Tag Archives: connections

Thinking and sharing in the blogosphere

Yesterday I wrote about this quote, “Mindfulness is a pause – The space between stimulus and response: That’s where choice lies.” ~ Tara Brach

And Shiela Stewart shared a post she wrote with a similar quote, “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”  ~ Viktor E. Frankl Man’s Search for Meaning

Sheila wrote this in July of 2014, over 7 years ago. Although I wasn’t blogging every day back then I had already been blogging for 8 years. In those early blogging years I was an avid reader of other blogs, including Sheila’s, and a whole host of other educators. We were all writing, and reflecting, and learning from each other. We were in a community that understood the power of sharing our thoughts out in the open.

But there were other people who didn’t understand why we would do this. There were those that questioned how we had the time. Those that thought we were self-indulgent and thought we were only writing for self promotion rather than self reflection and learning. That’s still around today but not as much.

The reality is that I enjoy writing. I’ve enjoyed it since high school. And I feel like a writer when I share my work publicly… when I share my work in a community of other writers. When I add to the blogosphere.

And I absolutely love when another blogger shares their work with me. I totally see why Sheila connected the two quotes above. I understand her ‘blogger’s mind’ that thinks, ‘Dave will appreciate me making this connection’. I love that the connection was to a 7-year-old post, and the Sheila was able to put the connection together so many years later. Bloggers can do that. They can pull an idea up from a decade ago and see how it relates all these years later. And they aren’t afraid to share those thoughts.

This is driven by an understanding that when we learn in the open we are exposed to more connections and ideas than when we keep our learning to ourselves. The idea of being an open and connected learner is one that I think can still be misunderstood, but it isn’t misunderstood by those who are doing it, only by those on the outside that don’t get it. This isn’t ‘insider information’, it’s not a secret. We happily share it out in the open, here in the blogosphere.

14 years

I remember joining Twitter reluctantly in 2007. I thought, ‘I never update my status on Facebook, why would I join a new social media platform that is just the one feature of another social media platform that I don’t use?’ But as an educational blogger, I was reading about how powerful this tool was for educators and I hesitantly jumped on board.

After a short experimental phase I was hooked. Things like this happened all the time!

I was connected to a powerful network of educators who went out of their way to make connections, build community, and converse about teaching and learning. I’d go to conferences and connect with people I’d never met face to face, but whom I knew well, thanks to this amazing tool.

I even wrote a book to help others get started on Twitter:

Twitter EDU

Now I no longer use Twitter, and most other social media tools, nearly as much. They have become one-way transmission tools for my daily blog, which auto-posts to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn when I hit ‘Publish’. I focus more on productivity, writing, than spending time consuming and using these tools.

But it’s still fun to get notifications like this yesterday:

I may not be on it as much, but Twitter helped me create an amazing community, and I cherish the connections and memories made.

Many years later…

Somewhere between the years 2000 and 2002 I taught a grade 8 art class. I was teaching a lesson on drawing faces with pencil and one student was a far better artist than me. She could really capture the details of the face, and not just be anatomically correct, but also bring life to her drawings. However she was hesitant to go dark with her work. It lacked contrast. Her drawings were like beautiful but faded photocopies.

“Don’t be afraid to go darker.” I would say. She would try and the image would get ever so slightly darker, but still look faded.

“Darker!” I would say.

“It is!” She would retort.

“Not enough, go darker.” Or, “You know what I’m going to tell you!”

It was a banter that went on all year, because no matter what we did in art, she had a pencil journal that she also worked on. Again, her work was beautiful, but too light.

Fast forward to yesterday, and this former student, now a friend on Facebook, did a tribute drawing of an older photograph, of a loved one. (It’s 5:30am, and I haven’t asked to share the story, so I’m not sharing names or details.) The drawing is beautiful with rich dark highlights, and still has her soft touch that brings her drawings to life.

I commented on the photo:

“Beautiful. Nice to see that you are no longer afraid to use rich dark shades 😜”

She replied,

“NO joke, I was actually hearing you repeat to go darker/not to be afraid to commit to it and smiling about how this many years later your teachings still come out 😊”

And,

“I even wondered if you’d consider it dark enough 😆 glad to see I’ve made progress with it!”

