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You can see the embedded video here: Josh Coates
The first keynote came on Tuesday evening, before all the sessions got started on Wednesday; it was Josh Coates talking about the history of Instructure, with an introduction to the new president, Dan Goldsmith. It was also our first introduction to the carnival barker who provided entertainment at all the keynotes! The carnival theme throughout the conference was really fun; I've never been to another InstructureCon so I can't compare, but I thought everything about the carnival theme was really charming; even the artwork you could see around was delightful -- here's a sample from a building column they had decorated in the registration area (see also banner image above):
The carnival theme was very nostalgic and backward-looking in a good way, and so was the first part about Josh's keynote. I already knew some things about the history of Instructure before, but I learned new things here; the picture of Brian Whitmer with their first-ever check was wonderful to see. It was also wild to think about them shipping the software without documentation because they were so convinced that it was just that intuition (but hey, as teachers we all know that nothing... literally nothing... is going to be equally obvious to every learner). Josh showed the flamethrower video, Change is Good (that video had endeared me to Canvas back in the day!), plus a hilarious K-12 roll-out video that I'm still thinking must have been a gag and not a real video but, hey, with Instructure back in the day, anything is possible ha ha. Here's the Change is Good video, which you can see at YouTube:
In another session, I also learned about the panda from early days: the reason the Instructure mascot is a panda is that they couldn't afford a receptionist at first, and so they put a stuffed panda toy animal in the receptionist's chair until they could afford an actual person. What a great story ( snufer who shared that with us, told us that Instructure is sticking by this story, although he could not get it independently verified, ha ha).
Canvas definitely has a storied past, with some great people and personalities involved. In particular, I have been a big admirer of both Devlin Daley and Brian Whitmer from early days, and I got to meet Devlin at InstructureCon this time; they are both involved in wonderful new work of their own now, having left Instructure.
As for the future, I have to confess that I was very disappointed by the second half of the keynote where Josh was talking with Dan Goldsmith. What a lost opportunity. That was a really valuable moment for an important group of people from the Canvas world to meet the new president and learn about him, but we learned very little, and what we did learn was off-putting (at least for me), especially when they started talking about driving for Uber and delivering packages for Amazon, and what great employment opportunities the new gig economy is making available now.
In a word: OUCH.
One of the biggest problems in higher education is the Uberization (i.e. adjunctification) of teaching, with most college teaching now being done by adjuncts who are poorly paid and have zero job security (I know; I am one of them). Likewise, in K-12, teachers are poorly paid; Oklahoma was one of the states this year that saw a massive teacher walkout to protest poor salaries and working conditions. A lot of the hostility towards education comes from instructors who, rightfully, fear that bureaucrats would like to replace actual human teachers with automated processes: auto-grading, auto-feedback, auto-everything. So, to hear Dan Goldsmith and Josh Coates talking about how great it is to be a casual employee for Uber and Amazon was really depressing (and disingenuous, coming from men who do have real jobs of their own). Uber and Amazon are both companies that, to my mind, provide terrible models of employment at a moment when teachers at all levels are having to fight for their most basic rights as employees.
Luckily, though, we had fantastic keynotes from the invited speakers Adora Svitak and Michael Bonner to provide a strong counterpoint to that strange first-night conversation; I'll have more to say about their inspiring work in future posts!
Who else has quotes and pictures to share from that first night keynote? Although I was disappointed by the second half, the first half was a blast! Even Scott gave a death-defying as a "volunteer" from the audience! I need to find a picture of that fun carnival moment to add to this post. 🙂
I was traveling yesterday, so I'm one blog post behind but I'll get caught up this weekend! Here are
here are my #InstCon30 posts so far:
Oh, the angle is perfect there... and we can see the weapon, ha ha. I'm including it here:
That is the context I was looking for, @kona ! But there wasn't any acknowledgment of that context in that talk... so when he asked who in the audience was an Uber driver, my immediate thought was, "Okay, yes, who else in this audience is, like so many teachers and instructors in this country, not making a living wage so that they have to take another job?" (I'm only able to carry on at my low-paying adjunct job because my husband has a military pension after a career in the Air Force; if I were a head-of-household, I would have had to quit my job long ago.) It's a totally different game to be an Uber driver for fun and curiosity, as he was, as opposed to being an Uber driver because it's the only way you can pay your rent. Maybe that was indirectly acknowledged somehow in the conversation, but if so, it was not coming through loud and clear, because I missed it.
Here are some pieces of Oklahoma teachers in the news; having to work second and even third jobs was a big part of why the teachers walked out:
- AP News: excerpt -- "Lovelace, 35, teaches third grade at Leedey Public Schools in northwest Oklahoma. Part-time job: Teaches special education for an charter school. Extra hours worked: 30 to 40 per week. “I have to work that second job because I’m a single mom with a teenage daughter,” Lovelace said. “If I didn’t have a second job, I’d be on food stamps.”
- Mercury New: excerpt -- "After a day of instructing first-graders at Oologah-Talala Public Schools in Oklahoma, Melinda Dale puts on a janitor’s uniform and begins cleaning the very same school building. Dale, who has taught for six years, earns $32,000 a year as a teacher. She spends about 15 hours a week on the janitorial work, which at $10 an hour allows her to earn nearly a quarter of what she makes teaching."
- EdWeek: excerpt -- "In Oklahoma, where teachers walked out of the classroom for nine days this spring, having to work multiple jobs was a rallying cry among educators. Kara Stoltenberg, a high school English teacher in Norman, Okla., who also works at a clothing store, pointed to her second job as one reason teachers needed a raise. Oklahoma teachers are among the lowest paid in the nation."
And the situation for adjunct college instructors, like myself, is even worse, because it is hard even to secure full-time employment of any kind as an adjunct (in that, I am one of the very lucky few who do have full-time jobs, albeit with no job security of any kind, just a year to year to contract which can be terminated at will and without cause anytime my school decides to hire someone at an even lower wage to do my job).
And an irony: when I searched on "teachers in oklahoma working second jobs" Google helpfully let me know that Amazon is hiring night-shift warehouse jobs near me (screenshot below). Which is exactly the point I was making above about Uber and Amazon: they are thriving as companies because they successfully exploit people who are economically vulnerable. I wish that had been acknowledged somehow somewhere in the keynote conversation, but I don't think that it was. And for that I say: thank goodness for the invited keynote speakers who were not afraid to get real about politics and economics in their keynotes (and kudos also to Jared Stein for that also).
Just FYI about the panda story, I think what I shared is the "official" line that Instructure is sticking with. See: Careers | Instructure (the In The Beginning section, to the right). Yet, I asked a few Instructure employees during the conference (and throughout the years), and was told different stories each time. In fact, I don't know that I've heard the same explanation twice. :smileygrin:
Bonus: if you look at the code on the Instructure webpage, they frequently use panda for their CSS.
