So, you might remember we visited Oregon a few years ago for our very first ever unit of PLP.
Well, we went back.
We took a field school to Oregon and Washington in an effort to learn about the Manhattan Project, specifically the Hanford Site. The Hanford Site is now a national park, so we got to take a tour of the actual buildings and reactors, and interview some people who actually worked there. All this contributed to the “Manhattan Project Project”– our current history assignment, centred around making a video about Hanford.
However, as much work as we got done there, we also took the opportunity to do some off topic learning, sightseeing, and lollipop eating .
One of my favourite places that we visited was Powell’s Books, the largest independent new and used bookstore in the world. While we were there, we were given an assignment: find a book with a weird title and recreate it, and find a weird book related to something we actually liked or cared about and take a picture with it.
The first book that I chose was called Where’s My F**king Unicorn?, and I took this picture looking confused over having somehow misplaced said unicorn.
I had some trouble finding a weird book related to something I liked, but I eventually settled for this book about hating Trump:
The bookstore itself was pretty amazing. It had a coffee shop, multiple gift shops, and an incredible amount of books. I would have liked to have had more time to explore or buy something, but it was a great place to get a chance to see.
Another interesting place we went was an art museum in Washington, known as the Maryhill Museum of Art. Some of their displays included essentially a displayed storage room for mismatched or broken pieces, a display of chess sets from around the world, and a collection of miniature clothes made by famous designers.
However, the exhibit I found most interesting was a collection of pieces created over several decades, which had been sparked when the artist had a nervous breakdown. Of that series, my favourite painting was this one:
Other than our main project, there was one stop on our trip that we devoted multiple classes to preparing for– this entailed watching instructional videos, looking at websites online, answering questions, and receiving detailed instructions on what to do when we got there.
As you may have guessed, the thing we were preparing to do was eat shrimp.
Now, I don’t eat seafood, so I can’t say for sure, but this seemed like a lot of preparation for one meal. However, as we were informed, this was no ordinary shrimp– this was endless shrimp, and those who participated in eating it would go forth like warriors and soldier through as many plates as they could stand.
Actual footage of Hughes teaching
As prepared as we were, however, we still had to wait to get into the restaurant. Naturally, we took this time to enjoy one of the only things the States has better than Canada: the continued existence of Target. It was early October at the time, so there was a plethora of Halloween decorations available. I love Halloween, so I decided to get a decoration while I was there, as did my friend Parker.
After a lot of work, some new experiences, and as many lollipops as we could steal from our hotel, it was time to turn around and come home. I enjoyed this trip, and although we didn’t go to the same places, it was interesting to visit Oregon with this class again after all this time.
So, you might remember a little thing called the launch cycle. In case you don’t, here’s a reminder of what it is:
I called it the launch cycle, but I should have probably written it as the LAUNCH cycle, capitalized, because it’s actually an acronym:
L: Look, listen, and learn. This is the part where you need to take in information from around you; identify issues, find out what subjects interest you, meet interesting people, etc.
A: Ask tons of questions. This is the part where you start seeking out more specific information instead of just taking in the information that is given to you. This might be doing research, interviewing someone, reaching out to someone who is a professional at what you’re trying to learn about, etc.
U: Understand the process or problem. This is where you really need to take the information you’ve learned in the previous two steps, process it, and think about applying it. You should know a lot about whatever subject is relevant to what you’re doing by this point, although you can always learn more.
N: Navigate ideas. This is the part where you actually start coming up with a plan. This might be working out a solution to a problem, thinking of a product, designing an activity, etc.
C: Create a prototype. Now that you have ideas, you have to actually do something with them. This is the part where you actually make your own thing that you came up with in the past step, whatever that thing was.
H: Highlight and fix. This is the part where you look at whatever you created, or get other people to look at what you’ve created, and try and figure out what you could do better. This essentially takes you back to the first step as you try and improve. This is technically the last step, and it’s an important one, as we like the revision process here in PLP.
If you have trouble remembering that, I made this handy graphic to help you out:
Now, those of you who did know what the LAUNCH cycle is probably know where this is going.
Yep, that’s right: We just had our annual spring exhibition. This year, the focus was on the UN’s sustainable development goals. We were split into groups, with each group being assigned a goal, and then each person creating a project related to the goal they were assigned.
The goal I was assigned was quality education, or more specifically, ensuring “inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all”. My project was about making post secondary more accessible, or to put it in slightly more catchy terms, making university more universal.
The idea for this project appealed to me for a few reasons: I’m going to go to university myself in a couple years, and I have an idea of what I want to do and where I want to go, so I’ve looked into prices a bit, and they’re pretty ridiculous– less so in Canada than the States, but still concerninglt high for no discernible reason. This is also just something that has never made sense to me; a level of education that is required for a lot of jobs is not available without the income you get from said jobs.
Now, unfortunately, I was not able to actually go out and create a university, so my project was mainly theoretical, with the end product being some ads for the university experience I designed.
I wanted to address a few different problems: How expensive university is, the fact that it can be difficult to work while also attending school, and the fact that for people who are in remote locations, university might require travelling far from home. Separate solutions for these things do exist (a fact very bluntly pointed out to me by a couple of people who asked about my project, so shoutout to them), seeing as they’re widespread problems, but I wanted to come up with a way to address multiple issues at once.
The main ideas I brought together were online classes (and, specifically, being able to get a diploma or degree online, which is less common than taking just some classes online) and doing a co-op program. I wanted to make sure that there was a way for students to still be making contacts and getting real world experience even with online classes, so I figured that the best way to ensure that was by them being given the opportunity to do that through said classes.
I made some ads to explain my project– a pamphlet, and a couple of posters (one of which I wasn’t a big fan of because it felt kind of misleading, and one of which I liked but wish I had put more information on):
With that done, it was time for the exhibition itself.
Since our theme was education, we decided to make the theme of our area (conveniently, a high school classroom) school and education. This included playing school themed music, serving the kind of food you would find in school lunches, wearing university hoodies, and having desk chair races.
As I’m sure you can clearly tell from that panorama, I was sitting over by the door, looking very professional and school-ready:
I’d say the exhibition went pretty well; the fact that we were already in a classroom made setup pretty straightforward, and while I spoke to a decent amount of people about my project, it didn’t feel super overwhelming or crowded. I did briefly leave my desk chair to look at some other areas of the exhibition, all of which seemed interesting, but I’m ultimately happy that I ended up doing a project themed around education.
I do wish that I could have done more with this project; for such an expansive topic, ending up with only some pamphlets and posters seemed a little skimpy.
Now, it’s almost time to take a break from receiving quality education for the summer, so…
So, as I mentioned in my last post we recently took a class trip to California, specifically San Diego, San Jose, and San Francisco. We did this trip as part of a social studies unit on disruption, and specifically with some focus on how technology is disruptive.
Now, in order to fully understand what this unit was all about, you need to understand exactly what disruption means. The word disruption has some negative connotations, but in essence it just means something that interrupts or changes something else. A lot of the disruptions that we looked at in this unit were positive.
On the technology side, we focussed on newer technology, and we spent a lot of time talking about Silicon Valley (not to mention visiting it), both as a disruption itself, and as the birthplace of a lot of disruptive companies and technology. Some of the major companies that we discussed that came out of Silicon Valley or have headquarters there include Google, Apple, Facebook, HP, Twitter, Intel, and Instagram. In fact, I made a video about the history of Instagram, and the story of how it disrupted the incumbents of social media at the time.
We also learned a lot about Silicon Valley in general; what it is, what’s happening there, and why it’s such a big disruption. We watched some videos in class to learn about it, as well as watching Pirates of Silicon Valley outside of class time. Additionally, we learned about the history of Fairchild and Robert Noyce prior to Intel.
I took some excellent, relevant and very academic notes on these videos including:
…and, you know, a lot of other stuff that actually helped summarize what the videos were talking about. The gist is that Silicon Valley is a place where people go to work on start ups and try to connect with investors, as well as other people to help with their startups, in the hopes of becoming the next big thing. As for the Fairchild video, it explained the history of Fairchild beginning with Shockley Semiconductors: William Shockley discovered the semiconductor while working on the east coast, came over to the west coast to be near his ailing mother, started a company called Shockley Semiconductors and hired a bunch of Stanford students (who were close to geniuses) to work for him, all went well for a little while, and then Shockley’s ego got the better of him and he started treating his employees terribly, leading eight of them to leave the company and go start their own company, Fairchild, led by Robert Noyce. Fairchild would go on to provide important technology to NASA during the Space Race, and to improve semiconductors quite significantly so computers could be made more compact and work better, before the company split and the founders moved onto their own different companies (such as Intel), known as the “Fairchildren”.
At the intel museum taking a selfie in the reflection of a wafer
Robert Noyce
For the end of the unit, we all wrote essays answering the unit question: How has technology acted as a disruption with its creation throughout history?
I started out with the thesis that technology is disruptive because it allows us access to information we might not otherwise have. From there, I created an essay outline, during the making of which I got bored and decided to represent each point with a quippy headline/strange nonfiction book title, and a subheading, which were as follows:
Intro
Paragraph one: Info we’re given
Trump’s Twitter: an insight into the president’s thoughts (AKA: holy guacamole how did this guy get to be president?)
