Categories
life

Jail Break

I just love having two kids who are such good friends. Laura told me a great story that took place yesterday with Savannah and Alyssa. I just have to share how Savannah chose to play the protective big sister for Alyssa.

Alyssa was doing something that she was not supposed to do. Laura warned her that if she did it again she would have to go sit in her crib – she did it again. When Laura was taking Alyssa to her crib Savannah followed her down the stairs. Savannah was talking to herself saying things like “I’m going to go help my sister.” After Laura put Alyssa in the crib she went to do whatever random things she needed to do. Savannah went into the bedroom where Alyssa was while Laura was busy and pulled the reading chair in their room over to Alyssa’s crib and helped Alyssa out of her “prison cell.”

A few minutes later Laura peeked into the girls room to find Alyssa out of the crib playing with Savannah in the room. The chair was left right at the scene of the jail break.

Categories
Uncategorized

Advertising this Party

I know Nate is serious about Getting off the porch and so am I. I said before that we are not getting our message out to the right audience just because it is on the web and thus universally available. I started talking about presenting at AECT in Orlando only to learn that Nate was ahead of me there with the Overlay and the Strategic Task Force. Since then I have realized that between now and October is at least one lifetime in the blogosphere if not two.

I think that finding some way to keep these good conversations visible in some ongoing way would be useful but I continue to contend that we also need to send the invitations into the established venues of communication. A presentation in October is too long to wait. We should still do that, but before then we should publish something. Here’s a radical idea – why don’t we actually advertise? Get an ad in TechTrends or ETR&D listing the topics of some good academic conversations that we have had in our stadium and invite people to visit us.

This would be print, so the conversations would have a different type of life, but the ad could point people to a website which teaches how to join the blogosphere as a reader, provides links to the conversations in the ad along with all the blogs that have participated in any of those conversations and teaches them how to begin writing a blog when they are ready to contribute in that manner. Perhaps it should provide a link to the aect-members list of blogs so they can get a dynamic list of bloggers to look at. The point is that we have to advertise our party in a way that will get to people, but email is not easy and definitly not persistent. We need it in print!

Categories
culture Education

Creativity and Culture

I enjoyed Rovy’s little rant. I agree that the lack of creativity is not rooted in the ISD process, but rather it is rooted in the lack of a design culture among LPs. We are taught how to develop things and then we follow the ADDIE recipe (or whichever flavor we favor). We have taken all the creativity out of design and turned this into learning science. We lose the artistry so that we have become cooks instead of being chefs.

Categories
Education

Seriously Funny

I have never laughed so hard as when I read Don’s partita in D. I could never do it justice in summary so let me just say that it is well worth the read – especially the last paragraph:

To turn to a musical metaphor, let’s look at a modern History 101 class. The chief instructor who knows all the notes has just been given a new synthesizer (think PowerPoint) that has all the range of his old saxophone, which he never quite mastered but at least it was familiar, but adds bagpipe, harmonica and peddle steel guitar to his possible instrument range. He has of course never been given any instruction on any of these instruments, but his father was a big Hank Williams fan and his mother watched soap operas while she ironed. The instructor has also been provided with a graduate student backup group. Two of these also have no musical training but one isn’t bad on the thumb piano which the university provided her and the other is working hard on the slide trombone which he found after last years homecoming rally. The third graduate assistant actually has some background, having taken tap lessons between the ages of 8 and 14, but has lately developed an unfortunate interest in late 70’s acid rock. So there we have our quartet, and it really is Bach, or maybe Mozart, they’re playing. And there really is an audience trying to make sense out of it.

Categories
Education

Not To Be Picky

I do not intend to poke holes here for the sake of argument. I just thought I would share this discussion that I have been passively enjoying at Cognitive Dissonance, but I think it is not just trivial to note that when Nate is talking about the Science of Baking he inserted a provision “baking — that is, applying heat to food in a closed box” in his definition of baking halfway through his analogy that was absent in his original definition “baking — that is, the transfer of heat into food within the confines of a box.”

