Competitive Urges: Skills Canada National Finals in Edmonton, 2018

I've hesitated to post this because I get the sense that competition is generally sneered upon in Ontario classrooms these days.  With earnest people saying everyone is a genius and anyone with the urge to pick up a tool is a craftsperson, something like Skills Canada might seem like a cruel and unusual way to show that as obviously incorrect.

I've always had a competitive streak and think there is real value in both winning and losing, but losing really bothers me (hence, competitive streak).  This was written on a long flight back from Edmonton as I struggled with failure.  Contrary to popular belief, I consider this to be a good thing.

Can you feel the heat?  Skills Canada Nationals is a pressure cooker of excellence!

I was in a foul mood when I started writing this, but by the end I'd thought my way out of the frustration, which is the most I can ask from a reflection...

I’m at a loss to explain how we can be so dominant in provincial competition and then fumble Nationals.  Two times now we’ve taken the time and expense to come out to Skills Canada Nationals and have come up short.  In the latest case I could not have possibly arranged things any better.  From coop to employment opportunities to multiple in-class opportunities and supports, my current candidate had every tool possibly on hand to achieve success, but we haven’t.  This is the worst possible time to ask me (on the plane, flying home, empty handed), but I’m feeling tired, frustrated and struggling to understand why I’d go through this again.

4am wake up for a 10am departure - moving hundreds of
people, many of them with hundreds of pounds of tools
is a logistical challenge.

A consistent issue with leaving our small town to come to nationals is circumstantial.  In our first go around, the social pressure around missing high school prom proved such a distraction that my candidate arrived with a pocket full of angry texts and little chance to focus on preparing for the coming battle.  In this year's case, a sports injury in a pointless local game the week before the competition led to a week away in wheelchairs and on crutches.  In both cases small town life conspired to produce the kind of static that knocked capable technicians off a medal.   But maybe there is more to it than that.

I don’t think the competition is particularly technically challenging.  There is nothing asked that my competitors aren’t directed to and encouraged to get a handle on.  This has worked so well provincially that we’ve medalled the past three years (two golds and a bronze), but at Nationals both times the wheels have fallen off the cart.  That we can do so differently at two near identical competitions suggests that our issue is psychological, not technical.

Team Ontario is a monster!

So, what about Nationals is so overwhelming?  The assumption (I think) is that Nationals will be next level, but Ontario provincials have many more competitors from many more schools.  Getting out of Ontario is by far the most difficult part, and we’ve managed it twice.  The people we face at Nationals aren’t IT unicorns; they’re kids, all with less experience in competition.  In some cases they only had to show up to get to Nationals because there were barely any provincial competitors.   I’d assumed that our previous ‘blind’ Nationals experience (where we placed 4th anyway), had prepared us for this one.  My candidate was more experienced, more focused (barring sports injuries and school plays) and had been given many more opportunities to develop their IT skills than our first go around, yet subjectively we’ve underachieved.  Our best hope now, prior to knowing the scoring, is a tie with our last attempt, but I fear that might be too much to hope for.

Got the kit...

Last year we blew provincials and didn’t go through.  I lay the blame for that entirely at my own feet.  The change to a Toronto based venue meant a cruel and unusual commute that made us exhausted and late; we didn’t have a hope of peak performing (yet we still managed a medal).  This year we did back flips arranging hotels and finding ways to minimize the financial burden on our competitors in order to ensure our best shot, and that worked.  Leading up to Nationals I made sure everything was taken care of and any possible need was filled prior to sitting down to compete.

Expectations are perhaps the killer here.  Our first time around I took Nationals to be a reconnaissance.  We’d already over achieved to such a degree at Provincials that I was just happy to be there.  Sure, a medal would have been nice, but understanding the contest was my real goal.  That we came so close to getting a medal had me convinced we were moving in the right direction.  This time around my previous champion gave a detailed rundown of what to expect on Nationals and we didn’t go in blind, yet we have failed to capitalize on that information.  This could mean it was bad information, but I doubt that.  It could also mean we simply didn’t make the time to make use of that information because my two competitors have an unhealthy competitiveness between them.   We have underperformed, yet the competition was described as too easy, and we knew what was coming.  How are we bottom half?  With the medal ceremony behind us, I’m left wondering where we are, and, as a coach, I don’t like the feeling - the lack of understanding feels like a failure on my part.

This might sound like whinging or poor sportsmanship, but I didn’t spend all the time and money and stress to not place again.  This isn’t even a case of gold or die, just knowing we were there or thereabouts would have met my expectations; I don’t think that’s an absurdly challenging goal.  If we didn't want to be competitive, why did we compete?

Pre-contest huddle.

One of the more surprising aspects of this trip was just how different my competitor was.  On our first go I had what looked like an Eastern European rock star who had the swagger to go with it.  He had the technical chops, but his cockiness also meant he’d tackle problems aggressively and with some verve; he wasn’t intimidated by anyone or anything.  I suspect that fourth place finish was as much the result of that fearlessness as it was his technical skill.

This time around I had an anxious perfectionist who I couldn’t read very well and (I fear) I didn’t coach as effectively as I could have.  Maybe, in this case, a less acerbic approach might have served us better, but my approach to coaching and teaching has always been to encourage an independent and experiential approach to the challenges of technology.  I give students the gears if they make a silly mistake, but never penalize them for it.  The ones who stick around end up resilient, self-aware and technically superior.  I don’t baby students and hand them answers, I’d rather see them struggle to a solution themselves.  The result is a technician who might not know all the answers, but damn well knows how to find them.

Like herding cats...

Except at Nationals.

This time around I had a university bound, academically strong student for whom this was just one of many feathers in his hat.  This is his second national final in an ICT related field in as many weeks.  At the CyberTitan National Competition, on our first go at it, we placed as high as I’d hoped we would and that trip was (I think) a great success.  My expectations here were actually similar this week, to finish in the top half, but we’ve failed to do that.  There were only 7 competitors in the national IT & Networking final – three provinces and all the territories failed to produce candidates who could meet national standards – so finishing in the top half would have meant a medal.

My first national finalist was a college bound kid who had been on the verge of failing in the years before and found his way out of that mess though finding his genius in info-tech.  He ended up going to college for IT and considers his Skills experience a vital piece of his career (as he should).  I never once heard my first champion say, ‘it’s just IT’ when someone asked him what competition he was in, but I heard that too many times this week.  Downplaying the field of study (I fear) when competing at the national level in it was a reflection of the doubt that plagued this medal run.  At one point I heard, "I don't understand why I'm here with all these people" (meaning experts in their skilled trade).  I thought it might have been false modesty, but it in retrospect it was doubt, which is a disaster when you're in a pressure cooker like Skills Nationals.  Maybe I should have identified that and talked about it earlier, but if years of straight ‘A’s in computer and software technology courses, multiple provincial medals, full time summer employment as a  network technician, a top five finish in the related cybersecurity contest nationally, detailed notes from all the competitors who came before and a coop in IT wasn’t enough to instill some confidence, I fear nothing will.  I don’t think this result was a deficit of technical skill.

Watching mastery across such a wide range of skills
never gets old.  If you get a chance, go to Skills Nationals.

This year in electronics we took a giant step backwards, to the point of me wondering if we were ever moving in the right direction.  My competitor was crushed by our poor result and this prompted me to chase down her judges and request some clarification on our results.  She'd actually ended up in the medals on the two toughest categories (building circuits), which helped restore some confidence.  Then we got clarification on what we missed, which has shed such a bright light on what we need to do that I can’t believe we won’t be contenders next year.  Her response to all of this was stubborn anger.  I can work with that.  One of the judges encouraged her to hang in there saying, 'it’s the failures that toughen you up and eventually make you a champion.'  It’s that kind of thing that makes me want to do the hours and hours of volunteer work it takes to build up to winning provincials again and perhaps going through another exhausting and potentially hope crushing week at nationals.

Maybe one of the things I need to be doing when I’m looking for candidates to take on this overwhelming challenge is to look for the tenacious scrappers who can’t, won’t and don’t stop.  Maybe that was missing this year.  A student following in his brother’s footsteps for whom things had fallen into place, winning medals even when he claims the whole thing was a disaster was suddenly doubtful of his place in the competition.  I don’t know what to do with that.  Maybe that judge is right – it’s overcoming the setbacks that make you commit to the competition and fight with conviction.  Win or lose, if we left everything on the competition floor I’d be happy with the result, but something stopped us from doing that this time.  Perhaps it was the injury, perhaps it was nerves, perhaps I'm just the wrong coach for a this particular student, which is a shame for us both.

I didn’t do well in school.  You can count the number of ‘A’s I got on one hand.  Things generally have never come easily to me, I have had to fight for them.  I dropped out of college, out of an apprenticeship and struggled to get into and through University.  I’m good at many things, but I don’t think I’ve ever been a natural at anything.  The things I’m good at are the result of determination and stubborn disregard for failure.  It’s that kind of tenacious student that I’m best able to help because I can identify with them.  I find the honour roll perfectionists alien and don’t always know how to work with them to bring out their best.  Perhaps the best thing I could have done here was to send another teacher instead.  If I could go back and rerun this week over and over again Groundhog Day style, that would be one of the variations I’d try.

