I created a bundle at Google that includes a variety of tech-related RSS feeds, mostly from the Horizon Report folks. Here’s the link.

One of the themes that came out of last week’s online course discussion about Web 2.0 was a sense that if you had an active online life, you didn’t have such an active offline life. Some students indicated that they didn’t spend much time online as they did other things and had other hobbies. They are the kinds of comments that I am already familiar with from others who seem to feel like there is a stark dividing line between the online and offline worlds and also seem to feel a little sorry sometimes for those of us who are online a lot.

I find that to be an artificial division, probably because I am online a lot and I don’t like the idea of being judged for that choice. I assure folks that I also have quite an active offline life that includes singing in a choir and playing in a recorder ensemble, making crafts, cooking, exercising, and reading lots and lots of analog books. And, in almost all cases, the online world informs those offline hobbies. Just last night, I looked on the web for a recording of a Medieval French song that I will be singing with the group to help me with both my pronunciation and rhythm. I belong to a Ning for recorder players that includes members from all over the world. The pattern for the baby sweater I’m crocheting came from the Web and I’ll be sending it to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation whose real life need was advertised on the Web. The digital books I listen to when I exercise come from a variety of sources online and are often chosen based on the recommendations of other readers. I share and discuss my digital and analog reading with both a face to face book group and several at LibraryThing. And Monday evening last I met with a group of educators in Second Life–at the Jamestown Fort meeting house on VSTE Island–to hear from author Elisa Carbone about her real life writing.

My conclusion: My offline life would simply not be as rich without my online life. They complement each other and are inextricably woven together into one life. Perhaps I should feel sorry for those who haven’t found that connection. Or perhaps we can recognize that we all have different ways of living, both online and off, and just leave it at that.

One of the reasons I love to teach is because I love to learn. During my ed tech class last week, one of my students introduced me to Alice, the programming language, and also talked about Storytelling Alice, the programming language geared towards middle schoolers, particularly girls. I had only a vague knowledge of Alice and none at all of Storytelling Alice. I had hoped to spend some time with both this week, but my own programming got in the way. I also stumbled because Storytelling Alice doesn’t have a Macintosh version. Using it would mean dragging out the Windows machine. But, I ended up doing that anyway since I loaned it to a student so it is up to date and ready to go. So, maybe this weekend…

Meanwhile, in one of those serendipitous events, I got an email today highlighting webinars being sponsored by Georgia Tech that focus on Alice. I was going to email the link to my students but thought there might be a wider audience. Here’s the link to the Tea Party website and the link to the webinar schedule.

I am teaching three courses this semester. Two are face to face and one is online. I’ve taught the undergraduate face to face course for more than five years. It’s the typical “tech” class that pre-service teachers have always had to take. When I took it some 22 years ago, I learned about using film projectors and got a brief introduction to computers through one class period devoted to logo. Even then, I was hooked, and my final project was created on my Tandy 1000 using a free database program to develop a gradebook.

Fast forward nearly a quarter of a century (how DID I get this old??), and the course covers everything from Inspiration to Google Earth to Quest Atlantis. In more recent semesters, I’ve designed the course around the concept of TPACK–Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge–to help students see the relationship of technology to the other areas of their learning. I like the course and enjoy spending time with 20-somethings who are excited about becoming teachers. I haven’t met with this year’s group yet. Monday is our first class. The section I teach focuses on elementary education and this semester I have several men in the course, which is unusual.

The two other courses–both graduate and both focusing on educational technology–are new to me. One is online and one is face to face. I developed the syllabus for the latter. The former has already been developed and I am working as a facilitator. But, the real difference I’ve discovered is how quickly I can bond with the students. I met with my face to face class last night, and I already love it. I knew some of the participants prior to the class so we settled in pretty well. And for the few I didn’t know, I already feel like I have a sense of how we will work together.

Even though the online course started a day earlier, I still don’t have much of a sense of the students. A few of them have posted to the discussion forums, but none have posted their pictures yet nor completed the audio assignment. So, I have no idea what they look or sound like! I’ve got names and email addresses and that’s it. I’ve been checking in several times a day to see what’s happening and am disappointed when there are no new posts for me to review. It is going to be a slow process and I am eager for Monday morning to come so I’ll at least know what they look like, well that is if they actually post pictures of themselves. The course creator gave them the option of posting any picture and I thought about changing that but didn’t want to immediately go in and start rearranging. So, I’m hoping most of them choose to post their own pictures rather than Marge Simpson or a sports team logo. That tells me something about them, certainly, but doesn’t help me really visualize them.

