3 sticks. IV is done

IV time

Today's the day

Sleep last night came and went, and thankfully our little boy slept through the night. Now if he'll just stay asleep while we ge ready to go into the hospital. We have to check into the labor and delivery wing at 7:30, so it's a really early morning, much earlier than normal for us.

I'm praying rat everything goes smoothly. Becky's been up since 4, unable to sleep. We're not in labor. We'll get around here and stop somewhere for mecto get a cup of coffee, Becky isn't allowed to have anything.

Today is the day the Lord has made, and Becky and I are both very excited to 'go and meet' her for the first time. I've heard from many friends that having one child is easy, two on the other hand...

Tomorrow's the big day

Pray for us friends.

Patti has arrived

Becky's sister is here!

Tech Learning TL Advisor Blog and Ed Tech Ticker Blogs from TL Blog Staff – TechLearning.com

Tech Learning TL Advisor Blog and Ed Tech Ticker Blogs from TL Blog Staff – TechLearning.com

So I really like what Nielsen has to say. Having been in the world of K12 before, and being aware that these types of tools exist - has been frustrating and I resonate with her quotes. The adoption of pencils and chalk didn't seem to be as difficult - and while the technologies we have today are faster than those, they're slower to be adopted. Yet that adoption is probably due in part to the fact that they're far more complex tools. Think of the pencil - a great and grand tool. Wireless, needs no batteries or peripheral attachments, and yet students could write anything they wanted to with it - appropriate and inappropriate content. Same with chalk. Now I am really blowing this out of proportion, but I think it does go back to the age old - "what are you using it for" type of premise. The technology itself is not bad, but rather it's how you use it that determines it's good or poor use in education.

Reflecting on the rest of Nielson's article, I really like the 6 steps she outlined. I could almost incorporate it into my Introduction to Educational Technology course - as a means of progress throughout the course. And in some ways, she even outlined the time-frame in which those things should happen. I really like her questions at the end, on which I could construct a rubric of sorts:

• Are you adding to the conversation?
• Are you helping open up the minds of others about technology integration?
• Are you learning new things yourself?

That last one is mine.

There goes the circular restore medium - for now.

Apple Killed The CD Today

It's rather interesting to me - thinking through the various forms of mediums that have been around, round and not round.  I think of the vinyl that I listened to off my Dad's old stereo, and in the same stereo, we had an 8-track player, and then we skipped forward to cassette tapes, then laser disks, which were followed by compact disks, and now flash storage.   So let's see, that's circle, rectangle, rectangle, circle, circle, rectangle.. ...which means that the next storage medium will also be rectangle - if the pattern holds any water.

When you get your MacBook Air and you open the box, you will find exactly zero optical discs inside. Normally, Apple includes at least one back-up DVD to reinstall OS X and other software if your computer fails. But now, that has been replaced with a super-slim USB stick. This stick, packed in with your manual, is all you need to reinstall your system now.

I'm not surprised too much about this, but I didn't think that it would come this soon.  What I believe this means for other OEMs, is 'follow the leader'.  It also points in a direction that indicates a greater reliance on cloud services.. storage.  Network storage and the Air were one of the major reasons Apple came up with the Air - if you store all your 'stuff' on a network (or in your .Mac account), why would you need a old clunky storage device on your laptop.  Insure a great internet connection and cloud storage and 'voila' the perfect laptop.

It'll be interesting to see how this goes - I don't think the new Air will outsell the iPad, but then again you can't really compare those Apples to them Apples, since they come in at completely different price-points.  I did have a colleague ask if I thought the whole OS was on the USB stick or if it simply kicked off a restore partition somewhere else in the internal flash storage. I'm sure someone over at Gizmodo or CNet will have one of them torn apart within the week or worse yet, and let us know how the new Air handles consumer pressure.

Just 5 more days

In just 5 days, or less, we'll be welcoming a little girl into the world. Our OB didn't expect us to make it to this week. Hopefully we can hold out for just a few more days.

We have few ideas for names, but we know we just need to wait to see her to make a final decision.

Changed the title...

So over the past several months, I've really been struggling with how to keep up with authoring several different blogs that deal with several different topics, and it's finally occurred to me - "You can't."  Well maybe there are those out there that have the ability to keep three different jobs separated, not to mention being a Dad - which is not included in the job count.  But I can't.

Instead, I've decided to pull all my posts into a single blog, called, "Thinking Space".  Basically I had a blog that I started almost two years ago to be a place of reflection for being and becoming a dad.  I also had a separate space blog that was to reflect some of my ideas and musings on technology, and then I had another blog that was intended to be dedicated to reflections on technology and it's impact on education.  Well, trying to remember which one was which was just way to complicated.  So, I've decided that instead, I'll use Blogger's great Labels (tag) tool and I'll just tag them appropriately.  This way I can post whichever or whatever type of content I want to, and it doesn't matter.

I really believe that reflecting on your thinking about whatever topic, is important to retaining memory of the topic - and if necessary to be able to interact with the knowledge or information and I really wish I reflected more often.  Just writing this actually makes me remember the research I did in grad school on meta-cognition and how fascinated I was by not only doing the research but what it could mean to my own professional practice. I was I often find myself wishing I could do audible blogs, and sometimes, I do just that, but basically it looks like someone walking down the street talking to himself.  Really - it's just me thinking out loud - my brain using my mouth to make sound to try and better organized and understand the stuff that's in my brain - does that make sense?

