Seth Godin's Tribes

Digital Reflection

Here is my Digital Reflection.  Enjoy the video.  I looked at the samples posted on Edmodo and did my video like one that really resonated with me.  This was a very powerful learning experience, seeing how I can integrate all this technology.  Probably the most profound piece has been creating my presentation on the beer making using Edcanvas because of how it ties everything together and integrates so many different tools into one interface.  

WE HAVE BOTTLES!!  I will be bringing in a few bottles for tasting today.

Exciting News!

I am going to filter and bottle the cider tomorrow for class!  Super exciting.  The project is coming along quite well but unfortunately has had to somewhat take a back seat to AR right now.  After the conference on Saturday, I will have time to make a presentation about my brewing process for the final session.

20% Project, Update

The mash is doing well.  I will take another alcohol reading and taste test it tonight and update this post.  I tasted it after our virtual class, and it actually tasted decent!  I am going to do a little bit of research into the bottle process before I undertake it so I do it right.  I will post a picture of the mash tonight!

20% Project

So I have a mash currently fermenting. . .so far at 3.9% apv (alcohol per volume).  If anybody is interested, the flavor combination (it's a cider) is acai, blueberry, pomegranate, almond, honey, sage, and thyme.  I am planning at least two to three more brews, possibly 4.  Depends on supply procurement, and yeast supplies. I will need more buckets because of the time required.  I will bring samples for tasting of the different ciders that I have ready for tasting for the field testing day probably.  The next flavor blends I am planning are:
Candied Apple (apple with cocoa powder, maybe nutmeg), Buster (named for my dog, will be either strawberry-lime or raspberry-lime), Capone (named for a friend's dog, mango-peach-strawberry), Tikal (a Classic Mayan city and one of the major power centers, aloe and agave, possibly with cinnamon).  Any flavor suggestions are much appreciated!  I will post a picture of the mash fermenting tomorrow night.  There are a lot of different substances involved in cidermaking.  It's not just the yeast!

PLN Reflection

READ:  I am somewhere between "Between Two Worlds" and "In the Matrix" on this one.  I read articles on CNN almost everyday and sometimes go to news.google.com.  I don't generally collect things using an rss aggregator to collect news stories.  I use tweetdeck, but I only check it sporadically.  I love being able to read books on my Kindle.

TWEET:  I check my feed quite often and retweet meaningful tweets and good quotes.  I am not as prolific as some of my colleagues at tweeting educational articles and such, but I will get better at that.  I don't check tweetdeck as often as I should.

ARCHIVING/BOOKMARKING:  In creating my annotated bibliography for my action research, I have made use of Diigo to archive the papers and websites I wanted to use for later reference.  I have not done much cross-sharing, but I will do more.

WRITING: My blogging so far has been exploring my own writings and making use of tools such as Wordle.  I need to comment more on my colleague's blogs, I know that.  Looking at my colleagues' blogs, I also have noticed that I should also be writing more professional and less whimsical entries.  \

COMMENT:  As I said above, I need to comment more on my colleagues' blogs.  I do respond as quickly and professional as possible to inquiries in response ot my blog entries.

GROW/SHARE:  I have shared freinds' blogs, I have grown my number of followers on twitter.  I try to blog at least once a week, but I tweet rather sporadically.  I love looking into different tools and using them.  I have Dropbox across my computer, my phone, and the cloud which I love to make use of it.  Word clouds are exciting and the myriad presentation media are intriguing as possibilities in my classroom.

MY PLAN:  I am going to make a point to check Tweetdeck at least once daily and repost from one of the educational hashtags I follow daily.  I am going to check educational and mathematical journals and such at least weekly and Diigo interesting articles and papers.  I will comment on at least 3 of my colleagues' blog entries every week.  I also have a growing network of friends that is already a good size on Linkedin, and I maintain a fairly profession, if left-leaning, presence on Facebook.  I have friends across the community, from my dentist to my rabbi and parents from my placement last semester to professors from my undergraduate studies.  As I have grown and gotten more professional connections on Facebook, I have matured my presence there, leaving behind less appropriate things and being very selective about what I share and post.  I do the same on Twitter.  I had an active presence with my sixth graders on Edmodo last semester, and really like the service.  I have tried as I become more mature to do the same to my web presence. I put a lot of plan type things up in each section of this entry as well as here, and I know what I need to improve on.  I will improve, and I will succeed.

This I Believe

Another piece of my own writing:

I believe in the power of writing.

I believe in the power of the mind to create

And the power of the hands to manifest

I believe in the power of the imagination to explore

And the power of the voice to relate.