It promises to be an interesting semester! My face to face grad course participants will be keeping blogs and I’ll be posting more here as well to keep up with them.

Mark Your Calendars: The VSTE Webinar for January will be held Thursday, January 28, at 7:30 PM. We’ll be taking advantage of Learn Central’s free Elluminate access. Mary Ellen Davis and Linda Carpenter from Virginia Beach will be reprising their excellent VSTE presentation about this online virtual problem solving tool for students. Come join us for an inspiring, interactive meeting. Here’s the URL for the announcement: http://www.learncentral.org/node/46740. You can register to let us know how many to expect but you can also just stop by.

This webinar is sponsored by the Education and Programs Committee of the VSTE Board of Directors.

Earlier today on Twitter, Alfie Kohn asked which signs directed at students were bothersome. Tim Stahmer followed up by commenting that he was bothered by signs that told kids to put away their mobile devices as though they had no instructional value. The exchange reminded me of a short blog post I meant to write but forgot about. Here it is now…

I was at a workshop for science teachers and they were doing some problem solving activities that required some basic math that they could have done by hand. However, most of them chose to use a calculator. Want to guess where those calculators were located? On their mobile devices.

Remind me: what’s the definition of irony?

I should preface this post by saying that I am not a professional historian. I am an amateur history buff, however, mostly interested in early English history from the Norman Conquest through the Elizabethan era. Right now, I’m also dabbling in American history, specifically the Revolutionary War and its aftermath. I am happy to learn about this history through a variety of medium: mostly books and movies. They can be fiction or nonfiction but they must tell a good story. I think we do a real disservice to historical times by trying to summarize them in textbooks. When I watched the John Adams series with my parents, my mother commented that if she had learned about history in this way, through telling it as a good story, she probably would have found it much more interesting than all the name and date memorizing to which she was subjected. And, at least two of my dissertation study participants who were history teachers complained that the history standards tend to be fact-based and thus seem to sap all the energy and excitement out of what should be very good stories.

As part of my fascination with English history, I’ve been watching the Showtime series, The Tudors. I’ve written about it before on my personal blog, labeling it as a guilty pleasure that plays a bit fast and loose with the historical record. The show’s producers do not deny this and, in fact, encourage viewers to identify those inaccuracies and post them to a wiki. The wiki also has a page devoted to Tudor historians and their impressions of the show, most of which are very bad. They call it entertaining fluff, spiced up with lots of sex, and a dumbed down version of history specifically designed to appeal to ignorant Americans. I would agree with the first two (lots and lots of sex, folks, so be warned) but I’m not sure I agree with the last one.

The series does take liberties–Henry, played by the very attractive Jonathan Rys Meyers–never seems to age even though he would have been close to 50 when he married Katherine Howard. In addition, they made the choice not to have Henry get fat, which he certainly did, weighing possibly 300 pounds. Characters are combined together or even made up. There are anachronisms in terms of language and costumes and the sex is mostly gratuitous but this is television after all. However, for a professional historian, I’m sure it’s problematic.

But the essential facts are there: Henry married six wives in his quest for an heir. He had no qualms about ridding himself of advisers like Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell when their views differed from him or he otherwise perceived that they had failed him. He reigned over the English Reformation and began the Church of England. The series spends some time on the development of the Six Articles, which, as Cromwell points out, affirm Catholic ideas such as transubstantiation. Henry brutally put down the uprisings in the North related to his dissolution of the monasteries, something which is also covered in the series. I don’t see any dumbing down there.

Which gets back to my original point…the series tells the very intriguing and exciting story of the reign of Henry VIII. It is interesting enough that it may appeal to people who have otherwise found history to be a dry recitation of facts. And that may lead them to doing some of their own investigating. Luckily, the web is filled with great resources which I’ll share in another post. Does historical accuracy matter so much? After all, in may cases, historians themselves do not agree on the facts as they are relying on sources that may themselves be suspect depending on the point of view and political agenda of the writer. Here’s where good research skills become essential along with the lesson that we cannot always believe everything we hear, see or read.

