apple juice

Hey Xcel! Do you think we could go one windless, light-to-moderate thunderstorm without losing power?

I need to look into a UPS for my cable modem, router and Airport.

We saw An Inconvenient Truth on Monday night. It was pretty startling. Lots of good info.

There were three things that really stuck out. The first was the CO2 levels for the past 600,000 years. Shown is a graph, with the rising and falling levels. They dramatically hide the last 50 years, and as it is revealed, I felt myself gasping as the graph spiked far above what the previous peaks were.

Second was the statistic about global warming in the popular press and in scientific journals. Basically, out of 1000 journal articles about global warming, not one of them questioned the human source of global warming. In the popular press though, something like 53% of the articles question whether we are causing global warming.

Finally, the hope. After a couple hours of depression, there is some hope. With current technologies, we can get our CO2 production down below 1970 levels  (Think CFDs and whatnot) I think that is fairly encouraging, if we had some political will on the subject. Also, during the end credits, lots of practical things that you can do to help.

So, it’s not really a “fun” movie to go see, but I think it is a must see for everyone. Have you seen it yet?

(oh, and I ditched the gas powered mower before seeing the movie 😉 )

I have come into the possession of a human powered lawn mower. By that I mean, one of the lawn mowers where there is no engine, just you, pushing.

I have wanted one for a while, and serendipitously, Josh had one at his house.

I took it home and fired it right up, so to speak. Oh man, it was hard work. For example, you’re cruising along, and a stick flies up and gets stuck. Well, this thing just stops and punches you in the gut with the handle. Mmm, fun.

After sweating it out for an hour, and then using my electric weed-wacker, the lawn is looking a bit more manicured. The grass is completely dead, but at least it is short-dead now.

I guess this is a good sacrifice to make though, if I’m trying to save the environment. I’ve read that a gas mower puts out more pollution in an hour than your car does in a week, could that be true?

I’m back home in Mpls after my trip out to San Diego for two conferences. My couch has never felt so comfortable!

The second conference I attended was the iSummit conference held by the Coalition of Lighthouse Schools. This was the second time I have attended iSummit, and it was again a great conference. Part of what makes this conference great is being able to connect with a great group of people for the second year. I’m already looking forward to sharing our experiences with the group throughout the coming year.

Bernie Dodge, creator of the WebQuest, was our keynote speaker, delivering a speech entitled the iToo model. In his own words, he recently came up with the name, and we were some of the first to hear this presentation. He spoke briefly at the beginning about the WebQuests, and then moved on to the iToo model. iToo is an acronym for inputs, Thinking, outputs and outcomes, and it was a simple, powerful framework for designing lessons. Not specific to technology, but it provides great structure for projects that involve tech.

This idea swung back to the WebQuest after the keynote when I had a chance to speak with Bernie. As I reported last week, I had attended a session in which WebQuests were described as shallow task-lists for kids to check off. After hearing Bernie speak about the WebQuest, and thinking more about his model for creating them, I’d like to amend what I said before. Bernie made clear the distinction between what he called the Web Experience, going out to the web to find facts, and the WebQuest, which is a deeper thinking task, supported by all of the disparate inputs that are available on the Web and elsewhere. I stand corrected. I think that it is ever-important that we guard against simplistic and shallow tasks.

The second presenation he gave was entitled GeoTeleWikiPodBlogCasting for Understanding. This was, as you could guess, focussing on many of the new collaborative social web technologies. This presentation was great because these ideas were presented for their value to education, which is of course, why we were there. Unfortunately, (I fall in to this as well) too much time is usually spent on the technology, and not enough time on the reasons for doing it.

Well, I had a day of sleep today, and tomorrow I’m going to spend a little time at work taking care of some loose ends. This summer is going to pass very quickly, and I have a lot of ideas wrapped up in my head for the coming year!

[tags]iSummit, iSummit 2006, Bernie Dodge, WebQuest[/tags]

This being my first time at a large, education and technology conference, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Honestly, I expected a lot of superfluous crap on the vendor floor, and I got that. It was disheartening to see scores of people milling around presentations for little clicker devices, rigid software, and tablet PCs (sorry I just don’t see it). I think those things may have a place, but they are certainly not the end-all, be-all fixes for all that ills.

My hopes, however, were also confirmed and enhanced. I believe the best technology is the technology that allows infinite possibilites, and endless options. Too often, I think, technology is viewed as a way to enforce that everyone do everything the same way. The best sessions and presentations I saw were the polar opposite. The future, I believe, will be in unlocking the individual’s creativity and voice. Allowing for interpretation in a way that suits each person.

So, from the sessions on podcasting, blogs, wikis, and storytelling, I felt that excitement. Tools that allow the individual’s voice to shine. I did see one new commercial product I was very enamoured with: InspireData. It looks to be a great data collection and analysis tool, and it seems to be crafted in a way that allows great flexibility in the interpretation and presentation of data.

The other wonderful thing about the past few days has been the turbo-overdrive web browsing I’ve been doing. I’ve come across a bunch of new websites, tools, and ideas. (This post is being written and posted with Qumana, a free, open-source, and cross-platform blog editing tool.(which needs a Window menu, I just noticed))

So now, a couple days off, I’m going to watch some soccer, visit some family, and gear up for iSummit 2006.

