Very funny video, but did you notice he said that his district dropped a macbook on him so that he could support a school-site that runs macs only and he didn’t know what to do with the thing. It’s all meant to be fun and games, but his “tech answer looking for problems” set-up brought up a whole host of memories from my thirteen-years as a public school teacher who at times was the site tech coordinator and sat on endless tech committees. I mean, who drops a foreign OS on a support technician and then says, okay you’re in charge of supporting this school site (plus all of the other sites he’s already supporting)? It’s been my observation that unless you begin with adequate tech support (as in training the tech support to handle the machines and potential volume of support requests), then you’re wasting your money in the initial technology investment. Not too many businesses could get away with that for very long.

The old t-cxr switch room

TCO (total cost of operation) is a black art, but a frightful percentage of tech roll-outs from my public school teaching days factored in little to no funding for end-user training and somewhere around 5% for tech support. The expectation for teacher or technicians to train themselves is a guaranteed failure and no business expecting success would begin there. You roll it out, you support it and that includes training. Funny video, but not a funny situation. jbb

Sources:
YouTube video: “Creative Ways to Use The MacBook” by WilsonTech1, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXFoyOOxmr8 retrieved on 06/07/2009

Image: pacbell01.jpg by Joe Bustillos

        

I got my papers a few weeks back & finally turned them in. sad [Sound of a door closing behind me]

courtesy LBUSD - RIP

        

I live in my email app and my browser, but don’t expect me to visit your site everyday just to check to see if you have new info. One of the reasons I like Twitter and spend more time on Facebook is because they come to me and tell me when new content is posted. Expecting me or worse, trying to force me to come to your site to check for new content feels too much like Web 1.0 to me. Strangely, even with this attitude and my constant need to have a sense of what’s going on in Tech & the World, I’ve never bothered to use the one tool specifically set up to bring the news to the user: RSS (see the video below for a complete explanation of RSS). I’ve gotten away with using Twitter as a kind of RSS feed. Along with the podcasters, I also subscribed to CNN, Ars Technica, and the AP. And having the constant flow of data along the left pane of my browser or easily accessible on my phone works just fine for me. Alas, things probably would have stayed that way were I not now tasked with tracking the musings, thoughts and frustrations of my 57 students scattered among 57 blogs. Damn. So I put out the call today amongst my learned colleagues for their choice in RSS apps and the stumbled upon a solution right under my nose.

Before iTunes entered and then destroyed the market, there was a budding little industry of RSS readers that would also pull down your favorite podcasts. Someone actually suggested an app that goes back to those crazy days called Juice (formerly called “Lemon” and before that something with the word “iPod” in it until the cease and desist letter arrived). Cute, but it’s not 2005. The next contender was the web app, iGoogle. iGoogle was the EMDTMS team favorite until it was redesign and the tabs moved to the side of the interface. Blah. I didn’t care about the tabs, but I did care that I couldn’t rename the labels to my students’ RSS feeds because they had the whimsical tendency to name their blog things like “Catchin’ the tech wave” and other completely useless names, making it completely impossible to be able to track their blog entries. Nyet. Next on the hit list was Netvibes. Very flexible, I loved that I could put my students in separate tabs per their sections and spent the better part of the afternoon getting one section set up. When I started setting up a second section it dawned on me that this was way too hard and my beloved tabs were going to make it more complicated to track the whole group. Ugh. Then I noticed in the sidebar on the left side of my screen that Flock had a Feeds panel all set up and ready to go. In fact, when I was opening my students blogs and then clicking the icon to get their RSS feed, Flock had been giving me a button to push to add the feed to list in the left pane the whole time. Ack. I got all three sections entered and in handy little folders in a third the time it took to do one section before. Damn. Flock, for the win!

The folks do a great job explaining stuff like RSS…

        

photo by B Buffington

I loved Benjamin Zander’s analogy of the conductor and orchestra. Too often educators forget that we are not there to fill there little brains with information all day long. This is where the NCLB act has brought us, though. His analogy was a reminder to me that I am not a teacher but a facilitator to great things. I have to create a safe platform for students to take risks and increase their interests and abilities… The way I see it, there is not enough freedom and fun in public schools now-a-days. For goodness sake, they even took away recess! (B. B.)

I was understandably horrified: What?! No recess?! Even us office drones are told to get out of our chairs every 15 to 30 minutes by most productivity experts. How the hell are little bodies supposed to learn cooped up like factory chickens in their little learning pens. Argh.

        

My students continue their reflections on the Zander book, The Art of Possibility. This time the musing is about the possible ramifications of the realization that “Reality” is not what we thought it was:

I try not to allow Zander’s conceptualism bother me–it goads me like a poker when he says “language is replete with a variety of ‘things’ that have no existence in time and space but seem as real to us as anything we own–’justice’ for instance….” … If everyone has their own personal framework of possibility, I fear we’ll lose the intimacy of sharing a common framework. Take the Hubble photograph above. The beauty of the Pleiades Cluster is not a construct of my mind–its beauty is there to be discovered by any who would attend to it. The community of astronomers who photograph it share a common beauty between them–something bigger than any one’s construct. Isn’t this what makes possibility appealing? What possibilities are worth seeking and having in my life? R. Swindoll

My response: Wonderful observations and pondering questions. I find it interesting that you comment about trying to not let Zanders conceptualizations bother you and then you spend the rest of the post wrestling with them. You are touching on the universal question between perception and empirical reality. Without going too much into what seems like a “dancing on the head of a pin” question, I believe that it’s foolish to think that there is no external reality. Thus the miracle is that we do seem to share in a common framework of understanding despite the fact that our consciousness is trapped in the “black box” of our individual skulls dependent on imperfect sensory organs to perceive and communicate with this seemingly infinite external universe.

And perhaps the universe was indeed laughing at me, that I would attempt to answer the student’s pondering because, after I had drafted what I thought was a perfectly crafted comment I inadvertently clicked a button on the screen and sent all of those wonderful words straight to hexadecimal oblivion. No small about of screaming or laughing at the absurdity would bring those perfectly positioned words back. Thus the above rendition is the best that I could bring back from a brain that wasn’t very happy with it’s fingers. Imperfect sensory organs indeed.

Music: Goodbye by Kevin Shields from the Lost In Translation – Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

        

Students in my course are assigned to read Ben & Roz Zander’s The Art of Possibility and over this past week I’ve been reading and grading their reflections on the book in their blogs. The book, which espouses the notion that we will find more success in life if we recognize that we live in a universe of abundance, is assigned to my students as a way to encourage them as they struggle with the restrictions often put on them when they try to do something new in their jobs. For my part I often find myself encouraged by my students’ efforts to grapple with the book’s challenges to their own understanding of the world. For example, one student commented:

The Zanders understand the transformative effect of the mind reframed. And they don’t linger on the hard parts of living a transformed life (because after transformation, the hard parts are worth it). Still, I would like to hear more stories that have no clearly defined ending–that end unresolved. Possibility takes faith in the face of empirical reality, and faith is a hard to have when our life stories are in their second act. Frankly, it isn’t the power of positive thinking alone that can “construct a new world.” Ben Zander’s opening premise is only proverbially true. (R.Swindoll)

One thing I love about working with my students in their blogs is that I can respond to their thoughts with comments of my own. I commented to the above observation: Your right that their stories had a cute red-bow satisfying endings to them, but then it wouldn’t be a very good book if they introduced scenario after scenario with no ending (sounds like some novels I’ve read). Actually I have read some books that never quite delivered on their promise, so I’m glad that the Zanders bring endings with their observations.

My student continued: “Ben and Roz Zander’s stories assume Providence is on their side. The Art of Providence… that seems a more fitting title of the book, given what I’ve read so far.” R. Swindoll

To which I responded: Very interesting word game… I don’t think that the Zanders believe that Providence is on their “side” because I don’t think they believe in “sides.” I think they’re more coming from the idea that the world is so much bigger than most of us are able to navigate (predict), that most of us miss the good or the possible because we put ourselves in a protective posture whining that we want “ours” before it runs out. It’s more than a proverbial observation but not new age “name it and claim it” magic.

I work in one of the most wonderful places and have some of the most amazing students. jbb

music: Great indoors by John Mayer from the Room for Squares CD

        

I’m beginning to think that the famed “Reality Distortion Field” isn’t limited to Steve Jobs or Macworld Expo keynotes. One of the benefits of being at Full Sail is having access to almost monthly tech events and this morning the good folks from Apple, Inc. sent over Steven Hayman to show an auditorium full of Full Sailites how flipping easy it is to create apps for the iPhone or iTouch. And how funny is it that Hayman began the presentation by showing the following Onion News video parodying the craziness of Macworld and Apple product launch events:

The Onion News folks did a perfect job echoing the hype and often irrational fandom of all things Apple. Then Hayman spent the next hour making me want to be an iPhone/iTouch programmer. Yikes. I really got sucked up into thinking about how easy it is to program the little things and what I could possibly come up with that would be fun to do, and possibly lucrative for me. Even as I was walking out to the car, talking to Holly about the cool things that could be done, I remembered, “Oh yeah, I just restarted my doctorate program, I’m going to find it hard to find time to sleep…” Damn. I wonder how I could work this into a dissertation research question. Hmmm.

        

So, what the hell have I been doing for the past four weeks? `Yeah, there was this little thing called Macworld and believe it or not I’ve been editing photos since then and playing catch up with my FS courses. Now I’m in LA to restart my Pepperdine EdD. My life as I knew it is over… and I feel fine.