Tag Archives: technology

Champions model but don’t always lead

It’s great to have champions of technology who can really show you what’s possible, but they are often operating at a level that’s far too intimidating for other educators, and so they don’t necessarily make the best technology leaders. If you really want to find innovation, yes it’s important to help those front runners who are capable of doing amazing things with technology. However you won’t take everyone further unless you invest in making sure that everyone in your learning community is moving forward.

A few things can help here:

1. Everyone gets access to the same tools. Sure, your tech champions may ask for access first, but once a tool is valued it needs to be accessible to all.

2. Access doesn’t guarantee adoption. With access, there needs to be two things also shared: need and training.

Why is the technology needed? What problem does it solve? What does it achieve more easily, faster, more effectively? Or what does it allow you to do that you couldn’t do before?

How easy is it to adopt? Who can help with training? When can training happen? What’s available for support when a roadblock arises?

3. Collaboration. How can the community support itself, what opportunities are there to share and learn from each other? How can this be embedded into meetings and when can time be given within the current schedule, without adding to it? How can the team use the technology themselves in a meaningful way to become more effective?

4. Recognition and/or appreciation. This doesn’t have to be public, but it does need to happen. How does leadership recognize adoption and use of the new tools? How do people on the team share their success? How are those that support others be supported themselves?

A technology champion can be a leader, but they aren’t inherently leaders. They aren’t always aware of the struggles of others. They don’t always see the roadblocks or pitfalls others do. They don’t always use tools or strategies that others see value in. The trick isn’t to adopt everything they try, or to have them lead by trying first. The trick is to harness their lack of fear and innovative spirit, to learn from them, and to figure out who else on the team will be able to find and share success with the same tools.

And finally, who are going to be the resisters? Who on the team will be most likely to struggle? If you know, then you know who to go to, and support, even before the full implementation starts. Help the resisters understand why. Help them see the value. Help them be part of the positive change.

We need the technology champions to bravely challenge the status quo. But, we also need others on the team to help lead the adaption and transformation of the team, of the learning community. That’s not necessarily the job of the technology champion. It’s the job of leadership to recognize who else needs to lead, and who needs to be supported.

The unwritten rules

I have three unwritten rules:

1.

2.

3.

🤣

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Jokes aside, there are certain unwritten rules and expectations we follow that have evolved over time. Here are 3 examples:

1. People used to pop by unannounced. There would be a knock on the door and the explanation would literally be, “I happened to be in the neighbourhood and thought I’d drop in.”

No cell phones, no way to give advanced notice. No social awkwardness that would surely come into play if someone did this now.

2. Don’t leave me a voicemail, leave a text.

Quite literally, the only time I leave messages now is because I’ve called someone and I’m driving. Besides that, the etiquette is to hang up when you hear the message, before you get to the beep, then text your message. Or don’t leave a message because you know the person saw your unanswered call on their call display. That’s enough to get a callback.

3. Don’t ‘Reply All’ to an email. I was tempted to say, “Don’t ‘Reply All’ to an email except when…” but just don’t.

Some people didn’t get the memo on this unwritten rule. I think it needs to be written.

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It’s funny how etiquette changes over time. I wonder what things we do today, that will just seem wrong to do 10 or 20 years from now? What new unwritten rules will there be?

Are our apps over-sharing our data?

My guess is, yes. I know that when I google search a product, I will likely see an ad for that item on Facebook. I know that information is being shared. But I’ve been listening to The Quantum Moment on my Audible App and today on my 30 minutes of TikTok (my time limit on weekdays) I ended up seeing 4 videos on: the Space-Time continuum (x2), an Einstein thought experiment, and the physics of light and heat vs dark and cold.

Now before reading this book, I did have a few science videos as part of my algorithm, but mostly related to space and the James Webb telescope. Now, from ‘out of nowhere’, I’m getting physics videos, after I start listening to a book about physics on a totally different app.

