Question 210 of 365: What does a three year old think about the oil spill in the gulf?

Today in the car, my daughter wondered what the oil wells in the farmland of Colorado were all about. I said they were used to suck up the oil that was underneath the earth. My daughter paused, deep in thought, and then she said this (I’m paraphrasing, but all of the ideas are there):

My teacher told me that in Florida there was an accident. Deep underneath the water there was a big machine that started to leak and let oil out into the water. I think that they are getting oil out of those wells because we need some in Colorado and the leak is too big.

I was proud. My daughter knows about the events of the day. She knows enough (or could guess at least) to reveal the root problem of oil in our lifetimes: there isn’t (and won’t be) enough to go around. If you don’t get it in one place, you have to get it in another. I love that her mind works this way, and I wonder why so many others don’t.

If others saw this in such simple terms, I don’t think we would debate about our focus for the future. Any energy source that’s scarcity can be found out by a three year old, needs to be replaced by one that isn’t so easy to poke holes in. Right?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Oil Spills Are Everywhere (tnr.com)
• Breaking the wall of climate opposition (grist.org)
• Oil catastrophe wasn’t just an accident (cnn.com)
• 100 days later, devastation and hope as oil spill efforts take hold (cnn.com)

Question 201 of 365: How hard and how fast should we jump on the ice?

The Chagrin river never froze over completely. At least, not in my memory anyway. It was always halfway frozen in the winter, allowing for a few ducks to sit on the frigid water as it took them closer and closer to the falls beneath the Popcorn Shop in my hometown. Halfway out onto the river, the ice was thick enough to stand on. Or so I thought.

Two of my closest friends decided to venture out onto the river as far as they would dare. I followed with a lot of apprehension, but eventually I was able to join them a few feet away from the bank. At first they were only interested in stomping around in circles and hearing the faint cracking underfoot. Then as they saw the ice hold more and more of their weight, they began to jump . Up and down they went and I did my best to be uninterested. I knew what was coming next. I knew that it was only hubris that was standing between us and the freezing cold water. But I couldn’t help from joining in. I knew that at any moment we would become enormous popsicles, but right then we were dry and warming up from all of our jumping.

I can’t believe it took us more than 5 minutes to break through, but we spent the better part of half an hour trying to prove that we were as dumb as the people watching from the park were beginning to suspect. And as we fell through the ice, I remember thinking that we deserved it. We had tempted the gods of the river, and we were right to freeze to death.

Luckily, one of my friends lived just a few blocks away. So, we ran as fast as we could, the water freezing against our skin. Our clothes were stiff by the time we made it. As we dried off with some of the warmest and most comforting towels I have ever known, I knew that no amount of explaining would ever allow others to see why we had to jump on the ice together and feel it crack under our weight. I knew that it wouldn’t be possible for my parents or my friend’s parents to see why jumping was our only chance to make sure that we were alive in all of the ways we wanted to be.

And I put it to you that I still cannot explain it. I still cannot decipher our total lack of understanding for what it was we were attempting. What I can say is this: Every risk I have ever taken is some version of that day.

Every risk, so long as it is worthy of consideration, but be two things: a collective act and have the possibility of catastrophe. Solitary risk isn’t of interest to me. It doesn’t hold my imagination at all. Without friends around to watch me fail, there is little hope that I will ever be able to learn or have any kind of humor about that failure in the future. I also believe in total catastrophe as a kind of performance art. I often tell my wife that taking two trips from the car to the refrigerator to put away the produce is much more fulfilling than taking one. I say this because there is a much higher likelihood that I will stumble my way into something interesting if I can take my time with each bag. I am just clumsy enough that the practice of taking two trips doubles the possibility of me falling headlong into the refrigerator, or better yet, a good idea.

I am not interested in advocating for jumping on thin ice, however. What I am advocating for is a kind of free will that doesn’t disallow jumping on thin ice because it is a monumentally bad idea in the eyes of pretty much everyone. I am recommending that we all, from time to time, embark on some hideously bad ideas in the hopes that we can gain insight. Oh, and we should write about them and share stories, too. That way, anything so absurd as to cause each of us to thank our lucky stars that we weren’t involved will be the push we need to go out and try something truly insane, and perhaps spectacular.

Condensation

I was at a restaurant this morning with my family and my wife’s
fingers were getting stickier and stickier from the leaky maple syrup
container. After a while she started looking for some water to wash
them off with. Her water cup was empty but the condensation on the
outside was still there so she used it to clean her hands.
 
I’m not sure why this sparked something in me, but the act of her
using only the water that was on the outside of the glass made me
think of what is happening in many school districts that I see around
me.
 
We can see the water, the life giving liquid inside, but we have to
settle for the small beads collecting around the outer edge.
 
