Well, so do I! I’ve been an iPad user since mid 2010 when the original iPad was released. Over the years the iPad has become far and away my preferred device for a few reasons ... and they would be high on many people’s lists I guess ... namely the great battery life, fantastic screen, instant on, light, small form factor, built in camera, and of course the many thousands of apps. But like anyone who has been a tech user for a long time (and at my age, that time is scarily long) you become set in your ways. For me, I now teach Digital Technologies at the secondary school level. I’ve taught Mathematics too to senior levels. So working my way around spreadsheets and databases has become common place. Similarly with programming and web design, these are the areas I mainly work on in a normal teaching day. I also provide PD for teachers and provide advice for parents about tech related matters. So a laptop has been my primary tool of trade for nigh on 30 years. But I hate having to manage 2 devices. I remember after the 3rd iPad model was released saying to an old friend that I was really hoping that I could replace my laptop with an iPad ... but always managed to find some reason not to. It was usually around the need to write some computer code somewhere or connect to some server or other or to do some database or spreadsheet work and it was just easier on a Mac ... and in some instances probably impossible on an iPad anyway. And not to mention that multitasking was a bit of a foreign concept for an iPad back then.
When I saw the launch of iPadOS back in June this year I thought ... hmmm, that could be a game changer for me. I’m a big Google Docs user, and finally I saw a version of Safari that looked like it would function like my Mac and allow me desktop access to G-Suite. While basic “multitasking” had sort of been around since around iOS 9, it was hardly useful (in my view) and not until iPadOS 13 can you have the same app open in different documents ... so again, a changer for me. And the ability of the Files app to finally read and write to removable media, and to make working with various cloud providers (E.g. Google, DropBox, OneDrive) was another huge plus. So I recalled my discussion with that old friend, and thought I’d revisit it. I still love the iPad look and feel - to me it just makes sense and I prefer using it. So I contacted Graham and suggested to him that I thought it was about time I stopped talking about it and started to try and live with an iPad as my only device. I’m grateful that he thought it was a good idea so I am writing this entry on a new iPad Pro 11” (2018 model) and using the Weebly app. Thanks to Graham (and his company Cyclone Computers) for the iPad that I work with. Over the coming months and into 2020, I’ll document my journey here. The good, the bad and the down right ugly. If you want to hop on for the ride, great. I look forward to sharing what I find. My next post will have some detail about my starting setup for the 11” iPad Pro - covering the starter set of apps that I will be using and why. That’ll be in about a week’s time. That will be followed by another post about hardware and peripherals ... like keyboards and other stuff. If you’ve read this far, thanks. Look forward to the journey.
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I'd never heard of Prince EA before today. There's probably a reason for that. We've all seen Sir Ken Robinson make the case for a change in schools - ever since his now famous 2006 TED talk. That talk has been seen on TED just over 52,000,000 times (as I write this). There are around 15,000,000 who have seen it on Youtube. 67 million views over 12 years - impressive by any measure. Viral is the word we use. This morning I watched 2 videos from Prince EA. The first one has had 110,000,000 views on FaceBook since its release 5 months ago. It has also had 12,000,000 views on Youtube. 122 million views in just a few months. So about twice as many views in just over 4% of the time ... that's viral! There's probably a reason for that. Here is that first video. The second video I watched has been out for a week ... it has had around 11,000,000 views on FaceBook and around 2,500,000 on Youtube. Again ... viral. The messages are the same as Robinson's ... just that even though his videos have been seen by many ... these ones are being seen by more. There is probably a reason for that. Here is the second video. six cruel hours of our lives I'll finish this little story with another video ... this one from SpringVille-Griffith Institute in the USA. Now - I don't think the story they tell is that unusual. And I'm equally sure that there are many schools doing similar great things. Ours included.
But what I keep coming back to is just how long it takes to change education. The system just fights back - as Saleem Ismail would say "the immune system of the organisation will fight any sign of disruption". For the last 12 years we have seen Sir Ken Robinson (and similar), and now Prince EA, deliver the same message. Why don't we see a viral video of what an awesome school actually is today? There's probably a reason for that.
