Catch the Wave

Lately I’ve been pretty much living on/in my laptop. This is not really a bad thing … athough I did take a long walk yesterday to give my eyes something in the distance to focus on.

I got a new Toshiba Tela laptop in February and love the faster speed of 2 gb of Ram. The only annoying thing is the volume icon/indicator which pops up on the screen every time I brush the volume wheel (which is on the front.) If anyone knows how to stop this happening, please let me know.   And no, I don ‘t think a sticking plaster is really a long term solution!

I’ve been playing with Marvin. While I think it’s clever and cute, I’m not yet a convert to the avatar craze, so I can’t see me using it much. I’m puzzled about why the software was so ‘high profile’ of at the Learning@School Conference. Is there a need to constantly have new things? Do education conferences depend on ‘new’ for their existence? I suppose we wouldn’t keep going to hear the same stuff over again! There is also the thought that Marvin used L@S for their New Zealand launch and paid the organisers for the opportunity. I spent time on the Marvin website trying to add some more understanding. Apart from learning more about Aboriginal health issues, I’m really none the wiser.

In my Internet wanderings, I discovered that Russell Street School in Palmerston North has changed their website to a blog. It contains all the features and pages of the original site, but allows for easy posts by the principal and teachers, photos, media and comments from parents. I think it’s brilliant and I’ll be trying to convince all the schools I work with to do this too. Best of all, the eBest ICT Cluster is taking a group of 19 leaders and teachers down to Palmerston North at the end of May to visit 3 schools - including Russell Street.

I can’t let the start of the rugby world cup go by without writing a post about it. (It was easy to give up on my plan to write something intellectual!) Yesterday some of the schools in my ICT Cluster celebrated the occassion by wearing black and flying the All Blacks flag from the school flag pole. At one school teachers chose between wearing black or dressing like the French. strped clothes and berets, old red rugby jerseys and other clothing which perhaps looked vaguely French. They also attempted conversations in rusty schoolboy/girl French.

Another school renamed all their classrooms to players names - so Room 10 became Room Carter and Room 7 became Room McCaw. The admin staff wore black Tshirts with the slogan ‘Howlett’s Girls’ and the Principal’s Tshirt was emblazoned ‘Henry for PM’. All the students wore black with plenty of black face painting and fake tatoos. Celebrating important events is fun.

I was up early to watch the opening ceremony and the France vs Argentina game. Argentina won!! What an upset!  That makes things even more interesting. It will be late to bed tonight after watching the NZ vs Italy game. The Rugby World Cup like gives life a bit of extra zing! GO the All Blacks!

technorati tags:All_Blacks, New_Zealand, rugby, celebration, Rugby_World_Cup, schools

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.

I’ve been making an attempt to write those 8 random facts and in the process I’ve become fascinated by the word ‘random’. Random was once just an adjective and now its a noun as well. My son recently bought a house and has been looking for a flatmate. It has to be someone he knows - he doesn’t want a random.

Synonyms for ‘random’: - chance, accidental, haphazard, arbitrary, unsystematic, hit and miss, indiscriminate, all over the place, disorganized, slapdash, jumbled.

Maybe random could describe some teaching practice. Especially when it comes to using ICTs.

As for my facts … well, anything but ‘just the facts’. And ‘all over the place’ sounds  about right. And there are only 7. Arti suggested some facts about sexing baby mice for #8 and while I do have some good party stories about disorientated rats, a mouse in a toaster and spiders as big as your hand, I decided they only had any impact when told in person and after a few drinks.

In the 1970s I spent a year teaching in a school in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Both myself and my students were and still are somewhat vague about what was taught and if anything was learned … and in which language.

On the spur of the moment once, during the lunch hour, I went to a horse auction (across the road from my school) and bought a horse. The next challenge was to find a paddock and an instruction manual.

I spent a week horseback riding in Te Urewera National Park, staying in DOC huts and following the Whakatane river from Ruatoki to Ruatahuna. I wrote in the visitors books using the tip of a bullet because I didn’t have a pen.

Rotorua is my home town, but I’ve lived ‘permanently’ in 16 houses in 8 locations in New Zealand. I’ve given up collecting things - it just means more packing. Every so often I have ritualistic burnings. My high school uniform was the first to go, followed by my teachers’ college ringbinders. Anything to do with whatshisname also hit the flames.

