July 2008

After creating yet another blog (OTA Tweightloss - check it out!), this time using Blogger, I decided to FINALLY address something that I’ve been meaning to for some time.

This first part is to all bloggers using Blogger as your blogging platform - if this is you, maybe you already know all of this. Based on the number of blogs that I try to comment on where I get really frustrated, I’m guessing not EVERYONE knows. If you don’t use Blogger or have another setting that you think people should know about, please share!

Here’s the deal:

When I want to comment on a Blogger blog, many people have it set so that only people with Google accounts can comment. NOT OKAY. I don’t like using my Blogger profile because it doesn’t link to my actual site and while it may be hard to believe, some people simply don’t have Google accounts.

Here’s where you can set it to allow people to enter their own name and url when commenting - make sure you select “Anyone”:

A common reason for only allowing registered users to comment is to reduce spam. Easiest way to deal with that is by moderating all comments - setting shown here (this is on the same page as the above settings, just scroll down a bit further):

Anyone else have something Blogger users should know about?

Wait - another pet peeve of mine as a reader……….this one is for ALL bloggers. And yes, it IS all about me, because when you’re a blogger, it’s all about your readers - in this case, I’m speaking as a reader. Please set your feed to push your full posts, not just the teasers. I simply don’t click through to read the rest and therefore miss important content - I’ll click through to comment, but not just to find out if I WANT to comment.

Worried about monetization? Make your content good enough that people will click through to comment every time or have features that require users to actually visit your site. Pushing only partial feeds is just punishment to readers, seriously! But then again, maybe you don’t care about me, that’s ok too. Just know that I probably won’t keep subscribing.

On that note, I just want to mention that I received an email from a TMG reader who has an issue with the author bios at the top of each of the posts. She said that this makes it hard to skim for good content in her aggregator because the bio is always taking up the top part of the post. Know what we did? We’re moving our bios to the end of our posts because this reader cared enough to email me and give the suggestion!

It’s all about the readers, no?

Yesterday I had the opportunity to travel 2.5 hours (each way) to attend a presentation/workshop with Will Richardson in River Falls, WI. Will is extremely well known in the edtech community, but perhaps not so much outside of this niche group - this should change! Parents and business/social media people alike could benefit from the messages Will shares about online learning and connecting, specifically his thoughts on Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody” and media literacy.

I spent the hours after the workshop in the car with one of my best friends dissecting my thoughts/feelings/musings on the experience and want to share a few with you as well:

There was no backchannel

This was a rather small group of educators and administrators and probably only a handful of the people in attendance even knew what a backchannel was. No one had laptops or phones out trying to live blog or tweet the keynote. This was actually a GREAT experience! I had my college-ruled notebook and pen out making a few key notes that I wanted to follow up on, but my focus was on Will. Well, and my friend Laura sitting next to me - I guess we had our own little backchannel as we whispered tiny asides to one another during the presentation. Guess what? The small conversation Laura and I had during Will’s talk added to my understanding of his ideas while NOT drawing my attention from his voice/words. I engaged with the presentation and wasn’t distracted. Lesson learned: no backchannel/laptop = great learning experience. Not for everyone, perhaps, but I know my limits. In the afternoon workshop session, though, I had a laptop and ended up doing a few other things as members of the group were talking about things (learning RSS) that I have pretty much down already.

I brought my online connections offline

I had the opportunity to meet John Pederson and Will Richardson offline - 2 people who I have connected with online. John is someone who I met on Twitter and then engaged in email dialogue and blog discussions with, another Wisconsin edtechie. John actually told me about the workshop - I would have never known about it otherwise! I had never directly communicated with Will before, but had read and commented on his blog and followed him on twitter. I was also able to meet, through strange coincidence, the brother-in-law (I think?) of Diana Laufenberg, another member of my online network. The man I met is an administrator in a nearby district and a colleague of my friend. It never ceases to amaze me how our online world translates into face-to-face connections!

Crossing lines

John and I had a great conversation about his love of the game World of Warcraft (sorry for outing you, John!) and the richness of the gaming community. We talked briefly about the difference between WoW and Second Life (with which I’m not very familiar) and also about breaking out of niche networks. Will asked what other people I interact with online, if not just educators, and I briefly explained my connections with many people in PR, social media, mommy/daddy bloggers…….and just plain PEOPLE.

