Reframing Digital Literacy: what it is and how to teach it

I did a research piece for Canadian School Libraries last winter that looked at how you might develop the complex, multi-disciplinary digital skills you find in cybersecurity in a relatively short period of time. When I first put it together I found myself spending a lot of the time at the front of the paper trying to define the digital skills we find ourselves lacking. I came to the conclusion that adopting high abstraction digital tools such as those you find in cyber, A.I. and other emerging technologies makes for an impossible leap when we don't have the basics in place.

How we've missed this in education is a good question. Anyone with a background in the field knows that there is no such thing as a 'digital native' and that this myth, which has caused so much damage as it prevents education from building meaningful digital pedagogy, kicked off what has become a multi-generational skills shortage that is doing real damage to both the economy and students' future prospects.

Digital technology has worked its way into everything in 2025, so being unable to make productive use of it damages our ability to compete in a digitally connected world. That we continue to hum and haw about what digital fluency is and how to build it suggests that we're not going to resolve this problem any time soon in Canadian classrooms.

We've seen coding and computational thinking finally worm their way into education curriculums, but this is the tip of a much bigger iceberg when it comes to understanding what digital skills are and how we should approach them.

Originally created for this post on why education is seemingly unwilling to address a persistent digital skills shortage (from 2023).

I've been pushing the boundary of what constitutes digital skills ever since I first got knocked out of digital technology by the compsci grads who had claimed the keys to the kingdom. It took me decades to recover and come around to the approach I have now that nurtures my hacking mindset rather than dismissing it.

A few weeks ago I attended a STEM space technology event put on by a partner of ours in Mississauga. Moonshot was designed to introduce students to the interdisciplinary nature of STEM careers - something we go out of our way to avoid in our departmentalized schools. If you're building space technology as an electronics engineer your job doesn't end where the wires stop, it also involves collaborating with all the other teams to ensure the electronics are working in conjunction with mechanical, communications, logistics and many other systems. Why do schools insist on siloing subjects like they do?

That siloing is also hobbling digital literacy development. The current coding/computational thinking fixation is just the latest in a long line of compsci blinkered approaches to addressing digital technology literacy. What would it look like if we represented the true breadth of digital and taught that wider scope of understanding in our classrooms? We use this technology daily to do everything from operate our schools to deliver learning across all subjects, but then avoid teaching how it all works at all costs.

At the Moonshot event I was introduced to the CEO of MineConnect, an organization that represents and works to promote the mining industry in Ontario. Our chat at Moonshot led to introductions with Science North over their Mine Evolution game. I'm hoping to get a web based version of that running on UBC's Quantum Arcade - perhaps with a quantum add-on as quantum sensing is going to drastically improve s in how we mine in the next decade.

What does this have to do with digital literacy? The fact that you're asking this question shows how little most people understand about where digital technologies come from, and that understanding should be a part of their literacy, don't you think? If you look up 'digital supply chain' you don't get what we need to build digital technologies, instead you only information on how to 'go digital'. Even industry goes out of its way to ignore what digital technology is... except in rare mineral mining, hence my work with Mine Connect and Science North.

It's incredible to me that this late in our adoption of this technology that we still go out of our way not to teach what is needed to make digital happen. The current wholesale adoption of A.I. in education is a great example of this ignorance, as was the rush to the cloud. There is no cloud (it's someone else's computer) and A.I. isn't intelligent, but we'll grasp at digital straws with willful ignorance if we think it'll make our lives easier.

In the CSL research I created a pyramid that showed how I taught digital awareness from the ground up in my rural high school. The assumption is that 'kids nowadays' know all of this, but that simply isn't the case. If you want to disable a 'digital native' it's as easy as flipping a switch they don't usually use. If you want to send a room of them into a panic unplug the Wi-Fi router (assuming you know what that is and where to find it).

Start with the physical substrata and work your way up into the more abstract realms of digital technology; starting digital fluency at coding is like starting literacy at poetry. 

In grade 9 I got a lot of digitally engrossed students who thought they knew it all because adults who lack even basic digital familiarity have been telling them that for years. Revealing that this perceived expertise is merely familiarity with a couple of devices and specific software doesn't take long. In many cases these kids had owned a series of game consoles and phones and that's it. Familiarity with software is limited to games and social media. Very few knew what an operating system was let alone the firmware that kick start it; this is literally how all computers work yet almost no one seems to know it.

Last week I was in Ottawa doing an introduction to OSes on our cyber range. The grade 5s didn't know what an OS was, but by the end of our 90 minutes they certainly did. They also learned the boot process any digital device goes through from firmware start-up to OS loading to where most users think computers start - when the desktop appears. They also got to interact with Linux as well as Windows on their Chromebooks (we use a cloud based cyber range so you're not limited to the restrictive OS on your local device). None of the students knew what Linux was, but they use it everyday because their Chromebook ChromeOS is Linux based. By the end of our afternoon they were navigating the settings in multiple OSes and understood how you could interrupt boot sequences to gain control and interrupt processes.