I’m most effective helping the stubborn, scrappy student I have much more in common with attain their mastery than I am trying to aim an honour roll kid at gold.  Those scrappy students also play to my love of underdogs.  As I said earlier, perhaps expectations are what make this so difficult to take.  This time I thought I'd brought a howitzer to a knife fight.  As fixated as I am in this moment on failing to medal again, in less fraught moments I’m more about a good struggle than I am about winning – but it’d sure be nice, just once, to sit on this long road home with something tangible to show for it.

***

A week after we got back we had an interview with the local paper.  When asked what I thought something like Skills Canada does for a student I immediately went to the degree of resilience it develops.  I truly believe that competition is good for us all, and that competition has to involve winning and losing.

At the opening ceremony the MC asked the audience of hundreds of competitors who was going to win a medal, they all started cheering - the unspoken disappointment was left hanging in the air, you can't all be winners.  More people come home disappointed after Skills Nationals than satisfied.  That's no bad thing.

My goal as a coach is to find ways to help competitors put their best foot forward.  This year has taught me a lot about how I can better do that.

Next Steps after Attending the CyberTitan Nationals

I just got back from the Canadian National cyber-security finals in Fredericton, NB. This was the first national championships in cybersec and it piggy backs on the the US/worldwide cyber-security contest called Cyberpatriot. Canada, and especially Ontario, is late to this party, but there is still time to catch up.

What got me thinking about cyber-security was an article WIRED did last year on the Russian attack on the Ukraine. Countries are now attacking each other using information technology infrastructure, yet we seem happily oblivious to this in Ontario. New Brunswick entered 10x more schools into this competition than Ontario did - New Brunswick has seven hundred and fifty thousand people in it. NB is also launching a number of provincial initiatives to place them at the front of a rapidly expanding and very under-served industry:
Homepage - CyberNB
Welcome - NBIF - FINB

1st time on a plane, 1st time out of the province for half
our team - they'll never forget this trip.

I'm going to be presenting on our participation in the Canadian CyberTitan arm of the US based Cyberpatriot competition at the OTF PB4Technology conference in August, and again at ECOO in November. If you're curious about how to get into CyberTitan, it runs as separate contests for middle schools and high schools. You do three 6 hour rounds during the school year, and depending on where you finish, you might find yourself on a fully funded trip to New Brunswick for the national finals in 2019.  What you're doing in the competition is searching for malware and exploits and removing them from the systems.  It's ICT technical work crossed with investigation.

You don't need to be techie or have previous experience to get into the competition. It's a small entry price ($200 last year) and you get 10x back in access to Cisco, Microsoft and other content. You also get a really nice set of team shirts, pins and challenge coins (Americans know how to do swag). Your students also get to brag about working off US government servers, because that's where the contest takes place virtually.

Cyber-sec is a field that is in high demand, it's exciting, ever changing and the requirements and pathways to get to it are rapidly evolving and improving. The Canadian Forces are launching a cyber-command that will offer high school graduates equivalent college level training in cyber-ops.

From military to government to industry, this is a rapidly expanding and diversifying field of study that isn't just about comp-sci degrees any more. Considering the fragility of our ICT infrastructure and the number of state and individual threats to it, I'm astonished that we haven't worked towards integrating cyber-security into our curriculum sooner. The US Department of Homeland Security has a great resource on cyber-sec education called NICE: National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education (NICE) | NIST

Hours in and hours to go - engagement was 100% through the whole thing even with technical failures and other frustrations.

Some links:

Links to next year's CyberTitan competition:
Register – CyberTitan – ICTC Canadian Youth Cyber Education Initiative

If you're curious about who the Information and Communication Technology Council of Canada (ICTC) are, you can learn more about them here: https://www.ictc-ctic.ca/about/

From Public Safety Canada: Critical Infrastructure... Critical Infrastructure 

A recent blog post on the competition and our lack of focus on vital, 21st Century infrastructure: Dusty World: Cyber Security and Critical Infrastructure Ignorance

Not covering the skills and knowledge needed to maintain our critical infrastructure in Ontario Classrooms is a glaring oversight (IMO)...

Cyber Security and Critical Infrastructure Ignorance

It's been a crazy week.  It started with Skills Ontario provincial finals in Toronto where we won gold in IT & Networking for the second time in three years, then I attended my first ever Ontario Council of Technology Educators conference on the Friday.  I write this the next Monday evening from a hotel room in beautiful Fredericton, New Brunswick where we're set to compete in the CyberTitan cyber-security National Championships.