I tried to define what these connections mean to me and how interacting with only educators makes my world a small place - opening the doors to other professions and people mean I better understand the world I’m living in and raising my children in. I can’t truly understand how technology is impacting our students and our world until I understand how the rest of society is using it. The use of social technologies needs to be understood OUTSIDE education before being implemented within, I firmly believe this. This is one of my main reasons for starting This Mommy Gig - to use social tools to interact with people on a topic I’m passionate about - my children. As I explained, the cool thing about this is that my worlds collide - many of the people I’m connecting with about parenting are also in my educational network.

Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Philadelphia

As John, Will, and I talked, the words Philadelphia, Science Leadership Academy, and Chris Lehman kept coming up. I’ve been reading and hearing about Chris and SLA for a long time now, but it was great to get to talk about the school and the remarkable things being done there in more depth. John and Will both asked if I’m going to Philadelphia in January, and I had to laugh………..on my current freelancer/consultant schedule, lifestyle (mom of 2 toddlers with limited childcare), and budget, trips across the country just aren’t feasible. I had to pay out of my own pocket for the workshop on Tuesday. Everyone else was there on district/company dollar, I can be certain in saying. I also didn’t go to NECC or BlogHer this year - these just aren’t in my reality at the moment. Someday, someday……………

Focus on fear

The overwhelming tone of the questions from the audience members focused on fear of the online world. I believe Will did a good job of explaining the realities and possibly minimizing these feelings of the people listening, but it just exhausts me. Maybe I’ve talked to too many people this year about the topic, but it’s just depressing how many educators still avoid online work with students because of F. E. A. R. The fear-factor also focused heavily on parental fear of online interactions, confirming my belief that every school needs to implement parent workshops of the type I conducted last winter for a small group of middle school parents. I’ll work on forming those thoughts in more depth in the future……..

Filters

We had the opportunity to see the River Falls High School filter in work as Will tried to show a few different sites. Among the blocked were MySpace and Facebook - no surprise there. However, also among the blocked were Popular Mechanics, Google blog search, and Technorati. Huh? Teachable moment to be sure. What blew my mind was what WASN’T blocked - a website (pretty horrible one) for a militant Aryan nation group. Just goes to show what many of us have been saying for a long time - filters aren’t working for us, they’re working against us. Note: I’m not even particularly saying the Aryan nation site SHOULD be blocked (even though it was horrible), but that when a filter is blocking innocuous sites like Technorati and NOT a hate group site, something’s wrong.

We had some great discussion on this topic, including one teacher commenting on how she likes having the filter in place because it means she can work one-on-one with students and “not worry about the others.” Of course I opened my big mouth and talked about proxies, consequences, classroom management, etc in response to her remark. That attitude is one which MANY teachers fall back on again and again. I asked Will what his ideal filter would be like, assuming one was required - he said one in which teachers had the ability to immediately whitelist sites they come across that were unnecessarily blocked. Perfect answer!

Bottom Line

I really enjoyed the keynote address in the morning and was thoroughly engaged and challenged during the entire thing. Most of the time I was nodding in agreement as I share many of Will’s belief’s about media literacy and the need for drastic change in today’s schools. I loved sharing the experience with my good friend and meeting new people, some of whom I hope to connect again with in the future. I left feeling a bit overwhelmed with the challenges facing education in the U.S. today and have a LOT to grapple with as I try to understand my place in this system and the kind of system in which I want my children to attend school.

What next?

Kevin Jarrett made a great point on twitter this morning, saying first:

Finished grading 2/3 of Walden papers. Cool seeing MSEd students quote Schrock, Richardson, Warlick, others I am fortunate to call friends. about 6 hours ago from web

and then:

What I want to know is when will I see them quoting Bretag, Davis, Stager, Jakes, Martinez, Lehmann, Utecht, so many other friend/scholars? about 6 hours ago from web

When do we start hearing from some new names OFFLINE? When do these voices (among MANY others, way too many to name here) start becoming commonplace among administrators and educators worldwide?

*Will Richardson’s resource wiki contains additional resources about the topics on which he spoke

Think back to your first month of college, regardless of whether it was this year or 30 years ago. Were you prepared? Did you feel competent among your classmates and friends?

Yesterday Patrick Higgins made a comment that struck me as a perfect way to assess whether schools are adequately preparing students for the rigors of college - he mentioned the survey he’s giving to all of the students from his school who just completed their first year of college. This seems to me the perfect way to determine if the students from your school are actually READY for that wild world of academia - if I had a school, I’d be jumping all over this!

Back to that question - was I prepared for college? Academically, definitely. Overall? Nope.

Tim Walker egged me on and egged me on to write this post, and I first balked because when I write about something I’m really passionate about I sometimes have a hard time conveying my true feelings - the rationale is all THERE in my head and has been for so long that it’s hard to get it out. Here’s my stab at it, one of a multi-part attempt to get my head around the issue -

My friends and I weren’t prepared for college for one simple reason - we were lacking time management skills. Sure, some of us had “Life Skills” classes in high school, but it didn’t prepare us for the complete and utter openness of the college experience. We went from being scheduled every single minute in high school to having a college class schedule, but WAY too much “open” time.

Who’s fault was it?

The high school I attended was on the quarter block system, which meant that teachers used the 90 minute periods to teach a long-ish lesson and then we worked on our homework in class with peers. Helllllllloooooooo reality the minute we hit our first university course! There was no time to work on homework in class and there was also no parent scheduling our afterschool time or weekends. How about those gaps of time on Tuesday mornings from 9-12:30 when I didn’t have class? I was NOT prepared for that! The last time I wasn’t working or going to school on a Tuesday morning must have been the summer after 8th grade!

I also wasn’t prepared for the ability to just not go to class - sure, some professors penalized us for not attending, but back in high school we were given the threat of being arrested if we skipped too much school - they scared us into attending! Also, our parents were held accountable for our actions - they were notified if we didn’t attend class and expected to take action.

Fast forward 3 months and it was ALL on us.

As Patrick mentioned polling students about academic skills they felt they needed for success in college, I immediately thought - but what about LIFE skills? Are we preparing our students (and own children) for life after us? Are we preparing them to make the choice about going to class and to assess how much free time is too much free time?

As we schedule our children in activity upon activity from the moment they are born, are we doing more harm than good?

My intention is to avoid this with my own children - I want to minimize the number of activities they’re in and help them learn to manage their OWN time. What to do with a free weekend? Homework or play? I want the consequences on THEM, not me. The only way to learn from mistakes is to be held accountable for them. I learned this the hard way in my college health and phy ed class where I earned one of my 2 C’s - it was the easiest course EVER, but I didn’t go to lectures because they seemed pointless and I could get the material from the textbook. Huh, turns out they took attendance.

I suffered from my own bad decisions - I think we as a society need to start letting our students and children learn just a few things the hard way.

Stop scheduling, stop cushioning the blows.

And now I head out the door for a 3-day trip to my hometown where I’ll see some high school friends - I look forward to discussing their experiences from that time period now that we’ve had a *few* years to process it all……….

This is the status of the twitter network issues many of us had on Wednesday night (losing over half or all of our followers and followees) - the reply is from Jason Goldman of Twitter posted to the thread on GetSatisfaction.com:

Jason Goldman replied to Followers and Following are all gone - when will this be fixed?, a problem about Twitter.

Thank you to all the folks who provided additional information. We went into maintenance mode to recover from the missing user problem which was caused by a data inconsistency problem.

We were able to restore to an earlier version of the relationship data. You may still see out of date information for one of the following reasons:

1) The changes are still propagating out to all parts of the site. It will take several hours for the data to be correctly reflected everywhere.

2) There may be some missing data as a result of this restore. In particular, changes you made to your social relationships in the past 12 hours may not be reflected.

3) Notwithstanding the first two points, the counts that appear in your profile for followers or followings may be slightly different than they were before. Those counts are generated from a cache that was not always a perfect reflection of the true data. Therefore, the counts may slightly change.

I completely understand how frustrated everyone is by this outage. Thanks for your patience as we recover and work to make sure it won’t happen again.

I’m heading out of town for 3 days - I’m just going to hide out and hope for the best when I get back! Because, as much as I love Twitter - it’s all about the network. No network, no fun.

UPDATE: It appears as if my network is growing again, and there’s another post on GetSatisfaction saying they fixed the problem manually. Fingers. Crossed.