StigmergicWeb

Time to rebrand.

I’ve been feeling a malaise in my desire to blog lately. I’ve attributed this to a number of things. With the M.Ed. complete, I’ve been spending more of my time with the family. I don’t want my children to think of me as the man who spends time in the untidy computer room downstairs. I’ve also had to chance to become involved in a few nifty projects - co-designing a course with Alec, reworking a website in a two week timeframe, developing an online course at school and developing my role as an in-school intructional technology support teacher. OK, this is more than a few projects but they all kind of inter-relate.

I think that Twitter is another reason my blogging productivity is low, for two reasons. First is that twitter is distracting enough to keep me from forming any coherent thoughts. When asked to describe twitter, one of my responses is that twitter is crack for anyone with ADD.

But I’ve finally hit on a bigger reason that the blogging productivity has declined. It’s time to move on. When I moved to this blog after spending time as an omegageek and as an ant, I chose the name of the blog from the concept of stigmergy

Stigmergy is a method of indirect communication in a self-organizing emergent system where its individual parts communicate with one another by modifying their local environment.

I wanted to talk about learning as an activity of a network, and that the community of educational-technology bloggers formed a kind of stigmergic network in the way we modified ideas by that whole rip-mix-learn-feed paradigm. A lot of bloggers have joined in on that conversation. They are far more articulate than I am so lately I’ve tended to follow the conversation and leave comments on other blogs rather than initiate some of the conversation here.

I still want to follow and occasionally be a part of those conversations but it is time to move on (cue the Sarah Brightman and Andrea Boccelli music). I’m not sure if the change will be changing what is here or heading to a new location. I think that I want to move in the direction of having a more general topic blog. I’ll still be talking about education, technology and digital learning. I’m still deeply interested in those topics and my career ensure that I will continue to have things to say about them. I also want to talk about parenting, politics, photography, insomnia as a lifestyle and anything else that I think is worth writing about. My life, like anyone else’s, has many facets to it and they are all related. I want to write about all parts of my life, not just one.

But no cat diaries - you have my word on that.

Stay tuned for details.

Powered by ScribeFire.

If this works, then blogmate rocks!

The presentation looks pretty good, especially if you go into full screen mode. I don’t know if it handles really complex powerpoint but the straightforward, page-turner stuff looks pretty good. Now we just need an interface for making the presentations and I won’t need to deal with Microsoft Office ever again! Or at least, not so much.

One of the problems that always comes up at my school is students want to be able to work on essays and such at the school and at home. The usual solutions are e-mailing back and forth (tedious, but at least there is a degree of revision control built in) or putting the files on a portable medium such as a USB drive or a CD-ROM. I showed Google Docs to a student the other day, and I could see the light bulb go on over his head. With the Google Apps suite available to schools for free, this is a service that a school or college could offer all students with zero cost to the institution. This is done without students seeing any ads - I’m glad google gets it that it is clearly unethical to use the offer of a free technology service in order to force students to watch ads.

Again, I find myself being a Google fanboy. I know that there is a cost attached - TNSTAAFL, after all - but they seem to be creating/acquiring the web applications that are most valuable for individuals, and for schools.

We’ve all had these. One of the joys of having a blog is that you can whine about them in public.

First thing that went wrong. OK - this one is actually my bad. I had forgotten to renew my domain name. My service provider had renewed or kept control of the domain but reset DNS to point it to some nefarious SEO-type link page (so if you’ve been seeing a bunch of links to various places, that was the problem). They were nice enough to keep all my data, and to return the domain name to me with no problems. I salute them for dealing with my lack of memory in a way that was nice to me and my data.

Second problem. I powered up the MacBook this morning and was greeted with the blinking “folder with question mark”. A few moments of consultation with the Apple Support site informed me that this meant that there was no system disk from which to boot. I scooted home to get my system install disks, then booted off of them. I opened disk utilities, discovering to my horror that there was no sign of my hard drive.

If there is any consolation in this, it is that I backed up my photos back on January 21, so most of my photos are still there. I also had the foresight to back up some of my more important documents. Other than that, I think I’m hooped!

I am feeling surprisingly calm so far. I’m sure that’s just the shock making me somewhat numb. I expect to enter the anger/pleading stage by this evening, and the acceptance phase in about a week.

In the meantime, I am in the market for a 2.5″ SATA drive or perhaps a new(er) MacBook. Anyone willing to barter some hardware for my instructional design skills?

Trying to explain to someone what is the fuss about RSS? (Brian, D’Arcy and Alan will get the reference - anyone else?) This is the video to show them.

UPDATE - argghh. Something on the blog (theme perhaps?) was not happy with the javascript, so I had to remove the nifty little included video viewer in favour of the text link, lest it prevent anyone from seeing the comments.

Donna and I have done a few podcasts we’ve entitled Ten Things to Know. We had a small corner of the school website to show this off, but we thought it was time to set it up as an independent site. If you are interested in some examination of the educational application of various technological tools, take a look at the official site and have a listen to our podcast at Ten Things to Know. I’m releasing some of our old shows at first, since most people probably haven’t heard them yet, then I’ll start adding the new ones.

I’ve recently become a fan of David Allen’s Getting Things Done system for personal productivity, largely due to the influence of Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders. I’m on Christmas holiday right now and, although I’ve done some organizing and getting some of my stuff organized for GTD in the future, I have successfully enjoyed a noticeable lack of over planning and scheduling of my time. My schedule has mostly consisted of Spend time with family, Read, Write and Work on M.Ed. project (and even that has been kept at a minimal level). Monday is the return to school and although I’m looking forward to seeing and teaching my students, I could definitely use another week or two of NGTD. Oh well - winter break is only 5 weeks away.

I’m not sure if I’m the only one experiencing this. I’m trying to load the latest EdTech Posse podcast (its edited and ready to go, just waiting to go) up to ourmedia.org, but I am unable to connect. Is anyone else having the same problem?

OK - its 2:15 a.m. and I have no intention of getting to sleep tonight. This brings back memories of all nighters in university, or even late night marking sessions during my early years teaching. Tonight I have nothing so exciting keeping me up. I mentioned a while ago that I have epilepsy, and that I recently had a seizure. One of my triggers seems to be lack of sleep. My family doctor and neurologist have both recommended that I need to reduce the stress in my life, reduce my caffeine intake, and get more sleep. Despite that being a pretty good description of my lifestyle, I have been fairly diligent in these things.

Tonight, however, the get more sleep directive is officially replaced with get no sleep. I am scheduled (in about 6 hours - I can make it) for a sleep deprived EEG. In short, they want to scan my brain after 24 hours without any sleep. To make this a bit more challenging for me, I have also been told that I may not consume any coffee, tea, chocolate or other stimulants during this time. No problem - my will is strong, my browser window is open, and iTunes is cranking out the stay awake tunes (Jerk It Out by The Caesars is pummeling my eardrums right now). In the immortal words of Elwood and Jake Blues:

It’s 106 miles to Chicago, we have a full tank of gas, half a packet of cigarettes, it’s dark and we’re wearing sunglasses… HIT IT

If anyone wants to check in on how I’m doing, my skype name is omegageek . Call now - our operators are standing by.

UPDATE - Its now 7:35. I made it through the night. I only hope that I have enough of a brain to be scanned!

spend a lot of time yesterday and this morning checking their inbox and/or aggregator hoping in vain that there would be something new from OLDaily?

Me too.