homoLudens

Update via Bud.)

NAGoogle or GooNASA: “

Here’s an update on the Google/NASA collaboration.

The
weekend approaches, the last long weekend before the long summer.
Everything that could go wrong with tech integration at Galileo has
gone wrong this year. Final straw is the departure of our three most
tech-savvy teachers. Well, it is urban public education.

In hopes of reviving flagging spirits, I’m off next week to NetSquared, where I’m told I’ll find:

The line-up looks great and the non-profit angle certainly includes BAWP
and, at a stretch, public ed. It would be nice to get some advice on a
school-friendly content management system out of the experience.

And he’s from Jersey too. What the hell, I can go along with the
hysterical visions of the weatherless. So ok, ok, it snowed in SF
tonight.

(Props to Meiko for the photo.)

From Joan, a colleague in the Southern Louisiana Writing Project, unedited and unathorized, but I think she would approve:

monkBlog’s Denis writes in an email:

To have the respect (cough snarl cough) of your buddies is a karmic
blessing beyond measure.

The D
& D resource
is pretty cool, btw. And it might get me in the faces of the
increasingly creepy X-tian presence infiltrating my school if I had time to do some part of it. Could
someone fund me a clerk helper so I can follow up on
this? Any rich atheists or agnostics or just plain rational people out
there?

So I yesterday I mentioned this notion of ”low tech high teas,” an
imagined series of informal gatherings at which SF Bay area teachers,
some linked to Galileo Academy, some to the Bay Area Writing Project
at UC Berkeley, and others just interested fellow travelers,
occasionally hang out in a comfortable tech-rich place. The ”teas”
will (initially) use my Bernal Heights house and garden for stress-free
afternoons where can explore technology for classroom and personal
uses. Emphasis will be on relaxing, learning, asking, laughing, eating,
drinking and generally having a good time. This idea is NOT a plan,
since it will change as people alter their purposes in attending. I’m
hoping we can set it up so some techie (whatever that word means)
partners feel at home and have a good time hanging out and conversing
in a mutually entertaining way with regular classroom teachers. I think
they’ll be pleasantly surprised by our appreciation of their 
”deus ex machina” visits. In their own ways, public school teachers
are nuts as hard to crack as techies (whatever that word means).

Maybe we’ll announce some ”topics” in advance. Say for instance that Erin or Tom happen to be in the neighborhood for a weekend and would be willing to field questions about Manila
(a CMS that doesn’t get much press and serves some of us pretty cheaply
and reliable, even if - boo! hiss! - it’s NOT open source). Maybe SF
local Matt Mullenweg thinks it cool to dazzle us educational Luddites with (open source!) WordPress. Joel Arquillos or Mindy Chiang might volunteer a guided tour around Moodle. Unforeseen things could happen too. Mike Lawrence might show up and offer everybody a discounted CUE membership. Or some bloggerCon attendees passing through might pause for a (free) drink long enough to learn how the radical ”unconference” idea
was old hat to Quakers 75 years ago and has influenced decades of
meeting structures for progressive teachers. (Why do all new druids
need to forget the reliable old druids?) Or maybe the Windows Active
Directory addict at our district IT center feels frisky and wants to
try his hand at explaining to a bunch of application-deprived local
high school English teachers why they can’t have the software they want
today, tomorrow or EVER! And of course, we’ll have a bunch of teaching
(NOT techie) partners who can talk in kitchen or the hallway about what
they know of tech that WORKS in the impossible conditions of our
California classrooms.

We’re hoping for a conversation, an
initial talking that helps us learn to talk to each other. The real
impact of such a series of events will not be the software or hardware
suggestions elicited by stumblingly articulated questions. It won’t be
the sum of the tips and tricks that get passed on. It won’t be the
arguments, complaints or inevitable stubborn disappointments and
misunderstandings. It won’t even be the surprising mutual
appreciations. The real impact will be in discovering that we can talk
to techies (whatever that word means), and they can talk to school
teachers, in ways not terrifying or frustrating to either side of the
conversation. Learning that conversation is possible is the most
important step toward having conversations.

It probably won’t work. I thought eBN2003 wouldn’t work. The guests decided otherwise.

Meanwhile, this tiny local model has a larger scaled twin. eBN has a plan. Well, not a plan; an idea. More later.

I should post more often. Otherwise I might become a ”has-Blogged.” 
LOL. I don’t think of myself as a ”hasBlogged.” Not quite yet. I’m
just not a techie (whatever that word means). Lots of blogging educators post about the latest and
greatest tech tool and the latest and greatest revolutionary
implications of the latest and greatest tech tool. They are techies
(whatever that word means). They like the details and the secrets.

Yawn.

Here’s an analogy. I have this cool VCR / DVD player. The friend who
helped me choose it comes over to the house maybe twice a month. He can
make that VCR / DVD player do all sorts of neat things. He can work
these wonders via either the control panel or various remote
controls. The control panel and the remotes defeat me in about 10
seconds. He says we have excellent equipment.I can’t figure out how he
makes it do the cool stuff: the
timed
recording, the subtitle function, screen image settings. I just like to
watch
movies. I’ve learned enough about the contraption (notice the “trap” in
the middle of that word) to watch movies.

I can’t pretend to such techie (whatever that word means) fascination. I don’t have the
time (OK, I don’t have the patience or interest) to even figure out
where the damn downloads go on this user-friendly Mac. At work, David looks over my shoulder sometimes and shudders at the impossible disorder of what I casually refer to as my desktop. Bryan
used to roll his digital eyes every time I’d ask him again and again and
again where iChat stores the archive files. When co-workers and
teachers see what I do with Manila for Galileo and BAWP and the NWP and then start referring to me (to ME!!! for god’s sake) as a techie (whatever that word means), then we KNOW
that technology (whatever the hell that word means) is way too
complicated. The ridiculous complexity of it all makes me a very
uninspired and uninspiring techie (whatever that word means) .

A case  in  point: RSS. Or, uh, XML? OK, Atom. Feed? Syndication? As a genuine techie, Tim  Bray, asks, who the hell cares what they call it?

Hereís
the truth: an orange ìXMLî sticker that produces gibberish  when
you click on it does not win friends and influence people.  The
notion that the general public is going to grok that you copy the URI
and  paste it into your feed-reader is just ridiculous.”

Just
make the tool - aggregator, html editor, blog, CMS, LMS, photo
manager, whatever the tool is - more user-friendly than a DVD/VCR.
Blog(a)thering about RSS’s revolutionary potential seems a
waste of time  when the concept of
aggregating news and the UI are both so complicated. I work with
people who get confused attaching docs to email, inserting tables in a
word processing doc, and remembering the difference between a
browser and  the World Wide Web. And these folks are NOT all
members of the boomer generation. They’re who I’m supposed to reach with
the wonders of technology integration.

Getting off line for seven weeks this
summer (Tuscany and Hong Kong - how’s that for a juxtaposition
of cultures and climes?) gave me a chance to think about how I got comfortable just enough with tech for all my colleagues to
think of me as a techie (whatever that word means). It’s pretty simple: I made friends
with some  real techies (whatever that word means) and implored them to help me. I retained
maybe 10% of what they  taught me because that 10% made my
job easier. Just that little bit of knowledge has led to some
interesting teacher work and even some good press (here and here). (Hey, that positive press thing is big in an urban school district.)

So a few of the SF /Bay Area 10% club is going to sponsor an informal  group of Galileo and BAWP teachers who can meet some real
techies (whatever that word means - ok, an example) to learn the 10% that will make their jobs easier. We’ll start
with a “low tech high tea” here at my house in Bernal Heights in September. Idea is to
let people wander between the (small) main house and the empty studio
apartment nextdoor, using(if thefog god is kind) the garden and porch
and patios too, with wireless and at least five house-provided laptops and
any other laptops that folks bring with them. There’ll be
snacks, BYOWhateverYouDrink, an enormous pot of minestrone, and absolute
permission to hang out, have fun and not learn anything. If it works, we
might be able to recapture some of the magic of the 2003eBN conference,
where programmers, web writers, vendors, superintendents of
instruction, server admins, designers, hypertext pioneers, teachers,
and students all spend 2 days talking understandably to each other.
This time the gathering is in service to a local community. Geography
might sustain momentum after the initial “tea.”

If you live in the Bay area and this intrigues you, drop me an email. I’m especially interested in attracting some real
techies (whatever that word means) who might think it worthwhile to
hang out with and talk to teachers.  Insecure but wanting to
learn teachers I can gather by the dozens.

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.

Taken, by Susie Ming of BADRAP (Bay Area Doglovers Responsible About Pitbulls).

This from Gary’s recent posting on Craig’s list, 2 beds for large, elderly pooch. I especially like the “in every room” part. That’s what I’ll expect.

I got a request for an interview about eBn from a
reporter. Good questions followed. Last
night’s incredible Paris-like rain in Shanghai had us exploring the
former French Concession into the
wee hours and I was content to work all today answering the
questions. In the middle, I realized homoLudens’ fourth
anniversary had come and gone. That led to even further rumination on
four years and the answers got longer and longer. The whole
interminable thing is here for those who have way too much time on their hands. But this early part of it I like as a sort of blogDay greeting to my Galileo, BAWP and eBN friends: