Like a Fish in Water

1) Would you like a big bowl of Anxiety Soup? 

We just finished the final round of this year's Cyberpatriot / CyberTitan Canadian Student Cybersecurity Competition.  To say this year has been a challenge would be a gross understatement.  We lost half our teams immediately thanks to COVID restrictions.  The cancelled teams were both the junior teams who have missed a vital year of apprenticing with the seniors as we prepare for competition.  Thanks to this break in our process we'll be seeing a reduction in the skills we've systemically developed over the past three years.  

With our two senior teams we limped through two rounds of the competition mask socially distanced to mask (because no one is face to face anymore) in our nerd lab at school.

The first round was shaky, especially on our senior co-ed team where our most experienced, senior students didn't show up mentally on competition day.  Some careful coaching and focusing got them on track for round two where both teams scored more like they're able.

We just completed the final round of competition last Friday, and (because things weren't already hard enough) this time it was fully remote thanks to Ontario's systemic mishandling of COVID19.  This had me up nights worrying about connectivity and tech at home for eleven competitors on two teams in eleven different home locations.  Our student built DIY lab means I can take care of the complex setup needed to do Cyberpatriot and let the students focus on the material itself, but not this time.

The competition uses virtual images (computers simulated inside a window) that give students hands on experience with infected and compromised computers.  When you open a virtual image and start working on it a timer starts and you've got six straight hours to maximize points by fixing the image.  If one of your images doesn't open or a student is having technical issues, you're still on the clock and losing time.  Doing IT support in a live environment with harsh consequences like that is very stressful, which is why I'd been anxious.

I delivered technology to students at home and did everything I could to ensure that they had what they needed.  I said repeatedly, "don't talk about what you're going to do, rehearse it!"  This was finally heard (after repeating it several times - teens don't like to practice things) and students didn't just think they were ready for Friday, they knew.

They sent me photos of their home setups, most of which were home made/DIY computers that we either made in our lab at school or they built at home using the skills they learned at school.  That produced a level of satisfaction I hadn't considered; this final round students were competing on technology they built themselves that they'd also done all the software setup on so they could then demonstrate advanced digital skills well beyond what Ontario's atrophied digital skills curriculum asks.

Put another way, I've been presenting on Cyberpatriot/CyberTitan for several years and a number of teachers have told me they'd do it but the technical setup is too complicated.  It wasn't for the grade 10s, 11s and 12s at home last week.  Maybe it's time to integrate digital fluency into Ontario's Teacher's Colleges if we're expecting every teacher in the province to be proficient in the medium.

2. Swimming with the Digital Fishes

I've talked about the power of authorship in understanding and developing a meaningful pedagogy around technology use many times, but this time we took things to a place where few dare to tread.  As we prepared for this seemingly insurmountable challenge I didn't tighten things into rote demands for compliance, I gave these students agency, and doing so gave me a peak into a world few teachers ever get to see.

Thanks to Heidi Siwak's suggestion, I watched My Octopus Teacher last week.  What I saw on Friday in competition is much like what Craig Foster saw when getting to know his octopus: a wild animal being brilliant in its native habitat.

When you see students operating in the restrictive, overly prescribed walled garden of your corporately provided educational technology you're seeing (in the ones that are actually digitally fluent because most aren't) a wild animal in a restrictive, unfamiliar and domesticated environment.  This produces a kind of reticence in the digitally fluent student that means you're not seeing them as they really are when they operate in digital spaces.  Even teachers with digitally literate students don't often get to see this natural behaviour, which is expressive, efficient and astonishingly rich.  It's also private and respective of personal space and how people choose to represent themselves online.  It's cool to use voice or share screens.  It may even be cool to use animated avatars, but what isn't cool is demanding visual access to a person when they're digital.  The wall we're running into with students not participating in video chats isn't just invasive, it's also counter-cultural to what they do when left to their own devices.  When you're digital you're something other than your physical self.  Our ageist demands for video capitulation ignore that generational truth.

One of the ways we came to terms with managing the many challenges of trying to compete in a technically challenging international cybersecurity competition while stuck at home in a lockdown was by letting the students self-select the tools they would need to do the job.  This started with making sure they were on technology that gave them the administrative privileges they needed to move freely.  Nothing we've ever been handed at school was that.  The other side of the equation is selecting the software we needed to be able to communicate quickly, privately and efficiently.

The students selected Discord as their communications medium of choice.  I've had a passing acquaintance with this software but hadn't been on it recently.  One of my jobs as Cyberpatriot Coach is to proctor the teams and ensure compliance with the rules; I'm judge as well as coach.  Cyberpatriot's minimum requirements for fully remote competition only asked for a single check in with competitors, but considering the circumstances (worldwide health emergency, remember?), I thought a bit more contact was in order.

The teams each set up private Discord chats focused on various areas of the competition.  They couldn't see each other, but I could quickly move between both groups and connect to live voice chats as well as screen sharing.  This was vital in our approach to the competition as we encourage and depend on collaborative team interaction when problem solving.  Other teams may like to do the loner hacker in a room by themselves, but we've never approached it that way.

One of the reasons for this is that I'm trying to raise digital skills in cybersecurity in a place where we started with nothing.  To do that senior students work with the juniors when we're practicing for competition (teams are physically and virtually contained during competition rounds).  Collaboration isn't just how we compete, it's also how we learn the material.

Discord's fluid and efficient communications environment not only allowed me to proctor the competition by easily moving between teams, it also let the teams design their own internal communications structures and then leverage them with astonishing effectiveness.  Because they are all fluent in the medium their use of it is emotive and staggeringly fast.

While we were waiting for the email from CPOC to start round three (it never arrived, I had to contact Maryland directly to get access - my best guess is it got blocked by my work email - sigh), I watched memes appear and morph in the group chat.  This was happening beneath continuous voice chats and screen shares.

Once competition began I was moving between the specialists on each team and then between the teams.  I would drop into an ongoing discussion about how to solve a problem and immediately get a, 'hey, King' from the people in the chat.  Discord has a little chime that goes off when you join a chat and the students are keyed to it.  There is a misconception that teens aren't engaged online but it's because of how we situate them in educational technology, not because they are incapable of rich, interactive online engagement.

Over the course of the six hour competition I was flitting between discussions, but Discord doesn't just make those discussions fluid and natural, it also lets you know what's going on in them.  At one point three students were in the senior team's Linux chat and our two operators were both sharing their screens so that all three people could see them.  What was next level in terms of UI (user interface) was that the menu down the side was showing me (in real time) how many verbal channels and screen shares were going on across all of the rooms.  That kind of clean, functional interface is a distant dream in GAFE.  This ability to easily share the live data streams that matter (talk, text and screen share - not invasive webcam footage) is precisely the kind of collaboration I feared we'd lose in a fully remote environment, but Discord made it possible for us to do what we normally do in a very difficult situation.

We must let go of the idea that we need to use digital communications to replicate the face to face classroom while we're remote through video.  It's a reflex based on (older) educators' need to get back to something familiar to them, but it's entirely alien to our students and ignores how digitally fluent students communicate live online.  The resulting lack of engagement and frustration on all sides is now in clear focus for me.  Glitchy, bandwidth heavy and privacy invasive video conferencing will never replace the classroom.  It was a misguided suggestion made by a man with no idea what he's talking about (both in terms of education and generational technology culture) that led us to this impasse.

What made this potential disaster a success was DIY technology at home on self-selected communications platforms.  We started and ended the day in a Google Meet on our board system and it managed to be both laggy and disengaging after Discord.  Students never turned on webcams in Discord but because they could quickly and easily screenshare and emote in written chat while verbally communicating, they created an immersive and powerful online communications experience.  On our stilted video chat at the end of the day I was left wondering why video chats are seen as the future.  Like telephone calls they're the fixation of a previous (Jetsons fan?) generation, but not the future ones.  If we weren't spending all our time pressing students' faces into their webcams on the bandwidth heavy, invasive and alien-to-everyone video platforms we've been told we have to use, we'd be able to see how the younger generation swim in their digital sea, and maybe go and meet them there instead.

What 2020 Taught Me

This is the fifth attempt at this post.  Sometimes, reflecting your way out of dark place professionally takes some iteration.  Previous attempts ended up heaping frustration on top of frustration until it seemed overwhelming again - not the best way to resolve a metaphysical crisis even if it is all true.  I'm not the smartest, most upwardly mobile educator in the world, but I know my craft and I'm good at getting students to express their talents.  I'm also effective under fire and can always find a way to get back on my feet again when the going gets tough.  This year has been a test of that resilience and at times it has broken me, but reflecting on a year where Ontario education has lost the plot more than once has me thinking about a Banksy piece:

I've been tempted to leave education a few times over the past year for pastures less politically misdirected, but I genuinely enjoy my work, recognize its social importance and don't want to walk away while my profession has forgotten its primary purpose in a fog of political misdirection and pandemic panic.  Education matters.  It matters even more in a crisis.  That's a simple truth 2020 has taught me.  What else has this epically crappy year taught me?

LESSON 1:  The people running 'the system' aren't focused on pedagogy, they're focused on making it run (at all costs, even if it makes people sick or abuses their lack of privilege)

I've known this since I got thrown under the bus for handling my mother's suicide too slowly, but 2020 has reminded me of systemic intent by shining a harsh light inside the process.  From taking multiple pay cuts to protect student learning in January while admin sat in empty schools collecting salary, to watching the system lurch back into the classroom unprepared in September, 2020 has shown that the most important thing to people running Ontario education is making a schedule and then ensuring it happens.  Pedagogy and equity might come up in the marketing material, but action around it is non-existent.  Threaten the schedule though and you'll get an immediate reaction.