I don’t consider the addition of the requirement that the box be closed to be a critical fault to the argument. Actually I think it helps to illustrate Nate’s point that we need to nail down a common definition of “learning” before we can productively argue about what makes learning happen. We need to confine our definition to a manageable scope. We will not make any headway in increasing our understanding of learning if we spend all our time arguing that learning takes place everywhere in unpredictable ways because I cannot manage all learning or all its ways. I can talk about learning and whatever is consistent about that or I can talk about what happens in a classroom (which is a lot more than just learning) but I cannot confuse “learning” with “what happens in a classroom.” I could argue that cooking is just chemistry but then I have to deal with all kinds of chemical reactions that were not considered cooking before. Maybe cooking is chemistry involving food that is intended for ingestion.

Whatever the case let us make sure that we do not inadvertently insert small new conditions in our definition in the middle of our argument because if we do our argument will not be sound.

P.S. I should note that this is not a critique of Nate’s argument, but an illustration of his excellent point.

Categories
life

D20

Thanks Dave. Of course I already knew

I am a d20

Take the quiz at dicepool.com

You are the large, round, friendly d20! (You probably didn’t know this, but the shape of the twenty-sided die is called an Icosahedron.) You are the friendly, outgoing, outspoken, leader of friends. You are often looked up to, even though you don’t normally deserve it. Most other types secretly wish they were you, and you’d give them tips on how, if only you had a clue yourself. Your charisma is often all you need, but you have your occasional moments of brilliance as well–just never when it’s actually needed. You are the all-around good guy, a dependable chum, a respectable foe, and an inspiration to those who need one. Who says you can’t get by on a smile and good looks alone?

It’s nice to finally have it from an official source. Of course I could also be D6, D4, or D100. You never know.

Categories
Education

Academic Status of Blog Posts

Nate has some interesting and accurate thoughts on the academic states of blog posts. Roy had some interesting thoughts to add as well.

As for myself I think that there is little we can do to encourage bloggers to post meaningful content because it is their own content. That is the beauty of blogs. We control only what we subscribe to. If I deem the content of a blog to be frivolous I am free to not pay attention to it. Anyone who wants to join in serious discourse will already be motivated to ensure that they are posting worthwile thoughts. Nate has argued, rightly I think, that having high qulaity discussions will attract wider participation and will elevate the status of blogging in the academic community. The key is that it is an individual choice.

There will always be people who blog recreationally. It is no different than any other media, we have professional journals and then we have non-academic publicaitons. We are responsible to be professional if professionalism is the purpose behind our blogging. We do not need to worry about those who have no professional objective to their blogging because, in the end, a good idea is a good idea regardless of its source. Those who wish to put serious content on their blogs must trust that it will be recognized as such.

Categories
technology

Trash IE 6

I just spent 5 hours working on some beautiful, valid CSS because it was not rendering correctly in IE 6. It worked perfectly in Firefox. After all that work I came up with ugly and almost valid CSS that functions in both browsers – because I have to. I’d rather just put: Get Firefox! on the site and tell IE users to trash IE 6.

Categories
life

Direction

What am I interested in?

That is the question of the day. I have realized that I am floundering and I know myself well enough to know that when I have an interest to pursue I do not flounder. I am currently unable to identify a direction for myself. I cannot plan an academic direction so I am left to wander academically – I am quickly learning that this is not a good situation. Too bad nobody else can tell me what it is I am interested in.

Categories
Uncategorized

I Understand

I think I finally understood Nate’s position after reading this today. Where I have been questioning him up until now I no longer question because I recognize his perpective and his push.

Well said Nate. It is especially important for those trying to develop reputations to take the risks that will build those reputations. This does not mean that the ranked players should not participate, but it means that taking the risks on new technologies is less important for them personally. It is not so important for the current leaders to lead in the new areas but it is an excellent opportunity for newer players (like me) to explore a leadership role in a new area like this.