As I mentioned earlier this week, while I haven’t been writing, I have been creating. Two of the projects I’m working on may be of interest to readers of this blog. Both are related to that oh-so-popular acronym STEM. In case you’ve been living under a rock, STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math.

I developed a web site for the STEM Education Alliance at William and Mary. While the primary audience for the site are teachers, there are also resources for students including an interactive magazine that features interviews with scientists. There are also videos of those scientists.

The second project is for the Tidewater Team for Mathematics, also housed at William and Mary. I’m doing a variety of things for them but my favorite is helping produce a video series called Math In Real Life. These videos feature interviews with business people as they talk about how they use math in their work and also their own relationship to math. Our first video is available and I’ve embedded it below:

In an effort to take Tim’s advice…here’s my odd, out of left field post.  It will come as no surprise to readers of this blog and people who know me that I’m pretty liberal.  It’s a label I proudly wear.  So, it probably also comes as know surprise that I’m a huge fan of Rachel Maddow.  I tune in almost every night to her show.  If you haven’t, give it a try.  She’s smart, funny, and sarcastic, and an antidote to the often harsh rhetoric we hear from both sides.  (As an aside, I’m not a fan of Keith Olberman…he’s a little too mean for me.)

One of my favorite features is Rachel’s Moment of Geek when she highlights interesting events in science and technology.  Even if you can’t stomach Rachel, these features are fun with no seeming political bias.  You can view them at her web site or if you prefer not to have that in your computer memory, check out YouTube.  One of my favorite was about the Google camera car that takes pictures for street view:

My last post was at the end of January, just about the time that I finished the data collection for my dissertation.  I spent the next five months analyzing and writing and successfully defended my study on June 3, 2009.  It took the rest of the summer to finish it and then I plunged back into work.  A combination of feeling pretty broke after not working for several months and a worry about being bored led me to take on several different projects, all of which seemed to have major deadlines in October and November so all those hours I freed up by finishing graduate school (I figure somewhere around 30 hours a week) were suddenly filled.  Any plans I had for posting some blog entries or even twittering were abandoned.

But now the work load has subsided a bit and I actually spent today reading and crocheting rather than working.  I got on my computer to check in to the online classes I’m teaching and to harvest a few crops in Farmville.  And, I had an urge to write, too. It’s funny…I was really worried about being able to find the time and energy to read once I finished my degree.  So many people had told me that they hadn’t been able to read for a long time after finishing their degrees.  And reading whatever I wanted was one of those things I kept promising myself that I was going to do when I was done.  So, I made an effort to read and even did some writing about my reading on my personal blog.

What I didn’t seem to be able to do is write professionally.  In fact, the last thing I wrote was a proposal for the American Educational Research Association conference.  I’m happy to say it was accepted.  I’ve been doing a lot of creating or what you might think of as 21st century writing: a website for a STEM project, the first in a video series called Math in Real Life and two episodes of a new podcast.  I’ve also been doing a lot of data work including Moodle administration, survey development, and a conference handout book.  And there’s been some flash programming for a kids’ website I’ve been working on with my husband. But, with the exception of some personal journaling and a few blog posts about books, I haven’t been writing, not even Twitter posts.  I should be working on an article about my study and I have passing thoughts about twitter posts and blog entries.  But I just can’t commit to the process.  (Just as an aside, this is my second stab at getting this blog post done.)

I’m not sure about the source of the block.  I do know that I find it difficult to write off the cuff they way I used to when I wrote blog entries.  They weren’t completely stream of conscious but I certainly didn’t draft them the way I did my dissertation.  The first three chapters of the study began as the proposal so they probably went through somewhere around 8 to 10 drafts and were written over the course of a year.  The last two chapters only went through two drafts and were written in about three months.  But that was three months of almost full time drafting, writing and revising.  It was intensive but also satisfying and productive.

But it seems to have ruined me for writing anything else. I want to edit every sentence, labor over every work, craft each paragraph.  I worry about having something important to say and whether I should be adding citations.  The freedom I used to feel as I wrote blog entries eludes me.

So, for tonight I’m going to stop and publish this…just get some words moving around.