Running with virtual scissors DFI session 6

‘Writing about music is like dancing about architecture’ is a quote often attributed to musician Frank Zappa - although I suspect he’d heard it somewhere else, liked it and used it as a bullet for his critics. Better than that irritating saying ‘it’s like comparing apples to oranges’ if far more specific. Irritating because apples and oranges are actually way more similar if you were to compare them: both are spherical, acidic fruit of a similar size. If I was having a conversation with you while eating an orange and quickly swapped it for an apple when you glanced away, it’s debatable whether you’d even notice. And if you did, you wouldn’t be surprised. You’d be similarly aggrieved if I threw either fruit at you. Instead, compare apples with something completely dissimilar say, post impressionist French painter Vincent van Gogh. Now there’s a mid conversation swap I couldn’t pull off. Anyway, I was going to try for a quote shadow - something like ‘blogging about DFI is like painting about mathematics. Then I googled ‘painting about mathematics’ and it’s an actual thing. In fact there was even this time magazine story about algorithms and post impressionist painter Vincent Van Gogh that I wouldn’t be able to swap for an apple. So on with my blog then.

I rolled in slightly late as Robbie was sharing about what had worked for him in the past week and was super impressed when he casually dropped the word ‘ameliorate’ into his spiel. Pretty good Robbie.

Dave Winter is the change outreach manager for Manaiakalani; I don’t really understand what that means but think sounds like some kind of pentecostal mission - a preacher delivering the digital gospel in some kind of tent in the town square. Anyway Dave-composed, impressive, statuesque-delivered the kind of rousing charismatic call to the masses that you’d expect from someone with the job title ‘change outreach manager’. I should also quickly describe the workspace at Tonui Collab where we were for DFI today. Immense glass windows let light stream into large spacious rooms, with a view over the inner harbour. Beautiful spring day, boats at rest in the harbour with others coming in or going out and the Tatapouri fishing club just across from where we sat. Terrible workspace: despite Dave’s obvious mastery of his subject (and large pauses as he faffed around on his phone) I couldn’t help but look out and think of what I was missing out on. Wouldn’t it be great to be out on the flat ocean, sun on my face with a line in the water? I worked a little further down the wharf for a time: unloading fishing boats for Moana Pacific Fishery. I prefer what I’m doing now though. Anyway - back to Dave who I wouldn’t be surprised to see throwing a ring into a volcano. Or following Snow White around with a cherubic grin on his little bearded face. Call him 'techie'. He was up to slide 15. And you can see the green, forested hills in the distance from those windows. Dave’s theme for his presentation was visibility. He mentioned Manaiakalani teachers having their inquiry in their blog so I’ll shovel mine in here somewhere. Just for kicks. But those windows, I’m used to the DFI in a much cooler environment, without that glorious view. Or dank, sweaty classrooms, where there’s little to see out the windows.

Shannon from Tonui Collab gave a presentation on the future of technology, showing a video about people with prosthetic robot arms that looked badass. Will Smith starred in a movie called irobot - an adaption of an Isaac Asimov story- and a major twist of the plot was when he revealed that he had a robot arm that looked much like the ones in the video. The theme of the movie was the conflict between A.I. technology and people. Relevant perhaps. Shannon’s insight was that this was part of the future of technology. I wanted to see one of the robot arms crush something. Or maybe a MMA fighter with a robot arm? Another pop-culture reference: Black Mirror. Created by Charlie Brooker, this show explores the uneasy transaction between human nature and technology. I could imagine that the MMA fighter with a robot prosthetic might make a great subject for an episode…

We rolled into a Kahoot about programming and I was only on the leaderboard briefly, getting absolutely destroyed by just about everyone. I wasn’t even staring out the window either, I had a good try at it. Robbie was doing pretty well, beating Dave Winter, the bespectacled Manaiakalani guru, for quite some time before succumbing at the end. Cheryl came in second and Perky third. No prizes for last place unfortunately.

We explored programming IRL by writing a programme to get a blindfolded robot across the floor to a set point, ensuring we avoided the dinosaurs on the floor. When I was eight I thought that dinosaurs were about the coolest thing that there was, they were even cooler than bulldozers which I thought were also pretty neat. We did ok. I was the robot for a start, Robbie wrote the programme and Tim did the steering. I didn't break anything.

 The next computational thinking activity was called lightbot, a game where you have to programme the bot to make its way to coloured squares. I was just getting the hang of it when we switched activities.

We watched a video on VR headsets and the fire department and then we tried some headsets also. Mine seemed to show some kind of weird nightclub that had a dancing donkey. Don’t get me wrong, a dancing donkey in a nightclub would be awesome - kind of like the apocryphal story about Johnny Cash painting his motel room black and having a donkey in there for who knows what. I was underwhelmed with the graphics after seeing this video on the unreal engine - I was hoping that we’d be in for this. You’ve got to start somewhere though. Crippled people are, apparently, put in movable suits and have headsets on and this experience helps heal them.

Co-spaces was the final activity. Emily took us through this. We looked at making a narrative in a 3D world. Because Tim had sloped off early to perform a fire dance at Eden Park as a curtain raiser for the rugby, we took his work complaint from a colleague as inspiration for a video we created using programming in the virtual world. The two characters were 'fancy boy' and a witch. Matt showed us some augmented reality. Reminiscent of that scene from David Fincher's Fight Club (one of my favourite movies) it was putting the characters that he'd created on the carpet by Emily's feet. In Fight Club, Edward Norton's blank-eyed character takes a walk around his apartment, narrating in monotone while advertisements from an Ikea catalogue pop up. Also relevant. It was a lot to take in and feels like we are just scratching the surface with this stuff. Here's our 3d video:

A few more thoughts...

E-sports was the cover story of the July issue of Interface magazine. If you’re not familiar with Interface, it’s an ICT magazine. Several pages (20-27) explain why e-sports is the coming thing.  Well, it’s actually here but not at the school I’m teaching at. E-sports - skill, strategy, competition- is a popular indoor activity that doesn’t require physical contact or running around. Neither do chess, darts, snooker, motor sport or golf the article is quick to point out. Of course, I mentioned competitive darts in an earlier blog post and that was not complimentary. And none of these ‘sports’ are interesting to watch. Students compete in various scenarios which all seem to involve violently exterminating the opposition. MOBA games (multiplayer online battle arena) FPS (first person shooter) RTS (real time strategy) are part of the deal and there are mini-articles from Paul, the teacher in charge of e-sports at Waiheke High School and Tom the e-sport TIC at Ashburton. They describe practice times at school and the multiple benefits of e-sports. There were five lines about the health concerns. Basically a short blurb about how everything should be in moderation. In seven pages of fairly dense text I might just add as a point of comparison.

‘Gamification’ is the new educational buzzword to describe how on-line or digital learning has morphed into something akin to an online game. However, dig a little deeper: what this means is that the learning has become a slot machine in a digital Vegas casino. Fancy beeping noises, a leaderboard, abstract points, colourful lights that our young digital addicts crave. ‘Gamification’ is the term often used to describe concepts behind the popularity of Facebook, Snapchat, instagram… Beeping alerts let you know that you have a new comment, a ‘like’. You can see how many ‘likes’ your post has, or your selfie or whatever. It’s great, obviously, to have content that students find engaging but I wonder if the title ‘gamification’ is a euphemism. Maybe ‘addictification’ would be accurate if less PR friendly. We started discussing this with Emily, after the bell had rung for hometime and she had some interesting anecdotes to share about home-schoolers with little access to devices having better concentration spans and imaginations.

Day 5 Sites. And Cyberstupidity

Cybersmart was the topic last week. Ironic how quickly things change. Wednesday night -open evening at GBHS for all year 8 boys and their families. So I left my laptop on the desk in the library. It was open and casting to a screen upstairs. I stepped outside briefly to inspect health and safety standards at the sausage sizzle with Neri (another staff member) and left my laptop unattended and logged in. Neri, between bites of a sausage, asked ‘Bro, have you lost your phone SIM?’. Confused, I looked at his phone as he showed me an email that I had sent the entire staff while I was standing outside, ensuring the grease to bacteria ratios were correct on the BBQ. Turns out, someone had ‘pranked’ my emails and told the entire staff I had lost my SIM and could they send me their numbers. Some dismissed it as a hoax, others are sending concerned messages with numbers that may or may not be correct. Others are saying it’s Karma and making all sorts of off-colour suggestions that I can’t repeat here. I’m not even the least bit suspicious about Tim who was loitering nearby, blamed Eric and keeps worriedly asking about video surveillance. I trust Tim-he wouldn’t have had anything to do with it. (But come-on, Eric clearly wouldn’t be the culprit. He doesn’t even know how google docs work). Tim, interestingly, suggested as a 'payback' that I could get on the offender's laptop and send a whole lot of offensive emails from them to other people but on some kind of schedule so they would go out at random times. Pretty nasty trick Tim - I wouldn't, in any good conscience, be able to do this as you well know.

Perhaps unfairly, I have been accused of all sorts of dodgy shenanigans regarding computers. Obviously, I am innocent of the accusations but throw enough mud at someone… Our DP, once had an unfortunate ‘trick’ played on him. Someone who knew a thing or two about computers realised that you can change the default sounds a computer makes and went into Pete’s (the DP) computer and changed his sounds for some custom noises. And then, so the apocryphal story goes, the offender muted his computer so the crime was hidden for a time. Unfortunately, Pete found out what the noises were during a disciplinary meeting with a constantly truanting boy and his parents. He had, apparently, gone to print a copy of the boy’s attendance and when he pressed the print function his computer loudly announced “Hello, my name is Borat, I lika you I lika sex!” accompanied with some ethnic music. In a panic, embarrassed in front of a couple of parents and a student he had just reprimanded, Pete tried to shut things down. The computer then loudly played the sound of a man rhythmically grunting and panting along with the sound of a sheep intermittently baa-ing. It sounded like….Well, I guess it sounded like the man was carrying the sheep up a steep hill, grunting and panting with the exertion and the sheep was not interested in being carried.  Maybe. I’m not sure what else it could have been.

I heard about this from our systems manager, Malcolm who started sniggeringly calling me ‘the cyberfarmer’ and when I asked why, told me I was the chief suspect. Pete (the DP) commented on my email hack that it was the very definition of irony but I think his definition comes from that terrible Alanis Morrissette song-which has no actual irony -  rather than a dictionary. Anyway, don't do stuff like this.

Other things I have been falsely accused of include the time when someone put a folder called ‘dwarf porn’ on one of the Science teacher’s desktop (his name is also Peter), took a screenshot and then set that screenshot as a background after deleting all the files on the desktop. I knew nothing about this either or about when someone accessed that same teacher’s trademe account that he had left open and bought a large number of extremely risque items - the least offensive of which was a polka dotted g-string. It can’t have been me- I didn’t even know trademe had that stuff. I’m probably leaving out the worst details but I just can’t stomach that kind of stuff. I’d like to state right now, for those who don’t know me so well, that I’m the kind of guy that straightens his tie, doesn’t use bad language and ensures that everyone is putting in %100 effort - not the kind of guy that resorts to highly unprofessional nonsense such as I have described. Clearly, none of this stuff is the least bit funny or even mildly amusing and it needs to stop. I'm obviously some sort of target for this nonsense -I've no idea why but assume it's because I'm such a straight shooter, get things done without the mucking around type guy.

Berated by Robbie on my lack of ‘cybersmarts’, I had to reluctantly concede he was right- there are people out there capable of doing all sorts of terrible and unprofessional things that I wouldn’t have either the inclination or imagination for and that best practice is to lock your screen if you are away from your computer. Also, pull your socks up,tuck in your shirt and be cybersmart not cyberpranked. Actually, if you put cyber in front of lots of words it makes it sound hightech and brainy. My cyberstudents are completing cyberassignments using various cybertools. Don’t overdo it though, you’ll sound cyberpretentious.

First on the agenda today after a whip around about what was working.
Presentation of a slideshow by a bloke called Gerhard from Auckland who talked about sharing while going through the slides. He was justifying why blogger is used (even after ten years - which is nearly an eternity in internet years which are worse than dog years) and described it as the Toyota Corolla of blogging in that it is a fairly safe way to learn how to share online. Side note: my first car was a 1981 Toyota Corolla and it was less than reliable. Constantly leaking carbon monoxide into the interior of the car, I had to drive around with the windows open all the time which could get super uncomfortable. It would often stall at a give-way and not start up again. My experience with Corollas are certainly not all positive.  Gerhard emphasised being thoughtful, helpful and positive in terms of blog comments. I'm sure Tim will take this to heart. Gerhard didn’t mention shitposting or trolling once - probably a good choice.

Next up was a deep dive into class sites. We tore into some sites with enthusiasm. In a positive, helpful and thoughtful way, we deconstructed the first site which was cluttered, busy and way too dark - and not in a cool way either. On the positive side, the teacher was doing a film study on Django Unchained.  Other sites we looked at were better; colourful, less cluttered and simpler to navigate.

Looking at our own sites, we had to fill in a google form assessment that looked at the form and function of our own sites. I’m hoping for some positive comments, but to be fair, my planning procedure is usually ‘Load, Fire, Aim’. And that’s how it looks.

Goal setting - apparently ‘make it to lunch' is not a proper goal so I decided to try and touch up my media site with some better looking buttons as the buttons I’ve got are fugly. Maria asked whether fugly meant ‘funny and ugly’ and I agreed, that’s exactly what fugly is. I mucked around with remove bg and made some editing adaptions and now my media site has the heads of iconic villains as buttons. Clicking on Darth Vader’s face takes you to ‘Advertising’, while the Night King from Game of Thrones takes you to ‘Camera angles and shots’. As an aside, I was pretty disappointed with that particular villain’s demise. Like the Y2K bug, he didn’t have the catastrophic effect that he was supposed to. Anyway my site is slightly less funny and ugly. You might be thinking Hmmm - but you should have seen it before.

Here are my buttons: (Also don't read the text - some of that stuff was made up when I was bored)

Day 4 DFI Friday 16 August. Honestly, my drawing is Thingy from WhatNow.

Cybersmart rather than cybersafety. Cyber from the greek word meaning skilled in steering or governing means pretty much anything to do with the spread of the internet. I wonder whether 'bubonicsmart' would be a better metaphor and it would fit with the whole 'viral' idea. In this context, it relates to being responsible users of the internet. One of the tips was not have have a whole lot of don'ts; instead show students what they should be doing. We didn't look at deepfake, the darkweb, install a TOR browser or scan through the deepweb/darknet or torrent sites. Instead we looked at a slides presentation that had lots of fun tips about being safe on the interwebs. In fact, later on in the day, I made a short video using screencastify where I scrolled through the 'smart legal' slide and a couple of attached resources. I'll try and embed it in this blog.

Hapara and the joys of big brother: monitoring and focusing students’ work went over to our staff like an open bar to an alcoholic. Or to pretty much anyone that likes a drink or two. I know I do. Some good tips today - especially around naming documents and organising folders - changing the view to 1 file in the folder so you can see which of your students have actually done what you told them to do two seconds ago and moved it into the correct folder.

We all had a go with Chromebooks - using shortcuts/taking screenshots/right click. Beneficial as it is good to know the hangups with using a chromebook; first thing you notice are the differences. We had a slides activity to work through. Robbie thought it was a good activity to give to the boys - I agree. In fact I think our staff should have a crack at it. On the same grotty, stained chromies with loose keys and shonky touchpads that our boys routinely defile.

Ipads. All the apple stuff is loaded for $$. I’ve got a Macbook. I found the ipad stuff difficult and I’ve got one. I use it for teacher observations and not much else; in fact my oldest daughter uses it to watch an atrocious reality show called Love Island. Bumped into 'Grinter' the principal of Rotorua Boys' at the Auckland airport. He was extolling the virtues of using ipads as RBHS has gone fully ipad. There's no keyboard and they're more than twice the price. But he thought they were great creative tools... I don't think we'll be going there.

Screencastify - this is another great tool, although I have gone down the 'Loom' rabbit hole instead. Loom offers 100 free videos that it hosts. And I've used 76 of them so far this year. In fact I've started recording my marking/conversations with students .Advantages of (free) screencastify: 50 videos per month that are downloaded straight to drive and there's the drawing functions. Advantages of (free) Loom: editing and hosting 100 videos that can be commented on and you easily can see how many times each video has been watched. This can be discouraging. If you hit the 100, you'll have to download them to drive.

Actually, now that I watch this video, I realise that my drawing looks a bit like Thingy from What Now - although you'll have to skim through to the end. Probably shows my age right?

Alright then, my trip to Tamaki last week. Russell started by giving us a description of the school community: something like 30% Tongan, 26% Samoan, 23% Maori and the rest is a combination of the other islands, Phillipino and 2% Pakeha. At least, I think it was something like this. My brain shuts down with statistics really quickly - even faster if you show me graphs. Very low average income and lots of students commute to the school - and lots of students commute to go to other schools - and lots of movement. The school wears the loss of the chromies when students move.