Part of me thinks this is great, after all I did enjoy the videos and found them interesting. That’s why I like TikTok, it feeds me more interesting content than any 30 minute show I could possibly find on TV. But part of me wonders, what other data is being shared? How much do my apps know about what I do on other apps? How targeted is the advertising I see? What about when I google medication, or symptoms? What about the health apps I use?

Is anything private anymore, or when I agree to use an app, am I agreeing to share my whole life? I might have enjoyed the videos, but I don’t think TikTok should know what books I’m listening to, unless I’ve explicitly permitted it to.

Doing STEM

‘Doing STEM’ or ‘Doing STEAM’… there is a saying, “Put lipstick on a pig, and it’s still a pig.”

I don’t want this to sound like a rant, and I don’t want to knock teachers for trying to do STEM projects. I do want to say that if 5 years ago a teacher did a project with kids where they broke them into groups and had them assemble a limited number of straws and a specific length of tape into the tallest possible tower, and if they do it again today it isn’t suddenly a STEM project.

Now, if that same lesson included teaching geometry and/or structural integrity; or if students had to design it such that their design had to have a function such as offices or apartments; or hold a weighted satellite dish; or if it had to factor in wind resistance (such as a blow dryer at close range); or if they had to model their design first and estimate the height they will achieve… if there was some thinking, designing, modelling, or estimating that was required before or even during the build process, well then it’s looking more like STEM.

Hands-on does not equal STEM. Building something does not equal STEM. Group challenges does not equal STEM. Meaningful integration of cross-curricular concepts, where problem solving requires thinking in more than one subject area relating to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math is STEM. It doesn’t have to check all the boxes, but it should include thoughtful integration of at least a couple of these.

It’s about making the cross-curricular connections explicit, or at least thinking through how the outcomes and expectations relate to these connections. It’s about developing competencies in the areas of STEM and not just doing a project that looks like STEM.

We don’t really understand

We don’t really understand exponential growth. It’s too hard to comprehend because when we look at growth, we tend to focus on what we’ve seen already, and project forward, but what has already happened is always less significant in length or size than what is still to come. So when we compare what has happened already to what is still to come, we are not comparing equal things.

Fold a piece of paper in half 6 times. How thick do you think the stack would be? Let’s have some fun and look at the folding paper challenge:

It was an accepted belief that folding a piece of paper in half more than 8 times was impossible. On 27 January 2002, high school student, Britney Gallivan, of Pomona, California, USA, folded a single piece of paper in half 12 times and was the first person to fold a single piece paper in half 9, 10, 11, and 12 times. The tissue paper used was 4,000 ft (1,219 m; 0.75 miles) long. ~ GuinnessWorldRecords.com

So she needed a 4,000 foot, (1,219 metres) long piece of paper to achieve this. It’s easy to look at this image of her folded paper and figure out how big it was at 11 folds and before that 10 folds, by halving the amount once then twice. But what if she were to fold the paper more times? How many more times would this image represent?

This image represents folding the paper just 3 more times… a total of just 15 folds.

At 23 folds this would be about a kilometre high (3,280 feet). At 30 folds, you would be entering space. 42 folds gets you to the moon. The 51st fold would get you to the sun. Beyond that it doesn’t matter because our brains won’t truly appreciate the scale anyway.

So I can see the difference that folding a piece of paper just 6 times (64 pieces of paper high) to 12 times (the first image of Brittany above) looks like, but I really struggle to extrapolate from this that 24 folds would be 2 kilometres high.

So when we look at things like technological advancements, we don’t really see well into the future. When I bought the 16k adapter for my Commodore VIC 20 computer to get me to a whopping 36k of memory, I could not fathom the idea that I’d one day be buying 2 Terabytes of memory to store photos that were 8 megabytes large. And I’ll have an even harder time imagining what kind of data I’ll be storing 10 or 20 years from now.

Watch out Metaverse here we come! What does this mean? It means that in 20 years we’ll look back at the technology we have right now in the same way someone who lived 160 years ago would look at our technology today.

That’s mind blowing!

