Moving at the Speed of Creativity

Great cartoon.

Via Whelmed and Tomaz Lasic.

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education, real, school, world, realworld

Here’s a fun Facebook option my sister showed me today.

From your Facebook homepage, scroll all the way down and in the lower left corner click on your LANGUAGE. From the available choices, choose ENGLISH (Pirate) – beta.

Now you can enjoy using Facebook and reading updates from your friends using Pirate English!

Warning: Be careful when USING Pirate English with others, particularly in professional settings. Not everyone may share your enthusiasm for this language dialect, especially fans of political correctness.

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english, facebook, fun, pirate, language

As you may have guessed if you’ve perused images in my Flickr stream or visited our family learning blog, I love signs. Driving from Manchester, New Hampshire today to Augusta, Maine, for the ACTEM 2009 Conference, I found the following two signs at the Maine visitor’s center just across the border. I’m glad to know the Maine Department of Tourism is taking care of travelers with these healthful signs.

Based on this advice, I am definitely going to avoid selecting choice pieces of rubbish from the local trash bins here, and snack VERY wisely on only rare occasions.

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fun, maine, sign, snack, travel, actem, actem09, trash, road

This week, the honor of being her preschool class snack leader falls again to my five year old daughter, Rachel. Inspired by her enthusiasm and excitement for the honor and responsibilities of being the class snack leader, this podcast features some dramatic narration from her dad, a little John Williams music reminding us of closing scene of “A New Hope,” and Rachel herself sharing her well-laid plans for this week when again she becomes, THE SNACK LEADER. This podcast was recorded in GarageBand 2009 using several of the built-in vocal effects as well as the default audio ducking for imported jingles.

 

 Podcast316: Behold the Glory and Honor of the Snack Leader! [5:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1155)

Show Notes:

1. GarageBand 2009
2. School S’Mores
3. Learning Signs (our family learning blog)

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This morning I accompanied my 5 year old daughter, Rachel, on a school field trip to the Orr Family Farm, an “Agri-Tainment” destination in south Oklahoma City. One of the learning highlights for me was seeing this metal sign of “Hobo Signs and Symbols,” posted beside the narrow gauge railway at the farm.

The history of hobos in the United States is actually quite fascinating. Check out the English WikiPedia article for “Hobo” for a sampling. My older daughter was introduced to the history of hobos via the American Girl movie, “Kit Kittredge,” last year. I found the following symbols on this sign today both amusing and interesting despite my limited background knowledge about U.S. hobos.

These people are rich

Kind woman lives here. Tell a pitiful story

Police here frown on hobos

I never remember studying hobos in history class, either in high school college. Yet apparently, a fair number of people in the 1940s and 1050s idealized the life of a hobo as a carefree existence which might be preferable to the responsibilities and predictable routines of a more civilized life. The history of hobos certainly could provide material for some interesting and colorful digital stories!

The existence and history of hobos is quite real and serious, but our discussions today of hobos also made me think of John Hodgman (known to many as “PC” in Apple’s “Get a Mac” advertising campaign) and his hilarious spoofs of hobo history. I first heard a sampling of John sharing this “history remix” in an interview he shared on NPR several years ago. (“The (Wacky) World According to John Hodgman” from September 2006.) This evening Googling around for a YouTube version, I did find this clever and amusing 7 min, 45 sec version of “Hobo Matters” by John Hodgman, created in a parody style of the PBS series “American Experience.”

This would be an interesting video to watch with students studying the Great Depression, and dissect the actual history from the created / parodied history. According to the hobo sign and symbol reference guide we saw today, John Hodgman is correct when he relates in his monolog that a picture of a cat means “a kind lady lives here.”

We should be more critical of John’s claim that “intersecting circles meant the local sheriff carried throwing stars” or his memory of “President Hoover’s pronouncement from his hover yacht in the Caspian sea” during the onset of the Great Depression.

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history, hobo, hobos, hodgman, parody, train, sign, symbol

This evening I learned about the YouTube video “Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn’t seen it)” by listening to Justin Karkow’s “Digital Storytelling Frame by Frame” presentation on the 2009 Nebraska Educational Technology Association Podcast channel.

As a big Star Wars fan, I found this remix quite amusing and fun. Nice use of Final Cut Pro.

The NETA 2009 conference was held April 23-24, 2009, in Omaha, Nebraska. The podcast channel from the conference is GREAT. I was not able to attend the conference, but thanks to this audio podcast channel I can attend virtually, after the fact, and you can as well! Way to go Nebraska educators! I think it’s definitely a best practice to, at a minimum, audio record key sessions at conferences as the leaders at NETA did and make them available afterwards as free downloads. This substantially amplifies and extends the voices of those presenting at the conference as well as the sponsoring conferencing organization itself.

Go NETA! A twitter account was created for the 2009 NETA conference, which can be a good way for face-to-face conference attendees to find each other on Twitter. I’d recommend, however, setting up a non-year specific Twitter account for conference events so the account can “live on in relevance” after the year of that particular conference is over.

Hat tip to Elizabeth Helfant of St Louis MICDS for letting me know about this NETA09 podcast channel. (Twitter: ehelfant) As a related aside, if you’re anywhere NEAR St Louis consider attending their “MICDS Summer Teacher Institute” in 2009. Their lineup of presenters and presentation topics is FANTASTIC. This is sure to be a fantastic series of learning opportunities for midwestern educators!

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starwars, finalcutpro, fcp, youtube

Could this road sign photograph have been taken in or near your community?

[Original Image Link]

Hat tip to Stephen King (@Kicode) for sharing the link to Atom Smasher’s “Highway Sign Generator.”

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school, reform, education, change, funny, humor, leadership

Thanks to Orange County, California, educator Dennis Grice, I learned last night and today at ITSC 2009 about the “Film on the Fly” digital storytelling contest: A “Mobile Phone Video Challenge.” Karen Mongomery had mentioned this to me awhile back but I had not seen any of the videos submitted to the contest until today. According to the website hosted by KOCE-TV (public television in Southern California):

We’re texting a secret story prompt to cell phones all over the world on March 14, 2009. Over the next 20 hours, people will be creating stories, making mobile phone videos and posting them to YouTube. Will you be part of this global experience?

The contest’s Ning site includes the seven videos which were submitted for the first edition of Film on Fly, which took place on Feburary 7, 2009. The prompt was sent by SMS text message to participants who signed up, and they had less than 24 hours to plan, shoot, edit and share their video. Cell phones had to be used to RECORD the video, but editing software on a computer could be used for the “chopping” (editing) process. The prompt was:

Everything changed – when the box mysteriously arrived at my doorstep.

Matt Monjan and Steve Dembo created the two minute short “Film on the Fly – Matrix Style,” which I think is absolutely hilarious. (This is, of course, guerrilla marketing for the Discovery Educator Network. A very effective method I think.)

Are you ready to take the blue pill?!

Karen Montgomery created this very clever 2 minute video with some help from her family.

This was Hall Davidson’s 31 second submission, filmed at an airport security checkpoint:

This one (which I think was created by Dennis Grice, but I’m not sure) uses a very clever technique of panning across hand-drawn images, which are shown sequentially in a flip book.

Great creativity, everyone! I’m signing up for round two! Won’t you join us? Get out your cell phone and let’s start making some movies!

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filmonthefly, video, cellphone, mobile, cell, contest, creative, creativity, digitalstorytelling

I’ve actually lived this cartoon several times at official meetings in the past two years.

Somehow, having a laptop in front of you makes the reality of cognitive multi-tasking more tangibly visible to some leaders. When we’ve been in class or in meetings, we’ve always had trouble as human beings maintaining a singular focus on the speaker’s voice and topic. In a meeting with my laptop, I’m likely talking notes with EverNote, checking my calendar and adding items to it, and/or looking up something which is being discussed. I’m never playing Solitaire. Yet I find that in some cases, some people assume laptops are just toys and useless distractions when it comes to class lectures or formal meetings. Certainly digital technologies can be used to “distance and distract” (words from John Naisbitt in “High Tech/High Touch” I think) but in my case a laptop is a used in a meeting to digitize thoughts for indexed access afterwards, and to obtain additional information needed to process new directives.

Scott Adams has captured elements of this reality well in his cartoon today.

Thanks to James Deaton for bringing this to my attention via a tweet.

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laptop, laptops, cartoon, dilbert, meeting, attention

In this rather amusing advertisement for Hitachi, Mr. T claims “intelligence is never in the network.” Apparently Mr. T has not been introduced to the concepts of connectivism.

Even though this video script for the the actor formerly known as Laurence Tureaud may not reflect a basic understanding of connectivist learning theory, I do like the video since I know several school IT departments that could use a Mr. T – style shakeup! Rather than advocating for Hitachi hardware, I’d re-write Mr. T’s lines to include the following exhortation:

Wake up fools! Mr. T is in the house! Why are you blockin’ all these web 2.0 tools for these teachers and students? Don’t you know we’ve got to collaborate as a nation and a planet if we’re going to survive? Are you all a bunch of supporters or blockers? Let’s get on the same page with this education mission!