With all these powerful events pulling me out of the classroom, I'm enjoying a strategic perspective that I'm usually too busy teaching to consider.  These events are also forcing me to explain to people what information technology, networking and cyber-security are, which is odd, because they all live their lives every day within this information  infrastructure.  How can people be so unaware of something that affects their lives every day?

Canadian Nuclear Labs are
one of the most advanced
research facilities on the
planet - these are their main
priorities...

A strange thing happened at the OCTE tech teacher conference I attended last Friday.  I finally got to meet other computer technology teachers in the province only to learn that many of them appear to be looking to hand off their classrooms to pre-set curriculum like First Robotics.  I can't speak to the effectiveness of First Robotics myself, but the evangelism of the people in it makes me suspicious.  That evangelism was set to such a high volume in this meeting that one teacher declared that IT & Networking is, "a waste of time now...it's so simple that an idiot can do it..."  If that's the case, why is our information technology infrastructure so fragile, and intermittent?  The general public is oblivious to this infrastructure and many teachers of computer technology appear to be grossly ignorant of its complexities and importance.  We're ignoring vital technology infrastructure in the classes we're supposed to be teaching it in!  It has taken me a few days during this wacky week to formulate a response to his comments, but here it is:

There is a lot more to computer technology than plugging your students into a robotics competition, no matter how well intentioned it might be.  What should be at the core of computer technology education (IMHO) is an understanding of how technology empowers and influences our society in the Twenty-First Century.  Nowhere is our ignorance of critical information technology infrastructure more pronounced than it is in cyber-security.

Last year I read WIRED's shocking article on Russia's attack on the Ukraine.  Like much else in cyber-security, most people are oblivious to the fact that nation states are currently attacking each other through information technology infrastructure.  Russia and China both have sizable military organizations dedicated to attacking IT infrastructure.  The Israeli and US cyber militaries have remotely dismantled Iranian nuclear research through digital attacks.  We're living in a brave new world most people have no idea about.

You might think that all this tech is just for entertainment such as social media, but you'd be wrong.  IT has worked its way into everything from our utilities and financial systems to food production and healthcare.  How we secure our information technology isn't just about looking after your personal information while you're wasting time on your phone.  IT is now a vital and targetable infrastructure asset.  Other stories on how social media became weaponized in order to influence elections also highlights our ignorance around how fragile our IT infrastructure is.  I was talking to an elderly relative about our upcoming cyber-security competition on Mother's Day and described it this way:

Ten critical infrastructures that people depend on daily.  See
robots on there anywhere?  CompTech should be about
showing students the vital roles technology plays in our
lives, not just a singular focus on robotics or anything else.

If you want to build a house you would have to go through many safety regulations to build it.  All subsystems in your house would have to conform to standards designed to make them as safe and resilient as possible.  We put these rules in place because we recognize how potentially dangerous just slapping things together in the cheapest way possible by people not professionally qualified to do the work would be.  Having your house plumbed by your cousin's kid who likes playing with water or getting the wiring done by your brother-in-law because he likes wires seems insane, but that's the relationship too many people have with our information technology infrastructure.

Even where professional standards exist, they are often ignored and undervalued (evidently by Ontario computer technology teachers as well as everyone else).  This happens because we don't recognize the dangers of an under-engineered, cobbled together information technology infrastructure.  We're then amazed to learn that Russia can turn off the lights in another country prior to annexing parts of it, or that social media can be engineered to break a democracy.  These things are already happening all around us.

So here I am at the first Canadian Cyber-Security National finals trying to overturn decades of willful ignorance.  New Brunswick seems aware of the urgency of this situation in a way that Ontario does not.  In spite of being a fraction of the size of Ontario's education system, many more NB schools participated in the CyberTitan contest this year, and awareness of the problem seems much stronger here.  

CyberNB does not appear to have an equivalent agency in Ontario that recognizes the urgency and fragility of the situation we've made for ourselves.  Our apathy has resulted in frail information infrastructures that are not up to the task of maintaining our critical social systems, let alone defending us from cyber-attacks by malicious states and individuals.

If I can help ICTC and the other organizers of CyberTitan and the CyberSmarts 2018 conference shed light on this neglected yet increasingly important Twenty-First Century fluency, then this process will have all been worth it; we need to build our ICT house to withstand the storms that are coming.  When we're done here we'll head out to Edmonton in a couple of weeks and go for a National Skills Canada medal in IT & Networking.  Perhaps in the process we can talk about how security should be implicit in that effort.  If this starts to gain traction, could we see a cyber-security Skills Canada competition sooner than later?

Team Falcontech from Centre Wellington District High School at the first annual Canadian Cyber-security national finals in Fredericton.  Two of them hadn't been out of the province or flown before!

Related Links:

https://www.itworldcanada.com/article/ictc-to-spend-3-m-of-cancode-funding-to-bring-business-challenges-into-the-classroom/401092
"Saric is confident that students from a range of backgrounds and of different ages will be able to rise to the challenge of tackling real-world business problems. She points to ICTC’s CyberTitan competitions as proof. These six-hour competitions that take place online, scoring students in real time as they work to secure systems. “They have so many of the tools and many of the skills in their repertoire,” she says. “I’d never underestimate the skills and brilliance of youth.”

https://twitter.com/ICTC_CTIC/status/995007883329921025

https://innotechtoday.com/developing-cyber-future-workforce/

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/cybertitans-nb-1.3934224

Ontario's neglected computer technology curriculum continues to miss the mark:  http://temkblog.blogspot.ca/2018/04/ontario-educations-neglected-computer.html
All we need to do to resolve this is address it!

TWITTER NOTES FROM #CYBERSMART2018:

https://www.nist.gov/itl/applied-cybersecurity/nice

wind storms and sci-fi reflections

I'm watching the new season of my current favourite sci-fi show, The Expanse.  It's about the next couple of centuries where Terrans develop the technology to move out into the solar system, but rather than the Star Trek angle that completely ignores the nastiest aspects of human nature, The Expanse imagines a near future with technology advances but none of the social evolution of the Trek universe - it's a politically messy, self-serving future, much like our present.  It's something I'm starting to think we'll never get to.

I'm also spending the day today putting our yard and house back together after a wind storm swept through here, and that got me thinking about all this technology we're so proud off.  If it gets a bit windy, it all goes away.  After a couple of big gusts yesterday there was no internet and no power.  I was unable to deliver attendance data for my classes at the end of the day, let alone get information on what was happening.

At

We ignore data and facts.

the height of the wind the local cell tower was down, meaning no information or electricity at all.  In the meantime (and when it works), I'm watching the news closely as the competition we're supposed to be travelling to in a couple of weeks in Fredericton is in peril because the city is under water.  We're ever so proud of our vaunted technology, but if it gets windy, or if waters run high, everything stops.  The real irony in this is that our fossil fuel powered society is what's prompting all this extreme weather.  Even our supposedly green tech is manufactured using fossil fuel based manufacturing.  Our technology doesn't allow us to control our environment, it provokes it to attack us.

There is this thing called the Kardashev Scale.  If you're ever wondering about how smart the bi-pedal apes are on the third rock from the sun, this scale will give you some perspective.  A level one society is one that harnesses the resources of an entire planet.  We're not even close to that.  Carl Sagan suggested human society is at about a 0.7 on the way to being able to harness planetary power, but I think that's wildly optimistic.  Our technology isn't on its way to managing planetary processes, in many cases it's prompting the planetary environment to violence - it's the opposite of control.  There are some cases of sustainable (ie: non-aggravating) human technology, but since we base most of what we produce on fossil fuels and unsustainable manufacturing, it's hard to say much of any of our technology is actually on its way to sustainable global resource management.  Our stubborn unwillingness to orientate ourselves in that direction is the problem, not our intelligence or technical capability.

When you get up into level 2 your society can manage the energy of an entire solar system.  We're millennia away from that even assuming we pivoted today and actually worked toward sustainable global management that would allow us to thrive as a civilization long enough to develop it.  The way we're currently going, we'll probably cause global environmental upheaval before we're likely to establish a foothold in space (by that I mean permanent human habitation off-world, we haven't even done that yet).  The environmental problems we cause now will eventually produce resource depletion that will result in war.  We love a good war to cap off our own bad habits.  Level 3 (effective galactic resource management and level 4 (universal/pan dimensional resource management) are so far beyond our short sighted, barely evolved minds that they beggar belief.

Meanwhile, here I am about to nail unsustainably manufactured aluminum siding back on to my wood framed house that was built with unsustainable lumber.  We have more in common with squirrels building nests than we do with even a level one civilization, except what the squirrels build isn't burning a hole in the world.  They're closer to a level one civilization than we are.  All the other unsustainably built, fossil fuel powered houses in my neighborhood are also missing bits and pieces.  Shortly crews of people will arrive in gas powered trucks to fix these problems.  That very process will further heat up the only world we're capable of living on at the moment, making future weather violence even more inevitable.  We'll be lucky to get out into the expanse at all.