Living in a Faraday cage

Our house was built in the early 1960’s. The good news, no asbestos in our walls, so we don’t have a massive abatement cost added to an already expensive renovation. The bad news, the plaster/drywall has wire mesh in it.

We used to complain to our phone service providers that the coverage was bad in our area, they even came with trucks outside our house to test reception. But it turns out it’s just bad reception in our house. We are basically living inside a Faraday cage, with large dead zones. ‘Dark’ areas where signals can’t reach or be sent out by our phones because we are surrounded by a metal cage in our walls. Hopefully the center wall on the main floor being removed will make this better.

Currently, when using a cell phone in my house I’m reminded of when we used to be tied to a specific location where the phones were on tables or were connected to the wall. I would be walking around talking to someone and the line goes silent. I would then need to backtrack to where I last had the signal and hope that I wasn’t disconnected. Once I’m reconnected, I have to stay locked in that one spot.

For most people mobile phones are mobile, but in my house we are still tethered to specific locations. For those of you that have nostalgia for the old days, this isn’t as much fun as it might sound.

The death and rebirth of alone

I’m listening to Neil Postman’s ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death‘. I’ve shared the amazing cartoon based on the introduction before, looking at the contrast of the dystopian novels ‘Brave New World‘ by Huxley and ‘1984‘ by Orwell, and “the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.” I’ll share the comic again below.

But first, a thought about how we amuse ourselves with digital entertainment. I think that if Postman was alive today his fear of television as an entertainment distraction would have been exponentially magnified with the advent of the post Truth world that the internet and smartphone have propelled us into. In some ways this book feels dated, and in others prophetic. Television no longer has the grasp on everyone it did when this was written in 1985, but everything about Postman’s concerns are just amplified with entertainment and distraction constantly at our fingertips.

One thing this brought to mind is the fact that kids today are never bored, at least not bored like I was sometimes as a kid. I mean, I couldn’t contact my friends after school whenever I wanted, and I couldn’t choose something else to watch when nothing was on tv that I wanted to watch. I just got bored. Then I figured out a way to fill the time… by myself… all by myself as in ‘all alone’.

I don’t think kids today know how to be alone, but they certainly know how to be lonely. They are always connected yet feel disconnected. They are always ‘on show’ but many just feel ‘off’. They see social media of everyone’s best self, and feel like they can’t be that person themselves.

The new ‘alone’ is constantly connected, but always feeling alone.

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Writing that last sentence reminded me of a poem I wrote, ‘A Life Consumed‘.

Below is Postman’s Huxley/Orwell comparison I mentioned above.

Getting technical

While others see me as tech savvy, I know that I’m not. What I am is patient, and willing to experiment. That’s different than savvy. Why do I say this? Because I struggle. I get lost, I make mistakes. I screw up. A lot!

Whenever I’m doing something technical, I have to go painfully slow, or I have to take one step forward and two steps back. This isn’t about me trying to be humble and under-representing my skills, it’s a reality that I’ve come to accept. This is most evident when I try something new. I’m the guy that misses a step, or tries something that I’m too novice to try.

I can remember when I first tried blogging. I’d play with the HTML and quite literally break my blog. Then I’d spend a couple hours on the back end, going way over my head to try to get something besides an error page to show up. But I figured it out. I muddled through.

Sometimes these trail and error escapades left me pulling my hair out, other times laughing at myself, and sometimes feeling like I wanted to cry (especially if my mistakes cost me money unnecessarily). But I try, and I try, and I try. And unlike the song, I find that my attempts create amazing opportunities to learn… and despite the frustration, my attempts at bring more technical than I am are very satisfying.

Dropped calls

I live in an old house, and rather than traditional drywall, we have plaster with wire mesh in it. This makes our house a bit like a Faraday cage. Some days when reception is bad, I have to find a spot that works and stay still to keep the call from fading in and out, and sometimes I even have to go outside.

But I notice it’s not just at home. I have bad zones in my school too, and will even tell someone I’m talking to on the phone, ‘You might lose me for a couple seconds as I walk through this hallway.’

