Books that influenced my views on education and project-based learning

~ Ryan Boren ~ 1 Comment

Project-based Learning and School Culture

~ Ryan Boren ~ Leave a comment

Change the culture and user experience of schools. Culture doesn’t come from a box. It’s not proprietary and rented from a corporation. Culture doesn’t have someone else’s trademark on it. Culture must be made from within with grassroots involvement.

Create a culture of neurodiverse teams of project-based learners using technology and design thinking to communicate, collaborate, iterate, and launch to authentic audiences of fellow humans. Tech won’t find its place in education until project-based inclusion replaces the lecture and deficit models.

Agile teams, distributed collaboration, and the hacker ethos of flexible improvisation and rapid iteration are powerful artifacts of the disruptive rise of software. They are life and industry changing. When informed with neurodiversity and the social model of disability in an open by default culture, they are a future for education and work where we collaborate and iterate our way through massive software-driven change. We will navigate disruption with compassion, finding opportunity and inspiration in the diversity of our shared humanity. We are humans making things for and with other humans, helping each other cope with sentience and senescence on our pale blue dot. Communicate, collaborate, iterate, launch. With these tools we’ll make it through.

There is thoughtlessness all around us, in all human systems. In this thoughtlessness is opportunity. Engage project-based learners in designing for real life. Start by designing a shared, grassroots culture together with students.

Culture can be the foundation for all future innovation, or it can be the single biggest resistance to innovation. Don’t fuck up culture.

A great fallacy born from the failure to study culture is the assumption that you can take a practice from one culture and simply jam it into another and expect similar results. Much of what bad managers do is assume their job is simply to find new things to jam and new places to jam them into, without ever believing they need to understand how the system—the system of people known as culture—works.

Source: Why Culture Always Wins

Culture always wins over tools and technologies, but most of the business world is tone deaf to understanding culture.

Source: FAQ about The Year Without Pants (with satisfying answers)

Education, Neurodiversity, the Social Model of Disability, and Real Life

~ Ryan Boren ~ 3 Comments

Great minds don’t always think alike.

To face the challenges of the future, we’ll need the problem-solving abilities of different types of minds working together.

Inform the voice and choice of project-based learning with neurodiversity and the social model of disability. Create a future of education and work where neurodiverse teams of project-based learners use technology and design thinking to communicate, collaborate, iterate, and launch to authentic audiences of fellow humans.

Together, we will iterate our way through massive software-driven change. We will navigate disruption with compassion, finding opportunity and inspiration in the diversity of our shared humanity. We are humans making things for and with other humans, helping each other cope with sentience and senescence on our pale blue dot. Communicate, collaborate, iterate, launch. With these tools we’ll make it through.

To that end, the quotes below provide a brief primer on neurodiversity, the social model of disability, and design for real life.

Neurodiversity

Neurodiversity is the diversity of human brains and minds – the infinite variation in neurocognitive functioning within our species.

The neurodiversity paradigm is a specific perspective on neurodiversity – a perspective or approach that boils down to these fundamental principles:

1.) Neurodiversity is a natural and valuable form of human diversity.

2.) The idea that there is one “normal” or “healthy” type of brain or mind, or one “right” style of neurocognitive functioning, is a culturally constructed fiction, no more valid (and no more conducive to a healthy society or to the overall well-being of humanity) than the idea that there is one “normal” or “right” ethnicity, gender, or culture.

3.) The social dynamics that manifest in regard to neurodiversity are similar to the social dynamics that manifest in regard to other forms of human diversity (e.g., diversity of ethnicity, gender, or culture). These dynamics include the dynamics of social power inequalities, and also the dynamics by which diversity, when embraced, acts as a source of creative potential.

Source: Neurodiversity: Some Basic Terms & Definitions, http://neurocosmopolitanism.com/neurodiversity-some-basic-terms-definitions/

“Great minds don’t always think alike.” We already understand the value of biodiversity in a rainforest. The presence of a wide variety of life forms – each with its own distinctive strengths and attributes – increases the robustness and resilience of any living community as a whole, and its ability to adapt to novel conditions. The same is true of any community of human minds, including workplaces, corporations, classrooms and society as a whole. To face the challenges of the future, we’ll need the problem-solving abilities of different types of minds working together.

The word “neurodiversity” was coined in the 1990s by an Australian sociology grad student named Judy Singer after reading a book about the social model of disability, which proposes that disability is a product of the way society is organised, rather than by limitations imposed by a person’s condition. In a world without wheelchair ramps and accessible buildings, wheelchair users have very few choices about where they can go. But in a world that accommodates wheelchair users, they have many more choices. Neurodiversity extends the social model of disability into the realm of cognitive differences like autism, dyslexia, and ADHD. How can we make the world safer and more welcoming to people with these conditions so they can lead happier, healthier, and more autonomous lives? That’s the question that the neurodiversity movement asks.

Source: Steve Silberman recommends the best books on Autism, http://fivebooks.com/interview/steve-silberman-on-autism/

Neurodiversity: the notion that conditions like autism, dyslexia, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) should be regarded as naturally occurring cognitive variations with distinctive strengths that have contributed to the evolution of technology and culture rather than mere checklists of deficits and dysfunctions.

Neurodiversity may be every bit as crucial for the human race as biodiversity is for life in general. Who can say what form of wiring will prove best at any given moment?

The idea of neurodiversity has inspired the creation of a rapidly growing civil rights movement based on the simple idea that the most astute interpreters of autistic behavior are autistic people themselves rather than their parents or doctors.

It seems that for success in science and art, a dash of autism is essential. For success, the necessary ingredient may be an ability to turn away from the everyday world, from the simply practical, an ability to re-think a subject with originality so as to create in new untrodden ways.

The revenge of the nerds was taking shape as a society in which anyone who had access to a computer and a modem could feel less disabled by the limitations of space and time.

The kids formerly ridiculed as nerds and brainiacs have grown up to become the architects of our future.

If you meet one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism.

Source: NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity, http://stevesilberman.com/book/neurotribes/

For more on neurodiversity:

https://refind.com/rboren/topics/neurodiversity

Social Model of Disability

The social model of disability is a reaction to the dominant medical model of disability which in itself is a functional analysis of the body as machine to be fixed in order to conform with normative values. The social model of disability identifies systemic barriers, negative attitudes and exclusion by society (purposely or inadvertently) that mean society is the main contributory factor in disabling people. While physical, sensory, intellectual, or psychological variations may cause individual functional limitation or impairments, these do not have to lead to disability unless society fails to take account of and include people regardless of their individual differences.

Source: Wikipedia: Social Model of Disability, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_model_of_disability

The social model of disability says that disability is caused by the way society is organised, rather than by a person’s impairment or difference. It looks at ways of removing barriers that restrict life choices for disabled people. When barriers are removed, disabled people can be independent and equal in society, with choice and control over their own lives.

Source: The social model of disability, http://www.scope.org.uk/about-us/our-brand/social-model-of-disability

They didn’t actually speak to his own limitations. They spoke instead to the thoughtlessness all around him. As he began to see it, disability wasn’t a limitation of his, but rather a mismatch between his own abilities and the world around him. Disability was a design problem.

One day someone will write a history of the Internet, in which that great series of tubes will emerge as one long chain of inventions not just geared to helping people connect in more ways, but rather, to help more and more types of people communicate just as nimbly as anyone else. But for the story here, the most crucial piece in the puzzle is this: Disability is an engine of innovation simply because no matter what their limitations, humans have such a relentless drive to communicate that they’ll invent new ways to do so, in spite of everything.

You could describe this in that old cliche that necessity breeds invention. But a more accurate interpretation is that in empathizing with others, we create things that we might never have created ourselves. We see past the specifics of what we know, to experiences that might actually be universal. So it’s all the more puzzling that design, as a discipline, has so often tended to focus on a mythical idea of the average consumer.

Source: Microsoft’s Radical Bet On A New Type Of Design Thinking: By studying underserved communities, the tech giant hopes to improve the user experience for everyone., https://www.fastcodesign.com/3054927/the-big-idea/microsofts-inspiring-bet-on-a-radical-new-type-of-design-thinking

For more on the social model of disability:

https://refind.com/rboren/topics/social-model-of-disability

https://refind.com/rboren/topics/disability

Stimming and Quiet Hands

“Quiet hands!”

