Someone once wrote that "you can't guard against the arbitrary." He or she must have been talking about travel. Stuff just happens over which one has no control. 

But knock wood, I’ve been pretty lucky in my travels about getting where I need to go by the time I need to be there. I’ve been doing about 10-20 speaking/workshop/consulting engagements a year for the past ten years, and I’ve always shown up on time*. Did I say, knock wood?

Some of this is dumb luck, but I’d like to think a little of it is good planning as well. As many of you head for ALA and NECC, here are a a few hard earned travel tips to get you where you need to be – on time.

1. Never book the last flight out in the day. If a flight is cancelled, you have a fall back position. I always try to get to overseas destinations a full day before I need to be there. Helps with the jet lag too.

2. Book a direct flight whenever possible. As much as I complain about Northworst Airlines*, I'm awfully glad to be living near Minneapolis, a major airline hub. Every connection is another chance for something to go wrong. Oh, keep your  airline customer support number on speed dial. A call is usually faster than standing in a re-booking line.

3. Know a couple airports within driving distance of your destination. I’ve had a flight cancelled to Syracuse, NY, but was able to get into Rochester and then drive to Syracuse. DC is really nice in this regard with Dulles, Regan, Baltimore and even Philadelphia are all within a reasonable drive. A late night 4-5 hour drive is better than not getting there at all. And I am more fun to watch when I've had no sleep.

4. Don’t check bags. Yeah, if you’re gone for more than a week or are combining business and recreation – hiking boots and dress shoes – you may need to check a bag, but generally a rolly and a computer bag should do it. Even the LWW has figured out how to pack wisely using a carry-on only. And she always looks lovely and stylish. It is just a whole lot easier to re-book if you don't have a bag that needs to found and re-routed. Oh, your luggage always arrives with you this way as well.

5. Get to the airport early. ‘Nuf said.

6. Learn the damn security procedures. Yes, you still have to take off your shoes, remove your computer from its bag and put liquids in quart baggie that also has to be scanned separately. This liquid business I believe is a scam perpetrated by the personal grooming business. Those big bottles of shampoo, hand lotion, and other mysterious substances people seem to need go into the trash by the hundreds each day and of course need to be replaced at the destination. And, never, never, never get in any security queue that has a woman (or man) wearing thigh high, lace up boots ahead of you. Or people traveling with children in strollers. And don't argue with security personnel. You'll not win.

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7. Once you get to the destination airport, your are only 98% there. Know where you will be staying and speaking. Bring printed maps. Bring printed driving directions. Bring your GPS. I'd never rely only one of these navigational tools, but it's hard to miss with all three working for you.

8. Never rely on a hotel wake-up call. I once worked as the 11PM to 7AM desk clerk in a motel. I know how reliable I was. In fact it was where I learned to sleep sitting upright.  I carry a cheap travel alarm. Cheap because I tend to leave them in the hotel room now and then.

*9. Double check and triple check the date of the event. Since I wrote this original post, I completely blew one speaking event. The date for my workshops change from the original date to one day earlier. I forgot to change that information on my calendar. It's a lesson you only need to learn once.

10. Come prepared. I have nifty set of items that I think every speaker should carry with him/her as well.

• One's own computer.
• One's lides on a flash drive or downloadable from Dropbox.
• Cell phone with your sponsor's phone number in it.
• The nifty litte cable that lets you recharge your phone from the computer's USB port. 
• Small powered speakers.
• A small travel powerstrip.
• A good remote for advancing slides. 
• A retractable ethernet cable.
• Computer lock.
• Foreign plug adaptor kit if speaking overseas.
• A small zippered bag of computer accessories like a power supply, video out dongle, and ethernet dongle if you travel with a Mac. Check it twice before you leave the house. 

It's not that I don't trust event organizers, but messages get crossed about equipment needs sometimes.

Consider adding one more item to your emergency speaking equipment kit - a RGB cable. In the last couple of schools I've worked, I needed to use a ceiling mounted LCD projector where the RGB cable was so tightly bound to the teacher computer, I couldn't get it to reach my laptop. A separate cable from wall plate to laptop (male to male usually) looks like it will be a necessity in the future. Hey, it beats lugging your own projector which I did for many years.

Your travel tips for guarding agains the arbitrary?

