It’s been a month, and I’ve changed a few things around and whatnot.
Current carry is:
In case you’ve ever wanted more places to find me (and the stuff I like, produce, or pontificate…), I thought I’d put together a list. In general, I work under the name nothingfuture– but here’s as complete a list as I can currently come up with:
Some of these aren’t in high use (pinterest, G+, ello) some are mostly for consumption (vimeo, soundcloud), and the rest are for producing/posting/sharing/ranting (twitter, tumblr, flickr, youtube). Even there, flickr is mostly for storage & content mining, if I’m honest. There are other, abandoned & orphaned accounts out here (foursquare, I’m looking at you…), but they’re as good as dead to me (and I only keep them open to maintain control of the username).
Of the active accounts, here’s what I use them for:
This is where my day-to-day comments go, though there’s always been a pretty heavy educational slant to my postings there. I’m not as active as I once was (which wouldn’t take much), but it’s still a place I check often. I use the API to do a bunch of archiving here as well- it’s a great research tool as well.
This is a favorite of mine- though I’ve been experimenting with it of late. I used to use it to share the quick shots of my life, but lately I’ve been taking a higher-quality view of what I post there (ironic, given the wildly poor quality of the media). All my content there is original to me- no reposts, no fluff, no filler.
tumblr
I’ve had one of these for a long time now- years. I’d mostly ignored it for a while, but recently I’ve been investing more time in it, and the more time I spend with the platform, the more I like it. Like, a lot. In fact, if someone was talking to me about wanting to start an online platform for themselves, I’d recommend tumblr before most other options. It’s very, very good. My instagram posts are cross posted here, but most of what goes here is not content created by me- I mine other platforms for content that speaks to me, and it gets queued here. This blog gets auto-posted 8 times a day, between 7am EST and 8pm EST. All I do is keep the queue full of good content. Also, tumblr is an amazing content consumption platform- it’s a self-contained RSS reader for other tumblr blogs.
youtube
I’ve had a number of projects in video over the last million years- and youtube is the place (right now, anyway) to post that stuff. I like the compression on vimeo better (uploaded videos literally look nicer there), but youtube has the audience and the infrastructure of google behind it, so there you go. My instagram videos are posted here in all their non-cropped less compressed 14 second glory. Longer work makes it’s home here.
In case you have a morbid curiosity of what setting/apps/workflow I’m using on my iPhone in my current series of instagram videos, let me break it down like a fraction:
Done. Some of the new Sony cameras have a neat wifi based proxy recording function where you can send your footage straight to your phone- my Nikon won’t do that (hrmph!) so iPhone it is. It’d be pretty neat to be able to shoot on the serious camera and still edit/grade/upload on the go. Maybe I need to buy a Sony?
An example from today:
Just a quick run-down of the podcasts I’m currently listening to:
Some of you may have notices some minor changes around here.
Wait- that’s not true. Nobody visits here.
Anyway. I’ve added a quick feed to my instagram account on the right side- it shows the five most recent photos I’ve taken. Sadly, it presents videos that I post there as stills (with no indication whatsoever they might be videos…). Whatever. Though instagram is where I’ve been (weirdly) posting most of my new-ish video content. Just this morning started looking at the Storehouse app for putting together narratives in video and still with text. I dunno. Looks promising.
Above that lovely display of media there is now a place to sign up for my newsletter. Enter your email and BOOM you get (infrequent and erratic) updates about the various things I find, think, see, and hear. And make. Let me be clear:
It is a terrible mailing list. You’d be a complete and utter fool to sign up. Nothing good will come of it. Resist the urge. Subscribing to Sean Bonner’s or Warren Ellis’ mailing lists would be far better. Mine is rubbish.
Despite this stern warning, some folks have started signing up regardless. Fools. That means, however, I will have to begin actually mailing things out.
So that’s it. Nothing else new (in terms of design and whatnot. Always lots going on in the background).
Things I’ve been looking into
Things I’ve been researching:
Things I’ve been researching this week:
So I was listening to The Accidental Tech Podcast a week or two ago, after Apple had announced their latest round of products. Casey, John, and Marco were all in amazement at why Apple was keeping the iPad2 around (and at that price!) and who would possibly buy that. John made the point that it was likely schools, but that they get “educational pricing” and that was that. In addition, there has been talk about how schools are slow to adopt technology and that this is the reason schools are sticking with such an old device even at the price.
Given that I have been a driving force in one of the first large iPad 1:1 deployment, I thought I might be in a position to offer both some error correction and insight.
Price: Yeah, the price sucks. Sorry, Apple, but it’s a silly price for what the iPad2 now is. Fine. What’s even more frustrating is that we don’t get “educational pricing.” Apple sells us iPad2’s in boxes of ten- and you can order them too. For the same price. Unit price for a 16gb WiFi goes from $399 to $379 per unit. Woo. Hoo.
On Being Slow: Nope, not really. At least not here. When we started buying iPad2’s, they were the new and current device. We’ve stuck with them since for a few annoying buy unavoidable reasons:
Price: Yeah, $379 is too much, but it’s still less than $479. And while that $100 is TOTALLY worth spending if you’re a regular person, when we buy 1000 iPad’s each year, that’s $100k difference.
Size: So here in Massachusetts, our students will have to take this stupid test called the PARCC. It’s totally awful, but that’s what it is. This test is taken on a device online, and they have specifications about the device that may be used. One of which is the screen size, which they specify not in pixels but in inches. So the iPad2 (or Air) both meet that requirement, and the Mini’s don’t and that sucks. The test also specifies that the device has a physical keyboard (which I cannot even fathom the dumbness of…), so I have to purchase enough keyboard to plug into iPad2’s to satisfy that requirement.
I’d much rather buy Mini’s for my older students, but the stupid requirements of a stupid test are in my way. I’d rather buy Air’s for my students, but that $100k is in my way. So it’s not a matter of being slow, but it’s a matter of scale and stupid state mandated testing.
There you go. Carry on.
There’s been a TON of traffic about the article that just came out about a “radical new teaching method” that mostly involves not teaching. It’s made me kind of angry. There are a couple or reasons for this:
The problem, as I see it, comes down to thirst. In an environment where students are parched for learning, the introduction of the equivalent of a glass of water to people in the desert will of course cause excitement. But that same glass of water in a room full of bottled water will not spark the same excitement. Conditions matter.
Even in conditions that have the requisite thirst to motivate the students, there are issues with coverage- students sufficiently interested will indeed learn, but that learning will be uneven. Plopping a computer in a room with kids itching to learn will allow them access to information they wouldn’t have otherwise, but it doesn’t guide them through any reasonable path. It doesn’t provide the guidance towards a knowledge base that promotes further learning. The danger, I feel, is the gaps in understanding that are inevitable without some guidance.
Is any learning better than none? Of course. Just as a glass of water to a dehydrated person is good, something is better than none. But in the schools I work in, most students aren’t dying for a drink of water.