One Trick Pony

I’m thinking that I must have slept right through May, and so did June. There’s so much paper mail piled up in the kitchen that it’s as though we weren’t even here to go through it. No… it’s even worse than that: it’s as though we randomly mixed up the mail, blended it with piles of stuff retrieved from our cars, and then sprinkled in a load of crap emptied from pockets and purses. So (again, instead of working on my project budget report) I filled a waste can with ads, annual stock reports, and junk mail. Found a few things that had been AWOL, too, like the new PIN for my ATM card.

I’m just a few dozen pages away from finishing Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. It reminds me of things I read in high school that imagine that the ordinary world we see is only a small part of what’s really going on. The Crying of Lot 49 and The Centaur come to mind. The premise is that the gods worshipped by everyone who came to America are still here: Norse gods, African gods, forgotten ancient gods. They’re blending in with the rest of us as funeral directors, prostitutes, FBI men, you name it. And there’s a war brewing between these old gods and the new ones: media, internet, money.

This is the first book that I’ve really enjoyed in a long time. I’ve grown to like Shadow, the main character, and want things to turn out well for him, but it’s probably not that kind of book. Gaiman is creative in an amazingly wide range of genres: comic books, plays, children’s books and this novel, according to an interview I just came upon. Once he’s mastered one form, he drops it and moves on. A serial one-trick pony, I guess.

Went groggily into campus to start working on the interim report for our PT3 grant. Once I got my marching orders from Marcie on what pieces I needed to do for the report, I quickly shifted gears (i.e., leaped into extreme avoidance behavior). Like: opening up the box for the new iMac and 17 inch flat display that arrived last week, moving my files from the old PowerMac 7500 that’s been taking up space for far too long, and moving my Blue G3 over to where the 7500 was. I threw myself into throwing out old stuff and generated a huge temporary mess in the process. Once the dust settles, though, the office will look very slick with the new gear gracing my desk.

Tomorrow I’ll have to get back to the soulkilling business of doing a budget report and writing up some of the other activity of the past 6 months.

The day began at 4AM when a wild thunderstorm woke me (and everyone else) up completely. Apparently this was a more dazzling storm than usual here and it was all the more impressive to this storm-deprived Californian. Another wave of lightning came through an hour later, just when I was dozing off again.

When I got to the school to do the workshop, the electricity had been knocked out by the storm and the router, the wireless access point and all the laptops had to be rebooted to re-establish the internet connection. There was a techie there to help out (the only other male in the whole building) and in hooking up the instructor laptop he knocked the brand new DLP data projector onto the floor. I watched him age 10 years in 2 seconds as he tried to squeeze the projector back together where it had split at the seams. Fortunately, everything worked. I hate to imagine what I would have done for a day without a projector.

This workshop was a challenge. The people who brought me in wanted the workshop to be about the Taskonomy as a way to describe learning tasks in general, not just as a way to build better WebQuests. The real monkey wrench came when the principal directed me to make sure that I portrayed Retelling as a perfectly good instructional strategy when I’m much more accustomed to describing it as the AntiWebQuest, as something not worth doing with technology.

I had all 30 teachers from the school there, but none had ever built a web page. They know Word and PowerPoint, and I was there to get them thinking about better tasks that they will at some point do with technology. It was not the usual sequence and though the workshop went pretty well, it felt strange.

The drive back to DFW was quieter than yesterday. The driver was involved in a couple of multi-level marketing programs and was excited about the book he had in the front seat: The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership by John C. Maxwell. I skimmed through it for awhile and it seemed readable and useful. Now that I’m home, I’ve learned from the Amazon page that this book has sold over 700,000 copies. My radar doesn’t beam into the Leadership realm much, obviously, or I would have heard of the book and author before. I tipped the driver enough to buy himself another new book.

or maybe…Of Guns and Roses
Spent all day getting to Tyler, Texas, which I have since learned is the Rose Capital of the World. One symptom of that: people on corners selling a dozen red roses for $2! These are extra buds nipped from bushes that were grown to be shipped out as plantable elsewhere. The crop, apparently, is good this year.

And actually, I didn’t tip the cab driver who took me for the two hour journey from DFW to Tyler. First, because the ride was already paid for by my sponsor, St. Gregory’s School. And second, because he was an hour and a half late finding me at the airport. Third, though he saw me reading and scribbling comments on an ED 834 final report in the back seat, he talked incessantly with topics like these: the fat cats (Enron, etc.) get everything and aren’t accountable to anyone; Republicans = good; Democrats = liars; people around us are becoming millionaire through multi-level marketing schemes. Hour two of the drive included a rant against gun control; a federal law has just been passed that disallows any criticism of political candidates; we only use 10% of our brain, so clearly the Creator is holding back our powers until we’re spiritually developed enough to deserve them; and women have 450 billion fewer brain cells than men. I asked for the sources for all this wisdom and the only named document he could come up with was the NRA magazine America’s First Freedom. The rest, I assume, came from his somehow accessing that other 90% of his brain that the rest of us can’t get to. No tip, Bunkie.

For Teenagers Nationwide, It’s New York and It’s 1904. Inspired by a film about newsboys, girls weave web sites full of lodging houses and local color. [New York Times: Technology]

This is a such a cool socio-technical creation; another way to reinvent the past and focus our interest in it. Tim Berners-Lee could not have foreseen such things. I dug around and found several of the sites described (but not linked) in the article: Hemstead, Newsies: The Lodging House, and Carnegie Hill. Surely there’s a way to channel this energy towards educational goals?

