Some background: I’ve been teaching my Grade 8 classes about information management since the beginning of January. We started off with spreadsheets, and are wrapping up now with a unit on databases. I’ve been really happy with how things have progressed. We’ve been doing some really innovative things, and I’ve learned a tonne in the process. Judging by the work students have been submitting, so have they.

Yesterday was supposed to be the last lesson.

I had planned something awesome. In the previous semester, some of the things we had touched on, through journal entries, collaborative activities and extended research projects, were cloud computing, software-as-service, hardware & software, interface design, and business models in the tech. industry. Yesterday, we would have brought everything together through an interview with a business owner.

I had lined up a speaker who writes web-based data-management software for businesses. He co-founded a company just over 2 years ago, and I’ve watched (and helped) his product grow into something quite polished. He has designed, built and secured his own technical infrastructure, and has an extremely impressive workspace, running on a high-end platform. He makes human interface decisions on a day-to-day basis while designing software modules, and his product is completely database driven. He makes his revenue in large part through subscriptions – not by selling his software outright. And he’s managed to attract several fairly big clients.

Great software.

I planned to set up an iChat video conference between him and my class. I would project the video chat onto the board so everyone could see. iChat Theatre would enable him to share photos of his office, and his hardware back-end. Screen-sharing would allow him to demonstrate his software, and then fire up his database server and give us a peek under the hood. We’d be able to discuss hardware, software, interface design, relational databases, and business models, all focused around a living example of what we had studied. The opportunity for reinforcement and learning would have been enormous.

“Would have.”

A week ago I started preparations to get this thing off the ground. I researched all the ports I would need opened for iChat, and compiled a list to submit to our I.T. department. The response? It would be too complicated to set up for just one lesson. I pleaded for alternatives, knowing there’s always more than one way to skin a cat when it comes to networking. Nothing worked. Finally, three hours before the lesson, still trying to ‘get out’ over the right ports, I phoned my speaker and cancelled the conference, indefinitely. Instead, I showed my students how relationships work in Microsoft Access, and then we started a unit on publishing.

My students have no idea just what they missed out on yesterday. As for myself, I was so upset that I was tempted to simply run out and buy a mobile internet stick from my ISP, so this would never happen again.

I have a huge chip on my shoulder when it comes to I.T. administration in education. In all my experiences, there seems to be an overwhelming bias against teachers. Because we are percieved to not have the formal qualifications, we are treated as liabilities – not assets – by network admins.

I’ve worked in the I.T. industry going on 8 years. I know how to program in several languages. I do graphic design. I create web applications to interface with database servers. I’ve been hired by the government, the military, higher education, and the private sector. I’ve set up networks. I’ve designed database schemas. I have a broad base of knowledge, and if I don’t know how to do something, I can get in touch with about half a dozen people who can help me.

I understand that there are a lot of people out there, working as teachers, with little to no technical knowledge. But I’m not one of them. Without a flexible network policy, and without a constant dialogue between teachers and administrators, I’m forced to abide by the same (suffocating) restrictions imposed on others ‘for their own good’.

In education, network administrators are supposed to be enablers – those that make things possible, not those that explain why things are impossible. There are times when exceptions are necessary. An inflexible network policy only stifles innovation. It imposes mediocrity. It dulls all the knives in the drawer, so nobody gets hurt. 

All I wanted to do yesterday was slice some bread.

This misses the point entirely.

Assessment is the part of my job that I enjoy the least.

By a wide margin.

I’ve taught math in the past. Presently, I teach I.T. and History. All three are completely different animals when it comes to assessment, and each poses a unique set of problems that manages to keep me awake at night.

You can be ruthlessly objective when grading a math test or homework assignment: the requirements are clear, and there is (generally) only one right answer. Your numeric grade in math represents the extent to which you measure up to perfection. Plain and simple. Cold and calculating. Not particularly friendly. ¹

Try throwing around a word like ‘perfection’ in a history class and you lose your credibility in an instant. In a course designed to teach students that there ultimately IS no ‘right answer’, you can’t take the mathematical approach. So how do you assess? What does that magic number represent? The extent to which you demonstrate reasoning and critical thinking skills? Well, yes. But good luck determining that objectively.

Take a moment and give your own reasoning skills a grade from 0 to 100.

… See what I mean?

What does assessment mean when it comes to  I.T.? The canned answer is “problem solving skills, naturally.” But are problem solving skills any easier to assess than reasoning skills, or critical thinking skills?

Skills are at the heart of assessment, but most assessment instruments do a poor job assessing skills. Unless you intend to measure content retention as a ’skill’, there’s really no point in giving closed-book, timed history tests. The same goes for math tests that don’t ask you to show your work. And the idea of a written I.T. exam is just laughable.

If you want to measure reasoning skills, assess the questions your students ask. If you want to measure critical thinking skills, give your students the tools and watch what they do with them. If you want to measure problem solving skills, pose a real problem, step back and watch. It’s fun.

Now, give your problem solving skills a mark out of 100.

Annoyed yet?

After gazing enviously at countless friends’ blogs, with their fancy features, consistent behaviour, sophisticated database schemas and out-of-the-box W3C compliance, I finally decided to scrap my home-grown blogging platform and stand on the shoulders of giants.

And it’s great.

Some background:

I wrote my first database-driven journalling platform back in 2001, when I was still in high school, using ASP, VBScript, an Access database and an IIS server. At the time, I did it just to see if I could. It was extremely basic, and extremely proprietary. I learned the value of platform-independence years later, and made the switch to PHP / MySQL / Apache, about the same time I put down the Kool-Aid and purchased a Mac. I decided to write a new blogging platform to help learn how to script in PHP. PHP is ugly.

I finally got something up and running about a year and a half ago, and the front-end worked reasonably well. But the back-end was a mess. So much so that I just couldn’t bring myself to use my own tools to write new posts. So for the past year and change, this journal has stagnated.

Time to start over.

I’ve always known that it’s important to keep a blog if you want to establish an online presence. Employers value it, and it’s an essential part of one’s overall brand. My home-grown solution… well… sucked. And I lacked the wherewithal to fix it. So I took the plunge over March Break and installed Wordpress. The back-end sold me. I haven’t looked back.

Migrating everything over took about 2 weeks, and I learned a tonne about WP in the meantime. Some thoughts on the whole process:

1. Your blog’s root directory is permanent. DO NOT bury deep inside your web server. It’s painful to move it out, afterwards.
2. Trying to trace Wordpress’ boot sequence is an exercise in futility. You’re shuttled from index page to index page, and nested functions from like 5 different files somehow generate your content for you. But damned if you want to know how.
3. I need to learn a LOT more about CSS. Boy am I ever out of touch.
4. ‘rel=…’ attributes are indispensible, and I need to figure out what they actually are.
5. Lightview is the hottest overlay viewer out there.
6. What are trackbacks and pingbacks, and why should I care?
7. AJAX. Need to learn. Desperately.

Hopefully, now that I have a decent back-end to manage my journal entries, I’ll be posting less sporadically.

Like, maybe more than once a year?

 A first-year student at Ryerson University faced an academic misconduct hearing this month for alleged ‘cheating’ over Facebook. Chris Avenir was ‘caught’ moderating a study group for students enrolled in a chemistry course.

When did this become a crime? Students at most universities (including Ryerson, I know for a fact), have department-endorsed study rooms where students come and go at will, swapping notes and exchanging solutions. This is virtually the same thing.

Thankfully, Avenir wasn’t expelled, but in what I view to be a gross injustice, he was given an F on an assignment and a note in his permanent record, stating he was disciplined. And they’re touting this as a huge victory for students at Ryerson, because he could have faced 147 counts of academic misconduct instead.

There is a huge problem here, and it doesn’t have to do with cheating online. The problem is that Avenir’s chemistry professor insisted that students work independently.

The expectation that students work on their own, in a vacuum, to solve problems and complete assignments belongs to a model of learning that became obsolete in the 19th century. No student is an island anymore, and nobody gets anywhere meaningful in complete isolation.

The professor, and likely the entire Faculty Appeals Committee at Ryerson, belong to an era where independent work was still valued. They also belong to an era where talking pictures were all the rage, computers were giant machines that filled entire rooms and took 5 hours to perform calculations on punchcards, and people still paid typists by the page to run off copies of their theses.

See a problem here? These people have no business shaping educational policy at a 21st century post-secondary institution. Their values are out of place, and so are their conceptions about education.

If anything, the 21st century will be all about collaborative learning and problem solving. It will be about groups of students working together, pooling all their resources, to tackle problems an entire order of complexity higher than any of them could solve alone. Good educational policy should reflect this. It should encourage students to ask each other for solutions, not penalize them with draconian policies when they’re caught doing what they’ve been doing for at least 2 decades already.

