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Now and the Future – iHub Grad Address 2024

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I can’t describe the joy of participating in grad at Inquiry Hub. These students are amazing. Our student focused show, with performances and videos that highlight the whole school are such a community building and community honouring event. The night warmed my heart, and I teared up more than once.

Here is my grad address. I really don’t have more to say, other than it was an evening that recharged my battery. It reminded me of why I love my job.

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Now and the Future – iHub Grad Address 2024

Greetings Honoured Guests, Parents, Family Members, Teachers, and Students including our very special Grads of 2024.

In your yearbooks, I wrote this as part of my message to you:

Asking questions is key to learning and I think at Inquiry Hub we do a pretty good job of getting students to ask good questions… and then answer them. There is a lot of conversations, dialogue, and debate that happen inside our school walls, and from that students learn not just about things, but they also learn the skills to discuss and negotiate and support their ideas in meaningful ways… and sometimes even to change their minds. A growth mindset is so much better to navigate life with, compared to a fixed mindset.

In a civil society, dialogue is the one problem-solving strategy that should be sacred. To do this, free speech is essential. But right now, outside the walls of our schools, there is a culture of ‘attack the opposition’ that is very scary. We need to be resilient when hearing opposing views, and understand that, we must be tolerant and accepting of opposing views, unaccepting of hateful and hurtful acts, and smart enough to understand the difference. When we can’t have conversations with people that have different views, we don’t grow as a culture or as a society.

That was a message for right now. There is so much conflict and strife in the world, and it can sometimes feel a little bleak.

But here’s the thing, I’m really excited about the future our grads have before them. It’s a future that is beyond my ability to predict, but I’m going to try anyway.

Our grads understand how to see the world from multiple perspectives.

You understand the challenges but you are also solution oriented. And you are going to have tools and strategies that no other generation has had. 

Here are four predictions:

  1. You will have better AI than we can imagine. What we think is amazing now will look like child’s play in the future. I didn’t have Google growing up, I had paper encyclopedias. In a few short years the Artificial Intelligence available will look to us now like what an iPhone would be to someone living in the 1920’s. (Oh, and by the way, I did not use AI to wrote this.)
  2. You will not live in a world that has an energy crisis, or one that harvests natural resources to create energy. Energy will be almost free if not completely free.
  3. You will live longer. Longevity research is reaching a point where more and more healthy years will be added to your life faster than you age.
  4. You will retire sooner. More of your life will be filled by doing want you want to do, rather than what you need to do to work and make an income.

All this to say that while it seems like us old folks have left you a pretty messed up world, we are less than a decade away from some key turning points where you have more freedom and choice, more access to cheap energy, and more free time than we could ever have imagined as recently as when you were in Grade 9.

It’s an exciting time to think about what the future holds, and when I think about you all as creators, artists, thinkers, dreamers, and leaders, I’m excited about your generation building the future I get to grow old in. 

Inquiry Hub isn’t perfect, but it is a very special school. It is a place where our students feel they belong. A place where you get to be courageous learners and leaders, and a place that I hope you carry fond memories from. 

To the class of 2024, I can’t wait to see what the future holds for you… and for what you will do to help shape that future. Be brave, be strong, and help build a community where everyone feels they have a place, and a way to contribute. 

Thank you.

Common Sense and Speculation

I was planning a long post to look at Covid-19 numbers and the pandemic. With global numbers around 1/2 a million new cases a day and 18-20% of those in the US, it is fairly obvious that the 2nd wave is clearly upon us. Some would argue that the second wave is worse than the first wave. I don’t think so, but I do think we are at a dangerous point where it could get worse.

I started taking screen shots and saving links to research, but I really don’t have it in me this Sunday afternoon to be writing a formal essay on Covid-19. If you want some supporting resources, here is a LinkTree to some great research from an epidemiologist.

The following is what has me concerned right now about the pandemic:

1. Of course the numbers now are worse than wave 1. During wave 1 people couldn’t get tested, there weren’t enough tests out there. A relative in California had covid in March and was sent home without a test. She isn’t a March/wave 1 statistic, as many hundreds of thousands were not, simply from a lack of testing. However, that doesn’t mean that the numbers now are good, and without effort to slow the spread, they will get worse.

2. Some people are easily fooled and manipulated. The idea that masks are either something political or something that infringes on personal rights is asinine. That people mix up being a good citizen with being a rule-following sheep is insulting to the human race. We have survived as tribes, and communities, and as a species because we are communal and support each other in times of need. We are in a time of need to cooperate and support each other.

3. There is only one way to achieve herd immunity that is morally acceptable and that is with a vaccine. Any other approach is a disregard for human life and for the most vulnerable people in our society.

4. We will need a large percentage of the population to get vaccinated. This won’t happen initially. I’m completely pro-vaccine. I’m booked for a flu shot. I will get a Covid-19 vaccine… but I’m not racing to get one that has been rushed to market without being properly tested.

5. Speculations: These are assumptions I’m making, unlike the things above that are based on facts, research and common sense, these are things that I believe will happen in the future. (Hopefully still based on common sense, but I could be wrong!)

A) We will have a safe vaccine in 6 months to a year. What that means is that we will be heading into 2022 before we have a grasp of how well we will come out from the shadow of this virus.

B) We will start to see some normalcy to our world in the middle of 2021 because rapid testing will be affordable and widespread. So things like travel can happen with 1-3 day quarantines rather than 14 days. Entire offices or schools could get tested and contact tracing will help reduce the spread. So, despite the vaccine taking more time to arrive, with proper efforts to protect ourselves and to be willingly tested, things will get better before widespread vaccine adoption.

C) Anti-vaccination and anti-mask groups will stop getting the over-glorified attention they don’t deserve, and they will diminish in size. I’m most likely to be wrong with this speculation if the current US president is re-elected, and his downplaying Covid-19 propaganda is permitted to continue.

D) Despite my optimism that anti-vaccine and anti-mask groups popularity will wane, I think we will struggle with: Conspiracy theories being confused for news; Fake news being so common and well presented that it will become harder to distinguish from real news; And, social media will continue to promote the spread of bad ideas for quite some time. We are going to witness an epic battle between Truth, fake news, censorship, and sensationalization that will leave everyone wondering where they can look to find any information that doesn’t need fact checking?

So, take a deep breath, and buckle up for another year of uncertainty. We need to recognize that nothing is going back to 2019’s version of normal for some time. That said, we need to support each other, do our part, keep our BS filters on high alert, and make smart choices as we head into the holiday season and the new year.

Strange days indeed

Nobody told me there’d be days like these
Nobody told me there’d be days like these
Nobody told me there’d be days like these
Strange days indeed — strange days indeed

Everybody’s runnin’ and no one makes a move.

~ John Lennon

If you go back to the end of 2019 and made predictions of the future, there’s no way you would imagine the situation we are in. Imagine going back in time 5 years and taking a newspaper with you. Let’s make that 50 years, and describe something as ‘simple’ as a cell phone.

I remember seeing this commercial and marvelling at what people would have thought to hear such a prediction.

I’ve been humbled by world events recently. I tend to be someone who is confident about my opinion but I don’t feel like I can talk with any sort of authority about what the world will look like in six months. I have no idea where we will be in the fight to contain Covid-19? I don’t know what school will look like on a day-to-day basis? I couldn’t intelligently guess who will win the US federal election?

I read news articles and they are filled with bias. I often fact check things before I share them. I actually spend time calling out friends when they share misinformation. I see clever, comedic articles like this:

And I wonder just how many people will share them, thinking they are real?

There are days when news seems more fiction than reality. I foolishly thought that in the Information Age, the information available would be accurate. I think it’s funny that people used to worry about Wikipedia being inaccurate, and now it’s the first place I go to confirm facts. I didn’t think I’d regularly use Snopes to fact check articles before sharing them. I didn’t think people of authority would call news they didn’t like fake, and that I’d consider major news agencies propaganda pushers. I didn’t think science would take a back seat to bizarre, unfounded theories. If you went back in time a decade and played a clip like this one, nobody would believe this is anything more than comedy… Pure satire.

These are very strange days indeed… and I don’t see them getting less strange any time soon.

2020 Vision – 3 predictions

Here are ways that I think digital content and content sharing are going to change in 2020:

1. More subscription-based online content without commercials.

Ad revenue sites will not be able to compete. This is the perfect time for a good micro-payment site to come along (imagine Medium blogs, but a ‘clap’ (or ‘Like’) is a 1 or 5 cent donation, or think of Twitch, which already has audiences paying for people to share content). However, while subscriptions for content will grow significantly, micro-payments will only just start to get a foothold in 2020.

2. Privacy concerns will reshape what and how we share.

Google and Facebook will both see dips in revenue and growth because people will choose to not search signed in (or choose to use private search like DuckDuckGo or private browsers like Brave). Facebook will have more advertising based/click-bait sharing, but less personal sharing. People won’t be complaining about privacy as much as just being cautious about what they share, and consciously sharing less personal information.

3. There is going to be an explosion of paid content infomercials.

You will be reading an article and suddenly there is a product placement you were not expecting. For example, in #1 above I mentioned Medium blogs and Twitch, and in #2 I mentioned DuckDuckGo and Brave. I could also have added links to them with a detailed sentences or a paragraph about them, intentionally ‘selling’ them as part of this post. Product placement within blog and news articles will be the new equivalent of the banner ad.

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I have not been a fan of paywalls and content hidden for subscription only, but I think that good, commercial free content will cost money in the future. You will either pay for the content, or you will give up personal information, or you will see imbedded advertising hidden in the content you read. Creators of good content are going to start providing teaser content where you either subscribe to see more, or just click to accept a micropayment to continue.

The advertising model will adapt and there will be even more click bait articles, but instead of making you click 10 pages to see 10 photos of some ‘amazing’ list surrounded by advertising, you will see the first 2 then pay 1-5 cents to see the next 8. We will still need to be discerning consumers if we want to get to the good content we are interested in, and we will have to be willing to pay a bit to continue reading, listening, or watching.