I just realized that my last post here said I was moving my blog... Well it has been moved!

Here was my post on my process of reflecting and reposting:

Something from Nothing

 

Here are 3 more posts since then:

What comes around - With a great student-made video;

Edupunk or Educational Leader? - See Confession #3 and the Footnotes;  And

Inaction is action -  Does your inaction reflect who you are or who you’d rather not be?

 

So please head over to the new Pair-a-Dimes for Your Thoughts now... Thank you!

 

Click the banner below to get the new RSS feed.

 

You can now find me on http://pairadimes.davidtruss.com

I'll do an official announcement when all my posts have been. I'm moving them one at a time and reflecting on them as I go. One down 80+ more to go!

The purpose of a system is what it does.  Still a favorite metaphor of mine! I hope you enjoy my added reflection.

Here is my NEW FEED.  If you don't want to see over 80 new posts in your reader over the next week, then hold off on subscribing for now, my official announcement and farewell is coming soon.

There is a saying that 'when it rains it pours' and I have really felt that over the past couple weeks! I was given one of a few short-noticed promotions for Feb. 1st., wonderful news that completely surprised me. I am now a Vice Principal of a Middle School and my two weeks there have been great! But I've spent 1/2 a year developing 3/4's of a program and it was very hard to let go. I spent this weekend doing my last duty for the program. I video-taped a few students doing their Exit Interviews and have put it together for a presentation this Tuesday. I'm glad this lingering obligation is over, and I am happy about my predecessor, he is someone who will take what I have started and make it better!

I've written this post in my head for days now and it just isn't coming out right so I'm switching things up a bit:

Wednesday was when I got the phone call offering me the VP position.
Thursday was my last day of school with students in my Planning 10 classes.
Friday was a Pro-D day and I spent it with Student Teachers telling them all about Web2.0 skills.
Monday morning I was in a session with Alan November.(See NovemberLearning.com.)

And that's when the Tidal Wave started!
It began about an hour into the Alan November presentation. First the announcement for my new position came out and a flood of congratulation e-mails came flowing in. Then Alan was speaking about all the neat tools Google has, and then within an hour I was being invited to present at his BLC08 Conference in July!

 

To call the events leading up to this serendipitous is an understatement. Here is how it evolved:
• Someone from my Learning Team just happened to be sitting at a table that put me within an arm's reach of Alan.
• Alan began to expand on what Google can do as a result of a participant's question.
• I just recently discovered and wrote about Google History.
• Alan walked right by me on the break and I asked him if he knew about Google History, "No, show me," he says...
• I go to my blog to get easy access to the link and Alan happens to catch the title of my blog as I immediately begin scrolling down to the post, "You're Pair-a-Dimes?"  ["Yes", I say, still fixated on finding the link for him.]
• He asks me again, "You're Pair-a-Dimes, you're that guy? I've read you, I've seen people link to you, you're that guy!" [So now I'm excited!]
• I show Alan Google History and a few things from my presentation I just happened to have done the Friday before for student teachers.
• Alan asks me to show the group Google History and "a few other things, whatever you want," after the break.
• I go through my Brave New World Wide Web presentation, skipping 'the competition' and show a few links from my del.icio.us.
• Alan comes to me afterwards and says he wants to get me to his conference. He asks for 3 presentation ideas, and as of a couple days ago, I'm going to be presenting all 3 of them at the conference.

So many things had to coincide for this opportunity to open up for me. It has been all so overwhelming! A new job, an old job that I couldn't just drop, and a presentation opportunity... all vying for my time and energy. I fell asleep twice at my computer last week.