In an era where one of our world’s foremost minds has no qualms about posting his life’s work online, and calling on mathematicians, physicists and particle theorists to read, refine and augment it, you would think that a few stodgy professors at a university claiming to be at the cutting-edge of applied sciences might want to rethink their stance on collaboration.

They’re probably too busy trying to open an email attachment in WordPerfect format.

Leopard has been a huge step forward in a lot of ways for me – it’s made me an even more efficient and effective computer user. But something has been bothering me consistently ever since I upgraded months ago, and it concerns the usability of iCal version 3.

I use iCal on a regular basis, both as a schoolteacher and a university student. On Tiger it was extremely easy to create events and access / edit information related to them. I’d often have to make changes to the time of an event, or its recursion settings, or its notes. If the event drawer was visible, changing any of these things involved at most two clicks.

In Leopard, however, not only do I need to double click on an event after it’s been created to view it, I next have to click on the ‘Edit’ button, and then click once more on the element I wanted to change. In addition to all these clicks, the event editing callout never appears in the same place twice, which means a different mouse motion is needed each time. These features violate a number of interface design principles – recognition over recall, consistency, flexibility & efficiency of use, and user freedom.

Conversely, the events drawer seems to me to be an excellent interface design decision: it allows users to access events in the same way, in the same location, in any view; it merges viewing with editing in a convenient and intuitive way; it doesn’t cover up other events in neighboring cells during viewing or editing; and it offers a much more spacious area to display event information.

As far as interface design goes, it’s obvious to me that the better event editing interface is in iCal on Tiger. I’m sure there are even better solutions out there, though I don’t pretend to know what they might look like; nevertheless, I’m convinced that what replaced the event drawer in Leopard is a step backward for usability. Using iCal has become a frustrating chore, and an uncharacteristically unpleasant step in my workflow. Please bring back the event drawer and its intuitive design, or alternatively, an even more innovative interface.

Ever since I switched to the Mac platform, working on even the most mundane tasks has become a pleasure. The only real exception is when I’m in the iCal environment.

I hope that, in the future, I won’t need to qualify this statement. Thank you for all the work you’ve done to make my life easier. Keep up the innovation, and thanks for reading.

Best regards,

Ari.

For now, here’s something I wrote for my technology methods class, in response to the following discussion question:

I also think that the principles behind the software, and its ideal functionality, are well thought-out. SMART Notebook provides a potentially complete feature set.

What I take issue with is completely under the hood. While 99% of all educators that use SMART Notebook will never complain about this sort of thing, I do find it sufficiently frustrating to air my concerns here.

SMART Notebook was designed, as all Windows applications, to be a stand-alone, self-contained application. As such, it has its own proprietary file format, and doesn’t “play well” with other applications.

My problem is precisely with this philosophy of software design. I believe applications should be treated as environments that perform one task, and perform it well. Abstracted this way, one would construct “piped” workflows that take the output of one environment and channel it into the input of another. What this would mean, for SMART Notebook, is that as a software environment, it would be able to tap into system level APIs that draw on the resources of other application environments. It could import and export files of any type, display schemas for files that were organized elsewhere, and rely on other applications to perform specific tasks that have been poorly implemented in Notebook’s current manifestation.

Software shouldn’t be envisioned as a vertical system. It should work laterally to provide the most effective user interface.

And yes, I’m especially bitter over this because Notebook was developed on Windows, and simply ported over to the Mac, without paying any attention to the Human Interface Guidelines that all self-respecting Mac developers follow like a bible. It doesn’t behave like any other application on my computer, and so I actually find myself discouraged from using it.

I sincerely hope SMART Tech. raises its development standards with version 11. As far as Windows programs go, it’s a fine piece of software – but the Mac platform is a little more demanding in its interface standards.

The MLVW, fording a giant puddle

Anyway, we all clocked 1000+km on two trucks, driving offroad, on highways and built-up areas. Some people just had a smoother experience doing so. I can also confirm that driver-wheeled courses are in fact as relaxed and laid-back as everyone claims. Here are the pictures to prove it. You can also visit the project page for video of what non-commissioned army grunts do in the field with way too much free time to kill.

Thanks for the memories guys.

Oh. I also wrote an article about the course for some army bulletin.

Click here for photos and video from the Royal Nova Scotia International Tatto. This is an annual military/civilian show with acts from roughly 15 countries. The Canadian military component was made up of personnel from army reserve units from 36 Brigade, the HMCS Athabaskan navy ship, and various air force PAT platoons from across the country. Our contracts lasted for about a month, most of which was spent rehearsing. That’s all I’ll say by way of introduction. Enjoy the pictures. Here’s my favourite:

Live from the stage floor

When the government drops the ball with education (as it has a history of doing in Ontario), public schools generally fall to the bottom rung of the upward-mobility ladder. This encourages the affluent middle-class peons to pull their children out and stick them in private schools where wealth and entitlement run as rampant as social anxiety disorder. While these childrens’ grades are being inflated, their parents’ money is no longer being siphoned through fundraising drives into the holes that property-tax revenue can’t fill.

Public schools can just accept that they’re on the losing end in this vicious cycle, or actively take steps to provide for their students. And I don’t necessarily mean by putting MBA graduates in the principals’ offices, or by requiring each school board to hire a ‘Business Supervisory Officer’ to oversee insidious and exploitative private-sector partnerships.
Let the schools compete. Let school boards accrue capital. Show students the profits. Help them think like the winning class of this historical moment. Maybe they’ll feel pride. Maybe they won’t feel the need to send their kids to a junior rotary club.

Oh, and helping the environment doesn’t hurt either.

Mcpl. Chris Stannix

 

 

We have a development firm hiring non-union labour to increase its profits by reducing labour costs. So far, normal. In response, we have a carpenters’ union organizing information pickets outside the firm’s offices. Again, normal. What isn’t normal is the fact that the picketers aren’t union members. In fact, they aren’t even gainfully employed. The union hired people on welfare to picket the developers so they wouldn’t have to do it themselves.

Who are the good guys here? Who should the socialist cheer for? The developers are the typical fat-cats, pretending that the rate of profit doesn’t inherently fall under advanced capitalism. The union workers are so institutionalized – so much a part of the system – that they’re actually willing to pay the unemployed to act out their class struggle. And the welfare-recipients? You just can’t cheer for the lumpenproletariat – they have no class consciousness, nor will they have learned anything from this exercise. Sure they’re recieving wages, but there’s none of that good, old-fashioned alienation of labour going on, because the union isn’t renting out its capital. It has no capital. And if it does, it shouldn’t!

I could take this opportunity to go off on institutionalized unions, for fragmenting the labour force within the same industry by selectively representing labourers. I could point out the fact that we’re living in such an affluent society that even the so-called working class can afford to hire someone else to do its bidding. Heck, I could even point out the similarities between what’s going on here and the active recruiting of American soldiers from urban ghettos to fight on behalf of the upwardly-mobile American middle class. But I’m sure you get the point.

You know, just out of disgust, I think I’ll tip my hat to the developers here. If these carpenters are too lazy to man their own pickets, would you want to hire them to build your low quality, cookie-cutter subdivision? I sure wouldn’t. Lazy carpenters.

Anyway, what I found particularly interesting about the evening was the question period that followed the half-hour of embarrassing squabbling between the Tory Minister of Education and the NDP’s premier. The themes ranged from hypothetical and historical tuition freezes to the feasibility of their outright abolition; from federal and provincial government funding models for universities, to known issues of deficiency in social welfare and student loan models; even to such trivial issues as taxation on textbooks and sources of funding for infrastructure maintenance. Though I learned quite a bit from the questions and answers themselves, what I found most startling was what wasn’t asked. 

It seemed that both the students and the officials had an unspoken understanding of the postsecondary institution funding model as a strictly-government enterprise: universities get funding from the province, the provinces get equalization grants from Ottawa, etc. However, the federal government and provinces also run the student loan programs, and they do so with public money only. If I had the time to stand in line by a microphone, I wish I had the chance to ask this in front of a room full of students that really didn’t seem to realize that nothing should be taken for granted: 

“When I graduate this year, I will have spent in excess of $35,000 on tuition and books alone. Though I’m lucky that not all of it was borrowed funding, I will have amassed a considerable debt. Now, from my perspective, it’s obvious that this debt will be paid off by the money I make from my employer. What doesn’t make sense to me is, if we’re such a socialist democracy, and if we openly admit that our educational policies are made based on the notion of education as training for work, why don’t government officials make the link between private enterprise and student funding? If private enterprise is the institution that benefits the most from our education, why don’t we see more investment in students on their part? It seems to me that the most logical, practical step to take would be to have the funding for student loans come from a pot to which private enterprise is forced to contribute as a gesture of faith in its investment. I invite the three officials at the podium to tell me how this proposal is flawed, and defend the sanctity of big business in the face of the painfully-clear relationships between enterprise and education that I’ve just underscored.” 

Of course, it wouldn’t have come out so articulate. Shame.