Sometimes it seems like its the Wild West out there! Any look on Google for serious cyberattacks or cybercrime will uncover many instances of literally millions of people being affected by various crimes often perpetrated by unknown individuals. In the case of large businesses (like Target above) often they are not even aware that their systems have been hacked for many months after the incident! Research tends to indicate that large scale hacking and infiltration of companies goes undetected for an average of 211 days after the hack occurred! By which time the damage has been done. Be aware that this is just the beginning of what I would call "exponential crime". The "bad guys" have known for a while that technology allows them to commit crime on an unprecedented scale, with almost total anonymity. But all is not doom and gloom - there are some simple things that you can do to help protect you. It's just that too many of us are not aware of what they are or how important they are to do. So read on - there's some suggestions at the end ... A Brief History of Crime Many of us recall the TV shows and movies of our childhood - those American movies showing what it was like in the Wild West. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was one of my favourites. Then there were the Clint Eastwood movies! What has this got to do with CyberCrime? Well, stay with me while I try and tell a story. You see, back in the day if you were a criminal who made your livelihood out of robbing people you did it in a rather personal way. You had to hold up each person separately. You hid in the alley way and jumped out and said "Stick 'em up" followed by "Hand over your money" (or words to that effect). It was what the mathematicians would call a 1-1 relationship. At best, you might have been able to rob a bank in the town. But you had to do each bank, and each town, individually. For the bad guys, it was really inconvenient to have to just hold up one person at a time. If only there was a better way to be more efficient at their work. Thank heavens that technology came to the rescue of our criminal. The advent of the steam engine meant they didn't have to hold up one at a time any more. They could stop the whole train and rob everyone on board. Much more convenient. As technology evolved to make life (travel in this case) easier, the criminals had found a new way to scale their business - and all they needed to do was find out what the train schedule was! The Internet as we know it
Fast forward to 1993, and the world wide web started to become available for widespread use for the first time with the release of the Mosaic web browser. Google launched in 1998, Amazon first went online in 1995. Today Amazon accounts for around 33% of total web purchases and Google accounts for 65% of web searches. "So what?" you say. Well, just stop for a moment and consider the scale that then internet has brought us all. In 2016 Amazon was doing around 400 unique transactions per second on a global scale. That's around 34.5 million transactions per day. That's a lot of transactions and a lot of credit card details, email addresses, physical addresses being shared over the internet ... every day! Google is responsible for 5.5 billion searches per day. That's a lot of searches. With a lot of us making those searches. And to think that only half of the people on the planet currently have access to the internet - so there is a lot more still to come to the internet in the coming years (and soon if FaceBook and Google have their way). The software required to run massive systems like Google and Amazon (and your bank, your power company, your car) is massively complex. Consider that Microsoft Office is comprised of around 50 million lines of programming code. Then consider that Carnegie Mellon University research indicates that there are 20 to 30 bugs per 1000 lines of code in your typical commercial software ... do the maths ... there are over 1,000,000 potential errors that a hacker might be able to exploit. And how do you think hackers manage to do their work? One of their main modus operandi is to use known vulnerabilities in major systems - the current WannaCry ransomware attack is one of these. It exploits a known bug in some of the Windows operating systems. Now - of course companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft (and indeed most if not all reputable companies out there on the web) will all have teams of developers constantly fixing bugs, because when there is software there will be vulnerabilities in it. And where there is vulnerability there is opportunity, and where there is opportunity lurks the criminal. Criminals are experts in this stuff. They are the early adopters of any technology. And they know that there are tens of millions, possibly hundreds of millions of devices out there connected to the internet - and they are betting that there will be plenty of devices that have not been "patched" or updated and that have these vulnerabilities - all they need is to look for them. And the web makes this so easy to do. So, consider now for a moment how much you rely/use various internet based systems. Many use social networks like FaceBook, SnapChat and Twitter. We've downloaded billions of apps from Google Play or the App Store or the web. We do banking. We connect our phones, iPads, TVs, Sky box, x-Box, Play Stations to the web. We see airlines, power companies, elevators, garage door openers, traffic lights, communications systems, accounting systems, health systems, motor vehicles, public transport systems ... in fact most systems ... communicating over some form of internet connection. And many of those systems hold a lot of information about you - that you have either purposely, or inadvertently, put online. You may have heard