That we hand students tools like these without any understanding of what they are or how they work is a great failure in modern education, especially as we are only accelerating our use of these machines in classrooms. Considering how widespread their use is now, digital skills have become an ignored foundational literacy.

***

How did I tackle this ever widening digital divide in my program? We started by making our lab DIY. My seniors and I built the first iteration out of e-waste and then kept improving it as we found resources. In 2015 I returned tens of thousands of dollars in board run desktops which then got converted into half a dozen chromebook carts for other classes to use. In that first year our DIY conversion saved the board over tens of thousands of dollars.

In 2016 I contacted AMD and asked if they'd provide CPUs for our next upgrade, and they did! Our board's SHSM program provided additional funding and for a fraction of the cost of a board run computer lab we had significantly better hardware and control over installing our own OSes and software, which allowed us to provide digital learning opportunities others couldn't reach.

By 2018 we had a mix of AMD APUs that could handle the graphic modelling we were doing in our game-dev class. This meant they were also more than capable of running any other software we needed to build digital fluency from scratch. In the process my one teacher department went on to win multiple national awards across a staggering range of digital domains ranging from coding and electronics to IT & Networking, 3d modelling and cybersecurity. DIYing is essential if we're to build digital skills without those compsci coding blinkers on. Even worse is buying a ready-made 'edtech solution' which does it all for you and doesn't teach anyone (staff or students) how technology works. It also tends to trap you in a single brand rather than striving for agnostic digital comprehension.

Having a flexible digital learning environment that we built ourselves allowed us to create unique student projects. In grade 9 that means starting with Arduino micro-controllers. Not only did these open source electronics allow us to develop an understanding of the circuits that all digital technologies depend on, it also offered a tangible approach to programming where the lines of code would produce direct outputs like turning on lights or making music. By the end of the Arduino unit students were confident in building circuits and for many it was also their first opportunity to code in text as opposed to blocks.

As you can see by the gif, getting into Arduino in grade 9 means that by grade 10 students are building customized electronics solutions to everything from the PC temperature system you see to various robotics and digital art installations. One of my seniors worked out an Arduino based fuel management system for his pickup that he then sold to others. Understanding the electronics substrata that digital operates in is imperative for well rounded digital literacy.

From that basis in electronics and introductory coding we moved to information technology and networking - two subjects studiously ignored in schools even though every one of them depends on both to operate every day. We begin I.T. by walking students through PC parts in our recently delivered Computers For Schools desktops. After covering the safety requirements for tools and working with machines that can contain enough electricity to knock you out if you don't treat them with respect, we dug in.

The biggest point I make in PC building is about static management. As long as students respect the delicacy of the electronics (which they already understand thanks to Arduino), they quickly gain confidence and are never again tyrannized by this technology. After this unit no one calls a desktop PC a "CPU", because that's just one part of a much bigger device. Calling a desktop a CPU is like calling a car an engine.

We typically spend a week taking a part desktops and putting them back together. Getting them is no problem because no one wants desktops these days and CFS has piles of them they're aching to give to classrooms. When we wrap up the IT unit anyone who wants to take their computer home can - you'd be surprised how many students (and teachers) don't own a home computer. The best part? If it ever goes wrong they know how to fix it because the built it from the hardware up.

Once we got the hardware figured out we installed operating systems. This involves interrupting boot processes and learning how to navigate BIOSes and other types of firmware. Everyone gets to the point where they have Windows and Linux installed, but some students want to build an epic stack. This can involve adding extra hard drives and going through install processes on up to a dozen OSes. By the end of week two we've got OSes installed and students have explored many more than the one that came on their phone or game system (which are often Linux based). We've even had our share of Hackintoshes in the lab.

Our final step in the IT/Networking unit is to connect the desktops together on a local network and figure out IP addressing and all those other connectivity details most people have no concept of even though they use them daily. Building a network like this takes it out of theory and into tangible practice, as does the PC building. By the end of the week no one is calling connectivity 'WIFI' any more. Ethernet is ethernet and wireless is wireless and everyone knows how to configure and troubleshoot both. The motivation is that once we've got our network up and running on a domain where everyone can see each other we cue up a LAN party and everyone plays networked games on their DIY systems.

Our wide ranging and borderless approach to digital skills created interesting opportunities to mash up different technologies that are typically taught in siloed departments (if at all). In this case a student leveraged Arduino electronics, PC building and networking with robotics to build a whimsical LAN party robotrain.

We do eventually get to coding of course, but starting that far up the tech pyramid is absurd. High level coding languages (the only ones schools teach) are resource heavy because they spell out commands in easy to understand English (easier for humans = harder for machines). We did HTML and associated languages in grade 9 so the internet didn't baffle anyone anymore. In grade 10 it was Python simply because it's in such wide use. In the senior grades students choose their own coding focus, but not before I drag them through an introduction to low level 'machine language' programming so they have an appreciation for all the work those high level languages are doing for them. After you've had to do your own memory addressing, it changes you.