My response,

“It really is, and you’ve captured [your subject’s] sparkle… not easy to do in a drawing. I love it! ❤️”

I truly enjoy interactions like this. They warms my heart. They remind me of why I wanted to be a teacher, and make me miss being in the classroom.

We are lucky to live in an age where we can connect with former students and celebrate their marriages, the birth of their children, or just check in with them when things aren’t going their way. And it’s so much fun to know that we can make small differences in their lives, long after they’ve left our classroom.

Back to it

After a very restful March break, I’m back at it tomorrow. While the break was wonderful, and a part of me wants to just curl up in bed for another week, another part of me is excited for some busy normalcy.

It’s interesting, but I seem to get more of what I want done when I’ve got more on my plate… the very times that I wish I had more time, are the times when I get stuff done.

I’m looking forward to seeing staff and students. I’m looking forward to getting back into my morning workout routines. I’m looking forward to thinking about education in ways that I haven’t been too thoughtful about over the break.

The end of the year will come quickly now, and I know that in a few short months I’ll wonder where the time went. But for tomorrow, the focus will be catching up and connecting with my community, and then the ‘To Do’ list can officially start on Wednesday.

2 week social media vacation

I’m removing Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram off of my phone until Sunday February 7th, 2021. That’s two weeks of shutting down the social media tools I engage with on some regular daily or weekly level. Staying on my phone will be WhatsApp and Snapchat because they both have family group chats that I engage with, without having other interactions beyond family.

I will continue to blog every day, and these blog posts will auto-post to Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook (to my Pair-Dimes page, not my personal wall, so please follow if FB is where you usually see my blog posts). Feel free to chat with me in my blog comments, but comments on other platforms won’t be seen by me.

There is no specific reason I’m doing this, other than curiosity. I want to see what I miss, and how I will use my time. I think I’ll end up with more audio book and podcast listening time, and I’m hoping that I’ll write and meditate more. Time will tell.

I actually deleted the Apps Sunday night, and I wrote everything above before going to bed. This morning I realized that one thing I’ll need to think about is how I get news? Normally I start my day in Twitter Search looking at the News tab and trending hashtags to get a sense of what’s happening in the world. This has been my strategy for a couple years because television and radio news are not designed to inform as much as to keep you watching and listening. And while I read some print news on my phone, it tends to be focussed on the coronavirus or US politics these days… and it seems to be more commentary and opinion than actual news.

In the end, I won’t have missed much if I’m tuned out of the news for two weeks. And although I’m not always in the room, my wife does watch evening news on tv. I will survive just fine with less news along with my social media vacation.

Interestingly, I came across some Coronavirus news this morning and did a little math with the stats. It seems that while the US has vaccinated 20.5 million people, Canada has only vaccinated 0.817 million. Looking at populations, my math tells me that the US has vaccinated 6% of their population while Canada has only vaccinated 2%. What’s the first thing I thought of doing with that info? Tweeting it… my social media vacation has already started to curtail my behaviour.

I’ll share my vacation experience and reflections on February 7th.

Covid daily routine

Early on in the pandemic, I read that ventilation and fresh air circulation was very good in helping to reduce spread of the virus. At that time my morning custodian was not consistent and so I had different custodians coming to the school, so I decided that I would go to each of our 5 classrooms at Inquiry Hub and open windows to start the school day. We have early morning principal meetings on Thursdays, and on that day I didn’t get around to opening the windows until just before classes started.

On this day I was able to see and chat with a lot of students on my route. So, that time slot has become my daily routine. In a couple of the classes I will end up asking students to open the windows if they are already seated nearby and I can’t access them and be socially distanced, while the other 3 room windows are always easy to access. But more than that, it puts me in every room, each morning, to say greetings and chat with students.

I know that I’m lucky to only have 5 rooms to do this in, with my other school being the online school with no physical classrooms to visit, and for some principals this would be a massive undertaking. But for me this is a wonderful way to start my day. Sometimes I just say quick good mornings, other times I get into full conversations with students.

Yesterday I spent time hearing about the progress of one of our grade 12’s who has been working on a massive project since grade 10. Monday was just a catch-up on the winter break. This routine can take me about 5 minutes or it can take over 15. No matter how long I spend, it has become a wonderful routine that starts my day off right.

Students are so confined in their movements now compared to pre-covid. Even in our small school they use 3 different entrances and have no common hallways. With things being so isolated between groups of students, this little covid inspired daily routine has really helped me connect to students in a way that I would have otherwise missed.

