Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category
I've been working both on the competency questions for the ontology I'm working on, and the ways to integrate it better into the Academic Institution Internal Structure Ontology (AIISO).
Toward the end of the break, I started thinking about how I wanted to approach the new year in terms of "productivity." I had read this article in Wired where Chris Hardwick tries three different productivity systems. I had only read GTD (of course), but had toyed with buying the other two, so I was grateful to Hardwick for having read them for me. I gleaned a few good tidbits from his experience.
1. Don't check email in the morning. I had already decided not to check email in the morning. I used to check it, oh, about now, before I'd even finished coffee. This is a bad idea. Email contains stuff other people want you to do and when you're working for yourself, you should put your own work first. Yes, some of it will be responses to your own queries and from people you really want to hear from, but it will all still be there a couple of hours from now. I managed to not check email at all over the last week. This was hard at first, but got really easy later on.
2. Take breaks completely away from your work. Go for a walk in the park. Knit. For god's sake, get away from the computer! Hardwick actually did go for a walk and found it really did clear his head. I'm not sure he'll keep up with it, but it's something I definitely want to do. It will go nicely with my resolution to get outside more.
3. Think in terms of next actions. This is something I got from David Allen, of course, but Hardwick took this message to heart too. It is the one thing that I think is really useful in breaking down tasks. For example, one of my resolutions is to remodel a room in the house. Mr. Geeky and I would both like to work on the bathroom. The first thing we need to do is find potential contractors. So, I put on my list "Search Angie's List for Contractor for Bathroom." Simple. When I'm done with that, I'll put, "Call so-and-so for bathroom consult and estimate."
Although this didn't come from Hardwick, another approach I'm taking is to only focus on three things in any given day. I'm also going to constantly review my tasks and goals to make sure things are balanced. I think in the past I've always put too much on my plate because that's what most of these productivity plans encourage. Even the 4-day workweek book is about starting businesses and making enough money to hire people to do everything for you. The work may be frontloaded, but it's still a lot of work. Now I have an eye to keep my days as open as possible instead of trying to be "productive."
Before we broke for the Winter Break, I was lucky enough to converse with language and technology colleagues from Case Western Reserve University. Case has a large and growing presence in Second Life, and when I received an email from my colleague Tina at Case that she worked with a Spanish instructor who wanted to use Case’s space for Spanish conversation practice and was looking for others with whom she could collaborate. And since this is exactly what I was hoping to do with my students, well, I was happy to have the invitation and even happier to jump in.
What follows are a couple of Machinima videos captured by Second Life Guru Sue at Case of our conversations. The first video is of Sue, me, Carolina from Case and the ever present, ubiquitous Dafne from Venezuela (well not us, of course, ’twas our avatars) sitting in the café that Sue set up specifically for language conversations.
[Ah Dafne: I have taught this Spanish conversation course using social software for three years now and Dafne, somehow, someway, has been a presence in every single one of these classes. I never plan for it, but she, like others whom I have come to know virtually through these tools, is always willing and more than able to share her expertise, her talents, and her language with my students. I often where I would be, where my teaching would be, where my students' learning might --not-- be without the kindness of strangers such as Dafne.]
The second video is a snippet of a tour that Dafne gave us of Ciudad Bonita, a remarkable immersive environment for Spanish language learning created by the folks at LanguageLab.com.
Here is a blog post from ll.com that talks about Ciudad Bonita and Dafne’s efforts to make it happen. Here is yet another blog post about this location
I am still trying to figure out whether one has to have an account with languagelab.com to go there, bring students there, explore there. I am looking forward to speaking with Paul Sweeney (the head of Languagelab.com) later in the month.
Here are the videos of our “meetings” (Man, could I have more work meetings like this…like meetings where I can fly?…please?)
(Click on the screen shot to run the video)
CWRU Language Café
LanguageLab.com’s Ciudad Bonita (Bank) Video
Dafne has since sent me this info about an upcoming in-world conference in Second Life for Language Educators… enjoy.
More to follow….
So sorry we dropped off the planet there for about 10 days. Somewhere around the 15th of December LLU was hacked. Oh my.
