StigmergicWeb

This is the last blog post I’ll write here. If you want to skip my droning on about why, you can just head over to the new blog, Open Monologue, at robwall.ca. If you want to stay subscribed to this blog, I’ll be auto-posting the ed-tech links that I bookmark at del.icio.us so and I’ll probably announce when EdTech Posse podcasts are online here as well, so if you want to keep track or our podcasts stay tuned here.

So why close up now? First reason, and I have only myself to blame, is the domain name. Stigmergy is a very cool idea and a key concept for understanding emergent systems. It is also, however, not the easiest domain name to tell people out loud without having to spell it for them.

The second reason is restlessness. Way back in 2003 (that feels like such a long time ago) Alan Levine noted that many edu-blogs seem to be abandoned after about a year. If that is the case, I’ve put in more than my time here. This incarnation of my blogging started in June of 2004 after trying other formats for a couple of years, and I just have a feeling that it is time to move on. When I’ve moved before, I have changed the focus, and I think it’s time for me to do just that.

I think that the desire to change the focus of my writing is probably the biggest reason. Go check out the new blog - Open Monologue - to see a summary of what I want to write about. I am not, as I mentioned before, going to give up writing about education, learning and technology. Those are still subjects I try to think deeply about, but other things will be there as well. Besides, I think the edu-blogging thing is starting to get a little tedious. No offense meant to anyone who is in the edu-blogging camp but I have to agree with some of the points made by Tim Holt in a recent post on his blog.

You know, you have to stop preaching to the choir. I am sorry, but frankly, the people that are listening to you leaders are the ones using the technology already. Have you seen the attendees at the conventions that no one can afford? It is a nerdfest. It should be filled with teachers that have no frikkin’ idea what a blog is or what podcasts are. But that isn’t the case. Seems to me that the message has been, for MANY YEARS, that we need to use technology. Okaaaay…So, you have saturated the ed-techie teachers with that message and most of them have done their darndest to get ed tech in their classrooms. But have you ever stopped to think that maybe after all of these years, the message needs to be changed to appeal to the non-techie educator?

In general I have to agree with that. I think that the conversations are becoming rather circular. (By the way, I disagree vehmently with pretty much every other point on dissent that he raises.) Certainly there are new technologies since this blog started, but I think we are still having the same discussions as we did then. And, generally speaking, we are preaching to the choir. There certainly are many more voices in the choir than their used to be, are we articulating a vision that is coherent in a way that is comprehensible to the teachers I work with who still don’t know how to use their e-mail? Can we show them something that will make them change their teaching practice? We seem to present technology based solutions - blogging, digital story telling, wikis, etc. - as the one true way to reform education. I certainly don’t believe that is true, at least not at this stage in my life. I know teachers who are brilliant speakers and lecturers that can enthrall and educate a class of students just by standing in front of a group of students and talking. My organic chemistry prof in my first year of university did just that (although he did use some very commonly used technology in his classes - an overhead projector and a chalkboard). I learned a lot from him. It was his way of teaching and it worked for him and for his students.

I should stop. I don’t want this to turn into a criticism of what we (speaking with my edu-blogger hat on) are trying to do or of the importance of some of the models of learning that we develop. we have some valuable contributions to make to pedagogy. I just want us to think critically about what we collectively want to achieve. Are our goals for the common good, or is it hubris for us to think that we hold the one true solution?

OK - if I haven’t totally alienated everybody with that, y’all can follow me over to the new blog which is pithily entitled Open Monologue. You’re invited to drop by anytime you’d like. No cat diaries - I promise.

I’ve been mostly neglecting this blog for a while. Sorry about that, but it has been a season of endings, beginnings and renewals.

First - some endings. I suppose the biggest ending has been the conclusion of my M.Ed. I don’t have the official piece of paper in front of me conferring that esteemed title upon me, but I think I can safely say that I have finished the degree (before it finished me). My project - an educator’s guide to using digital audio - started off as an interactive web site, spent a short time as a CD-ROM, then finally ended up as a video on DVD. I was happy with a lot of the process of creation, and I learned a lot about using audio to support learning. As for the final product, I’m extremely unhappy. I’m sure that a big part of that is the hard drive pooched during the editing of the videos. I’m also unhappy because I don’t think I created the right product for my topic.

As I was doing the final re-editing of the video, it occurred to me that I was mostly doing talking heady stuff. I had originally intended to have a lot of instructional, semi-geeky screencasts on things like using GarageBand, but when I thought about who this was designed for - teachers who are interested in some quick info so they can use audio as part of their instruction or as a method for student learning - I realized that the how to approach was all wrong. Teachers do need some this is how you do it instruction, but even more important they need and want an idea of how this tool works pedagogically. So, I re-shot and re-edited with that focus in mind. What didn’t occur to me is that changing the focus of the project should have changed the nature of the final project. The final project could have worked much better as straight audio in the form of a CD or as a podcast or both. Considering the nature of my project, I found this epiphany to be rife with irony. It would be nice to re-visit this as a podcast one day. I found some exemplary educational podcasts that I intended to be used in the final project but ended up on the cutting room floor. If you were one of the people I talked to, I apologize for cutting you from the project. I think it would be very interesting to talk to some edu-podcasters as part of an educational audio podcast series. I’ll put this on the someday/maybe list.

More endings - my final class for the M.Ed. I was intending to take a class in the fall/winter of the coming year, but realized that more than anything I just wanted to be done, a sentiment shared by my wife. There was one class in spring session that caught my attention - EDCMM 478: Still Photography in Education. My interest was partially based on my desire to get the degree done but also based on my long-dormant interest in photography. The biggest reason for being interested in this class was that it would be the last class taught by Barry Brown, one of my mentors and advisors in the EDCMM M.Ed. program. It turned out to be a perfect choice. Photography is one of Barry’s great passions in life, and he got me going on taking pictures again. The class was a lot of work - lots of time in the darkroom for the b/w photography section, and two nights a week of driving to and from Saskatoon - but I feel like I’m a better photographer as a result, and I’m enjoying taking photos more than ever. Thanks, Barry, and I hope the retirement thing works out for you.

A minor ending - I finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Wow - when the engine room flooded with radiation and Harry had to go in there to restore warp drive. Oh … wait a second, that was The Wrath of Khan. My bad ;^)

Short review - good book, not the best in the series but it does provide an ending to the series that feels satisfactory to me. A number of unresolved questions get answered in the book, and it does give a proper sense of finality to the overall story arc.

Now some beginnings. At work I’m going to be involved in the design of an online course for my school division’s impending online schooling initiative. I haven’t been involved in the design of a complete online course before so this will give me a chance to work more deeply in the world of online learning. This work is especially interesting and daunting since it is the beginning of a new initiative for the school division.

I’ve also started working on a project with Alec Couros. The project is Alec’s - I’m just along for the ride - so I’m not sure it is up to me to give away any details. I think, if I may be allowed a teaser, that the project has to do with tools that are open, connected and social. This ought to be a blast, and I’m really looking forward to working with Alec.

More beginnings start on Monday (yikes - where did the summer go?) when I head back for another year of teaching, learning and other coolness at NBCHS where I’ll be teaching some fun classes and also working with teachers and students using digital tools for learning. I’ve got a few ideas about what I’d like to do this year, but I’m going to work with teachers on the idea of digital storytelling. I’d also like to hold some digital photography workshops for teachers and students during the year. I’ll give Barry the credit for inspiring me to take on that project.

Finally, the renewals. Most important has been renewal of time spent with the family. My wife has been extremely patient while I was working (and playing) my way through the M.Ed., so I’m planning on spending a lot more time with her along with The Boy and The Girl. The boy’s entire life and over half of the girl’s life have gone by while I’ve been working towards the M.Ed. degree. A greater presence in their lives is long overdue.

I should also be doing a little more blogging, and some more podcasting with the posse. I’ve got a show that was recorded in March that is still in production. I’m hoping next year the production process is a bit faster!

OK - that’s the state of my life as the summer draws to a close and a new school year looms in front of me full of new adventures in learning. If you are in the same situation, I wish you good luck and lots of fun in the coming year. Stay tuned for the details of my continuing learning journey and the meagre thoughts and reflections that pass through my brain.

I have mostly recovered from the great hard drive crash, thanks to Apple’s Backup software. Most music has been recovered, and I will soon be sniveling and groveling to iTMS to be allowed to re-download music that I have already paid for. Most pictures have been restored, up until I last backed up all my iLife data which was back in January. I’m am grateful that I managed to recover what I did, but still kind of mad at myself for losing some of the photos (like Declan’s first birthday, or the visit from our friends from Edmonton in April). I’ve decided that I need to start using Flickr again, not just to share photos but also to archive them. The recent purchase of a new camera has also renewed my photo enthusiasm, so I want to be taking more pictures again (and hopefully not losing them).

The new camera has a butt-kicking super macro zoom feature. I like it!

As for the flocking, I’m giving it another shot after listening to MacBreak weekly episode 42. Leo recommended it as his software pick of the week pointing out that it had improved a lot since earlier versions. I like the nice drag picture to blog post feature. It seems to work pretty slickly, and if you can see the caterpillar pictures above that must mean that it works. The blogging seems OK, but it doesn’t look like it does anything with categories. Hmmm …

Update: It does let you add categories as you publish, and also allows you to add technorati tags. This is looking like it does not suck.

technorati tags:flickr, flock

I’m letting myself take a distraction break from marking and entering numbers into the grading program (Good old numbers … what would school be like without them?). In OLDaily Stephen has posted about his presentation “What you really need to learn“. Great stuff. I’m looking forward to the audio.

Here’s a tasty little morsel from the presentation that started some neurons to flicker:

Rather than memorizing form (the old way) multimedia teaches to look for signs in the environment (the new way)

Literacy, if I may paraphrase, is not about memorization of facts. I think we all take that as a given. Literacy is also not about finding facts, a notion that I find interesting although it is at odds with what I usually conceive of as information literacy. Literacy, of any type, is about pattern recognition, about seeing how art is like physics is like literature is like dance is like architecture is like …

Literacy is not about knowing where the dots are. Literacy is not about finding dots about which you may not know. Literacy is about connecting the dots and seeing the big picture that emerges.

Well - enough intellectual stimulation. Time to get back to judging students on how well they know where the ecology dots are.

Learning is like rowing upstream; not to advance is to drop back

Kathy Sierra, in her great blog Creating Passionate Users, writes about The myth of “keeping up”.

You’re not keeping up. I’m not keeping up. And neither is anyone else. At least not in everything.

Wow - those are encouraging words to hear. I’m just getting some last minute work done before I leave to Saskatoon for the TLt 2006 conference, so I haven’t had time to read the whole thing. Would someone mind reading it and leaving a summary for me here? ;^D

After a great deal of badgering, cajoling and bribery, I’m pleased to announce that my friend and colleague Donna DesRoches is now blogging at The Illuminated Dragon. Donna and I enjoy having many heated discussions about many issues involving educational technology and now we can bring our debates to the public! Donna also has a variety of skills and areas of expertise that will make her blog worth putting on your aggregator list.

For her first post, entitled Playing to Learn, Donna has shared some thoughts about a presentation we are working on for our staff about the social web. (Call for ideas coming shortly) Donna points out some interesting differences of opinion between us and others about our attitudes towards learning, and she asks four very important questions:

Shouldn’t teachers play with new knowledge and information? Why should learning be serious work? Is this the feeling we impart to our students about learning? If teachers cannot find joy in learning is it possible to create students who are life-long learners?

I’ve often felt there’s a bit of a divide amongst teachers on this issue. I’ve always made it a priority in all of the classes I teach that I’m having fun; if I’m not having fun, I don’t think anyone else can. Many times students are labelled as being lazy or not willing to put in the effort. When I watch some of the same students, though, practicing tricks on a skateboard or playing a game, it seems quite apparent that they are willing to put significant time and effort into some very difficult problems. One of the differences, obviously, is fun - it is expected that someone will have fun while they are practicing a trick on a skateboard or learning a new video game. Fun is built into the design of these problems. So why can’t fun be built into what we do in classrooms? Perhaps even more important, and I think this is what Donna was alluding to, why is it assumed that what we learn while having fun is of lesser value than what we learn while being sombre and ernest?

You could read what I have to say, or you can just skip to this essay by Paul Graham right now:

How to Do What You Love

Still here? Well, here are my thoughts on the matter. I teach at a secondary school, and one of my goals for this upcoming semester (which starts on Monday) is I want all of the students to read this essay. Then I want them to have their parents read it.

To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We’ve got it down to four words: “Do what you love.” But it’s not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated.

True enough. Joseph Campbell phrased it differently, but I think the sentiment is the same, when he spoke with Bill Moyers for the TV show/book “The Power of Myth”:

My general formula for my students is “Follow your bliss.” Find where it is, and don’t be afraid to follow it.

One of the tragedies of the way so many schools operate is that we never give young people a chance to really follow their bliss, and we set them up to think that following their bliss is merely having fun. Graham says, “Do what you love doesn’t mean, do what you would like to do most this second.” Doing what you love is not a plea for impulsivity. I wonder, though, what other sorts of activities we expect to get when time is metered out in 50 or 60 minute increments. Activities that I truly love - playing with my daughter, talking with my wife, reading, or walking and thinking - can’t be bounded into a time frame. Sometimes 15 minutes with my daughter is enough (especially when she’s wanting to play Barbies ;^) ), but sometimes we can spend a whole day together and as she’s going to bed we are still talking about what a great day it is. The time I need to follow my bliss is fluid, and can’t be blocked off in a daytimer for a certain regular time. Neither does following your bliss mean doing things in order to receive great prestige or monetary reward. Again, we send very mixed messages to our students, especially when our education system is skewed towards preparing students for post-secondary education, especially the emphasis and prestige given to getting a University education. Paul Graham refers to prestige and money as being Sirens that can lure us off our true course if we pay them too much heed:

You shouldn’t worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world. When you can ask the opinions of people whose judgement you respect, what does it add to consider the opinions of people you don’t even know? … The other big force leading people astray is money. Money by itself is not that dangerous. When something pays well but is regarded with contempt, like telemarketing, or prostitution, or personal injury litigation, ambitious people aren’t tempted by it. That kind of work ends up being done by people who are “just trying to make a living.” (Tip: avoid any field whose practitioners say this.) The danger is when money is combined with prestige, as in, say, corporate law, or medicine. A comparatively safe and prosperous career with some automatic baseline prestige is dangerously tempting to someone young, who hasn’t thought much about what they really like.

The trick, says Graham, is discipline when finding what it is that you love to do:

Although doing great work takes less discipline than people think– because the way to do great work is to find something you like so much that you don’t have to force yourself to do it– finding work you love does usually require discipline.

To do this, you need to have the discipline to navigate around the hazards posed by prestige, money and other traps in the way to finding what it is that you truly love to do. This is tough to do when you are in high school and have had very little exposure to real life (and, if you are in high school and reading this, you’ll just have to trust me that this is probably true. There are, of course, always exceptions). I think one of the best ways to avoid getting to deep into these traps is to find something you love to do that requires a certain amount of discipline and dedicate some time and effort into doing these as well as you can. Sports and artistic pursuits are good for this, as is education as long as you work on honing your mind instead of “How will my career opportunities be enhanced by this.” This kind of activity may end up leading you to your bliss, but it is rarely a linear process. The outcome of what you do with your life is rarely predictable based on where you start! Some people might find that a frightening prospect, but I find it rather optimistic and encouraging!

And now, speaking of discipline, I should stop writing (which is often my bliss) and get back to marking and preparing exams (which often requires much discipline for me, but is a good exercise in self-improvement).

Warning - heavy self-reflective navel gazing ahead. You have been warned!

Two weeks ago when I started my Christmas holiday, it looked like such a long time and I had hopes of getting so much done - take care of some long overdue projects around the house, more time doing fun stuff with my daughter, time for some real conversations (instead of just communications) with my wife, smiting the evil overdue-marking dragon, and some good, thoughtful blog entries and maybe even some reading. Where does the time go? (The answer, by the way, is called life)

You would be wise to conclude that I did not get through everthing on the list. The important stuff - making better use of time with the family, for example - made it to the top of the list, and I am thus not the least bit unhappy about the way my time was spent. This is also an opportune time to think about the year past, and where my life is headed.

First some reflection on the past year:

• It has been a busy time. This is partially the result of having a busy five year old, and her need for transport to and from various activities. I keep telling her that in 11 years she will need to drive me around while I go do fun things, and she has agreed. Work has, as always, been a big consumer of my time as I think it is for many teachers. Being involved in educational technology and feeling compelled to be continuously staying on top of all the innovations has only added to the black hole that sucks up all my time.
• I’m back at work on my Master’s degree in Educational Commnication and Technology after a one year hiatus. Its good to be back, but the time away was an absolute necessity for my mental well-being. My wife and I had to cope with two pregnancies that didn’t work out in the past two years. If you’ve ever had to deal with the same circumstances, I don’t need to tell you how difficult it can be; if you’ve never been through this, there’s no way I can explain. I learned that there are a lot of people around me who have been through the same thing, and just knowing that helped me to keep going. This is the first time I’ve blogged about it (or mentioned it outside of conversations with friends), so I guess that means the healing is coming along.
• Along with Alec, Dean and Rick, I’ve enjoyed starting the EdTech Posse podcast, and getting feedback from so many listeners around the world. Its been a blast, and (as Dean once said) the best professional development experience I have. I’m looking forward to continuing this great experience.
• I’ve had the chance to present at AMTEC in Calgary, and at the LORNET research symposium. In both cases, I had just as many (or more) interesting conversations about my presentations online as I did in person. That’s what I love about blogging - its like one never-ending conference wine and cheese reception with good, unscripted, spontaneous discussions with all the people who’s writing you love to read!
• Few experiences in my life can match the sheer bliss of watching my daughter grow up. Taking her to her first day of Kindergarten was an amazing experience, and watching her walk across the playground to school every time I drop her off makes time stand still.

Hmm - looking back on the list, its no wonder I’m feeling busy. Most of it seems to be self-inflicted, so I suppose there’s not much reason to expect any sympathy! ;^D

Plans/resolutions/aspirations for 2006:

• Get my thesis 75% done (or more). Talking to Rick this afternoon over lunch about some of his plans for classes next year helps some of the pieces to fall into place.
• Get more sleep. I really don’t get very much productive done after midnight anyway, it just feels like it.
• Spend more time away from the computer. Or get paid more for it so I can afford to hire someone to do all my housework.
• Teach my daughter how to throw, catch and hit a baseball.
• More conversations with my wife that don’t involve planning our time so that we can manage our overly busy conversations.
• Get more students/teachers using blogs and wikis, and listening to and producing podcasts.
• Despite past setbacks, we are expecting another addition to the family in mid-March. I guess optimism sometimes wins out over experience or common sense! (or, if you can tolerate a baseball metaphor, when you’ve got two strikes on the count, the only thing left to do is swing hard and see if it flies over the fence)  ;^)
• More EdTech Posse podcasts!
• Doing cool, fun things with my students so that we all learn and have fun together!!
• Keep blogging (but not after midnight) ;^D
• Watch Canada kick @$$ at the Winter Olympics. If we do half as well as we did at the EduBlog awards, it will be our best olympics ever.

So, that’s my state of mind right now. Check back in about a year to see how I did. Or just check back throughout the year to offer me encouragement!

Peace and love in 2006!