enviable stuff

One thing we can say with some certainty is that, for the first time in the still-short span of human history, the experience of creating media for a potentially large public is available to a multitude. A good portion of the population has switched roles from “audience” to — speaker, creator, participant, contributor, we don’t even have the proper word yet. Forget whether this is “good” or “bad”; just dwell with me for a moment on its novelty.

If you were hoping that this course would be one of those "watch some videos and answer multiple choice questions without needing to interact with a human being" MOOCs, then these aren't the droids you're looking for. You can go about your business. Move along.

By asking the question "how could I flip my classroom?" it gives a way of thinking about the best affordances (klaxon!) of online and face to face. And that seems like a good thing.

this is something everyone should learn about. You may not have a valuable blog, online portfolio or other valuable online assets, but eventually you might. No matter who you are online, you should work to understand where your content, images, video and other assets you generate reside, and retain as much control over them as possible. The business model of major companies like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Instagram and Youtube are all based upon you generating valuable content that people want to view, which then allows these companies to generate revenue by selling advertising or access to your (their) content. It is in their best interest to retain as much control over your content as they can. In 2014 there are many ways to assert control over your online world, and this project site is about me doing it for myself, but under a larger umbrella called Reclaim Your Domain.

Here are the problems I see in the way we think about eportfolios The One System to Fit Them All Approach we think one platform, product, system is going to work best for all individuals. It Looks Like Its For You But Its Not who really do these serve? If it’s for assessment and tracking, the individual’s needs are subservient. What am I really getting out of this, at a personal growth level, but shoving stuff in the portfolio? It’s a Chore If the portfolio making act is not one that is rewarding or motivating, then it becomes a task I am doing… for someone else. It’s All About the Shiny Final Thing It becomes a thing of where we want to show out “best” work. the final stuff. Once again, where is the place for all that led up to that, the ideas, the wrong turns? If portfolios are just the best stuff, there’s not a whole record of growth and evolution. It’s all movie and no extras. I think we should not be telling students how or what to portfolio, we should be helping them figure a way and means that works for them.

4. Consider that all ‘mobile learners’ are ‘digital natives’ As the ‘digital native’ hypothesis (that all young people are somehow different than their elders because they instinctively ‘get’ technology) enters its second decade, this widely used term continues to exert a strong influence over many educational policymakers, educators and vendors alike. Quickly learning and demonstrating a mastery of the mechanics of a particular process or application on a mobile device (posting to Facebook, for example, or playing a video game one has never seen before) shouldn’t be confused with a mastery of how to successfully use such a device for learning. Design exclusively for the ‘digital native’ and you may well ignore the needs of many of learners, potentially needlessly confusing and complicating their efforts as they engage in ‘mobile learning’.

Once, a long time ago, I was cleaning a bunch of parts of a VW bus I was putting together at my uncle's farm in Florida. I was using gasoline to do the cleanup (it's a great solvent). At the end I was left with a bit of dirty gasoline and had no idea what to do with it. So I decided to see what would happen if I lit it on fire. Bad idea. The tiny little coffee can with a tiny little bit of gasoline in it exploded! Made a huge sound and I felt it all over my body. I still remember it. I had been putting this stuff in my car for years without any clue as to how powerful it was. If I had thought about it a bit, I might have figured it out, but I had no need to.# Same thing with RSS. The power of RSS is that everyone uses it to move news around.

We built the books on top of Apple’s HyperCard, Voyager’s platform of choice. Colin Holgate, a soft-spoken, compact Brit with an unparalleled talent for making HyperCard do astonishing things, took on scripting the book shell (that is, the empty HyperCard stack into which the book’s contents would be “flowed”). Voyager’s small art department provided a clean, book-like page design. I laid out the text, using utility scripts that Holgate created to “flow” a book’s text into consecutive pages. As the number of scripts multiplied, I also created a hidden Magic button in the book shell that presented an ever-growing menu of Colin’s scripts (and some of my own) so I could readily invoke them at need. (When I eventually got around to Macbeth, I gave it its own, much more complex Magic button — it may still be there in some early releases of the CD-ROM if you know where to look.)

Restaurant workers already claim food stamps at twice the rate of the rest of the US population because their wages are so low. Because of this, after they fall prey to the march of the tablets, America’s waiters and waitresses could be the subjects of yet another social experiment: in a recent thought-bubble, Google engineer and activist Justine Tunney suggested last month that food stamps should be replaced with Soylent, a grey nutritional slurry mooted as a total meal replacement, to keep poor Americans “healthy and productive”.

A set of corporate business tools, no matter how good, are not focused on learning and teaching – they are not designed for the purpose so don’t expect teachers to use them if they add significantly to their already busy working lives. These are busy people, professional people, and if you can’t offer them something that improves their situation by meeting their needs, don’t waste their time.

So there we are, a blog post of >1,000 words. If you’ve made it this far I’m not sure if it’s enriched your life in any way, but I feel a lot better for having written it and knowing that, at least potentially, other people have read it.

I think history does have lessons for us. But in order to learn them, we have to engage with history in all it’s messiness, not the history of think tanks and TED talkers. If you’d like *that* sort of conversation, feel free to school me in the comments.

I am no longer looking at Dropbox Markdown blogging systems. Most are just side project that get deleted, threatened deletion then aren't or become Posterous-like slow once I navigate off the first page of blog posts. I have lost my willingness to try them. I will stick with Blogger.

I'd like to think that open online learning will make the elite universities irrelevant - of course, a lot of things have to happen for that to take place, but we can always hope.

It’s a charming reminder that Facebook isn’t just the place you go to see pictures of your friends’ kids or your racist uncle’s latest rant against the government—it’s also an exciting research lab, with all of us as potential test subjects.

Teachers were complaining that they wanted a simple way to share files and links within the classroom, like a private Twitter app. Rather than having IT professionals respond to the request, Reisinger’s students programmed a solution that they call Paper Plane. ”Those kids have code up on GitHub [a site for open-source code] right now that they’re sharing out,” Reisinger said. Students also designed the help ticketing software that their peers use to request IT support. Reisinger is aware that his computer science interns don’t represent the whole student body and that not every student is taking advantage of their open devices to become programmers. But a few are. “Every district has talent like that,” he said. The systems just have to support them to let those talents shine.

Good copying learns from another’s innovation and then applies it in a novel way to a new context in a way that doesn’t diminish the source invention.