To start off the second of my Philosophy 105 lectures today, we’re watching Summerhill.

I told a friend, at lunch the other day, of my sudden realization that it is my peers who are running the world now.

As if to reinforce this, our friend Tessa Blake directed this week’s episode of NCIS New Orleans.

Today was lecture number one of the four that I’m teaching this winter in Philosophy 105: Technology, Values and Science at the University of Prince Edward Island. Here’s how it played out.

I spent the afternoon yesterday – and a good part of the evening – developing a complex Powerpoint presentation wherein I laid out the terrain in front of us (open data, open source, open government, open society), provided something of a personal history for context, and ended with an assignment.

And then this happened:

To which my visceral (self-directed) reaction was: 

Covering!? Oh my, what am I doing? I don’t even know these students and I’m already covering something?

This was, in a sense, a conversation with my 17 year old self, for whom the very idea of “covering the material” was anathema.

So I jettisoned the Powerpoint and, over 2 hours this morning, in the Atlantic Vet College cafeteria, I came up with a reworked set of slides, much shorter and with space for real dialogue with the students after the scene was set.

Which was a terrifying prospect.

“I don’t know how to have a real dialogue with the students!”, I worried to myself. “What if they don’t say anything?”

Fortunately I had two allies in working through this terror.

First, 17-year-old-me reassured 49-year-old-me that, in the right environment and with the right setup, the students would rise to the challenge.

Second, I re-watched Johanna Koljonen’s introduction to the 2013 Alibis for Interaction conference and remembered that I, as the designer of the experience, had tremendous latitude in setting a situation where this would be more likely to happen than not. In Johanna’s terms, I could create a magic circle.

So here’s what I did.

I went to the UPEI Bookstore and bought 2 boxes of dry erase markers, reasoning that I could hand one to each student and, therein doing, welcome them, make eye contact, and share a sort of totem with them.

I titled my lecture Megalomaniacs & Magic Circles: The University as a Technology, positing that Philosophy 105, and the university that cradles it, are a complex technological system that we, students and teacher, are part of, affected by, both beneficiaries and victims of.

My goal was for the students to start to feel agency over their educational experiences, and to reflect upon their own power as actors in the education mechanism. As such it was an attempt to both explore some of the terrain of Technology, Values and Science while, at the same time, to begin to build a magic circle in which we could go on to dwell together in the days to come.

To begin, I talked a little bit about two formative educational experiences from my past: my semester at the Ontario Science Centre Science School (which essentially ruined me for formal education, so unusually participatory as it was):

And the year I spent at Trent University which, although bucolic:

saw me ending up far too often in rooms like this (the Wenjack Theatre), listening to 50 year old professors droning on about something that didn’t particularly interest me:

I then noted the irony that, 30 years on, I was now a 50 year old professor at the front of a similar lecture theatre in danger of droning on about something of no interest to them:

I then referenced the tweet from the day before, the Robin Williams vs. John Houseman one:

By way of putting the Tweet in context I showed two film clips.

First, the scene from the 1973 movie The Paper Chase, the scene where Professor Kingsfield first encounters Mr. Hart:

And, second, the scene from the 1989 film Dead Poet’s Society where Robin Williams first encounters his class:

After watching each, I suggested that, while the two professors might be seen to be polar opposites, they are also of a kind: megalomaniacal educators convinced firmly in the rightness of their world view. I talked about the sad irony of almost everything else changing in the last 30 years except the tradition of the “megalomaniac educator” standing in front of their students, imparting their wisdom. 

This led, in my thinking this morning and in the lecture itself, to this follow-up Tweet, where I replied to myself:

But what of this “magic circle.” For that, I turned to Johanna’s explanation, as I could find no better:

That was a valuable 20 minutes of our time to spend, but I felt it worthwhile, as it set the scene so well for what came next: I invited the students to use their totemic dry erase markers to come up to the whiteboard, carve out a space for themselves, and try to represent, in words or image, their own experience of university education so far (for most of them they’ve been at it only since last September).

I am happy – and somewhat relieved – to report that they all rose to the challenge. Some eagerly and immediately, some after a few minutes to think and somewhat timidly. But everyone.

Their representations brought joy to my heart:

I asked each student to speak to their representation.

And they did!

Thoughtfully. Emotionally. With tremendous insight. 

My faith in them was established. And my worries that they would not fully participate, with the right setup, was for naught.

Using their work as a jumping off point, we finished up the session returning to the notion of the magic circle and, for example, the rules, implicit and explicit, that exist in the university lecture theatre.

We talked about how professors relate (or don’t relate) to students. How university education appears to cater to a subset of students who “get it.” About how, in the ideal, professors learn as much – or more – as students. I talked about my hope – referencing a graphic in Johanna’s slides – that in our short time together we would both emerge from our own magic circle transformed. All of our discussion was rooted in the concepts they surfaced on the whiteboard: that is what we “covered” and we could not have covered it without them.

We’re back into the circle on Wednesday afternoon.

If only the professor can write on the whiteboard, how can you have a true dialogue?

As a bonus, I discovered that there’s a 20% “staff discount” at the UPEI bookstore!

