I watched Hector Ruiz’s moving TedTalk “The power to connect the world” at lunch today. I resonate with his passion for the 50×15 project, which seeks: …to enable affordable, accessible Internet connectivity and computing capabilities for 50 percent of the world’s population by the year 2015. Yesterday at our monthly Oklahoma Creativity Project education committee
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I’m sharing the commencement address for graduating seniors in Howe, Oklahoma, this evening starting at 7:00 pm US central time. Connectivity permitting, I’ll webcast my presentation live on Ustream. I haven’t seen the program yet, but I’m guessing I’ll start around 7:15… I’ll post an update to twitter when I have a better idea of
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A couple of years ago when our family spent time in and around Jemez Springs, New Mexico, I met several local residents who aspired to “live off the grid.” By “the grid,” they meant the electricity grid to which most of us in the “developed world” are connected every minute of our lives, and without
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I am reading Rob Bell’s book “Velvet Elvis” along with about 50 other men in our church’s Friday morning men’s group, and came across the following passage recently which resonated with me as a teacher. Rob wrote: Tour guides are people who see depth and texture and connections where others don’t. That is why the
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The “Daily Motivator” quotation from Ralph Marston on October 3, 2007 resonates with me: Do you understand where you are right now? You are in a place, a time, and a set of circumstances toward which you’ve been moving your entire life. Do you realize the enormous opportunity that now exists? You are more experienced
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It is quite challenging to return to “normal life” and work after a week-long trip and face email inboxes.Since starting David Allen’s book “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity” several months ago, I’ve started applying several of his core organizational principles with limited but positive results. Since it is quite hard to change
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I’m about a fourth of the way through David Allen’s outstanding book “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity.” I mentioned this book to a friend yesterday with the comment, “This book is going to change my life by helping me really get more organized and efficient with my use of time,” and I
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I’ve almost finished reading Carl Honore’s book “In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed,” and I discovered his 20 minute TED talk video today recorded in July 2005, and posted online in February 2007. These are a few of my notes from that presentation. We are marinated the culture of speed today, our
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This are my notes from Dr. Lynell Burmark’s presentation at TCEA 2007 on 2/9/2007. Lynell’s website: www.educatebetter.org All of us know that just because you fail one test you are not a failure, right?! Hopefully we’ll have some laughs and some serious moments today – also we will talk about some tools we can use
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I am continuing to read “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and am seeing lots of connections for educators and learners. At the outset of chapter 4, Csikszentmihalyi summarizes the “common characteristics of optimal experience” or flow: …a sense that one’s skills are adequate to cope with the challenges at hand, in
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Many people mistakenly seem to equate the terms “courage” and “bravery” with an absence of fear. This is not the case. I remember free-fall parachuting five times to earn my jump wings in the Air Force, and there definitely WAS a fair amount of fear involved in those experiences! People who are brave are not
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Many, many thanks to Dean Shareski for generously guest-blogging the past week and a half as I traveled with my family to a family reunion at Hunters Peak Ranch, Wyoming, and spent four wonderful days in Yellowstone National Park! Dean mentioned in a post that he had not heard of guest blogging till I introduced
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This podcast is the first in a series focusing on Guidelines for Educational Revolutionaries. In this podcast I explore the natural tension which often exists between those in charge of K-12 educational technology (IT departments who tend to favor control over creativity) and those advocating for innovation and change. I explore ideas about what might
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Lynn Brewer is the author of “Confessions Of An Enron Executive: A Whistleblower’s Story” and shared these comments at the Texas Tech University Ethics Day on April 6, 2006. Lynn generously gave permission for her presentation to be recorded and shared as a podcast, available on the Texas Tech University College of Education podcast channel.
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Don Cash is Chairman Emeritus of Questar Corporation, and shared the following remarks at the TTU Ethics Day on 6 April 2006. He become CEO at age 39, served in that capacity for 20+ years. Regards himself as a “professional board member” now. He currently serves on 5 boards. They have retired here in Lubbock,
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NPR’s “This I Believe” podcast is one of my favorites. The shows are always short, and almost always quite poignant. This week, Phil Power’s essay (shared in his own voice) titled “The Practice of Slowing Down” is outstanding. This resonates with me. I like the following two quotations particularly: In times of crisis, pace comes
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Dr. David Orr, in the question and answer period following his presentation “The End of Education” shared with an audience at the University of British Columbia on January 13, 2006 (hour/minute/second mark 1:00:05 of the podcast), quoted a corporate CEO who stated the problem with his company was that they “suffered from a deficit of
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Remember if you are not interested in reading posts like this about non-education/educational technology stuff, you can always subscribe to the “edtech only” feed for my blog. Tonight for fun (and in preparation for my continuing Sunday school teaching series about the theology of C.S. Lewis) I spent about an hour and fifteen minutes listening
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The Connectivism presentation by George Siemens (the eLearnSpace author) is a great 35 minute multimedia reflection about teaching, learning, elearning, and web 2.0. George explores how learning today is often disconnected from the informationally robust environment in which we live and work. He discusses “distributed cognition” and “learning as network creation.” Great stuff, great thoughts,
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