Monthly Archives: January 2023

History Repeats

We went to see a theatre performance of Fiddler On The Roof last night. The story ends with the Ukrainian Jews being kicked off their lands and dispersed across Europe and to America. After the show the lead star said that last night’s performance, and all of their performances, were dedicated to the Ukrainian people.

It makes me realize that we are not a truly civilized species. We fight over land and over resources. We kill in the name of God and Country. We judge based on skin colour and cultural differences. We act like unruly children against each other and we allow ourselves to repeat historical errors, none the wiser that lessons could have been learned.

We might have bigger brains, but we are no better than warring ant colonies, or a rutting animal fighting for dominance. We are animals pretending to be civilized. Power corrupts and corruption leads to injustice, and injustice undermines civility. We let history repeat itself because politics is more important that people and countries matter more than compassion.

Tiny little boxes

The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the over examined life isn’t worth living either. 

Isn’t it interesting how two people can look at the same experience and see it completely differently? How is it that 2 prisoners of war with similar experiences can come out of the ordeal and one has PTSD while the other emerges strong and resilient?

I think some people let past experiences spill into their everyday life, while others compartmentalize their past into tiny little boxes. Some people tie their identity to things that make them feel like they are not in control, that things happen to them, that they must continue to endure what has already happened. The past is as in front of them as it is behind them.

Other people see past events in a metaphorical rear view window… there when you are looking at it, but the memories in the reflection seem distant. And the mirror is somewhere in your peripheral vision when you aren’t looking, and easy to forget to pay attention to, unless there is a reason to look back.

A loss of someone you love can haunt you, or it can provoke feelings of love and fond memories. A loss of limb can leave one person devastated with respect to what they can no longer do, and another person is left thankful for what they still can do. Both of these are painful things to endure. But the frame around the experiences can be very different. Two people and one experience. One frames the experiences into tiny little boxes, the other lets the past experience spill into new experiences.

Do we get to decide? Or are we wired a certain way? Maybe a bit of both.

Does our upbringing influence our ability to cope? Certainly! Trauma transcends generations, and growing up in a psychologically unhealthy environment will impact one’s ability to cope. Tiny boxes aren’t built in stressful environments, and it’s hard to ignore the rear view mirror when you are constantly reminded that objects there are much closer than they appear.

But there is always an opportunity to wrap things up in tiny little boxes… still there, still available, just not spilled out into the present when the memories don’t enrich the current moment. Because when we spend too much time looking in the rear view mirror, it’s hard to see the road ahead.

Culture and kids

I was visiting the Philippines back in 2010, my kids were 8 and 10. We went to the beach and immediately they wanted to build sand castles with me. I spent about 25-30 minutes playing then told them I was going to sit with their mom for a bit. I’d had enough. They wanted me to play longer.

Then a family with a mom, dad, and 3 or 4 year old kid came and sat near us. The kid had a shovel and her dad had a spoon, and they started playing in the sand. We stayed on the beach for well over an hour, probably closer to 2 hours and that dad was on his hands and knees or squatting next to his kid playing in the sand the entire time. I think they were speaking Tagalog so I didn’t understand the conversations they weee having, but this dad was engaged with his kid the entire time. During that time, I played with my kids in the sand for another 20-25 minutes.

I remember telling my wife that this guy was making me feel like a crappy dad. I was amazed how his little girl was the center of his attention for so long. It makes me wonder about how our culture and our upbringing influences the raising of our kids?

Visiting Thailand around that same time we stayed for a few days in a resort with tree house rooms near a national forest. The first morning we went to breakfast and there was a makeshift playpen, for a kid who wasn’t quite walking age, near where we ate. When we arrived at the restaurant, the owner was sitting in the playpen with the kid. He left when another worker came to tend to the kid. Then later we saw his wife doing the same thing. We assumed it was their granddaughter. My wife asked if this was the case and we were told no. One of the cook’s mother’s was sick and couldn’t take care of her kid, and so she had to bring her baby to work… they were just all taking shifts when they could so the employee could do her job.

One of the best parts of travel is seeing how some cultures differ from our own, and appreciating that their lifestyles include little things that we can learn from. And I think you can learn a lot about people by watching how they care for their kids, and kids in their community.

You can’t police it

I said Chat GPT is a game changer in education in my post Fear of Disruptive Technology. Then I started to see more and more social media posts sharing that Artificial Intelligence (AI) detectors can identify passages written by AI. But that doesn’t mean a person can’t use a tool like Chat GPT and then do some of their own editing. Or, as seen here: just input the AI written text into CopyGenius.io and ‘rephrase’, and then AI detectors can’t recognize the text as written by AI.

The first instinct with combating new technology is to ban and/or police it: No cell phones in class, leave them in your lockers; You can’t use Wikipedia as a source; Block Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok on the school wifi. These are all gut reactions to new technologies that frame the problem as policeable… Teachers are not teachers, they aren’t teaching, when they are being police.

Read that last sentence again. Let it sink in. We aren’t going to police away student use of AI writing tools, so maybe we should embrace these tools and help manage how they are used. We can teach students how to use AI appropriately and effectively. Teach rather than police.

Technological leaps

I’ve been very interested in bicycle gadgets for a while. I designed a backpack for bicycle commuters and patented a bicycle lock, both things that I’ll share in detail here at a later date. But today I want to share a brilliant, even revolutionary new advancement in bicycle design.

This Ultra-Efficient Bike Has No Chains and No Derailleurs

This video explains how it works:


Absolutely brilliant! No more chains, much more efficiency. Wireless electronic shifting and a split pinion that adjusts to the next gear while still engaged with the previous gear.

This isn’t just a better design, it’s a leap forward. I have questions around how it would perform in dirt and mud, and reliability in ‘the real world’, but those are things that can be tweaked over time. The reality is that this isn’t a tweak, it’s a fundamental shift in design that is going to change the future designs of bicycles, and other drive shaft designs, in the years to come.

Amazing!

Incrementally better

I’ve had a cough for 18 days now. The first week was really rough, then I started to feel a bit better. Each day has been slightly better than the day before. Each night has been a slightly better night, with less coughing and waking up… but it has been really slow progress.

This is a challenge with ‘getting better’ in general, not just from recovering from this nasty flu. When we are trying to work out and get stronger, when we are looking for gains in our fitness, we often see them pretty quick in the beginning, but then we get on a slow path of small gains that are hard to notice.

We want to see great gains. We want to be instantly rewarded for our hard work. But the gains are incremental and sometimes unnoticeable for long periods of time. The personal best achievements don’t come every day. And we don’t always notice the gains when we want to. We quickly notice the setbacks, but not always the gains.

Recovering so slowly has made me see improvements I usually ignore… because I’m looking for them, and I’m appreciative of any improvement. But working out I don’t pay attention to tiny gains in pursuit of bigger ones.

I’m going to be a bit more appreciative of the tiny gains in my fitness from now on. I’ll look for them, and know that I’m getting incrementally better. Who knows, these small moments of appreciation might even make me incrementally happier. 😁

Keeper of your digital history

When I lived in China, I had a hard time communicating on any social media. I connected to this blog using Posterous, which let me post easily from an App on my phone, before WordPress had an App. When Posterous went defunct all the images I posted through their App were not saved on WordPress and so those images were lost. So I have old posts like this, where I only have a dead link where a photo used to be:

This isn’t the only social media company that has gone defunct, taking the history of my work with it. I loved using the Ning Network communites like Classroom 2.0, I had a student project with over a 100,000 visits on Wikispaces, this video had close to 100,000 views on BlipTV, and I had great conversations archived on coComment. My original blog was on ELGG, where I had a great community of bloggers to learn from, then it switched to Eduspaces which was less friendly and forced me to do the smart thing and self-host on DavidTruss.com. Delicious, Diigo, and Scribed were communities but now they’ve changed and are just ‘places’ that I used to visit and use. And there are plenty of other tools that have come and gone and when they are gone, so is a record of everything I did in those spaces.

One social media tool that I have used more than any other is Twitter. I was such a fan, I even wrote an ebook about how to get started on Twitter, then gave it away for free. I have Tweeted 33,800+ times since I started Twitter in 2007. Today I decided to request an archive of all my tweets.

I’ve lost too many great conversations and archives of data because of social media services either transforming to something different, suddenly requiring fees that are beyond what I’m willing to pay, or just going defunct… and with so much happening to Twitter right now, I just figured I’d request my data and store it myself for safe keeping. If anything happens to Twitter, I want a record of what I did in this social media space. I’m not predicting that Twitter will go the way of the dodo bird, but I’m just not confident it will look the same at the end of 2023, now that it is privately owned and operated. I want a backup of my data… just in case.

Fear of Disruptive Technology

There is a lot of fear around how the Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool Chat GPT is going to disrupt teaching and learning. I’ve already written about this chatbot:

Next level artificial intelligence

And,

Teaching in an era of AI

And,

The future is now.

To get an understanding of the disruption that is upon us, in the second post, Teaching in an era of AI, I had Chat GPT write an essay for me. Then I noted:

“This is a game changer for teaching. The question won’t be how do we stop students from using this, but rather how do we teach students to use this well? Mike Bouliane said in a comment on yesterday’s post, “Interesting post Dave. It seems we need to get better at asking questions, and in articulating them more precisely, just like in real life with people.

Indeed. The AI isn’t going away, it’s just going to get better.”

And that’s the thing about disruptive technology, it can’t be blocked, it can’t be avoided, it needs to be embraced. Yet I’ve seen conversations online where people are trying to block it in schools. I haven’t seen this kind of ‘filter and hide from students’ philosophy since computers and then phones started to be used in schools. It reminds me of a blog post I wrote in 2010, Warning! We Filter Websites at School, where I shared this tongue-in-cheek poster for educators in highly filtered districts to put up on their doors:

Well now the fervour is back and much of the talk is about how to block Chat GPT, and how to detect its use. And while there are some conversations about how to use it effectively, this means disrupting what most teachers assign to students, and this also disrupts assessment practices. Nobody likes so much disruption to their daily practice happening all at once. So, the block and filter and policing (catching cheaters) discussions begin.

Here is a teacher of Senior AP Literature that uses Chat GPT to improve her students’ critical thinking and writing. Note how she doesn’t use the tool for the whole process. Appropriate, not continuous use of the tool:

@gibsonishere on TikTok

Again going all the way back to 2010, I said in Transformative or just flashy educational tools?,

“A tool is just a tool! I can use a hammer to build a house and I can use the same hammer on a human skull. It’s not the tool, but how you use it that matters.”

And here is something really important to note:

The. Technology. Is. Not. Going. Away.

In fact, AI is only going to get better… and be more disruptive.

Employers are not going to pretend that it doesn’t exist. Imagine an employer saying, “Yes, I know we have power drivers but to test your skill we want you to screw in this 3-inch screw with a handheld screwdriver… and then not letting the new employee use his power tools in their daily work.

Chat GPT is very good at writing code, and many employers test their employee candidates by asking them to write code for them. Are they just going to pretend that Chat GPT can’t write the same code much faster? I can see a performance test for new programmers looking something like this in the future: “We asked Chat GPT to write the code to perform ‘X’, and this is the code it produced. How would you improve this code to make it more effective and eloquent?”

Just like the Tiktok teacher above, employers will expect the tool to be used and will want their employees to know how to use the tool critically and effectively to produce better work than if they didn’t use the tool.

I’m reminded of this carton I created back in 2009:

The title of the accompanying post asks, Is the tool an obstacle or an opportunity? The reality is that AI tools like Chat GPT are going to be very disruptive, and we will be far better off looking at these tools as opportunities rather than obstacles… Because if we choose to see these tools as obstacles then we are the actual obstacles getting in the way of progress.

Leadership Storytelling

I had the opportunity to be one of 6 Principals and Vice Principals to speak at a series for teachers called Building Leadership Capacity. The theme was Storytelling and so I decided to share a fable:

THE MOUSE TRAP

A mouse looked through a crack in the wall to see the farmer and his wife opening a package. What food might it contain? He was aghast to discover that it was a mouse trap. Retreating to the farmyard the mouse proclaimed the warning: “There is a mouse trap in the house, a mouse trap in the house! “The chicken clucked and scratched, raised her head and said, “Excuse me, Mr. Mouse, I can tell this is a grave concern to you, but it is of no consequence to me. I cannot be bothered by it.”

The mouse turned to the pig and told him, “There is a mouse trap in the house, a mouse trap in the house!” “I am so very sorry Mr. Mouse,” sympathized the pig, “but there is nothing I can do about it but pray. Be assured that you are in my prayers.”

The mouse turned to the cow. She said,”Like wow, Mr. Mouse. A mouse trap. Like I am in grave danger. Duh…NOT!” So the mouse returned to the house, head down and dejected, to face the farmer’s mouse trap alone.

That very night a sound was heard throughout the house, like the sound of a mouse trap catching its prey. The farmer’s wife rushed to see what was caught. In the darkness, she did not see that it was a venomous snake whose tail the trap had caught. The snake bit the farmer’s wife. The farmer rushed her to the hospital. She returned home with a fever.

Now everyone knows you treat a fever with fresh chicken soup, so the farmer took his hatchet to the farmyard for the soup’s main ingredient. His wife’s sickness continued so that friends and neighbours came to sit with her around the clock. To feed them, the farmer butchered the pig. The farmer’s wife did not get well and a few days later she passed away. So many people came for her funeral, that the farmer had the cow slaughtered, to provide meat for all of them to eat.

I shared this from memory so it differed in a few details, and I ended here. The fable continues with this:

So the next time you hear that someone is facing a problem and think that it does not concern you, remember that when there is a mouse trap in the house, the whole farmyard is at risk.

What I said instead was that Good Leadership is organizing the volunteers that came to help the farmers wife, and being stoic and organizing the funeral, and supporting the grieving friends. And Great Leadership is addressing the concerns of the mouse. But then I gave a disclosure that in this school year alone I could think of two occasions where I had to do my best to be a Good Leader because only in hindsight could I them when you don’t identify the concern as being as big a concern as the other person. I shared how important it is to really listen, and understand your staff, and not just look at things from your perspective.

I was asked, ‘How do you know when you’ve got it right?’ And I said that our egos tend to make us believe we’ve always got it right and so it’s when you get it wrong that is important to identify and try to fix before it becomes a bigger problem. The example I gave here was when I was in my first role as a Vice Principal. A teacher sent a kid to the office and when I asked him what he did, I didn’t believe him. The reason he was sent to the office was trivial and something that I would never have sent a kid to the office for.

So, I had him rehearse an apology to the teacher and frame how he would change his behaviour, I had him practice a few times on me and sent him back to his class. Five minutes later he was back at my office and when I looked at him in surprise he said, “Mr Truss I did exactly what you told me to do.” So I took him down to the teacher and we resolved the issue together, and he went back to class.

And that was the moment I realized that just because I came from a school where teachers handled most situations on their own, and just because I only sent 2 kids to the office in a decade of teaching, it doesn’t mean every teacher is like that. I learned that I had to appreciate the concerns of the teacher as well as the student, and if the student was going to be successful in getting back into the class I had to really understand the teacher’s perspective and not just the student’s behaviour.

Being a Good Leader isn’t that challenging for the people that choose to go to a series like Building Leadership Capacity, they would already be leaders in their building. Being a Great Leader is hard for everyone. It involves building strong relationships with your staff, really knowing them, and understanding how to support them in ways that are different from each other and yet still bring the team together… and sometimes the best you can do is be good at handling the aftermath when you don’t realize how threatening the little mouse traps are.

Defining the Unconventional

Inquiry Hub is a very different school than a conventional high school. Students get a lot less direct instruction, they do a lot more group work and presentations, and they get time in their day to work on passion projects. These passion projects serve as their elective courses, and they get credit for doing them. And while we can’t offer the amazing array of electives courses students get in a large high school, students get to go in-depth on topics of interest in a way that they just don’t normally get to in a ‘regular’ high school.

Despite our grads moving on to programs like engineering and computer science, and despite acceptance to UBC, SFU, Emily Carr, BCIT, Waterloo, McGill, and other universities, colleges, and technical schools, we still get parents concerned that somehow their kids will be disadvantaged by going to our school.

Our kids transition to university very well, and do not struggle in their first year, unlike 12-15% of grads across the province that graduate high school successfully then don’t make it through their first year of university. But incoming parents are still worried that their kids won’t be prepared for university. The skills they learn in our school to self advocate, self-direct, and structure their own learning are exactly the skills student don’t get in far more scripted learning environments where the teacher tends to determine what students are doing for almost the entire day in a traditional block schedule.

Skills learned at Inquiry Hub not only help students when they get to university, but these skills also help students be more entrepreneurial, more innovative, and more prepared to be productive in a knowledge economy. Our students will prepare presentations for a midpoint in a project that would blow away what a team would do for a final project in another school, or even what a marketing team would do for a client pitch. Guests in our school are continually blown away by the confidence and professionalism of student presentations.

We are still iterating, we are still learning, we are still figuring out how to help students who struggle… but that’s part of what makes the school great. The environment is dynamic, flexible, and responsive. And students learn that learning is a process. They learn to share their learning in meaningful ways. And they learn to be productive members of a learning community. If that’s considered unconventional, we’ll just keep being unconventional.