April 2008

My mother is always right. Always. Whether I like it or not, her advice always comes back to haunt me when I don’t follow it - this time is no exception. When I told her I was planning on doing a half-marathon in May, her response was, “Are you eating enough? You look like you’ve lost weight - if you’re going to do distance training, you need to make sure you’re eating enough and taking care of yourself.” Well, being the strong-willed person I am, I laughed and said, “Don’t worry, I’ll be fine.” Turns out I AM human and I CAN’T do it all. So, when faced with this:

2 kids (2.5 yrs and 14 months)
2 jobs (which I love) with some tight deadlines
a husband who works late (NOT by choice) and is never home in the evenings
a unquenchable thirst for learning
family obligations
a trip to Chicago next weekend (REALLY excited about this!)
training for a half-marathon

What gives? It ended up being the half-marathon, and I’m ok with that. I have 2 marathons and 3 halves under my belt from back in the day before kids, a husband, and 2 jobs - those will do for now. I don’t have to prove myself to anyone anymore and my mom was right, I DO have to eat right and sleep enough to be able to train effectively. Otherwise, EVERYTHING suffers. Oh yeah, and there was no way a 10-mile training run was going to be squeezed into this weekend. I’m human, I guess it’s time, at 27, to finally accept it. My 2 mile powerwalks will have to do for now……….

We’ve had a wicked winter where I live in Wisconsin and I’m just so relieved that spring is finally here, although later than usual. Along with the increasing temperatures will be (I suspect) a decrease in *play* time online……guess I’ll just have to practice better time management to get all my work done!

Just some visuals for you of what I’ve had to put up with lately……..and a sign of hope…..lilac pics have been requested, but still a month to go for those. I’m just dying to see and smell them, they’re the TRUE sign of spring up on my hill.

March 21, 2008 (Good Friday)

April 11, 2008

April 15, 2008 - A sign of hope

If you start wondering where I am and why tweetage has dropped off significantly in the coming months, just remember that 2 toddlers are much more easily entertained OUTSIDE………….

If you’ve been online at all since early Sunday morning (CST), you may have seen the acronym ad4dcss thrown around with abandon on twitter and in diigo - if you haven’t seen it yet, here’s your introduction!

ad4dcss = Advocates for Digital Citizenship, Safety, and Success

Our group’s description for the ad4dcss Google Group (you can join!):

“This is a grassroots efforts started by educators to promote the active instruction of students, parents, and administrators on topics concerning digital citizenship, safety, and success.  We want to mobilize ONLINE but take our actions OFFLINE into our own communities and schools.  We’re a group sick of talking about it and ready to DO something.”

Vicki Davis wrote a post yesterday detailing a lot of what was discussed at the original planning session (I attended for a portion of the discussion), I suggest heading over to her post to see the original ideas presented.

The ad4dcss wiki page for Advocates (you can join!) states:

“We are educators who wish to work with others to create information that may be widely disseminated about best practices for digital citizenship, safety, and success. We will volunteer some of our time each month (it may be 30 minutes, it may be that we bookmark with standard tags, or it may be that we promote the activities of ad4dcss through twitter, but we will participate in promoting and aiding these efforts.)”

The ad4dcss Diigo group (you can join!) description begins with:

“Grassroots effort of educators, parents, and teens to promote digital citizenship, safety, and success. Advocacy for wise, balanced, researched based actions in the offline world to promote…”

This movement is still in its infancy, but the main push right now needs to be getting the word out and getting advocates to join. Here’s what you can do RIGHT NOW to get involved in the movement:

1) Read this post (wow, you’re almost done with one task already!)
2) Read Vicki’s post about the origins of ad4dcss
3) Join the ad4dcss Google Group
4) Join the Diigo Group and share your related resources with the group using the group’s tag dictionary (this pops up when you select “share with group” and choose ad4dcss)
5) Request membership on the ad4dcss wiki so you can help form the movement (to request membership, click on “join this space” in the left-sidebar of the wiki)
 

6) Tag your blog posts about this movement with ad4dcss
7) Tag your tweets about ad4dcss with #ad4dcss

Using tags will allow your thoughts and resources to be added to the Netvibes aggregator for ad4dcss - head on over and check it out! 

Now, the real challenge with this, as with any other movement formed online is moving it OFFline.  This is where we need to go beyond tools that most people in society aren’t using. To use a phrase I normally avoid, we need to stop preaching to the choir. Too much in the edtech world ends up being talk, talk, talk and never having it go beyond this niche group of devoted educators. How do we get this offline? How do we educate people wary of this entire topic? We need to reach out to the people who make the decisions and unfortunately, they’re not sitting around watching our twitter stream and joining Diigo groups.

What am I doing to help?

Well, I’m helping get the word out, helping with organization, and have formed a project to create a free online course (hosted generously by Professional Learning Board) to educate people (parents, teachers, administrators, politicians, policy makers - this all needs to be decided yet!) on our “curriculum”. You can find out more about this project and volunteer to help out by visiting the planning page.

The most exciting part about ad4dcss is that it’s not one group of people with a few leaders telling everyone else what to do. You can see on the wiki and from Vicki’s post that you are invited to come up with your own projects and own ways of helping. Everyone has different areas of expertise, we need EVERYONE! An example of another project being created is Stephanie Sandifer’s Blocked Blogs Week that she references in Vicki’s post and on the wiki.

Now, if you’re thinking that you’re still confused and want to help but are SO overwhelmed that you don’t know where to start, don’t worry! Just take a minute to read some of the materials listed above and please comment here if you have any questions. We really need people working with PEOPLE, not just computers, so there’s a place for everyone here - tech skills are NOT mandatory. Let us know how you can help!

(Note: on the Netvibes page for ad4dcss, Vicki Davis has listed an email account, saying “You may e-mail the organizers at ad4dcss [at] gmail [dot] com to find an advocate in your area.” - you might have to click on the ad4dcss tab in the top left corner for the group page.)

While watching “The Jane Austen Book Club” last night (and yes, I have read the book as well and no, I have not read all of Jane Austen) I came across a line that really stuck with me. One of the characters was asked if her husband had read Jane Austen and she replied (rolling her eyes), “He reads stuff online” as the other women laughed derisively. Is this just something that’s always going to be an issue with book “purists” or is there a true difference between reading online content and “paper” content?

In addition, I find reading online to be a skill in and of itself - scanning a screen and being able to filter out the unnecessary material on a page, scrolling, being able to maintain focus on the content, etc. As we venture into more e-learning and more and more online content I believe this is a skill that we should work on with our students. Rather than just telling them to go read something online, we should first treat it as an additional reading skill. At the moment, I’m attempting to work out where this best fits in the Framework for 21st Century Learning - your thoughts and theories are welcome!

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills - Framework for 21st Century Learning via kwout

Note - I really enjoyed the movie (yes, I cried) and found it to be different from the book, but not negatively so.

Additional Reading

The Jane Austen Book Club movie trailer on YouTube
21st Century Learning Standards - Cathy Nelson
Four Charts - Scott McLeod