Category Archives: blogging

Coursera Drop Out

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My summer reading led me to enroll in Thinking Mathematically, a Coursera course offered by Stanford professor Dr. Keith Devlin. This was my first formal MOOC and I was looking forward to taking the course. Then, reality set in. The course demanded 8 to 10 hours a week and in order to get a grade, you had to view all the videos and complete the problem sets. I managed to do so for the first two weeks despite travel and vacation. This week, it looked like I would be spending most of Sunday completing the work. When an event this afternoon got cancelled, I was relieved because I could spend the time viewing the video and getting started on the assignment for the week. As I watched and worked out the problems, it occurred to me that this wasn’t the way I wanted to spend those suddenly free moments! The content is interesting and I like being challenged, but I found myself asking the age old question, “When am I going to use this?”

What did I really want to do with that free time today? Read! Paula White has been writing about the Virginia Readers’ Choice Awards and how she and her students are reading the books. Today, the National Book Award nominees were named and I would love to read a few of those. And somehow I also found Library Reads, a website that crowdsources librarians to identify the top ten books published in a month. Here’s October.  Jhumpa Lahiri, “The Lowland”  is on both lists. And there’s an interesting nonfiction book about a food program in Toronto.

I also want to write! I am inspired by Paula…she has been blogging every day, providing rich descriptions of her classroom, engaging book reviews and intriguing questions. From doing online coaching to teaching online courses about elearning design and online communications and working as an instructional designer for a project developing online courses to, until a few hours ago, taking an online course myself, I am immersed in online learning. There is much to think about with online learning but I seem to be living it and not making time to reflect on my work.

And, this was the first week of my community computer/tutoring program. What started as a summer conversation has resulted in a small outreach program to underserved kids in my town. The first meeting was a little chaotic as we really had no idea how many kids were coming. We ended up with a group of early elementary and middle school. I’m wondering how to engage each group: I’d like to get the first graders involved in a make project. Maybe making their own shoes? Provide materials like magazines, cardboard and foam. I’m going to dive into gaming with the middle schoolers…play a few as a basis for our conversation and then explore various tools for creating online games, starting with Scratch. Edubuntu comes with a couple programming tools like laby and kturtle.

To his credit, the professor warned us that the course would take 8 to 10 hours a week. I’m not sure why I thought I had that kind of time to devote to the course. I think I’ll just read the book.

Create, Connect, Commit in 2013

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Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach described her New Year’s commitments and challenged the rest of us to do the same. As always, she makes a powerful statement and I found myself nodding my head in agreement as I read. Dealing productively with digital and emotional distractions, finding a work/life balance, and pursuing excellent in everything…these are all worthy goals. She sums it up beautifully: “I am determined to influence the world this year rather than be  influenced by it.”

I have three goals for the new year: create, connect and commit.

Make Art Dammit!

This is the mantra from The Daily Create, an offshoot of ds106, a MOOC that originated at the University of Mary Washington. Each day, they post an assignment designed to inspire “spontaneous creativity.” Today’s assignment is to illustrate a decision. Mine is a screenshot of my Kindle app and wondering what to read next…

First Read of 2013?

As part of ds106 GIFfest, I had fun making my first animated gif in a very long time. It reminded me that I enjoy creating:  from crocheted doilies to homemade bread to flower gardens to digital media. And, I have lots of opportunities to be creative, as long as I make the time. Along with Sheryl, I’m going to stop thinking there isn’t enough time…I value creativity so making it part of my daily life is important. In a larger sense, by creating these things, I am creating a life.

Create Connections

One of the great things about doing The Daily Create is that you do so as part of a community. It was a real kick to get positive comments on my animated gif along with suggestions for how to extend the creativity. Creating is fun but being part of a creative community is even more fun. Writing this blog post is part of this goal: a way to connect with others at the start of the new year, a year in which I want to do more connecting. More blog writing, more twitter sharing, more community creating. I have recently started exploring Google+ as well. I do a lot of connecting as part of my work, bringing people together in courses and webinars and conferences, but I want to do it more personally, including getting more involved in the crochet group I joined last year.

Increasingly, our farm is becoming a place to make connections. We have gotten to know many members of our local community when they come by to get vegetables. We have also made connections with other local farmers, and the first thing I did this morning was sign up for beekeeping classes so I can get my hives up and running this year. This past summer, we donated our excess harvest to the food bank in town. I want to strengthen those local community ties, perhaps as part of a local anti-poverty or literacy initiative. Moving to the country has opened my eyes to rural issues. I’m not sure of the details yet but am committed to finding my niche in our new place.

Forge Commitment

When I look back at my reading list for 2012, it is filled with great books. But most of them are fiction. Meanwhile, there is a whole host of writing calling for my attention: get back to Kozol, dig further into the banned book list, spend time with contemporary writers about education and change, and work on the shelf of Wendell Berry’s books. I feel a deep connection to Berry as both a writer and a farmer.

This reading will help fuel my writing. I committed to a daily blogging practice this fall and then life and work got in the way. I am re-committing to that practice as I move into the new year. Writing is a way to both create and connect so offers a foundation for my other goals.

So, a public declaration of my goals for the new year…what about you? Want to join me in any of these endeavors?

 

 

 

 

 

 

When We See It As A Challenge

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My attention lately has turned to game design and notions of gamification.  Part of it stems from the discussion of Reality is Broken that I facilitated earlier this year and part from my own growing devotion to time management strategy games. It has led me to incorporate game language into my ed tech course for pre-service teachers.  They are moving into the gamification phase right now as they determine which areas they wish to pursue in more depth and they’ll level up, achieve mastery, and then choose one area in which they will get to the Boss level.  One of the engaging pieces of games is the notion of the challenge.  If a game is too easy, we tend to be less interested. It has to be just hard enough that we have a sense we can beat it but know that we may fail before we succeed by applying the lessons we have learned in our earlier attempts.

I read two different pieces today that seem to be using the challenge approach to encourage positive change in two very different groups of people.

Education Week profiles Haut Gap Middle School, a school that has used the Positive Behavioral Interventions and Suports (PBIS) approach to discipline. It has something of a game style approach as it seeks to reward positive behavior:

For example, once every quarter, Haut Gap students who have collected the right number of PRIDE coupons earn a special privilege. They also can cash in their coupons for prizes. They earn coupons for asking thoughtful questions in class, being prepared for a lesson, and asking for permission the right way. Coupons or not, when students behave the right way, they are told.

“You have your reading book out,” English teacher Brandon Bobart told his students during a recent class. “I can tell you’re committed to your learning.”

Earlier this month, 6th grader Saniyah King happily reported she had earned 10 PRIDE coupons. If she has 20 by month’s end, she’ll get to take part in a schoolwide dress-up day, when students swap school uniforms for business attire.

I can hear some of you sputtering: why should kids be rewarded for good behavior?  It should simply be what is expected of you as a citizen. But we see rewards in the real world: earning points for good driving, getting at least a small interest rate for saving money, and in San Antonio and Chicago  a wellness challenge that will reward municipal employees for getting healthier with cash prizes and penalize those who don’t by increasing their health benefit payment.

The second article was a reminder from Shelly Terrell about the 30 Goals Challenge for 2012. She has been focusing on one or two goals a week but I may at least get started on the list in anticipation of getting into the 2013 challenge at the beginning. Having specific goals for learning and growth can help guide us as students. When they are set as personal challenges, we may find them even more compelling.  And like a good game, Terrell builds in reflection: why did you learn by completing this challenge.

Of course, I’m already involved in a 30 day challenge of blogging every day.  It’s been a good journey: I find myself thinking about the blog entry throughout the day and then sitting down in the evening to pull it together. But sometimes, like yesterday, I will see a headline that just calls for comment. I’ve allowed myself a fairly wide net of subjects from poverty to technology to Neil Young with a blog entry about Bruce Springsteen is in the works.

I’m doing some reflecting on whether or not I can keep this up after the 30 days ends next week. I would like to very much as I’ve found the practice of writing to be very useful both in terms of codifying my ideas and beliefs but also in terms of making me keep up a bit more as I look for blog fodder. I’m considering ideas for how to streamline it a bit and will share them in a future entry.

Grand Challenge Felled by Cold

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My ambition to blog every day for 30 days came to an end yesterday.  I battled a cold for a couple days and yesterday had to attend an all day meeting despite being in the worst of it.  I know, I know, I should have stayed home but this is a once-a-year meeting and it was somewhat essential that I be there in person. (For those of you who might have been with me, I apologize for the hacking and sneezing and only hope I did not infect you.) Once home, blogging, education and technology were the furthest things from my mind.  I cuddled up in comfortable pajamas and fell asleep before 8 PM.

I’m going to blog twice today to make up for it…does that count? This first one is something of a follow up to the last blog post about the VCU blogging community.  There are a few other blogs that I read on a regular basis and I thought I would share one of them with you:

For five years, Diane Ravitch and Deborah Meier wrote thoughtful letters back and forth as part of the Bridging Differences blog at EdWeek, exploring issues related to education. They began at different ends of the spectrum with Ravitch representing a more conservative viewpoint and Meier a more liberal.  In the end, though, they seemed to have met on the bridge, with Ravitch moving perhaps further along towards Meier’s side as her discomfort with reforms she once espoused like charters and vouchers grew. It was a pleasure to get a peek into the minds of these two women.  Ravitch has moved on to her own blog where she is posting 10-20 items per day (talk about a grand challenge)! And she has become an outspoken advocate for public education.  In her closing post for the Bridging Differences blog, she points out that failing public education is a myth:

Here is something to reflect on: the NAEP scores of students who are black, white, Hispanic, or Asian are at their highest point in history. The proportion of young people between 18-24 who have graduated high school is close to 90 percent, another historical high point. Those who rail about the decline and failure of American education are either misinformed or they obfuscate or prevaricate.

Now, Meier has been joined by Pedro Noguera, sociologist at New York University who studies urban education.  About the same time he came on board, he posted an article in The Nation in which he took issue with the Chicago teachers who were on strike that sparked a response from Diane Ravitch. In his first post for Bridging Differences, he asked Meier to respond as well and she did.

While much of Education Week is behind a pay wall, this blog is freely available.  It provides a chance to get beyond slogans and agendas and think deeply about education.  The commenters also rise about the average and help expand the conversation.

Join A Community of Learners

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I was browsing through some of the bloggers I read looking for blogging fodder to keep up with my 30-day challenge of writing every day. Jon Becker at Educational Insanity always has thoughtful posts and I appreciate his willingness to poke fun at himself sometimes.

The post that caught my attention today is about VCU’s Department of Educational Leadership’s new media ecosystem.  Jon invited us all to get involved in this ecosystem that includes blogs by doctoral students at VCU. I’m already part of the ecosystem as I belong to the Facebook page and follow the Twitter feed. But, it was great to spend time browsing the wide variety of blog entries.  I left a few comments for folks and signed up for the updates.

I think the post that really resonated with me today, perhaps because I feel like I’ve been burning the candle at both ends lately and now have a cold, was one by Andy Wolfenbarger.  He focused on the power of a cohort to support its members, but the main message was that passionate people tend to simply work too hard.  We see all that needs to be done and forget that taking care of ourselves is important, too.  I’m taking his good advice today…work can wait. The henhouse needs some attention and so do I. There’s a sunny spot on the porch calling my name and dogs that will be happy for a long walk later on.

And now that I’ve gotten my blog entry done, I really don’t need to be online the rest of the day! Thanks, Andy, for your good advice.  Your cohort is lucky to have you and I’m lucky to be part of this ecosystem.

Of Sweeping Passions and Grand Challenges

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Attending the TedXAshburn event on Saturday was an uplifting experience.  I was able to hear fascinating people talk with great passion about their lives and their work.  They were teachers and administrators and mission workers and musicians who all live very different lives yet shared one thing in common: passion.  Most of them had a single sweeping passion that drove them but they also had a passion for life and a determination to live a life that mattered, a life that made a difference to others.

yin yang graphicI found myself asking the question: what am I passionate about?  What drives me?  The simple answer is teaching.  I do lots of things as part of my work from organizing conferences to balancing budgets to leading book groups. But as I look across the landscape that is the life of a consultant, it is teaching that inspires me. So, I was glad to hear George Wolfe declare that we are all teachers.  I miss spending time with middle schoolers and having the feeling of influencing a young mind, but I know I am making a difference in the ways my pre-service teachers think about their classrooms and in the ways my graduate students approach the use of technology in their schools.

I have a second passion: learning. This summer, I had the privilege of working with groups of practicing teachers in schools across the country as they try to figure out the best ways to use emerging technologies to meet the needs of their students. I was the teacher as I had the responsibility of organizing our work together but, as with any teaching experience, I also learned so much from the participants just as I learn from the students in my courses. Now, as we continue our work together, I am taking on a different kind of teaching role, that of mentor, as I guide and support them as they work on implementation.

Hence the graphic I was inspired to create as I drafted this entry: we teach, we learn, all in the same time and space. I want to make sure my students know that I am learning from them and with them despite my label as teacher.

In addition to the live speakers, we were treated to two TED videos.  The organizers of Saturday’s event chose Google engineer Matt Cutts’ talk about the 30-day challenge.  Cutts suggests that you think of something you’ve always wanted to add to your life and try it for 30 days:

While Cutts talks about doing something “new,” I’ve decided I just want to do something I already do but would like to do more regularly: write.  Specifically, write blog entries. It is something I think about a lot, even going so far as to draft entries in my head, but I never seem to get them written and published.  Life intervenes by way of emails and phone calls and other distractions.  So, starting today, I am challenging myself to write in this blog every day for the next 30 days. I make this personal challenge public as an added incentive for keeping with it.

My March Resolution

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First a word to my students: do as I say and not as I do. I know that this semester, I’ve really asked you to stretch yourselves in terms of using technology. You’re blogging and twittering and participating in a Ning. Tonight, we’ll be exploring Second Life as well. And you’re doing a good job. I appreciate your thoughtful blog entries, your forum posts and your willingness to even give twitter a try. Mostly, I’m writing to apologize that I haven’t been keeping up. I’ve been resting on my laurels as it were…after all, I have blogged and twittered and ninged before. But that’s just not fair: I need to be doing all that with you this semester. I’m asking you to make time; I must do the same.

And, there’s really the rub: virtual communities have two qualities that make them require special attention: they are virtual and they are usually voluntary. Turn off Tweetdeck and Twitter essentially goes away. Forget to visit iGoogle and the blogging world is somewhat distant. They aren’t calling on the phone or bouncing in my launcher bar.

So, for me, the issue is one of just making time and the commitment to being more active in all these communities. Finding something to write about, posting articles of interest to Twitter, and reading and commenting on the Ning. Maybe over that first cup of coffee in the morning…harken back to reading the paper with breakfast?

And then I wonder, if I struggle to keep up my connections with the virtual world, what’s going to happen to may students when they leave the course? Will they have found enough in this virtual world to continue their work: how many of them will blog? or tweet? or be part of the Ning? What do they need to experience in the next two months that will convince at least some of them to continue to use these tools to teach and learn?

Surfacing

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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.

Community Made Visible

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I tend to be a loner.  I like to do things on my own, including learning.  Given a choice, I would always choose to work alone on a project or learning activity.  I’m comfortable in my own company.  Working from home has only exacerbated that tendency.