Worldwide news and the speed that information travels: What allows us to read articles online but Dennis the Menace in print
Anticensorship: internet friends, social media, the blogosphere, and other things that allow us to unveil the truth
Paragraph two: Info we go get
People are hacking, security is lacking: the potential for people to get access to your personal info, people who overshare on the internet and don’t bother with being secure about it, how this could ruin your future job
Tweet, delete, repeat: why deleting stuff doesn’t stop people from being able to access it, and how the public can pull up information from throughout the years in a way they weren’t always able to
Getting the Googley eyes for someone: our innate need to cyberstalk people when we meet them and how this is potentially helpful/damaging
Paragraph three: Info we didn’t used to have
George Washington Is Instagram Famous: posing the question of how different history would be with our current technology
Newsprince: How the newspaper used to lord over us all and what it would be like if the paper was still our main/only source of info
Conclusion
Then we were given time in class to write our essays. I didn’t use every point in my outline, but chose some of them to elaborate on, and a few specifically to connect to the book we read for this unit. I ended up with this as my essay:
How Technology Has Acted as a Disruption Throughout History
Throughout history, humans have developed more and more complex tools, or
technology. This technology changes the way we live; we eat, sleep, think, speak, and act differently from any other animal. In short, technology disrupts our daily lives. One of the things technology, especially more recent technology such as computer, the internet and social media, has interrupted is our flow of information. Technology disrupts how, when, and how much we receive information, allows us to get information that wouldn’t come easily to us otherwise, and allows us to have and share much more information than we did in the past.
First of all, technology means we are being given more information, from more sources,
some of which is much less filtered than it once was. A good example of this comes in the form of the twitter account of Donald Trump, the current US president. Until recently, almost anything a president said to the publication large would have to be planned, and usually happened via a public appearance in person or on tv. However, the last few presidents have had access to social media sites that allow them to share any thought at any time, unfiltered and without much planning. Many articles, books, and videos talking about Trump’s presidency have discussed statements from his twitter, which he uses regularly to publicly comment on recent or future events. Trump’s twitter allows us to have an insight into his real thoughts and plans, in a way we haven’t had with many people of power throughout history. A Time article described a series of tweets from the president as “angry, sometimes profane and occasionally misspelled outbursts” that “gave the world a glimpse into what was going on in [Trump’s] head” and “brought to light what it’s like to work for [Trump].” Of course, it’s not just Trump who can now share things unfiltered. The internet allows anyone to share opinions and information on the spot, through social media, blogging, or commenting on existing sites. Groups of people who would not have been able to publicly share their thoughts in the past are now able to in a matter of minutes, and as a result we now have access to new, uncensored opinions and information. People from different parts of the world can easily speak directly to one another and talk about where and how they live. There are tutorials and instructions teaching anyone who wants to learn how to do a multitude of things. For better or for worse, information is being shared more than ever before.
However, not all the information shared with technology is public. At the very least, it’s
not all meant to be public. According to a Quartzy article, “few of us deliberately show our whole selves online or elsewhere, even when we’re trying to seem… honest.”. Many people have private information protected with passwords or other forms of required identification. Others still overshare what should be private information, which can lead to security problems. Sometimes, people overshare and then realize their mistake and delete whatever they posted. However, the speed at which information travels means that just pressing delete doesn’t necessarily ensure something is gone forever. Technology gives people the power to find information even if it’s not immediately presented to them, which can be an issue depending on their intentions. The book Little Brother has a running theme of security, lack thereof, and people hacking or cheating the system with technology. Within the first chapter the main character, Marcus, evades various kinds of security technology at his school by either shutting them down or finding a way to “confuse” them into not working. Throughout the book, Marcus is able to hack into almost anything he needs to– while simultaneously taking extra precautions to make sure nobody can do the same thing to him. While Marcus, as the protagonist, has the right intentions for hacking to get past security, the things he does in the book mirror the not-so-wholesome actions of real life people. As much as technology helps to keep our information safe, it also makes it possible for people to gain access to information that they shouldn’t have.
One of the most significant things about technology allowing us access to information is
the sheer amount of information we are able to access now in comparison to the past. At one point, people got almost all their knowledge of world events from either a newspaper or speaking directly to another person. Learning about things from such limited sources meant limited information, and less chance of misinformation being corrected. With the rise of radio, tv, and now the internet, people are able to find hundreds of different sources of information on the same thing. They’re also able to find information on exactly what they’re looking for, quickly and readily. This allows people to learn much more, make sure what they’re learning is correct, and find multiple points of view on things. It also allows people to easily save or share the information once they have it, so knowledge travels faster, and can be kept accurate for a longer amount of time. Had the technologies we use today been able to exist much earlier, we might perceive history very differently.
All in all, technology is disruptive because it changes our ability to get and share
information, be it information that is given to us or information that we seek out ourselves, and it lets us have information that we wouldn’t have had in the past. Technology not only disrupts how we get information, but also when we get information, how much information we can find, and what information that is. As communicating information is incredibly crucial to our ability to function as humans, technology will most likely continue to disrupt how and when we get information, and how much information we get. Technology could go far enough to make the ways that we share information today seem primitive, but who knows what will happen? That’s not information we have access to yet.