So I have this blog now, and I hope I can be better at reflecting here on all manner of topics - a sort of thinking space.

Now to be sure, thinking space is a term that actually has more history than just a name for this blog, it goes back to before I married Becky.  From time to time, as young couples do, we would get into a conversation that would lead to an intense discussion and then boil over into confusion, misunderstanding and a refusal to speak any further.  We had a break down in communication.  So to resolve the matter, we came up with this idea called "thinking space", - it was the simple opportunity to share whatever was on our mind or heart - but that it was merely a sandbox - a place to put ideas to think about - not make a decision on.  That one decision led to a lot better discussion and interaction, and that is what I want this space to be.  A thinking space.  A place I generally use to reflect on many of the different aspects of my life.  It can allow me to document my thinking process, and help me better reflect, so I can learn from and develop my thinking.

As a side note, in looking for some image to represent thinking space I came across this page at The Economist - not a magazine I typically read at all, that captured many other individuals thinking spaces, visually, and represented them in a rather interesting way.

Tech Tools Fostering "Mini Generation Gaps"

It really will be interesting to see if or how this actually affects teaching and learning. I'd never thought about a generational gap larger than a single generation, and yet here we have an idea about "mini-gaps", caused, of all things by the technology that so saturates our culture - all the way down to 4th graders. It also brings up another question with regard to technology and learning and what's appropriate. Surely not all technology is appropriate for all levels of development? Learning character traits such as patience and non-technological communication skills are at least as important if not more. Do you remember taking a facial recognition course on social and emotional exhibition? Of course not - those skills about how someone feels - based on their face - were taken in preschool and kindergarten. I wonder if teachers will have to begin wearing a smiley on their shirt instead of just displaying how they feel on their faces.


Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times has an interesting report on the iGeneration, born in the '90s and this decade, comparing them to the Net Generation, born in the 1980s. The Net Generation spend two hours a day talking on the phone and still use e-mail frequently while the iGeneration — conceivably their younger siblings — spends considerably more time texting than talking on the phone, pays less attention to television than the older group, and tends to communicate more over instant-messenger networks. 'People two, three or four years apart are having completely different experiences with technology,' says Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project. 'College students scratch their heads at what their high school siblings are doing, and they scratch their heads at their younger siblings. It has sped up generational differences.' Dr. Larry Rosen, a professor of psychology at California State University, says that the iGeneration, unlike their older peers, expect an instant response from everyone they communicate with, and don't have the patience for anything less. 'They'll want their teachers and professors to respond to them immediately, and they will expect instantaneous access to everyone, because after all, that is the experience they have growing up,' says Rosen." Read below for another intra-generational wrinkle.

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Working with Sakai

One of the most exciting things about technology is the newness of it, but it's also often the most daunting at the same time.

In this case, I'm speaking directly of Sakai, the new LMS that Johnson is using to replace Blackboard later on this year, and is currently being used for some courses this semester, including Introduction to Educational Technology.

Playing with or opening up a new technology is like getting that brand new bike at Christmas time.  You see the box, it's big and it's wrapped in this great looking paper with all the speckles and fancy ribbon on it, with a ginormous bow on top of it.  You think "I know what that is, and I'm so excited!"  So you open it with bubbling excitement, only to be stopped by the picture of what's inside of the box - a brand new, ruby-red, white-walled, 10 speed with cruise control, or something like that. All of the exitement quickly dies down when you actually open the box and discover...

... it still has to be put together.

Now don't get me wrong.  Sakai is 'put together', in fact it's put together rather well, and by a team of very dedicated and education-minded folk.  And it offers some fantastic advantages over Blackboard, not to mention the cost savings.  There are a tonne of tools available within any course or site (as they reference it), and a wealth of granularity available to professors and students alike.  But one of the most significant issues and often one of the most critical pieces of an LMS is the gradebook.

Sakai does include a gradebook tool, but there are some given limitations. The gradebook can be setup in one of two overall ways - as a percentage based gradebook or a points-based gradebook.  This is great, because on of the other tedius tasks in grading is the computation of a final grade, and reading into a standard paper/pencil gradebook can often yield unexpected grades, just because of computational error or mis-reading lines.  Sakai's gradebook takes care of this - to a point.  The standard gradebook is also where I typically handle attendance and other assignments.  The problem with the Sakai gradebook tool is that anything entered into the gradebook MUST have a corresponding point value - including attendance.

There's also an assignments tool in Sakai - which is great because I can create all of and have students submit all their assignments right inside of Sakai - even to where I get a notification for each assignment that each student submits.  I can even make comments on submitted assignments and give it back to them for resubmission.  And all of this can be integrated into the Gradebook - how great is that?  The only snag is that assignments that are integrated into the gradebook MUST have a point value assigned to them.

Really as I've thought about it, it's not so much a limitation of Sakai, as much as it's just a limitation of a computational tool.  In order to have a gradebook automatically calculate a grade, it must be able to so based on a set of pre-configured parameters, and when it comes down to it, points is the only way to make an equivalence for any other grade type.  9 points out of 10 points, really comes down to a 90%, which in most cases is a low A.  A pass or fail grade could be representated by a one (1) or a zero (0).  Attendence could be represented by a 3 point scale, 2 = present, 1 = tardy, 0 = absent.  Ideally for a 16 week course that meets once a week, a perfect attendence point value would be 32.  So this works pretty well.

I'm sure that the gradebook tool will become more robust in the coming years, and I understand that there's some potential for an actual attendence tool in the works.

I'll keep my eyes peeled.

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