of the Internet of Things (IoT) - and we are already well into this. We have FitBits, Apple Watches, various "home kit" devices we control via our smartphones (lights, air conditioning, locks, fridges, TVs, security cameras etc). All of these devices online all of the time. They all need software to make them go, and they are all connected to the internet and are thus potentially accessible to anything, or anyone, on the internet. Are you comfortable that all of the systems you are connected to are totally secure? Probably not. As the internet, and the number of internet connectable devices, expands exponentially you must expect that problems increase exponentially as well. And there will be known, and unknown, problems. And the bad guys will try and exploit these. They have the prefect technology development to help them scale their business exponentially! Better than the people of the train, they can now target anyone on the web. In mathematics language this is now a wonderful 1 - many relationship! Keeping safe then is going to be pretty important. So - are we prepared and able to protect ourselves? What can I do to protect myself? There are some simple things that you can do to dramatically improve your safety and security. 1. Upgrade your software - system as well as applications 75% of all vulnerabilities are on systems that are around 2 years old and users have not updated or upgraded software. One of the key drivers for regular software updates is not for the addition of extra features, but for the patching of vulnerabilities and security updates. So keeping your system software updated always is the best thing you can do. At your place of employment (if it is like a school or larger business) there will be some form of upgrading of system software pushed automatically. Companies like Microsoft and Apple have regular updates that they deploy. So make sure that you install them as soon as you can. It may take a little time to do, but it will be a lot less time than you will spend if you don't and you fall victim to some form of cyber attack. And make sure you do this for all of the devices at home too - your phones, tablets, game machines, in fact anything connected to the internet. 2. Backup your stuff It's easy to backup your stuff. If you use an external hard drive to do this - use a system which does it automatically for you. If you use a web based backup, make sure you use a reputable one. Some devices offer online backup automatically though their systems - like Apple's iOS backing up through iCloud. Crashplan is a company that provides a range of backup options, both to local hard drive and to the web. They have a free version (which I use). But there are plenty of other options too. Just choose one that will work for you. And make sure that all of your important home devices are backed up too. 3. Don't use the same password everytime Do you use the same password for FaceBook, Google, Microsoft, your bank accounts, etc etc. Probably not a good idea. But remembering a pile of different ones is a pain too. So, use a tool that will help you here. There are a number of password tools that you can use, some are free. 1Password, LastPass and Dashlane are all reputable password managers. Some of them synchronise across all of your devices, which covers your phone, tablet, laptop etc. 4. Enable 2 factor authentication You can increase your level of security by using 2 factor authentication (2FA) if it is available. Some services and devices support this. If you are an Apple user then you can apply 2FA to your Apple ID. This article tells you how. Netsafe here in NZ have produced this article explaining 2FA a little and giving reasons why you might want to use it. We've often heard that we can't predict what the future will be like in 5 years, let alone 20. Now, this is pretty scary. Because if we don't know what it is coming, how do we plan for it? Or do we even bother to plan for it? Should we just wait and adapt to whatever comes our way? Shall we just accept that whatever comes our way is our destiny and we just have to suck it up, accept it and wait for the next change ... and then we do it all over again. The late Allan Watts described this beautifully and so do take the time to listen to his thoughts in this 2 minute clip. So, it's important to live in the now. And while the now is important, it is equally important to use the now to fashion the future that we want. To be an active participant in the process of delivering the future and what we want the future to be. Rather than passively sit back and wait for the future to be delivered to us. By doing so, we will be always in the now and will constantly be participating in delivering the future. We won't wake up one day and think that we've ended up in a place that is different from the one that we thought we were heading towards. We live in "exponential" times. At least, that's what the good people at Singularity University would have you believe. It so happens that I agree with with them. Before SU began in 2008, Ray Kurzweil already had a long history of predicting technology developments based on observations more or less around the so-called "Moore's Law". If you understand an exponential function and how it behaves, then you will appreciate that over a long period of time it takes the shape of a linear function. Once it reaches it's tipping point it blows out completely. As an example here is my version of the exponential growth of information over the past few hundred years. The horizontal axis shows years (starts at 1600) and the vertical axis the "quantity" of information available to us (in arbitrary units). The point is that the total amount of information is doubling every few years. [My graph shows this at 5 yearly intervals, though the current rate is