Obama Drastically Scales Back Goals For America After Visiting Denny’s

i never did embed the saul williams poems i was talking about early in the year.  so here it is…

he has also teamed up with trent reznor and gone on tour promoting an album they created together, which is interesting cause i never expected trent reznor and saul williams to be two people that would work together.  but who knew?  either way they’ve put this together, which you may recognize from some nike ads not too long ago.  it’s called ‘list of demands‘ and they’ve disabled the embed option so you’ll have to click and chase it a bit.  here’s the nike ad and you can hear a minute of the song in it…

i’ve got a list of demands too, don’t you?

to write about my reflection on social learning.  first off i was doubtful about how well this class would work; i mean, i’ve never taken a class online before or even considered taking any sort of computer course whatsoever.  But it was the social aspect of the shared challenge – technological newness, blogging, online tools – that allowed for an  exchange of ideas and discoveries to push one another on to learn together.  It was a nice environment. Normally in a class you don’t get to see anyone’s work, never mind progress.  But in this class when someone figured something out, we could all learn from it.  That’s a major difference between the classic university course – everyone for him/herself – vs this one – everyone for him/herself but building off of each other’s successes.

The class wiki was one component that could have been fleshed out as a group a little more, but i think the limitations of the shortened class combined with the reading load and the summer format changed how much time we all had to contribute.  But that’s not to say that even with our limited contributions to it one couldn’tsee how a class wiki would be great.  I’m not adding any links in this post cause i’m lazy but i think we have all seen some great examples of successful class wiki’s during the course of our mentoring and examples provided by dean and other guest lecturers. And of course, one last point about the success of social learning in regards to group wikis: how many times did i use our wetpaint site to find email addresses, due dates, tech tasks, blog addresses, links from our elluminate sessions (thaaaaanks aaaaambeeeerr) etc etc etc….  totally invaluable and for the most part equally generated between professor and students.

one last thing i’d like to mention is how strange it was to see everyone at our real life classes in regina.  We were all so quiet and hesitant to talk – that wasn’t the case during our elluminate sessions.  real life was weird.  Elluminate life was open, and i felt compelled to comment in our class chat in ways i wouldn’t have even considered during our face to face meetings.   imagine larissa and i getting loud during class about 911 in a classroom while the prof is teaching and a guest lecturer is presenting!  not going to happen.  But in the online environment it is a possibility.  And that may not be the most positive example but the point remains true: an online class was to my surprise easier to contribute in than a “normal” class.  interesting, no?

so to finish off i’d just like to thank everyone for making this class a great experience and for posting helpful how-to videos and links.  And for creating really compelling and interesting reading via your blogs.  also i’m not sure how many of you were reading dean’s blog but there are some interesting ideas being discussed by educators from all over the country and beyond.  and some funny stuff too.   so again thanks to everyone for a creating an awesome social learning environment and making this summer (ugh) class as enjoyable as possible.

I’ve resigned myself to the fact that i’m never going to be a heavily technical sort of teacher.  Well not in a technological sense anyway…  I am still an old school believer in establishing fundamental artistic skills as a basis of expression, rather than the sort of expression first b.s. that was dominant during my first round of university.  As such my ideal classroom is a nice big  high school art room with access to a kiln and (at least) four sweet macs for photoshopping/editing work and (after seeing possiblities emerge during this class) for editing movies.  Definitely some of the tools that work for me are blogs (my own and student blogs where they can upload and share their work and their ideas/intent behind whatever it is they’re doing); google docs/forms/presentations/etc for assiting with student interaction; and of course  plenty of youtube tutorials (i’m thinking of grade elevens/twelves making videos of techniques learned throughout their time spent in my art class, which could be useful for upcoming grades and other students around the world).

The ability to network with people from everywhere via the internet/web/some-other-less-used-term is a huge plus for any classroom.  Doing a unit on Japanese style pen and ink work?  Why not try and get in contact with someone in Japan or wherever who could do a better job of teaching some tips and tricks to the students than myself (i’m no painter).  And with youtube or skyping being viable options the students will be actually watching and doing the work with instructors from (again) everywhere.  Just the interest such an endeavor creates in the students would be well worth the effort.

