I’m a middle of the road Twitter user (please don’t call me a Tweep, Twit or other cutesie-pie name). I post pictures of food and coffee and the places I go. I make observations about things in the media or in my fields of interest or I share links about the stuff I read. I retweet comments and links that are interesting or make me think. I talk to a few people, ask a few questions, respond to a few others. Somedays I am prolific; at other times I’m quiet. I read a lot more than I write.

I love Twitter because it’s about choice. I can dip in and out, engage or disengage. If I find someone who is really interesting or who posts stuff that makes me think, I can follow that person. If I find that someone that I already follow doesn’t interest me or posts too much rubbish then I can un-follow them. During an event I can follow a hashtag (#eqnz for the Christchurch earthquakes) or a specific user (eg, @acarvin who has been described as the man who tweets revolutions).

Some people mourn the days when it was just them and their friends on Twitter. This makes me laugh. You can choose who is on Twitter by carefully choosing who you follow. If that’s not enough then restrict who follows you – which I tend to think misses the point. It’s no different to blogs. If you engage only with people on the same wavelength then you will never be challenged to think in different or new ways.

I don’t like excessive retweeting. Some people go a bit crazy on the retweet button and copy everything a person says. This annoys me. If I find a retweet interesting I can go and look at the original stream and follow that person if I want to. I also don’t see the point of Kiwis retweeting archane news items from overseas. A lot of  BREAKING NEWS isn’t breaking for everyone. And just because it says PLEASE RT a lost or found  dog / cat / child … you don’t have to – especially if most of the people you interact with are on a different continent to the mislaid creature.

Sometimes I’ve discovered that my Twitter stream gets a bit unbalanced. I find that there are too many self-promoting journalists, politicians or celebrities pointlessly jabbering away at each other. Or like right now, I’m finding too much negativity in my stream. It’s easy to fix with a few judicious clicks of the delete button. After all if I wouldn’t enjoy it in real life, I don’t need to see it on my screen.

So, in order to finish on a positive note what do I like? New ideas, links and angles. Photos, music and videos that I’d never find on my own. The serendipity of making and meeting new friends (on and offline). And fun – good fun like the stuff in this collection of Kiwi gems. That’s what I love about Twitter.

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The Mac App Store has a few other benefits. Apps will be kept up to date, they be available later and if you have to reinstall your Mac. What’s not to love about the idea? I hope that Microsoft also bring out an App Store. Heck, I would love it.

The main reason that I’m keen is because I believe that people should be paid for their work. It is simple really – while I am a fan of Open Source Software, I’m also a fan of choice. If developers want to charge for their software, I think they should be able to have that opportunity. Afterall, most adults are in work and expect to be reasonably recompensed for that work. You don’t often find Open Source teachers, politicians or lawyers do you? Woohoo, I spent four years at university and got my degree and now I’m going to work for nothing?

That’s the reason that I do pay for a lot of the software that I use. I’ve paid for Apple and PC stuff. Commercial and shareware. I’ve also sometimes tipped a few dollars to people whose software is freely shared but who have a PayPal account for appreciative users. I also pay for a few of the websites/web apps that I use regularly. LastPass, Xmarks, MetaFilter, Flickr …

As the World Wide Web grew in popularity people got used to a model where everything could be found for free. I still have private clients who ask me how to find music and movies on the internet. When I point them to iTunes or the like they are incredulous because they already pay Xtra or Vodafone for the internet, and the other stuff is for free, right? This attitude extends beyond people who would never “illegally” download music or a movie. Many people sign up for websites and applications and then cry foul when the site changes the groundrules or worse, has the teremity to close.

“What about MY bookmarks? I have this many and I’ve had them there for all these years!” was the cry when it was leaked that Yahoo were looking to change Delicious.

“Have you paid for the service?” was my answer. And even then, does paying for something really give us any rights?

Nothing has changed. Webspace, bandwidth, customer service and support all cost money. Money that can’t always be recouped by advertisements. If a service appears free to use, someone is paying for it – and why should they subsidise your use?

If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold. (MetaFilter user blue_beetle)

Think about it. You get what you pay for.

No related posts.

St Kilda Overpass panorama from my digital Magimix

Artichoke is blogging again! And because I have decided to attempt to write again I am going to comment on her posts here in my own space. Arti has written a post entitled Pedagogical Promiscuity and “Assessment for Learning” where she talks about a number of current issues in modern teaching and learning.

Interesting points that Arti makes are about the continued importance of traditional literacies and how new digital literacies can only be developed on a foundation of knowledge and understanding of how things work. The post takes me back to my brief teaching experience this year when several of the 12 and 13 year old students that I worked with were unable to find their local MPs address in an internet treasure hunt (after we’d spent some time looking at advanced search techniques). The issue wasn’t that they couldn’t use their new found skills. It was because they didn’t know the name of their MP – who happened to also be the Prime Minister of New Zealand, John Key.

During that same teaching experience I spent a lot of time working with the kids looking at different ways to express their learning. We explored websites and blogs, photography, slideshows, audio stuff (I hesitate to say podcasting) and movie making. My brief from the school was to look at ways to help these students become creators. This was all well and good, except that the kids didn’t really want to create. They wanted to consume. If they did want to share something they wanted to be able to feed their photos, videos or music into a digital Magimix and have a product plop out at the end.  Any form of thought or editing was designated boring because they wanted to move onto the next Chuck Norris joke website or Justin Gaga YouTube.

Of course there is nothing wrong with using a food processor. It certainly speeds up the tedious job of chopping vegetables for soup or smooshingup avocado, chili and onions for a guacamole. The thing that the food processor doesn’t do is add the special ingredients – the long simmered ham hock for the soup, the special chili and lime oil that I made last year. The digital Magimix is no different; pulse for too long and you have digital pap, forget to season with judicious editing and it’s same-same and boring.

While we have been holidaying, I have spent a little time (and a lot of my precious mobile bandwith) watching and listening to music mashups like this from DJ Earworm and this MJ piece.

When you examine these clips carefully and think about the skills that are needed, it removes the idea from “something all the kids are doing” to an artform. I couldn’t even start with the beat matching to make a mashup like this. And the video skills – these clips aren’t made on the family computer with MS Movie Maker or on a 13″ MacBook with iMovie 09. These are professionally crafted pieces that have taken hours to complete.

I have been playing with MS ICE software and the photo-stich function of my camera. The results are pleasing but nowhere near the professional results that a “proper” photographer would achieve. I’ve made them for my own amusement and to show to my family and friends. My son brought his little HD video camera to Melbourne and has spent a few minutes compiling his aeroplane taking off clips into a dream sequence. Again, his short video pieces will amuse his family and his friends and maybe garner a few hunderd view on YouTube.

What my pictures and my son’s videos won’t do is display anything much more than the fact we have some nice consumer gear and that we can hold them still occasionally and press the right buttons at the right time. Even if I had a flash new Canon EOS or bought him the latest “proper” video camera, we couldn’t produce more professional material because we haven’t the necessary post-processing equipment or the indepth understanding of how to put pieces together.

I think it’s time that we stopped conflating the ability to throw some pictures, videos and music together with digital literacy. There are a ton of programs and applications out there that allow you to pour digital stuff in one end and then get a manuafactured product out of the other side. All these are is the digital equivalent of a Magimix that is able to turn ingredients into something more easily digested.

Related posts:

1. Digital Content Strategy
2. The Digital Strategy

• I started post-graduate studies. Moving from the field of education to computing proved to be a lot more difficult than I anticipated. Nevertheless, I have passed both of the papers that I sat
• I fought a couple of internal stoushes in 2010. I won a big one, and am in maintenance mode on another
• After several years of work with the Ministry of Education ICT Professional Development clusters, I decided to move sideways and work on the technical, infrastructure side of ICT in schools. This hasn’t always been easy. I now work in both Mac and Windows schools and administrate Windows, Mac and Linux servers. I am still more of a desktop specialist than a server technician. This might change in 2011 as I intend to do some study around networking and server environments
• At Christmas I was 10kgs lighter than at the same time last year. I may put on a kilogram or two the way we are eating at the moment
• I spent some time back in the classroom working with real, live kids. Much as I enjoy teaching, I re-discovered that it’s not for me
• I lost my photography mojo this year. For a long time I stopped taking pictures. Thankfully it has come back at the end of the year and I am Ms Paparazzi again, stalking my grandchildren, shooting everything in sight and even getting some passable shots
• In November I became a New Zealand citizen. After 37 years in the country it was time that I showed that I wanted to stay
• 2010 saw the usual round of illness. The spots have come and gone, reminding me when I need to slow down. I’ve had a couple of bouts of asthma and my kidneys reminded me how important they were in July
• We saw Carole King and James Taylor at the Vector Arena, Lydia Cole, Madeleine Peyroux, Melody Gardot and Diana Krall out at Villa Maria and The Topp Twins at the Auckland Zoo. Sarah MxLachlan cancelled her concert. I was quite upset about that
• In April I got a new (to me) car – a lovely blue Subaru Impreza
• My grandchildren continue to be a delight. Olivia is now 8, Keziah is 7 and Camryn is 6. Michael is almost 4. Their parents are doing a fne job bringing them up with love and wonder. Georgia Jane, my newest granddaughter was born on 4th November, 2010. Her parents, Esther and Andrew delivered the baby themselves in his old family home. I am far, far too young to be the grandmother of five
• My youngest daughter, Jesse, moved back to Auckland. It’s been lovely to have her closer to the family
• My youngest child, Ben, turned sixteen. I am enjoying guiding him to adulthood
• Holidays! We have travelled a lot in 2010. We flew down to Wellington early in January and then spent a week in Tairua before school started. In May we visited Dunedin. The July school holidays saw us in Tonga on a professional development trip. In October we spent a weekend in the far north. We visited Melbourne in November and, now, just six weeks later, we are ending the year (and starting the next one) back in Melbourne
• The Tonga trip was a huge big deal. Thanks to the staff at May Road School for including us in their professional development journey. I learned a lot. I confronted a lot of my beliefs about teaching and learning and about the role of technology. Most importantly I learned about myself and dealt with some demons
• I also made a very quick trip to Hastings after my mother became unwell. My parents’ health is an ongoing concern
• I went back to the tablet PC. My beloved 7 and 10” netbooks have gone to my children and I’m now using an HP TouchSmart. It’s not perfect but the multi-touch screen is well advanced from what I was using in 2005
• After losing my beloved Nokia E71, the insurance company gave me a Nokia E75. I hated it so sold it and bought a cheap Samsung Spica Android phone. Only one thing to say: Android phones rock. I am writing this whilst tethered through PdaNet (my Samsung is still stuck on Éclair)
• Blogging has slipped almost completely away in 2010. Instead I am using Facebook to communicate with friends and family (on a personal level) while my Twiter accounts are more open and general. I am reasonably comfortable with the mix although, like the rest of the connected world, privacy is a big concern

And finally, in contradiction of my opening statement, this is the most important …

• Our home continues to be a place of peace, love and happiness. I dearly love the people that I live with and the way that we live. Thank you both for putting up with me. May the love and laughter continue in 2011

Related posts:

1. New Year Resolution

My catch of the day at the Huka Falls Prawn Park

A new decade – a new start?

It would be nice to be able to resurrect this space and do some “fun” writing again. The pressures of the last eighteen months have meant that, apart from tiny Twitter-bytes, I haven’t done any real writing about the things that I care about. These holidays have been tagged for a bit of R&R&R – Rest and Recuperation and Resurrection.

It’s not that I haven’t been doing the things that I love. We’ve done a lot of travelling around the place recenttly and I have uploaded a ton of photos to my Flickr account. Visits to Wairoa, Hastings and Wellington have been photographed, tagged and put online. I’m uploading some shots that I took around the lower Kaipara Harbour after an amazing cruise we did on Thursday. There are family photos too.