Five computers in each class (not chromes) for those who forget or are getting their chrome fixed.
We looked at some of the sites - Hinerau Anderson (tech) gave a tour of her site. Impressive - she said it was the third iteration and her first couple of sites were trainwrecks - although, at the time she thought they were gold. Russell talked about the uniformity of the sites - for student’s ease of navigation. So the name was the teacher, then subject. Year levels across the top. Calendars organising coursework were the first content. However, looking at the different staff sites, they did not always conform to the model. Good model to see though, and borrow from.

Tour of classes. No class seemed bigger than 13 students. 13 -  WTF!  Also interesting - instead of all teachers using Hapara workspace there was variation. The first student I spoke to had a couple of classes using Google Classroom, a couple with Hapara workspace and another couple that just used sites - the student referred to this as ‘Drive’. Not all staff were as accomplished as Hinerau Anderson either - she was obviously a bright light and had her courses/content organised outstandingly well. In terms of course content, Tamaki weren’t doing anything that seemed out of the bag special - they were using the same sorts of content and tools (such as Education Perfect) but the advantage was how visible everything was on sites. Another difference was that all students had devices - which were not in use in every class. One class was doing an annotation activity for heath that involved a text reading about the dangers of Methamphetamine. They were using paper and highlighter pens - it could have been done on a doc, but they’d chosen to go ‘old school’. Not too many ‘shared learning spaces’ - in one double class, the teacher was explaining the vagaries of her year 10 Social Studies course to us while at the other end, a member of the Y12 English class played hip hop music through a bluetooth speaker and others were involved in a boisterous discussion about a subject I’m not sure about but am confident it wasn’t anything to do with English. It felt a bit like GBHS. David Winter persisted in asking the English teacher an awkwardly worded question while we disrupted her class. She didn’t hide her annoyance.

Blogs - these were not commonly used. Tamaki, like Hornby, experienced a significant drop off in the senior school. In fact juniors were not so keen either. They were optional - and an alternative used for sharing was the google + communities. We had some discussion about the use of blogs as a method of increasing writing practise (I was about to say mileage but we have the metric system and kilometrage doesn’t have the same ring to it). If blogger is merely a tool for sharing, then google + communities is a fine alternative, but in terms of reflection on learning using writing… Well, I guess the jury’s still out. Jason noted that they have a lot of wrecked chromebooks to fix. They have a school of about 600 students and 50 staff - and a full time techie with an intern coming in for two days of the week. And they were busy cannibalising broken chromebooks and fixing minor and major issues with students' busted stuff. Jason said they had a lot more repairs, possibly due to the fact that the chromes go home each day and get munted around.

What GBHS has to improve then, is the visibility. Developing sites is ideal - if every teacher can start putting stuff together on sites then we are not too far away.

Shooting email zombies DFI Day 3 Friday 9th August

 Filtering and organising email - I decided to do a session on this at the GBHS staff PL; partly because at a staff meeting earlier this year, a senior staff member whinged about how many emails he got and that he wasn’t going to bother reading them. This seemed to be a popular sentiment. Emails are a never ending to-do list and you have to slog through them. In fact, the popularity of Zombie movies are (in my opinion) are a result of this. Consider, most horror genres-and this is critical film theory- are thought to be a personification of some human fear -a metaphorical representation, if you will. So Godzilla, as a fear of the atomic age. werewolves, an instinctual fear of predation and human detachment from nature, Frankenstein as a fear of science overreaching and vampires and zombies as our anxiety over disease: Zombies had a parallel with rabies, vampires with AIDS. In 1968 George Romero made the first Zombie hit movie ‘Night Of the Living Dead’ and admits ripping off the plot of a book called ‘I am Legend’ which was actually about vampires. It has since been made into a zombie movie starring Will Smith. Since then there have been a shit ton of zombie movies and television programmes.

In fact we’re probably past ‘peak’ zombie which was 2014 or 2015 depending on your opinion of season five and season six of ‘The Walking Dead’. Interestingly, in the U.S. 5.3 million people watched the premiere of the Walking Dead but only 2.9 million watched the season 4 premiere of critically acclaimed show Mad Men. So 2.4 million people would rather watch January Jones, Christina Hendricks and Jon Hamm if they were shambling, decomposing corpses. Even Game of Thrones fits (uneasily) in the zombie genre. Which zombie movie is my favourite? I’m glad you asked - it’s a tie between Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland. Anyway, a better question is probably: What on earth have the popularity of Zombies got to do with my email account? First: zombies. There are two types: fast zombies and slow zombies. They can’t talk, don’t think and want to consume your flesh. And that’s it. The solution is also simple: blast zombie in brain from point blank range -preferably with a shotgun-until you either run out of zombies or run out of ammo. Here’s the point: what if people are less interested in seeing a metaphorical representation of their unconscious fears (zombies as a proxy for our fear of rabies) but are more attracted to an analogy of how their day to day life feels? My inbox is a constant, unholy shitstorm of tasks, reminders, notifications, announcements and requests sent impersonally by colleagues, students, senior managers and complete strangers. I didn’t ask for them and now I have to deal with them even if it is just to read them or delete them. And like the zombies, they keep coming. 

