Misplaced
We build a lot of great “doors” in education and then wonder why no one uses them.
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SETDA Notes
I’m at the State Educational Technology Directors Association leadership summit, yet I am clearly not a state director of anything. Nonetheless, it is an interesting place to be and I’ve heard and had a number of interesting conversations. I’m going to attempt to get a few of them down on digital paper before they get too buried in email and other mental garbage. Prior to the conference starting, I had some time to read Montessori: The Science Behind the Genius and it roughly corresponded with seeing another one of those useless top 100 web 2.0 apps for education lists on Twitter.Those lists make me root for alien invasions, the rapture and any number of other things that would end such stupidity. Anyway, the point was that the Montessori classroom was structured around choice but carefully selected choice. It went on to discuss that given more choice than they’re prepared for people become overwhelmed and constantly second guess their choice after the fact. I think that happens a lot with technology options. People are presented with all their options when in many cases they just need to choose between three or four that are presented to them. We (HCPS) need to give this some thought with regard to how we structure and display our digital tool options. Clearly, having a sense […]
Random Thoughts on Students and Privacy
Prior warning — A little ways down this page is an actual tweet that uses expletives. It felt stupid to try to blur out the words. If it bothers you don’t read it. I also blurred out information I felt would ID these people or their schools. They are ID’d as being from the general VA area but they aren’t necessarily from the Henrico school system. I’m briefly talking to our administrators about social media on this coming Tuesday. As a result, I was messing around with some of the ways you can do location-based searches on Twitter. It’s pretty simple, go to the advanced search, add a location and set it to search within 50 miles or so. That allows me to search for “school” or whatever and see results from my area that are likely to be more relevant.I’m not sure exactly how this is determined. I believe it to be from a combination of GPS information from phones and from the location indicated in Twitter profiles- in other words, not the kind of thing I’d bet my life on but good enough for light work. My goal was to find a few tweets that made my point- that Twitter and other forms of social media can offer a pretty unique insight into the broader conversation occurring around […]
Hashtags of Inclusion
flickr photo shared by AndrewDallos under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC-ND ) license I’ve been thinking a bit about how hashtags function on Twitter when used in course in particular. These thoughts are shaped mainly by seeing how #vizpoem, #curiouscolab, and #thoughtvectors have played out vs some of the other hashtags we’ve used like #vcualtlab or #vcuglobalhealth. There’s not a right way or wrong way to do this but there are certain things that seem to happen when the structure of the hashtag is less tied to an institution. The VCU prefix pretty much means that only people within the VCU structure will use that hashtag. It is less likely it’ll become part of a larger structure for other people to use when thinking about/organizing the topic. #thoughtvectors is an example of a hashtag that has spread beyond the course in both time and people. While I believe Gardner coined?/hashed? the hashtag based on Doug Engelbart’s quote, its first use on Twitter was by Jon Becker (at least according to this site and this site). Since that time it was used extensively during the course (nearly 4000 times) but it’s still being used today long after the course officially ended. More and more it’s used by people who have no obvious relationship to the course and probably no knowledge of […]
Comments on this post
But don’t you see how pretty and ornate the door is and how much time and effort we put into it? Of course we didn’t actually talk to anybody about its location or if it accomplishes the goal of a door we just came up with our own solution! I don’t see the problem.
You’ve got to get more frustration and self-righteousness in your voice but other than that you’ve nailed it.
The old school designer/planner in me so badly wants to use this image at a major conference presentation again. I just may. One day. Lovely!