But take away context and psychology for a moment and just consider the notion of risk. Based on EU Kids Online’s surveys of families in 25 countries, Sonia Livingstone offers two insights that I think would be helpful to parents as well as debaters in any public discussion about youth risk online:

• “‘Risk’ is not the same as ‘harm’: Seeing pornography online may be harmful to children but it may not. It depends on the nature of the images and on the personal circumstances of the child. The minority of vulnerable children may be more at risk of harm from online pornography. Rather more may be more at risk of harm from pornography when it is abusive or degrading to women (or men). But conclusive evidence will always be lacking since we cannot ethically expose a random selection of children to pornography and monitor the outcomes for scientific purposes.
• “Risk may have positive as well as negative outcomes. For many children, some exposure to some risk is necessary to build resilience. We cannot wrap our children in cotton wool and protect them from the world forever, and we must allow our teenagers to explore their sexuality away from our often-disapproving gaze. But for some children, the same exposure may be harmful – depending on lots of factors, and this contingency – where much depends on the child, the online content, and the circumstances – cannot be avoided.” from NetFamilyNews "Thoughts on the UK's debate about online porn."

Always level headed, Anne Collier's post on online pornography is worth a read. That children's exposure to pornography is harmful has so long been a given, most of us have simply stopped thinking about it. And coming to a permanent conclusion is always dangerous.

Again, CIPA reads: "The protection measures must block or filter Internet access to pictures that are: (a) obscene, (b) child pornography, or (c) harmful to minors." Make no mistake, one of the filtering categories our school has selected to block is "sexual acts." And I am glad this barrier is in place. I would want my grandson's school to take the same precautions.

However, I was struck by Livingston's comment "For many children, some exposure to some risk is necessary to build resilience." I would put accidental or brief exposure to pornography in the category of a "safe mistake." In my own adolescence, accessing the hidden stash of Playboy magazines or reading Miller's steamy novels seem in retrospect a normal part of one's informal education. Did Hef or Henry teach us curious kids great values and respect for women? Of course not. But I really wonder if any of us were permanently damaged either? 

I'm not advocating that kids have access to adult sexual materials here, just that if it happens, it may wind up being a teachable moment, not the end of civilization.

Were I to define what makes a site "harmful to minors," i would say that it displays information that is both important and wrong. Bad health advice, misleading science, biased reporting, and, yes, unrealistic sexual views that go unchallenged and unquestioned are what are really harmful to minors - and to the rest of us as well.

Image source

Hmmmm. I'd agree with all of these based on my experiences. Go Jessica!

But I'd also add a few...

1. There is one right answer to every question. At least to every important question. In fact those who can come up with the most right answers will do well in this economy. 
2. The purpose of your education is make sure you can get a good job. The real value of education is to help make sense of the world, to open your eyes to new points of view, and to help you hone skills that will allow you accomplish tasks you feel are personally important.
3. The more money you make, the happier you will be. Once you make enough money for the basices, making a difference, not making money, will make you happy.
4. Heredity is fate. There will always be "the first person in the family to ____________" scenarios. Not enough, but enough to know it's possible. And your school experience does not have to be the same as that of your big brother or sister.
5. Popularity = success. Listen to Springsteen's "Glory Days". At least three times.
6. You have to be smart at everything. Good at math and science, but poor at English and social studies. Don't sweat it. Really smart people tend to be smart in the intersection of two fields, say technology and health. Focus on your passions.
7. Classwork is more valuable than extracurricular activities or a parttime job. There is still too much learning for the sake of doing better at the next high level of education. You'll learn life's best lessons on the basketball court or your first paying job.
8. You should like every teacher you have. This is impossible. You should learn how to work with every teacher, however, since one day you'll need to learn to work lots of people.
9. Objectivity trumps passion. It's the Captain Kirks, not the Mr. Spocks, that discover new worlds.

What dangerous things were you taught in school?

A new definition of professional behavior is developing in this social world. Here is the transition:

from What Does “Professional” Look Like Today? by Allison Fine (via Stephen's Lighthouse.)

While Fine is writing about business CEOs, I am struck by how each of these things applies to those of us in education - classroom teachers, librarians, principals, tech directors and superintendents alike - with the new need for transparency driven by the forces of social media.

While our conversations so often deal with being cautious in our use of Facebook, friending students, and questioning social networking's education value, the ground is shifting.

As I was looking at Fine's list, I thought about two of our district's most popular and effective elementary teachers - Arne and Steve. These guys have long been Civil War reenactors (Arne briefly appears in Dances with Wolves) who have shared their interest and passion for the era with students through a Civil War camp, presentations and a variety of instructional activities. Rather than hiding their personal interests, they've used them to make themselves more effective teachers.

Social media is allowing all educators, teachers and librarians included, to share their personal passions and make themselves "more interesting and attractive." 

What interests you that makes you more interesting in turn? Gardening? Bicycling? Genealogy? Fishing? A particular literary genre? Scrapbooking? Travel? It's time to stop hiding these interests and start sharing them if you aren't already. What does your website, Facebook page, blog, and LinkedIn profile say to your parents, students and potential employers?

Tell us a little about yourself. It's part of being a "new" professional. 

Apple shipped 67 million iPads in just 2 years after the product launched. It took 24 years to sell that many Macs, 5 years for that many iPods, and over 3 years for that many iPhones. [Source: Forbes]

In response to  Why iPads II, my old friend Peter Rock left a comment about this paragraph from the post:

Say what you want about "proprietary" applications and Apple uber-control over what runs on the devices, the damn things just work. I don't think I've had to trouble shoot my iPad (and I have the first model).

Peter writes:

There's a lot to be said in terms of the educational value between proprietary (why the scare quotes?) and free/open source applications/operating systems. There's also a lot to be said in terms of the educational value of having the freedom to choose what one will run or not run on one's own device. There's also a lot to be said in terms of the educational value of actually doing some troubleshooting instead of seeing it as an obstacle to learning.

Personally, I think every student should have a machine they can hack. Until they do, trying to get an iThing in their hands represents a backward set of values. Hackable hardware and an Internet connection should be the goal.

Peter's comment, for some reason, got me to thinking about the cars I drove in high school and college: a '63 Corvair, a '54 Chevy BelAire, and a '59 Rambler station wagon. If I remember I paid, respectively, $400, $100 and $50 for these vehicles. And whether I liked it or not, I got plenty of chances to troubleshoot these vehicles. I will admit that the experiences -  climbing under an old car in junk yard to find a replacement part, skinning my knuckles loosening recalcitrant bolts, and sitting at home or bumming rides instead of out driving to a dance or party - have colored my thinking about the do-it-yourself approach to any technology. How often I wished I just had a car that would reliably get me from point A to point B. And having a computer that just lets me do what I need to get done reliably - research, communicate, edit, or whatever - is my kind of machine. 

"Hackable hardware and an Internet connection should be the goal," Peter writes. Is customizing one's computing environment a skill everyone needs? Or is it a distraction that gets in the way of teaching more important skills like communications and information literacy? I guess I know the emphasis I'd like my teachers to place on computer use with my grandsons.

Related to Peter's objections are Gary Stager's in his long and thoughtful reply to the Why iPads II post. One of the power uses that he has kids doing with laptops that cannot be accomplished with iPad is programming. He writes:

These constraints [Apple's limiitations on customizing the iOS and apps]  make impossible all of the "knowledge work" I did with kids this week. 3rd graders used formal mathematical language and turtle geometry to create beautiful art, 4th graders built and programmed robotic stuffed animals. 5th graders programmed their own video games while learning complex math, science and computer science concepts, while some classmates figured out how to program the computer to represent any fraction as shaded regions of a circle.

If you a follower of Seymour Papert, this argument needs to be considered. In the hands of the right teacher with a genuine constructivist mindset, with gobs of time and no expectations of student performance on tests, this is indeed a powerful means of teaching. If the kinds of activities Gary describes are common and expected practice in your school, iPads are not the device for you - or at least not the best devices.

But whether Gary likes it or not, Papert's ideology is not mainstream practice in any U.S. school I know. (Not saying it shouldn't be, it just isn't.) If we go back to auto analogy, schools are more focused on helping kids use a car to get from one place to another (driver's ed) rather than design and fix the cars themselves (auto shop). Our district and state)asks for kids who are doing genuine research, writing stories and essays, creating mult-media visuals, accessing and reading high-interest materials, and who are using games to increase their skills and content understandings. When these are the goals, hackability become a distraction.

What Peter's and Gary's comments made me think about was just how critical identifying educational goals are when selecting devices - a task that too few school planners undertake.  Start with the task, not with the tool.

Yeah, duh. I know.

Image source

Please read his post Some libraries still have got it wrong. 

The point Andrew makes is that librarians isolate themselves behind desks (and I would add in offices) rather than being out in the area with those they serve.

I've always wondered just how differently school librarians would be perceived if everyone put his/her desk on the floor of the library, turned the librarian's office into conference room, and chopped about two feet off the height of the circulation desk. As a school librarian at all grade levels, the first thing I always did was move my desk on to the floor. 

Did kids and teacher come up and "interrupt" me by asking questions or just saying hello.

Yes. But that's the point.

Get out of the office. Get our from behind the circulation desk fortress. 

I don't how much of what Mr. Stager writes he truly believes and how much says just to stir the pot. In his latest post, Big, Little Paradox, Stager argues that younger students are being shortchanged by being give lower powered computers, especially iPads. He writes:

Sure, the iPad is light, easy to use and has a good battery life, but of all the students in a school or district, younger children need the most computing power for speech, graphics and video.

While Gary often states that kids need full-powered computers to do real learning tasks, I don't remember reading exactly what those tasks are. An iPad won't run CAD/CAM programs,  heavy-duty video or photo editing software or crunch masses of numbers. But I am not sure how many third graders are doing or ought to be doing 3-D graphics rendering anyway.

iPads are just fine for word processing, spreadsheet building, photo editing, and video/audio composition. You can use them to draw pictures and created mindmaps and timelines. They can be used for collaborative work and communication. They work with most online tools.

And the real advantage that Gary admits - that they are "light, easy-to-use and have good battery life" -  makes them powerful indeed since they will actually BE USED more often and in more places and for longer periods of time. (See Apple as at right.)

Gary, spell out specifically what tablets and similar devices won't do that you feel are so essential. You may change my mind.

But for now you're sounding like a shill for computer manufacturers, I'm afraid.

 When men are pure, laws are useless; when men are corrupt, laws are broken. - Disraeli

Teacher posing and then posting with a male stripper.

Two interesting blog posts crossed my radar this week. The first was from a couple years ago (via Dr. Doug Green) about the stupid and mean things educators have done on Facebook. (Eight Ways Teachers Get in Trouble Using Facebook. Sites and Blogs, April 2011.) Included in this post are egregious examples of educator bad judgement:

1. Making fun of a student's hair by posting her picture
2. Complaining about the low character of students
3. Joking about a little girl's death
4. Posing in pictures with alcohol
5. Flirting (or worse) with students
6. Leaking standardized test information
7. Mocking the poverty of your school district
8. Appearing in pictures with a stripper

Eight out of, what, three million plus K-12 teachers in the U.S.? Given that 46% of Americans qualifies as mentally ill at some point in their lives*, teacher are a remarkably sane group. Or perhaps the people who committed these acts were stupid (see quote above) or drunk (see poster below). So while thousands of teachers and student use social media daily without incident, we create rules for the idiots and the irrational. But I suppose this is also why we have helmet laws and plenty of other policies as well.

The second post is Scott McLeod's insightful "My thoughts on a proposed social media policy for school employees (Part 2). In it he takes Iowa educational leaders to task for creating a social media policy for employees that he doesn't much like. (Actually I think most of it comes directly from those that Jen Hegna and I wrote in back in 2009.) He opines:

• The policy reads as if you don’t trust your educators.
• For those occasional instances of inappropriate use, I don’t believe that you need a separate ‘social media policy.’ (Are we treating these resources differently because of format bigotry?)
• You’re alienating your most technology-savvy educators.
• The policy is unwieldy and partially illegal.

While I did not fine the proposed policy nearly as onerous as Scott did, I agree with his general sentiments. The major disagreement I have with Scott's criticism that such a policy is not needed at all - that such a guide indicates a distrust of employees. Social networking and its role in education (and society) are new phenomena, uncharted territories for which most of us don't have a good map. To me, the Iowa document would be better described as a set of guidelines than as a policy. And I do think thoughtful guidelines are necessary for the use of any technology that may cause harm to the user or others (see examples above.) 

Logically, people would automatically apply past experiences, rules, and ethics to any new situation created by technology. And this is not so difficult when we are using technology to simply enhance current educational practices. But when Scott and others foment for radical restructuring of the educational process with the assistance of technology, it is more important than ever to assure those being restructured have some guidelines.

It's interesting that since Jen and I wrote (what I think were some of the first) social networking guideline, how the conversation has changed from "Don't use social networking with students at all" to "Use social networking for a purpose and with caution." A healthy transition that I can remember going through with questions the internet itself  and e-mail in the mid-90s. We cautious educators tend to ban it until we can figure it out - and since kids' well-being is at stake, the only ethical approach.

Oh, Facebook itself has a guide authored by Steve Anderson called “How to Create Social Media Guidelines for Your School.” The document takes no stance (wimps) but defines a process for creating social media policies. Worth a read. Facebook in Education

I didn't want my boss thinking this was picture of me drinking so I used a monkey.
Odds are good she'll know the difference.

*Kessler RC, Berglund P, Demler O, Jin R, Merikangas KR, Walters EE (June 2005). "Lifetime prevalence and age-of-onset distributions of DSM-IV disorders in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication". Arch. Gen. Psychiatry 62 (6): 593–602. doi:10.1001/archpsyc.62.6.593. PMID 15939837

A beautiful, wet Sunday here on the lake. I got the lawn mowed yesterday just before the rain started. And I was inordinately happy that I managed to get this one over on mother nature until it occurred to me that "lawn pride" is just one more sign that geezerdom is not just close, but may well have arrived. This entire past week seemed filled with such portentous signs:

• I thought my workshops were going pretty well last week. Until lunchtime when I noticed that I had given the entire morning's session with two large coffee stains on the front of my white shirt. While I do remember drinking coffee that morning, I don't remember there being any spillage. Have I become one of those pathetic old guys who routinely sport stained clothes, miss great swatches of whiskers shaving, and wear their trousers with an over-the-belly at the waist and high-water at the cuff look. 
• I am re-reading Neal Stephenson's book Snow Crash. When the LWW asked if I liked it as well the second time, I couldn't really tell her since I remembered so little about it from the first reading. It is a great book that is prescient about MUVE's, global information systems, and the privatization of government services. 
• I spent yesterday morning doing helping my Kiwanis Club clean the trash out of our two-mile section of road ditch just south of town. Who'd of thunk it would be so much fun to do a civic-minded volunteer program with these codgers? And then to join them at the coffee shop afterward to grouch about the piggishness of the human race?
• This 2012 weekend, I've been noticing just how much pleasure one can derive taking mental snapshots of the 2-year-old grandson in action - petting the cat, eating with gusto, flashing a joyous smile. Senility or maturity or zen?

• If one enjoys watching young women, one's definition of "young" encompasses a vastly larger percentage of the population.
• There seem to be fewer and fewer "hills worth dying on" at work. That leaves one time and energy to engage in the important things. 
• One can relax knowing that one's potential for becoming a professional athlete, musician, or porn star are long past.
• It's a pleasant change to worry more about the lack of time than the lack of money in one's life.
• In athletic events, one doesn't have to finish first, just finish, for people to be astounded.
• It's fun to tease one's spouse about all the mailings she's getting from AARP.
• Shoes can be purchases based on comfort, not looks. (Oh, I guess I have always done that.)
• One word: Grandchildren.
• Mid-life crisis  - been there, done that, got the shirt. Moving on.
• With all one's children over 21, one is responsible only for one's own mistakes.
• One is expected to complain about one's aches and pains.

So far this aging thing, I'm happy to say, has been a lot more good than bad. I hope to be a problem to others for at least another 20 30 years.

Art by Brady Johnson. Download pdf of full layout here.

Blue Skunk readers get the pleasure of seeing some of Brady's drawings each time they view this site. The skunks in the 30 or so different headings that rotate every couple weeks are all his work, some of the originals now over eight years old. Brady's work has also graced the cover of KnowledgeQuest conference editions a couple times (2009) (2011) - thanks to Sara Kelly Johns. He did the illustrations for my book School Libraries Head for the Edge - which has sold in the dozens of copies.

But seeing the drawing above - an college art class assignment that required a Ray Bradbury poem to be illustrated -  has gotten me really excited about revising and updating Brady's and my first collaboration effort from 2004 Machines Are the Easy Part; People Are the Hard Part. The text will probably still be lame, but the illustrations will be great!