This came into focus in November when we watched Ontario Education Workers United's live webcast on how to stop the 'pedagogically impoverished' hybrid/simultaneous online and face to face learning model.  I've had a go at this unsustainable and problematic smoke screen of an approach on Dusty World previously.  There was a great deal of dissonance in listening to educational experts like Doctor Beyhan Farhadi talking about pedagogy when the system itself seems to have turned its back on it entirely.

Our absurd pandemic teaching approach reduces in-class instruction to less than half the normal face to face instructional time while making no changes to curriculum expectations because it's important to retain the appearance of credibility.  Actual pedagogical credibility, let alone equity, compassion and even teacher burnout doesn't appear to be a consideration unless it's an email or newsletter - board newsletters have proliferated this year.  2020 has taught me that the system must run at all costs - even at the cost of the people it serves.

Our broken pandemic teaching models also demand that teachers be simultaneously teaching online and face to face to two different groups of students simultaneously all day every day while throwing about a month's worth of material at students each week.  It's doing this having cancelled face to face special education support which has led to even further inequity in the classroom.  It's an approach that has hurt my son directly.  Listening to parents of students with IEPs begging for support and compassion is heart breaking.  I'm going to make a point of honouring that need even if the system appears to be deaf to these calls for help.

The paradigm shifting moment during that OEWU webcast was a Toronto teacher and union activist who approached the fight from a very pragmatic angle.  She said (and I'm paraphrasing), that the system is only interested in making sure the system works and if you want it to take notice you have to stop if from working.  Killing yourself to make a bad system run and then complaining about it isn't an effective approach.  System administration will only pay attention to you if you stop the system from functioning.  I'm not sure where to take that truth in 2021, but it's something to keep in mind if you see systemic abuse occurring and want to stop it.

The Ministry mandated full day of racism training we got in September prior to starting an unprecedented change in schooling feels more like a smokescreen rather than any kind of genuine attempt at addressing inequity.  Trot out a day of racism training (entirely delivered by 'woke' white women) and then execute a schedule designed to suit privilege while crushing students who don't have it.

2020 has taught me to see actions, not words, as the real barometer of an institution's intent.

LESSON 2:  "This isn't elearning, it's emergency remote learning"

A wise colleague said this in one of our earliest online remote meetings and it changed my mind about how to teach in a pandemic.  My reaction in a crisis is to display initiative and work to help people, but systemic paralysis was followed by a lurch into elearning with zero support and then a series of baffling changes of direction by the Ministry in terms of what technology we can use.

Ontario's experiment in remote learning ended when Stephen Lecce came on one Friday afternoon and told students across the province that marks don't matter in remote learning, which has established a culture of irrelevance in remote learning that continues.  We aren't supposed to grade any learning that happens remotely and many teachers have given up on it entirely due to poor student engagement.  The system's zero support is ongoing - we've been given no PD or even time to redesign the entire curriculum for remote learning on the fly.  The metaphor of building a plane in the air hasn't changed, and we're going back to full remote learning tomorrow.  How do you think that will fly?

2020 has taught me that curriculum is less important than student and staff welfare. It's a pity the people in charge only pitch wellness emails at this ongoing mental health crisis, but as a classroom teacher my ever shrinking sphere of control still allows me to address it with my  particular students, and I intend to.  While other teachers are crushing students (especially the ones with IEPs) in a desperate quest for academic credibility in a system that's only pretending to have it, I shall not.  This involves differentiating, which is another one of those pedagogical best practices we've burned to the ground during this crisis.

Some students, like myself, want to be engaged and kept busy lest they go mad with frustration!  For those students I will offer the variation and enrichment I've always pursued (yes, even in a pandemic), but for the vast majority less is their new normal.  For this group (which includes many teachers), being gentle is more important than being productive.  2020 has taught me that for the majority of people, when the going gets tough, waiting to be told what to do and then doing as little as possible is the way forward.  It doesn't bode well for a future bulging with ever increasing overpopulation in a limited ecosystem, but it's the world our systemic myopia has brought us to.

2020 has taught me that pushing broken people only breaks them more, so I won't be doing that even if the system demands it.

This is indeed emergency remote teaching.  It isn't a 'new normal' and we shouldn't all be waving flags proclaiming, 'I got this'.  What we should be doing is looking after the children in our care, supporting their families and our colleagues and making sure that everyone is alright instead of pretending that everything is business as usual.  We can always learn what we missed on the other side of this.  Meanwhile, we're getting strident 'you have to provide blah blah minutes of synchronous instruction online' directives as we return to our second bout of emergency remote teaching.