As far as concepts i want my students to understand… difficult question.  I want them to understand that some cliches are stupid (e.g. you’re an individual snowflake) and others are absolutely true (e.g. the world is at your fingertips).  Assisting students in developing stronger online identities is a must (whatever my previous posts might suggest i am in no way against developing an online identity – i am just saying we should all still have a choice) and obviously my future students are going to be light years ahead of me in social networking abilities.  What i would not do is limit them in utilizing that ability to further their educational development.  Of course monitoring blogs (especially when as a teacher you are encouraging interaction between students online) will be a difficult and probably sometimes downright ugly task, given the rise of online-bullying.  But i’ll cross that immense hurdle when i slam into it.  That said, i don’t think the fear of any online ugliness should dissuade teachers from taking advantage of technology; not to mention the fact that it’s going to happen anyway you look at it so you might as well be aware of how things work and not just bury your head in the sand.

Lastly, i’m definitely going to try and go paperless (textbook-wise) in my classrooms – if you haven’t checked out Michael Kaechele’s student blog you should for the video there. And as he says, going paperless is not about saving paper…

So for our final project Karen and i collaborated and created something that would be useful as part of our mentoring component as well as useful for getting us some final project marks.  We were working with Jared Nichol out of Cold Lake, Alberta and his grade nine students who were just getting their feet wet with poetry.  As it turns out two of my friends are poets; Dan S Tysdal is a published poet and lecturer from the University of Toronto and Patrick Swan is a slam poet who has performed all over Canada.  The trick was to somehow create some interaction between the poets and the students that would get the students excited and keep the poets interested.  Of course all of this was limited by our (mine and Karen’s) ability to work in an online environment.  In the end we went with what we knew: the google form allowed us to get questions from the students that they would like directed to the writer and performer (you can also read the student responses); and youtube just requires a video.

Now that we had a way of allowing the students to take control of what information they were going to get from the poets we had to get the poets to respond to the questions.  We decided to accomplish this via a youtube short.  We planned originally to make a ten minute video of the two responding to the student questions but the questions we received were too good and the responses too interesting to edit it down and ended up making three short videos.  You can watch the first one right now

and link to the other two here(#2) and here(#3).  Jared even had his students write some poetry in a style Dan employed wherein you highlight words already present in text and create a sort of poetic subtext within the chosen quote.  Jared also said that the students loved the enthusiasm Patrick brings to poetry and his presentational style (though occasionally raw and often crass) had the students actually enjoying grade nine poetry class!

This project definitely gives me an appreciation of how creating work online and taking advantage of networking would assist me as a teacher one day. Jared and his students could have been half the world away and everything would have worked just as effectively.  Also youtube is a great way to allow a greater depth of interaction between people; being able to see and hear someone goes a lot farther than just reading what they have written for you.

so it’s the evening before our big day of set-up for our wedding, and when we run out to the car the battery is totally dead.  (our alternator belt had broke a few weeks ago and our poor battery had been suffering ever since, but still – the night before set-up?).  but that was fine, a little delayed the next day but we were able to recover.  but then we had yet to totally get our music sorted out; we had planned on doing our own music just on our computer by making a big playlist and buying some songs we wanted but didn’t have from itunes.  no problem.  in fact my brother-in-law brought his hard drive down from calgary and it contained 15,000 songs (needless to say they weren’t all from itunes) so we were well equipped to dj our own wedding. after several late nights getting that sorted out, we go to bed the night before the big day as ready as possible…

next morning the computer doesn’t work.  won’t even turn on.  in the end i didn’t even tell amy because she would have freaked from the stress.  luckily some computer guys at intrex took pity on my relatively panicked call that morning and sorted the whole thing out for us.  apparently it was a fried video card.  but seriously all of our music and countless hours of work gone and then back again all in the morning of our wedding??  they do say things will go wrong  no matter how you plan…

then today was my 100 year family reunion because the original homestead has had Wolfater offspring living on it now for over one hundred years (the Wolfaters are on my mom’s side) and of course they did a bunch of family history research.  i’ve thought my entire life that my mom’s whole side was german.  but apparently we’re austrian and prussian and even a touch of russian so it’s all close but still not exactly german (especially the russian part!)  oh and my great uncle (maybe great-great uncle?) went to high school with babe ruth and apparently they used to “chum around”.  so yeah interesting stuff.  i like how one’s proximity to celebrity (even when it’s generational) becomes mention-worthy.

so i’ve been out of the loop for a couple days and i see everyone’s been posting up a storm.  funny thing with the blogging – if you fall behind you’ve got a lot of reading to do to catch up.

the wedding went great, everything that could go wrong and more went wrong but we still managed to pull it together without a hitch.  because i’ve been posting about public versus private i won’t be providing pictures (what’s more personal than the day you were married?!!) but thanks so much to everyone who wished us well…

