lovehate podcast 184: Bill Gates Is An Idiot
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Bill Gates regularly waxes idiotic on education and population control. I think Bill Gates has proved his head is firmly entrenched up his ass, and to understand why, have a listen.
When culture gets overinflated, yet refuses to pop, I want to be there with the needle. Enlightened cynics of the world unite! Express your love or hatred of things from the sacred to the mundane.
By the way, there's a good chance any podcast you listen to may have language not suitable for children. If you don't want to take a chance on hearing the occasional f-bomb, don't listen.
(download)
Bill Gates regularly waxes idiotic on education and population control. I think Bill Gates has proved his head is firmly entrenched up his ass, and to understand why, have a listen.
EDIT: Found the following link through a US-funded shill group on Facebook. I suppose lining the pockets of Tony Clement, James Moore and Stephen Harper isn't enough.
Upon reading the a blog post by Michael Stewart at his site klikables.com, I was struck by a level of presumption to speak for the benefits to educators and specifically teachers with the proposed legislation. The provisions concerning digital locks in the Bill will not only serve to stifle the classroom teacher, but education in general. His post is linked above, but I thought I'd post my response here, at my blog, in case his moderation of the comments are too exacting to include my thoughts:
Mike,
Are you a teacher? I am.Â
Countless teachers break digital locks every day in order to offer the best education for their students. At what point do you choose to weigh digital lock regulations over the professional judgement of a teacher to deliver curriculum as effectively as possible?
All of your so-called "benefits" listed above are precluded by digital lock language in Bill C-32. I have to break a digital to rip many CDs, to rip many DVDs, and even to create  workable codecs for the "mashups" in your celebrated YouTube clause.
Digital locks are NOT good for teachers. They are NOT good for students. They preclude a free and open learning environment.
I have no doubt that as a content producer for education, you may have been persuaded that your extensive list of C-32 benefits are true. I tell you, without malice for your educational efforts in content, which I'm sure are laudable, that Bill C-32 will not be beneficial for teachers or students.Â
The Bill will force second, third, or fourth choices when finding the best example for a lesson. Such a decision to avoid a $5000 fine for breaking a digital lock, by being forced to choose inferior content, is a disservice to education.
I trust your business of creating digital content is under threat by users redistributing your work without permission. I understand your motivation and your goals. I have little problem with you speaking of the benefits of Bill C-32 for your sector of education, but I would caution you about presuming to speak for teachers.
As long as the digital lock rules remain in Bill C-32, it will be a threat to classroom teachers.
Â
It's not often that I allow my day job to creep into lovehatethings. In fact, I enjoy using LHT to wind down and express ideas outside of work most evenings while hockey plays mute across the room. Tonight though, and partially because I was encompassed by it all day, I want to share the text submission of a presentation I made to the Standing Committee on Social Policy at Queen's Park in Toronto.
The topic was "Student Achievement" and the new legislation (Bill 177) they seek to impose would make it the responsibility or everyone, from teachers to educational assistants to school board trustees, to ensure th at Student Achievement targets were being met. The trouble is, while the Bill (which passed 2nd Reading in the House) actually includes Student Achievement in its title, a definition or standard for Student Achievement is NOWHERE TO BE FOUND. In other words, my job performance is now based on something that is undefined.
I realize that this may be boring as sin to any of you who aren't either living in Ontario or tied to public education, but I'm too tired to write anything else tonight.
A couple of quick definitions to start:
EQAO = Education Quality and Accountability Office which is also the group that provides and grades the standardized test at the grades 3, 6, 9, and 10 level.
Deming's Disciples = William Deming, the father of modern productivity and quality control in industrial settings, revolutionized post-war Japan with the work ethic that the country would become famous for. Unfortunately, while his theories hold well for manufacturing concerns, several educational theorists tried to apply them to education in the 1970s and 1980s under the guise of the Effective Schools movement. The major flaw lies in the fact that students are not widgets, and you can't throw away bad ones when they hit the "factory" floor.
Submission to the Standing Committee on Social Policy
Hearings on Bill 177 – An Act to Amend the Education Act with respect to School Board Governance and Student Achievement
With the term “Student Achievement” ready to be cast in stone, or at least into the Education Act anyway, as a key goal for all students, education workers and now trustees across Ontario, one should have a concrete definition in order to set goals and know potential risks for job performance.
What then is our clear concrete definition of “Student Achievement”? I suppose one could look to the Education Act and find what the Ministry of Education has deemed “Student Achievement” to be. After all, when Bill 177 passes, school boards will be able to taken over by the Ministry. Locally-elected trustees could be denied their abilities to represent their constituents. You would think the trustees, and municipal voters across the province, might like to know what standards they are being held to. But, alas, no such definition exists in the pages of Bill 177.