There are too many system-people hanging on too tight that need to unclench.  I realize that this is being driven by a sabotaged Ministry, but enforcing it makes you complicit in it.  I'm going to look after my little patch (even the ones with special needs!) and push back if my student wellbeing first approach isn't deemed appropriate by the powers that be.

LESSON 3:  Most people just want to be told what to do, even in a crisis...

My first instinct in a crisis is to show initiative and try to act in a way that helps, but the system thinkers don't want you doing that, they want you to fall in line and do what you're told.  This is problematic for me as my raison d'être in teaching is my agency as a teacher.  When the best I can hope from the system is benign neglect I can get a lot done in my immediate space, but when the system is in crisis it insinuates itself into my classroom and this is infuriating.  If I wanted to give up my idealism I'd go into management.

I'm able to do what I do in the classroom because I have agency.  One of the reasons I enjoy classroom teaching is because I have the latitude to make decisions that aim at the highest ideals and see them through without having to water them down.  In a crisis it seems that systems clamp down on individual agency and demand compliance.  My issue with that is that I've never done the bare minimum, always do excessively more and my students benefit from that in many ways.  I refuse do my job in an online lockstep of systemic expectations, especially if they're designed for marketing a fiction of a full school experience during a pandemic that is preventing exactly that.  I have no interest in misleading people, most especially my students.

Not all teachers are above-and-beyonders, but I gotta tell ya, the vast majority are.  You'd be hard pressed to find a single teacher in my school that doesn't do extracurriculars and work on the weekend.  Given some latitude they'll do more than the minimum simply because they are professionals.  2020 has taught me that I don't necessarily want to leave the classroom, but I would like to work for a system that recognizes my professionalism and honours it instead of treating me like an errant child.

Many people want to be told what to do and wait for that direction.  You'd think that would change in a crisis but it seems to intensify.  I've occasionally had leaders who recognize my need for action and honour it, but they are a minority.  I suspect this is a control issue for most.  Many people find invasive and systemic control a comfort, but for some it feels like strangulation.

Reading Matt Crawford's latest book, Why We Drive, this fall while I was getting waterboarded at work taught me how to differentiate to students in a crisis by recognizing the need for human agency in an increasingly automated world.  Some people need clear direction and eased expectations while others want to exercise their agency and do something to help.  I only hope that the people running things recognize that.  We could get a lot more done if the doers weren't being strangled by system lockstep thinking; we need to do much more than we are.

***

We're about to step back into emergency remote learning after the mid-winter break, which hasn't been much of a break at all.  Everyone looks grey, stressed out and exhausted.  We are probably not even half way through this pandemic marathon but I'm not about to let it diminish my professional scope.  My classroom will recognize that my students might be providing daycare for their siblings or working to support parents who have lost their jobs.  Others may live in rural locations with spotty internet or might be trying to do remote learning on ancient or poorly working technology that they only have occasional access to.  The school system likes to ignore these issues while sternly demanding full days of remote synchronous instruction.  I'm not going to demand that because I have no interest in maintaining a vicious government's fiction of business as usual in the classroom.  What I am going to do is help where I can, give each student what they need to feel like they're achieving something (anything) in this crisis, and make sure the ones who want to do more have the tools and material to create the agency they crave at a time of forced helplessness.  If everyone wakes up the next day feeling recognized and enabled then that's a sound pedagogical goal.

Personally?  2020 taught me not to throw myself into the massive gap between the system's failure to do what it should and what my students need, because it's unsustainable.  I'm not helping anyone if I hurt myself trying to make up for the lack of vision demonstrated by the thousands of people 'above' me on the org chart.  I'll read my Tao Te Ching and follow Lao Tsu's advice and withdraw when my work is done.  2020 has taught me that the system will happily let me burn myself out attempting to resolve its shortcomings.

To hold and fill a cup to overflowing Is not as good as to stop in time.

Sharpen a sword edge to its very sharpest, And the (edge) will not last long.

When gold and jade fill your hall, You will not be able to keep them.

To be proud with honour and wealth Is to cause one's own downfall.

withdraw as soon as your work is done. Such is Heaven's Way.

Tao Te Ching Chapter 9

2020 also taught me that the education system's academic focus is a fiction we all tell ourselves to justify its existence, but it's actually much more foundational than that.  The deeper truth is that the system should be less about curriculum and more about equity and inclusion.  Public education is one of our best tools for socially enabling everyone to become their best selves.  If we approached this pandemic by differentiating our expectations and working from a place of compassion and inclusion instead of fake academic integrity we'd do more good and teach students about things that genuinely matter, like kindness.  Ultimately, education should be about recognizing individual needs and enabling students to express their best selves, the rest is paperwork.

