Tag Archives: Pairadimes

Luddite Doctors? Luddite Teachers?

Imagine if a doctor’s first instinct was to ban new technology from hospitals…

Imagine if a educator’s first instinct was to ban new technology from schools…

Miss_management
4408321697_6f7bbd9aaa_b

See the full gallery on Posterous

Ellyn Schaffner said, on twitter, about this Warning poster: 
“http://flic.kr/p/7HxNsv @datruss Read your poster again this morn and thought about how it needs revamping to include handheld web devices”

I think filtering and a ban on handheld devices are two separate ideas, but the cartoon above shows my thoughts on banning technology. I would love to see someone put both ideas together into one cohesive poster or cartoon, but my creative juices just aren’t flowing at 4:30am this morning. 🙂

This cartoon by RRMurry on bitstrips makes an insightful comment related to both ideas:

Related posts: 
• Is the tool an obstacle or an opportunity? (older version of the Miss Management cartoon)
• The POD’s are Coming! BLC09 (POD’s – Personally Owned Devices)

 

Alan November: “Do learning”

Alan-november-tweet

Forgot that I had made a screen shot of this until I decided to clean up my desktop, (which at the time looked very much like Alan’s when he presents:-)

This goes well with my recent pairadimes post: 

We aren’t in the ‘teaching business’, rather we are in the ‘learning business’.

…and yes, Alan, we aren’t in the technology business either! 

The learning doesn’t stop when I hit ‘post’!

Comments make blogging a rich experience.

Comments on four of my recent Pair-a-Dimes blog posts have blown me away!
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again… The learning doesn’t stop when I hit ‘post’! 
Check out the amazing conversations: 

Thank you, thank you and thank you to all who have ‘joined the conversation’… I really appreciate the opportunity to learn from and with you! 

Balance and a river of information

Almost 2 years ago now, I had to seriously shift my attitude around online information. I was gullibly trying to read every tweet in my ’stream’ and diligently trying to keep my unread items on Google Reader at a handful. I saw these as pools of information and I wanted to hold on to the information that came into the pool. It was too much. The shift for me was seeing information as a river. Now, I’ll paddle along the stream, but when I get out, I don’t feel the need to pay attention to the stream of information that goes by. It has been liberating.

The key is finding balance rather than being inefficient as I tried to demonstrate in this 4 slide presentation I did for a Connectivism course:


That was the first assignment for the course and it helped me decide to drop out of the course as I tried to seek balance.

I think I’ve made a few points, but if I could make one more it would be that my life still lacks balance and I still spend too much time online… but 3 years ago I would have ‘wasted’ that same amount of time, or more, watching TV. In the wise words of the Comedy Network’s tag-line… to me my online life is ‘Time well wasted’.

via a comment I made on weblogg-ed.com – ‘The Choices We Make’

~ The idea behind a post I’ve written in my head about 50 times… some day I’ll really expand on this idea on my Pairadimes blog.

The original post for the slide presentation is here: Connectivism, Relationships and Balance. But it is in the comments that the ideas behind the presentation really came out. 

Bruce Wellman comment » On being an agent of change

“At this point, we appear to have a 19th century curriculum, 20th century buildings and organizations and 21st century students facing an undefined future.”

via ‘On being an agent of change’ – pairadimes.davidtruss.com

’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‘.

Two old but not too old links | Year-end Food for Thought

I have two sources of inspiration for you.

One is a video… Brave New World Wide Web.  It compares 20th century learning with 21st century learning.  It was originally posted in 2008, but is still relevant today.  I hope it gets you thinking about one small change you can make to bring yourself forward.  I can help and support you in that process.

 

 

http://pairadimes.davidtruss.com/

The second is a blog post from December of 2009, but it’s still fitting and good food for thought…

21 Things That Will Become Obsolete in Education by 2020.

via dasdlisd.wordpress.com

I was planning on sharing the link to Shelly Blake-Plock’s, @TeachPaperless’, post (a year old today and still very insightful), ’21 Things That Will Become Obsolete in Education by 2020′ anyway, but here it has been put together with my Brave New World Wide Web video on the DeDorest Area School District blog.

It amazes me that on blip.tv where it was first posted, the video has never in 2 years and 2 months had a ‘zero’ day… it has had a long-tail audience and every couple months it gets a spike in viewings as someone else shares it. All told, at several sites, it has probably been viewed over 40,000 times and downloaded over 500 times since I put it online. I realize that a cat sneezing on YouTube can get 150,000 views in less time than that, but this story of a personal journey into the world of edtech, and what it offered to me as an educator, has a very specific audience and I’m humbled by it’s reception… even 2 years later.

Twitter EDU

UPDATE: This post has been vastly improved on, and made into an ebook.

Click here to access a free copy of Twitter EDU.

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.

Pick up your copy here. 

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.

William Ury: The walk from “no” to “yes”

via ted.com

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!

 

Why letter grades/percents?

Shared this on Remi’s blog post as a comment. I thought I’d share it here for now, before I expand it into a full blog post on Pairadimes some time (soon). 

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Why letter grades/percents? It goes “Beyond TTWWADI” (Google it)!

Fear has a lot to do with it… what will the parents say? What will the admin say?

Well, I actually did it… and in Grade 10 too!

Students got 2 marks (percentages) all semester for Planning 10 in my class. They got a mid-term and a final mark, required on report cards, and I didn’t chose it, they did! They picked a mark and then we discussed it based on conversations, expectations and comparisons with what I thought was exemplary work. In 2 classes of 28 and 29 students, I helped guide a total of 4 or 5 of them up or down a few percents, and beyond that, they picked their own grade… doing a very good job of it I might add!

One interesting anecdote from that experience, I had one class that was almost all IB students where marks really mattered. Anecdotal feedback without marks attached drove them a bit crazy to start… but, one kid at the end of the term, after picking his own mark, told me, “That’s going to be my lowest mark this semester.”
But he wasn’t arguing, he was only making a statement. He knew he could have done better and he also knew he could have done more and earned a better mark, (you see I also allowed students to go back to their digital projects and improve them at any time, because Learning Outcomes don’t come with teacher timelines only semester timelines. He was willing to accept the self-imposed low ‘A’ rather than put more work into it.

So, what’s stopping us from purely anecdotal report card up to Grade 8? The marks are not needed for university… there are no excuses but FEAR and TTWWADI!