Monthly Archives: March 2020

How long is a year? It’s all relative

We recently celebrated my wife’s birthday, and it made me think about what that meant in our solar system: One year means that our earth has circled the sun and is in the *same* position that it was a year ago. What that really means is the same position relative only to the sun.

Not only is every other planet in a different position than the year before, but the sun itself isn’t anywhere near where it used to be.

Watch this video: Skylight: How Does Our Solar System Move Around the Milky Way?

“As our spinning planet revolves around the sun, we’re also speeding through the galaxy at 230 kilometres per second.”

So, while here on earth we are in the same relative position to the sun that we were a year ago, the sun itself has travelled:

230km/second x 60 seconds in a minute x 60 minutes in an hour x 24 hours in a day x 365 days in a year: The sun and earth are approximately 7,253,280,000 Kilometres away from where they were a year ago. We are quite literally only in the same place we were a year ago relative to the position of the sun.

Happy birthday = Happy single rotation around the sun… while the sun is racing through the galaxy, taking us 7+ billion kilometres away from where we we a year ago!

Oh, and by the way, this just factors in the way our sun moves within the galaxy. Our galaxy is also moving through the universe… all this movement is relative.

As a final thought on the relative length of a year, a year of fighting cancer is significantly different than a year of sabbatical on a tropical island… no matter how far we may travel through the cosmos in that time.

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This video shows us the actual travel path of the sun and planets through the galaxy: The helical model – our solar system is a vortex

Biohacking human abilities and the future of CRISPR

We are comfortable altering our bodies to maintain our abilities: laser eye surgery, hip replacements, hearing implants… What about genetically enhancing our abilities? Is this different?

Imagine three men, all of them 82 years old and generally healthy. But they are all quite different.

The first man is mostly bald with gray hair over his ears, hunched over, walks with a cane, wears thick glasses, has hearing aids, has bent fingers from arthritis, and his hands shake slightly… and although he has a couple stints in his veins, he has no life-threatening ailments. Unless he meets an unexpected or untimely death, he will likely see his 85th birthday.

The second man has had his genetic makeup altered by CRISPR, taking advantage of human genes being altered to reduce the effects of aging. He looks 55-60 years old, with a full head of hair, greying near his ears, an upright posture, 20-20 vision, good hearing, and steady hands, unaffected by arthritis… his cardiovascular health is like that of someone fit and in their 50’s. He has no life-threatening ailments. Unless he meets an unexpected or untimely death, he will likely see his 100th birthday.

The third man has had his genetic makeup altered by CRISPR, taking advantage of animal and plant genes being altered to enhance his life. His hair is naturally jet black, and has an attractive but unnaturally beautiful shimmer. His eyesight is as good as a hawk’s, 20/2 vision, meaning he can see something 20 feet away as if it is just 2 feet away. His hearing range is more like a dogs than a human… His muscles are huge and he has the physical and cardiovascular health of a man in his late 30’s. He has no life-threatening ailments. Unless he meets an unexpected or untimely death, he will likely see his 125th birthday, and he will still have the mental acuity of a man 1/3 his age.

My hunch is that you are not bothered at all by the health improvements of the second man, but the idea of the third man is a bit disturbing. We are ok with the idea of reducing the effects of aging… skin creams, laser eye surgery, cochlear hearing implants, plastic surgery, knee and hip replacements. All these things to help us hold on to our youth, and if we can do these things genetically, that’s great.

But the third man seems unnatural in a way that is scary. He seems more than human. He seems to be an enhanced species. And here is the truly scary thing… he is inevitable. We now live in a world where people consider themselves biohackers… self-taught amateurs who are DIY (Do-It-Yourself) biologists. And the technology is becoming easy enough for a person in their basement to alter the genes of a human being.

Stop and really think about that for a moment. An amateur biologist can alter the genes of a dog, and there is nothing to stop him from attempting to do the same to himself. This isn’t science fiction anymore. And if a DIY, basement biologist alters their own genetic makeup, then decides to have children, those genetic alterations will become part of the human genome. We are going to see altered and enhanced human abilities added to the genetic makeup of our future generations… with no oversight!

The question isn’t if this will happen, it’s how soon, by whom, and with what unforeseen consequences? Will biohackers be designing super humans? Will being an unaltered human 75 years from now be disadvantageous? Will these disadvantages be enough to be considered a sub-class of a super being… An upgraded human that is smarter, stronger, healthier, and lives longer, with more vitality in their later years, which will make a regular human being seem weak, and perhaps stupid too.

