Communal living

I never realized just how important community was to me until my wife
and I asked our best family friends to come and live with us while
they are saving up to buy a house.
 
For many years I have written about online communities as being an
essential part of authentic learning. Yet, I have never lived in such
close quarters to another family, and thus did not know how much is
learning by being a part of a close-knit real-life community.
 
Daily I learn what actions by my children and theirs “really mean”. I
now know why personal space has so much value. I know what to expect
from our community and what my community expects of me.
 
The reason for this post is that it has gotten me thinking about our
need for a nurtured real-life community that supports everything we
attempt to change in education. While I would like to think that the
twittersphere is all that I need for support and community, I need the
people that I can look straight in the eye and brainstorm the greatest
learning activity with.
 
I guess I will just state this idea as a challenge to myself: if I am
not cultivating my real community as hard as I am doing so for my
online community, I will never be able to accomplish all of the things
I would like.
 
Or, to put it another way:
 
The number of people you can touch with your work depends upon how you
work with the people you can literally touch. (Although, that sounds a
little creepier than I wanted.)

Posted via email from olco5′s posterous

I won’t buy anything that only does one thing

I have been thinking a lot about this recently: I don’t want anything to do with a device that only does what it was advertised to do. It is something that I have slowly realized as over he last few years as I went through the experience of using a Smart Board, CPS clicker system, an iPod touch and an Apple TV. The two former products are meant to do one thing well. They are advertised specifically for educational purposes, and they work. But the two latter products are meant to do anything that the community makes them do, and they are not specifically marketed as educational components.
 
The latter products I keep on coming back to because they can do more and more as the community supports future development, and I guess that this is the difference between products I want to use and ones I don’t. The ones I care to use for education, are the ones with built in communities. They are the ones that get pushed to their full potential.
 
So I guess what I am saying is that if I am ever put in change of large purchasing decisions for a district or school, I will be choosing to purchase and support products that connect together and have a community surrouning them.
 
For example: I am right now using my iPod touch with an open source program called boxee (remote on the touch and the full program on the Apple TV) that is a full fledged media center in order to watch powerful TED talks in high definition on my TV using WiFi to stream the content. It is all connected.
 
Shouldn’t it always be this way?
 
(As an aside, I realize that this example is filled with apple products. I don’t believe that apple has a monopoly on connectedness or hackability, it happens that this is the community that I associate with most easily. I would actually love to hear about other devices that you keep on coming back to because they increase in value over time.)
 
Sent from my iPod

Posted via email from olco5′s posterous

Create something every day.

One of the big revelations for me at educon was that creating things is the only way to sustain change. You cannot influence things to change. You have to create what you would like to see and make the change real for people.
 
Concretely, I mean that every student, every teacher and every administrator should not be allowed to leave their buildings with being able to truthfully say that they created something new that day. The following things do not count as creations:
 
1. Grades
2. Worksheets or any answers to lower level thinking questions
3. Meetings or notes from meetings
4. Email (unless it is cross-posted somewhere else)
 
Another reason why I believe that everyone should create something every day is because no one will be removed from learning if this happens. If you have to go through the process of creating something new, you have to also go through the process of demonstrating learning or of even learning something new. We would no longer have teachers who are out of touch with students or administrators that are out of touch with teachers. If we are all engaged in the act of creation, we are all speaking the same language.
 
We must, therefore, create an economy of creation as well. We must require creation as a requirement for participation in society. If we all now have the ability to publish quickly and create regularly, why are we so timid about requiring it of others. (That being said, anyone feel like poking holes?)
 
 
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Posted via email from olco5′s posterous

Create your own MobileMe (Sync Everything, at all times).

An aside: it is too bad that every post I write seems like an attempt to get back into the habit of posting, but I suppose until I start blogging consistently again, that is just how it is going to have to be. I have missed way too many things that I have been thinking about to ever fully catch up, but perhaps I can start anew. Anyway, here are my latest thoughts.

Before I go into the details of how to sync yourself completely, I want to tell you why I even undertook this idea. Well, our school system uses an extremely proprietary e-mail and calendaring system called firstclass. Every person that uses firstclass in our schools is locked in to using the firstclass calendar for appointments and things of that nature. But, because I have seen the light of using Google Calendar (open API, shared calendars, embedding, etc), I refuse. In fact, I was so obsessed with the idea of converging the two that I speant an entire weekend (when I wasn’t having fun with my family) on getting Firstclass to sync with Google Calendar, and then eventually my new blackberry that the school district provided for me.

So, this is how you sync everything:

Calendars:

Contacts:

Now, for the details…

(Update: I didn’t put this in the initial post, but I think it is worth mentioning that Firstclass does have a way to sync with both Palm Desktop Software and SyncML directly, but since my district hasn’t set either of these up, I thought it was important to try and find a better way of doing things… there are also third party services that do some of this, but I want a FREE workflow)

In order to get your first class calendar to talk to anything else, you will need to export it as a iCal file:

Now, you may look at this picture and ask, why I wouldn’t just export it as a blackberry file and skip all of the steps in the middle. Well, there are a few reasons. One, if I did this, all of the events would be duplicated every time I exported and imported. Two, because I am on a Mac I do not have any blackberry desktop software to make this sync work.

So, onward we go to iCal. First, you will need to set up your Google Calendar to sync with iCal, using this handy dandy tutorial from Life Hacker.

Now that you have your Google Calendar set up to sync, simply import into iCal your latest and greatest export from Firstclass:

Now, if this isn’t your first time doing this, you will end up with a lot of duplicates. If that is the case, just use the iCal Dupe Deleter. This is also a good tool for deleting duplicates from Google Calendar if you have ever found yourself with too many of one item.