Despite this overwhelming Tidal Wave of activity, what excites me equally as much are the tiny Ripples that I have seen recently too!
• Two teachers from my last school joined my presentation to Student Teachers, one of them started his first class wiki while in the session. Five of the student teachers have been in contact for some level of support/guidance since the presentation, (guilty admission here, I have not been going to their wikis to see how things are progressing).
• Another two teachers, as they offered well-wishes with my new position, thanked me for my guidance- both of whom I did little more than 'show a few things'.
• At my new school I am amazed at how receptive teachers have been to web2.0 tools. I spent Friday afternoon until 4pm with two of them.
• Considering how busy I have been, and how new to the school I am, I've been awed by the staff's receptive welcome and eagerness to try new tools. On more than one occasion I've been learning from them as I suggest a tool and then they suggest an engaging use for the tool that I would never have imagined.
• Next week, I'm helping out with a presentation to parents, at my previous (high) school, to help them navigate MSN, Facebook and other means to connect to their digitally competent children.
• As an added bonus my Brave New World Wide Web presentation has been viewed almost 800 times, downloaded 25 times and embeded 10 times... more ripples.

I'm totally excited about this Tidal Wave that I caught and have been riding for a couple weeks now, but it the end, I think the Ripples of change that I have seen recently are what's really going to make my new job meaningful to what I blog about in the future. And on this final note, I think that I will be leaving eduspaces and taking my Pair-a-Dimes somewhere else. I think I'm going to follow Clay's lead and host my own Word Press blog. I don't regret anything about my experience with elgg, then eduspaces, I just think that I need some things that this wonderful open-source initiative simply isn't providing me. My move will be unconventional, (and time consuming), and I hope this approach will be cathartic as well as inspiring fodder for my upcoming presentations... but more on that later.

I spent Friday morning with 22 student teachers and a couple teachers from my school. My goal was to introduce them to the world of web2.0, wikis, and del.icio.us. Well 2 out of 3 ain't bad- I didn't really get into delicious beyond an introduction. That aside, I think this group of future teachers really understood my point that education is changing and our teaching needs to change too!

The slideshare was my main introduction, and here is the wiki we used. I gave them each a page to play with and used video's to convey many of the ideas I wanted to get across. I'd like to thank SFU Faculty Advisor and friend John Stockdale for the opportunity.

I'd love to be able to give this message to every student teacher! 

This is the end of my last post on our class Ning network for Planning 10 this term. The first link isn't really appropriate but my students get my sense of humour by now, and we just finished talking about sex-ed, so I put it in anyway. For reasons I cannot express in this venue at this time, I will really miss these two classes!

 - - - - -

And finally, I will leave you with this:

1. Make smart, realistic goals for yourself... it takes effort to follow through with your goals, so make them SMART and easier to find success with!

2. Figure out who you are and what is important to you. Don't let media perceptions change you. Be safe, and if you are going to be a role model for others, be a positive one.

3. Remember that the world is getting smaller, and that we are now global citizens... in a new global market... connected in new ways... take care of your neighbours!

Peace.

 - - - - -

Kim Cofino writes on Twitter:

Join us in our uStream session: http://ustream.tv/channel/isb-edu-stream Conversations about the Future of Learning in a Networked World.

 

 

I click the link to uStream and find that 12 others have also joined her meeting, later there were 17 of us.

 

 

Vance Stevens is talking and a participant in the meeting links to the slide show he is showing.  

Vance keeps us up to speed with respect to when to advance the slides. 

I bookmark one of the links in the slides to my del.icio.us, a great link for new bloggers to check out. 

 

 

I chat with some 'familiar' people, Alec Couros and Kelly Christopherson, and ask them to help me out with a Pro-D session I'll be running with student teachers on the 25th. Chrissy says to 'Twitter' her and she will help out. (She actually says, "Twitter us and we will help"). I don't follow Chrissy on Twitter so I go to my open Twitter window and request to follow her. 

I see that I have a new Gmail message in my inbox so I open another window to find out that it is Kris. She is asking if I had seen her new post, which is titled Web2.0 Compatible.

I'm listening to the meeting, I postpone popping open windows to the links Vance is referring to, or checking the live chat on uStream so that I can read Kris' post. I notice a small typo in Kris's second paragraph. I also notice a green dot by her name in Google Chat indicating that she is online. I open a chat box and quote her typo back to her.

Kris replies back minutes later that the typo is fixed, (I hit refresh and it is). Kris' post is about how 'her generation' is totally web2.0 compatible. 

