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.

I often tell people that I have been learning to play the guitar for more than thirty-five years – and that I still can’t play. They think it’s a joke. It’s not. Although I love music and in particular the sound of a well played guitar I am not a natural musician. I have the technical knowledge – in that I can identify lots of chords and guitar fingerings – but I can’t get both of my hands working in unison.

So what’s the problem? Am I unmotivated? No – I really would like to improve. Is my equipment poor? I don’t think so. I have a couple of good guitars and I listen to lots of examples of wonderful musicians. Maybe I haven’t been taught well? My current teacher has excellent skills and patience. Perhaps I don’t practice enough? Maybe …

A couple of weeks ago I bought a new album on iTunes. A song on the album really got me and when I listened to it carefully I realised that it was probably very simple chords. Sure enough  a quick look at YouTube and I saw that I could play the song with my acoustic guitar. Then I had a go on the electric guitar. Because the song is played with a capo (to change the key) I transposed the song and played it with barre chords. After a couple of days I worked out the lead guitar parts – although as yet I haven’t cranked up my tiny practice amplifier to get the soaring sounds of the original. Now I can even sing and play at the same time. Woo hoo!

So why can I play this song but struggle with other music? While some of it is definitely about the technicalities of getting two hands working independently but also in harmony, I think the real problem is ownership. When you go to a guitar teacher they teach you the songs they know are good because they give you a whole lot of important skills and techniques. And those songs may or may not be tunes that you like. When you work away at a song on your own, because you simply enjoy it, you just go for it. And learn whatever.

It’s no different in formal learning situations, in schools. On the one hand you need explicitly taught “stuff”. And on the other hand you need to really get into “it” rip it apart and get stuck into the other stuff.

This term most New Zealand schools will “do” the Olympics. There will be much flag creating and waving and there will be countless posters, Powerpoints and podcasts made about small countries and unknown sports. The Olympic website and the Wikipedia will suffer from cut and paste overload. There will be Olympic Days and whole schools will parade and compete in mini-Olympic events. Teachers will talk about being authentic and current. But how many classes will get stuck into the really current stuff like the relationship between China and Tibet? Or controversies like delving into the advantage of wearing new-fangled Speedos? Or the desperation felt by swimmers who are willing to face the wrath of their sponsors to wear the lastest LZR suit? Big ideas and questions? There are a multitude more.

The Olympic Games are an amazing global event. The history, the people, the places and the events can be looked at in so many exciting and interesting ways or they can be “done” the way that they have always been “done”. To death.

Related posts:

1. Ten Guitars
2. Need
3. Now What?!!

That being said, there are some observations that I’d like to make about this week’s Learning at School conference in Rotorua.

1. we have some amazing teachers in this country.The willingness to share their learning is absolutely amazing.
2. our ICT conferences attract a wide cross section of the education population. I met old conference friends and met people who had only just jumped onto the ICTPD juggernaut. There were lots of teachers who were really worried about leaving their class so early in the year. This is a Good Thing.
3. the practical sessions are really important. People want to learn about blogs, wikis and podcasts (for example) and how to use them. Keep up the 101 workshops.
4. related to above … please write abstracts that actually relate to the session that you are presenting.
5. the pedagogy is even more important (than number 4).
6. presentations that are linked to a particular sponsor’s product should be labelled as such. Pedagogy cannot be used to loosely wrap what is in effect a product placement.
7. Marvin looks to be very interesting use of 3d and avatar technology. I can see all sorts of potential uses for it. Let’s hope that it doesn’t quickly descend into Marvinocrity with unplanned, quickly thrown together mashups of sound and irrelevant characters.
8. the Engineering Challenges website mentioned a couple of times over the conference. “With input from people around the world — much of it on this website — an international group of leading technological thinkers were asked to identify the Grand Challenges for Engineering in the 21st Century. Now their conclusions are revealed on this website.” Link
9. the story of the Starry Starry Night machinima shown us on Tuesday night. Robbie Dingo is a Second Life avatar – but we knew that didn’t we? Link to high quality download
10. two interesting statements from Jeremy Kedian‘s initial keynote, “too strong an engagement with multiple agendas will paralyse growth” and ” teachers are overwhelmed by the dailiness of their position”. How are we adding to that?
11. copyright, copyleft, Creative Commons. There is a loose understanding out there about who owns what. Maybe I should resurrect the 2005 presentation?
12. we are several years down the track now and understand bandwidth. Second Life, video from the internet, even voice chat all require a fatter pipe than can be found with a shared wireless connection. Either put these sessions into a room with wired connections for all participants or make them into presentations. The stress that a shakey internet connection puts on a presenter is awful.
13. the greatest networking opportunity of them all – the conference dinner dance floor.

I enjoyed my few days in Rotorua but I am so glad to be back at home in my own bed and with my own bandwidth. To the people whose sessions I attended, thank you for all of your hard work and for sharing your insights.

Related posts:

1. Tablet @ Work – One Week In!

“a “citizens’ compendium of everything,” is an experimental new wiki project. The project, started by a co-founder of Wikipedia, aims to improve on that model by adding “gentle expert oversight” and requiring contributors to use their real names.” from Citizendium Main Page

This is an interesting development in the evolution of the internet. The Wikipedia has been criticised for the way that its articles can be subverted by self-proclaimed experts and by those with barrows to push. It will be interesting to follow what happens with this new initiative.

Related posts:

1. Content Sharing

I looked at some of Leonardo Da Vinci’s work and a copy of Alice’s Adventures under the Garden (which I had narrated to me in a plummy English voice).

Visually stunning.

No related posts.

Although Camryn is just two years old and a little more reserved, she too is also learning about the way the world works. At the moment every second sentence is a question – usually, “What doing?” – as she participates in the life of the family. last year Camryn didn’t like strawberries. Yesterday I discovered that this year she does.

When these two treasures enter the education system will they be entering the same kind of classroom that their mothers entered? That I as their grandmother entered? I hope not.

These two know already that a pencil or marker pen will make a picture and so will a camera or a phone. They know that to get a message to someone you can use a phone or a computer or a pen or you can wave a sparkler. The technology is ubiquitous. They don’t care about all of that they just want to get their message across.

Related posts:

1. Flattened

“She said that she’s not going to sacrifice the other things that she already does in her life to spend more time on the Internet.”

I meet and work with lots of people who are just like this teacher. In fact I think that possibly a large proportion of the teaching workforce is just like that. Rightly or wrongly, they don’t see the need to get out onto the web and join in the discussion. In fact in the vast majority of the cases, they don’t even know that the discussion is taking place.
Will’s post follows a recent flurry about whether educators should be blogging. This too was an interesting and revealing discussion and one that thankfully wasn’t ‘won’ by the YES brigade.

The interweb has developed alongside the best, the biggest, the most challenging, the most absorbing, the most amazing, the deepest (and yet the most shallow) change that education has faced for decades. It hasn’t been the cause of that change though and we must not forget that.

Those of us who are using the tools and toys that we find out there on the web need to stop talking about the end product and start talking about the reasoning beghind why we are using them. We need to do this for our our own practice as much as we need to do it to show other people.

Related posts:

1. Points For Discussion
2. Virtually Speaking
3. Directions

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

And share we did. Despite the naysayers and the knockers we kept on spreading our version of the truth. We rejoiced when people listened and converted themselves to our particular doctrine. We were saddened when people didn’t listen to our words, but that was OK because we knew that was the way that it was going to be and they needed to be weeded out anyway.

We regularly got together and held gatherings attended by people from all over New Zealand. It was really exciting when we had a speaker from overseas. One of our conferences would keep us going for months as we remembered and recounted all the wonderful speakers we had heard and presentations that we had attended.

Some of the people in our group struggled more than other people. For some it was because they had more than their fair share of trials and tribulations. We surrounded these people with love and encouraged them to spend more time inside our group where we could protect them from the vicious wolves who were just waiting for them to let down their guard.

Other people suffered because they didn’t Do Things The Right Way. They hung out on the edge of the group and occasionally strayed beyond the safety net of the organisation. Those of us who were good group members always struggled with our response to these people. They preferred to be individuals and associating with them could cause us to question our faith which could lead to us falling away from what the group knew was right. On the other hand, it was our sacred duty to warn these individuals of the folly of their course … And if they didn’t listen and fell away, we knew that it was for the best because they weren’t the right sort of people anyway.