The death of the business card

I recently updated my business card and I ended up recycling a few hundred of the old, out-dated ones. This isn’t the first time my responsibilities or title has changed prompting me to do this, but maybe it’s the last? In a post COVID-19 world are we going to routinely take a small card out of our wallets and hand it to someone else? Are we going to sanitize our hands first? Or are we going to send a digital version via our phones, instantly and without making physical contact of a common object?

Frankly, I think it’s about time! When I get a card, I usually take a photo with it in Evernote and then either hand the card back or put the card in a small business card holder on my desk, seldom ever to be looked at again. One thing I’ve hated about the Evernote process is that when I first started using this feature (I think it’s only on the paid version), the card reader would pick up all the different parts like name, company name, title, and phone numbers, and put them in the right category, and then ask me if I wanted to connect with them on LinkedIn. But now people are so creative with their card design, I find Evernote often has trouble picking up the different categories and something as simple as the company name is wrong, or missing or miss-categorized, because the company name is embedded in a logo or uses a different font for the first letter, or is placed in an unusual place compared to the rest of the information, etc.

What we need are simple contact cards that we can digitally ‘bump’ to each other. One nice feature of this would be that the card could have several versions, appropriate for the person you are sharing it with. For example, I run two schools and sometimes it’s nice to have a simple card with just one of the schools on there. Also, my card has my cell phone on it, but I’d rather a vendor call my office line, and leave a message with secretaries, rather than interrupt me with a vibrating phone when I’m with staff or students.

Having a business card digitally sent and entered directly into our contacts makes sense. It shouldn’t need to done by a proprietary company that requires everyone to have the same app to do, it should be a feature of our phones. It should be sent via Bluetooth or via a tool like airdrop, except not limited to Apple devices. It would need to be initiated with a request, rather than just open for anyone to take/steal your information.

For example, I click an invite and it says, ‘David Truss is asking for your business card’, the other person sees this, picks a card to share and sends it. Upon receipt, I see something like ‘Peter Parker shared his contact information with you. Share back?’ The tool could also ask if you want to connect on different social media sites that were shared, like Twitter and LinkedIn, and even scrape a profile photo from one of these as your contact image. It could also set a reminder to contact the person, or ask for additional details or tags/categories to help you remember the person.

Some people will be sad to see the card stock business card go away, but I’m looking forward to having the information shared digitally, on the tool that I’ll actually use to contact the person. We don’t need the waste of hundreds of our-dated cards being recycled or put in landfills, when a digital card is superior and provides far more choice than a static card that is seldom kept or looked at again.

Breakfast with a friend

“Come gather around people, wherever you roam
And admit that the waters around you have grown
And accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’ ~ Bob Dylan

We sat at a booth chatting, breakfast done, bill paid. We had already turned down more coffee and the waitress was kind enough to fill our water glasses. The restaurant wasn’t full, we weren’t filling a potentially needed booth, and so the waitress didn’t mind that we were still there over 30 minutes after our meal was done.

We were reminiscing about our childhood, and how people would come for a visit and stay for dinner. In my family there were 4 kids so we made a family of 6, but my mother never cooked for less than 10. Someone’s friend (or 2), an aunt, granny, a cousin, even a neighbour might be joining us. If it was just the 6 of us, we had leftovers.

This doesn’t happen much anymore. Having friends over means a half-day of getting the house ready, and a half day of preparing food. Meeting for coffee? How’s next week Thursday? Breakfast? Pick one of these two Sundays. Dinner with a group of friends? We better use that appointment App to find a day that works for all of us.

Or maybe we just chat on the phone. Maybe we text. Comment on Facebook. Like a friend’s tweet… smiley face emoji:)

Gatherings used to be impromptu, spontaneous, and they extended past expected times. “See you soon,” not “See you later,” as in weeks or months later.

Things have changed.

I’m going to try to bring the old ways back a bit. I’m tracking my social connections this year. A dinner and a breakfast last week, a morning coffee and a minor league hockey game this weekend… A walk with my wife, dinner out with my daughter… I’m going to see if intentionally keeping track will inspire me to connect face-to-face more frequently with the people that are geographically available. That doesn’t diminish the opportunities to connect with people who I can’t always see. For those, we have spaces like this.