Category Archives: Daily-Ink

Holiday in a cup

I just read an article: Vacations won’t help your burnout, which states: “…‪many of us stress out at work as we prepare to take a vacation, only to face a pile of things to do when we return. What’s better? Carving out small slices of relaxation every day.‬”

This reminds me of a conversation I had with a customer, when I worked as a manager.

I was working at a tiny Starbucks on Denman, not far from Davie Street, across from ‘The beaches”, in downtown Vancouver. Two doors down was a shoe repair shop. The cobbler worked 6 days a week, and he came in for a triple-tall latte, 2 times a day.

One day we were chatting about vacations and I said something like, “I’m not trying to lose you as a customer, but do you realize that if you didn’t have your 2 coffees a day, you could have a pretty amazing holiday with your wife and kids each year, for the cost of those coffees?”

He took a sip, held up his personal Starbucks logo mug he always used, and said pointing to the cup, “Dave, this is a holiday in a cup, and I get it twice a day!”

How do you, or can you, create your own daily ‘holiday in a cup’?

Expand Your Horizons

We were cleaning out our garage on Sunday and my wife was sorting things for a garage sale.

She came across 2 home repair books I’ve used in the past and asked me if we should keep them. “Yes”, I said, remembering one of the book’s usefulness when replacing a toilet. Then “Actually no”, I said, remembering that I haven’t looked at either of those books in years, having gone instead to YouTube.

Just the day before, I couldn’t figure out how to remove an old-style door knob from our basement, and I watched a young boy on YouTube show me how… with his small hands and an off-camera voice that could not have been more than 12 years old.

We are so lucky to live in an era where learning something new is always within our reach. Not just home repair, but new skills and new approaches to the way we think, learn, work, and play.

What are you currently trying to do that you couldn’t do before? How are you expanding your horizons?

“If you only do what you can do, you’ll never be more than you are.” ~ Shifu, Kung Fu Panda 3

Super Powers

When I was younger, I wanted to be Spider-Man. He was the superhero I most connected to because he was a ‘normal’ kid that gained super powers. Unlike Superman, born on another planet, Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive spider and was thus transformed from normal to super human.

I think that was what I was most attracted to: I couldn’t become Superman, but I could become Spider-Man.

In reality, we all have superpowers.

We have the ability to be kind, make someone’s day, change people’s minds, help people learn, and even change their luck.

We can equally use our superpowers for evil.

How will you use your superpowers?

Alphabet Soup

Vocabulary is a currency in our world.

Vulnerable learners, English language learners, students with reading and learning challenges, all start with a deficit of this currency.

What are we intentionally doing to reduce this deficit?

We don’t all have to use big fancy words, but if our students aren’t articulate and can’t thoughtfully get their messages across, their futures are likely to be hampered.

Be it learning challenges or environmental challenges (some kids grow up in homes where they aren’t read to by an adult, or lack a variety of books, or struggle with a new language), some kids start off with a vocabulary deficit.

But vocabulary is the currency of communication, and how we are able to express ourselves is becoming far more valuable in our amazingly connected world.

Embrace the suck

I’ve been meditating for at least 10 minutes every day for just over 6 months… and I suck at it.

There are days where I can’t concentrate on my breath for more than 3 breaths without my mind wondering off to a myriad of topics from the mundane to the ridiculous. This is when, in the past, I’d just give up. Before this attempt, I’ve never lasted more than a week without getting frustrated and quitting meditation.

Then in a number of podcasts (and audio books) I listen to I kept hearing things like: meditation isn’t about emptying your mind, it’s about bring yourself back when you realize your thoughts have drifted; And, meditation isn’t about a destination, but rather about the journey.

I tried to change my self-talk, but when I’m 9 minutes into a guided meditation and the guide says, “For the last minute I want you to…”, and I feel like I’ve been scattered for the full 9 minutes, the feeling of ‘I suck’ comes back whether I want it to or not.

So, rather than fight it, I decided to embrace it. Six months in, I still suck at meditation, but I’m less and less upset with my distractions. I’m more tolerant with myself when I recognize I’ve drifted into distracted thinking.

I couldn’t convince myself that I was getting better until I accepted and embraced the suck.

**UPDATE: August 12, 2019 – found this image and thought it was worth sharing:

Innovation Lag Time

When you’re innovating, it takes a considerable amount of time before the benefits of that innovation can be seen. What that means is that after the excitement of creating plans, and the thrill of collaborating towards a wonderful vision… You won’t arrive at the benefits of your labour right away. That lag time is not easy. It can be disheartening, discouraging, and even leave you doubting if you’re on the right path.

At some point you’re going to be stuck in an innovation time lag. When that happens, it’s the work ahead of time to create a vision, and to help get everybody on board, that will help to see you through to the rewards.

Vision before perspiration gets you past stagnation and on to elation.

Disruptive Forces

To not use Google is like choosing to use a horse and cart on the information highway.

To not use Wireless is like choosing to use a boat to deliver a trans-continental phone message.

To not use your own devices is like choosing to walk across gravel barefoot while holding your shoes.

We have disruptive forces within our reach and it is exciting to speculate just how far we can go… If we accept that these forces transformative, and use them as such!

11:13pm

I started my run at 11:13pm last night. Jogged for 12 minutes, then did some sprint/walk intervals home. Nothing really special, but critical. Critical because since January 4th, I haven’t had less than 4 workouts in a week and this week I only had 3.

This is all part of my personal health goals that I shared in a video log here.

The same thing happened with my meditations. I haven’t missed a single day. I usually meditate in the morning but there was one night last week that I realized I missed it, and although it was after midnight, I stayed up later to do a meditation.

Why does this matter? Because cheating is a slippery slope… especially when you cheat on yourself.

If you are on a diet that has cheat days, use them, but if you find yourself cheating on other days, well then you are only cheating yourself.

So, last night I started my run at 11:13pm. My streak continues…

It’s time…

I tweeted to Bill Ferriter about how time flies, and that we are getting older saying,

Age is 2 things:

1. A state of mind.

2. A state of the body part that aches the most.

I will often say silly things like, “My mind is 31, my body is 51, and my back is 71″… doing a plus/minus of 20 years (which was 10-15 years when I was in my 40’s).

Here’s the point… I’m not getting younger and more than ever, NOW is the best time to start.

I tried over a decade ago, now I’m going to do it – a short daily blog.

It’s time…

“More Free” #OpenEdMooc Week 2

Part 1 – The commons

Understanding Free Cultural Works

Creative Commons provides a range of licenses, each of which grants different rights to use the materials licensed under them. All of these licenses offer more permissions than “all rights reserved.”

To help show more clearly what the different CC licenses let people do, CC marks the most permissive of its licenses as “Approved for Free Cultural Works.” When you apply these licenses to material you create, it meets the Freedom Defined definition of a “Free Cultural Work.” Free cultural works are the ones that can be most readily used, shared, and remixed by others, and go furthest toward creating a commons of freely reusable materials.

What does “Approved for Free Cultural Works” mean?

CC uses the definition of free cultural works at Freedom Defined to categorize the CC licenses. (Freedom Defined is an open organization of free culture advocates and researchers; the definition was developed by its community as a parallel to efforts such as the Free Software Definition, to have a standard for defining Free Culture.) Using that definition, material licensed under CC BY or BY-SA is a free cultural work. (So is anything in the worldwide public domain marked with CC0or the Public Domain Mark.) CC’s other licenses– BY-NC, BY-ND, BY-NC-SA, and BY-NC-ND–only allow more limited uses, and material under these licenses is not considered a free cultural work.

https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/freeworks 

Part 2 – Stephen Downes

However…

According to Stephen Downes: (On the topic of CC-BY-NC and CC-BY-NC-SA licenses)

FREE AND NOT FREE 

  • licenses that allow commercial use are less freet han those that do not, because they allow commercial entities to charge fees for access, to lock them behind digital locks, and to append conditions that prohibit their reuse
  • works licensed with a Non-commercial clause are fully and equally open educational resources, and are in many cases the only OERs actually accessible to people (because the content allowing commercial use tends to have costs associated with it)
  • the supposition that works that cost money can be ‘free’ is a trick of language, a fallacy that fools contributors into sharing for commercial use content they intended to make available to the world without charge the lobby very loudly making the case for commercial-friendly licenses and recommending that NC content be shunned consists almost entirely of commercial publishers and related interests seeking to make money off (no-longer) ‘free’ content.

