It's Dairy Month in South Dakota, wherein we celebrate an industry in which the pro-corporate policies of Bill Janklow, M. Michael Rounds, and Dennis Daugaard have concentrated ownership in just 370 hands. (Once upon a time, South Dakota had 20,000 independent dairy producers.)

We'll see a month of Ag United outreach activities like Lunch on the Farm at the Royalwood Dairy in Brandon tomorrow, intended to sustain our fantasies of that family farming still looks like our Fisher-Price playsets, with smiling calves prancing playfully in green pastures. Not a word will be spoken about the exploitation of immigrant labor or the reliance on state-supported Korean and Chinese investors buying their green cards to give massive corporate agriculture operations an unfair advantage in the South Dakota marketplace.

But don't worry about those exploited laborers. We're about to solve that problem—no, not with sensible immigration reform. With robots:

Robots are invading farms all over America, including a dairy farm near Ethan. But the dairy farmers couldn't be happier.

A machine, called an astronaut, is just like a robot. Gary and Amy Blaze use four of them to milk their 200 head of dairy cows three times a day. The robots use laser scanning technology to line up the milkers on the cows' utters.

The Blaze's decided to buy the robot milkers mainly because hired help wasn't reliable.

"You tell a robot to do something and it does it exactly what you told it to do every single time," Gary said.

"We would get calls at 4:30 a.m. or so saying they couldn't be here today or do you really need us today," Amy said.

Each cow wears a tag with a computer chip, allowing the robot to identify each one by a number. A computer in the robot registers all kinds of information on each cow, like body temperature, weight and milk production [Don Jorgensen, "Robots Invade Dairy Farm," KELOLand.com, 2013.06.10].

One A4 Astronaut costs $210,000. It can milk 60 cows a day. I invite my farm-experienced readers to calculate when that investment reaches break-even point over hiring people to handle your teats. We get rid of hassles with employee turnover and Social Security and USCIS... at least until the robots wake up and start arguing for workplace rights as sentient beings.

Bonus Free Association: I can't help thinking of that scene in The Matrix where Morpheus shows Neo the fields where machines harvest humans as batteries. (Oops—there goes another hour of my life to YouTube.)

I hate to call prospective (prospecting?) GOP Senate candidate Annette Bosworth a red-state moocher. I'm willing to embrace the idea that she became the first physician in South Dakota to meet new federal standards for the use of electronic health records because she truly and correctly believes that EHRs improve service for patients.

But we must recognize that part of the reason Bosworth got ahead of the curve on health technology was the federal gold that President Barack Obama put in them thar EHRs via his stimulus law, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Tucked into that big bill was the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act. Under the HITECH Act, doctors who adopt EHRs and meet the federal "meaningful use" criteria by 2016 can get $44K from Medicare or $64K through Medicaid. Dawdlers who don't adopt EHRs face penalties

South Dakota's Medicaid program has proudly issued over $16 million in federal EHR incentive payments. Dr. Bosworth makes clear that she wouldn't have been able to fully implement EHRs and qualify for these incentives without more federal help:

According to Dr. Bosworth, HealthPOINT's services were crucial to getting the office prepared to attest to meaningful use. "When we first decided to attest to meaningful use, I thought we were ready. But there were so many little roadblocks and issues. Nothing major, but just things we wouldn't have known how to figure out without an expert" [Jeff Pickett, "Physician first in SD to be federally validated as meaningful user," DSUNews.com, 2011.12.20].

HealthPoint, as you may recall, is the Extension-like service created at Dakota State University to help South Dakota doctors implement EHRs. That "crucial" service exists thanks to over $6 million in stimulus money from the Obama Administration. Similar services across the country have been helping thousands of doctors literally get with the program.

As with so many other sensible health care ideas, the U.S. still lags behind other countries in EHR adoption. But we're catching up thanks to the 2009 stimulus and the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

If Dr. Bosworth is an honest campaigner, she'll have to forgo her Republican Party's usual line that federal dollars are the root of all evil and admit that her success depends in part on the sensible health care policies of the Obama Administration. Honest campaigning like that might keep her from sounding like just another hypocritical red-state moocher.

