Do I Dare Disturb the Universe?

Dueling Devices

21. January 2007 · 2 comments · Categories: Communication, Technology

This happened a week or so ago. I didn’t have a blog "back then," but I do now so I’m going to share. Lucky you.

On the first Thursday of every month, my school sends a teacher and student of the month to lunch with our local chapter of Rotary International. On those Thursdays, I am fortunate to get to represent our administrative team and accompany the teacher and student to lunch. If you’ve never been to a Rotary meeting, it’s really something to see. Rotarians are an incredible group of people.

At the January meeting the program featured the dean of the performing and visual arts school at UNC (Apologies to Tarheel fans, but that’s the University of Northern Colorado to folks out west…). At the start of his portion of the program, he offered a pair of tickets to any concert this season to the first people who could tell him the names of the artists who sculpted Mount Rushmore and the Statue of Liberty. Someone knew right away that Gutzon Borglum had sculpted Mount Rushmore, but no one in the room knew the answer to the second part of the question.

In what I later equated to a game of 21st century quick draw, one other gentleman about my age reached for his Blackberry as I reached for my T-Mobile Dash. In less than a minute, my opponent was able to call up Google, correctly identify FrÃ©dÃ©ric-Auguste Bartholdi as the sculptor, and claim his tickets to one of the spring concert series events. I blame my EDGE connection which will never be as fast as Verizon‘s EVDO, but I digress…

Reflecting on this later that evening got me thinking back to a post I had read on Scott McLeod’s blog the week before regarding ubiquitous access to information on mobile devices. It was a real eye-opener as I think I finally understood for myself how frustrating it must be for our kids who function this way every day outside of school to have to abandon the use of their devices when they walk into a classroom.

Diving In With Both Feet

19. January 2007 · 7 comments · Categories: blogging, Education, Leadership, Technology

I suppose there’s no better way to get started than to dive right in. I have wanted to be a blogging principal for some time but was hesitant to get started. For one thing, I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to be anonymous. I also wasn’t sure whether I really had anything to contribute to the already very active community of "edu-bloggers" whose blog feeds I have been following for quite some time.

This fall I am planning to begin doctoral work at Colorado State University. In planning my program of study, I was fortunate this week to have had the opportunity to pick the brain of Dr. Scott McLeod. I have been an avid reader of his Dangerously Irrelevant blog for the better part of the last 6 months. As part of getting started and beginning to crystallize my thoughts on a program, he suggested I become involved in the blogging community and gave me quite a few tips on how to get up and running.

I’ve spent way too much time registering a domain and tweaking my TypePad account (I’m sure more layout tweaking will follow. I can’t help myself…) and I thought it was high time I got something posted. Then this morning I saw an interesting post over at think:lab and it was just what I needed to read. Christian’s post about liability issues for blogging educators really gave me the kick-start that I needed:

Anonymous is only a delay; it no longer means anonymous.

Interesting. And true. Of course I already knew that anyone with a computer and access to Google could figure out who I was in short order, but somehow seeing it in print on my screen drove it home. After reading the entire post as well Kim Moritz’s post over on G-Town Talks, I decided there really is no reason to be anonymous.

So here I am with my empty blog space and a head full of thoughts to post on. It should be an interesting ride.