Leveraging this digital literacy, my seniors helped keep the tech in our building running smoothly. This not only saved money but also gave students invaluable public facing support experience. Perhaps the best example of this was our Chromebook graveyard. We would take in broken machines and then repair them with bits from others. After a couple of years of service most high schools in our board had lost over a quarter of their Chromebooks to abuse and accidents - we enjoyed a 90%+ active rate meaning more computers for more students at no extra cost.

The 'that's not your job' thinking that most boards operate under prevents this kind of innovation and cost savings. I always am left wondering to whose benefit.

The other benefit was that our digital fluency made us resilient. When COVID struck and everyone else folded up their classes and went home early, the digitally fluent students in my program didn't want to lose their semester's work and we went online, created our own Discord and landed it remotely. It took a bit of re-culturing because the students needed reminding that this isn't a gaming Discord - you're at school, but they quickly adapted and were sharing 3d models, Unity code snippets, circuit designs and network details back and forth to build complex demonstrations of their skills. In many cases they were doing it on the PCs they'd built when they were in grades 9 or 10 because many parents thinking digital technology is a toy.

So what's stopping us from graduating digitally fluent students with a wide range of skills who are ready to go into any field they choose because every one of them these days involves some kind of digital technology? I come from a time when home computers were brand new and no one had worked out how to 'do them' yet. In that primordial binary goo I hacked my own software and learned how to build my own hardware. My millwright apprenticeship turned to IT because of my familiarity with this new technology but I never came at it as a scientist might, but rather as a mechanic would. Hacking isn't bad, it's humans finding ways to approach digital technology as agents rather than consumers.

If we're going to tackle complex interdisciplinary digital technologies like artificial intelligence with anything other than willful ignorance, we need to start building an understanding of digital from the ground up so students and teachers can see beyond the box tech companies want to keep you in. If we're putting children on it, we should be showing them how it works so that they become more than what most of us are: consumers.

This is from a decade ago. FB has faded from relevance, but every 'tech' we use follows the same approach: your attention is the product being sold.

It might sound counter-intuitive, but cybersecurity offers a unique approach to tech that other subjects lack. Cyber is inherently about edge cases and encourages a 'meta' mindset when approaching digital environments. You're not a component inside the system, you've recognized its limitations and are working beyond it where being human is not only a benefit but essential. With all the 'AI doing it for you' going on these days does being human matter? Other approaches seem easier and wear 'academic credibility' better, but what is academic credibility but another system meant to contain your thinking? If we keep our current status quo we will, at best, produce another generation of passive consumers. We've tried that and it isn't going well. Time to hack this problem by putting students back in control of the technology we are using to control them. It's time to embrace your inner hacker.

Cyber Resilience: the evolution of cybersecurity beyond the technical

Navigating a Generational Digital Skills Crisis

The World Economic Forum's Centre for Cybersecurity recently (Nov '24) released a white paper called Unpacking Cyber Resilience. The goal of this paper is to redefine digital information security (currently called 'cybersecurity') beyond the technical box it currently sits in.

Digital transformation has forced unprecedented change in all aspects of our lives, yet digital literacy has remained at best an afterthought in education even as education systems across the world embrace mandatory eLearning and place students in online learning environments from the earliest grades. Our failure to recognize digital fluency as a foundational skillset has resulted in generational global digital skills crisis demonstrating shocking digital habits that are the main cause of an epidemic of cybersecurity breaches. Hiding cyber in a technical bubble is probably both a reaction and the result of this mess.

WEF's opening remarks in the Unpacking Cyber Resilience white paper describe an expansion of cyber awareness using business language that many educators will use to say, 'that's not our job!' (i.e.: training students for workplace readiness), but this digital illiteracy also damages our democracies by destroying our trust in institutions, creating disinformation echo-chambers that erode public discourse and also preventing us from accessing trustworthy news sources. Surely some of that is the job of public education?

"The digital transformation continuously reshapes and evolves businesses and governments. The primary goals and objectives of organizations are often supported by business processes that are critically reliant on digital technology, commonly without any analogue  alternatives. While primary goals and objectives will differ between organizations, they will always  include the protection of critical service delivery, stakeholder confidence and the principle assets  that underpin value and position in the market. Achieving true cyber resilience is fundamentally a leadership issue, and is paramount to retaining shareholder value."

- Executive Summary, Unpacking Cyber Resilience

Those 'business processes' underlie all aspects of modern life, including those in education. School boards call their operational network domains 'corporate' because it's lifted from the same digital systems that support business and government. Educational operations aren't digitally distinct from those in the public and private sectors, they're the same technologies but with higher security needs because they collect the data of minors (and their families) on a massive scale. Putting employees and students onto these systems without teaching them fundamental digital literacy is akin to putting them in a car and hoping they'll drive it without having an accident.

WEF's efforts to reframe cybersecurity are important because there aren't many aspects of our lives left that are independent from networked information technology. This dependence is absolute because the analogue processes that proceeded digitization have been jettisoned with a promise of cost savings. We live in a world run on ICT where almost no one understands ICT.

Cybersecurity is a particularly difficult nut to crack because it is an interdisciplinary field of study that exists within a larger framework of digital expertise that very few people possess. Cyber also suffers from being the edge of digital where zero days and emerging technologies can have devastating impact. Instead of building stable systems that then change slowly over time, cyber stares into the edge case abyss where you not only need deep digital fluency but also a willingness to step into the unknown.

If we address digital skills at all in education it tends to be a rote coding plug-and-play edtech solution. This one and done approach fails to recognize the complexity of digital literacy.

The Evolution of Digital Information Security

The idea that 'cybersecurity' was the final conception of this rapidly evolving field demonstrates a lack of understanding both in how new it is and how quickly its scope is changing. For a long time the cool kids on the West Coast hated the term cyber and created a lot of political tension in a field that was barely conceptualized. You know you're in trouble when the people doing the thing can't even agree on what to call it. If you take a step back and look at how things have evolved over the past four decades you begin to see the broad strokes of digital information security:

For many even what to call cybersecurity was a sticking point. The good news is that if you don't like it now, it's already moving on. From WEF's Unpacking Cyber Resilience.

One of my favourite early graphics pushing back against the framing of cybersecurity as a purely technical field of study was this one:

Not because it's complete, but because it reframes cybersecurity in a multi-dimensional manner. Through my coaching of student teams in cybersecurity I've found that a mix of talents is much more effective than a group of identical 'head-in-the-machine' types deep diving the technical. That skillset in cybersecurity could be parallelled by a lawyer or surgeon who is doing the point work but is surrounded by specialists with varying skillsets that allow the technical resolution of problems to happen. Can you imagine someone saying that the only people in the medical professions are surgeons, or the only legal professionals are lawyers? These more mature disciplines have a wider understanding of what's necessary to do the work. Clinging to this lone haxor fixation has been one of the mechanisms used to keep cyber a male dominated profession for far too long.

You need team members with organization and communication skills or the technical discoveries get fumbled between detection and response. You also need researchers and admin who understand what everyone is doing so that they can provide resources where needed. Those skillsets are essential to a cybersecurity operation, even a predominantly technical one, but the world of digital information security has expanded far beyond even that scope.

I wrote about this a year ago in a Cybersecurity Secret Sauce post. At that point I was still arguing for better technical training in cyber, but that's the tip of a digital skills iceberg that leans on abilities often ignored in STEM education. The creativity and self-direction demanded by the edge-case nature of cybersecurity is more often found in the arts. My strongest cybersecurity teams included a mix of students from a variety of disciplines, and the very best were also wildly neuro-diverse. Reframing the field to cyber resilience opens the door to those alternative and much needed talents.

Considerations of inclusion are often framed as charitable, but in this case diversity was a genuine performance enhancer, especially once I could convince non-technical students that they had a place on a national championship bound cybersecurity team. STEM education does a great job of selecting out creative thinkers early on. Hopefully reframing to cyber resilience ends this gatekeeping.

Cyber Resilience Reframing Digital Information Security

Multidisciplinary collaboration is a force multiplier well beyond blue teams doing competitive defensive work in capture the flag exercises. I should add here that no one should avoid a hackathon or cyber-defence competition because they are afraid they don't have the hands-on technical skills to do the hacking for a couple of reasons:

CyberTitan Top Defenders in 2021 had
diverse and complementary skillsets.

1) The detective process for determining  damage from a cyberattack is remarkably intuitive and the best way to learn it is to watch someone who has developed this intuition display it.

2) If you have half a dozen haxors all digging into a hacked system and attempting repairs at the same time you have chaos, so it's typical to have one operator in the system while others support them. Again, think of the operator as a surgeon with a team of supporting talents around them and you begin to see how even technical cyber needs diversity.

Even in technical cybersecurity team based/complimentary skillsets are the norm. Attempting to solve the global cybersecurity skills gap by minting as many hands on cyber-operators as you can misunderstands the needs of the field, especially with the onset of AI automating basic tasks.

Cyber resilience recognizes the diversity of expertise needed to create functional digital information security. Another example of this expansion is in international collaboration. You can't work across languages and cultures without being eye to eye on the technical aspects. The work I've done this fall around cyber diplomacy both in DC and the DR have shed light on this emerging field and the importance of us understanding the same terminology. You'd think this is how things are done but training is often rolled out by insular regional interests who (incredibly) often lack an understanding of the subject and don't give much thought to national let alone international collaboration. You can't work together defending against cyber attacks when you don't share common understandings. The work Global Affairs Canada has done in providing internationally recognized industry certifications for developing countries is a great example of this in action.

Hundreds of people from dozens of countries all working
together on cyber resiliency at the GFCE annual meeting
in Washington DC in September, 2024 (I'm on the left).

From talking to the newly minted director of cyber at GAC to presenting on emerging technology disruptions in cyber internationally, I'm more aware than ever of the challenges in creating global connections encouraging cyber resilience. Unless we align our terminology and technical awareness we cannot communicate and collaborate effectively. In our one sided world of digital defence where they only have to get it right once but we have to get it right every time, this is a recipe for disaster. Without collaboration and cooperation there is no way organizations can defend against the asymmetrical nature of cyber attacks, the largest of which have the funding of nation states behind them. 

Hope For The Future

Locally, I hope that reframing cybersecurity to cyber resilience means more leaders begin taking it more seriously, especially in education. But even cyber resilience remains problematic because it is hidden inside a larger digital literacy crisis that has grown to such a degree that many in education ignore it rather than recognize the cross curricular damage it is doing, not to mention the societal damage it is doing to our democracies.

Nationally, I hope that cyber resilience creates more diverse pathways into the field. I would love to see the absurdly privileged 'comp-sci degree' base expectations disappear (this is the equivalent of saying everyone who works in the field of law has to be a lawyer). Cyber resilience isn't for specialists, it's for everyone and I hope this reframing encourages more diverse skillsets to engage with it.

Internationally, cyber resilience is where emerging fields like cyber diplomacy and multi-country partnerships grow. If we want the benefits of digital transformation to be available to everyone while relaxing the grip of surveillance capitalists and ensuring our democracies are functional, critically looking at how we compartmentalize digital literacy and opening them up to reinterpretation is essential. Digital technology is only accelerating and clinging to old frameworks makes no sense.

NOTES

The idea that we can resolve a lack of cyber skills when they hide within a much larger digital illiteracy crisis has caused a lot of frustration in cyber training. Teaching information security awareness when users lack basic digital skills is akin to attempting to teach Shakespeare to people who can't read.

Rather than base your cyber stance on this impossible situation and watching training fail to stop the vast numbers of breaches digital ignorance causes, reframing cyber resilience through a human risk management lens reveals a more effective tactic. If people are the weakest link (and they are), don't expect their illiteracy to be an easy fix. Leveraging a wider human risk management approach lets you ensure safety regardless of how digitally clueless your users are.

LinkedIn Post

Security awareness and training is a method, not an outcome

"In 2024, the idea of human risk management shifted from concept to reality as frustrated CISOs looked for solutions beyond security awareness and training to make real change."

The EU isn't hanging around:  The Cyber Resilience Act

EdTech Hockey Sticks

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.

https://www.fraserinstitute.org/blogs/pisa-results-a-breakdown-by-province

"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?

Creating A Canadian Cybersecurity Ecosystem

Last week I attended my first conferences in a long time. Someone will have to explain to me why classroom teachers have no access to professional development like this. On Wednesday and Thursday morning I was at SecTor in Toronto, making many new contacts in industry and realizing that the vast majority of companies on the front lines of cyber-defence in Canada are eager to help both the public and public education get a handle on cybersafety and digital hygiene. On Thursday afternoon and Friday I was at the University of Waterloo for their Privacy & Cybersecurity Conference. These were two very different conferences with SecTor clearly focused on industry and sales and Waterloo's CPI on academic research and strategic thinking, but you'd be amazed how well the two fit together. I really wish they'd arrange things so people could do one and then the other instead of overlapping them, but that failure to look after each other symbiotically is emblematic of a larger problem in Canada.

I had a great chat with a colleague at ICTC a few weeks ago where he described his approach as 'serving the ecosystem', which I intend to emulate.  He sees ICTC's role as helping everyone working in Canada's digital skills development space to meet the council's mission, which is to strengthen Canada's digital advantage in an ever more connected and volatile global economy.  This sounds like a big ask but I believe in the goal, and that belief gives me the energy to take on this seemingly insurmountable task.

One of my favourite moments from the Waterloo CPI conference was when one of the audience, after listening to how five universities are connecting to each other, interrupted with a clear and present warning.  He guaranteed that in the next five years Canadians are going to be sitting in the dark after a cyber-attack from a well developed foreign aggressor.  When we're all sitting there in the cold and dark with no electricity, gas or communications, will we think we've done enough?  Intense, right?

Early in the talk that question came up in, the head of TMU's CyberSecure Catalyst was talking about how he headed to Israel to see how they created a world-class cybersecure ecosystem in the most challenging of circumstances.  His takeaway?  The Israeli system is predicated on familiarity, trust and connectivity.  After only a month and a bit observing Canada's approach, it seems we're doing the opposite.  I've stumbled across excellent resources in both government academia and industry, but each one is working from its own funding formula and entirely focused on meeting the targets in that formula.  Even our connectivity is fractured with numerous 'networks' forming independently of each other, all with the idea of uniting us.  It'd be funny if it weren't so absurd.  Here are a few of them:

• https://www.canadiancybersecuritynetwork.com/home
• https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/cyber-security-innovation-network/en
• https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/cyber-security-global-alliance-csga-pleased-announce-launch-castle/
• https://www.universityaffairs.ca/news/news-article/five-universities-supporting-canadas-cybersecurity-strategy/
• http://ncc-cnc.ca/
• https://www.cybersecurecatalyst.ca/actp-overview
• https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/cyber-security-innovation-network/en
• https://www.ngen.ca/cybersecurity
• https://www.digitalsupercluster.ca/programs-projects/programs/
• https://www.cdsn-rcds.com/

They're all doing good work, but they're doing it in silos and in many cases repeating material found in other programs.  It's neither efficient nor is it anything like the Israeli approach of centralized trust, familiarity and cooperative development.  I'm not surprised that, after announcing yet another Canadian network that'll cure our cyber-skills shortage (which is so bad that the government says we need to bring in talent to fill the gap), that guy in the audience lost his patience.

"The siloed approach we know doesn't work anymore. We think it should change and this budget didn't give us the warm fuzzies."

- Christyn Cianfarani CEO Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries

Christyn is exactly right, Canada's initial approach of jumpstarting as many programs as it could to try and cover the cybersecurity shortfall doesn't scale well now that cybersafety is a part of everyone's lives from individuals and small businesses all the way along to multi-national corporations and federal governments.  COVID only accelerated our dependence on digital connectivity yet we continue to lag behind in terms of cyber capacity, especially in education.

At the conference, Ontario's Ministry of Economic Development representative kept describing Ontario's many cyber-focused companies and educational organizations as an ecosystem, but a lot of potted plants all sitting in the same area are not an ecosystem, which is exactly Canada's problem.

How Canada is approaching cybersecurity capacity development.

How Israel does it - with trust, interconnectivity and familiarity - no silos, and everyone looking after each other.

Canada needs to work together to create a national focus on cybersecurity skills development starting in elementary school with integrated digital hygiene and cybersafety learning that leads to middle school access to programs like CyberTitan that introduce students to hands on I.T. skills that demystify the subject and open up pathways.  In high school everyone should be learning essential digital skills (which are atrociously poor - more than 80% of successful cyber-attacks are the result of user ignorance) as a mandatory course. Students interested in pursuing cybersecurity should have early access to coop and STEM programs that will set them on the right track for post-secondary - no adult upskilling required.  This is also where we need to address how our high schools genderize pathways, knocking many girls out of these opportunities.

If we can demystify cyber in k-12 we will be able to graduate cyber-safe students who are able to operate in our interconnected digital economy in every pathway.  Digital fluency and access to cyber-opportunities is, of course, also an equity and inclusion issue; these opportunities aren't just for wealthy, urban boys, though they continue to dominate the industry.  Emerging digital careers tend to be more future proof and higher paying, and everyone deserves a crack at them.

Canada is the only major federation and one of few countries in the world without a national education standard, leaving our minors open to wildly differing political influences and support in our schools; there is no such thing as 'Canadian Education'.  Rather than start with central administration, I think Canada should start with a canadian student bill of rights to protect minors from these changeable winds, but I digress.  Canada's fractured approach to education (like its fractured approach to cyber) means that we need to reach a critical mass with government and industry partners in order to break into the siloed world of canadian public education.  But with no central authority to get onside, a win in Ontario does not mean a win in Quebec, or anywhere else in the country.

Canada's patchwork approach to governance along with its challenging geography means we're facing barriers that Israel and other world leaders in cyber have never had to contend with, which is precisely why we need to pool our resources, grow an interconnected ecosystem of pubic and private cyberskills supporters and then take on this seemingly insurmountable task.

Cybersecurity might sound like an esoteric reason for this big of a challenge, but cyber lives at the pointy end of a pyramid of digital infrastructure needs that Canada is still sorely in need of developing.  Focusing on cyber means we're also focusing on equity and inclusion by connecting everyone, including remote northern communities, new Canadians and people who can't afford Canada's monopolistic telecom infrastructure, to the digital economy.  To get to cyber we need to get through device accessibility, network connectivity and digital skills development, which is why it's a worthy strategic goal. 

The trick is going to be getting all these disparate interests to unite in order to tackle Canada's unique and challenging geography and history - otherwise we're all going to be sitting in the cold dark in a few years wondering why we didn't do more when we could have.

***

UPDATE:  News from the frontlines of 21st Century war, which includes cyber:  

"Collaborating, exchanging information, assisting one another — this is the best way to thwart cybercriminals."

"All told, cyber resiliency relies on collaborative efforts from the global community, he said. Addressing the corporate audience, he underscored the importance of investing in and building a cybersecurity system as a strategic method to improve the cyber resilience of the state."

https://venturebeat.com/security/ukraine-cybersecurity-head-speaks-at-blackberry-summit-says-cyberwar-affects-us-all/

The importance of collaboration in cybersecurity, including in education and user outreach, is more obvious than ever as the Ukraine conflict continues.  One day Canada will be in the crosshairs, will we be ready?  Or will we have dozens of competing interests all producing redundant content?

Dirty Vocational Subjects Sullying the August Disciplines

https://www.wired.com/story/how-we-learned-to-love-pedagogical-vapor-stem/

"just tell me what STEM is. Above all, I want to know how science, a byword for all knowledge, and mathematics, the great harmonies of the universe—two august disciplines that have defined education since antiquity—yoked themselves to the vocational field of engineering and, worst of all, to “technology,” which could mean almost anything from space mirrors to VSCO girls."

... I can't tell if Virginia is being faceitious or not.  Probably not.  Brains are paramount in academics, they may as well be in jars.
I wonder what Matt Crawford would say about this dismissal of manual intelligence.

As one of those vocational teacher types the 'august disciplines" have yoked themselves to, I'm once again thumped in the head with just how classist the education system is, but it was a bit of a shock to see WIRED advocating it.  I wrote about how there really is no such thing as STEM, at least in Ontario classrooms, in September.   Nice to see WIRED weighing in on the pedagogical smokescreen that is STEM, though I don't think they disentangled it very effectively.

Good to remember that not all academics are so prejudiced.

Mathematics (aka: 'the great harmonies of the universe') and science ("a byword for knowledge") are pretty much all STEM are about when it comes to application in the classroom.  There has been no real movement on technology and engineering in the high schools where we are.  All STEM has done is paid for math manipulables and fund science.  Technology and especially engineering are still an afterthought at best.  If you've been fooled by the STEM smokescreen to think that there is any collaboration between those august disciplines and the filthy vocational classes, you can relax, because there isn't.  If you want to be an engineer in university, take science and maths courses, because that's all there are in most high schools.



If you've ever wondered why technology students (and their teachers) feel disenfranchised in their own schools, WIRED has made that adundantly clear in this month's edition.  We're less than, we get it.

An op-ed piece on how the august disciplines that have defined education since antiquity have yoked themselves to vocational fields, along with a cover article about one of those vocational types who dropped out of engineering to make things.  WIRED's come here go away editorial stance is a bit hard to follow.

You'd expect academic types in The Atlantic to rip on skills based education in favour of their own university disciplines, but WIRED ripping on engineering and technology?  I'm at a loss to understand the end game there.  The philosopher in me wants to pull out Aristophanes' Clouds and take a swing at the hallowed halls of academia while the technician wants to point out that people were apprenticing in the trades millenia before anyone was throwing square hats in the air, if we're going to talk about what has defined education since antiquity.

STEM is indeed nonsense, and I don't disagree with a lot of what Virginia says about how the STEM smokescreen has gone down, other than to say that STEM never really happened at all for those of us at the bottom end of the educational value spectrum.

... because there isn't.  It's a just SM, as it's always been: https://temkblog.blogspot.com/2019/09/there-is-no-stem.html

There is no STEM

There has recently been a fair bit of push back against STEM as a focus in schools, but as a classroom technology and engineering teacher I have to tell you, there is no STEM.  By sticking science, technology, engineering and mathematics in an acronym, many people, especially people who aren't in classrooms, think that this is some kind of coherent strategy, but I can assure you it isn't, at least not in Ontario.

Maths and sciences are mandatory courses throughout a student's career.  Technology and engineering are not, ever.  Maths gets even more additional attention because of EQAO standardized testing, so numeracy is an expectation for all teachers throughout the school.  Science is mandatory throughout elementary grades and high school students are required to take two science credits to graduate.  Maths and science are baked into a student's school experience.

Want to feel the sting of irrelevance?  Waterloo University (and many others) do a fine job of underlining how little technology and engineering programs matter in high schools.  If you're signing up for their software engineering program you need lots of maths... and lots of science.  Engineering for an engineering program?  Well, there's no point in making it a requirement because it's an optional course that is barely taught anywhere in Ontario.  At one point I heard less than 15% of Ontario schools run any kind of coherent computer engineering program.  The technology prejudice is a bit different, that's more of a blue collar white collar thing, but engineering, as an academic focus, has been swallowed whole by science and maths.

SM has always been a foundational piece of public education, and remains so, but the entire 'STEM push' is really an SM push, engineering and technology remain barely taught and entirely optional and peripheral in Ontario classrooms, assuming they exist at all.  Tactile, hands on technology programs with their lower class sizes, expensive tools and safety concerns are the first to get canned when the money tightens up.  It's cheaper to stuff 30+ kids into an 'academic' (aka: text based/theory) course where you can sit them in efficient rows and learn linearly until everyone gets the same right answer.  It doesn't do much for them in the real world, but it's cheaper.  Math and science make sense in a school system focused on those kinds of academic economics.

Governments get voted in by creating panic about student mathematics skills, and how science is taught is another political hot-spot that gives politicians lots of traction.  I have no doubt that these two subjects enjoy the attention they do because of this political fecundity.  Engineering and technology?  The skills that build the critical infrastructures that allow us to feed, connect and house people?  Not much political mucking to be done there, it just needs to work.

Last year I had a student graduate and go on to college for computer technology.  He had some trouble in school, but was on track to be a successful computer technician.  In his first post-secondary computer technology courses he was feeling well ahead of his classmates and was confident of success, but not all his classes went so well.  He ended up failing his maths course and eventually dropped out of the whole program.  Talking to his mother after this happened, she implied that I'd failed to teach him the mathematics he needed to succeed.  I didn't argue the point (I don't teach mathematics other than in conjunction with what we're doing in computer technology).  There is an entire mathematics department with ten times more personnel, resources and infinitely more presence in the school than me an my oft-forgotten program, but with STEM ringing in her ears we're all lumped into that failure.

This year I'm rocking a budget (which I've already exceeded in the second week of September) that is 25% of what it was a few years ago.  Everyone is seeing cuts, but the mandatory departments are protected in a way that our optional courses are not.  Where they might see a 10% cut, I'm seeing 75%, because what I teach is not a priority.  That cut is happening while I'm actually up in sections due the success we've had in various competitions and the media attention we've received (but not in our own yearbook).

You can rail against STEM all you like, but there is no such thing.  If there has been any STEM funding with this focus it hasn't found my technology and engineering courses because not all STEMs are considered worthy of political attention.  The best I've seen out of this are a few more manipulatives in maths classes based on corporate tech-in-a-box, but building a kit isn't engineering.  When you're engineering there are no instructions and the end goal may not even be possible, you certainly don't end up with everyone looking at the same finished product.  That kind of stochastic process is another reason why eng/tech is frowned upon in academic settings; they like everyone to arrive at the same correct answer.  It makes for a clear sense of progress, but learning to deal with potential failure in reality isn't wasted time in school.

In the article that kicked this off, you get a very articulate and scholarly take on the value of a liberal arts education and how it can free you from economic bondage in our overpopulated and automated world.  The down-your-nose 'yeomanship' / servitude argument pasted on STEM and CTE as a preparation for the workplace ignores the many soft skills that hands-on technical training can provide in favour of the argument that students of technology are dimensionless corporate shills whose only interest is to find work in a system that doesn't really need them.  But aren't we all yoked to our broken economic system?  A degree doesn't somehow free you from that commitment, but it will bury you in debt and the attendant servitude to it.  A technical education costs less and teaches you some valuable soft skills that will help you in any vocation, while also offering you a shot at something other than general labour.  The engineering design process technology training is predicated on would help anyone in any aspect of life where they must self-organize and tackle a problem that may not have a solution.

I have a liberal arts education (English and philosophy majors) and I greatly value the discipline it has brought to both my thinking and writing, but that doesn't mean I don't value hands-on mastery and the attendant good habits that accompany it.  It took me a long time to value my technical, hands-on skills against the constant noise of academic/white collar prejudice and privilege.  Since moving to technology from English teaching, I face that pressure daily, as do my tech-teaching colleagues.  In speaking to many people I still get the sense that technical, hands-on skills are inferior to academic skills, but I find them complimentary, not less than.  It would be quite a thing if we could value a student's technical hands-on mastery as much as we value their academic grades... or even their sports abilities.

I get the sense that Professor Zaloom believes the future will be full of highly educated academics elucidating on the state of humanity while they float above economic necessities with their intellectual freedom.  I'd argue that learning hands-on technical skills gives you a variety of soft-skills (persistence, self-organization, resilience, humility to name a few) that will help students deal with that overpopulated, automated future every bit as much as a degree might.

If you follow that article through, it's less about STEM and more about what we're going to do in an increasingly automated world populated by more and more people with less and less to do.  In that no-win situation, the value of being able to repair your own technology and understand the hidden systems that regulate your life is another kind of literacy that I think all students should have, especially if they are going to depend on those systems and let them direct their lives.

A good read on the fecundity of hands-on mastery.

Technology education offers that insight along with a plethora of tough-soft skills that are wanting in many academic programs where established reality is whatever the teacher thinks it should be.  There is a hard, real-world edge to technology training that is often hard to find in the mentally constructed world of academic achievement.  Matt Crawford describes management thinking in Shop Class as Soulcraft as having a 'peculiarly chancy and fluid character' due to its success criteria being changeable depending on the whims of the people in charge.  That was my experience in too many academic situations.  You know where you stand in technology because reality isn't fickle.

It's a shame that this pointless acronym has thrown a blanket over the grossly neglected curriculums of technology and engineering, while giving even more attention to two of the Disney princesses of academia.  To be honest with you, I think technology and engineering would be just where it is now had this STEM focus never happened, which tells you something about how this ed-fad has gone down.


Additional Reading:

The rich intersection of a liberal arts background and technology expertise:  Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Shop Class as Soulcraft is a must read, but so is Matt's follow-up, The World Beyond Your Head.  A philosophical look at the power of tactile skills to free us from consumerism and the mental world of the digital attention economy.