I’m spending some time today with the folks at Flagstaff Academy in Longmont and digging into an old bag of tricks. Can you guess which slide is the yarn slide? Flagstaff folk – I hope we can continue some of the conversations that we started today here in the comments. I’d love to hear your thoughts and reactions. Thanks.
PS – Terri, the link to the video you saw is here.
Are there worksheets on the upside of slavery?
Equal time assumes all positions have equal merit. They don’t. Learning and institutions are subjective, no matter how loudly we suggest they’re not. Attempting to pretend otherwise is destructive and self-defeating.
And yet.
The Boston Globe reports that Cushing Academy will be eliminating their library and replacing their 20,000 physical volumes with 18 e-readers. And a cappucino machine.
The article goes on quote various experts lamenting or praising the decision. My only question is this: How bad was circulation in their library when the assumption is that 18 e-readers will be enough to meet reader demand for books to take home?
I continue to worry about the rush to replace paper books with electronic ones. Seems like we’re in the early days of digital rights management with electronic texts, and Kindles are sexy, but not practical for sharing books with others.
I’m writing this post from the back porch of a family beach rental in South Carolina. The breeze is ruffling the pages of the paperback Ive just put down, and will soon pick back up. The ever-present hum/roar of waves hitting the beach drones on, in a most delightful way. My father’s swimming in the pool below me, and my children are upstairs napping. They have every right to be tired, because they’ve been exploring the ocean and the house and the pool and the greater Charleston area for the last several days and have plenty more exploring to do.
I try pretty hard to take a few technology breaks a year, to distance myself completely from the devices that rule my work week and can dictate, on occasion, priority. (Well, at least, I allow myself to believe that devices, and not the people connected through them, or my own agency, or lack of it, can determine priorities. But I know that’s not the case.)
This trip, I’ve found myself taking my “break” in a slightly different way. Today’s a good example. I made pancakes for my daughters with a few Twitter friends. Then we dined on the porch, about three feet from where I’m sitting now, and I announced the view. The girls and I then hit the pool for several hours, and returned for a late lunch. In their pre-nap stupor, as they “rested” on the couch, I caught up with several colleagues attending a conference and chatted with a couple more friends/acquaintances/people I (don’t always) know.
Some of the folks I’ve interacted with today are folks that I work with. Many are not. Most have no business being “here” on a family vacation. That said, I’d have it no other way. My world’s at my fingertips on my own terms mostly all the time now, and I’m nowhere close to prepared with how to deal with that.
I feel like I balance work and personal responsibilities fairly well, sometimes leaning one way, other times the other, and I still don’t think I’m anywhere close to certain about how best to handle the blending of personal and professional that we’re smack in the middle of. It’s new. It’s different. It’s awesome. And it’s tricky. And I rather enjoy it. I’m not quite sure why I’m choosing to think about it on a day like today, except that I’m aware that my normal “power down completely” relaxation strategy isn’t comfortable today. Balance is important. But balance isn’t binary.
I’m an hourly employee in a world where schedules are less and less important at a time when time’s never been more precious. My friends and my colleagues may or may not be on the same short list of people, but they’re always close and reachable. And that’s a fine paradox for such a sunny afternoon here at the ocean. As I head back to my novel, I’m going to take a few minutes to ponder the point further. Whatever’s happening at present to my nomal routines, I’m still getting some rest and relaxation, and I’m not going to squander it.
In this podcast, recorded last week, Karl and I continue the conversation that began in the comments to my last podcast. I hope that he and I can keep talking like this from time to time, and that the recording of our conversation is useful to you. And I hope you continue the conversation, too.
Today’s podcast is a continuation of some thinking that came out of a roundtable conversation that I had at Learning 2.0: A Colorado Conversation. Karl reminds me that I’ve been forgetting to share here on the blog lately. I’ll try to do better.
As always, I’m interested in your thoughts.
I had the opportunity on Friday to spend some time with our enterprise systems manager thinking about something that certainly isn’t glamo(u)rous, but is nothing shy of essential. That something?
Storage.
Sure, there’s plenty of “free” storage out there for the taking, but I’m interested in making sure that we can offer students and staff in our district a reliable environment that will be there today and tomorrow, and won’t disappear, or fill up, in the middle of the night. As we see more and more growth of our district’s Virtual Campus (a Moodle installation), as well as the beginnings of the use of in-district blogging tools, we’ve got to make sure that we’re planning for enough space so that we can meet the needs of teachers and students both today and down the road.
That sounds easy – but it’s certainly not. Hence our conversation. I actually find fascinating all the bits and pieces of infrastructure that go into making sure that, when you turn on your computer or launch a browser, the stuff that you want is there for your use. And I know, too, that the infrastructure that we build ultimately affects what can and cannot be done with students, so there’s a direct impact on education with every technology decision made. I take opportunities to think and learn about the district’s infrastructure very seriously.
And now, I need your help. I’m wondering, and have been asked to make a guess (well more like an attempt at making a semi-intelligent shot in the dark) about what the storage needs of a teacher and a student are today here in the dawn of the 21st Century. How much space does a teacher need to teach and a student to learn and to archive his or her learning over the life of public schooling? What’s a decent ballpark? How much space should we have available just for the digital learning and online storage needs of a district of approximately 25,000 students and 1300 teachers? Can you defend your answer?
We’re going to be making some plans around these numbers, and we’d like to at least get close. Any ideas you have are much appreciated.
I’m sitting at DIA about to board a flight to Philadelphia, headed to Educon. It should be a good conference, and much of it will be available online. I hope we all learn lots. And I hope you, wherever and whenever you are, come, too.
Check out the wiki and join me and us. I think it’ll be useful. I’m doing a session on writing and I hope to get some writing done while I’m there.
What have you been writing lately? Where? Who’s been reading? What should we be talking about when we talk about writing? What shouldn’t we be talking and writing about?
In an age of ubiquitous publishing and always public if you want to be writing spaces, what new writing behaviors should we be adopting? What older behaviors still require our attention? What can we leave behind?
What about writing have we never gotten right in the classroom, and what can we do about that?
Your answers to these questions will probably make an appearance in the session, so feel free to share them in the comments.
On this podcast, recorded during yesterday’s commute, I share a little bit about the meeting I was driving home from, a conversation about how best to share resources across districts in the middle of an environment that encourages a different sort of sharing. I then layout my idea for a possible sharing tool. As always, I’m very interested in your feedback and suggestions for the ideas I’m talking about in the ‘cast.
You are invited to attend the Learning 2.0: A Colorado Conversation Conference (2009 Edition).
What is Learning 2.0: A Colorado Conversation?
Learning 2.0: A Colorado Conversation is a one day conference/meetup for teachers, administrators, students, school board members, parents and anyone who is interested in education. It will be held on Saturday, February 21st, 2009, from 9:00 am until 3:00 pm at Heritage High School in Littleton, Colorado, USA (different location than last year – here’s a map). We assume most folks will be from Colorado, but everyone is welcome to attend, and we are working on some ideas for virtual participation.
Tentative Schedule
We’re still working on the details so this will be updated before the conference. Also, this may expand if we have more folks register than we are anticipating.
Registration
You must register so that we know how many folks to expect and so that we can have enough lunches available. (Who says there’s no such thing as a free lunch?)
Cost
Free, baby. And lunch is included, thanks to the generous support of Littleton Public Schools and St. Vrain Valley Public Schools.
Wireless
BYOL (that would be Bring Your Own Laptop) – we’ll have wireless access to the Internet (filtered) – we may test our capacity to handle density of machines, but hopefully things will go swimmingly. If not, we have wired machines in various places you can access.
Questions for Students
We’re having a student panel discussion during lunch. Here’s your chance to submit some questions for them to consider.
Invite Others
We strongly encourage you to invite other folks from your school, district, neighborhood, or learning network to attend as well. It would be great if everyone could bring at least one person with them that is perhaps new to this conversation. Bring a student along, too. (Just remember to register.)
Questions?
Feel free to leave a comment on this post or on the FAQ page on the wiki.
Oh, also feel free to add this image to your blog, or download and print the flyer.