A Bits & Bytes Reboot

 Hello TVO,

I'm active on Teach Ontario and my wife has been a regional councillor with you; we're both big supporters of TVO.

A long time ago as a 10 year old new immigrant to Canada in the early 1980s I came across Bits & Bytes as I was teaching myself how computers worked.  This became a career in IT that has since morphed into a career in education where I've coached students in my small town to national championships in Skills Canada and ICTC's CyberTitan Student Cybersecurity Competition.

I frequently write about the dearth of computer skills in the education system and society at large.  This one from 2017 is a good example.  The article that kicked off that blog post offers a staggeringly dark view of digital fluency not just in Canada but around the world.  We have all become increasingly dependent on computer technology while simultaneously wallowing in ignorance around how it all works.

I think back to how Bits & Bytes influenced a whole generation of Ontarians to take on this emerging technology and think it's time for a reboot.  If we're going to plug our children into networks for their learning and live our lives in digital spaces then we all need to have a basic understanding of how these digital technologies work, or we're inviting abuse and manipulation.  ICT (information and communications technology) is now considered a critical infrastructure by the government of Canada, yet most Canadians are essentially illiterate in it even as they come to depend on it more and more.

If you ever decide to put together a B&B reboot and are looking for people to work on it I'm all in.  TVO's mandate is to transform learning through digital technology, but if we don't understand that technology then we're nothing more than easily manipulated consumers.  Addressing this illiteracy would also raise Ontario's place on an increasingly interconnected world stage.  Bring back Bits & Bytes 21st Century Edition and help educate Ontarians on the technology we're all living our lives through!

Sincerely,

Tim King

Elora, ON

Psychology, Cybersecurity and Collaboration in Educational Technology

We were beta testing Field Effect's state of the art Cyber Range online cybersecurity training system this week in our grade 10 TEJ introduction to computer technology course.  Our skill levels in that open class range from two students who are top ten in Canada in the CyberTitan student cybersecurity competition in their respective disciplines, to students who have never owned a personal computer at home because their parents thought a series of gaming consoles would adequately prepare them for life in the Twenty-First Century.

The challenges of keeping students with such diverse skillsets engaged in a single classroom aside, I'd agreed to beta-test this software because it offers a way past one of the biggest blocks to schools entering the Cyberpatriot/CyberTitan competition.  To participate in the competition you need a desktop or powerful enough laptop computer being run by an operating system that can do more than just browse webpages through a single corporation's lens.  Virtual machines are whole computers that can be simulated in a single window, and they offer a valuable tool in examining cybersecurity issues without putting your school network or computers in peril (installing a virus to see what it does on a school computer would produce obvious headaches).  If things go wrong in a virtual machine you just shut the window.

The Field Effect remote software ran fantastically well on our DIY student built classroom desktops and would work equally well on something as simple as a Chromebook,though trying to do this through a single, tiny 1366 pixel wide monitor would be a headache.

Once we got everything up and running I reminded students that they were manipulating a remote, virtual computer stored on a server in Ottawa.  When you're aware of what's happening behind the screen, seeing what we can do on networks with enough bandwidth, like the one we now have at school, is mind blowing.

The cybersecurity gurus at Field Effect didn't muck about when they set up this virtual online image.  When you first boot up the compromised Windows 10 image you're met with a full screen warning with flashing lights and a locked screen telling you that you've been ransomwared.

Even though students had been repeatedly prepared for this and I'd explained what a virtual machine was and how whatever happens in it doesn't hurt anything, this threw half of them into a panic.  The responses ranged from randomly mashing buttons to giving up, sitting back and loudly commenting on how stupid everything was.  That's in an optional course full of students who have demonstrated an interest and willingness to learn computer technology.  The vast majority of students (and staff) in education don't get nearly that much training, yet they're all still increasingly depended on digital technology in every class they're in.

The psychology of the attack was interesting.  The flashing warnings and countdown timer did what it was supposed to do with anyone lacking in digital skills (which is a startlingly large number of people in Canada in 2020).  Cybercriminals depend on this technical illiteracy.  My CyberTitans and many of the other digitally savvy kids in the room right clicked on the flashing screen and exited 'full screen' mode, which brought them back to a desktop, which some then got lost in:

This 'geek prank' fake WindowsXP desktop was also on 'full screen' behind the ransomware fullscreen warning, but even when others showed students trapped by the ransomware screen the same F11/exit full screen way out of it, many had already succumbed to frustration and had given up (again).  Several spent long minutes in the fake XP desktop trying to do things even when it said 'fake XP simulator' right on the screen.  Being unresponsive to what a computer is telling you when things aren't working right is a common response in weak users.

