Tag Archives: daily-ink

M is for Motivation

So, I woke up early to meditate, write, and work out. It took an hour and a half of muttering about before I got to the meditation, didn’t write until now, hours later as I’m about to head out on errands with my wife, and I still haven’t had my workout. (And my run-on sentence suggests I still shouldn’t be writing.)

I know I’m on holidays. I knew I’d be writing today. I will workout before the day is over. But dang, it’s hard to get motivated sometimes!

I’m going to need to start making this a habitual routine before the school year starts. If it isn’t dialed-in by the start of school, it won’t be something I continue.

Right now meditation is daily, writing is daily, and exercise is 4 times a week. I think I need to add 3 days of stretching and make all three things (meditation, writing, and fitness), part of my daily routine. A routine I do to start every day, without interruption or procrastination.

M is for Motivation… what are you motivated to do?

World Markets and Apps

Two apps have made me realize how the world is changing. These apps are very popular, but not here in North America. Here, a very popular app for connecting with others for business (as well as socially) is Slack – a messaging app for teams.

However, pop over to India and WhatsApp is the cool tool that everyone is using. “Simple. Personal. Real Time Messaging.”

And hop over to China (as I did just recently) and WeChat is the tool that is already ‘Connecting a half billion people’… A HALF A BILLION PEOPLE!

Slack-whatsapp-wechat

One of my students, Brandon Mayhew, was invited to the Facebook F8 Developer’s conference, and he wrote about Mark Zukerberg’s opening presentation and an ongoing theme he heard, “4.1 Billion was repeated several times at the event and that’s the number of people that aren’t connected to the internet, over the next few years facebook plans on investing heavily on infrastructure to help connect these people in these remote regions of the globe.”

As an interesting aside, Facebook bought WhatsApp… for 19 Billion Dollars!

When over 1/3 of the world’s population lives in just two countries, and when those countries are on a fast track to get everyone connected… it is easy to see that if you were building an app, you’d want it to be used in other countries beyond North America, and specifically in China and India.

Soon, you are going to see some of the top apps start in other countries and the American/Canadian market will be an afterthought. In fact it has already happened… WeChat was ‘Made in China’!

Goodbye Posterous

I started my Pair-a-Dimes for Your Thoughts blog on Elgg, because a friend invited me there to try out this think called ‘Blogging’. Elgg moved to Eduspaces killing all of my back-links. Frustrating. Eduspaces was being bought out and so I had enough and moved my blog to DavidTruss.com. Once there, and while in China, I decided to move my little-used Posterous site to this address, as a place to easily upload photos of what I thought would be a daily hand-written journal. That didn’t last long.

Daily-Ink-on-Posterous

But Posterous was nice and simple. Put a link to a video in an email, or email a photo, add a few comments in the body of the email, then put the title in the subject line, and even add some tags in brackets if you wanted. Then send the email… instant post.

But then Twitter bought Posterous. Instead of slick integration, like post a Twitter Thread or Storify… Twitter killed Posterous. Sad. Really Sad.

This is why I moved my blog to my own domain. This is why I suggest everyone do the same. Spend some hosting money, and claim your own part of the internet. Use wordpress, it’s free and you can even set up posting by email, although in the ipad/iphone app era, even that isn’t really needed.

I’ve lost archives of student blogs on Elgg, and also on Ning sites after they went from free to fee. I still have links to ‘retagr’ and ‘explode.us’ which were identity pages that are now defunct. But I’ve paid for DavidTruss.com until 2018, and I pay yearly or bi-yearly for web hosting and now I don’t have to worry about big company x buying out cool company y and making it go away because x and y don’t want to create happy formulas together.

Goodbye Posterous. You’ll be missed. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to tweet about this post.

DigiFoot12 – My Experience

Yes, I’m still at work. Yes, I’m probably too busy to add something new to my plate. But this is my work in a way… actually in two different ways!

1. I have been a MOOC dropout that did one assignment for the course, and I’ve never followed through with an online course… and yet, I work in an environment where I help students find success in online courses. I work in a learning centre for adults and most of them, like me, live very busy lives. I want to model the commitment I ask of our students.

2. Digifoot12 is an excellent launching ground for me as I start to build my course, Applications of Digital Literacy for our new Inquiry Hub, starting in September. I’m very excited about teaching this course and I think that almost everything I do in Digifoot12 will benefit the development of my own course. In fact, as we approached the start of this course, Verena Roberts and I had a conversation and we realized that we were taking similar approaches. She has students working as Digital Detectives, working on cases: Case 1 – Scavenger Hunt And I too had the idea of students being ‘digital detectives’ though not as an overriding theme. 

So, I have a lot to model and to learn from. I decided to use my Daily Ink blog because I’ll be posting much more frequently than I normally do on ‘Pair-a-Dimes‘, and that blog is really not for course material as that’s not the audience I’ve built there… Although reflections on this experience will creep over there as we move forward. 

What I’ve done so far:

* Joined the Student2.0 Digifoot12 Group and updated my profile. 

* Introduced myself

* Added my twitter and blog links. I’ve also posted about on Digifoot12 Twitter. 

* Added an artifact to mightybell – This one: The complete guide to building a digital footprint

* Watched the slideshow for week 1. (I had a work appointment that prevented me from being part of the live session.)

* Written this introductory post, And…

* Created this Netvibes page to help me, and hopefully others, follow along. 

Digital-footprint-me-dot-com-david-truss-cc-by-nc-sa

Cassie and Katie – Public Speaking 2011

Both of my girls did a great job with their speeches! 

Katie was a finalist in our non-judged Junior Public Speaking Celebration, on the morning of June 9th, 2011.
Cassie was 2nd in the Grade 5/6 category of the Senior Public Speaking Finals, later that afternoon.

‘My Day with Boon the Elephant’ by Katie Truss

‘Procrastination’ by Cassie Truss

Sarcasm, even spelt right too!

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I think Cassie was only 3 years old when she started asking me, “Dad, are you being tar-tas-tic again?”
This is from her Father’s Day card.
It’s interesting but I really don’t think that my sarcasm plays out online. I tend not to use it as it is too easily interpreted as rude or at times even scathing. So instead I barrage my kids with it. I’m sure as they get older their eyes will role-over as I embarrass them in front of their friends, (the eye-rolls have already started), but my editing filter shuts off at home. So, my girls will just have to put up with me… even with my sarcasm. 🙂

T.I.C. Chinese School PE Program Inspection

via qik.com

This routine is practiced almost daily for a few months before the inspection. At the start of the year it involved skipping ropes, but our school (neighbouring theirs) showed a lot of interest in basketball, so they incorporated basketballs into their spring routine.

Every student was asked to bring a basketball from home. The small items on the ground near them are cardboard rings that they made to keep their ball from rolling around at the back of their classrooms. Often during PE classes you’ll see the younger students wearing these like bandanas on their heads. Cute!

Watch to the end to see the speed at which they run to their line-ups to head back into the school. It’s that fast even when there isn’t an inspection happening.

A neat look into a very different school culture.

Looking into North Korea

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We arrived in Dandong at about 9:15pm. This is the view of the Peace Bridge heading into North Korea. The lights on the bridge end at the border. Apparently a city of almost 2 million about 200,000 people sits in the darkness. Any hint of light is probably a military installation.

We’ll learn more in the morning, but this one image tells quite a story.