I really enjoyed seeing this on Slashdot Firefox Breaks 50,000,000 Barrier. It was also fun to go to Blazing a Trail to 50,000,000 and watch as the counter shows that another 44,000 plus downloads have taken place in the six hours since then. Let the good times roll.
This will only make sense with the background information that I never wanted to buy a minivan.
I love my minivan. That statement, and the rest of this post, is less about my minivan and more about me – and minivans in general.
As I peel away the rough edges of my own pride I discover that I do not care about image like I used to. I did not even know that I cared about image, but in retrospect I did. This is not to say that I have no care for image, but that it is different than it had been.
Before I chose to get a minivan I had decided that I did not want that minivan image. Basically that was because the image is not popular. It truth there is nothing wrong with it. I hated all the arguments about SUV’s using too much gas. The fact is that the mid-sized SUV’s have about the same gas mileage as the average minivan. It’s not great mileage, but it’s no reason to choose a minivan over a mid-sized SUV (at least once the optional third row entered the Ford Explorer and Chevy Trailblazer class) because they could seat the same number of people and got no significant disadvantage in fuel efficiency and I might as well get the increased towing capacity and power of the SUV – besides the image thing.
When the time came that I was faced with the need to grow out of two carseats in the back of my sedan I changed my mind on the stance I had held that I would rather make car payments on an SUV than own a minivan free and clear. I made the wiser choice (financially speaking) and now I look back and realize that I have come to care less about the image, more in line with what I used to believe was already true. I have also came to wonder why I ever hoped to own an SUV rather than a minivan. Who wants to open the back door of an SUV (of any size) when they have the option of sliding doors on their van. That also makes me wonder why anyone ever made a minivan with hinge doors to the back (the older models of the very minivan I bought – Mazda MPV – did not have sliding doors) when sliding door are so functional/versatile and save so much space in my garage.
Today I am thankful, not so much that I have a minivan that I like, but more because I got to catch a glimpse of growth within myself which is always what I am striving for anyway.
In a discussion board for my Using Technology to Enhance Learning class I made a proposal (on March 18th this year) based on teachers having a scarcity of time and the fact that teachers are underpaid partially because they are they are only paid for 9 months out of the year and they have to figure out summer employment if they want to keep working for the other three months.
If all of the preceding premises are true, wouldn’t it be great if teachers could get paid over the summer to take classes on new learning theories and new technologies where the assignments would consist of the teachers developing plans and ideas of how to integrate that new knowledge into their teaching.
Among the many responses I got that really interested me was this one from a teacher in Corning, New York named Micheal Simons:
I taught for two months in New Zealand at the end of my student teaching in 2000…
They operate on a GREAT schedule – I apologize that I can’t remember all of it:
They don’t have a “summer” (agricultural) vacation, first of all. Christmas (during the summer, down there!) vacation is the longest time off from school, I believe, and is approx. 5 weeks or so. Then, they return for 9 weeks, then are off for 3, then on for 9, and so on – YEAR ROUND.
I think that schedule is simply fantastic – a great balance, and it gives teachers 45-day chunks (with no days off, I think) in which to plan units, lessons, etc.
With a schedule like that, then, I can see teachers getting what [David] was suggesting – we’d have 3 week chunks during which we could get more training, go to a lengthy conference, work toward identifying “best practices,” and more!
-Mike
I wonder if anyone else has any thoughts about such an idea now that the class is over.
I think it’s only fair after posting about Feeling Useless that I give a little update on the calling thing. I have been called (about a month after I posted that) as the assistant executive secretary and I will be lose the assistant title in a couple of weeks we the current executive secretary moves to Georgia. I do not feel at all useless and I am excited because I will definitely get to know everybody in the ward through this calling.
I did this same calling in a student ward at BYU for a couple of years and so I know how involved it can be. Prayers are answered – more than we expect.
Get comfortable. This is going to be along one. I have been thinking about this subject for a while, but suddenly in the last 24 hours I have changed my position.
I was fully behind Will when he posted Blogging vs Journaling again as he argued:
Xanga is not a blog site. It’s an online journal site. There is nothing inherently wrong with journaling online (provided it’s done with the proper precautions.) But there is something wrong with calling that blogging. And that’s what’s happening more and more. And the problem comes when parents and principals equate Xanga and other such sites with blogging, which in turn predisposes them negatively toward efforts to use blogs the way we know they can be used.
Not so anymore. After reading The Horseless Carriage by Tom Coates I have changed my stance on the subject.
Just for fun I ran Firefox (1.0.3) and IE 6 (XP SP2 etc.) through The Second Acid Test after hearing the Safari passed the test. I was slightly disappointed to find that Firefox had problems with: shrink-to-fit on floating elements, paint ordering, collapsing margins and some CSS Table elements.