But, yesterday, as I headed out to vote and then, later in the evening, as I waited for the election returns, I found I wanted to share with others besides just my husband and the dogs. And, happily, there was my online community.  Over the past year, I’ve made an effort to become a more active participant in that community, and last night, almost for the first time, I could really see that it at work, mostly through Twitter.  During the day, we exchanged voting stories, how long the lines were, how we felt about what we had done.  Many people posted pictures and videos.  Then, as the polls began to close, we gathered to share our anxieties, to celebrate the milestones, and, finally, to take a deep collective breath as we realize what had just happened in our country.

Looking back, I can’t point to a specific moment when I joined the community.  It’s been a gradual process, one that I suspect will continue.  One positive step I’m taking is to do more with this weblog by following along with Teach42’s 30 Days To Being a Better Blogger.  I’ve only gotten through the first challenge, to update my About page.  I was surprised to discover that it was woefully out of date, like from 2006.  My other plan is to do more reading and responding to others both as comments and as blog entries as a way of making connections.

Another step is going to do more with the Ning community I’ve chosen.  I’m a member of VSTEOnline.  This semester, I had my pre-service teachers sign up.  They’ve been doing a great job posting their ideas and questions and interacting both with each other and the other Ning members.  Sad to say, I haven’t done much except monitor their progress.  It’s time to make this community a priority.

It is easy to get distracted by multiple communities, something John Hendron recently wrote about, so I’m going to try to focus my energies.  I’ll still Twitter, of course, since I’m rapidly discovering how much I’ve come to rely on those little updates from my tweets, and just last night welcomed several more friends to my Twitter world.

Thanks to all of you who make up my learning network…some of you know who you are, others have no idea. (But I’ll be sending out a few thank you notes so you may find out soon.)  Together, we are living, learning, and growing together!

Now More Than Ever

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It has taken me nearly two weeks to muster the energy to write this post.  You see, I’m a Unitarian Universalist, and on Sunday, July 27, a gunman walked into the packed Knoxville church and opened fire.  Two died and seven others were wounded.  A letter found in his truck indicated that he harbored hatred for liberals and gays who he perceived as preventing him for getting a job.  Subsequent reports revealed a deeply troubled man who planned to keep shooting until the police came and killed him.  It would be easy to write him off as another crazy person who had somehow gotten his hands on a gun.  And, even as I mourn for the Knoxville church, I know this isn’t the worst mass shooting nor is it the last.  But this one hit pretty close to home for me and not just because it was directed towards people of my faith.  Another reason is because it also reminds us that promoting civil discourse is one of the most important things we can do as we send our students out into both the real and virtual worlds.

That was the theme of an article I wrote–“Don’t Feed the Trolls: Using Blogs to Teach Civil Discourse“–for Learning & Leading With Technology that appeared in the May 2008.  I’m in the process of getting permission to put the article on my website so for now you need to be an ISTE member to read it.  Why is this important to this story?  Because I, at least, had my head in the sand when it came to the rhetoric of hate that has been directed towards liberals.  Evidently, joking about killing liberals and issuing liberal hunting licenses is fair game for cable news commentators, radio entertainers, and conservative bloggers.  I wrote about this in my personal blog:

Really?  Someone, anyone, finds it funny to talk about killing people like me because of my political views.  I might find Russ Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly offensive but I would never wish their death.

And I found myself wondering how we got here…where hateful rhetoric like this is not only accepted but seemingly encouraged.  While I wouldn’t want to blame people like Sean Hannity for what happened last Sunday, his ongoing war against liberals certainly didn’t help.  For someone who is mentally unbalanced, these relenting attacks become an underlying soundtrack to a tragic life and offer up an easy target.  Tom Friedman says that while he was sleeping, the world got flat.  While I was sleeping, the world got ugly.

We can DO something about this, folks.  We can talk to kids about how words–whether spoken or written–really matter.  I’m sure there are liberals out there who are also guilty of negative rhetoric although my own bias might make it more difficult for me to really hear them.  As you head into the school year and start getting your kids on the web, please take the time to include civil discourse in your conversations with them.