Every summer, our children are out of school. And yet, I am not out of work over the summer. You can see the problem this poses for getting work done. So, every summer, our kids are involved in various “camps” and “activities” that will help me to get work done. …
The video essay is not a brand new art form and it wasn’t created from scratch by YouTube’s algorithmic interest in long-form video that increases “watch time.” People have been constructing commentaries on popular culture and on “important works of art” since there was culture popular enough to be commented …
I joined Twitter in March of 2007. In the five thousand four hundred and forty-six days since then, I have tweeted nearly 19,000 times. That is a lot of words to put out into the world. The question you might ask yourself is, “Why?” What is it about Twitter that …
I have often considered Mastery to be the thing to which all students should strive. I have thought of it as the pinnacle of achievement in any area of my life. After all, the spectrum of knowledge moves from naïveté to Mastery, right? You should want to be a master …
I am not entirely sure when it happened, but at some point in the last 50 years, teachers became “Other.” They became people who come from outside of the community in which they teach. Teachers became antagonists in a war for our nation’s soul. They became masters of indoctrination as …
In November of 2010, I became the first ever Online Community Manager for Edmodo. I was the 13th employee at a startup that was barely two years old. It was my first remote position, and also my first role outside of public education. This is how I framed it to …
COVID and Vaccination politics are making for some very strange communication coming from my children’s school district, Littleton Public Schools. This week, every parent with at least one student in the district received a notice that Littleton was discontinuing the use of school buildings as community vaccination clinics. On the …
In the beginning of the (current) pandemic, Kara and I decided to fundamentally change our living room. We decided to put away “the play room,” an ever expanding set of toys that were shoved into a 8 x 4 Kallax. This was an acknowledgement that our children were no longer …
Let’s set the record straight: I do not have a Masters or PhD in Instructional Design. So, how can I claim Pedagogical Authority with faculty members or my peers who do? That’s what I would like to reflect upon during Week 3 of #DigPINS. Yesterday, I was a part of …
As I have been cultivating my personal and professional learning networks online since the 2004-05 school year, I struggle with actually seeing online spaces as anything other than a learning network. The 15 years in the interim have so deeply engrained how I interact with connected learning, it has ceased …