Tags: necc, necc2006, necc06, qumana, inspiredata, iSummit2006

I love stories like this:

“You come here and it’s like, ‘Where do I park? Is it five blocks down a side street, or what?’ “

Yes, you’ll have to walk! It’s part of the plan. Once you find that really great parking spot for your car, for the love of pete, don’t move it. Ever been to Chicago? Exactly. I think I’m having deja vu or something, but the strib is running a story about all the parking problems and havoc that is the excelsior and grand project.

By the end of the article they seem to be praising it a bit more:

Industry observers say the clearest point of success has been the residential portion. Wilson and his colleagues at TOLD describe that side of the project as “stellar,” with no vacancies among 337 apartments and all but 12 of the 210 completed condos sold, with more being built.

Geri Schiavino moved into her new condo in May. “I totally don’t use the car half of what I used to,” she said. “I take the bus, and when friends come over, we walk to coffee shops or dinner. Everything’s right here.”

This is a really cool project on the whole, and I think it is great to see all these higher density residential areas sprouting up, but you need to have the mixed-use areas in there as well (grocery stores, coffee shops, etc), otherwise you’ll be exacerbating the traffic problems, and not alleviating them. When residents of these condos can walk to everything, they don’t need to drive their cars everywhere.

[tags]condos, urban, minneapolis[/tags]

I am feeling the swell of information and excitement today after a series of great sessions.

The keynote speech today was given by Nicholas Negroponte, creator of the one laptop per child initiative. It was very exciting sitting in the audience and hearing him describe the transformative power of placing this tool to connect with the world into the hands of a child. Especially a child who takes nothing for granted, and where the only hope for advancement is through education.

As is now the case with any sort of conference with even a smattering of tech connections, many people have written up their thoughts about his speech:

• Andrea’s BlogQuest – Educators First to Test Negroponte’s $100 Laptop Prototype
• David Warlick – Negroponte Moblogged
• Ian Jukes – Move over Microsoft, Dell, Negroponte’s $100 laptop has arrived
• eLearning Blog – Nicholas the Great!

Favorite quotes from Negroponte’s speech:

Supporting Windows on your laptop is “like a fat person using their energy to move their weight.”

and

“If Intel and Microsoft are against it… we must be doing something right.”

and

I’m paraphrasing this one: “It broke my heart to come to cambodia, and find that these kids were learning Word and Excel, like that was somehow going to secure them a job”

My next source of inspiration came in the form of Gary Stager, who delivered a rousing, shoot-from-the-hip presentation entitled: Preventing your one-to-one dreams from becoming nightmares.

I decided to attend this session in a very last minute fashion, and I stationed myself close to the door, in case things got ugly.

I could not have been more wrong.

A number of things stuck with me from his speech, things that perhaps were in the sub-concious, or things I have been simply unable to articulate to the right people. The real power of the internet is the opportunity for collaboration, and the opportunity of empowering yourself to publish your ideas. As he said, the power of the internet is not “dopey notions of things like webquests.” Going to some website to write down when Abraham Lincoln was born doesn’t somehow make it more exciting or engaging, because it is on the internet.

Another idea floated, that some of my teachers have picked up on, is the idea that assignments should be broad enough to be satisfied in a number of ways… meaning a number of methods of problem solving and a number of methods of production and communication.

Also, he dissed the clicker/voter things that seem to be all the rage at the moment. Companies would love nothing more than to sell thousands of those things and “turn all the teachers into Vanna White.”
Both Negroponte and Stager hit on the idea that teaching computer programming is all about teaching kids to learn, think and problem solve. Both used Logo as an example. (Don’t I feel special for having written down this spring in my draft curriculum, “LS – Logo”)

Okay, enough from me, here’s some from the community:

• Julie Lindsay – Gary Stager – One to one computing visions

Finally– Will Richardson on the Read/Write Web. Again, an excellent, excellent presentation. “Why web 2.0 changes everything”. It’s not about the technology, as Will says, its again this idea that the empowering and amazing thing is that now every kid is a newspaper, a textbook, a radio show, a television show and a movie. Students can publish to a worldwide audience and it is incredibly powerful.

One moment from Will’s speech was especially poignant. He showed a Coors’ beer commercial from about 5 years ago, I love football and the Twins, etc. And then presented some teenager’s MySpace profile. The link was obvious. “We should not be afraid of MySpace, we need to teach MySpace.” And by teaching MySpace, that means teaching about society, culture, ethics, and what is of value in this world. MySpace is not some separate little thing that we can block kids out of. MySpace is real life. And if we’re worried about what our kids are doing and saying in that virtual space… we need to be teaching and leading in every space.

We’re fighting a battle of relevancy with our students. We block access, we cut off communcation, and we dictate how technology will be used, and in the end, schools are losing relevance with kids.
What can we do to regain relevance? We change the way we teach. Teaching in the past was linear. Life is not like that. Life is not a linear set of steps to get from Point A to Point B. Life is a mess, the internet is a mess, myspace is a mess, we need to teach how to navigate, interpret, understand and shape the mess. I’ll bet you have heard the phrase, “How are you going to learn if you don’t get your hands dirty?”

[tags]necc, necc06, necc2006[/tags]