Author: timcalvin

One of my favorite authors has a famous quote:

The street finds it’s own use for things.

-William Gibson

Some of the tech that’s released ends up getting used in ways the creators never imagined. The two classic examples are pagers and text messages, but there are many more.

It’s something to keep in mind when you’re being bombarded with new tech being marketed at education. In fact, most of the best tech I’ve found hasn’t been made for education at all. Even worse, the stuff marketed at educators is often the worst of a breed I’ve seen.

Look outside the box a bit, and don’t be afraid to turn a product on it’s head if it’ll do what you need.

 

I found this on Kevin Kelly’s Technium:

Parkinson’s Law of Triviality states that, “the time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.” In other words, if you try to build a simple thing such as a public bike shed, there will be endless town hall discussions wherein people argue over trivial details such as the color of the door. But if you want to build a nuclear power plant — a project so vast and complicated that most people can’t understand it — people will defer to expert opinion. — C. Northcote Parkinson, 1957, Parkinson’s Law.

I’m not saying public education is a nuclear power plant; it’s just that everyone seems to have an opinion.

 

Why don’t High Schools have cafe’s as separate areas, with their own bathrooms (and so on)?

Then students wouldn’t have to leave for lunch period, and the rest of the building could be isolated from the commotion of hundreds of students being fed and socializing.

When my car recently broke, I took it to my local butcher. He offered several reasons it might not be running. And then he went back to work cutting steaks. He also has no background whatsoever as a mechanic.

My actions above make about as much sense as allowing career politicians to make decisions about education.

 

The layout of a room is the first clue that a student has about what the focus of a room is going to be. When they walk in for the first time, where the desks are pointed says a lot about what they’ll be doing in that class.

If your desk is at the front of the room, does that mean you’re the focus of that class?

 

Here’s what’s not in my room:

1. A desk

2. A mounted whiteboard

3. A smartboard

4. Desks

5. A printer

 

And all is right in my world.

There’s a great quarterly magazine called “Make.” It’s about (wait for it) making things. A good read, if you’re into the DIY thing.

They’ve got a slogan for companies that are killing off software or hardware:

If you’re going to kill it, make it open.

You could apply this to Cisco, who killed the semi-popular Flip video cameras. Or to any small software company.

The classic example of this is Apple’s Newton handheld device. This was, in many ways, the iPhone before the iPhone was a thing. WAY before. It was ahead of it’s time, and Apple eventually killed the project. They never open-sourced it. But a vibrant community of hackers and makers have kept at it, and there are still Newtons running, now with WiFi, Bluetooth, and a myriad of other features that were never part of the device.

But think about it with education: A lesson that I’m maybe not going to use can be set free for other educators to use/modify/grow into a new and vibrant thing.

What we do is make content. We curate, we select, we cull, but first and foremost, we make.

If the thing you’re looking for doesn’t seem to exist, part of what we should do is to make that thing.

 

So when you’re frustrated that the thing you’re looking for can’t be found-

When you’re making do with something that only partially does what you want or need-

When you’ve given up on an idea because some piece was missing-

 

Make that thing.