homoLudens

“They brought them dead sons from the war,
And daughters whom life had crushed,    
And their children fatherless, cryingó    
All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.”

The game begins: Warm Up, Introduction, Expectations. More to come. WARNING: Players need a “Get out of school and be free” card to begin. Tick tock.

Day before yesterday I got a form letter response of “thanks but no thanks” from a central school district
office near and drear to my heart. It was in reply to an application submitted on 12/15/2003.
Five month turn around - not bad for the old urban bureaucrazy. So I
won’t get a job with an IT department whose incompetent representative wiped out
all of the Galileo library database, blamed us for the problem (”You
mean you don’t do burn-to-CD backups because someone from my
department told you that the outrageously expensive server tape backup
system means you don’t have to do backups? Well, that’s YOUR fault!”),
and then pronounced with absolute conviction that the data was lost
forever. Forever. That’s when (as reported earlier) our Galileo server
tech, Minh Ly, looked around a bit, found a file, called the software
vendor, and recovered the data in 15 minutes.

This
set back on my career path disappoints.
Relegated to its obscure northern reaches, I’ll have to make due with
the district’s most efficent site IT team, smartest principal, sharpest
faculty, best tech infrastructure, fastest internet connection, fullest
collection of online databases (OED anyone?), coolest kids, and
most international connections. Small solace as all that may be,
even Gal offers the occasional visitor from the center of the Heavenly
Kingdom. This Tuesday it will be none other than our mayor, in the
Li-blog-ary to announce his new budget. 60 members of the press are
anticipated. A banner with our school logo (and URL!) will be his back
drop. Like Wang Wei to Assitant Magistrate Chang, I feel I owe His Honor (without whom I wouldn’t be married) a poetic tribute, and so:

Greeting the City Mayor Newsom

Now in middle age,
I know the value of library silence,

The district’s affairs no longer stir my heart.

Turning to my catalog and websites, I have no greater plan,

All I can do is settle into my cluttered office.

A bay breeze blows the shade behind me,

The class bell rings in the hallway; I post a news item.

You ask me why the world must rise and fall,

A kid grabs a book off a shelf and checks it out.

It’s a middle aged attitude, this notion that if it’s not fun, it’s
definitely not worth it. Money helps too, so we wrote two grants,
schmoozed from various other accounts, and creatively “re-positioned”funds within the larger school budget. Result: a PAID group of 16
teachers ready for a board game with these moving pieces: Manila,
Blackboard, IM, Photoshop, iPhoto, iMovie, Net News Wire, and
CURRICULUM.  On the Blog-opoly site we’ll collaboratively plan the four day agenda, review it, revise it, and implement it.

Kudos to our senior SLAC-er designer, Loi L., whose talent is only surpassed by his patience. If we get sued by Milton Bradley, we promise to visit him in Jail.

Beamish Alan comments thusly on the last post:

And obviously (I would have thought - ahem), that is what I meant by
“simple, clean and slick.” I assume, dear reader (There is afterall
only one of you, and that on a dull night to boot.), that previous
posts (5/13/03)
to the effect that “LEARNING objects (!) to learning objects” made my
opinions clear. LOR’s are silly. Learners and their teachers aren’t.
Alan and the MLX crew know this.

An impending frabjous day. I just posted this news from Alan Levine over on eBN. It’s exciting because of what it might mean for deepening the roots of Gal’s and BAWP’s
(and other) teaching community efforts. MLX is, IMHO, the simplest,
cleanest and slickest Learning Object Repository I’ve ever seen:

Our legal department was supportive, even enthusiastic, about our plans to provide an openMLX, the proposed open source version of the Maricopa Learning eXchange??? We have been doing some redesign, re-programming of the mother MLX, the new packing slip featuring more useful display and posting for comments and “sharebacks.”
We have some bits to do inside the “Loading Dock” the package creation
area, but by next week we should be testing out the new, “vanilla”version???I guess most folks out there are waitng to see the “beef”. [cogdogblog Alan Levine]

And if you haven’t taken a tour of MLX, do it now and offer thanks unto Maricopa’s beamish boy .

OK, so he’s got a “plan” for Iraq. Now how about one for this deal:

Wherein the middle-muddled author masters a magical assault on his
waning powers with the aid of distant and appropriately propitiated
spiritual allies. Read more???

he regularly gets me thinking about what I don’t know I’m thinking about. In this case, his pointer to Christopher Allen begins to frame a conversation on Galileo community building energized by Manila blogs and Blackboard sites. David
describes the post as a “fascinating analysis of optimal group sizes
with particular application to online group formation and activity.”Here’s a quote from the article, slightly more than DCT used:

Life With Alacrity: The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes:
This all leads me to hypothesize that the optimal size for active group
members for creative and technical groups — as opposed to exclusively
survival-oriented groups, such as villages — hovers somewhere between
25-80, but is best around 45-50. Anything more than this and the group
has to spend too much time ‘grooming’ to keep group cohesion, rather
then focusing on why the people want to spend the effort on that group
in the first place — say to deliver a software product, learn a
technology, promote a meme, or have fun playing a game. Anything less
than this and you risk losing critical mass because you don’t have
requisite variety.

Imagine an educational example added to
the list above. What if the group were a vibrant cadre of friendly
educators within a faculty of about 130, hooked into writing and
reading about their teaching practice and their students learning while
having a hell of a good time? What’s the optimal number in that setting?

What appears to be happening at ‘G-house on the bay‘
is a locally rooted digital community. The notion of a web-linked work
community is no big thing for business people, especially for tech
business people, but for an urban public school, it’s unusual. Gal’s
gradual adoption of blogging and Blackboard-ing and IM-ing and RSS-ing
and e-mailing within a large building has begun to save time, discover
resources, improve collaboration and inspire creativity. How do we
nurture those beginnings?

When I worked for the AFSC,
field staff explicitly discussed theories and approaches to community
building. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such conversations take root
within a public school faculty. Sure, there are the usual department
and whole faculty and special project and “school within a school”initiatives. They inevitably deadend. (Does ANYONE now remember those
halcyon ‘restructuring‘
days? [BTW, that link to Frisco's Ben Franklin Middle was the first hit
on a Google search. I used to coach at Ben for ACCESS. It's a 'dead and
met its maker' FORMER restructured school, about to be closed or taken
over by a 'dream school' initiative.
Well, I suppose that's restructuring of a sort.]) Money, faculty
turn-over, administrative brouhahas, all contribute to the failures.
But essentially, such community building efforts are always top down.
Disruptive technologies make control from the top difficult. Hmmm.

An early adopter at Gal is Dave Barrios. He’s subscribed to homoLudens. I IM-ed him earlier to read the Allen piece. Let’s see what happens.

Friend David Hardy writes: