Author: timcalvin

A bunch of the bio’s of me floating around out there mention me as an “archivist.” That’s two steps away from being a hoarder. One, maybe. I keep files on all sorts of things- projects, mentions, ideas, discoveries, artifacts of my life- and I’m pretty good about keeping it organized and culling from time to time.

I found an old unfinished project of mine the other day- a book I’d been working on called “Cinderblocks & Greasepens.”

The file itself is very complete- it has the full succession of proofs from the start of the project up until it’s abandoning. Original art, cropping notes, color tests- the works. The shocking part for me was to re-visit and see how many proof cycles it had been through. My quick counting showed at least 8 full proofs. That’s not counting testing and drafts and everything else. The book kept evolving- shrinking and expanding- as time went on and I struggled to find the exact right tone and combination of design parameters to satisfy my shifting tastes. That book will stay in the archives- it’ll never get finished and never be released. It’s time has passed.

And what this really tells me is that sometimes you just have to pull the trigger. You have to say “That’s it.” And even if you’re not 100% sure about the thing, you have to let it go anyway. If you don’t it’ll spend it’s life mumbling around some archival purgatory- and worse yet- you’ll never get the feedback you need to know what to do on the next project.

 

…decide anything about education?

I mean, in my state, if you’re an educator, that means you have both a BA or BS, as well as a MS/MA. That means that we have advanced graduate degrees in the field of education. That would make us experts.

But we allow non-educators, laypeople, politicians and the like to tell us how/what we need to being doing.

I don’t tell particle physicists how to run experiments.

I don’t tell my doctor how to treat my illness.

I don’t tell an architect how to design a building.

So why would someone else tell me how to teach?

Everything can be replaced.

Given the software market dynamics, there is always competition for market share. That means choices.

If you think you can’t live/work/function without a specific piece of software, you’re likely wrong.

There’s nothing more intimidating than a blank page and a blinking cursor.

And sometimes you just need to start typing, and worry about what it says later.

 

Sometimes starting is the most important part.

So we had a visitor last week. Doesn’t matter who.

And while talking about our new digital student portfolio initiative, there was some concern about the public/private nature of putting young students’ work online. Understandably. It was something we’d been grappling with for a bit already, but mister visitor was quick with a response:

Just make it public.

The argument, I suppose, being that it makes things easy on the administration end. That it creates an environment/culture of “openness.” And so on.

But I’m not convinced. Not everything in the “real world” is open. In fact, we stress the ability to keep much of what we do private- from social networks to banking to forums, we cherish the ability to keep things isolated to a specific community.

So why would we take that ability from students?

So Google went and got me all excited about the new Course Builder project they’ve got going.

It looks pretty neat.

And then-

Requires some knowledge of Python. And JavaScript. And HTML.

So I’m lucky enough to have one of those under my belt. And, as an ELA teacher, that’s pretty unusual. I even know a teeny-tiny bit of JavaScript. And I know what Python is.

But to expect a classroom educator to either know- or have time to learn- all three of those things in order make a course means that this was designed for people with heavy web-based development. That might be reasonable at the college level and within the realm of technical studies, but not at the k-12 level. And not with traditional classroom teachers.

So once again, some tech/engineer types have failed on two accounts:

1. They have assumed everyone is just like them, and

2. They haven’t brought in any educators to look at what they’ve made.

I expected more, folks.