I continue following the meeting where a participant is talking about how these new applications are now 'net' applications and not 'pay-for' software. I realize that other than my computer and Internet connection, all this linking and watching and listening and engaging is free.

The most amazing part to all this: It was almost midnight here and I was 'chatting' with a student, reading her writing, and offering (minor) feedback... while 'sitting in' on a staff meeting at the International School Bangkok, Thailand... 'talking' to Kelly in Saskatchewan and Alec in Regina, as well as others in Australia and The UK... and 'meeting' Chrissy, a new connection from New Zealand, who has offered to Twitter-in and help demonstrate networking/connectivity at my Pro-D session next week in the suburbs of Vancouver.

All this happened in a shorter time than it took me to write this post! 

 - - - -

Postscript:

While getting links for this post, I discovered that Chrissy also wrote about this experience. Here is a great image she uploaded. Click on it to get to her post. 

...and back again moments later. Apparently this was not a staff meeting, but a session in an un-conference. Kim just linked to the conference wiki page via Twitter.

 

 

The first time I saw the term 'B.G.' referring to 'Before Google' was in Karl Fisch's 'Did You Know' presentation. Tonight that term came to life for me.

Here is an eye-opening statistic I discovered about myself today: 

Total Google searches: 3633 (Since April 30th, 2006, and only counting when I have been signed into Google.)

I did some quick number crunching: On average, I use Google about 450 times a month, which also averages to about 15 times a day. I really do have to ask, what did I do B.G. - Before Google?  

If you have a Google account you can check out your own history here http://www.google.com/history/

Have a look at my Googling trends: (The secret is out... I am a night owl!)

Above and beyond this chart, there is actually quite a lot here that Google knows about me. Add to this the things I choose to RSS into Google Reader, the things I choose to Star and Share there, the sites I sign up with on Gmail, the people (and information) I e-mail, and basically Google could start to make decisions for me.

- - - - -

A.G. - After Google 

How far away are we from having Google prioritizing items in our e-mail and RSS feeds for us? Or providing us with personalized search results? I wonder how far this could go?

Will there be a truly semantic web? Although Stephen Downes says 'no', and makes a very knowledgeable and compelling argument, I wonder if he isn't looking at it from a paradigm that will change?

Stephen states:

But the big problem is they believed everyone would work together:
- would agree on web standards (hah!)
- would adopt a common vocabulary (you don't say)
- would reliably expose their APIs so anyone could use them (as if)

But I think of the sophistication of Language Translators today and wonder if standards and vocabulary will have to be stringent? Perhaps there will come a time when it will be enough to have a somewhat common vocabulary (congruent semantics within different languages)... and so 'loose' standards become beneficial since if you choose to follow along, you reap greater benefits. Or perhaps the same way Mashups scrape information from multiple sites a semantic web could be built by information scraping?

How many billions of dollars were spent on laying down fiber cables in the few years before wireless access mushroomed?

How many experts thought blogs would fail? Without RSS blogs would never have become so prolific. Blogs came first, but they might have drifted to the fringe without the ability to have feeds go to the reader.

Is a semantic web really doomed to fail or is it inevitable? Web4.0 - your webmodality.

- - - - - -

C.E. -Communal Era 

I'm not changing my behavior because I have become aware that 'Google is watching' and tracking what I do.

And yet I'm not fully trusting either. How accurately can they pinpoint my interests and focus Google ads towards me?  (With a last name of Truss this would be refreshing... Yahoo always shows me Roofing and Bra Support ads.) Furthermore, who else can see my information? Who decides this? How secure is my information? All these things concern me, yet I'm still using Google. 

There is an option to 'pause' the history tracking and also to 'remove' an item in Google History, but do these things actually happen or just disappear from my view? (I recall some issues with Gmail not 'deleting forever' after such a request was made.) Yet I'm still using Google.

With OpenID and Corporate ID (Youtube is Google, Flickr is Yahoo) I am going to be sharing my information regardless of how much I chose to 'pause' or 'block' or 'remove' information from the web. My information is communal/shared to a very large extent!