I also bought a bottle of dry erase cleaning fluid, because there’s no way we’re starting out with grungy whiteboards.

I got a call on Thursday afternoon from Dave Stewart, a reporter at The Guardian. He was writing a story for the business section about John Dale’s Breadworks and, knowing I was a satisfied customer, wanted a customer’s-eye view of the business. I happily complied.

The story ran in yesterday’s paper, and when Oliver and I stopped by Taylor’s Taters at the Charlottetown Farmer’s Market to pick up potatoes, carrots and cabbage, Garth and Peggy pointed it out to us. I asked them if I could borrow their paper, and I got my first chance to read the final story.

Toward the end of the story I’m quoted talking about why I like buying my bread from John:

I buy my potatoes at the farmers market every week. I like the fact that I can talk to farmers about the fact there is more than one type of potato, for example. I feel the same way about John. If I can have that relationship with all my food I think I’m in a pretty good place.

Ironically, it was Garth himself I was referring to there as the farmer from whom I buy my potatoes; he didn’t realize that when he read the story.

It is a small Island.

Found in a paperback book I brought back from New Hampshire. I’d forgotten where I’d tucked them. A fortuitous rediscovery given the events of yesterday.

Spotted in the water filtering section of the Charlottetown Canadian Tire: a home water test kit selling for 5¢.

Somewhat confusingly, that is the price for both the test kit and the water test itself.

It’s not the Cadillac of water testing, just a basic test of pH, iron, hardness and a few other things, and nothing biological. But you can drop off the water at any Canadian Tire, so there’s no cost for postage.

And so it really is a 5¢ water test.

This may be not only the cheapest thing you can buy at Canadian Tire, but the cheapest thing you can buy in Canada.

Kudos to T3 Transit on the design of new signs for bus stops in Charlottetown: a big improvement in clarity!

By virtue of my work with the PEI Home and School Federation, I’ve been attending meetings related to the SHAPES survey this week.

SHAPES is a survey that students complete, starting in grade 5, about their “health behaviors” — the H stands for Health — every two years. The survey data is collected by UPEI researchers and used to produce a biennial report that’s used to drive policy.

We have found that reviewing the SHAPES data on a school level is an excellent catalyst for discussion at local home and school meetings, and that’s what drives our involvement with the effort.

This week we’ve been meeting with SHAPES researchers, and others involved in the project, to discuss the development of more focused “drill-downs” into specific topics. On Wednesday the meeting was about physical activity and it was held on the UPEI campus.

The campus is only a 30 minute walk from Oliver’s school, where I walk every morning with him and Ethan; there was some irony, then, that I drove to the meeting at UPEI to discuss ways of increasing physical activity in our youth.

The irony was not lost on me, and I resolved that for yesterday’s meeting, on healthy eating, I would walk to UPEI.

So I did.

It was a lovely day, bright and warm, and the Confederation Trail, which runs a straight shot from Birchwood Intermediate to UPEI, was in fine shape.

This morning I have no SHAPES meetings, but it’s another bright (though not so warm) day, so I decided, after dropping off Oliver, to just keep on going to UPEI.

Which is where I tap out this post, on my phone, sitting in a comfortable chair in the library. In a minute or two I’m going to keep right on going and walk up to Royalty Centre to rendezvous with my ride to Kensington for a home & school event.

If this fever continues, Oliver and I might just walk to to Farmers’ Market tomorrow.

In 1967 the National Film Board of Canada released Summerhill, a film about the British school of the same name. I first saw the film in 1985 when my education professor showed it to our class at Trent University. Summerhill is and remains a fascinating school, organized, quite unlike any other, along truly democratic principles. I wanted to see the film again, and so I went looking for it on the NFB website where it was nowhere in evidence.

I knew the film existed because there’s a cataloging record for it (and, of course, because I’d seen it with my own eyes 30 years ago). So why wasn’t it to be found on the NFB website?

It turns out that the NFB has two websites, the “regular” one at NFB.ca and the one they call the “institutional” site at ONF-NFB.gc.ca. The former presents only a subset fo the NFB’s holdings whereas the institutional site has a more complete record, with its own search function. 

Searching that site led me to the record of the film, described there as follows:

A visit to a school without fixed rules, where students study as they wish, and are their own masters. A co-educational English boarding school, Summerhill was founded by Alexander Neill a half-century ago. In the film he explains his objectives, and from the activities of the children at work and play can be seen how his methods work. School, he says, should put preparation for life ahead of learning.

Following the “To Order” link on that page led me to yet another NFB website, with the option to buy for private use, for classroom use or for public presentation.

I put a copy – for “classroom use” – in my shopping cart and began the checkout process. At which point I was required to “create an account in a few simple and secure steps.”

It turns out that one of those steps is “wait around for us to approve the account you’ve created.” I waited around. And eventually the email arrived confirming my account.

At which point I had to start the process of finding and purchasing the film all over again.

I stuck with it, sure in the knowledge that the end was near, and it turned out that the rest of the checkout purchase, while endowed with user experience with a 1985 EDI system, went relatively smoothly, and after a barrage of pointing and clicking and typing, I was checked out and done:

I’m excited to be able to see the film again; I’ll let you know when it arrives.