There is a large portion of my life that I look back upon with a sense of disbelief. How could I have ever been so gullible? How could millions of other people be so gullible?

It’s actually really easy and it’s coming really soon right now to a group near you.

Last week someone called me a hopeless optimist. That hit home because I truly do want to believe in the power of something. There is a huge group of singing and waving educators out there who are speaking in the tongue of Web 2.0. I’d love to be right in the middle of them with my del.icio.us tags, Flickr photos and Elgg blog tucked into my conference bag.

But I can’t because I need to stand safely on the edge. It’s a wonderful thing to belong to a group, to hold common views and values and to be able to celebrate and share. But only when you actually fully agree. And I don’t think that Web 2.0 is the answer to all that ails us.
Artichoke calls it Blogger Frottage. I don’t have her way with words but I do know how to spot a problem when I see it.

No related posts.

And so here lies the problem. I handwrote the first part of this post into OneNote (because that’s where I now keep a lot of the “stuff” I collect and because I can theoretically covert that text into typed text. (You can see a snip of what my handwriting looks like here. ) One of the huge advantages for me of using a computer (of most descriptions) is the ability to save information and ideas and be able to sift and sort through them later (like – I took notes at that meeting and …. this is exactly what she said and I wrote down at that time). Will I be able to sift and sort through the above stuff? I possibly have the only cove Duo tablet in town that I paid for in Yen?

So where am I going with this and what is my conscience telling me? That many of the benefits attributed to putting tablet technologies into the hands of teachers and kids are imagined or overblown. Apostasy? Probably.

The ether is full of educators who are promoting tablet PCs as the next big thing for students (well after Web 2.0 that is). Even here in Godzone we have a Digi-Ops project based on a partnership between HP and a school in Wellington who are using tablets with year five and six kids. They are all very keen to show enhanced learning outcomes! Paperless classrooms!

And so they should be! But there needs to be more work. As I hope I have proven with the first part of this post, using a pen to get writing down is cumbersome and slow (I have a whole lot of Ulearn notes to prove this further). The time spent correcting from pen before proof-reading and editting is wasted time. And yet, in review after review I see all of this waffle about speed and accuracy with the pen. Not true. I simply don’t believe it. Typing is still quicker and more accurate for anything more than a simple jotted down note. I know that Vista is promising to be light years ahead in handwriting technology, but these schools are claiming speed and accuracy now. With today’s technology.

So where does the pen become useful? As I stated before, if you can translate, Artrage is a wonderful example of a programme that is only enhanced by a pen. I have also found that I find the pen is an amazing tool in KidPix, MSPaint and in PaintShop Pro. I find the pen is useful when I annotate or edit Word documents – in Excel it is clumsy and frustrating. I enjoy using the pen to edit PowerPoint slides on screen. I can make a presentation more interactive by putting comments or ideas straight up there.

But wait, there is more to a tablet than just a pen enabled device. I like to lie around and surf the web or to take my tablet to bed and cruise through my RSS reader. The form factor makes it a great device for doing just that. The buttons and pen mean that navigating through web-pages is easy. Do kids in classrooms lie around and surf mindlessly through blog feeds. I hope not, but maybe I missed that particular Web 2.0 goodie.

During meetings, (if I’m in slate mode) the tablet sits on my knee meaning that I don’t look over my screen to the other people. This is good. However, the innacuracy of my handwriting means that I spend far more time looking down correcting my errors so I still don’t look at the people I am with. However I’ve seen lots of photos of kids clustered around tablets on the floor. Now that does look like a good thing – kids all with their own pen anle to add to a mind map … maybe that’s more like it? Next cluster meeting on the floor around my 12 inch tablet guys?

Here endeth the crisis? No, probably not. I wanna be a Tablet PC Evangelist. I really do! I have downloaded the Becta research papers to read later and I hope that I can find some more solid data (???) to support spending money on something that in my opinion has limited usage the way that it’s being presented today.

Related posts:

1. Tablet @ Work – Day 1
2. Taking My Tablet
3. Vista on the Tablet