We know that the bandwidth that is needed to fully share with one
another the media, ideas and resources of our district is available.
It exists for businesses and other entities out there, but in
education we are stuck with the runoff from those large high speed
pipes.
 
We need a straw, but we are stuck licking at the glass.
 
(The preceding metaphor is stretched pretty thin, but I did want to
get it out there just in case someone else found it useful.)

Posted via email from olco5′s posterous

Swimming lessons

For one year when I was younger, I took private swimming lessons. This
was in the stage after I had learned all of the basics with a bunch of
other kids my age. We could all do the breaststroke, tread water, and
do relay races for extended periods of time. And it was before any
official swim team existed for our age group. I saw potential in
myself; I wanted to do more advanced things than were going on in a
group, but I wasn’t yet ready to compete.
 
The reason I am relaying this rather personal story is that I feel
like this happens often for educators. They get to a point where they
need some one on one attention in order to continue their learning.
They are ready to fine tune their skills, ready to move beyond the
simple strokes that all teachers posses. So, where do they get this
one on one help? If they have a personal learning network, they can
get it quite easily. They can ask questions and create a relationship
with another teacher who has just had the benefit of “private
lessons”. But, if they see themselves as disconnected from all
teachers who aren’t in their school, then this kind of learning
doesn’t happen.
 
“Private swimming lessons” are much harder when everyone around you is
just treading water.

Posted via email from olco5′s posterous

The Ripe Environment: Connecting more than two dots.

There is a severe lack of time in the air. It pervaides every conversation I hear on many days:

“No, I don’t have time for that collaboration right now. Maybe after this quarter is over.”
“Are you sure that it has to be due tomorrow. I really think that having the weekend when I don’t have games or practices or school would make more sense.”
“I don’t even have time to think.”

Hyperbole aside, this lacking is palpable. I think it is one of the only times that a lack of something can be more heavily felt and deeply understood than the presence of it. Many people, though, have just gotten used to having no time to connect the disparate parts of their working or waking lives. It has become the film upon our skin that always coats our interactions but can’t be rubbed or cleaned off.

I am not one of those people, however. I believe that connecting the dots and creating time for that process is possible. I believe that it is all about creating a Workflow of Passion (requires a better name, but that’s all I’ve got).

When I say passion, I do not mean that you must be equally in love with every assignment or task that you come across. Instead, I mean that there is something meaningful within each thing that you do. There is some meat there, no matter how hidden it may be in the luke-warm soup of “other stuff.” The only way to craft the time to connect that meat to something else equally meaty is to plunge your spoon in and not be satisfied with the carrot or water chestnut you come up with the first time. (I would like to apologize to both the literary crowd who sees the metaphor being stretched thin and the vegetarian crowd who beleives that no one should be looking for meat within a vegetarian soup.)

So, what does this spoon plunging action look like. Well, I have recently taken to a maxim for resolving the issue of time suckage and distraction in the classroom and out.

“Use the tool that has everything you want, and nothing you don’t.”

Although the different image settings in Photo Booth are cool, the distraction factor is so high that it is nearly impossible to use it as an instructional tool (for kids or adults).

Wikipedia provides a cornocopia of educational resources, but blind searches are still stabs in the soup that lead to less than appetizing results.

The Ripe Environment is anywhere that makes information clickable, that sets the path of least resistance to learning as the norm. The Ripe Environment is a place that doesn’t waste time on stuff that doesn’t matter. It is a place that the workflow always works for the user, according to their needs and passions.

Is School 2.0 just a fad?

Although there is a lot of talk about School 2.0 among those in the edublogosphere, I believe that many educators are going to try and wait out the torrent of technology integration that they currently are experiencing because they believe that it is merely a fad that will eventually go away. If we are serious about this type of systemic change, we need to be able to convince everyone that School 2.0 is not a fad. In this podcast I came up with a few observations about the nature of School 2.0:

1. We need a watershed collaborative School 2.0 event that causes all educators to take notice (I’m thinking of a hybrid between the numbers on myspace with the education of the K12 Online Conference (http://k12onlineconference.org/))
2. Once you give students the power to create their own learning, you can never take it back (nor would most teachers who have tried it, want to take it back).
3. Students are clamoring for School 2.0 classrooms, even if they don’t know that is what they are looking for.
4. School 2.0 is not a fad because it doesn’t repackage something that has come before (like many movements in education). It is truly something new.

Show/Chapter Notes:

• 00:00:00: Edtechlive Springboard
  Steven Hargadon and David Warlick

• 00:03:51: Is School 2.0 a Fad?
  David Warlick’s Blog
  Steve Hargadon’s Blog

• 00:06:28: The Definitive School 2.0 Event
  School 2.0 by the Department of Education

• 00:09:54: Framing Change
• 00:12:38: School 2.0 is different because the students say it it’s different.
• 00:15:52: Changing Professional Development
• 00:18:01: Conclusion
  My Blog