…posting tons of personal pictures to their facebook account and essentially cyber stalking old classmates.  and being cyber stalked.  strange world hey?  **warning – there’s only one hyperlink on this huge post so you can stop reading now if you need the hypertext to keep things interesting.  **warning two – if you are a potential employer checking me out and this post came up know that i hate you and don’t want your stinking job anyway.  discard resume.  or probably just press delete.

so we are all nervous about employers checking us out and finding some dirt online and – god forbid – not hiring us for that job we wanted oh so badly.  i’m gonna go ahead and straw-man this argument for a bit and then get to the heart of the matter.

there are two ways i look at this.  the first: i say good, go dig up some s*** and don’t hire me.  there is no way that i would want to work for an employer who thinks checking my profile online is the end-all be-all of employee recruitment.  guess what?  i have a resume.  i can also talk, believe it or not.  and i’m pretty sure you can navigate your way to the top of my resume and figure out how to use that oh-so ancient piece of equipment called a telephone and actually schedule a time to talk to me face to face.  if any of the above doesn’t sound like an option to you (even if you are an employer who i have applied to right now in internet-forever-time and this right here is the dirt you have dug up) i don’t care.  if this colours your opinion in any way it should be that you can expect at all times absolute honesty from me.

i can’t believe that right there i was actually directing a conversation at someone reading this in the future.  and this is the insanity that this type of paranoia brings: you should absolutely not act as if you are on candid camera at all times (as dean’s quote suggested) even if you are.  i honestly can’t imagine a worse scenario for the future than all people at all times acting as if their boss is looking at them through the peep-hole of someone else’s camera phone.  if that same boss or potential employer or whatever was actually behind a wall looking through a little hole at me during my stag night (for example) and then confronted me about something he saw through said hole i would quit my job and break someone’s nose (possibly in reverse order).  but suddenly it IS ok to do the same through technological means.  look, i don’t doubt that this is a new reality but this is an issue that is created and governed by the actions of people – and WE are people.  don’t give in to this type of hyper-paranoia, and don’t contribute to it.  if you want to check some dude out online to get a taste of his lifestyle or whatever you will probably learn something, so don’t be an idiot and post weird pictures of yourself that night you were ______________.  essentially don’t divorce your actions from common sense.  but fearing these things is ridiculous – do you feel actual paralyzing fear every time you get behind the wheel of a car?  even though statistically you will actaully die or at least be horribly maimed a thousand times compared to the odds of someone finding that picture of the time you sneezed and accidentally head-butted your son and then not hiring you because they think you’re some kind of child abuser.  that sentence is clumsy but funny enough to warrant keeping.

the second thing i think about this is that we have personal lives and private lives.  and we do not at any time – as people here, remember (not employees/employers/consumers/citizens/etc.) but actual people thinking and making decisions – we do not need to participate in this sort of act.  just don’t do it.  stop your cyber stalking on facebook or google or whatever.  seriously how many of you went home and started googling people you know just to see what came up?  there’ s the basis of your fears in action – people doing to you what you do willingly to them.  take a stand.  delete the 100 people you don’t care about from your facebook account and keep the 20-30 that you actually make contact with.  like meaningful contact.  stop googling people.  and stop fearing being googled.  i remember that link to an article dean sent us at the beginning of the year said people who constantly check their email and update their status and monitor their various online contributions test at a lower iq than people who are actually high on marijuana.  so please at least have the balls to stand up to someone who outed you on google and say “society! i draw a line around my private life and my family here, here, here.  do not cross line or i will ___________ (fill in blank according to what your personality type or temperament allows).

of course your other option is to pepper the interworld with positive things about yourself so the possible (possible!) negative is well covered in a fuzzy blanket of self-perpetuated goodness.

puke.

k’naan speaking to the pirate issue in somalia.

…is Q with Jian Ghomeshi.  You can find the podcast here.  This show is great because Jian keeps you up to date with new music from across Canada and all over the world, plus he interviews all sorts of people from a wide and diverse range of interests and ideas.  The show itself is well paced and upbeat, with a nice mix of music and interviews.  Every friday he has live guests in his huge studio who play throughout the show.  As a primer here’s this hilarious video of Billy Bob Thornton (who is a total jackass) – they also film Q and it airs on CBC’s Bold tv and on youtube.

that’s probably not the best example of the show because thornton is such a jerk.  Here’s another of my favourites with Somalian-Canadian rapper K’Naan.  Check this one out, i love this guy.

and catch one of his songs.