Wind storm freak you out?  Don't worry, it'll be back to business as usual on Monday...

nosce aspie te ipsum

This past week I was taking first aid (again).  I've been first aid qualified since I first did it in air cadets thirty three years ago and needed to be current to take my cyber-security team to the national finals in New Brunswick next month.  As we were wrapping up the course our first aid instructor shared a Will Smith video about surrounding yourself with good people:

It's a good piece of advice from a talented fellow who has made a lot of conscious decisions to nurture and grow opportunities across many genres; you'd think this is good advice that would apply to everyone, but for a lot of people building this kind of social network is nearly impossible.

I've been reviewing various situations that have happened to me through an aspie lens.  It does a lot to explain why I've run into the problems I have.  Knowing myself in this way earlier might have helped me understand why I was doing what I was doing and might have led to different outcomes.  Being aware of a diagnosis would also have helped others understand why I'm not acting in a way they consider normal.

Back in air cadets I went for my pilot's license.  I did well at the training, commuting for the better part of three hours every Saturday to get myself down to where we met at the opposite end of Mississauga; commitment wasn't a problem.  I ended up missing a single meeting due to a work conflict and even though I communicated this, the guy in charge took the opportunity to drop me from the application for the summer flying scholarship course, even though I had the highest score in powered flight that year.  I ended up despondent and frustrated by the process, hundreds of hours of volunteer effort disappeared in a moment.

That situation ended up ratcheting up an already awkward relationship with that officer and did much to prevent me from advancing through the ranks.  In an organization I'd spent thousands of hours volunteering for, and one that I thought might lead me into a career, I ended up peripheral and bitter.  As I got older I began taking opportunities to sabotage situations and undermine the command structure.  I didn't do this out of a maliciousness, I did it out of a sense of disenfranchisement.  I was capable, I was dedicated and I was keen but I was dismissed as a kid they neither liked nor trusted because I didn't fit into the hierarchy and act like everyone else.

In school at about the same time I was hanging out with a bunch of kids who started to get into teen-related nonsense, from smoking to drugs and other darker experiments.  Rather than value emotional connections with people over the nonsense, as everyone else did, I simply walked away.  This wasn't easy, and I was lonely, but it wasn't in my nature to prioritize friendships first and follow those guys down the rabbit hole.

That approach to things has always made me socially peripheral even though I played team sports throughout my childhood.  In many cases I played isolated positions like goalie that further limited my ability to interact with team mates, but then that was never the point of playing for me, as it was with pretty much everyone else.  As an adult, I couldn't hang on to hockey because so many adult teams are friendship based and I was never good at prioritizing that aspect of the game.  The mandatory after game beers in any sport seemed like an awkward social moment, but for many of the guys there it was the point of coming out.

In university I managed to alienate a professor I thought was one of the best I'd ever had.  He got us to aggressively question the foundations of what we were doing, but in a case of Aspergers gone too far, I ended up questioning the group think he had generated in the class room and in doing so once again made myself a pariah. I'm a perennially bad joiner.

At work I've run into similar problems.  When I moved out of the city and up to a rural small town school I immediately ran into complications.  Being a big, white guy, you'd think the all white, all Canadian, mono-cultural class I suddenly found myself in would have felt more comfortable than the multi-cultural classes I'd just left, but the opposite was true.  In the previous multi-cultural environment, everyone tended to fall back on a more rational approach to interaction because cultural norms couldn't be assumed, but in a mono-cultural, rural classroom all sorts of really offensive (to only me apparently) norms were accepted.  Students would use terms like, "he jewed me out of five bucks", and drop the 'n' word in class like a  password.  They were doing this to confirm cultural conformity with each other.  It made them feel secure and meant they all believed similar things, it drove me around the bend.

I ended up showing this senior English class the Canadian-written academy award winning film Crash, as a way to make them question their overt racism and discriminatory thinking.  It's a challenging film, but then that was kind of the point.  It put an end to kids talking like that in my class, but it also got me removed from the school.

Once again, I'd failed to adopt social norms and conform to group-think and instead went after a moral absolute.  People really don't like that.  What people like is when you reinforce their prejudices and act like they expect you to.  In this case, one of the students in the class was the daughter of a local church leader and he decided this would be an excellent excuse for a good old fashioned witch-hunt.  I got moved out of there by the school board before things got sillier.  I'm sure nothing has changed up there and everyone is still more than happy being racist red necks - and this is precisely my problem.

When our teacher's union lost the plot I couldn't help but make a stand based on principle rather than supporting the people in the organization no matter what.  I'm a staunch believer in unionism - left to their own devices, the rich would happily disenfranchise everyone and return us to the middle ages.  An argument could be made that I should have supported the union at all costs considering this ever-present threat to the middle class, but I don't think that way.  When the union broke its own rules around fair voting practices and forced an illegal contract on our members, I fought it tooth and nail.  No one had to strike and members got a contract (albeit an illegal one that has since cost tax payers millions), shouldn't I have encouraged that?  I could have complied and ingratiated myself to the powers that be and found myself rising up the hierarchy, but not doing that is precisely my problem.  Rising up hierarchies depends on conformity of thought and valuing relationships before principles.  This is the single reason why I don't pursue leadership positions.

Back to Will Smith's advice.  I've always found it hard to make friends, let alone find supporters who will stoke my fire, though I've never lacked for flames.  I'm driven and capable, but I find it impossible to put social expectation above rational and moral consideration.  An inability to do that means I never develop the deep levels of trust that other people lean on in their careers.

Yesterday at PD we were looking at White Ribbon scenarios but they all seemed absurd to me.  Cases where teen age boys agree to isolate drunk girls to take advantage of them?  Evidently it's a thing now in Toronto where groups of high school boys are convincing girls to perform sex acts for money.  If that's what neuro-typical, socially focused people end up doing with those tight networks they develop, then I'm glad it's beyond me, but then so is Will's empowering social network.

Of course, there are precedents for aspies building great success, but in a lot of cases they don't do it with a supportive social network, they do it through sheer malicious will.  I tend to fixate on creative and technical challenges, people domination isn't in my wheelhouse.  Most business-successful aspies are fixated on that kind of dominance.

Finding collaborators with complimentary skills sets is a way around this impasse.  The problem for an aspie is that the people who tend to be very good at social discourse find our lack of it trying and don't associate with us.  In many cases, those are precisely the people who have attacked me socially.  It has been the rare socially skilled person who has been able to see past my lack of tact and recognize what lies beneath.  Finding a leader who stokes my fire rather than pouring water on my inabilities is a rarity.  I long to find people worthy of being loyal to, but they are vanishingly rare.  When I do find people like that I'm the staunchest ally imaginable, as long as we're fighting the good fight.

Looking for people to fan your flames is a difficult proposition at the best of times.  Without the deep at-all-costs social ties most people leverage, the aspie is left depending entirely on their technical skills to get anywhere.  Most people factor in trust when making hiring and promotional decisions.  That trust is usually based on their sense of how loyal a person is to them.  In almost any management decision this emotional bias means the aspie loses out to nepotism - something that has happened throughout my life:  don't expect fair or skills based promotion, expect nepotism.  In a world where who you know always takes you further than what you know, this is perhaps the single largest disadvantage this aspie has faced.

NOTES:
Asperger's inside the ASD spectrum: high functioning autism without specific titles.
A survival guide for people with Aspbergers
ASD and aging: peaks and valleys of youth and old age
Zuckerberg: coping with Aspbergers
ASD as flavour:  this kind of thinking gives me hope that my son won't suffer the same prejudices that I have - perhaps he'll even be given a chance to take Will's advice and build that empowering social network.
A great piece of ASD media:  Roman J. Isreal Esq...

The dreaded online personality test:

FITC: The Pitch

Dear Industry & post-secondary VR/AR Interested People,

I'm at the last day of my first FITC Conference.  I'm buzzing from talks on emerging technologies, inspirational stories of artists thriving in a complex and rapidly evolving time and futurists shedding light on what is coming next.  That last bit is the focus of this post.  

I have a number of current students and recent grads with a great deal of experience in VR, AR and the coming media evolution, and we're all eager to find people to COLLABORATE with!  

If you're in the creative industry and are interested in VR & AR but don't have much technical experience, we'd LOVE to talk to you.  If you're developing VR ready software or hardware and want to talk to us, we'd be over the moon.  If you're in Ontario post-secondary and are starting up VR/AR focused technology courses, my students are your future students and we'd love to work with you.

Sincerely,
Tim King
CWDHS Computer Technology


Here is our VR CV in glorious detail:



In 2016 the computer technology department I run at our local high school was given the opportunity by our board to explore the newly released consumer virtual reality headsets.  My background is in visual art and information technology, and my interest was in getting this visually demanding tech to work.  I'd be lying if I didn't say I also had dreams of Sword Art Online being imminent.


We purchased one of the first HTC Vives to drop in Canada and proceeded to build a PC that could run it.  Over two years ago we had working, fully interactive VR in our lab.  That summer I got put in touch with Foundry10, a Seattle based tech-in-education research group, and they helped us get into our second VR headset.  So that we could be platform agnostic we went with the Oculus Rift.