My first computer was a Commodore 64. It cost $2300 in 1987. It was a toss up between buying a computer or a car. My second was a PC with an 80mb hard drive and 2mb of Ram! I was really impressed with its speed! I got lost in IRC for a couple of years until sleep deprivation caught up with me.

I hate cooking - it’s one of life’s great mysteries that some people
actually enjoy it. Would there be McDonalds if cooking was such fun?

I am possibly the only person in New Zealand (or even the world!) to attempt to take 2 Boxer puppies to dog obedience classes at the same time. To everyone’s relief, we eventually took a break to ‘consolidate’ what we’d learnt.

technorati tags:random, meme, New_Zealand, A_random

If you had to make a five word speech which somehow epitimised what you’re about professionally and what you’ve achieved - what would your five words be?

A trademark of the annual Webby Awards is five-word speeches. A story in today’s New Zealand Herald reports on the best of these -
‘Unlike most awards ceremonies, The Webby Awards limits speeches to just five words, a rule that is only slightly relaxed for special achievement honorees like Bowie.

“I only get five words?” Bowie asked. He continued: “Sh*t, that was five. Four more there. That’s three,” concluding: “Two,” before exiting the stage.’

Other good ones are:
“YouTubers, this is for you.” Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, co-founders of YouTube (Webby Person of the Year)
“Fat cats need watch dogs.” OpenSecrets (Best Politics - People’s Voice)

So, five words, huh? It’s not easy to decide. Maybe … ‘ICTs can transform student learning!’ And I’ll probably think of several more creative five word speeches during the day. Help me out if you want.

technorati tags:New_Zealand, Webby_Awards, ICT, education, learning

In the weekend I saw this article in a New Zealand newspaper, in which meteorologist Augie Auer attacks ‘the myth of global warming’. He maintains that ‘a combination of misinterpretation and misguided science, media hype, and political spin had created the current hysteria.’ Media hype has done a good job. During our long, warm New Zealand autumn, how many times have you heard global warming mentioned? And every time there are storms and flooding, what causes them? Even our cold spring and cool summer were somehow mysteriously caused by global warming. Augie Auer maintains that global warming theories will be considered a joke in five years time.

Have a combination of misinterpretation, misguided science, media hype and political spin created a 21 Century learning and Internet hysteria in education?
The converts talk about digital natives and immigrants, connectivity, social networking, engagement, exponential change, a flat world, the future, reality and learning through ICT. They embrace the Internet with excitement, devout belief and trust.

The debunkers talk about fads and failed theories (they’ve seen many over the years), personal experience, tried and true methods, stability, practicalities, dependability, reality, time and money. They question the educational value, accuracy, intrusion and safety of the Internet.

Hype, hysteria and political spin … perhaps education is being overloaded with all three. So, fad or future? And who will be laughing in five years time?

technorati tags:global_warming, New_Zealand, education, hype, political_spin, teaching, future, Internet, ICT

Coach Calhoun: “First you have to change.
Danny: “I know, that’s why I’m here.”
Coach Calhoun: “No, I mean your clothes.”
From the movie ‘Grease’.

An interesting post titled ‘How to change others’ in Artichoke’s blog has forced me to think (arghh!) about Change (capital C!) And whether or not we can change people by talking about and teaching Change. OK, I admit that I have no recognised expertise in this subject. I have done no deep and/or meaningful study - I have no ChD, no sociology degree (Change major), or Heraclitus Diploma. But as I said, I’ve been thinking.

The thing is, I don’t understand the idea that attending a workshop on Change, can result in … well, change! If this was possible, would we still have problem teenagers, drink drivers, obese adults, smokers, or technophobe teachers? We would just run a few Change workshops - using ‘Who Moved My Cheese” as the main resource - hand out quotes to keep everyone on track - and in a blinding flash the process of Change would begin.

It’s true that learning about change increases our understanding of the process. We know that change can be difficult, is strange territory and is often resisted for a variety of reasons. The need to change has to be discussed, demonstrated, encouraged, assisted and supported. But you can’t force change on someone else and expect a successful outcome … can you?

It’s interesting, pertinent and inspirational to look at how things have changed during the last 10 years. To talk about the 21st Century, digital natives, digital immigrants, new technology, online environments, future change and what all these mean for education. However, does any of this make things change? And who and what really needs to change first?

More thinking! Aarghh!

technorati tags:Change, education, 21st_Century, technology, teaching