My running joke is: iPhones are amazing, they can do so much, it’s too bad they don’t make good phones.

I do find it odd that I’m better off on a Zoom call or WhatsApp, streaming a video call on wifi, than I am making a simple phone call. As the world slowly moves towards global wifi, I think we might see an end to traditional phone calls. We’ll still carry phones with us (one way or another), we just won’t be tied to a phone network and locked into phone company contracts. And we won’t be dropping as many calls.

Future Tech: Prescription Glasses Metaphor

It’s the early 2030’s and you are walking downtown, heading to a specialist appointment. You don’t know where the office is, but you aren’t looking at a map on your phone. You haven’t done that in a few years. No, instead, you are looking through a contact lens that is like a heads-up display giving you augmented reality directions. There is simultaneously an arrow flashing 3 times in your view, showing you that you need to turn right in 15 meters, and a haptic vibration from an implant in your right elbow. The vibration you feel in your elbow has a pattern of long-short-short, which you have set to let you know is a map direction.

Had the vibration been in both elbows with a short-short pause short-short vibration, then you would know that it was a phone call from one of your chosen favourites, and your heads-up display would have shown you the name and/or photo. You have it set so that you need to look down and right to see the name and face of the person calling, but it could have been set to come up right into your line of sight. If the call was from an unknown number, you would not even have been bothered. Instead the call would have been answered by an Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistant that (for voice phone calls) sounds like you, but with a decision tree to decide if the call is worth bugging you, leaving you a message for later, or even blocking the call if it determines it is spam. Since you are just walking, it might have offered you a text version of the message on an augmented display, but if you were in the specialist’s office, the AI would have waited until your appointment was over to notify you of a message.

You arrive at the specialist’s office and because you connected on LinkedIn, your AI has identified the secretary from her profile picture, and her name pops up above her head so that you can greet her appropriately. You wave your hand over a scanner, stare briefly at a ‘Yes’ box to indicate that you want to share your personal medical information, and you are done signing in. Because this is a medical specialist, that data includes the last year’s worth of bio information like heart rate, blood-sugar levels, and even blood pressure. A small implant collects this data in a just slightly more sophisticated way than the current apple watch. If the doctor didn’t want to run some specific tests on you, all this would have been done remotely, with the Zoom call actually happening through your contact  lenses and an implant in your ear. To get around the fact that you don’t have a camera on your face, the person you are talking to sees a perfect rendition of your face, and even if you were watching, you wouldn’t know that is wasn’t actually you. It even uses your voice intonation to help determine the emphasis on facial expressions, so if you said the same thing twice, it would look subtly different, rather than robotic.

Is this a future you want? Because it’s coming… and you will embrace it. You will participate in it. Because to not do so, would be to have a disadvantage.

When my youngest daughter was 9, we took a trip to England and France. In Paris we went to the Eiffel Tower, and it was there that we learned our daughter needed glasses. We had just come back from China, where we had been living for 2 years, and we hadn’t had eye exams in almost 3 years. We got to the top of the tower and my wife started pointing out things to look at, and my daughter couldn’t see any of them. At 9, she didn’t know that she couldn’t see well. She thought everyone saw the way she did. Distant hills were supposed to be blurry. What about street and store signs? Who needed to see those, they were in Chinese anyway, and we couldn’t read them. Once we returned home, we went to the optometrist and our daughter has worn glasses or contacts ever since.

The future I shared above is a future with a metaphorical 30/20 vision. It is the ability to see and feel things that people today can not see or feel without augmentation… and this will be the new version of 20/20 vision. The same way that my daughter was disadvantaged without her glasses, any person not augmenting their lives with technology will be disadvantaged compared to those around them. They will be less connected, less informed, less able to see. It would be like my daughter realizing that she couldn’t see like everyone else, and still deciding not to get glasses. Augmented reality will be the prescription glasses of the future, and you can choose to use the prescription, or stay in the dark.