What really concerns me is how this information about me will be used to "help" me? Will "smarter" searches force like-minded ideas on me? Will they stifle my creativity? Will I suffer the 'Dumbness of Crowds'?

Will a semantic web shield me from an onslaught of unnecessary information or will it insulate me from possibilities and learning opportunities?

 

Read and comment on this post at the new Pair-a-Dimes location here: http://pairadimes.davidtruss.com/you-cant-go-back-now/

It's the old allegory of the cave.

    Last Friday I was leaving the school and I popped into my VP's office. Among other things, Anthony and I often talk about technology in the classroom. One thing led to another and I showed him the YouTube video that was the subject of my last post: iPhone tutorial from a two-year-old. It was shortly after this, while I was saying something, that Anthony interrupted me:

        "You can't go back now, can you?"
    "What?"
        "You could never be able to go back to teaching without technology, could you?
    "No."

    Driving home after our conversation it occurred to me what a transformation my teaching has gone through in the past couple years. Could I go back to a classroom and teach void of blogs, wikis, & online networks? Well, of course I could, but I just wouldn't want to!

    Not only do I never want to go back, but I have become an evangelist.
However I've noticed a bit of a backlash among teachers. Comments like "We can do that without technology" miss the point about what students have the potential to do. "Every time I get them in the computer room all they do is Facebook" recognizes that technology is a tool, not an answer, but comments such as these are used as excuses rather than challenges.

    In the past few weeks I've heard more than one teacher say, "What is Facebook", and "What is a wiki?". This I can handle. But then I hear about how technology is evil; about what a distraction it is. Well here is a little news flash... IT ISN'T GOING ANYWHERE!

    There are times I just want to put my head down, improve what I am doing as a teacher, and forget that there is 'work to be done'. I can't. Not only can't I return to life in Plato's cave, but I am also compelled to 'share the true light'. I now realize that at times I am destined to be seen as 'blinded', such will be the lot in life for many of us.

Can you go back now?

Read and comment on this post at the new Pair-a-Dimes location here: http://pairadimes.davidtruss.com/digital-exposure

 I've bounced some digital immigrant/native ideas around a few  times. Now I have one more thing to add.

 When I was young my sister had dolls that spoke. This was so amazing! You pulled a string in the doll's neck and as it recoiled the doll said, "Hi Ma-ma" or some other short phrase. Later the dolls would say a series of phrases, changing with each pull-of-the-string. Now my daughters have My e-Pets and Webkinz. Next comes this video:

 It seems that the 'Immigrant/Native' argument is moot. I called the digital range in competency/capability of students a spectrum, not a dichotomy, (I think the correct word should have been continuum -note the reflection/comments on the post to see why I now think 'spectrum' is better than 'continuum'). The fact is students can't be lumped into general categories such as this. George Siemens summarizes this point better than I can, so read his post, and I'll move on to the point of this post.

There is an issue of 'digital exposure' that many (but not all) of today's kids have that simply wasn't available when we were young. Despite my new distaste for the 'digital native' catch phrase, I am back to liking my Batman/Borg quote:

"I come from the Batman era, adding items to my utility belt while students today are the Borg from Star Trek, assimilating technology into their lives." 

 My daughters interact with their toys in ways that I never could. In the same vein, two year old Paige from the above video will expect her toys to interact with her, to provide her with choices that I never had. Does it not follow that she will expect the same interaction and engagement in school?

Basically this is about 'exposure to' and 'integration with' digital technology at a young age as opposed to 'adaptation to' digital technology later on in life.

When Paige is 9, she will have peers that instant meesage each other on their PDA's... they will be more likely to communicate online at a younger age... they will be more likely to connect to like-minded social groups digitally. They will be continually exposed to 'new technology' that they won't ever remember living without. (Technology and tools that we name, and they participate with.)

Meanwhile, I will continue promoting the value of integrating technology into the classroom to teachers who have "enough on their plate already". I will offer out some 'delicious' tools for their utility belts... while Paige plays with an iPhone and learns to connect to the world around her in ways many of us are now learning about... learning side-by-side with a two year old.