Last week I absolutely needed a way to import a lot of records into a database. My database skills are legendary – because I have none. I created the tables in Excel and did what I should and tried to import it all into the database. It didn’t work. I tried again. I tried several different ways. Then I decided that I needed some extra help. I emailed the database programme author and over the course of a few emails and a couple of hours he updated the programme so that the data would import properly. Job done.

I was talking to a sounding board about this experience and she said to me that she would have given up at the point where the data didn’t import. I couldn’t afford to give up because I needed to import the data and I needed to get it done efficiently. Time is money and all that.

So what was the difference (tipping point?) – I needed to get the job done.

When I work with teachers and they say … I want to make a movie … I want to make a PowerPoint … I want to do Keynote … I want to learn to make a webpage … sometimes I get just a teensy bit difficult. Because if they want to learn to make a webpage, a movie, a presentation on the off chance that they might use it next term it’s not going to work. They won’t remember how to do it. Framing it inside an existing piece of work or a absolutely have to may just work but that’s not always guarranteed. To learn how to do something – to actually be able to engage with the process and really want to be able to do? it – requires a need. Is this where authenticity steps in?

People often say to me that they envy the ease with which I get around my computer. They should see me with a guitar.

About 35 years ago I asked begged my parents for my first guitar. They got me one of those plywood half size jobs that you give to kids. I think we left it behind when we moved to New Zealand. Shift forward about six or seven years and I remember buying an ancient nylon stringed guitar through an advert in the Hawkes bay Herald Tribune. I read every book in the Hastings Library and attempted to teach myself to play the thing. I got to a D and and A7 but I could change between the two. Not with any degree of accuracy or speed anyway.

Move forward another few years and I had another el cheapo second hand guitar. I took some lessons and actually mastered a 12 bar blues progression. I could even do a B7. But those damned barre chords threw me.

I managed to get a beautiful steel stringed guitar and some of the elusive barre chords fell into place. My guitar teacher gave me quite a bit of help to get my head and fingers around some other guitar sounds and I could throw out some passable renditions of some of my favourite music.
After that beautiful guitar disappeared from my life a few years ago (left in a classroom, lifted by a stranger – I will probably never know ) I occasionaly stummed an old cheapie that floated around the house.

I bought a new acoustic electric last year and took some more lessons but I’ve never really got back to being able to play like I used to. Now I stumble my way through a set playlist, occasionally scouring the interweb for the chords for the latest radio tune. I can play just enough to amuse my self but not enough to satisfy myself.

Half baked post about Just in Time? I don’t even think this one made any where near the oven!

Related posts:

1. Doing It
2. Tablet Apostasy
3. Shopping Lists

From Lisa’s comments

“… But one of the big problems, as I see it, and one of the main contributors to problematic usage, is that some people develop socio-cultural fluency in-world that they aren’t able to transfer to RL, over time building a marked dichotomy between their abilities in the two spheres, causing them to retreat even more fully into the one they inhabit most successfully. I think this is both a big issue and a huge opportunity… how do we help people transfer that literacy into RL?”

The discussion about transferability is the important one that we need to have. I remain unconvinced that any one is able to automatically transfer the skills that they learn in one situation to a new one.

I agree that this is, though, a huge opportunity  for further thinking and research.

Related posts:

1. Joining the Discussion
2. Directions
3. Need

Every week I bought so many toilet rolls, so much washing powder, a bar of soap and all of the stuff necessary to maintain a young couple in a small flat. After a few weeks I realised that I had a lot of toilet rolls in the cupboard. I had several extra boxes of washing powder and enough soap to start a bathhouse (if we had a bath – it was a small flat so we only had a shower).

I realised that the list had a two way purpose. It served for a reminder for me to check what I was running low on and needed to replace as well as a reminder when I got to the supermarket.

This week in New Zealand, teachers will be having Teacher Only Days. They will get cautiously opening the doors of classrooms to see if the cleaner has done the carpets. Some people will be hauling out the curriculum documents and the school’s schemes and doing their planning – because their senior teacher needs it next week, or ERO are coming this term, this year or because that’s what they do at their place.

That’s why the Artichoke‘s latest post The Edublogger and Matthew Arnold is so important for teachers who are returning to work this week. The curriculum, the scheme, the planning is only as important as it is made to be. What is important is the teaching and learning, the thinking and doing.

Back to my shopping list. If you get stuck on the relevant documents you’re in danger of having too much soap and too many toilet rolls. Of kids ‘doing’ space every second year of their primary school lives. Of Auckland kids learning about volcanoes without ever setting foot on Mount Eden or picking up a lump of pumice at Takapuna with Rangitoto in the background.

Artichoke says,

“I think it means that what is authentic in you is the desire to learn.”

She talks about teachers being keen to think and learn in the own time – to even (shock horror) talk about it in their own time. Imagine that. Imagine if it caught on and the kids did it too?

No related posts.