“…people may attach licenses allowing commercial use to their work if they wish. I have no objection to this. But such people should cease and desist their ongoing campaign to have works that are non-commercial in intent, and free in distribution, classified as ‘not free’. Content that cannot be enclosed within a paywall, and cannot be distributed with commercial encumbrances attached, is just as free – indeed, more free– than so-called ‘free’ commercial content.”

http://halfanhour.blogspot.ca/2012/11/free-and-not-free.html

Part 3 – My Reflection

Is BY-NC-SA ‘more free’ than the commons page above suggests?

Before going into this, I want to first state that I believe “No Derivatives” is very closed. If you can’t build on previous work, the work is being locked down.

With respect to By-NC-SA, I predominately use this for things that I share. That said, my default for family photos tends to be full Copyright when I can (on sites such as Flickr). But for educational work that I create, I use By-NC-SA specifically because I think this makes my work ‘More Free”.

Continuing on a personal note, I have gone after a few people that have shared my work in inappropriate ways. For a while, my ‘Pair-a-Dimes’ blog was ranked very high on Google, I’m not sure what I was doing right, but since then Google has gotten wiser, and my ranking has plummeted. Before that happened, my Statement Educational Philosophy was on the first page for many searches, and often one of the first 3 hits. As a result, it is pretty well read, and unfortunately, fairly well plagiarized too. A search of just the first sentence in quotes will give you a listing of some appropriately and some appropriated copies of that sentence. Other sentences in quotes will find more of the same.

In most cases, I roll my eyes and try to take it as flattery, but in 3 specific instances I have gone after people:

  1. A student teacher that took my work then added fake references to make it seem like it was a research paper she had written, when every word of the work was mine.
  2. A professor that had all his copyrighted work linked to his page where he shared my philosophy as his own.
  3. A “Buy Essays” site that was offering a heavily copied version of my work for sale.

I have also (inadvertently) found my work behind paywalls or in moodle courses that I don’t have access too, but I have not gone after these uses, although they are the very reason that I think BY-NC-SA is more free than other licences. In the case of a Moodle course, it is likely that the students in the course had to pay to get into the course, and rather than linking to my work, it is copied and the Share-Alike aspect is not respected, and since I can’t see the work, I’m not even sure if it is attributed to me?

So that is a look at my personal experience with work being copied. I’m honoured by some of the ways things I’ve written have been quoted, and shared, but I also want that sharing to be as ‘Open’ as I have been, and I think that making work Non-Commercial does that. It keeps the work in the open, and not where others can profit in the process of withholding what should be free.

In fact, I absolutely love it when someone takes one of my ideas and runs with it… expands on it, and yes, even disagrees with it. When conversations like this happen out in the open, we all benefit.

So when Seth Godin shares, “Why I want you to steal my ideas“, I totally understand what he means:

“Ideas can’t be stolen, because ideas don’t get smaller when they’re shared, they get bigger…

There is, of course, a difference between stealing and passing off. When you pretend that those taken words are your words, you’re no longer taking an idea — you’re taking an implementation. When you pretend that you are the originator, the original source, and you’re not, you’ve corrupted your work by claiming authorship, when you are merely contributing synthesis. This hurts your reputation as well as the person you stole from, because our society values authorship and origination.

The amazing thing about giving credit, though, is you never run out. Like ideas, the more credit is shared, the more it can be worth, to the giver and to the recipient.”

If a work can not be used in a way that closes it off for commercial reasons, without consent, then isn’t that ‘more free’ that a work that is only attributed, but then used and re-used on walled websites or in courses or programs or presentations that cost money?

Originally, I had intended to redo this image, rather than write a blog post. However, I’m not sure that I would know how to order this with BY-NC-SA being ‘more free’?

And yes, it was Stephen Downes and not me that came up with the idea of this being ‘more free’.

And yes, I want any good ideas that I might have to be ‘stolen’ in the way Seth Godin wants his to be as well. 

I’ve benefited from open sharing and learning and I want others to be able to do the same.