why “we” blog

great blog posting by Dean Shareski here that talks about not only why he blogs, but the cyclical and reflective nature blogging takes when compared to his teaching.  i particularly like when Dean talks about the times he would try new methods in his classroom not only to see if it was more effective, but also so that he could blog about it and find out what his online colleagues thought about it all.  as a matter of course we ask students to journal and free write to get their thoughts out so that they can start to think about them critically, but we as adult educators often fail to do that exact thing.  are we hypocritical?  there are all the excuses in the world for why we are too busy or have nothing to say but did we accept those excuses from our students when they refused to pick up their pencils?  i’ll add one more reason to blog/journal/write and that is to clear space.  its almost as if getting the thoughts out somehow compacts them and makes space for new thoughts, otherwise i have the same old thoughts tumbling around my head, taking up far more space than they are due.

 

the cloud

i’ve been reading lots lately about what cloud computing means for all of us, and with push notification becoming increasingly common the way in which we access information and how information finds us, is crafting the technology we use.  it’s not good enough to store information on some server and be able to access it from seemingly infinite points, now we have to make sure that information is pushed straight to us the moment it is available regardless of whether we are or not.  i think its important to acknowledge these types of trends so we can leverage them (not my favorite term, but it works) for our uses in working with teachers, and for use in the classroom.

 

a great post on default settings

i read a great blog post here today that brought up some great points about default settings and how we are more prone to leave things the way they are rather than look for ways to make things better, or to ‘think like a hacker’ as he puts it in his post.  i think the weight of what has always been expected of us as educators tends to be too much to bear for many teachers to really take an innovative approach.  think about it, if you do exactly as you are told and students fail some would have no problem absolving them of guilt because they followed all the steps in the exact order they were told.  now if a teacher were to take an innovative route the results were less than perfect then the methods would be to blame.  it really is a shame, but fear has become a powerful demotivator in our profession at times.  three cheers for the teachers who go in and change those default settings in their classrooms to make it work for their students.