I believe in the power of myth to entrance

And the power of word to enhance.

I believe in the power of the simile, of the metaphor to create vast, vivid images in the mind, to ignite the imagination, to stoke the flames of creativity.  I believe in the power of rhythm, tone, and point of view to paint a picture. 

I believe in the power of having a voice with which to express oneself, the incomparable power of the soul to fuel that expression.  I believe in the power of the will in defining oneself. 

Never is one’s true self clearer than in one’s writing.  One writes about what one knows and what one likes; one writes about one’s desires and one’s passions.  In writing one finds one’s purest voice and the ability to fight for oneself.

I believe in the power of agency and the ability of writing to make one an advocate for change and justice.  Richard Wright and Frederick Douglass used writing to shed light on a horrific injustice 400 years in the making.  Anne Frank used writing to put a human face on the genocide during World War II.  Cesar Chavez used writing and speaking to bring attention to the plight of migrant laborers.  Countless authors down the generations have used writing to speak for themselves and others.

Thomas Paine used writing to instigate revolution; Benedict Arnold and John Andre tried to use writing to poison the root of that revolution.  Monroe and other leaders used writing to justify egregious treatment of indigenous peoples in the tireless expansion of this nation.  Writing can be used as an agent of change and a weapon of immense power. 

Nelson Mandela used writing to overcome decades of oppression and redeem his nation.  Martin Luther King Jr. used writing to continue the work of Wright, Douglass and others, making great strides in bringing this nation out of a very dark period in its history. 

Writing is the most powerful tool we as humans possess.  It can shape nations, cause wars, and change the world.

This I believe.

My Story

I got some questions on the Word Cloud I posted today so I thought I would answer them.
First question:  I used Wordle.Net to make the cloud and then used the Windows Snip tool to grab a screen cap of it and saved it as a jpeg.
Second question: So what's the story about?
In my years of reading, I have noticed a particular, disturbing trend among the highest epics with regards to female characters.  Female characters in these works tend to fall into one of three categories: 1) the problem; 2) in the way; 3) in the background.  They are never given a chance to be at the front, to be the hero, to make the quests.  My story takes the traditional epic and turns it on its ear.  All of my main cast are female.  The setting is Victorian Europe, particularly Britain and Ireland.  The band of women warriors is about to travel to France to bring one more into their number.  I have done a lot of research into Irish myth and legend as well as the Irish Gods for this story.  It currently sits at a shade longer than 20 pages and a little under 15000 words.      

A new world cloud

Here is a wordcloud I did for a story I have been working on for a long time.  I wanted to see what words and such came up the most.

20% Project

And so it begins. . .My home brewing kit is on the way and I have found a suitable process to follow in order to make my own cider.  This shall be quite an adventure.  When I do bring in samples for tasting, they will be  relatively unrefined as they won't have had the benefit of full aging.  Some may be twice fermented for clarity but that depends on the recipe and how much time I have left in the semester.  The kit should be here Thursday or so and I will have pictures posted here on the blog for you to see.  After that, entries will range between text, pictures, and videos documenting my progress.  Excelsior!

And now another poem of my own composition for your enjoyment.

The Pass

here we stand on a path

that goes we know not where

high in the mountains between

two lives, a decision to make

we cannot go back

ahead lay two paths

do we travel one together

Or each take one, 

Ne’er the twain shall meet

we can’t merely stand idle

A gentle mountain wind

blows through the grassy plain before us

spurring us on

As if Fate herself were

sending the wind,

it blew down one path only

and we start down that path

hand in hand, step by step

Life takes us where it will

but we go together

now and always

here we stand on a path

that goes we know not where

Ode to Thunder

An Ode to Thunder Rhinos charging across the Savanna, Elephants stampeding the Serengeti, Warrior’s cry as the horde descends The heavens raging Primal crash of drums Thunder, thunder The thunder crashes and crashes, Ethereal resonations The thunder crashes and crashes Heavenly reverberations The thunder crashes and crashes Thunder, thunder Roll, roll, thunder rolls On, on, thunder rolls Cannons roar, thunder rolls Guns blaze, thunder rolls Thunder, thunder

Deb's Blog

This is my awesome sauce friend Deb's blog! She is a graduate student at USD in SOLES, but in a different program from us. She is balancing a lot of things and doing so with great aplomb, I really admire her :) Go read all about it!

Wordle

 

My Passion

As I said in the Visitor/Resident post, I am passionate about using the web and web based tools to expand and enhance my class.  I believe that my class is not just about the path we take through the material, this unidirectional walk we take through a textbook or our curriculum is not enough to truly learn and understand the material.  I believe that my students and I form a neural network of sorts.  In traditional models of education, we only focus on the left brain, the physical manifestation of the class. This is because we have never truly had the right brain, the nuanced interpretive side of the course.  We have never had technology at the level we have now.  Tools like Edmodo allow us to create the right side of the brain.  In order for the organism to fully function and succeed, we as the learners need to form the corpus callosum, the mechanism by which the two hemispheres of this brain communicate and interact.  Certain aspects of the learning are accomplished on both sides of this brain, as certain functions of human beings, such as speech, are controlled by both sides.  In human speech, the left brain can be said to control the words we say while the right brain controls how we contextualize those words.  Accordingly, the physical presence of the class controls what we learn, the material itself while the web presence adds dimension to how we the learners internalize and synthesize the material.  It allows us as learners to find resources that cater to our particular modes of learning.  Before this, learning was very one dimensional, very cookie cutter; if you couldn’t learn it the way the teacher is saying it, your best hope was to teach yourself from the text book or whatever resource the class is using.  Now, we can access myriad other resources on the web.  This can make for a very powerful thinking organism.  Notice that I included myself, the teacher, in the group of learners, in the neural network.  I am as much a learner as any of my students; I am acting as facilitator and guide more than sage on the stage.  Students these days need to be more responsible for their own learning; in order to succeed in today’s world students must be active rather than passive learners.  Students must know enough to question and be confident enough to know that they need to question rather than just accepting what is being presented as gospel.  Teachers are fallible creatures; I model for my students that it is perfectly ok to make mistakes and that we can use them to learn and find the correct answer.   

Visitors and Residents

I see myself as being on the resident end of the continuum.  I have a pretty active Facebook presence and was active last term with my sixth graders on Edmodo as well as in classes at the university.  My presence has been expanding as I have gone through this program because I have been exposed to more tools online and have found that I am able to figure out and interpret various web tools with relative ease.  I see my future expanding on the internet.  I think that I want to involve the internet in my teaching and take advantage of tools like Edmodo to extend the boundaries of my classroom.  Students have questions when they are not in the classroom.  Why can’t I make myself available through these tools and create a forum that the students themselves can use to network and help each other.  It creates another, more complex layer to the class because now the students are not just connected by physical presence in the classroom and I am not just connected to them by the same.  We have two classes really, the physical manifestation and the web presence.   The physical manifestation, to use some of Pink’s ideas, is akin to the left brain; that is, it is the literal interpretation of the class, it is the logical, sequential part of the whole.  The physical class moves through the material in an order.  The web presence is the right brain; we can examine and respond to posts and queries from any time during the course at any other time during the course; we are not confined by our physical place.  We can easily scan back through the tapestry of the presence and find particular threads in a very lateral fashion.  By combining these two halves of this metaphorical brain, we create a metaphorical organism capable of very complex accomplishments and great things.  This is my greatest hope with technology; that we create this organism and find a less linear, directed fashion to access the material.  