Alongside our essays, we were also asked to each create a video, podcast, or puppet show with a partner about how one of the places we visited in San Diego acted as a disruption. My partner and I chose to create a podcast about High Tech High, a high school where we spent time with a grade nine class for a couple days. High Tech High is a charter school that focuses on using project based learning to help prepare kids for the real world, a bit like PLP. High Tech High also works to create equal learning opportunities for students, choosing students to attend via a lottery system by zip code, with more spots available to the lower income areas that typically might not have as nice an education readily available.
So, as I mentioned before, we recently went on a trip to California. While we were there we did an iBook about the different things we did.
The book included different pictures, videos, and text explaining the places we went, people we saw, and things we learned about, all staying within our theme of disruption.
Doing the book allowed us to reflect on the trip and get lots of good pictures and other documentation throughout.
Which is important, because we did a LOT on this trip. My favourite thing we did was visiting High Tech High in San Diego. However, we also visited the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, saw the USS Midway museum, wandered around Old Town, ate a lot of Mexican food, took seven kinds of transportation, saw the birthplace of HP, visited the googleplex, looked around the Apple visitors’ center, toured Stanford, spoke with people who work in Silicon Valley, went bowling, chanted something in Spanish, rode cable cars, went to Alcatraz, toured Haight-Ashbury and the Castro, and looked around the official headquarters of Twitter.
These were some of my favourite pictures from the trip:
Me inside a giant donut at Google
Living the high fashion life
Aboard the USS Midway museum
A hot air balloon that we got to ride in (which was super zen)
Me becoming a fish
Some koalaty sourdough bread at a bread place in San Francisco
Me at High Tech High with a new friend
All in all it was a super interesting trip, and I feel like I learned a lot from the experience, about not just disruption but also technology, school, and aircraft carriers. I’m really glad I had the experience of going on the trip.
So, my classmates and I recently returned from California.
Specifically, we visited three places: San Diego, San Jose, and San Francisco. Right now I want to expand on that first place we visited: San Diego.
Now, we did some interesting things in San Diego. We went to the Safari Park, we saw the USS Midway, we saw Old Town.
(That’s me at the zoo blending in with some cacti)
My favourite thing we did in San Diego, however, was visiting High Tech High , a charter school that uses Project-Based Learning to teach their students. While there, we were each paired up with a grade nine student or two (or four, in my case) who we shadowed throughout the day. We went to classes with our students, ate lunch with them, and at the end of our first of two days there, we interviewed them about life at High Tech High.
I found it very interesting to hear about High Tech High, both because it’s different than Seycove and because in some ways it’s similar to PLP. I also did my main project for this trip on High Tech High, and in the process I interviewed one of the teachers of the class we were working with. Being able to hear what she said about High Tech High in comparison to what the students said gave me some different perspectives on the school as a whole.
So, back at the beginning of the month we (my class) took a trip to Florida. The purpose of this trip was mainly to go to Walt Disney World, but also included visits to NASA, a wildlife reserve, and a surfing school.
There was some educational merit in the form of getting footage, interviews and real life experience for a project that I’ll be covering in a separate blog post when it’s finished. In this blog post, however, I want to discuss the trip itself.
The first day was a travel day, and consisted of getting up at about 2:30 AM and taking a flight to Florida. (Actually two flights, as we took a connecting one to Seattle.) Not much notable happened, although I did eat a lot of apple cinnamon Cheerios.
The second day we went to magic kingdom, which was fun but very busy and honestly kind of overwhelming.
I did get to meet Winnie the Pooh, so ultimately the day was a success.
The third day was universal, and mainly consisted of me being a total Harry Potter nerd (but you knew that already ), and getting completely soaked on the Jurassic Park. I also got stuck on the wrong side of a parade about five minutes before having to meet up with the class, which would have been a very upsetting and panicky situation had I not been listening to Fix Youthe entire time, which kept me pretty calm.
The fourth day was my favourite, as it involved a very calm, very pretty wildlife retreat, and an alligator-watching tour.
The fifth day included a surfing lesson, which was really fun, and a trip to NASA, which was also really cool. The following day was also NASA-focused; we spent the day at the Kennedy Visitor’s Center, where we got to learn a little bit more about space and astronauts, and got to go to a lunch where an astronaut was guest speaking.
The remaining days were all spent at various Disney parks: EPCOT, Animal Kingdom, Hollywood Studios, and Disney Springs. My favourite was probably Hollywood studios, as I enjoyed the various rides and experiences there, as well as the Star Wars themed “Dessert Party” we attended, where we got to meet Chewbacca and Kylo Ren.
All in all, as much as it had its ups and downs, it was an enjoyable trip.