I was pleasantly surprised by IE6 though.
It rendered the CSS 1 properly.
I rarely just link to things like this, but I have been very excited to discover Mathemagenic where Lilia is interested in exactly what I have begun to pursue in my PhD studies. The difference is that she is way beyond me as far as the work she has done. Her list from November 17, 2004 looks like a very good list of things that will need to be studied in our quest to understand blogs academically. I just don’t want to forget it.
Will hit the nail right on the head with his post: Curriculum is for Kids. Every quote and every thought was exactly right clear down to his conclusion – blogging is exploration. We can ask ourselves why the education system has become a series of canned curriculum objectives – which are often not met anyway despite the best efforts of many good teachers – when we recognize as adults that learning comes from personal exploration. Anyone who has watched their children closely will easily see that children learn in exactly the same way. The only difference is that they do not always understand what they are doing or how to go about the process of discovery in meaningful ways. I hope we can get that little flaw fixed.
I have been trying to learn more about Islam in an effort to sort out the truth from the fiction that is reported in conjunction with the war on terror and other similar realities of our day. As a part of that goal I recently picked up No god but God by Reza Aslan, an Iranian born and American educated Muslim scholar. I was well rewarded. This book is a must read for anyone trying to understand the religion that operates in the areas of the Middle East that have suddenly become so prominent in American politics. Not only did I come to a more complete understanding of Islam, but I came to a better understanding of faith, religion, society and America as well.
Aslan explains the difference between faith and religion and helps the reader understand the culture and history of pre-Islamic Arabia before trying to relate the rise of Islam with Muhammed and the changes that brought to the Arab culture of the area. The reader then learns how the challenges arising from the death of Muhammed eventually lead to the various movements in Islam such as Shi’ism, Sufism and Wahhabism.
After reading this book there was no more question in my mind as to why so much strife exists between the Shi’ites and the Sunnis as the Iraqis try to rebuild their country. In the struggle between the west and the people of Iraq in defining democracy in that country, Aslan helps differentiate between secularism and pluralism. With that distinction we may have less fear of letting the Iraqis set up democracy in a way that represents their culture rather than our own.
Representative democracy may be the greatest social and political experiment in the history of the world. But it is an ever-evolving experiment. These days there is a tendancy to regard American democracy as the model for all the world’s democracies, and in some ways this is true. The seeds of democracy may have been sown in ancient Greece, but it is in American soil that they sprouted and flourished. Yet precisely for this reason, only in America is American democracy possible; it cannot be isolated from American traditions and values.
Read No god but God to learn about the traditions and values that will shape the democracies that will make the world feel safe once again.
I want to thank Tom Hoffman for his comments on James Farmer’s post: Blogging works best… in relation to my previous post.
You should already be structuring work so that it is relevant to a student’s life, whether or not it is in a blog or a notebook, and frankly, whether or not you are forcing the students to do it or not … If you don’t know how to do this without blogs, you also don’t know how to do it with blogs.
He is absolutely correct that student work should already be relevant.
What I was trying to convey in my post was that blogging is more than a way of communicating your ideas. It appears to me that blogging tends to create or reinforce a way of thinking and working on ideas. It is a forge in which I fix up a raw thought into a useful tool with the heat of thoughtful input from anyone who is inclined to participate.
My comments stemmed partially from a conversation I had with Matt in which Matt said that he learned through practice that blogging is contrary to his personality. He noticed that blogging worked for me because I like to present thoughts for other people to evaluate and build upon because I am comfortable with people pulling the ideas apart and building upon them without feeling that changes devalue the original thought. Matt prefers to do this in a way that allows for the various iterations of the idea to be hidden behind the final presentation. He will share raw ideas verbally so that they can be worked on in a group, but they cannot be so accuratly traced back so there is very little risk of being pinned down by an idea that turned out to have little merit. If I put a worthless idea on my blog someone can find it years later if they are so inclined. I am responsible for what I say here in a way that exceeds the responsibility for verbal communication. After talking with Matt I began to recognize a number of people I am aquainted with who I believe will never become bloggers for the same reason that Matt will probably stop blogging in the near future. I have come to accept that as perfectly natural and acceptable.
Tom talked about forcing students to do things (assignments) which implies that they will likely stop doing those things when the prodding ceases. I think blogging is like traditional writing in that students should be exposed to it as a way to think and record/organize ideas. That being said we should not expect that all students wil find value in continuing to use the tool after the prodding stops. The point of my earlier post was that we will discourage some of those who would use the tool if we do not give them ownership of the tool in the first place. That would mean that those students who might be inclined to blog will possibly underuse any blog assignment they might have and thus the blog in their classroom is counterproductive if they do not own the blog.