L-directed thinking versus R-directed thinking

L-directed thinking is thinking based on logic, sequential ideas, and very literal interpretations of situations.  R-directed thinking, on the other hand, takes into account context and is more artistic, more intuitive than its counterpart. R-directed thinking relies more in simultaneous intake of information.  It is less literal than L-directed thinking.  Abundance affects L-directed thinking because supply is outstripping demand so in order to differentiate oneself or one’s product from the panoply of other like things out there.  Thus the import of L-directed thinking is reduced in favor of R-directed thinking.  In order to make one’s product more distinct, better design is needed, more creative design.  MFAs are becoming among the most lucrative degrees because of this need for flashier product designs, for an increase in focus on aesthetics.  Asia plays a role because there are so many new L-directed thinkers who can do the same jobs as American L-directed thinkers for much less pay than the Americans.  Americans are thusly having to expand their repertoires to include more R-directed thinking.  Because Asian workers are able to do the rote logical tasks for extremely low wages, less American workers are being hired for the same jobs.  Automation is heavily impacting L-directed thinking because computers are able to do so many of the L-directed tasks far more efficiently than humans can, humans are being replaced.  Again, R-directed thinking is coming to the fore because it cannot be replicated by computers; for instance, facial recognition.   One of my sixth graders from last term had a sister in, I believe, second grade.  We met once walking to school (I parked on the street off the campus and walked a block or two to campus); several days later on the playground she recognized and correctly identified me as her brother’s student teacher; no computer today could accomplish the same task with such a fleeting initial contact; however, she cannot do complicated statistical analyses in her head with nearly the efficiency of Excel.  High Concept involves the ability to create complicated emotional mindscapes, to detect patterns and opportunities, to create meaningful context and to combine seeming disparate ideas into some novel creation.  High Touch involves analyzing and appreciating the nuances of human interaction and finding value in these interactions as well as in oneself.  As a teacher of math, I find High Concept and High Touch in contextualizing problems in the lives of my students.  For instance, one day I had a problem set situated around one of my students at a skate park in various situations involving proportions.  The students invested more and added context because they knew their fellow student and were able to fill in the subtleties of skate parks because they are able to combine L- and R-directed thinking and use both to solve the problems.  When the problems are in familiar context, the students are able to much more quickly get to the meat of the problem and solve it because they are not having to hack through foreign concepts and objects.  Systems completely dependent on and preferring IQ are deeply flawed because humans are not one dimensional thinkers.  Some humans are L-directed thinkers but still employ R-directed thinking to supplement their strengths; Some are R-directed thinkers but still employ L-directed thinking to supplement their strengths.  A system that values EQ is more important because it takes into account the value of R-directed thinking and the whole brain.  IQ is an important measure of aptitude but alone is not enough to fully evaluate humans.  It only measures have the brain.  Today’s most successful people are no longer strictly   L-directed thinkers.  Our society has evolved to prefer thinkers who find strengths on both sides of the corpus callosum.  The ability to abstract and intuit is as important nowadays as the ability to compute and analyze.    

Communities of Practice

Wenger and Lave developed this concept of communities of practice, which finds its home in myriad distinct fields.  Our focus, being teaching candidates, is on the field of education.  At the charter school where I student taught last semester, the teachers were grouped into many different communities of practice.  To name a few, they are organized into grade level teams, by subject and by level groups, that is to say, elementary and middle/high school.  The administration team is also broken into groups, the principals and the subject coaches.  The complex principal is part of a cohort of principals in the district which is another community of practice.  Because the vast majority of students in each grade have been together since their earliest years, they are tightly knit and are in themselves a community of practice. We, the Master’s Credential Cohort, are a community of practice.  I could go on and on listing the different communities of practice that I observe and have observed during my time in this program.  It is clear that these are very valuable tools for the professional development of teachers’ practice.  In constructing a community of practice it is important to have a common goal and passion that all of the members are striving toward.  This provides the motivation behind the structure and hierarchy of the community; for instance, in the math teachers’ community at my charter school, we had a professional development meeting wherein we brought samples of how we set up student work and the math coach was the central node.  The teachers were primary node, and we student teachers who were there were the peripheral nodes.  By creating a web of interactions, that being examining each other’s student samples, we learned about different ways to motivate student learning and organize information at different levels.  However, any real progress was moot because the math coach, the central node, kept engaging individual nodes rather than letting the network engage.  There were also vehement and stubborn arguments from various grade levels.  We could not come to an agreement on how to unify the notebooks across 9 grades.  This was because each segment, primary middle and high, had different requirements and variables to account for.  In the younger grades, students are more prone to losing things and so the notebooks stay in the classroom.  In the middle grades, we send the notebooks home with the students.  Also, priorities were different in terms of what at the different levels the teachers thought should be in the notebooks.  It was only after leaving the room to rejoin the larger group that the epiphany that we should be trying more to unify expectations across grades rather than the notebook itself.  That is to say, we should figure out what each grade expects students to come in from the previous grade with in terms of study skills, and agree from grade to grade and segment to segment.  All of this is to say that the structure of the group broke down because the central node, rather than facilitating thoughtful discussion among the entire web, chose to engage various nodes head on.  The epiphany would have happened in the session if we were engaging each other.  I think a fault of this system was also readily apparent in that example.  Because we in each grade level were too proud and stubborn, we couldn’t see past trying to unify the notebook across 9 grades; rather, we got stuck on our own notions of what is right.  Also, the math coach, as the central node, got dragged into the petty disputes rather than staying objectively neutral.  She allowed herself to be part of the fray and in so doing broke down the structure of the community.  We dissolved into our subcommunities rather quickly and held fast.  The failing of the community of practice model lay in the human element; the structure must be such that there are checks in place to abate any disagreements such as we had.  That said, if it can be moderated properly, this can be a very powerful tool.  I could see using this model with a tool such as Edmodo with my students to create a community of practice to further their learning, especially in a project based model.  In our class, our domain is technology and teaching, our community is us, and our practice is integrating technology into our teaching.