Yesterday I turned my video off a few seconds early. At the next corner, this was the scene. A bicycle, a chair, a sheet to cover the patron, a pair of scissors, a comb, and a battery-operated shaver. That’s pretty low ‘overhead’ for this ‘street barber’. I’ve tried a lot of different street food, but must admit that I pay a bit more for an indoor haircut!
(I asked before taking the photo.)This is less than a 5 minute walk from our school, and it’s a China you don’t see when you visit Beijing or Shanghai and do what the tourists do. A block up was a barber cutting hair on the street corner. I’ll share that photo tomorrow.
For the next few days I’ll share a number of different sights and sounds and ‘Chinglish’ phrases that help to make this a wonderful experience here. There are many hard-to-describe events and circumstances that happen here and our staff will say T.I.C. – “This is China”. I’ll use this same term to celebrate and share in the adventure our family is having here.
Just to put a little perspective on T.I.C. – one of my teachers shared her elevator ride to her apartment with a neighbor and her goat today… T.I.C.
“At this point, we appear to have a 19th century curriculum, 20th century buildings and organizations and 21st century students facing an undefined future.”
’20th century organizations’ – We spend a lot of time discussing our out-dated curriculum, and about students graduating into an unknown work force… could things move faster if we paid a lot more attention to our organizational structures that perpetuate an out-dated education?
Related:
A pro-d session I did with Bruce Wellman, ‘Promoting a Spirit of Inquiry‘
and
Andy Hargreaves and the 4th Way ‘Part 1‘ and ‘Part 2‘.
Unlike Rock Band, you actually have to know how to play music to do what these guys are doing. Here is another group doing a Christmas concert with iPads: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DJddb73OOQ
Or how about 1 guy putting all the pieces together himself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYo5dCeBZYA
Garage Band comes free on Apple computers and the same ‘equipment’ would have cost about $20,000 and needed it’s own room when I was a kid. It’s just amazing what you can do these days if you have a musical or creative flare.
Taking this one step further. Have a look at what Eric Whitacre did using technology to connect “individuals alone, together.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyLX2cke-Lw
Rock band is fun, but making music is definitely beyond Rock Band!
Danah Boyd asked this very question, last June, and here was my response:
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I’m interested in knowing more about:
1. Gaming: As it relates to socializing with others vs isolating & playing on their own.
2. Friendship: Actually two things here, first, definitions of online friendship by teens, and second, more about the duration and quality of friendships teens are creating. I know that as an adult I have created some very meaningful online relationships (in my case with other educators) with people I have never met f2f, is this happening with teens as well?
3. Content creation (trends): What are teens creating and sharing online? Here I’m actually interested in the bleeding edge, where are they taking content creation to a new level? How are they ‘mashing’ things up?
4. Learning: How are teens taking learning into their own hands, what are they doing outside of schools to educate themselves and learn new things?
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I’m still interested in these things… who can help me learn more?
Well, not on a highway, but we’ve had some interesting adventures while here in China. The weird thing about events like this is the lack of horn-blowing from oncoming traffic. Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of horns going off here, but not for things like this, or for a left-turn into oncoming traffic.
Instead a horn comes from:
1) A driver passing on the left in the lane of oncoming traffic, to let the car on their right know to squeeze over as it is being passed.
2) A driver passing a slower car that’s on the right and then making a right-hand turn in front of the car just passed.
3) A driver passing two cars, on a two lane road, down the middle white line of the two lanes between the cars.
Which one of these has happened to me?
All of the above!
UPDATE: This post has been vastly improved on, and made into an ebook.
Below, you’ll find the material that just one chapter of this ebook is based on. The ebook is much more comprehensive, just as easy to read, and engages you with Twitter while you read.
Update: January 8, 2017
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Some simple advice to set yourself up for success on Twitter– BEFORE you start following people:
1. Add a (tasteful) image.
2. Put something in your bio that says you are an educator.
3. Add a link. Don’t have a blog, use your district/school website, (this is the most optional of these 5 points).
4. Actually tweet a few times. Find a resource or two and share them.
5. Before following other people, add a tweet saying, “I’m an educator from (Country/City/State/University/Course/choose 1) trying to get started on Twitter.”
Do that and you’ll get WAY more follow-backs than if you follow someone with no details and a rookie egg image that Twitter gives you.
Follow me: @datruss (Do the 5 things above and you have a guaranteed follow-back from me!)
And follow some of these great people… I do!
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Related: The complete guide to building a digital footprint.
I’m reading over report cards and came across this comment:
I think posters like this… student generated, are great!
There is something to be said about it being a hand-crafted project as well… It is easy enough to share it digitally after-the-fact, as I have. I shared this: http://pairadimes.davidtruss.com/great-things-in-the-classroom/ which has all kinds of student work posted. I think much of it can be then shared with each other and with the world after-the-fact… after putting ‘pencil to paper’. We need to stop seeing technology as an either/or thing and start seeing it as useful tools on a spectrum of tools that includes pencil & paper, Skype, blogs and wikis, and everything in between!William Ury wants us to walk together, to take a shared journey to peace.
In my Two Wolves post, I look at the last chapter of Thomas Freidman’s ‘The World is Flat’, and I ask ‘How do we move from being stuck on History to looking forward and finding Hope?’
Ury says we need to travel a path together:
From Hostility to Hospitality, and from Terrorism to Tourism… wonderful!