The digitally skilled CyberTitans were past the two blocks in seconds and were figuring out how to secure this hacked Windows 10 laptop and restore control for the proper user on it.  More than 70% of the class were stuck in two hacks that were so easily resolved that I was left wondering how we could back things up and restore their mangled pride.  Many of them, only a few days before, had done "my-experience-with-technology" presentations where they'd described themselves as digitally savvy, on Thursday morning this was in tatters.

The actual work of a cybersecurity operator in a case like this is not just to return things to normal but also to diagnose and identify the attack vector.  In an administrative user account that shouldn't have been on the machine there were files and instructions for how to run the malware, and even some background in downloads and browser histories that explained why this other employee had done what they did, but many of the students - including the quick movers, quickly deleted the evidence instead of forensically examining it.

This brought up the opportunity to talk about how much of what information security professionals do in our very networked world is more like a detective than a traffic cop.  It isn't just a matter of making sure every user complies with expectations, it's also vital to understand how the system was compromised because this will guide future security defensive settings.  It's things like this that have me wondering why there are no cybersecurity courses running in any Ontario high school, or no mention of cybersecurity in Ontario computer technology curriculum.  Any mention of security in the curriculum is rooted in 20th Century ideas of passwords or at best wifi encryption, the world has moved on.  The cloud-based networked world we're all leveraging in every classroom in Ontario goes unmentioned.

Once we got past the opening chaos, many students got into the detail work of repairing settings deep inside Windows, restoring control to the correct user and locking down firewalls that the ransomware had opened up.  If this all sounds greek to you it shouldn't, you're using all those things right now to read this.  And you and your students are using them every time you have them login to a cloud based service.  We're all offering an 'attack surface' to cybercriminals whenever we go into the cloud, but pretty much everyone is blissfully unaware of it.  People (users) are part of that cyberattack surface.  Not addressing cyber-illiteracy means you've just opened up opportunities for bad actors.

The problem then became all the wounded male pride in the room.  The students who struggled and gave up were also the ones who adamantly refused to get up and collaborate with the other people in our mono-gendered morning cohort.  Fragile male pride means you can't be asking for help - or collaborating, especially in a subject where you've convinced yourself you're an expert.  The more gender balanced afternoon cohort was constantly communicating and hive-minded their way through the infected image so effectively that most of them actually finished it with a perfect score.

The opening hacks were a source of laughter rather than long faces in the afternoon group.  The lack of collaboration in the morning cohort and then the negativity that descended was something I'm thinking about as we proceed into our violently crushed quadmester.  I've encouraged collaboration in face to face computer tech classes as no one works alone in modern tech jobs, yet the boys seem at a distinct advantage when it comes to creating or engaging in collaborative work, though even a small population of girls changes this dynamic.

This is an even bigger problem in my conservative country school where girls are peer and system pressured out of taking technology courses.  I'm lucky to have 10% female participation in my junior computer technology courses.  In senior courses we're lucky to have a single girl in any of the classes of up to thirty-one students.  The is problematic beyond our classroom.  Women are least engaged in engineering and computer science where the most lucrative careers currently are.

At the end of the day many students got their first glimpse into cybersecurity and a number of them are curious, which is good because we need to open up this pathway to students.  My original intent in giving this a try was to give students an opportunity to demonstrate their technical skills, but a surprisingly large chunk of the class, including students I thought would dig through it more effectively, were startlingly quick to give up and get pwned by some pretty simple hacks.  This is making me wonder how Ontario students are doing in our half elearning face to face and fully remote learning courses during this pandemic.  I fear our level of technical fluency is so shallow that unless online teachers are all doing simplistic, repetitive tasks that require no actual digital fluency, they and their students are unable to effectively engage.  This goes a long way to explain poor online engagement.

From the latest attempt to encourage Ontario
Educators to integrate cybersecurity into their
practice, especially if they're putting children
on hackable online devices.

I realize that cybersecurity scares the daylights out of most people (I've spent the past 3 years trying to engage Ontario educators in it to poor effect), but if we're going to be putting more and more of our education system into digital spaces then we're all responsible for raising digital fluency to the point where everyone can demonstrate resiliency in the face of unexpected outcomes.  At the moment, throwing up your hands in the air and giving up seems to be the solution for too many people.  Hopefully things like ICTC's work with Field Effect will help spread a deeper and more resilient tool for improving cyber-fluency.  Everyone working in the cloud needs this.

Surveillance Capitalism and Educational Technology

I'm currently finishing Matt Crawford's third book, Why We Drive.  His first book, Shop Class As Soulcraft arrived just when I was transitioning out of years of academic classrooms into technology teaching and it helped me reframe my understanding of my manual skills that are generally seen  as less-than by the education system I work in.

