There was frost to be scraped off the car windows this morning in St. Louis and yet, through the miracle of American Airlines, I was home in San Diego by noon. I used the time in the air to add two new WebQuest Design Patterns: Ballot and Comparative Judgment. These will be useful, I think.
If I can get the list up to about 40 patterns, this will cover most possibilities. I’m going to try to set aside some time for this over the next month.
Having a great time here in Columbia, Missouri doing workshops for eMINTS. This is the seventh or eighth time I’ve been back here, and each time I am impressed by the solidity of the organization and the with-it-ness of the people in charge. eMINTS has set up technology-rich classrooms and trained hundreds of teachers all over the state and now it’s poised to go national. Already there is an eMINTS spinoff in Utah and there’s interest elsewhere.
For me, it’s fun to come back here each time. The structure here is that for each of three days a different group of about 70 teachers comes and cycles through three different sessions about WebQuesting. I’m doing my hour and a half on design patterns nine times and I feel a little like Bill Murray every morning when I wake up, though in a good way.
I’ve driven this road a half dozen times before, always in the dark: Interstate 70 heading west of St. Louis. All I see are long stretches with a few lights, punctuated every 15 minutes or so with exits leading the same ten fast food places. This time, though, I’m seeing it differently. I’ve got the PowerBook open on the passenger’s seat, and ROUTE 66 is running. On the dashboard, I’ve got my nifty little Rayming TN-200 GPS thing. So now the darkness is embellished. Now I can see where those lights are coming from and that just behind the trees there are roads and lakes. It makes the two hour drive go more quickly, though I’m careful not to get distracted.
The crescent moon and Venus are directly in front as I head west.
It will be interesting to see if this report will also change the behavior of a guy who never admits to being wrong.
That’s a name that I’m guessing will be famous a few weeks from now, at least if Josh Marshall is correct as usual.
Had my first successful iChat conversation tonight with Otto Benavides up in Fresno in preparation for my meeting with his class next Tuesday night. Very impressive. Good video and sound quality, completely transparent set up. Apple does it again!
Actually, since we’ve been cleaning the house all day, I looked like a dog’s lunch. Having good quality video is a mixed blessing. Maybe the next version will have a “Display me the way I wish I looked” checkbox.
“Don’t look back — something might be gaining on you.”
Had a fun class with my EDTEC 296 kids. We were discussing Tapscott’s Growing Up Digital and Prensky’s Twitchspeed stuff. The question in the air was, are you really different from your parents’ generation?
And of course, they are. But the funny thing was that these 18 and 19 year olds are already looking over their shoulders at their 10 - 15 year old siblings. THEY’RE the ones that are really different, they tell me. This even younger generation would rather IM than meet face to face. They’d rather be online than play outside. One 15 year old even breaks up with his girl friends over IM. In lots of ways, these college freshmen are feeling outgeeked by kids only a few years younger. Are the generations getting even shorter?
I’ve made it through the day without major mishaps, but this is roughly how I feel.
After a few hours sleep, we all got on the minibus one last time at 6am in Targoviste. From there to Bucharest, Paris, Chicago and home. Twenty-six hours in transit.
I’m
dead
tired.
Today was mostly about getting a look at Romania’s mountains. No official work until evening. We piled into the mini-bus and headed upward.
I’m still jetlagged and achy and sitting in one place in a mini-bus designed for shorter legs didn’t add to the fun. But the show outside the window distracted me from all that. Images slipped by so quickly my eyes couldn’t parse them: a winding dirt road with two old women carrying bags; an old man in a fur hat solemnly saluting the minibus in welcome; a family in a horse drawn cart with auto tires; wooden houses with sharply pitched roofs; a gypsy village by the river; a whiff of wood smoke, twin domed church spires clad in metal. If I were driving this road by myself there were a dozen National Geographic-worthy pictures I could have taken; but the mini-bus hurtled onward.
One of the highlights was Bran Castle, the official Dracula destination. This is the one they’re setting up as a tourist attraction, but Vlad the Impaler never lived here. It was a garrison for his soldiers guarding the border betweek Transylvania and Wallachia. One thing I learned from the guide was the etymology of “Dracula”. Vlad Tepes’ father was called “Drac”, which means devil. The “ul” affix means “the”, and the “a” affix means “son of”. Romanian adds all these things to the end of words. So Dracula = son of the devil. I think I’ll refer to our president from now on as “that Bitchula”.
And all the Disneyesque commercialization that was absent at the castle ruins in Targoviste was there in spades at this one. I picked up a Dracula t-shirt for Alex and a handstitched table runner for June (that had flowers, not fangs).
After yet another big meal and a long drive, we made it to Brasov, a beautiful old city with buildings dating back centuries.
With night falling, we zoomed back to Targoviste with a couple of hours to spare before dinner. I slept like a corpse for an hour. And dinner was great. It was a celebration of the professional relationships that were deepened during these three days and looking ahead to the next part of the project. These are fun people and I’m happy to be getting to know them.
Even after the long day of tourism, we somehow managed to prolong dinner past 2am. There was dancing involved and even I, a notorious stick in the mud disco-wise, got up and boogied some.