Now, you have synced completely to your Google Calendar and you are ready to sync to your blackberry. Simply point your device to this address and download your over-the-air sync application.

You can now enter an event in Firstclass, iCal, Google Calendar, or on your blackberry and they will sync with one another. Pretty cool, right. But, we are not done. If you would like to have your calendar in an even more universal Format, you can put it on a SyncML server, like Funambol.

All you have to do is download their blackberry application and you can sync to your heart’s content there.

For Contacts:

I understand that MobileMe does a lot more than this, but I believe that if we can create a FREE workflow for each one of our teachers, students, and administrators that syncs information to the place that they need it, we will be able to have the conversations that truly matter. We will no longer be stuck trying to find information, it will always be ours. Although you may not geek out at all that I am proposing, I think there are some pretty heavy implications for continuity in the systems that we are creating. If you have figured out any more syncing tricks, please leave a comment and add to the value of our collective research.

Hack your learning: The way it works now.

I didn’t know that there was a giant subculture of 12-16 year olds hacking their iPod Touches.

I didn’t know that a community of kids existed that were helping each other to troubleshoot, adapt code, or discuss best practices for making the Touch do what they wanted it to.

I didn’t know that my entire idea of what it means to be a nerdy kid who is interested in computers and gadgets had shifted to include kids who just wanted to be able to have something they were recognized for being good at.

I didn’t know these things because I never asked. I never had a reason to.

This lack of knowledge really is making me think. It makes me think about what we are not asking our students. It makes me wonder what other supportive communities exist that are underground learning environments. Why doesn’t the whole world know about the kind of learning that is going on here? Why aren’t we in awe of the building blocks of critical thinking being laid. Is it because we are simply too busy trying to force our own ideas of community and learning upon them? Is it because we can’t come to grips with the fact that they may not actually need what we have to offer sometimes?

So, this blog post is an attempt to call attention to this community. It is an attempt to shine a light on the collaboration and ingenuity that is increasing with every search for a new way of doing things, with every creation of a new hack, with every question of how something works.

I purchased my iPod touch last Monday for my upcoming birthday (03/15). I did not purchase it because of what it could do out of the box. I purchased it for what I thought it could do if I bent it to my will. You see, I had been doing a little research earlier that morning on YouTube. A simple search for the terms “ipod touch” at that fine repository of videos will yeild quite a few videos with the word “jailbreak” in the title. This meant nothing to me when I first came across it, but after a few videos it because abundantly clear that I would have to spend some time hacking my iPod if I wanted to use it for anything that wasn’t created by apple (upon much research I learned that this is in no way illegal but I will void your warranty, but I have been voiding warranties since I was a kid so I was not afraid.)

However, I started noticing a pattern in many of these videos. The age of the creators was startlingly low:


It is hard for me to say that these kids are not providing valuable information. Their videos have an audience of thousands and they receive huge numbers of comments, spurring them to create more. The most surprising element of this community is that this is a genre of text that most kids do not engage in of their free will. My students groan each and every time they have to provide a step by step process for a written prompt. They run away from instructions on nearly every piece of paper or blog post. So, what makes these instructions so engaging? Why do they flock to these tutorials as a means of expression?To me, it is about purpose. The purpose they have is to create useful learning for others. I believe more surely than ever that each of us has an innate need to teach others what we know. Most of the time, however, we all know similar things or we are being asked to learn similar things. This does not provide many people with the ability to teach something new. It allows for learning together, but not learning from one another.

This community exists only for the purpose of information sharing and learning. It is what we should be modeling our schools and classrooms after (without all of the swearing in the comments hopefully).

My personal Journey with the iPod Touch:

So, if you believe in the idea that everyone not only needs to learn but also needs to teach, I must now teach you all of I have learned about the iPod Touch:

After much searching and looking for ways to get 3rd-party programs onto my iPod (a function that Apple will not make available until June), I found a few helpful programs:

ZiPhone – A jailbreaking program for mac and PC.

iJailbreak – A jailbreaking program for Mac. (The blog is incredibly helpful as well)

independence – A jailbreaking and unlocking program for Mac that also allows you to add wallpapers, ebooks, files, etc. manually from your computer.

However, because I have the latest version of the iPod Touch, none of these programs worked for what I wanted to do (although they may now because most of them have had a few updates within just the last few days). I used this amazing tutorial for figuring out the inner workings of my iPod. (Not to geek out too much, but I really like knowing how things work rather than just pushing a button and having it “do its thing.”)

After I set up my iPod to accept 3rd-party programs, I decided to actually install a few and try them out. Here are a few of the ones that I have kept:

1. Books – Allows you to read eBooks on your iPod.
2. MxTube – Allows you to download Youtube videos to view later.
3. VNSea – Allows you to view and control your home computer remotely (mouse, hard drive, etc.) from any remote location with a wifi connection.
4. WeDict – Open source dictionaries and encyclopedias.
5. Mobile Scrobbler – Listen to great internet radio thanks to Last FM.
6. Sketches – Use your iPod Touch like an etch-a-sketch (my 17 month old loves it)
7. iStudy – Use flashcards.
8. Homework – Keep track of homework assignments
9. Photoboard – Play with your photos like they do in Minority Report.
10. DashBuster – Update your Blockbuster Queue (I always forget to do this and get terrible movie choices in my mailbox)

Please let me know if you have found anything else that is useful for the iPhone or iPod Touch. I will be writing more about the pedagogical implications of many of these tools soon.