In lieu of a provincial definition, perhaps local school boards could define their own parameters for “student achievement” in a clear, concise manner so everyone could easily “get on board”. After all, the term is plastered all over school board websites and PR materials while becoming the blanket defense for every questionable action a board takes. If they close a program or a school, if they add fees for specialized programs, if they seek to segregate students by gender or ethnicity, it’s all under the guise of “student achievement”. Surely they must have a working framework to define the term. Yet it’s nowhere to be found.
In lieu of a concrete definition, which, one thinks, should be required for a term that attained ubiquity across Ontario’s education system, perhaps a teacher is expected to cobble together some kind of amorphous metric of what “student achievement” is on an individual basis. I’ve been told for years that a diploma is important, so let’s include that piece. I’ve been sold on the corporate stock ticker stats of EQAO scores, so we’ll assume those are important too. I could throw credits in there as well, but credits are a subset of the diploma, so we’ll assume you can’t have one without the other. And while EQAO was originally a subset of graduation as well, the Ministry has found ways around that, so we must consider it on its own. In reality then, if we are to parse down “student achievement” for the purposes of this Ministry and this Bill, we are left with two things: a diploma and EQAO scores.
To test any definition, one should reach for the parameters and exercise the tolerances that constitute it. For instance, if a diploma is our first indicator of “student achievement”, doesn’t that mean a student with ten or twenty marks of 50% on the way to a diploma has met the criterion? Are grades even relevant any longer, or have credits been reduced to pass/fail? Is a student with twenty credits at 50% someone who has “achieved”? If so, the Ministry of Education can incorporate a very simple baseline into a standardized definition. But the Ministry always said that Level 3 or mark in the “70s” is the provincial expectation. Does it make sense that a student can achieve by getting a diploma, yet not meet the provincial expectation? It’s quite unclear as to which direction the Ministry wants to go with respect to including credits in any standard definition. If accumulated credits become suspect, then doesn’t that make the resultant diploma suspect as well?
Credits aside, EQAO scores must surely be an indicator that can fit into “student achievement” definition with little to no fuss. We should simply be able to assume that passing the EQAO tests must be good enough for “achievement”. We should be able to assume that, but we find it difficult to do so, because, as a teacher, EQAO tests are insulting to my profession. The Education Quality and Accountability Office, by its very name, suggests educators are not doing their jobs. At some point in recent history, someone at the Ministry of Education became convinced that teachers, educating students, and evaluating their work by attaching a grade and associated skills wasn’t good enough. Surely teachers couldn’t be trusted with education, and there had to be a way to tell if students really weren’t getting the education they deserved.
There’s a subtle irony in that the EQAO evolved out of fears of inconsistency about education in Ontario. The selfsame EQAO scores which now prompt visions of administrative career advancement and under the guise of “student achievement” goals have prompted a fear on behalf of education workers in Ontario about state of education.
And so we’ve come to the real crux of the issue: in talking of “student achievement” very rarely does one speak of education. People talk of scores, stats, credits, diplomas and, in the end, far fewer people are concerned with a student’s education than a student’s stat sheet. I’m not a math teacher, but two simple equations are clear to me: Achievement does NOT equal Education, and Data Collection does NOT equal Learning.
I was incredibly disheartened, though not very surprised, upon perusing a draft of the proposed “Learning for All K-12” document that came across my desk a couple of weeks ago. While I’ve never been a fan of “Deming’s Disciples” of education that formulated the Effective Schools movement’s “Learning Communities”, backed “No Child Left Behind” in the United States, and are rife with quotations in the draft document, at least they spoke of “education” and “learning”. Yet, in the document, the Ministry has chosen to place their “Achievement Agenda” language side by side with these sources as if to co-opt their credibility. We cannot make achievement equal education by proximity of words on a page. Achievements are trophies earned at the end of a process. Education IS the process. To place more importance on the trophy than the process is demeaning to all education stakeholders.
Education workers are providers, mentors and facilitators of education. We are not stock brokers trying to maximize a student’s EQAO number so we can “buy low and sell high”. We don’t treat student learning as graphing points; we view it as a process. We are loathe to reduce a year’s worth of dedicated curricular efforts to help educate students down to a data-inspired administrative-mandate of “let them redo one assignment, so you can let them pass the course”. Finally, and perhaps seemingly contrary to tone of my submission to this point, while we don’t really see a need for this soon-to-be-enshrined undefined term, we are actually all for students meeting whichever nebulous definition of “achievement” is the order of the day, as long as it’s measured on the back of true learning and real education and not at the expense of it.
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Celebrating the first anniversary of lovehatethings.com with a year's worth of lessons learned and a rant on a topic that has dominated the week: Net Neutrality.
Tomorrow is the one year anniversary of Lovehatethings and I figured Anniversary Eve would be a good time to reflect on the past year's most valuable lessons in my latest round of blogging. Lovehatethings is not my "side" blog or my picture/clip repository; it is my only solo blog.