Tuesday’s PL session with staff went pretty well, some staff had no idea that docs does the voice typing - in fact some of them now think I'm some sort of digital Dumbledore (how do you like that reference to my first blog). I had a short spiel about filtering emails into folders and bypassing the inbox. There were a couple of ‘in’ jokes about filtering specific serial email spammers. Staff then had a crack at google grouping and I found myself added to several groups with interesting names like GBHS Blokes. I had mentioned that if you invite people they will ignore the invite. No doubt we’ll soon be exchanging our opinions on the latest Marie Kondo episode.

Dorothy’s spiel - presentation. Emphasis on creativity as a ‘hook’ for student engagement. Maslow’s hierarchy, solo taxonomy both rank the whole creative thing as fairly important. Sight, sound and motion are an important part of creativity - she finished with some quotes from Kevin Roberts who is well-known for leaving Saatchi and Saatchi in a storm of controversy after making some rough calls about gender diversity in the advertising industry. I should also mention that Kevin retracted his comments when people gave him stick and apologised. But...
Multi modal sites Engagement (hook) As a guy that loves fishing - I even watch fishing shows- the hook is a compelling metaphor. The best hooks are super sharp and have a wicked barb so the fish (fighting for its life) can’t spit it out. Circle hooks are my favourite type: they have a design feature that makes them slide to the corner of the mouth and don’t cause a huge amount of damage if you did want to chuck the fish back. Of course, with the hook metaphor, you have to consider bait. What interestingly flavoured shiny thing is impaled on the hook that hides the vicious barb? Even Maui had to bait his hook; he used his own blood. The hook is a fairly aggressive metaphor. But unlike something similarly aggressive - the spear, the dagger, the bullet - the hook has a degree of subtlety and deception. It’s also a fairly common metaphor: the hook in a song is the catchy part, riff, phrase(even catchy is metaphorical). Also, if we started talking at length about ‘spearing’ our learners someone is going to get flamed. Much like any other aggressive hunter-gatherer images there is a fairly brutal process inferred with ‘hooking’ something. The catch is dragged ashore (or onboard) and bludgeoned to death, filleted, skinned and put on ice. At least, that’s the ideal process. Sites: I enjoyed Maria’s detailed explanation of setting up a site. I have to do a similar presentation on Tuesday morning to a staff group that has swelled to 18. Some of the stuff Maria went through was instructive - such as having navigation across the top instead of the side because it frees up space for content. Some of these things I’ve just blundered through intuitively or I’ve just gone with presets. I asked about fonts, wanting to customise these but there are few choices. Luckily none of them are comic-sans. Explaining the simple stuff and not taking a whole lot of prior knowledge for granted is vital. The multi-modal suggestion is also worthwhile: if I reflect on my sites, I have initially gone crazy with loom videos. My media site is probably a better example as my staff site has been heavily weighted toward loom videos. Anyway, I am hoping to use this content that Lenva Shearing developed for making new sites. Also useful: the DFI slide presentation which I moved to my drive. I was trying to make a copy (that I could adapt) but that function has been turned off.

I should also probably mention that I’ve just been on a trip to see Hornby High School and Tamaki College as orientation for the Manaiakalani programme. I went with Jason Scott who is our techie and our principal. As our techie, Jason is probably the most indispensable guy at the school. Last year, I broke my achilles tendon and had quite an extended sick leave. There was someone in my class doing my job straight away. If Jason fell over, the school would fall apart. Anyway, Hornby’s principal, Robin Sutton gave us the grand tour of the vast property Hornby sits on. Everything looked new. And the classes were tiny - we're talking 12-13 students. Robin admitted that Manaiakalani was still not embedded after five years on the programme. Interesting. Also intriguing was an extended discussion about exponential decline in the popularity of rugby. I found this fascinating as I think that there’s a real digital crossover. Not to mention the elephant in the room (which no one did) which is concussion. I think I should expand on this in a further blog post as it’s got me thinking. Hornby, small classes, modern learning environments, digital devices, probably has more in common with Campion College than Boys' High. Tamaki College, however had more in common with Boy’s High. I should probably expand further on this trip but am still considering how my school compares. The short version is that I don’t think we are far from where we should be and that it won’t take much to get there.

Last week, one of the things that was new to me was the 'soft skills' thing which is about responsibility, teamwork, leadership, decisiveness - that sort of stuff. This is the popular stuff!  It made me reflect on the perception of intelligence which was pretty much connected to having a good memory; especially relating to current events and history.  If you’re still reading (and good for you) you may have noticed I used the past tense. That was deliberate - the perception of intelligence may have just changed. Back to the original perception of intelligence before the internet became ubiquitous - this was partly to do with how we absorbed information -  most of which came from books with the occasional documentary. You had to retain whatever you learnt so a smart person had a general but imperfect sense of history and current events. But then the internet started to collect and index pretty much everything including facts, opinions, and reviews generated by pretty much anyone who wanted to have a say on anything. This is not a good thing. An overwhelming amount of information becomes a morass. Now, I think a perception of intelligence won’t depend on these skills - some of which are innate - but instead, an ability to sieve through an overwhelming amount of information. I have a reasonable memory - but as I said, memory is now not really a necessary thing - it’s like being able to multiply two five digit numbers in your head instantly. Sure, it’s impressive but I have a phone in my pocket and it can do the same thing. 

Day 2 DFI Friday 2nd August 2019

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Last week I learned a few things I’ve already used. The indexing for google docs example; turns out it works in slides as well. This year our school is putting out our subject selection as a google slides presentation. There are 127 slides packed with information about achievement standards and endorsements available at each level, in each class so I stupidly volunteered to index it. Well, otherwise people are going to be frantically scrolling to find anything. I copied the scavenger hunt and am using it as a relief activity -I may use it on our staff too. Thanks Dorothy. I had a go at it and it took a wee while - I got a bit jammed up inserting an equation but aside from the maths, not too bad I think. Google groups - I’ve made a couple and will be presenting these as part of a google shortcuts and tips section. I’ve got to deliver a staff PL module for the next four weeks and will be sharing this stuff with the unlucky 16 staff who have opted in to my module. Any other tips will also be passed along. For example: a mate showed me a great app called Vevino that I think will be a hit. You can scan wine bottles and, if you’re at a restaurant, the wine list. Vevino will give you a rating and the usual price - to see if you are getting a bargain and whether it will double as paint stripper. I used it on the wine list at Portafino. Unfortunately it was after I had ordered a glass of wine and it confirmed just how cheap I am. Currently investigating apps that do the same but with beer is also a priority.

Today we’ve looked at a few more things. The filter function in gmail looked so appealing that I immediately filtered our school spammer bastard who sends stacks of emails every day. Boring stuff. To everyone. I bypassed the inbox so they won’t show. I then filtered the mailing list I subscribe to for media studies teachers throughout NZ. I get some worthwhile stuff but there’s a lot of dross and it clutters up the forum section of my inbox. I don’t know where that stuff has gone now. I assumed it would make a folder. Asked Tim, who was sitting next to me. He responded, ‘Who cares?’. That’s pretty much why you filter. Also appealing: Google Keep and the capture text from photo function. We started the day with a whole lot of theory: Bloom’s taxonomy. Learn, Share Create. Great stuff - I’m sure someone else’s blog will cover the nitty gritty. Create, incidentally, is right at the top of Bloom’s pyramid. This afternoon: further exploration of google hangouts where, in small groups, we discussed a blog on a dinosaur by a kid called Tanner. With some shock, I noticed that he'd posted this blog on the 22nd of December and his teacher had commented on the 24th and later on the 29th. Another kid called Zephaniah had commented. Zephaniah! Josie, our MC asked us about what 'soft skills' were the focus and thought that Tim and I were pretending to be ignorant about these. We weren't. We had an illuminating discussion about these. Thanks Josie.

So I also looked up the Marie Kondo that some of the ladies on the DFI were enthusiastically talking about the previous week. She’s got a T.V. show called Tidying up with Marie Kondo. It’s a series. I don’t know how many seasons. I also don’t care. The first episode: Tidying with Toddlers. (insert your choice of expletive) Now I like Netflix and Netflix, like just about everything else, is running algorithms to figure out what you like and make suggestions based on your preferences. Netflix has never suggested that I watch Marie Kondo. Good to know those algorithms work then; at least some of the time anyway. Back to Kondo, according to google, the process of tidying is supposed to bring you joy. So unlike any tidying I’ve ever done. And people watch this stuff - which doesn’t surprise me either. People watch golf. There is-or was- a programme on T.V. where you could watch other people watching T.V. People (mainly young males) watch videos of other kids playing video games. I once caught my father-in-law watching competitive darts (some of the most un-athletic competitors ever). There was an enormous crowd of fans going batshit crazy every time some pudgy, middle-aged bald guy (with a scraggly pony-tail) threw a dart. Don’t get me wrong - I’m not a slob, but I don’t find tidying appealing. I’ll do it but I’m not watching anyone else do it for entertainment. Or play darts, golf, video games or watch T.V. While it’s true that there’s been an artistic elevation of television ,(Breaking Bad, The Wire, House of Cards, Black Mirror etc) we also have to deal with the opposite extreme. That’s a general statement too, not an inference on the quality - or otherwise - of Kondo tidying. Another side note, I was talking scornfully to my wife about ‘joy’ and its association with tidying - kind of like ‘fun run’ but she assured me that it was actually a thing.

Further thoughts while I'm sitting here: in 1978 a guy called Jerry Mander (interesting name) published a book called Four Arguments For the Elimination of Television. Pretty stodgy sounding title. And misleading. Mander had a lot more than four arguments. Some of the arguments were about the light emitted being the wrong sort of light for people to absorb. One argument that stuck with me though, was the argument that watching T.V. destroys some of our innate creativity. How does that work? Well, think of the disappointment you felt after watching a movie of a book you enjoyed. It wasn’t what you expected. Or (and this got me), picture in your imagination, the following scenarios: a preoperative conversation between two doctors, the maiden flight of Jean Batten, Eskimos preparing a meal (I think they prefer to be called Inuit).  Close your eyes if you have to. Now let me ask, did your mind create a picture for you or did it reference something you saw on a screen? Here’s another mental exercise. Picture an important moment in a rugby game. A try, a kick, a tackle - whatever. Got it? Well. Most of us have seen an actual live game. If you are a kiwi male, you have almost certainly participated in an actual game. I have watched and played in many. But when asked to picture a moment from a rugby game I almost instantly pictured something I had seen on T.V. In slow motion. Rather than a game I had played in or been on the sideline for. Now those two examples are different. One asks for a creative act, the other is memory recall. But the similarity is the pervasiveness of the screen. And this is significant.  Also, once you have seen something on T.V. it removes your ability to imagine it. I was fortunate enough to read Tolkien’s Hobbit, Lord of the Rings before I saw the film versions. Same as the Narnia books, Game of Thrones, Harry Potter etc. And I can’t read the books now without picturing something from Peter Jackson’s mind rather than my own. I cannot imagine Harry Potter as someone other than bespectacled Daniel Radcliffe or Aragorn as someone other than Viggo Mortensen. Dinklage as Tyrion and so on. What’s an exception? Glad you asked: casting Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher - I can still read a Lee Child and not ‘see’ Cruise. 

Now I’m watching with interest some of the cautionary stuff I see on TV3 news and on websites such as Stuff.co. Advice to get young people off screens and limit devices. Articles that point out the effects of looking at screens too much before going to bed. Others point out that Jobs and Gates didn’t let their children on devices. Mander published his book in ‘78. And it has proved insightful - even the stuff about different types of light -which I initially thought was a steaming pile of crap. Using devices, or so I thought, was akin to learning to drive and depriving kids would be a luddite setback. But Mander (and Gates/Jobs) may be correct and in 30 years people will look back at our attitudes to kids using tech like we look back on early cigarette ads that promoted healthy smoking. Or wonder why kids are being marketed caffeinated diabetes like V, Mother, Demon and Lift Plus. Or maybe even wonder why we use glyphosate herbicides so readily. That’s beside the point though. The point is, what is technology taking away from us? Mentally. And will we even notice?

Footnote to these rambling thoughts: Unlike his name;Jerry Mander never, as far as I can ascertain, tried to change electoral boundaries.

TL:DR
Some more stuff this week like google keep and organise your calendar and emails.