I’ve been geeking around too. Dropped 500GB hard drives into my laptop and netbook and upgraded them both to Windows 7. I’ve been playing with some Linux and Windows PE live CDs and looking at how these environments can be used in my world. This week I finally got around to setting up some extra network stuff so that our whole house has the right kind of internet access. Benn and I have taken on the task of stripping down all of our old junked computers and sorting out which parts go to TradeMe, which we can use and what just needs to go to someone else to recycle. Our home network is pretty shoddy at the moment – I need to think about placing our equipment more efficiently so that it serves us rather than we serve it.

We bought ourselves a Wii for Christmas and have really enjoyed playing some of the games and activities. The Wii Fit is getting a daily workout too! I’m planning to have a play with the ideas behind the Wiimote Project.

Porthole to history at the Museum of Wellington City & Sea

This year sees a bit of a change in direction for me. I’m going to start my post graduate studies. After several years heavily immersed in the educational ICT arena it’s time to step back and take another look at the world of silicon, ones and zeroes. I’ll still be doing my schools’ tech support work, my websites and looking after my business clients, however, it’s time to get thinking again and to think more widely.

The world of educational ICT is a great place to visit but it’s not the world that I want to stay. There are a lot of amazing thinkers in that world but unfortunately there are also a lot of people who can’t see beyond their own sphere. I think that it’s time for me at least to break out and to see if I can get a wider perspective on things. So that’s what I hope to do this year. I’ll still be on the fringe of the education world but by being outside of the ICT PD network, hopefully I’ll be able to see things with more clarity.

No related posts.

Within ten minutes my son, who attends the same college came into the kitchen to ask if I remembered a student that I taught a couple of years earlier who has chosen to shave her heair off to raise money for cancer.

I spent the day surveying teachers about Inquiry and Problem Based Learning. It’s easy to think that what is taught in the classroom stays there. I would like to think that the today’s lesson of the day is that we have a far greater impact than we realise. I hope that we, as teachers develop learning experiences that allow kids to think about how what they have learned can make a difference to other people.

Related posts:

1. World Clock
2. If the World Were a Village of 100 People

In the last couple of years I have been more interested in building websites using WordPress than in writing the content. Nowadays most of the stuff I write is jammed into 140 character Tweets or slightly longer Facebook status updates. It’s short, it’s disconnected and it’s lost amongst people who want me to join a mob, buy a farm or go to a marketting seminar.

I’m starting to become a little disatisfied with that as both of these fine platforms are overrun with marketers and people who want me to buy a farm or join a mob.

So where to from here?

I’m going to write again. I’m going to start crafting again. Make my own connections again. And take back my interwebs.

No related posts.

While we visited she was able to give us some stories about her treatment and the therapies that are helping her to relearn some old skills and adapt to the new life that she has. Her words and demonstrations made me consider the quote mentioned at last week’s Ulearn08 Conference in Christchurch. I think Steven Carden quoted this Alvin Toffler idea it in his entertaining keynote,

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.

Which is a paraphrase of this,

The new education must teach the individual how to classify and reclassify information, how to evaluate its veracity, how to change categories when necessary, how to move from the concrete to the abstract and back, how to look at problems from a new direction -how to teach himself. Tomorrow’s illiterate will not be the man who can’t read; he will be the man who has not learned how to learn.    – Apparently the real quote from Herbert Gerjouy when interviewd by Toffler

I’m a great one for telling everyone else how to deal with change. I even held a round table discussion about it at Ulearn. Today I was refocussed.

“… how to look at problems from a new direction -how to teach himself …” I watched my sister-in-law hoist herself upright and maneover  into an electric wheelchair. She picked up an errant leg and plonked it on the footrest and tucked an out of contol arm onto her lap. Then she walked (wheeled) us off the premises so that she could carry on relearning.

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RMS argued that “a change in technology cannot change basic moral principles” and used historical facts to show how large and corrupt business organisations have used governments in order to retain complete contol over software, works of art, music and literature. He discussed DRM (Digital Restriction Management as the Free Software Foundation prefer to call it) increasing threats to our freedoms in the “pay-per-view universe”. I could go on and on but others have already done it for me – with a photo as well (complete notes here from someone who attended a similar event last month).

What really interested me was that RMS proposes that we stop looking at copyright based on the medium of of a work. His idea is, instead, to look at the purpose or the social use of a piece of work …

• works that serve a practical purpose – software, recipes
• works of testimony or expression
• works of entertainment

RMS argues that all are of equal value but that their different nature means they should be treated differently.

The first category – the practical works – must be free. Free to publish, free to share and free to modify. His argement is that unless you are free to change it, you don’t own it. My roast beef recipe, your code or an interesting mashup of the two.

The second category – memoirs, essays of opinion, scientific papers (which he says are the witness of specific scientists)- should not be able to be modified because in doing so the original author could easily be misrepresented. These works should be able to be freely (although non-commercially) shared. “Sharing is the basis of society,” he said.

And the third category – works of art and entertainment – should have some copyright attached but for a much shorter period of time. Stallman argues that an creator should get royalties for ten years before a work enters the public domain (and can be modified). However, during that time he says that unmodified versions of the work should be freely shared. Modification and attribution is the key idea here. He spoke in detail about music sharing and cited the examples of Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails who have released their work to be downloaded and freely shared. He had a couple of suggestions about how musicians, for example, could be recompensed by those of us who could afford a dollar or two.

While I believe that copyright law needs a total overhaul, Stallman’s talk threw up more questions than answers. The audience had opportunity to ask some of those questions and I noticed that he avoided answering those that he didn’t like by telling the questioner that there was a better question (that he did answer).

A couple of further ideas to think about:

• avoid YouTube because the software required to view the videos is proprietry (an interesting discussion about that here).
• Stallman demands that recordings of him are shared only in Open Source formats – RadionNZ respected that viewpoint and made all of yesterday’s recordingings available in Ogg Vorbis format – not just the Stallman interview – although there is still a Windows Media Stream available here.

Richard Stallman is an interesting man with a passion for something that is really important. The trouble that I have is the totality of his belief. His “all record companies are evil and are ripping off all musicians” mantra is too much of a generalisation. What about the artists that have their own record companies – are they involved in their own rip off ? And should we teach that all laws that we believe are evil should be totally disregarded?

Yesterday, on Radio New Zealand’s Saturday Morning Show Kim Hill asked a listener’s question about travelling in a modern car running on all manner of non-free software. Stallman said it was permissible, just as he allowed himself to use Windows computers if that was what was available at places that he was staying. Isn’t that a contradiction of his own terms? From the man who gave back a copy-protected CD because he had a point to make?

I often wish that I totally believed in a cause – a religion, a political ideal or a social cause. I used to have a cause, a total belief system but one day I woke up and realised that I was living in an echo chamber, that I had no peripheral vision or depth perception.  When I heard RMS on Friday, and again on the radio yesterday morning, I was reminded of that time in my own life and while I espouse many of his views and ideas I think it’s all just a bit too black and white.

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For, perhaps, a brief moment in early 2004 there was a hint that blogging/social media/Web 2.0 was about big, world-changing ideas. But it very quickly became all about spewing out as much crap as you can. Quantity over quality. Fact checking? Who cares! Opinions are all that matter! Construct a beautiful photograph? No way! Point and shoot and dump it ALL on Flickr. Friends. Friends. I need more and more friends. Interviewing skills? That’s so old media! I don’t care about that! Look! I can stream video from my phone! I’m streaming live right now!!! Come chat!!! It’s about praising every piece of rubbish an online friend of yours does like it’s all ‘genius’. It’s about believing that just cos you’ve got a fricken blog or podcast, the world should owe you something and treat you with reverence and respect. There’s no taste or style. There’s no big ideas. There’s no quality. It’s 99% crap.

From In The Beginning : Gia’s Blog

and from a link on the above blog, a bloggers code of conduct:

Don’t write crap, don’t link to crap and if you see someone else writing crap take them to task about it.

Why make it more complicated or sanctimonious?

Being that I have now cleaned out my drafts folder, normal service will return …

Related posts:

1. Ink Blog