going, because this is one big weird rabbit hole we're all going down together and a lot of people are getting lost in it.

Ghostly Distractions & Digital Doppelgängers

Cyborgs are all around us now, and 
they have trouble finishing a thought

If you popped into a current classroom from any time before the last five years you'd think your students had gone mad, or were in need of an exorcist. Being unfamiliar with the rapid miniaturization and personalization of electronics, you'd be left wondering what it is they are fiddling with on their navels, why they seem to be constantly thinking about something else, and why when you walk into your next class the students there already know what happened to pretty much everyone else in the school (and the ones who skipped) last period.

I was talking to a colleague the other night about this sense of personal dislocation in students, though digital vertigo isn't a student only issue. The teacher in question won't even make a Facebook account because he believes (perhaps rightly) that it means the internets will know where he is all the time. He was telling me about a difficult student who was giving him a hard time in class. This teacher has a great rapport with students so many other students leapt in and argued his point for him. Afterwards the difficult student in question seemed overly despondent and would not re-engage in discussion. I suggested that the disagreement in class may not have ended in the classroom but had become virtualized.  The idea that invisible forces were emanating from and reflecting back into the classroom was quite upsetting to this teacher.

The fluidity with which teens pass back and forth between physical and virtual space make them very hard to read, at many moments in their day they are literally in two places at once. That uncommunicative student may still be getting hammered on Facebook long after the physical confrontation is over; digital echoes of a verbal disagreement. The moods so common in teens anyway are amplified by these invisible, always on, invasive connections; their volatile minds are wired to always-on drama.

There was a time when you could read a class by the students you had in it. Relationships were obvious and management challenging but straightforward. If you had the nitro and the glycerin in the room  you could separate them, you can't do that any more.  You can't do that if you move them to a different class... or a different school.  I've had students who moved up to our small town to get out of the GTA and away from a bad influence only to be intimately connected with them on Facebook the moment anyone's back is turned. Always on, always connected, always being emotionally amplified - that is the modern, connected high school student.

This creates some  interesting new psychology in the classroom.  That student who used to feel isolated for their poor behavior in class might be experiencing any number of unseen influences.  Instead of being able to modify poor behavior by moving a student, or placing them in classes where their bad influences are not, they are always connected.  Many of those connections may very well be morally supporting or even inciting them; they never feel isolated in their bad attitude and are always supported in their beliefs, even if it is hurting them.  In that sense you might argue for a lack of emotional growth because  you never have a chance to get free of a clique or bad influence.  In the other direction you've got the example above where a group of students may easily create an ad hoc digital mob and go after someone. This can happen so quickly and quietly that it's almost impossible to consider let alone manage.


Working with the emotionality of high school students is challenging at the best of times, but with the drama-net of Facebook fully embedded in every student's mind, administration struggles with the more obvious cyber-bullying while the subtle ghostly influences go unnoticed, thought every teacher faces them daily.

As students migrate to Twitter without realizing the very public nature of it (many think it similar to texting),  coercive social media becomes even more widely broadcast than just between Facebook friends. Suddenly we have social media as means of large scale slander, creating influence well beyond the intent of the ignorant person thinking their tweets are private.

This is a new social situation that affects early adopters while others remain entirely ignorant.  Many teachers don't consider it at all because they have no experience with social media yet it increasingly influences the students in their classrooms. Kids whose minds are in many places at once, constantly being emotionally tweaked and influenced by social media inputs, not knowing how to manage this pervasive influence in an effective way.

Digital literacy considers media fluency, collaboration and critical thinking, but the extent to which digital media is influencing the minds of our students isn't really on the table. Their inability to manage their own access (watch a student, they are Pavlovian in their use of social media, they can't self manage) is only one part of the problem.  In the emotionally charged world of high school, social media pours gasoline on that fire, making teaching a challenge in ways that it never was before.

***
had to add a wee update. It's Monday morning and the internet meme from the weekend that all the grade 10s are talking about is of a girl and her feminine hygiene product on youtube.  It sets new (low) standards on what teens are willing to do to get seen online.  

This race to the bottom in terms what teens are able to subject themselves to is radically changing how they approach both sexuality and social norms in general.  Teens nowadays have seen things that would have been virtually impossible for them to see even a decade ago, and this is entirely a digitized influence.

You really don't want even think about what teens do for truth or dare nowadays, they've seen things that will make you ill, they dare each other to.  The entire nasty world is available to them and influencing them moment to moment. Yet another way that online  influence creates a classroom unlike any before.

Tablets are like high heels part 2

The original: Tablets are like high heels

A while back I tried to wrap my head around tablets and why they are so popular.  I struggled using an original ipad and eventually gave up.  A bit later I had an opportunity to use a windows tablet and almost broke it across my head in frustration.  I'm a tech savvy type, so I kept at it.  If tablets are so great, what wasn't I getting?

This past year I got my hands on an Asus Transformer - the tablet that would convince me that tablets are handy (because it also comes with a keyboard).  It only convinced me that Android has a long way to go in being a tablet OS.

I've got an ipad2 and the Asus Transformer floating around my department waiting for robotics to start, so I offered them out to my staff for test drives.  18 emails requesting the slower, lower memory, single tasking ipad, one saying either would be fine (he got the quad core multi tasking Asus).  Marketing works.  Perhaps that is the key to tablet success.

The sell on tablets is a hard one.  You're getting epic style (yes, Picard has epic style) along with interweb access.  I want to be peppy, mobile and look like I come from the future!  I want a tablet, right?

Turns out I don't.  After trying and trying to tablet up, it just isn't sticking.  It appears I'm at an impasse when it comes to tablets and how I use the internet.

When I go online it's a full contact sport.  I like to get into many things simultaneously (that knocks the ipad out), I'm constantly taking pictures from one thing and slapping them into another.  I'm in and out of photoshop, dreamweaver and other processor heavy software, I want lightning fast responses, the ability to create media on the fly, a keyboard that rewards me for years of learning how to touch type, and a screen that offers a clear view of as many full colour pixels as I can lay my eyes on.

Keep your filthy touch screens!
I want no part of it!

I expect to be able to toss something I found online onto my twitter feed or Facebook or linkedin, or flickr or evernote, or Ning, or Edmodo or any of a million other online tools without having to wonder if it'll copy and paste this time or not.

Touch screens drive me bonkers.  Until I'm getting Iron Man like performance from my 3d touch interface, I'm not interested in taking stabs at data to see if I can pick them up over and over again.  Watching people do this on tablet baffles me, they seem content to have to attempt the same action over and over again, resigned to it - the inefficiency drives me batty.  The fact that you look like a lost mole looking for a hole makes me snort in derision!

Then there's the screen itself.  I'm the kind of guy who cleans the windscreen in his car often (or his glasses before he got the lasers).  If I have to look through it, I want it pristine.  Peanut butter encrusted high def screens hold no interest for me at all.  Even a plain old finger print smudge makes me wonder why you'd pay for the high-def screen in the first place.  I'm a visual person, I want my digital window to gleam.


Tablets are for people who like to watch, spectators.  If you are a passive web media consumer, I'd suggest going back to TV, but if you're determined to lurk, tablets are a good fit for you.  You look nice, but can't do much; we're back to the high heels again.

If you're an active web user, someone who produces (and by produce I mean generate media, not merely be a retweeting machine) as much as they consume, then you're going to find that the all show

Geeky high heels.

and no go reality of tablets frustrating.

There is no single moment where I've wished for a tablet when I've had my ultrabook handy.  Light, fast and fully capable, and running on a full/real operating system instead of the dumbed down mobile OSes on tablets; that is where my proclivities lie!

If I have to have a tablet at all, it's a phone and it fits in my pocket.  It has a good camera, can get me online in a pinch, the batteries last all day and it doesn't run so slowly as to drive me around the bend.  I'll live with the lame mobile OS until they get better and it'll do everything I'd ever need a tablet for without spending hundreds of dollars on a redundancy.

At any other point, when I really want to hit the web, I'll turn to the laptop.

Tablets might be a good fit for how you go online if you're a freaky lurker, but otherwise stay clear!  You'll look great using them, but you won't actually be doing much.  If that's your M.O., an Apple genius is waiting to take your order.