Ode to #Pencilchat by MiddleLevelEd

Ode to #Pencilchat: Technology Integration in the Classroom
by: MiddleLevelEd

In honor of Twitter's #pencilchat, I put together some of the more memorable tweets to create this video. I plan to use it for upcoming professional development workshops about technology integration in the classroom. It's a light-hearted look at the spectrum of where we sit regarding technology in the classroom and meeting our students' needs. Enjoy! (Xtranormal, MiddleLevelEd, 2011.12.07)

The Machine is (Changing) Us: YouTube and the Politics of Authenticity

Wesch (YouTube, 2009.07.16) presents "a brief history" and extolls a new age of "whatever" (33:44 min.), which as Couros (2009.07.21) suggests is well worth our time.

Balance, on all fours

Balance, on all fours, seems to be what keeps tails from wagging dogs. For educational technologists, these days, the balance and interplay of humanity and technology seem to keep coming to the fore. The technological end of things has been twisting my noodle since I chewed over Achieving Sleep/Network Balance (Ceraso, ELT Blog, 2007.10.21) in pab's potpourri (2008.01.28).

Call it a rush, or addictive, vacuous pressure to adopt more and more diversified web tools, join more and more diversified professional and social networks, hold further discussions - with more people, explore existing topics more deeply, share and try new ideas, compare findings, pool and package resources, ..., and what do we get?

Loud whooshing sounds as our lives evacuate online, or something graphically represented as an exploding head, for which Alan Levine suggests he is "lacking an easy answer beyond shrugging it off, unplugging, letting stuff slide, or just floating along til the groove returns." Nonetheless, he keeps contemplating "how much 'power' we acquiesce to technology tools" (CogDogBlog, Exploding Heads, 2008.07.22).

Without ever having tried twittering, I'm inclined to agree that doing it needn't make everyone who does micro-thinkers. Yet humans are creatures of habits, and Levine wonders, "If some of the most sharp and clever people I know and respect find themselves overly immersed in something like twitter, what does that portend for the many more people who look to them for guides?"

If collection and recollection of both data and thoughts becomes largely and ubiquitously mechanical and piece-meal, it may lead to flattening of the web, and bode ill for discursive thought patterns, coherent conversations, cogent analyses, and deliberative syntheses. When push comes to pull, which way will online educators be leaning - towards the flat, quick, and transient, or the deep, rich, and stable?

It comes as some relief to hear of folks abandoning twitter accounts before I ever got one. However, I felt a twitch of dismay yesterday discovering So Many Nodes, Not Enough Reciprocity (Yet) (Marielle, Authorship 2.0, 2008.07.03), about which I growled on the LTD Project Blog (2008.07.24). Marielle reminds us "not to get lost in a plethora of solipsistic silos, speaking without listening, [and] reinventing rather than building upon each other’s ideas and deepening the collective dialogue." I wonder how long it may take twitter-free digital immigrants to groove deep enough into the web for the rest of the world to hear the music.

Photo by Andrey Sukhanov (2008)
Creative Commons License BY-NC 2.0

How a Japanese mouse works

Here is a bit of comic relief from chronic mousing syndrome:

1-click Award by Recuit Media Communications
(Web Creative Awards, Recruit Co., Ltd., 2006)

Thanks to Graham Stanley on Learning with Computers for pointing it out (February 28, 2007).

Inspiration from Karim (a Google Video)

A blogroll buddy from the Blogging for Beginners workshop put the following video on his blog for for a bit of comic relief "after three weeks of hard work" (B4Bers, We deserve a Break!). The six-week workshop is over now, and I'm finally getting around to enjoying it. I hope you do, too.

Lighten up, dude!

When a colleague emailed this morning and asked for reminders of what we'd discussed yesterday, face-to-face, in a global locale that may have been a tertiary or quaternary target the day that Nagasaki got a-bombed, I sort of went ballistic. Here's an annotated snippet of what I wrote back:

Tabula rasa, man, tabula rasa;1 let me twang your synapses!

You dutifully promised and faithfully engaged to:

a. Always bring a pulp and fiber-based notebook and indelible ink pen with you when you visit my office, and have them handy whenever you call;

b. Begin immediately listing to-do's in your notebook the moment that they spring to mind, because if you don't write your thoughts down, they may as well never have happened;2

c. Carefully annotate those to-do's as to whom you'll need to involve, what resources to obtain and distribute, and when you expect to do so;

d. Deliberately and diligently transfer all [pen & paper] notes to a byte-based format at your earliest convenience, supplementing them with electronic ticklers (reminders) as necessary;

e. Endeavor to duck and cover your pulp and fiber notebook at the earliest hint of an EMP,3 and soak the notebook with urine in case of subsequent firestorms;

...

r. Remember that all data stored electronically can be wiped out faster than ink dries.

...

Personal correspondence
February 1, 2007, 09:59:45 JST
Re: Success (L2 writing...)

Of course the colleague never promised to do any of that, but it should serve as a reminder!


Notes

1. Tabula rasa (Wikipedia): blank slate;
2. The bit about writing it down or it never happened is a long lost reference to a Tom Clancy novel;
3. EMP: Electromagnetic pulse (Wikipedia).