every 12 months and as the Internet of Things starts to gain momentum this will become every 12 hours according to IBM research.] And you can see where we are the point of the curve. The tipping point. For the past 500 years we have been in a linear space. And if you (like many) think we are overwhelmed by data now - bad news. It's going to be exponentially worse very soon! Now consider that its not just information growing like this. It's technology, it's energy, it's crime, it's nano technology, it's biotechnology, it's medicine, it's health, it's community, it's science, it's space, it's vehicles, it's food ... in fact, it's most of what we know - and a whole lot that we don't know! Consider that all of these "silos" of development are in fact rapidly converging - and that this in turn will fuel further development. We are at an unprecedented time in the life of this planet and that should give us tremendous hope for our future. We should be able to address health, disease, wealth, water, land, food issues (and more) in our life time. If we choose to. Dave Roberts (from SU) made the observation at the closing session of the recent SingularityU NZ Summit that the world has always had inequity for a variety of reasons. He pointed to what he called the four aspects of a "stable system" that unless broken, sees the system perpetuate. Those 4 aspects are:
If we want to change the "system" then the fulcrum of change is the "bystander". By changing that silent majority (bystanders) we can affect significant change. To make his point, Dave showed the following video (or bits of it). It is an 8 minute video from the Kruger National Park in South Africa (taken over 9 years ago). It features as main characters: lions, crocodiles and buffalo. Don't be put off by the first part of the video - it looks as though things are going to be bad for the victim for quite a while. Then something quite amazing happens. So the silent majority can make a difference - and at the end you see buffalo chasing lions! To me the point here is that if we really want to make the changes to the various systems that have governed politics, education, finance, banking, health, crime, leisure, poverty, and the like, then the buffalo need to make the stand. Because if the will really is there, then certainly the technology is there to help and enable the change. The key to making the connections here is to really understand the nature of exponential. It means dramatic, unparalleled change. We think linearly. We think that the tools we have today are the tools we'll use in the future. Where on earth did we get that idea from? As the gentleman from the oil rich country below says - the tools that we will have for tomorrow will be radically different from the ones we use today. Over the next few posts I'll be exploring in more depth some of the developments that are changing the world and making our life as an educator ever so more important. Not that it has not been important in the past. It's just that our role is now much more important and the tools that we have at our disposal have never been so powerful. I was lucky to be at the SingularityU NZ Summit last week. I look forward to sharing with you more of the dynamic content from the conference along with my thoughts as to how we can shape our education system here for the future, while living in the now. So, the fundamentals of life ... not so fundamental after all. You can make babies without an egg. So, you can make babies without a female. Here's the Telegraph article and here's the scientific version.
The basis for the family unit that we have grown up with is now totally challenged. If the family unit has been the building block of society as we know it, then at some stage in the next 10 - 50 years this will be severely challenged as science continues its exponential pathway. So society will radically change as a result. We are living at an incredibly interesting time in the life of our planet and our species. It is a time of constant disruption. Assumptions we have relied upon for years/decades/centuries are being shown to be inaccurate, flawed or just plain wrong. We've always had some element of this of course - remember the Earth used to be flat and Sun revolved around the Earth. But it took centuries of development for these assumptions to be proven inaccurate. Today - it seems like every other day we find another dent or hole in our belief systems.
Wow - so much for reflecting forward so much! Nearly a year ... lot of reflecting, just no writing.
So - I continue to be torn between what the system requires and what I think is important. Will this always be the norm for me? Suspect the answer to this is in the affirmative. The 'system' will dictate to a high degree what I need to be seen to be doing when I look at student achievement and reporting. What I need to get better at is working around the system so that what my students do is not restrained by the assessment requirements. My old mate (well, he doesn't know me, but I know him) Ray Kurzweil has a view on this - as do most commentators these days (pick any educational futurist ... from Robinson to November to Papert to ...) I'm thinking that just maybe I need to have a massive rethink about the courses I prepare for students. Big picture stuff here ... maybe the likes of the Technovation Challenge should be the starting point for a year's work at senior levels? Students would need to have a vision for a project then apply a range of software/hardware development concepts to the project which could see them easily meet assessment requirements for NCEA ... except for one thing. Such a project is a group project and the 'system' requires me to grade individuals. Need more thought on this ... |
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