Speaking of technology and attention, here's a great video via Lifehacker on how we learn and how the constant stream of new stimuli from our computers and phones undermines our learning:

When you let new items—e-mails, Tweets, texts, new Webpages flashing by with each hyperlink you click—keep pinging your short-term memory, you keep the thing you were just thinking about (what was that again?) from moving from your short-term memory to your long-term memory. In other words, if you try to pay attention to every little thing, you won't learn any big things. You'll think like a computer—no permanent learning, just constantly moving data and following commands—or like a Borg drone.

Naturally, I'd love it if you'd share this post with all your Facebook and Twitter friends. But I'll understand if you don't, and if you choose instead to read a good long book.

An interview on NPR Tuesday morning about the evolution of technology caught my attention with this opening:

JOE PALCA, BYLINE: In the TV show "Star Trek: The Next Generation," the ultimate evil enemy threatening to destroy humanity was an alien species known as the Borg Collective.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION")

PATRICK STEWART: (as Locutus) I am Locutus [of] Borg. Resistance is futile.

PALCA: One of the things that made the Borg so lethal was that they had a collective consciousness. Every Borg was connected neurally with every other Borg, so they could share knowledge.

CORINNA LATHAN: If you could spin the Borg Collective in a positive way, that's almost exactly how I envision the future [Joe Palca, "Envisioning the Future with Inventor Cori Lathan," NPR: Morning Edition, 2013.05.07].

Locutus of Borg

Stop right there. There is no spinning the Borg in a positive way. Resistance is not futile; it is necessary.

Lathan envisions machines that could automatically read our physiological and emotional states and broadcast that information to everyone else's brains. We have a machine like that now: the human face. It's far from perfect. It has limited range, and skilled users can send false signals.

But think about how often you use that machine every day. At any given moment, how many faces can you read? How many faces do you need to read? My largest French class currently has 17 students (ugh! prime number! How's a teacher supposed to divide kids into equal groups?). I can scan the room, get an idea of who's got a question, who's worn out, who's paying attention, and who's playing Tetris. But could I make practical use of data overlaid next to each child's face on my Google goggles? If I receive all that supplementary information on some near-optical display or an in-cranium hummingbird, how much attention is drawn away from my peripheral vision and my general situational awareness of the classroom?

I revel in the near-ubiquity and omniscience of our current Internet. I like being able to find out almost any fact I want in seconds. The South Dakota Blogosphere couldn't do what it does if it didn't have access to such an extensive global library of media clips, research, and other texts to highlight and link and incorporate into arguments.

But we don't turn on the firehose and drink everything. We divert tiny streams of information from the global flood of data and say, "This is worth looking at closely." Out of the countless things demanding our attention, we point to just a handful.

The same would happen with Lathan's envisioned Borg consciousness. We'd have the potential to know anything about anyone's location, mood, concerns, etc. But barring a major leap in evolution, we'd still have the ability to pay attention to only a few strands of that global human tapestry.

And we'd only want to pay attention to a few strands. My daughter is probably already developing a complex from seeing me so often intensely scowling at the computer screen while she waits for it to register with me that she could use some raisin bran. 10% of the people in our lives deserve 90% of our attention.

Seeing young lovers tweeting on a date is bad enough. Seeing them gaze blankly at each other while processing a flood of techno-telepathic inputs from a thousand elsewhere Facebook friends is worse. Technologically enhanced collective consciousness has its place, but not in most of our human interactions.

The Borg know no love. Let that collective consciousness flow into your brain unimpeded, and neither will you.

Resistance is essential.

*   *   *
Related: My wife is gnashing her teeth over a seminary assignment to read a whole bunch of Wikipedia articles. Among her complaints is that Wikipedia isn't written very well. It has lots of information, but since it's written by committee, it has no voice, no identity. It sounds like the Borg.

Access to lots of data is great, but we learn through storytelling. And stories must be told with a unique voice.

During our professional development time at Spearfish High School yesterday, we discussed Susan Kruger's SOAR study skills program, which Spearfish HS will implement next school year. One of the key components of SOAR is a big binder in which students organize their papers.

Paper. I haven't handed out a single paper to my French students all year.

As I Googled SOAR, I found a link from Kruger to Colorado teacher-turned-tech coordinator Karl Fisch's blog. He poses this question to school folks sitting through their final professional development sessions before exams and planning for next year:

I was talking about the changes in how we access information, from books to text-based search to voice recognition search to image/location based search to Wolfram Alpha search, etc. And then I said something along the lines of:

Are you ready for all your students to enter your classroom wearing Google Glass?

There are lots of layers to that question, most of which I wasn't thinking of when I said it, but I think it's worth asking yourself - and your colleagues - some variation of that question. Are you ready for Google Glass-nost, the increased openness and transparency of a connected world? When you are endlessly debating CCSS, or your curriculum, or whether to go with a paper-based planner for your students, are you really thinking about a Glass-enabled world? Are you ready for your students to have a heads-up display with instant access to all the world's knowledge - and the ability to instantly connect with most of the world's people? [emphasis mine; Karl Fisch, "Are You Ready for Glass-Nost?" The Fisch Bowl, 2013.04.17]

Kruger has only recently decided that smart phones are sufficiently flexible and accessible to support the binder-planner method she teaches.

The tools we use to teach kids to plan and study are not as important as the planning and studying skills themselves. Fisch himself said (originally in this 2006 presentation), "We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist, using technologies that haven’t been invented, in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet." Orienting curriculum around any specific product, whether Google's fancy e-monocle or a bulging Trapper Keeper, ignores the heart of the learning students must do to prepare for the unpredictable future.

But consider the heart of Fisch's bigger quote: if our tools are moving toward omniscience and omni-connectance, shouldn't we teach students to plan and study with the assumption that they can access and make accessible to anyone else any information at any time?

The Harrisburg and Hanson school districts are among the best schools in the nation at integrating technology in education, according to a survey by the Center for Digital Education. Harrisburg placed fourth among mid-sized school districts (3,000-12,000 students), while Hanson placed ninth among small schools (under 3,000 students).

Harrisburg and Hanson have each popped up in this Digital School Districts Survey before. Hanson has pushed to integrate interactive whiteboards in its classrooms and to acquire high-tech tools for its industrial technology program. Harrisburg is a bright shiny Mac environment, but the biggest innovation they have in the chute isn't technological, but logistical: the Modular Customized Learning schedule they are implementing in the upcoming school year. Students attend classes in "mods", 20-minute blocks arranged one to four at a time, with classes happening at different times each day. I'm eager to see how the mod schedule works... but I have a feeling it will rely heavily on technology to make all the pieces fit and to keep students and teachers in contact.

We should note that this survey does not appear to be an exhaustive survey of all school districts in the nation; schools choose to enter. So there may be some other districts doing more than Hanson and Harrisburg with their tech tools but not alerting the Center for Digital Education to their efforts.

Among the tech efforts this survey rewards is use of social networking tools. CDE says 69% of districts use Twitter and other micro blogs, and 76% of districts maintain a presence on one or more social networking sites. CDE does not indicate in its summary the extent to which schools allow teachers to interact with parents and students in those social networks.

More striking is the number of districts in the survey embracing the "Bring Your Own Device" (BYOD) concept. Instead of restricting students to use of school computers, schools are moving toward allowing students (and, I hope, teachers!) to use their own computers, tablets, and phones in school. 41% of the schools have implemented BYOD policies. 50% are working toward BYOD policies. Only 9% have no BYOD policy in the works. My employer, the Spearfish school district, is one of those 9%. Our tech guys run a nicely secure network—for what it's worth, I haven't had a virus outbreak in my classroom once—and they aren't ready to risk that solid security record by opening our network to devices they don't control. But apparently a large majority of school districts are deciding that security risks are outweighed by the practical, educational benefits of training kids to integrate their own tech tools into their learning routine.

Bob Mercer mistakes Ken Blanchard's sporadic narrow-minded only-ism for the deepest thinking in the state. Dr. Blanchard says past performance does not indicate future climate results:

I have been skeptical of world climate modeling projected into the future for the same reason as I am skeptical of anyone who claims to have discovered a formula that will predict the next winner of the World Series. It is possible to build a formula that corresponds to what has happened so far; it is another thing to guess what will happen next [Ken Blanchard, "Global Warming Flatlines," South Dakota Politics, 2013.04.06].

That sounds familiar.

Then Dr. Blanchard then asserts that past performance of technology and economic growth does predict future results :

One thing that we cannot project into the future is the nature of technological development. New sources of energy under the ocean floor will be exploitable very soon and it may be possible to put some of the carbon back when we got the energy. If we really want to solve the problems that our environment poses, the only hope lies in new technologies. The only way to get those is to promote economic growth. This is a lesson that the environmental left desperately wants not to learn [Blanchard, 2013.04.06].

Um... economic growth is also the only way to create environmental problems—eat more stuff, make more poop. Technology can make things cleaner (cars reduce manure on street; antibiotics reduce disease); it can also make things dirtier (cars make smog, antibiotics on dairies promote more resistant bacteria).

Technology and economic growth don't solve environmental problems; values do. Assuming that not-yet-invented technology will someday clean up our messes disinclines some of us from making less of a mess in the first place. Promoting economic growth as the only salvation for the ecosphere keeps us from seeing that we can remedy or avoid some messes by consuming less.

You can get rid of all the junk accumulating in your house and yard by inventing a Mr. Fusion to turn all your trash into energy. Or you can just buy less junk. You can use less gas by buying a Prius. Or you can choose a lifestyle in which you can depend on your feet and a sturdy bicycle to get you where you want to go. You can increase GDP by buying a bigger Case IH tractor and more Monsanto seed, hoping that those corporations will invest that money in research on miracle food pills. Or you can choose to farm organically and conscientiously to conserve the land and water for future generations.

Economic growth and technology are not the only ways to solve environmental problems. Without the right values, economic growth and technology can just as likely be our ruin.

Related Reading:

1. I wrote a similar critique of commentary from Dusty Johnson in 2008.
2. Wendell Berry's farmer-father said you can't plow your way out of debt. Berry says much more about conservation and economy in his 2012 Jefferson Lecture. A key passage:

The problem that ought to concern us first is the fairly recent dismantling of our old understanding and acceptance of human limits. For a long time we knew that we were not, and could never be, “as gods.” We knew, or retained the capacity to learn, that our intelligence could get us into trouble that it could not get us out of. We were intelligent enough to know that our intelligence, like our world, is limited. We seem to have known and feared the possibility of irreparable damage. But beginning in science and engineering, and continuing, by imitation, into other disciplines, we have progressed to the belief that humans are intelligent enough, or soon will be, to transcend all limits and to forestall or correct all bad results of the misuse of intelligence. Upon this belief rests the further belief that we can have “economic growth” without limit [Wendell Berry, "It All Turns on Affection," National Endowment for the Humanities Jefferson Lecture, 2012].

The Sioux Falls school district just made a slam-dunk tech decision. They will outfit 17,500 grade 3-12 students with Google Chromebooks. These bare-bones laptops run nothing but 'Net. Communicate with webmail, create and collaborate on documents on Google Docs or another cloud app... what else do students need? Sioux Falls will spend $4.4 million to acquire the machines, which comes out to a right-on-retail $251 per machine. That's a fifth of what other schools have historically spent per Gateway machine or swivel-top Tablet HP. Those huge savings are more than enough to cover the remaining costs of outfitting the K-2 kids with iPads... and we haven't included the savings that the district will enjoy from dropping the costly license contracts for all the software that it cannot and need not install on the Chromebooks.

Enter the state Department of Education to throw a monkey wrench in this smart tech move. Next year, in the final year of the Dakota STEP test, DoE is moving the test online. DoE is now telling Sioux Falls that it can't use its Chromebooks and iPads for the Dakota STEP. Those devices will be fine for the new online tests we get on 2015, but the Pearson corporation that makes our current statewide standardized test says it just can't make the Dakota STEP work on Sioux Falls's chosen technology:

[Education Secretary Melody] Schopp said there are doubts about the ability to lock down the testing window on Chromebooks so that students could not access other applications. And the iPad has a smaller screen than a standard desktop or laptop computer, so the questions might not be displayed in the same way.

Schopp said there is no chance Pearson will address those concerns in time for the 2014 tests, and the Department of Education hasn’t yet decided what to do about it [Josh Verges, "Students Can't Use New Computers for 2014 Tests," that Sioux Falls paper, 2013.04.01].

Horsehockey. Pearson, you have 12 months, You have our money and lots of experts. You can figure this out. The display issues are trivial and fixable with probably four lines of CSS code. The security issues are also malarkey: a little configuring on the testing end, a little filter/firewall action on the school end, and your concerns that kids will cheat on this meaningless (for them) test disappear. The notion that the state Department of Education and an education testing mega-corporation can't solve a simple tech problem that's been addressed by numerous other organizations suggests obstinance or incompetence in both offices.

Secretary Schopp at least has the good sense to say that testing is secondary to district efforts to improve instructional tools. And since tools are secondary to actual instruction, that makes testing tertiary at best, right?