Today was my scheduled session on Tapped In and as usual it took half the day to prepare. I’m getting smarter about these sessions, though, by trying to make sure that there’s some residue at the end that I can build on.

The topic was Tricks and Tools for Spiffier WebQuests and I used the opportunity to update some of the tools I’ve used in the past and add a few new ones. I organized the chat around this new page, and now I’ve got a place to store things like this as I encounter them in the future. I had a small but appreciative crowd for the session.

Tomorrow I’m off to Tyler, Texas.

You in 1905 is a page connected with yet another put-a-modern-family-back-in-time-public-TV program. This time they’re going back to Edwardian England, a familiar place to any Upstairs, Downstairs fan. The working assumption of the page is that in that era, your entire life was determined by your father’s occupation. So I bravely typed in my father’s occupation (unemployed) and learned about life for the 1905 English Bernie Dodge:

Education

You’ll manage to get away without going to school and will start work when you’re ten.

Career Prospects

You’ll have temporary jobs, none for more than six months as you keep having to take time out to rest your bad back. You’ll join a friendly society to help you out. You’ll take home a few shillings for a week’s hard work and will have to make sure it lasts a long time.

Leisure Time

You’ll drink methylated spirits - it’s the only alcohol you can afford at 4p a pint.

Living Conditions

You’ll share various rooms in lodgings with other men. Some weeks you won’t be able to afford to pay the rent and you’ll be evicted.

Marital Relations

You won’t marry but you’ll make up for it by spending time with girls from the street.

World War One

You’ll try to sign up to join the army when the war starts and will be rejected on medical grounds after physical examination.

Needless to say, I’m glad to have been born in a different time and place.

Went to bed early last night with sore, swollen neck glands. For the sake of symmetry, I slept late, too. Still feeling achy and tired.

Alex spent last night at a Public Speaking Camp way out past Jamul and this afternoon we picked him up. The kids slept in bunk beds inside covered wagons and did the usual s’mores and stories around the campfire.

The teacher was a lively, physically expressive homeschooling Mom. She led the kids in a final performance for the parents in which they related to us what they’d learned. It was all about body language, modulating your voice, conquering nervousness, and structuring what you say. Alex had a good time and says he’d like to do it again.

I’m heading for an early bedtime again. Going to curl up with Volume I of the Christ Clone Trilogy. Hope it’s mostly about SciFi and Vatican politics and doesn’t get all goddy on me.

Sometimes I think about what I get to do for a living and all I can do is to grin right out loud. Today was one of those times.

Greta Nagel was a doc student in a course that I taught two weeks of a decade ago. My topic was motivation and interestingness and something about that stuck in the back of Greta’s mind and caused her to invite me to a brainstorming session today. Greta is now on the faculty of Cal State Long Beach and has some funding to do a planning study to create a Museum of Teaching and Learning.

So from 11AM until 7PM I got to toss out ideas and listen to the others in the group in a moving conversation that started at the Museum of Contemporary Art in La Jolla, moved to the Stephen Birch Aquarium and ended with dinner at the new Lodge at Torrey Pines. All this for a $100 honorarium, but what I’m grateful for is the fact that I could spend a day like this instead of staying indoors hunched over a lens grinder or in a factory like my father and uncles.

Spent most of the day grading 470 projects. If there’s a common theme for the day, though, it’s that this is an awkward in-between era we’re living through and I’ll be glad when it’s over.

We’re surrounded by systems that need to know who we are, and they’re all different and it’s getting to be a pain to deal with them. Case in point: SDSU has finally developed a way for us to turn in grades electronically. For faculty like me who put grading off until the last minute, it should be terrific. To check out the system, I logged in with the temporary password I was given and plugged in the grades I had already done. Very slick system. I also took the opportunity to change the password to something I could remember and logged off.

Then, with a half hour to spare before the deadline, I logged in again to post the rest of my grades. Who the hell are you?! the system asked. I tried the old password and the new one several times and then the screen told me that my account had been locked down. The formerly slick system now saw me as a potential hacker trying to give even more A’s away and it blew me off. So tomorrow I need to go physically to campus to turn in the rest.

Then off to pick up some dinner. I pulled up to the ATM and punched in my PIN. No way!, said the ATM. What I’d typed in was my old PIN but we just got new cards with a new PIN and since I’d only used it once a month ago, I’d forgotten what it was. No cash.

With Pizza Hut P’zones warming the back seat, I picked up June at Von’s where she had spent the time getting groceries. They asked at the checkout if we had a Von’s card. June said we did, so they typed in our phone number to get our discount. They lie!, said the cash register. We used to have a Von’s card, but it’s no longer in the system. So we spent another few minutes applying for another one to get $8 off our $40 order.

If only all these systems could just look me in the retina or gaze lovingly at my thumbprint. No muss, no fuss. I’m willing to let Big Brother know my bank account balance, my grocery buying habits and my grading behavior for the blissful convenience of it all. He already knows it all anyway.

Turns out the Department of Justice has
“http://www.biometricscatalog.org/” target=”_blank”>a search engine to help one find the latest and greatest technologies from this realm. Not surprising.