~Our stats page reveals all~
Many thanks to our faithful readers who noticed something was wrong and let us know. Many thanks and snaps to Ryan for several days of chatting with Bluehost and for paring down the backup version of the blog’s database from the 500MB bloat-o-rama it had become into to something a bit more lean and hungry.
And soon…Ryan will be migrating this baby over to Wordpress 2.7 and a new theme. Say goodbye to the scary snout (her name is Large Marge and she loved every moment of the last three years of gracing our blog, but its time for her to go) and get ready for something a little more upbeat.
Oh my. We have just finished three years in the blogosphere. I know that isn’t a lot when compared to others…but for the brief instant when I realized suddenly the blog potentially — wasn’t — it was sorta scary. A body of work, a bunch of people’s combined work, was only as good as its most recent back-up. (Note to all: Back up your work, folks, early and often)
So here we go (again)… new year, new tools, new thoughts, new dogs… still unleashed.
Peace.
It’s about time I blogged this, so why not go with New Year’s Day, 2009. This post could also be titled, “What to do while waiting for a Blur Reunion”. I had every intention of posting this in June after seeing Monkey: Journey to the West at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, S.C. Busy weeks followed and summer came and went. At the end of August an album was released of the music from Monkey, and it was a surprise hit in the U.K. Should have blogged it then. Next, the trials and tribulations of buying a new house and now here we are at the beginning of a new year. So it’s time to tell you about this wonderful experience called Monkey.
I went with my wife and son and the first few minutes things are loud and everything is coming right at you – and we were in the front row! My then 5 year-old son wasn’t sure what he had gotten himself into. Things settled down a bit after the initial excitement. The story is fairly easy to follow, even though the dialog is in Mandarin. There were subtitles for the show, but for us to see them we were almost literally looking straight up into the air. The show was so compelling that it truly wasn’t worth the pain of craning my neck.
A fine synopsis of the show can be found at Wikipedia, but it’s a classic Chinese folk tale that has been told numerous times. In England, in the late 70’s, Monkey was a TV show that Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett loved to watch. Kind of the equivalent of the Kung Fu series here in the states, Monkey Magic memories are what gave Albarn and Hewlett the impetus to work on the opera. Albarn is the musician behind the real-life band Blur, the animated band Gorillaz, and the superb one-off work entitled The Good, the Bad, and the Queen. Hewlett is the animator of the afore mentioned Gorillaz as well as the cultish Tank Girl comic.
As Manchester International Festival (where Monkey debuted in 2007) director Alex Poots points out, the original meaning of the word opera means “works”, meaning different art forms coming together. This is like no other opera you have seen. The unique nature of this show is what has earned it rave reviews. Aside from the one stateside run, the show has mostly played in the U.K. A film version of the production has not to this point been confirmed, but if it ever materializes, I couldn’t more highly recommend that you see it. Certainly, if you have a chance to see the live opera, do not hesitate to get tickets.
In addition to the trailer from the show above, I recommend you take in Damon and Jamie’s Excellent Adventure available after creating an account at Blurcast.tv or you can watch the aggregated YouTube videos located in an experimental site with a working title of YouTube Documentaries. Happy New Year!
Happy New Year everyone! Here is the first post of 2009 on the first day of 2009.
Last years resolution to blog daily failed spectacularly around February I believe, but I got a lot out of it for the time I did. It pushed me to be creative and put those half-finished thoughts out there, make a mess.
I have more to say, but right now I am battling a cold that won’t let me go. So there are resolutions to come and more thoughts that have been in pieces in my brain that I hope to get out there.
For now I am drinking my tea and watching old home videos. It is a good life.
I hope everyone started the year off well. We went to a big party, where I knew just a couple of people. It was fun but not quite what I might have chosen to do. We survived, stopping by another friend's house on our way home, then celebrating a little with the kids when we got home.
I have been thinking about my resolutions for the last couple of days. In general, my theme for the year is simplify and balance. So here are some of the things I'd like to accomplish this year.
Career/Professional
-write every day to work towards completing two projects
-officially set up my business
Home/Family
-take the kids on an international trip
-go on a date with my husband at least twice a month
-remodel a room
-continue to get rid of stuff and organize
Personal
-get outside at least 3 times a week
-get to know my city
There's actually a lot more I want to do, but I'm going to take it one day, one week, one month at a time, continuing to evaluate as I go. i feel positive about the coming year. It feels full of possibility and change and for me that's a very good thing.
I'd love to see everyone's resolutions--link below if you want. And Happy New Year!
It is the last day of 2008, and as with many others, it is a time for reflection.
2008 was certainly a very different year from my 57 previous ones. Even though I had worked with computers for years and had engaged in online learning for the past dozen years, in many ways I was a creature of the Web 1.0 era. I did not grow up with interactivity - I grew up with Basic computer language and dial-up modems. The computer was a tool that I used primarily offline, but I did go online to go places (my online class in Blackboard, Google, Mapquest, even Wikipedia). In my developmental years, my web interactions were mostly one-way and teacher-oriented. I remained in control of my journey and knew where I was headed.
With my colleagues at the Center for Teaching Excellence, Jeff Nugent and Bud Deihl, I had begun dabbling in Web 2.0 apps like Ning sites (Classroom 2.0 and College 2.0) and delicious in 2007, but I was still primarily a voyeur. My colleague Jeff would prod me to try out different sites or check out different blogs, but I did so rather passively. My “network” for the most part consisted of people I worked with and a couple of others. At the start of the year, I was subscribing to about ten blogs and a variety of journal and news sites. It was not until January 13, 2008, that a blog post by Michele Martin grabbed me.
Over the course of a couple of days last January, Michele discussed her own growth online and illustrated this with her social media spiral shown above. I saw myself in that spiral, and recognized that to grow, I needed to move higher up the spiral. I had moved from isolated consumption to aggregation in 2007, but I was still of the mindset that few would be interested in anything I might have to say. I really cannot say why, but Michele’s spiral was the tipping point for me that moved me to start my own blog.
Michele cheered me on during that first month, as did Sue Waters, a new “friend” whose advice and guidance helped be grow as a blogger. My network began to grow as I entered the spiral of commenting and blogging. By May 2008, I felt confident enough to join the 31-Day Blog Comment Challenge. It was exhausting but illuminating, and it added new friends like Ken Allen to my network. Along the way, I learned that my “personal” learning network was really a social one and not an individual one. I was learning from the likes of Will Richardson, Michele Martin, Wes Fryer, Vicki Davis, Jeff Utecht and many, many more - and that learning was social. These superstars were interacting and commenting on my comments and blog posts!
As I taught this fall, my frequency of blogging slowed. Part of that is due to the time spent microblogging in Twitter with many of the same people I follow through their blogs. Part of it was due to redesigning my online course - Instructional Uses of the Internet. The redesign was driven in large part by my experience in the spiral. 2008 was the year I made the leap to social networking, and it was transformational. I now view my life and my job through a different lens than I did a year ago, shaped by the global friendships I have made and continue to make.
Learning in a Flat World. The name still fits. This will be my 125th post this year. There have been 310 comments, comments that helped me learn - and comments from all over the globe. I am still humbled by the ClustrMap above. My readership is worldwide with nearly 4,600 hits since I started tracking it last February. More importantly, I have gotten to know some of the gifted people behind those red dots marking the globe. I see them as mentors, colleagues, collaborators, and friends. I see the world as a different place from the way I viewed it pre-2008.
Tom Friedman remarked that the world had gotten flat and closer due to the internet. While I loved his book and had done several seminars on THE WORLD IS FLAT, I do not think that I really understood that until 2008.
To those who have journeyed with me this past year, my deepest thanks! You have made me a better educator!
Just think what 2009 might bring!
Authored by Britt. Hosted by Edublogs. addthis_url = 'http%3A%2F%2Fbwatwood.edublogs.org%2F2008%2F12%2F31%2Fa-year-in-the-spiral%2F'; addthis_title = 'A+Year+in+the+Spiral'; addthis_pub = '';