I’ve yet to meet a student who didn’t instinctively know to pull back and put their hands in their lap at this order. Thanks to applied behavioral analysis, each student learned this phrase in preschool at the latest, hands slapped down and held to a table or at their sides for a count of three until they learned to restrain themselves at the words.

The literal meaning of the words is irrelevant when you’re being abused.

When I was a little girl, I was autistic. And when you’re autistic, it’s not abuse. It’s therapy.

They actually teach, in applied behavioral analysis, in special education teacher training, that the most important, the most basic, the most foundational thing is behavioral control. A kid’s education can’t begin until they’re “table ready.”

I know.

I need to silence my most reliable way of gathering, processing, and expressing information, I need to put more effort into controlling and deadening and reducing and removing myself second-by-second than you could ever even conceive, I need to have quiet hands, because until I move 97% of the way in your direction you can’t even see that’s there’s a 3% for you to move towards me.

Source: Quiet Hands, https://juststimming.wordpress.com/2011/10/05/quiet-hands/

I will never understand how people can justify the use of “quiet hands”. If you are unaware of what this phrase means, or of the implications for autistic people, you need to read Quiet Hands by Julia Bascom.

When a parent, sibling, educator, therapist, medical professional, etc justifies the use of quiet hands, it baffles me. Do they understand what stimming is? Do they realize that my hands are the key to helping me see the world? Or do they just see my movements as separate from me, as a source of embarrassment for them? I tend to think it’s the latter, that it’s because stimming draws unwanted attention that people want to quiet my hands in the first place. They don’t understand the point of stimming, or I think (hope) they wouldn’t try and prevent it.

So this is what happens when you “quiet hands” us. It’s the equivalent to duct taping an NT person’s mouth shut or preventing a nonspeaking D/deaf person from signing. You are taking away our natural language. You make interacting with the world that much harder.

Source: On Stimming and why “quiet hands”ing an Autistic person is wrong, https://thecaffeinatedautistic.wordpress.com/2013/02/10/on-stimming-and-why-quiet-handsing-an-autistic-person-is-wrong/

For more on stimming:

https://refind.com/rboren/topics/stimming

Advice to Teachers of Autistic Kids

  • Be patient. Autistic children are just as sensitive to frustration and disappointment in those around them as non-autistic children, and just like other children, if that frustration and disappointment is coming from caregivers, it’s soul-crushing.
  • Presume competence. Begin any new learning adventure from a point of aspiration rather than deficit. Children know when you don’t believe in them and it affects their progress. Instead, assume they’re capable; they’ll usually surprise you. If you’re concerned, start small and build toward a goal.
  • Meet them at their level. Try to adapt to the issues they’re struggling with, as well as their strengths and special interests. When possible, avoid a one-size-fits all approach to curriculum and activities.
  • Treat challenges as opportunities. Each issue — whether it’s related to impulse control, a learning challenge, or a problem behavior — represents an opportunity for growth and accomplishment. Moreover, when you overcome one issue, you’re building infrastructure to overcome others.
  • Communicate, communicate, communicate. For many parents, school can be a black box. Send home quick notes about the day’s events. Ask to hear what’s happening at home. Establish communication with people outside the classroom, including at-home therapists, grandparents, babysitters, etc. Encourage parents to come in to observe the classroom. In short, create a continuous feedback loop so all members of the caregiver team are sharing ideas and insights, and reinforcing tactics and strategies.
  • Seek inclusion. This one’s a two-way street: not only do autistic children benefit from exposure to their non-autistic peers, those peers will get an invaluable life lesson in acceptance and neurodiversity. The point is to expose our kids to the world, and to expose the world to our kids.
  • Embrace the obsession. Look for ways to turn an otherwise obsessive interest into a bridge mechanism, a way to connect with your students. Rather than constantly trying to redirect, find ways to incorporate and generalize interests into classroom activities and lessons.
  • Create a calm oasis. Anxiety, sensory overload and focus issues affect many kids (and adults!), but are particularly pronounced in autistic children. By looking for ways to reduce noise, visual clutter and other distracting stimuli, your kids will be less anxious and better able to focus.
  • Let them stim! Some parents want help extinguishing their child’s self-stimulatory behaviors, whether it’s hand-flapping, toe-walking, or any number of other “stimmy” things autistic kids do. Most of this concern comes from a fear of social stigma. Self-stimulatory behaviors, however, are soothing, relaxing, and even joy-inducing. They help kids cope during times of stress or uncertainty. You can help your kids by encouraging parents to understand what these behaviors are and how they help.
  • Encourage play and creativity. Autistic children benefit from imaginative play and creative exercises just like their non-autistic peers, misconceptions aside. I shudder when I think about the schools who focus only on deficits and trying to “fix” our kids without letting them have the fun they so richly deserve. Imaginative play is a social skill, and the kids love it.

Source: A parent’s advice to a teacher of autistic kids, http://blog.ed.ted.com/2016/04/30/a-parents-advice-to-a-teacher-of-autistic-kids/

Design for Real Life

Real life is complicated. It’s full of joy and excitement, sure, but also stress, anxiety, fear, shame, and crisis. We might experience harassment or abuse, lose a loved one, become chronically ill, get into an accident, have a financial emergency, or simply be vulnerable for not fitting into society’s expectations.

None of these circumstances is ideal, but all of them are part of life—and, odds are, your site or product has plenty of users in these moments, whether you’ve ever thought about them or not.

Our industry tends to call these edge cases—things that affect an insignificant number of users. But the term itself is telling, as information designer and programmer Evan Hensleigh puts it: “Edge cases define the boundaries of who and what you care about” (http://bkaprt.com/dfrl/00-01/). They demarcate the border between the people you’re willing to help and the ones you’re comfortable marginalizing.

That’s why we’ve chosen to look at these not as edge cases, but as stress cases: the moments that put our design and content choices to the test of real life.

It’s a test we haven’t passed yet. When faced with users in distress or crisis, too many of the experiences we build fall apart in ways large and small.

Instead of treating stress situations as fringe concerns, it’s time we move them to the center of our conversations—to start with our most vulnerable, distracted, and stressed-out users, and then work our way outward. The reasoning is simple: when we make things for people at their worst, they’ll work that much better when people are at their best.

Communicate context and intent:

  • Be intentional
  • Be transparent
  • Be precise
  • When it matters most

Source: Design for Real Life, https://abookapart.com/products/design-for-real-life

For more on Design for Real Life:

Rules of Thumb for Human Systems

  • projects > lectures
  • agency > compliance
  • inclusive model > deficit model
  • social model > medical model
  • rights model > needs model
  • acceptance > awareness

Use of Force, Disability, and Transparency

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~ Ryan Boren ~ Leave a comment

Here’s a short letter on use of force, disability, and transparency I sent to my representatives:

To those in Dripping Springs, Hays County, and Texas state government,

In response to a public information request for use of force policies, the Hays County Sheriff’s Office provided only eight pages of policy. The policy does not address deescalation, chokeholds, duty to intervene, warn before shooting, moving vehicles, transparency, or reporting. For more, I discuss what little there is of the policy here:

FOIA use of force policy and then ask these questions

I share this to bring awareness and to urge policy agendas of transparency and accountability in policing.

Local policy agenda:

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/55ad38b1e4b0185f0285195f/t/55dce731e4b07137c6a819b9/1440540465863/CampaignZERO+Local+Policy+Agenda.pdf

State policy agenda:

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/55ad38b1e4b0185f0285195f/t/55dce7b3e4b0b9d287069df9/1440540595819/Campaign+ZERO+State+Policy+Agenda.pdf

As a neurodivergent parent of neurodivergent kids, use of force is of particular interest to me and my family. Police use of force and school-to-prison pipelines disproportionately impact those with disabilities. Use of force policy should be available online to all and should address neurodiversity, mental illness, disability, and deescalation. Use of force is a social contract to be discussed openly.

Help bring transparency and end compliance culture. We are responsible for humanizing the systems we inhabit. Encourage and require transparency from Texas law enforcement agencies. Dallas PD serves as a role model. They’ve taken positive steps toward transparency.

This is not all on police. They need support to handle the big issues of disability, neurodiversity, and mental illness. They need resources, training, and the assistance of other institutions and social structures. They should not have to fill the massive lack of services for our most vulnerable citizens.

With open data and open government, we can work on these issues together. Default to open. Sunlight heals.

Regards,

Ryan Boren
https://ryan.boren.me/
https://twitter.com/rboren
Dripping Springs, TX

FOIA use of force policy and then ask these questions

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~ Ryan Boren ~ 4 Comments

Muckrock makes submitting a public information request to your local law enforcement agency (LEA) pretty easy. Existing requests serve as templates you can clone. To submit a request for use of force policies to your local LEA:

  1. Select a use of force policy request for a town in your state from this list: https://www.muckrock.com/search/?q=use%20of%20force%20policy
  2. Click/tap the Clone button.
  3. Change the agency name in the title.
  4. Change the jurisdiction and agency in the selector.
  5. Click/tap the File button.

That will wrap the magical line “All current policies maintained by the department regarding use of force” with boilerplate appropriate for your jurisdiction. If your local LEA is not in Muckrock’s database, Muckrock will do the grunt work of finding the right agency contacts. You can speed this process by providing the agency’s email address, website, and phone numbers. Further, search your local government’s web site for an open records request contact. Here’s an example of an open records page on a local government website.

Once you obtain the use of force policy, read it with these questions from Use of Force Project in mind:

Affirms Value of Life:  Does the policy affirm that preservation of life is the primary, most important, and/or sole principle guiding police actions?

Requires De-Escalation: Does the policy require officers to de-escalate situations, when possible?

Bans Chokeholds and Strangleholds: Are chokeholds and strangleholds (including carotid restraints) explicitly prohibited, except in situations where deadly force is authorized?

Duty to Intervene: Are officers required to intervene when witnessing another officer using excessive force?

Warn Before Shooting: Are officers required to give a verbal warning before shooting someone, when possible?

Moving Vehicles: Are officers prohibited from shooting at people in moving vehicles unless the subject presents a separate deadly threat other than the vehicle itself?

Transparency: Is the full, unredacted use of force policy available online?

Reporting:  Are all uses of force required to be reported, including the pointing of a firearm at a civilian?

My local LEA, Hays County Sheriff’s Office, responded to my public information request with an 8 page policy. Its brevity does not answer these questions, though it somewhat affirms life.

It is the policy of the Hays County Sheriff’s Office (HCSO) that employees will respond to resistance/threats prudently for their own protection, the protection of the life, health, or safety of others and property, in the execution of a lawful arrest or search, and/or as otherwise authorized by the law. Employees will employ objective reasonableness as a standard for appropriate levels of response.

Compare that to the Austin Police Department’s affirmation.

The protection of life is the primary core value and guiding principle of the Austin Police Department. As such, all employees will strive to preserve human life while recognizing that duty may require the use of deadly force, as a last resort, after other reasonable alternatives have failed or been determined impractical. The department’s basic goal is to protect life, property, and to preserve the peace in a manner consistent with the freedom secured by the United States Constitution. Employees of the Department are professionals. We must realize our main responsibility is the protection of the community and the preservation of human life and dignity.

Excellent Sheep

~ Ryan Boren ~ 3 Comments

Excellent Sheep and Most Likely to Succeed thoroughly indict the American education system. In the late 80s and early 90s when I was in high school, the treadmill wasn’t as stressful and pervasive as now, but straight A students like myself were encouraged and expected to get on it. We were expected to join the student council and National Honor Society, give a shit about Who’s Who Among Students and National Merit Scholarships, and do extracurriculars we didn’t really care about. Who’s Who and National Merit came along with the tests I had to take, but I skipped the rest of the script. I saw it as styrofoam and a waste of time. What did this have to do with who I wanted to be?

Instead, I was dialing in to Bulletin Board Systems using a hand-me-down 286 and a 2400 baud modem. I was particularly captivated by boards run by engineers. The Digital X-Connect was run by telecom engineers in the telecom corridor north of Dallas. Bulletin boards showed me what I wanted to do and be. I wanted to be an engineer who helped build the infrastructure that would allow me to talk to the world with the written rather than the spoken word. I was working on cross-connects a couple of years later.

My neurodivergence saved me from the treadmill. The society I lived in didn’t have the vocabulary for me. “He’s just shy. He’s just quiet.” Autistic is the word. I credit my autistic operating system for rejecting pressure from peers and the system to get on the treadmill and give myself to a false culture. Introversion and an analytical skepticism of society drove me to the written word and alternative life scripts. Instead of eating stress and curating a fake self in hopes of entering a prestigious school and maintaining my credentials, I went to an affordable state university that gave me a scholarship. It happened to be right next to the telecom corridor. I entered the university’s co-op program and secured a position at a company making switches and cross-connects. I worked there full-time while taking a full-time course load and doing sys and network admin work for the school. The web and commercial internet were dawning, and I wanted to approach them from every available angle. I wanted to speak with computers and text.

I continued my straight A trend for a while, but the load was too great. Something had to give. Academic treadmill thinking would have me drop the co-op and sysadmin work and put more of myself into my course load. That was certainly what administrators wanted me to do. But, school was almost all theory. Physics and math courses were much of the curriculum, and they were unenjoyable cut courses meant to weed out students. I wanted more. I wanted theory and practice. I wanted to make things.

I invested myself in courses like Automata Theory – regular expressions are used by all developers all the time – but other classes I barely attended. I showed up on test days, did well enough to pass, and cared not at all about my GPA so long as I got the BS in CS that companies still required back then. Though I was already working full-time as an entry-level engineer, I had to get that piece of paper to make the position real and permanent.

Helping make telephony, the internet, and the nascent web was a helluva lot more interesting than most of my courses. Bringing open source and the web into stodgy corporations (through and around FUDdled suits and lawyers) felt great. While skipping much of  a forgettable course load, I learned how to work on a team and ship. I got the diploma, and never in my career has it mattered that I didn’t stay on the treadmill to a prestigious cum laude. Only that first engineering job ever asked to see my diploma, and then only so that a box on a form could be checked.

That piece of paper is no longer needed. In the last ten years I’ve seen and helped  really smart people get off the treadmill, avoid debt, and ship cool things.

For a taste of Excellent Sheep, here are a handful of quotes from the opening chapters.

The system manufactures students who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it.

 

Look beneath the façade of affable confidence and seamless well-adjustment that today’s elite students have learned to project, and what you often find are toxic levels of fear, anxiety, and depression, of emptiness and aimlessness and isolation. We all know about the stressed-out, overpressured high school student; why do we assume that things get better once she gets to college?

 

Convening a task force on student mental health in 2006, Stanford’s provost wrote that “increasingly, we are seeing students struggling with mental health concerns ranging from self-esteem issues and developmental disorders to depression, anxiety, eating disorders, self-mutilation behaviors, schizophrenia and suicidal behavior.” As a college president wrote me, “we appear to have an epidemic of depression among younger people.”

 

But the compulsive overachievement of today’s elite college students— the sense that they need to keep running as fast as they can— is not the only thing that keeps them from forming the deeper relationships that might relieve their anguish. Something more insidious is operating, too: a resistance to vulnerability, a fear of looking like the only one who isn’t capable of handling the pressure. These are young people who have always succeeded at everything, in part by projecting the confidence that they always will. Now, as they get to college, the stakes are higher and the competition fiercer. Everybody thinks that they’re the only one who’s suffering, so nobody says anything, so everybody suffers. Everyone feels like a fraud; everyone thinks that everybody else is smarter than they are.

 

And make no mistake; today’s elite students are, in purely academic terms, phenomenally well prepared. How could they not be, given how carefully they’re bred, how strenuously sorted and groomed? They are the academic equivalent of all-American athletes, coached and drilled and dieted from the earliest years of life. Whatever you demand of them, they’ll do. Whatever bar you place in front of them, they’ll clear.

 

You need to get a job, but you also need to get a life. What’s the return on investment of college? What’s the return on investment of having children, spending time with friends, listening to music, reading a book? The things that are most worth doing are worth doing for their own sake. Anyone who tells you that the sole purpose of education is the acquisition of negotiable skills is attempting to reduce you to a productive employee at work, a gullible consumer in the market, and a docile subject of the state. What’s at stake, when we ask what college is for, is nothing less than our ability to remain fully human.

 

Never to have failed is a sign not of merit but fragility; it means your fears have kept you from doing or becoming what you might have.