Since then we have introduced hundreds of students in our board to virtual reality.  We have done multiple grade eight technology fairs and elementary school weekend tech-days demonstrating VR to teachers, parents and students.  We're a deft hand at remote setup and breakdown now.  It never gets old watching people get floored by their first immersive VR experience.  We don't do it with phone based passive systems.  When we introduce VR our users have hands and full interactivity.

Starting last year we began building VR ready computers and packaging them with headsets to hand out to other schools.  We've built dozens of Vive based sets and this year we swapped over to cheaper but equally capable Samsung Odyssey VR based systems.  We have built mobile, laptop based VR systems and desktop PC  systems on a variety of different platforms.  We have become very adept at making VR work in a variety of circumstances.

While all that was going on we also started developing VR ready software for the hardware we'd built.  Our earlier work was built on Oculus and Vive but with the amalgamation of VR platforms on Microsoft's Windows 10 Creator's Update last fall, we are now able to build across multiple platforms simultaneously.  This spring our senior software engineering class is building two VR based titles.  You can check out the 3d models students are turning out on our Sketchfab site.

Freddy Falcon by CWcomptech on Sketchfab

Meanwhile, I've been presenting and demonstrating VR to teachers and educational administration across the province.  I've attended the Educational Computing Organization of Ontario's annual conference the past two years, demonstrating and presenting on AR and VR.  That led to an Ontario Ministry of Education grant in student led VR and AR research.  Our groundbreaking work is helping to decide how VR will be used in education in the province.



Last summer I presented at the Ontario Teacher's Federation summer conference on Pedagogy and Technology.



We're always looking for other ways to diversify stereoscopic 3d digital interaction.  This past year we built school-branded 3d Google Cardboard viewers using a company in Toronto. We've also been in contact with Lenovo's Educational outreach over the Google Daydream platform that's about to drop and would love to get our hands on a Hololens, but that's a bit too rich for a public high school.  Which leads me back to the start.

We're tech-handy, more VR experienced in both hardware and software than most VR startups, and eager to COLLABORATE!  If you're able to reach out online, you could be anywhere, but we'd especially like to make connections with industry and post-secondary programs who are exploring this emerging medium in Ontario.  My students will become your post-secondary students and eventually the people you hire when you're developing in augmented and virtual reality in the coming years.  We'd LOVE to hear from you.  If you can help enable us, we'll floor you with what we can do.

Here are some links:

To The Department:
CWDHS Software Engineering (VR development) page
@CWCompTech on Twitter
CW CompTech on Google+

To Tim King, the teacher:
On Google+
On Twitter
Direct to my work email
On 360 degree video capture - if that isn't extreme enough, how about 360 on a motorcycle?

To current student work:
To Cameron: our valedictorian who is already working on his second VR game title AND a Unity based construct for embedding 360 immersive video into - he already has experience on half a dozen 360 camera rigs from basic consumer Samsung 360s to the Insta360 professional quality 8k 360 camera.
To Nick:  also working on his second VR title and the winner last year of a specialist high skills major award for introducing a new coop program where high school technical experts go back to their old elementary schools and help them improve digital fluency.

Both Nick & Cameron are part of the Cybertitan team who are in the national finals of ICTC Canada's cyber security competition.

To Eric, one of our top 3d modelers


To recent grads:
To Zach, now at Mohawk for IT and Networking (so he's already better than he was) - he was pretty good in high school too, winning the Ontario Skills Canada provincials for IT & Networking with one of the highest technical scores in the competition  Zach can get anything to work.

To Charles: top 5 in Ontario in IT in high school, but also a metal shop work par exellance and a giant anime nerd after my own heart - Charles has the technical skills (more so now after graduating from college) and a bizarre mix of creative interests that make him able to produce truly unique digital art.

To Jake: one of the founding students that designed our software engineering program on year one - his foresight and ability to see where technology was heading was what allowed us to produce the program we enjoy today.  Jake has gone on to post secondary in coding and has hundreds of thousands of users playing his mobile game apps through Android and iOS.  He is a founder of Vulcron Games. 

To Maddi, who has gone into 3d modeling and video game design.  She was producing stunning work three years ago, I can't imagine what she's up to now:

Here is Maddi's portfolio of work to date... 

Speaking of which, I've been moving mountains to try and get more girls into our digital tech program (an uphill struggle in conservative, rural Ontario).  Our electronics expert in Skills Ontario (7th last year, aiming for a medal this) is the only girl in the competition.  Getting in contact with women in tech who are interested in mentoring the next generation would help support me in this.

Please don't hesitate to contact us!

Tim King