Tomorrow - the Anniversary Post!
Another brilliant turn of Cookie Monster as Alistair Cookie on Monsterpiece Theatre doing "Conservations With My Father". Everything with Cookie Monster is an instant classic and here the blue fuzzball goes "green"... maybe he should be called eCookie Monster... "Me get you drift Pop!"
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In as much as I have trouble staying concise (especially when I get on a roll) the ability of a person or organization to convey a story or message in a short period of time is admirable. It is a skill that especially becomes necessary when acknowledging that learning skills are diversifying to include "snippet education".
I can't complain. Most of my knowledge of US History (being a Canadian) came from three minute Schoolhouse Rocks cartoons sandwiched in between the Superfriends and Laff-a-lympics. I suppose that's where I also got my basic knowledge of Parts of Speech, because Verb is What's Happenin'.
I do not think, however, that either extreme of learning can be sacrificed totally for the purposes of today's educators. The one-minute long Amnesty International video showing the different faces and horrors of war over the centuries is a fine example of making an impact in a short period of time. But, as much as we might like to believe this is learning in a minute, the process of comprehension and analysis takes us far beyond what could be termed "snippet education".
The descriptor "snippet", which I like to join to not only education, but journalism as well, doesn't really speak to a full education process in as much as an introduction of a concept. But that is really what the web is turning into, brief (sometimes very brief) introductions of concepts. The Twitter link referral often doesn't even introduce a concept so much as provide an advocacy gateway for the link itself. The greatest use of "snippet education" can be derived from elective learners, i.e. people who get to pick what they want to learn next. Quite frankly, if someone doesn't want to learn history or grammar or multiplication tables, even one minute is too long.
So while there is a constant push to integrate web2.0 and like technologies into modern education, there is often an inconsistency between the methodology and the pedagogy. The web has become the great repository of elective learning and, for that purpose, is unequaled in scope and accessibility. While education advocates have been clamoring for free education for years, the web can provide a great tool for self-instruction and free learning. The web and its like technologies are not, however, the be all end all of formalized education.
Multimedia can be great, but can also cloud a concept. As much as students are more likely to think an impactful snippet is cool or memorable, such an impact is shallow. The deep learning starts to arrive through discourse and discussion, which, on an individual level, could be facilitated by the web, but on a real life level is much better achieved through face-to-face interaction.
Someday all public schools will be able to afford the tools which will allow these methods to be meshed together seamlessly, but one or two computer labs doesn't cut it. Until then, a thousand shallow dents of knowledge is probably better than tabula rasa, but one or two deep wells of knowledge is probably preferred in the long run.
Sitting in my room, downtown Toronto, Podcamp 2009 weekend.
I've been looking forward to this weekend for some time now, although I'm not sure why. Sure, I know there's the obvious "gathering in a community of like-minded people" and the ability to be away from home for a couple of nights at an event that has nothing to do with work, but I think there's an intangible that has been creeping around as well.
I've been an afficionado of pop culture and media for decades. Perhaps it came with being co-raised by television, season after season of Sesame Street, and an undying nostalgic recollection of hours upon weeks upon days being spent in front of cartoons on Saturday mornings. Maybe it was helped spawned through the advent of video games and the generations of arcades with their coin-sucking pixellated goodness. Could be that playing in band for years in every soul-sucking bar across Southern Ontario listening to beer-drenched bozos bellow "Skynyrd!" at the top of their lungs every five minutes spawned a desire to escape into films, music and television?
All I know is that I've discovered some interesting things about myself through explorations in new media. It's not until one can immerse themself in something, and see the archetypes and patterns, that they can truly appreciate the whole in relation to its parts.
I know that's not too clear, but think about how your intelligence about films grows as you watch more films. This does not necessarily result in an one's enjoyment of films increasing, because the critical eye one starts to develop can often embody a cynicism that sticks with viewer for the rest of their life. One starts to view acting, writing and direction in a meta state that becomes a series of parameters, patterns, and data sets. Becoming the meta critic for any such medium involves endless time spent enaging and enriching one's mind with content... and there's only so much time in the day.
While I've been surfing the web for almost fifteen years, I have been, for the most part, an end user content to consume information and, in doing so, have become accustomed to, and critical of, the type of web that I started with - flat, passive, and one way. When I started to provide content instead of simply consuming it, there was not only a desire to entertain and create, but also learn about the constructs and archetypes that constitute this final frontier... or final until next week anyway.
So, in gathering around hundreds of bloggers, podcasts and new media types, I hope to not only learn about the minutae that makes up the technical side of bold new techniques and unknown approaches to creating online, but also to start to get the meta take on New Media... well at least from one city, for one weekend, washed in weather colder than I would like it to be... love it or hate it.
