Tag Archives: Elon Musk

Keeper of your digital history

When I lived in China, I had a hard time communicating on any social media. I connected to this blog using Posterous, which let me post easily from an App on my phone, before WordPress had an App. When Posterous went defunct all the images I posted through their App were not saved on WordPress and so those images were lost. So I have old posts like this, where I only have a dead link where a photo used to be:

This isn’t the only social media company that has gone defunct, taking the history of my work with it. I loved using the Ning Network communites like Classroom 2.0, I had a student project with over a 100,000 visits on Wikispaces, this video had close to 100,000 views on BlipTV, and I had great conversations archived on coComment. My original blog was on ELGG, where I had a great community of bloggers to learn from, then it switched to Eduspaces which was less friendly and forced me to do the smart thing and self-host on DavidTruss.com. Delicious, Diigo, and Scribed were communities but now they’ve changed and are just ‘places’ that I used to visit and use. And there are plenty of other tools that have come and gone and when they are gone, so is a record of everything I did in those spaces.

One social media tool that I have used more than any other is Twitter. I was such a fan, I even wrote an ebook about how to get started on Twitter, then gave it away for free. I have Tweeted 33,800+ times since I started Twitter in 2007. Today I decided to request an archive of all my tweets.

I’ve lost too many great conversations and archives of data because of social media services either transforming to something different, suddenly requiring fees that are beyond what I’m willing to pay, or just going defunct… and with so much happening to Twitter right now, I just figured I’d request my data and store it myself for safe keeping. If anything happens to Twitter, I want a record of what I did in this social media space. I’m not predicting that Twitter will go the way of the dodo bird, but I’m just not confident it will look the same at the end of 2023, now that it is privately owned and operated. I want a backup of my data… just in case.

Cost of communication

I’m changing my Internet and cable service this week and will save about $45 a month. Even with that savings I am blown away when I think of the amount I pay for these services and phone data plans for my family.

Yes, I could save even more if I sacrificed speed and volume of data that my family pays for, and yes, what we pay for is a bit of a luxury compared to what others might choose. But still, the cost of these things seems ridiculously high in Canada.

Elon Musk is putting a series of geosynchronous satellites into space that will creates global wifi service. This will bypass the high costs of providing wifi in rural areas. It will also undermine the monopoly-like costs of internet access in countries like Canada. The reality is that these companies Elon will compete with will not fold. They will survive the competition, because they can afford to.

I look forward to this happening. I think Internet access should be cheap and accessible to all. It isn’t a luxury anymore and the reality is that prices in Canada make it so.

Failure is a frame of mind, not an outcome

I’ve written a lot about learning and failure. In a post titled, Learning Through Failure vs Failing to Learn, I said,

“When we talk about learning from failure, we are not actually talking about failure, we are talking about perseverance, and resilience, and tenacity. We are talking about coming up to resistance and unplanned outcomes and working through them to achieve a goal. We are talking about students learning significantly more than if everything went their way.“

Listening to many students at Inquiry Hub, you hear them talk about this in an amazing way. They share the very ethos behind this idea:

For anyone that didn’t bother to watch these two short clips, here is what Thia said in the second one,

“Inquiry projects aren’t about always being successful. It’s about trying something new, learning new skills, creating something. It isn’t always about being the best at it, or succeeding in it. You might have a failed inquiry, and that’s completely ok. It doesn’t always have to be a success for it to be a good quality project. It’s all about the process.”

What’s interesting is that if you don’t understand this idea, it sounds like accepting failure is ‘OK’. If you don’t recognize that students are talking about putting themselves ‘out there’ and trying something beyond their comfort zone, then it sounds like they are giving themselves a participation badge for just showing up. But if you truly understand and embrace the idea of learning through failure, you aren’t talking about failure at all.

Elon Musk just had a rocket explode upon landing and called it a success because of the data they collected.


I’m sure there are people who get this. I’m also sure there are people who laugh, “Ha, you call that a success? What a loser.”

A real loser is one who doesn’t try. A real loser is one who gets an outcome they don’t want and quits. A real loser is someone that makes excuses rather than steps up to make things right.

People who do epic things, and people who try epic things and don’t succeed, understand that failure is a frame of mind, not an outcome. They understand that learning is a journey, not a destination.