So Long and Thanks for all the Fish
[cue Tom Petty’s “Time to Move On”]
For those who haven’t already counted me out, now’s the moment you’ve been putting off for months. I’ve enjoyed my erratic posting on Bionic Teaching over the past couple years. Tom, thanks for letting me ride along with you for awhile. I’m continuing my professional development work at Varina High, but I’ve decided to dedicate my personal time to other explorations and exploits. You can find me at my newly renovated home, Cynical Idealists. Expect nothing less than what I’ve always provided: Everything from the heart, and nothing on a timeline.
-Jim
Related posts
Weekly Web Harvest (weekly)
IBM’s Watson Can Now Debate Its Opponents “Watson then presented three relevant arguments in favor of banning violent video games for minors, but qualified its assessment by bring up several relevant counterarguments and considerations. In all, it was a fairly cogent review of the data. “ tags: ibm watson debate ai weekly argument thoughtvectors BBC News – YouTube star Michelle Phan sued over copyright breach “Michelle Phan found success posting make-up tutorial videos, attracting more than six million subscribers to her channel since she started it in 2007. She is a member of a group of YouTube stars whose popularity rivals that of many mainstream pop stars. “ tags: bbc youtube copyright weekly tweet breaking the spell – Text Patterns – The New Atlantis “Ben Jonson’s frustration that Shakespeare’s plays were far more inconsistently and incoherently put together than his own but were nevertheless, somehow, more popular, and commented that this was just it: Jonson’s plays were put together, more like “mechanical models of plays” than the real thing, whereas Shaksepeare’s plays had all the odd growths and irregular edges of organic life. This is my chief complaint with much fiction of the past fifty years, including much very highly regarded fiction, like that of John Updike: these aren’t novels, they are mechanical models of novels. Precision-engineered down to the last […]
Expanding the Circle Session
A lot of great people and a lot of “famous” edubloggers (I sometimes wonder what impact that fame has on these conversations- real and virtual, good and bad.) It was really nice to meet a lot of people I’d only written to. Now down to business. Expanding the Circle – ebc07ec My take on some of the more concrete ideas- Get an active recruitment/mentoring team going as most people are “brought in” by others. This could be planned or happen naturally. Don’t be afraid to use the heartstrings to motivate. Teachers are teachers because they care Get people personally motivated and then branch out to curricular uses. You need hooks for your various audiences – admins, teachers, students, parents Social networks are nice because you have a built in audience. There’s no “frontier feeling” that you’re out in the middle of nowhere hoping vainly someone will read you someday. There’s some comfort in that but it’s also intimidating to join a big established network because it feels like the training wheels are off way too soon. Maybe an attractive scenario would be to create a small social network to get everyone warmed up and then move to a larger one. Steve‘s comment (I’m paraphrasing) that the sessions would have been better on a blog rang true to me. There wasn’t […]
A blog is . . .
#usgened #connectedlearning A good summary of the ethical issues of student blogging: http://t.co/EHlyiG4ZiT — Robert H. Gowdy (@rhgowdy) June 20, 2015 The Twitter exchange above prompted this post which will revisit some things various people have said lots of times to lots of different people but I haven’t written any of my responses down lately. The post that kicked this particular version off was from Annette Vee. I find it a well-intentioned consideration of things she’s thinking through when using blogs with her students. And that’s the important piece. This is about how Professor Vee has chosen to use blogs with her students (Sounds like personal essays as part of a writing class?). That’s not the same as concerns with blogs (the tool that lets you put stuff on the Internet). The danger with the word “blog” is that it appears to mean something specific and it doesn’t. Alan makes that point here in 2005. A few years later I tried to do similar things in 2007 and 2008.I’m always a few years behind Alan. All hail XKCD! I pretty much feel like the comic above applies to this topic pretty well. We’d just need to add a few statements around democracy and inequality. This won’t fix all the core things that are broken about school or our society. It […]