This is the stuff that science fiction is made of, and it’s happening right now. It’s happening in biomedical labs bound by ethics boards; And it’s happening unsupervised in the basements and garages of biohackers with both good and nefarious intentions. That’s both a very real and very scary concern to think about.

Novel ideas can spread from a novel virus

I travelled to China during the early H1N1 (swine flu) pandemic in 2009. Concerns were low in Canada and there wasn’t a travel warning at the time. On my flight to Japan there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. However after leaving Japan, when we landed in Chana we were asked to stay on the plane and remain seated.

A team of people masked and dressed in white came on board and used an infrared thermometer to take our temperatures. Two rows in front of me a person that was coughing and unwell, and her husband, were escorted off the plane first. I remember thinking, ‘Oh man, sucks to be you!’

I thought that was it, but after leaving the plane I guess that we passed a heat sensor camera because I was tapped on the shoulder and pulled aside. A lady in a mask, shining a red light on my forehead, took my temperature and said, “Too hot.”

To say that I was freaked out is an understatement. I was visiting for 1 week to learn about my future job as a school Principal, and visions of quarantine in a foreign country, where I don’t speak the language, swirled through my head. Fortunately, a second reading was done and I was fine. I think a coffee right before landing, plus the fact that I run a little hot anyway, might have been the initial trigger.

Still, that shook me a little. I wondered about why these measures were not happening elsewhere? The response in China seemed preventative, while in other countries it seemed merely reactive. I’m not sure too many lessons were learned and the novel Coronavirus currently spreading across the world will likely have a significant impact on our globe before things get better. Yet I don’t mean that to sound like foreboding, and ominous foreshadowing. This virus will run its course, then some valuable lessons will be learned that were not learned by viruses like this in the past. Lessons that will hopefully help prevent the severity of a future pandemic.

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I read in interesting article, “How the coronavirus will shape the future” and want to expand on one section as it relates to schools and education:

If the growing novel coronavirus outbreak becomes a lasting pandemic, it could accelerate fundamental changes in the economy, politics and the workplace...

Going remote: Videoconferencing and remote work have exploded as the virus has spread.

  • According to Kentik, a global provider of network analytics, videoconferencing traffic in North America and Asia has doubled since the outbreak began.

  • Led by tech firms like Twitter and Facebook, companies are encouraging and even requiring their employees to work from home, both to slow the spread of the disease now and prepare for the worst should offices be closed in a quarantine.

  • Many experts believe business leaders will come to see that central offices and face-to-face meetings are less vital than they thought. “We’re going to see that work can be tied to productivity anywhere rather than putting time in an office,” said Peter Jackson, CEO of the digital collaboration company Bluescape.

At Inquiry Hub Secondary every assignment is already available online. Students have access to Moodle, Microsoft OneNote, and Microsoft Teams from any connected computer or mobile device. The Microsoft tools also have immersive readers and dictation tools to support students no matters where they are learning from.

Using Teams, I can invite colleagues or students into a virtual classroom, sharing video including either my or a student’s screen, and we can all link to resources in the Chat. Students could collaborate and do presentations, submit work, and get feedback without entering a school. That creates a lot of opportunities that weren’t previously available. I have no idea if this is something that will become necessary in the coming months, but in some parts of the world schools have already been closed, and so the idea that this is possible becomes a topic of discussion.

Discussion about the possibility of remote learning invites questions about blended learning where some of the work, both asynchronous and synchronous, is done remotely. It also invites conversations and questions about what we should be spending our time on when we do get together?

We might not have to change anything to deal with the Coronavirus, but the fact that this virus is impacting the world the way it is might impact how we think about operating our schools and businesses in the future. What excites me isn’t the idea that more work might be done remotely, but rather the ideas behind what we do when we connect face-to-face, and how we use that time? Will we focus more on collaboration, team building, social skills, construction and creation of projects, and more personalized support? How will we engage students in learning when they might not be coming to school every day?

The size of your digital footprint doesn’t matter when it comes to viral social media shaming

When I started building my digital footprint, I saw a positive side-effect. If I googled David Truss, the first few pages belonged to me, or were about me. It got to the point where I actually felt bad for someone who shared my name. I mean, if you share the same name as someone famous, it makes sense that you will search your name and see that famous person. But if you are a young David Truss, you don’t expect to be inundated with information about a Canadian educator that no one has ever really heard of.

This gave me an illusion of ownership of my digital footprint that no longer exists. I used to tell students and educators that if you created a long tail of good things on your digital footprint, that would protect you from negative attention. For example, if someone wrote a blog post that said something mean about me, unless they were famous, or unless it was a major news publication, that article might end up on the 5th or 10th page of a Google search of my name. Essentially, it would be buried behind a trail of positive things I’ve done. That illusion no longer exists thanks to social media and #hashtags.

The reality is that everyone is one public, stupid mistake, one careless tweet, or one embarrassing Facebook post away from public humiliation that can last for years. And with respect to the public mistake, it might not be something recent, but could also be something that is dug up from the past. I didn’t grow up with cell phones and ubiquitous access to digital photos, but I’m sure that there are some embarrassing photos of me in my youth, sitting in photo boxes, in other people’s photo albums, or stored in basements or garages. I’m also sure that at least a few of my 30,000 tweets and several hundred blog posts, over 13+ years, have not aged well and can be seen as either rude, condescending, or even embarrassing.

Nowadays, it’s all too easy to be publicly shamed by something in a way that can go viral and absolutely overshadow your digital footprint, no matter how big it is. Viral videos and hashtags can create a storm of unwelcome attacks to you and any digital footprint you might have built. This is horrible. Imagine only being judged by you worst indiscretion. Imagine trying to escape that indiscretion a decade or more later, but that’s what comes up when your name is Google searched. Is this the kind of society we want to live in? A person can commit a crime, serve time, and move on… but a single tweet can haunt someone for years afterwards.

I really enjoyed this piece on Public Shaming on ‘Last Week Tonight with John Oliver’: (*Language/Profanity Warning)

Which led me to watch this TedTalk by Monica Lewinsky on The Price of Shame:

“The more shame, the more clicks. The more clicks, the more advertising dollars.”

This one quote from Monica Lewinsky underlies how systematic this issue is. It’s not just about a bunch of individuals deciding to bully and shame someone, it’s an entire media industry that feeds off of it. But as she later says, quoting Brené Brown, “Shame can’t survive empathy.”

We have the power to be good and positive in our actions. Not feeding the clicks of scandalous headlines and not sharing in the bullying and shaming of others. We can block and report negative people who focus on attacking others. We can be kind and forgiving.

Our online actions can feed a system that rewards the shaming of others, or our actions can reflect the same sort of empathy we would want others to give us if our worst indiscretions (past or future) ever became publicly viral.

Be the designer of your world and not merely a consumer of it

I love this quote by James Clear in his book Atomic Habits. While I’m not big on platitudes, I think this invites more thought and conversation:

“Be the designer of your world and not merely a consumer of it.” ~ James Clear

How many times in a day are we faced with a decision where we passively acquiesce and do what is expected or what is easy rather than taking control and making a choice? The potato chips are easy to grab; The second last attempt on the last set of a workout suddenly becomes the last attempt; The rude person at work says something inappropriate, but you let it slide; The student who knows the answer but doesn’t raise their hand; The 5 minute check of social media becomes 25 minutes of scrolling; the ‘Next Episode’ counts down on Netflix and you let it start.

How many moments are there in a day that can be chosen rather than consumed ‘as usual’? We are the designers of our lives… or at least we should be.

Fix the inputs

“We think we need to change the results, but the results are not the problem.When you solve problems at the results level, you only solve them temporarily. In order to improve for good you need to solve problems at the systems level. Fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves.

You do not rise to the level of your goals, your fall to the levels of your systems.”

~ James Clear, Atomic Habits

I’m re-listening to Atomic Habits, and this time I’m bookmarking sections and taking notes.

Relating this idea of, “Fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves,” to students and schools, I think we often focus on the outputs. A simple example is homework incompletion: A student doesn’t do the homework, what do you do? Make them do the homework they missed.

On the surface this is a good idea. The best consequence for not doing the work is doing the work. But when this issue is chronic, and the teacher is constantly making the same student do the work after the fact, then that teacher is dealing with the output constantly, when the issue is the input. Why isn’t the homework getting done in the first place?

Maybe the student is overloaded with activities or a work schedule that doesn’t allow much time for homework.

Maybe the homework isn’t seen as helpful to the student.

Maybe the student doesn’t see the value in the homework, and thinks it’s not helpful.

Maybe the student prefers to do the homework after it’s due because they know they can sit with the teacher and get help, which they don’t get at home.

Maybe the student lacks the habits that makes homework achievable. Especially when they get unlimited time to play video games at home. Maybe the structure of being forced to do it later is the only structure they have in place to get the work done.

Maybe the teacher is giving that student too much homework and it takes too long to do.

Maybe there is a totally different reason. But here is the thing, if the homework is chronically late, chasing the student to do the work later isn’t solving the problem, it’s just trying to fix a problem with the results that you are getting.

“You do not rise to the level of your goals, your fall to the levels of your systems.”

On a personal note, I’m working on systems at work to stay focused on a single task rather than being distracted by trying to do too many things at once. This is challenging in an environment with constant distractions and a multitude of priorities – both my own and from others. I’ll share more on this later, but for now, the thing that I’m realizing is that it’s the inputs I need to work on. The systems I put in place set me up for good results or leave me chasing results when I don’t have those systems working for me.

Adopting tools in a transformative rather than additive way

Years ago I was doing a presentation to high school educators and things didn’t go as planned:

I started my presentation and within 30 seconds the power went out. I picked up my laptop and said to the 100+ audience members, “Ok, everybody gather around here.” 😉

I started a conversation about ‘What tech tool can’t you live without, that didn’t exist 5 years ago… and by the time people had discussed this with their neighbours and we started sharing as a group the power turned on… “POP” … that would be the sound of the ceiling mounted LCD light bulb burning out.

That’s when I asked a new question: “How many of you have had the experience before of having a lesson planning epiphany… suddenly you are up late at night planning… you head into the school before class starts in the morning and when you get to the photocopier… it’s BROKEN!“ ~Most teachers raised their hands.

“So, keep your hands up if you said something like, ‘That’s it, I’m never using the photocopier again?’“ ~All hands went down.

Sometimes ‘technology’, be it a photocopier, a presentation, or even a pen doesn’t work.

Other times the technology is new, and different, and not intuitively transformative. That doesn’t mean the tool can’t be transformative, it just means it’s hard to see the benefit or the value.

This afternoon a good friend and educational leader, Dave Sands, and I will be presenting to principal and vice principal colleagues. We will be sharing the value we see in using Microsoft Teams with our staff in schools.

For some people this is just one more tool to add to the list of other things they need to look at in a day… it doesn’t add value, it adds work. However Dave and I see it differently. We see how this tool can change workflow in a positive way, making it an effective way to streamline communication with different teams of people that you work with. Here are a few key points about how a tool like Microsoft Teams can be transformative:

1. It can reduce and be more efficient than email.

Have you ever shared an email that requires a response from a group of people? Some ‘Reply All’, some don’t. And you’ve got to figure out what’s what, and collate the information while responses trickle in.

Have you ever shared information with a group and one-by-one people ask the same clarifying question that you end having to respond to individually?

Have you received an email from someone that you wish you looked at sooner than you did, but instead you were dealing with 30+ other emails that came in after that?

Using Teams contextualizes conversations. It allows you to keep responses public to the team, and to clarify responses in contained conversations rather than scattered throughout email. It also allows you to prioritize your teams over the most recent items in your email inbox.

2. Using Teams creates a shared learning space within your community.

Have you ever worked as a staff on professional development, sharing paper resources that never get looked at again? Then someone shares a great resource through email, but that resource stays in your email?

My staff has created channels within a Team to work on our professional development. We co-create the notes, share files, and publicly follow through with our plans. Afterwards if someone adds anything, everyone has that resource available within the context of the learning that happened, not lost in email.

3. You are working with a team of people in other buildings and you don’t see them often.

Email is brutal for this. Conversations get scattered, supporting each other is challenging, it doesn’t feel like you are a community. When you create a Team with this group, everything is shared in one public space. When a question is asked, the whole team is there to respond, and resource sharing is easy. It shifts the environment from a broken up group into a shared community.

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That’s three quick examples of how a tool like Teams can be more effective than other tools like email, but it requires shifting practice to be truly transformative. If you are communicating with your team or staff using both Teams and email, then you are being ineffective and adding more to your plate. But if you replace communicating through email with Teams, now you have a few key advantages you didn’t have before:

  • You can actually prioritize the people within your community that you want to give your attention to by going to teams first, before dealing with the most recent and often erroneous emails at the top of your inbox.
  • Communication on Teams is public to your team, and responses are easily clarified for everyone.
  • You can embed forms where everyone can see everyone else’s responses.
  • You can easily switch to the private chat function when information becomes relevant to just one or a few people.
  • You can use the @name function to specially address a person or a whole Team.
  • You can build a sense of community and support that email does not provide.
  • Conversations are contextual. I can prioritize what I look at first, at a glance, not just by the most recent items.
  • You can reduce the amount of email you get! My email has gone down by more than 1/3 since adopting Teams.

For me the ability to prioritize my teams in a space outside of email, and reducing the amount of emails I get, have been the greatest benefits to moving to Microsoft Teams.

Note: I share expectations and etiquette with my teams about how and where to communicate. It’s a good idea with any new tool to make the intentions and expectations about how to use the tool clear. Otherwise, the tool isn’t transformative, it’s just one more shiny new thing to check, without really seeing the value in using it.

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Related: Transformative or just flashy educational tools? (Written almost a decade ago.)

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Also shared on my Pair-a-Dimes for Your Thoughts blog

Notifications are interruptions

For the past few months I’ve been turning off most notifications on my phone. I tend to keep my phone on silent most of the time. I still get banner notifications for a few things, but most of my notifications only go to my Notifications Center, they don’t pop up and interrupt what I’m doing. What that results in is a phone filled with red notification dots, every time I look at it. I know this would drive some people crazy, but I don’t mind.

I use the dots to remind myself that I’m in control. I don’t need to see what’s on social media, it will still be there when I choose to look. I will see all my email, but I won’t let email determine my schedule. I won’t let email interrupt what I’m doing now. I let my staff know that I will frequently look at Microsoft Teams, and that this is a faster way to connect with me than email.

This shift to MS Teams allows me to prioritize my staff over the last 10 emails that came in after a staff member asked me something on email. It allows me to contextual the conversation rather than letting outsiders determine what distracts me, simply because they were the most recent item in my email inbox. This shift has reduced my total daily emails, and it has also reduced my time on email further because I’m not getting emails I wish I saw hours before from my staff, and my staff know what to, and not to, add to my email.

I’m the first to admit that I probably still spend too much time on my phone, especially at home. It’s where I read my news, listen to audiobooks and podcasts, consume social media, and even create these daily blog posts. But I also know that reducing notification interruptions has helped me stay more focussed on the tasks I’m trying to complete both at work and at home.

Sometimes features are actually bugs

I am not a fan of vertical (portrait) video. It’s not just an aesthetic, it’s wasted real estate. Seldom does more room above and below a subject being filmed give you as much information as more room to the left and to the right. That said, we will end up watching vertical videos that people choose to take. If you are one of these people taking vertical video, please do me a big favour: Do NOT use the Apple iMovie ‘feature’ that fills the black sidebars on a vertical video viewed horizontally with a magnified, blurry copy of the video.

This is a bug, not a feature. It actually takes away from the video. It’s a distraction. Worse yet, it creates a horizontal video with the side bars out of the vertical video so that even if you watch the video vertically, then the video is even smaller.

Here is a vertical music video:
Billie Eilish – bad guy (Vertical Video)

It was an intentional choice to film the video this way. Here is a horizontal screenshot of the video:

And since she left the video as vertical and didn’t fill the sides, or worse fill the sides with distractions, here is a screenshot of the video viewed vertically:

And here is the video vertically if she had forced the video to be horizontal after the fact:

I didn’t share any images with the sides blurred, but just know that this is even worse. Sometimes features that are added are actually bugs, they don’t make things any better no matter how they are used.

Here are some public service announcements regarding the tragedy and horror of using vertical videos! 😜

And one more short one, but the cover image has a swear word not seen in the video, so I’ll just link to it.

The Netflix Trap

Despite the fact that I grew up in the era of Seinfeld and Friends being sitcoms that were on the air, I haven’t seen all of the episodes. My daughters have seen every episode in order, and my youngest daughter is on her 3rd round of watching Friends through all 10 seasons, or 236 episodes, on Netflix.

When I watched these shows, they were on TV, with commercials, and we didn’t have a VCR set up if we missed the time slot. By the time the reruns were on, I was already not a fan of waiting through commercials to watch a show.

This weekend I got sucked into a drama on Netflix, and still nursing an injured knee, I found myself in front of the television for hours. I fell deep into the Netflix trap watching the next episode, after the next episode, after the next episode. ‘OK, just 1 more,’ I’d tell myself, then just one more after that…

I do this sometimes on longer breaks like summer and Christmas break but it’s very rare that I sink into a series like this on a regular weekend. The appeal is strong when there are no commercials and the opening/closing credits can easily be skipped. There is no waiting until next week’s time slot on TV, no waiting for commercials either. Just show after show, with each ending designed to hook you into the next one.

Watching television has changed significantly. I can see how easy it is to stay trapped in front of it now in a way that wasn’t possible when I was younger. YouTube and Facebook can be the same for some, with the next video automatically playing after the one you are watching is done. Blink and several hours have gone by.

I had a good dose of this on the weekend, and I’m done for now… At least until the March break. The series I was watching has one more season and I’ll probably watch most of it in a two to three day span. I force myself to wait for an extended break. But when I start, I don’t pretend that I’m not easily sucked into the trap of binge watching, like many others.