I think this video provides some great ideas for further creativity and remixing of ideas. Certainly it can provide an interesting opening for a discussion on the relative merits of dumb networks compared to smart network technologies.

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technology, school, web2, mrt, Hitachi, youtube, video, ad, advertisement

I had a meeting this week at the Oklahoma Department of Education, and I found the following signs in the hallway on the third floor of the building rather humorous.

First, there were several boxes of bags sitting outside one of the offices. Apparently, at least a few people felt the availability of the bags in the hallway was an invitation to help themselves to a free bag. As a result, the following “Do Not Take Bags” sign was necessary on the side of one of the boxes:

I suppose I can partly see why people walking by thought these bags were being made available for the general public. If the owners didn’t want anyone to take any bags, perhaps it would be good to close the box?

In the same area, apparently some people in the past had seen the deposted boxes and figured it was a dumping area for other boxes of trash and unwanted items. As as result, the following sign (which can be paraphrased as “no dumping”) was posted:

Often we bemoan or hear other adults bemoan the behaviors of children as “so immature” or “unprofessional,” yet I think we can often find adults in professional contexts who (for a variety of reasons no doubt) make poor choices. These signs reflect that reality, and also gave me a good laugh this week.

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signs, trash, funny

Feeling like you can’t learn new tricks with educational technology tools at school? Do you know other teachers who have similar sentiments? Perhaps you can try and recommend some of the top ten downloads from the British site My Mobile Guru.

The following popular topics might be appropriate and needed at the next technology-related workshop or conference event you attend, or to just cope with the daily stresses of classroom teaching!

1. I get so angry
2. I’m too old to change
3. I can’t wake up

I’m thinking the third suggestion above might be perfect for a few superintendents and school board members I know.

Unfortunately these short audio downloads are not free, they cost £3.00 each. According to Google’s estimate with today’s exchange rate that is about $5.25 US. Seems a bit steep. But perhaps these audio messages ARE truly transformative? They could provide the missing ingredient needed to help get you and teachers you know on the right track with effective technology integration and digital learning strategies.

photo credit: J?sé

I doubt it, however.

Thanks to Clark Boyd on The World Tech Podcast #211 for sharing this site. I’m thinking this would be good to share in my introductory keynote remarks next week at TechCon in Chicago.

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mobile, phone, cell, counseling, therapy, gury, mymobileguru, technology, stress, education, teachers

This is too good to not share.

Last weekend our family attended the wonderful wedding of my cousin Devin Henley and his beautiful bride, Andrea. This evening as my wife and I watched “The Red Violin” (a great flick, btw) I caught up on my photo and video uploads to Flickr. I’m in the habit of limiting access to photos of our kids to family and friends (those designated in Flickr) and I did with the wedding photo set, but the video set is too adorable (and not really that identifiable like a photo can be) to not share.

Of the six videos in the set, this one of Rachel dancing to YMCA is our favorite:

This second video of her YMCA dancing, including some breakdancing moves she certainly did NOT learn from her dad, comes in a close second:

Did we ever have a BLAST together at Devin and Andrea’s wedding or what? Boy this was a lot of fun! Clearly our family (led by our youngest members) needs to get out and go dancing more often!

Again I say “thanks” to the flash-based camera and camcorder I picked up several weeks ago for enabling me to capture these memorable moments.

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dance, dancing, wedding, family

This podcast features a recording with Steven Smith, a wonderful re-enactor of Benjamin Franklin, at the 2008 Oklahoma A+ Schools Conference on August 1st. In the character of Benjamin Franklin, Steven recounts historial events of his life as an inventor, statesman, author and civic activist. If there is a more memorable and impactful way to learn about historical characters than having an animated conversation like this one with Benjamin Franklin, I’m not sure what they are! This was a lot of fun! Thanks to Steven for granting this interview and permission to share it online. Steven role plays several characters in addition to Ben Franklin including Peter Cartwright, Professor B Looney and Tupper the Clown. Visit the podcast shownotes for links to his websites. He is based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but shares his wit, wisdom and life lessons with audiences young and old around the United States.

 

 Podcast270: A Conversation with Benjamin Franklin- Inventor, Statesman, Author and Civic Activist [21:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1894)

Show Notes:

1. Blooney.com – Website of Steven Smith
2. Oklahoma Arts Council website for storyteller Stephen Robert Smith: AKA Ben Franklin
3. Christian Sanity Theater website for Stephen Robert Smith
4. WikiPedia article for Benjamin Franklin
5. Oklahoma A+ Schools

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[tags]history,benfranklin,benjaminfranklin,franklin,story,storytelling,actor,reenactor,constitution[/tags]

It is thankfully not often my heart actually stops beating momentarily after clicking a mouse button. Unfortunately, one of these moments happened this evening when I was updating my online vitae.

Have you ever accidentally overwritten a computer file you did NOT have properly backed up? I have. A few of those instances are burned indelibly into my neocortex and wherever else long term memories are stored in my brain. Even though tonight’s experience did not turn out tragically, I think I’ll be remembering it for a long time to come none-the-less.

My earliest computer-related near-heart stoppage took place in the early 1980s, when I was working on a relatively simple but for me, pretty complex program in BASIC. My experiences with computers started with the Commodore 64 in 7th grade math class, writing amazing programs like the following:

Eventually I advanced to slightly more sophisticated programs, and I was working on one I had developed to keep track of my personal finances on that fateful night in 1983 (or thereabouts) when I made the fatal error. My homebrew personal finance program had several hundred lines of code in it, and I THOUGHT I had the program opened in BASIC. As you will recall if you used BASIC in those days, everything was done from a command line, the computing “mouse” had been invented in 1981 but hadn’t yet found its way into the Fryer household. Unfortunately, I had NOT opened my multi-line BASIC finance program into RAM, so when I typed the command to save my program to a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk (our computer didn’t have a hard drive then) I actually saved a BLANK, EMPTY file over my existing program.

Uh oh. I didn’t have a backup.

Hours and hours of work at the computer screen, with one ill-advised click on the keyboard– down the toilet. Ouch.

Let’s fast forward twenty-five years to this evening. I needed to update my personal contact page, bio page, and vitae with new information since my resignation from AT&T was effective at the end of the day Friday and I begin work for the Oklahoma Heritage Association on Monday. I am still using an older version of Dreamweaver to update those pages on my wesfryer.com site, so once I update a page I have to ftp the file (I use CyberDuck) from my local computer’s hard drive up to the server in the sky. After I reviewed the updated file I’d changed and set to the server, I realized the mistake I’d made. Darn. I’d been considering moving my vitae as well as other personal pages over to a personal wiki site. If I had, older versions / revisions of the page would have been accessible and I could have “reverted” my page back to a previous version. Unfortunately, I hadn’t been using a wiki.

I’d used a pre-December 2007 version of my vitae webpage to update my site. By uploading that version of the page to my server, I OVERWROTE the existing page which had HUNDREDS of new entries in it for all the articles I wrote and presentations / workshops I shared in 2007. Ouch. I put my head down in despair on my laptop’s keyboard. My son came over and asked in a concerned voice, “What happened, Dad?” I didn’t have a backup on my computer of my most recently updated vitae… and that meant HOURS and HOURS of work had just gone up in smoke. Or been overwritten through the magic ether of the Internet at the speed of light. Or whatever. I was seriously bummed.

Yet in the midst of this near tragic nightmare on HTML-street, a light appeared. A narrow chance my work could yet be salvaged.

Two in fact. And the second one proved golden.

My first glimmer of hope came when I remembered the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. The site takes a “snapshot” of many websites at regular intervals. If I was lucky, the site would have a snapshot of my vitae page which included all the new additions I’d added in December 2007 and January 2008.

Unfortunately, the last Wayback snapshot of my vitae was from 16 Feb 2007. The site showed a snapshot was available for 27 Jul 2007, but I couldn’t get it to display in my browser, and if it WAS available it wouldn’t help. That date was too early. I needed something after January 2008, and before about three minutes before I had started this desperate search.

My second glimmer of hope came when I remembered that Google automatically caches webpage versions. Could it be that Google could come to my rescue? I performed a quick search for my vitae address on Google.

I clicked the CACHED link and held my breath. Would it be Christmas in July? Can furtive prayers at the keyboard of a Macbook be answered so quickly?

Yes indeed! The wonderful Google search engine had indexed and cached my vitae website automatically back on July 4, 2008, and I was able to view the source code of that page and save it to my local hard drive. WHAT A RELIEF! Hours and hours of work had been saved!

Hooray for Google, and hooray for Google’s caching functionality!

There are other examples we’ve heard about where Google’s caching function or the Internet Archive’s Wayback machine has come back to haunt someone (like when an unwanted, inappropriate photo is posted online and is cached so it can’t be deleted forever) but my experiences this evening provide a compelling counter-example to those stories.

I’m delighted Google automatically caches webpages. That’s was life-saving functionality for me!

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google, cache, backup, save, overwrite, story, pain, wayback, copy