homoLudens

Bryan Bell is moving on from KCSOS Web team. Damn and whoopie!

In July, 2002, I posted a long item called Translating,
Tweaking and - Whoopie! - Making a Mess. It was about
blogging in the classroom, about some of its challenges, and about how
partners could help overcome those challenges. I wrote, “The damn blog
problem is with teachers being locked in their rooms and out of the
digital hallway: the absence of publicly funded and reliable hosting,
the absence of working computers in classrooms, the absence of nearby
blogging partners, and the absence of trust that teachers can learn,
master and use blogging software.”

Bryan has been my mentor in everything I’ve done with blogs and tech
in schools and writing projects since the spring of  2000, when I
saw his name on a Manila template, saw it again on a KCSOS web page,
and cold called him to see if he’d get me blog hosting for BAWP and
MLK. We were up and running in about 2 days. Some of the results (a few no longer in use) are
stacked in chronological order below:

In that same July 2002 post, I explored what teaching partners do for
each other. Bryan was my tech partner for four years, the guy who
bailed me out and pushed me on, listened to my schemes and (damn!)
helped make some of them come true. Along they way, we laughed almost every time we talked. So here’s a rewrite in his honor:

Teacher and tech partners tell each other that it - the training
session, the template, the software bug fix, the funding proposal, the
conference weekend, the semester, the year, the career, the blog (!) -
will go just fine. Partners generally believe each other. Even when
time, and personalities, and the difficulty of communicating from remote
locations on different schedules, complicate their relationships. What
tech and teacher partners do for each other is mysterious, and does
not, contrary to the results of annual evaluations and reports and the
general belief of school site and county office of education
administrators, have much to do with lesson plans and poster paper
charts of scopes and sequences, with the deliverables’ schedule and
spreadsheets of income streams. Nor does it have much to do with the
software “stuff” that gets shared. The relationship between tech and
teacher partners is much subtler and deeper than than that. Partners,
when they’re good, help to give each other the ideas of themselves, the
images of self, that enable them to enter the school and office and
find meaning in their work every day.



This is a tricky undertaking, and requires the partners not only to
maintain a faith that each shares only in intermittent flashes, but
also to like each other, which is hard to do. Teachers, at least during
their work year, are only rarely likable. Educational tech types share
this social flaw. They bring nothing to the party, leave their game at
the podium or overhead or split-screen workstation. They fear their
contribution to the general welfare to be evanescent, even doubtful,
and, since the business of public education is only marginally a
respectable enterprise that increasingly attracts people who sense this
marginality all too keenly, teacher and good tech partners need each
other more than they need anything else, blogs included.

And oh yeah - this homoLudens design is his work too. I’ll miss him.