Catch the Wave

The online world is absolutely enormous now and I think I tap in to only a very small part of it. Some days I hear about something that’s been around for a while and I wonder how I didn’t know about it when other people did. That’s part of what makes the Internet so much fun. (What will I learn today? How did they do that? How could I use this? How can I find out about …?) The availability and depth of online resources and opportunities are amazing. And we are increasingly expecting other people to have the personal ability and tech capability to access these resources as well. We refer to website, online forms and are using the Internet for communication, collaboration and problem solving.

For some time now I’ve being telling people that using the Internet is making me more intelligent … sometimes they laugh, but I’m serious. So it was interesting to read an article titled ‘The World is getting Smarter’ which mentions ‘The Flynn Effect’. Your IQ is likely to be higher than those of your parents, and your children’s IQs is likely to be higher than yours.
“Our advantage over our ancestors is relatively uniform at all ages from the cradle to the grave,” says Flynn.
Wikipedia gives a possible explanation - ‘The general environment is today much more complex and stimulating. One of the most striking 20th-century change in the human intellectual environment has come from the increase in exposure to many types of visual media. From pictures on the wall to movies to television to video games to computers, each successive generation has been exposed to far richer optical displays than the one before and may have become more adept at visual analysis.’
Flynn’s thesis shows that whole societies can get better at thinking if they’re given the right environment. ‘The mind is supple and the Flynn effect shows that what we value gets stronger.’ This has huge implications for education … and never more so than now.

I flew to Nelson last week for the Lower North Island and Top of the South ICT PD Clusters’ Regional Meeting last week. You big cities types don’t know what it’s like for us people in the provinces! Getting up at 5 a.m to catch a flight in a pencil thin plane to Wellington and then dashing from Gate 5 (skinny provincial planes) to Gate 12 (fat city planes.) Hmm, maybe there’s some sort of symbolism there. And it wasn’t really a dash, more of a brisk walk.
The 2 days were really good. The best parts were probably the tour around 3 local schools on the second day (lots of great teaching ideas), the chance to talk to others doing a similar job and meeting Rachel Boyd and Allanah King in RL.  Rachel  has put some great photos from the tour on a Flickr site. Thanks Rachel, they’re really worth looking at.

Tags: Nelson, New Zealand, planes, teaching ideas, photos

I’ve been busy lately. Mostly job related - although I did hang around at home waiting for tradesmen twice - if that can be described as being busy. I had a heat pump intalled and the hot water element replaced. (You don’t think about hot water until you don’t have any!) Everything else is about professional development and/or professional learning … if someone wants to write a 1 sentence definition of the difference between these, that would be great. So sometimes I feel like just a head walking around. My poor neglected body. I’d go to the gym if they had the Internet.
So lately I’ve either been providing PD for others, getting some myself from real experts, or trying to teach myself something. The latter being very haphazard with varying degrees of success!
It’s good when two of those things combine. At the end of August I presented (I’m uncomfortable with that word, but alternatives I try are worse!) a couple of workshops at the Waimarino Cluster Conference in Tauranga and scored two great keynotes - Mark Treadwell and Trevor Bond. Being back in the Bay of Plenty was great. BOP people make great audiences - a possible research topic for someone is ‘BOP people have more personality than other New Zealanders.’
Then last Thursday I snuck into a Pam Hook and Julie Mills workshop at Coley Street School (I Can We Can Cluster) and learnt so many new things that the pressure on my skill from my expanding brain has further increased. You can check out their inquire2learn wik to learn more. I’m thinking that as a sideline or optional extra, Pam and Julie should market themselves as conference after dinner speakers or even tour as a two woman comedy and motivational show. The full extent of their talents could be wasted in education, not to mention Auckland. (Maybe they should move to the BOP?)
The other things I’m doing - in the largely self taught category - are exploring (often with frustration) Twitter and Facebook. I’m working on finding more friends and the following people around thing. It’s as tiring as it sounds and I’m still working on the ‘why?’ question.
Milestone 11 got slotted into the left over time. Watching tradesmen crash around, install, fix, test and ask me questions I didn’t know the answers to was useful time for that.

I’ve been thinking a bit about motivation lately. What motivates us to do what we do? How easy or difficult is it to motivate others? I haven’t done much research - yeah, scary thought, Googling ‘motivation’. I decided not to.

So how did this preoccupation start? My blog cluster map! On my latest visit I noticed that I have many new readers in places in the world far from New Zealand. Great scott! And I haven’t been posting very often on this blog lately! (OK, so maybe the Internet moves more slowly than we’re led to believe.)
So why AM I now writing a post? Well, people seem to be interested in what I write (OK, after this aberration I’ll try to post something intellectual!) Amazing. Motivating! And I obviously needed a trigger. Its really hard to motivate yourself.

It’s a belief thing - ‘people work well when they believe they are good at what they do.’ … See, motivation.
And giving someone that belief? Leadership.

On TV tonight I saw an ad for a funeral plan which told me that ‘my application WOULD be accepted’. Funny! Ads like this tend to catch my attention at MS time.

Although there is no direct connection, this got me thinking about scams and how they work by making people feel special. While a scam is fraud, its not always the same as Internet fraud. If I’m told I’ve won an overseas lottery, or that a distant relative has died in -you guessed it - Nigeria, I laugh and delete. Why do people fall for such obvious scams? Plenty do. How weird. So maybe I was too confident … because Internet fraud found me.
Recently my credit card was used in a shop in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Then again in the USA, to bet on a baseball game and again to purchase computer hardware … and no, it was not me shopping on the Internet. Nor had I lost my card - it was safely in my wallet. So who got hold of my card details and how? The bank’s view was that ‘it could have happened anywhere’. This may be true, but I don’t use my credit card a lot and I had a theory about the location of the fraudster. I was disappointed that the bank didn’t try to nail them. I was after blood! I was told that if the correct procedure isn’t followed, then the card has been used fraudulently and the merchant is the loser. Tough. That’s the difference between a bank and the police investigating, I guess. What could I have done to avoid Internet fraud? The scary answer is nothing. Now I understand why people sign up for funeral plans.

technorati tags:funeral, scam, Internet, fraud, shopping, credit_card