Why We Drive looks at how we're automating human agency under the veil of safety, ease of use and efficiency.  But in examining the work of the technology companies providing this technology, Crawford ends up uncovering a nasty new version of voracious surveillance capitalism at work in the background.

In an education system that can't get into bed with the masters of surveillance capitalism quickly enough (we're a 'Google Board' full of 'Google Teachers'), this makes for particularly uncomfortable reading.  Crawford makes persuasive, well researched arguments for why we shouldn't be leaping into Google's brave new world.  Meanwhile I'm watching public education indoctrinate children into feeding the cult of Google.

Crawford comes at this from the point of view of driving because Google and the other attention merchants are very excited about moving us to driverless cars in the near future, and Crawford is skeptical about their motivations for doing this.  From Shop Class As Soul Craft to The World Beyond Your Head and now in Why We Drive, Crawford has always advocated for human agency over automation, especially when that automation is designed to simplify and ease life to the point where it's obvious we're heading for a Wall-E like future of indolent incompetence in the caring embrace of an all-powerful corporation.

Situated intelligence is a recurring theme in Crawford's thinking and he sees it as one of the pinnacles of human achievement.  He makes strong arguments for why surveillance capitalists aren't remotely interested in human agency and the situated intelligence it leads to, and he fears that this will ultimately damage human capacity.  Among the many examples he gives is that of London taxi drivers:

Google isn't the only target in this book.  Tesla's misleading manipulation of crash data in self driving cars and Uber's manipulation of markets using its capitalization to dismantle existing industries that were providing a service within market forces are also targets.  Uber and Tesla's goals align with feeding the Google engine more human experience (that's where the money is), though this is often hidden behind marketing around safety, ease of use and efficiency closely tied to unarguable issues like climate change .  The quote above describes the difference between a London cabbie who has to commit to years of 'deep cognitive accomplishment' in order to become a driver in the city.  Uber's thinly veiled attack on an otherwise viable career by using untrained, underpaid and ultimately disposable drivers to break that livelihood before replacing them with automation is damning.  What 'tech' companies say seldom aligns with what they do.

'Free' means something different in surveillance
capitalism.  Note the accessibility and simplicity,
a common idea in edtech marketing, because
learning digital tools doesn't mean understanding
them, it means learning to consume on them.

I can't help but see parallels with educational technology.  We recently had another technology committee meeting where it was decided that once again we would buy hundreds of Google Chromebooks: "simple yet powerful devices with built-in accessibility and security features to deepen classroom connections and keep user information safe"   Notice the hard sell on safety and security, like something out of Tesla and Uber's misinformation marketing plans.  The reason your student data is safe is because Google is very protective of 'its' data, and make no mistake, once you're in Google's ecosystem, your data IS their data.

These plug in to our 'walled garden' of Google Education products that keep iterating to do more and more for students and staff until they're sending emails no human wrote and generating digital media automatically, all while saving every aspect of user input.  Board IT and myself argued for a diversity of technology in order to meet more advanced digital learning needs, but advanced digital learning isn't what we're about, even though we're a school.  Digital tools now mean ease of use and cost savings (though this is questionable), they are no longer a tool for learning as they increasingly do the work for us.

As Crawford suggests, the intention of these tools is ultimately to automate our actions and direct us towards a purchase.  That fact that we're dropping millions of dollars in public funding at best familiarizing students with their future consumer relationship with technology is astonishing.  As big tech gains access to increasingly personal information, like your geographic location, patterns of movement and even how you ergonomically interact with a machine, personal data gets harder to anonymize.  The push is to get into all aspects of life in order to collect data that will serve the core business... 

Crawford offers example after example of technology companies that offer ease of use and accessibility under the unassailable blanket of safety, ease of use and efficiency.  This too has crept into education technology, where instead of taking personal responsibility for our use of technology we surrender that critical effort to the inscrutable powers that be.  One of the intentions of the new normal is to produce people that do not question authority because a remote, cloud based authority is unquestionable.

From Shop Class forward Crawford has been critical of the 'peculiarly chancy and fluid' character of management thinking, which also falls easily into the safety/automation argument being provided by the richest multi-nationals in the world.  That system managers fit in well with system think shouldn't be a surprise, but for anyone left in the education system who is still trying to focus on developing situated intelligence, it's a completely contrary and damaging evolution.  I shouldn't be surprised that the people running things want to cut out the complexity in favour of safety and ease of use (even if that isn't what's really being offered), but any teacher thus focused has lost the plot.

Google and the rest don't 'give' software to education any more than they 'give' software to the general public.  All of their instruments 'serve its core business of advertising'.  Andrew Campbell has long had an eye on this, not that any critical analysis has stopped Ontario's educational management from hopping into bed with Google and the rest as quickly as it can.

And how do you automate people?  Get them in the system as soon as possible and make it familiar.  Forcing children to learn corporation specific tools instead of offering them platform agnostic access to educational technology is a good starting point.

There are still questions around how student data is used by Google. Crawford highlights how location data can't be anonymized (it's like a finger print and very individually specific), so even if your corporate overlord isn't putting a name on a data set, they can still tell whose data it is.  Location data is a very rich vein of personal information to tap if you're an advertising company, which is why Google is interested in developing self-driving cars and getting everyone into convenient maps.  Unless you're feeding their data gathering system they don't lift a finger.

Towards the end of the book Crawford leans heavily on Shoshana Zuboff's (Harvard Business School Professor Emeritus in case you're questioning the validity of this research)  Surveillance Capitalism, which came out in 2019.   Zuboff makes multiple appearances in Netflix's The Social Dilemma, which explains how surveillance capitalism has developed as a cancer immune to society's protective processes because it goes after something that has no legal protections:  our digital/cloud based data.  As an economic weapon, a US law from the late nineties that absolved social media companies from responsibility for what appears on their sites under the name of 'internet freedom' has done untold damage around the world.

Crawford goes so far as to describe this as a new kind of colonialism that we're all under the yoke of, but passive analysis isn't the end goal.  He shows experiments like Pokemon Go (created by Google) as a test in active manipulation.  The goal isn't to create a new level of advertisement based on predictive algorithms, it's to build an adaptive system that can sublty manipulate user responses without them even realizing it.  In doing so he also explains why so many people are feeling so disenfranchised and are making otherwise inexplicable, populist political decisions:

Google's mapping projects are situated in colonialist intent (empires make maps in order to control remote regions).  By mapping the world and giving everyone easy access to everywhere, local knowledge becomes worthless and a remote standard of control becomes a possibility.  Smart cities are shown in this light.  The language around all 'smart' initiatives from edtech to smart cities all follow the same ease of use/efficiency/safety/organizational marketing language.  This language is unassailable (are you saying you don't want efficiency, safety, ease of use and organisation?)  This thinking is so ubiquitous that even trying to think beyond it is becoming impossible.  Though tech-marketing suggests that ease/efficiency/safety is the intent, the actual point is data collection to feed emerging markets of predictive and influencer marketing; digital marketing is Big Brother.  Orwell was right, but he couldn't imagine a greater power than centralized government in the Twentieth Century.  The Twenty-First Century produced the first world governments, but they are corporations driven by technology enabled mass data gathering that are neither by nor for the people.

There is no way out of the endless cage Google is constructing.  Self-driving cars and driving itself are the mechanism by which Crawford uncovers an unflattering and insidious form of capitalism that has already damaged our political landscape and looks set to damage human agency for decades to come under the guise of safety, efficiency, ease of use and security.

Any criticism of this is in violation of the cartel that supports and is supported by it and results in a sense of alienation that leads to anger and populist resentment.  Governments, including public education, can't tap into this 'free' technology fast enough, but of course it isn't free at all, and what we're giving up in the pursuit of easy, efficient and safe is at odds with the freedom of action it takes from us.

I've long held that understanding technology allows you to author it instead of it authoring you.  In the detailed Guardian surveillance capitalism article by John Naughton, Zuboff makes a point of stating that digital communications are not inherently monopolistic in intent which is something Matt hasn't done in Why We Drive (I get the sense that he doesn't like digital technology in any capacity):

"While it is impossible to imagine surveillance capitalism without the digital, it is easy to imagine the digital without surveillance capitalism. The point cannot be emphasised enough: surveillance capitalism is not technology. Digital technologies can take many forms and have many effects, depending upon the social and economic logics that bring them to life. Surveillance capitalism relies on algorithms and sensors, machine intelligence and platforms, but it is not the same as any of those."

There was a time when digital technology wasn't being driven by advertising.  The early internet wasn't the orderly, safe and sanitized place it is becoming, but it was a powerful change in how we worked together as a species.  I don't know that I buy in to all of Matt's arguments in Why We Drive, but his fundamental belief that we should be using technology to enhance human ability rather than replacing it is something I can't help but agree with, and any teacher focused on pedagogy should feel the same way.

Why We Drive is the latest in a series of books and media that is, after years of political and psychological abuse, looking to provide society with a white blood cell response to surveillance capitalism.  Rather than taking some of the most powerful technology we've ever created and aiming it at making a few psychopaths rich while enfeebling everyone else, my great hope is that our understanding of this nasty process will give us the ability to take back control of digital technologies and develop them as tools to enhance human capabilities instead.  We need to do that sooner than later because the next century is going to decide the viability of the human race for the long term and we need to get past this greed and short sightedness in order to focus on the bigger problems that face us.  We could start in education by taking back responsibility for how we use and teach our children about digital technologies.

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I've long been raging against the corporate invasion of educational technology: