See ya'll at NECC in Atlanta this summer

Like my friends and colleagues David Warlick and Kathy Schrock, I have had a session accepted for this year's NECC conference down in Atlanta. "Classrooms and Libraries for the Net Generation" will be on Monday, 6/25/2007,  3:30pm– 4:30pm. Be there or be square.

To the best of my knowledge, I am not a "spotlight." More of a dim bulb.

 Hope to see you there!
 

Keys to the car

Kathy Daulton, the Curriculum Coordinator at Instituto Educacional Franklin Delano Roosevelt: The American School of Lima, sends this reflection about the need for collaborative technology planning...

I have a new analogy for all this (for some reason my analogies here always have to do with transportation).

In the beginning, techies drove their tech cars around the school neighborhood inviting teachers to take a ride and see what great opportunities were out there for teaching students.

Slowly but surely, teachers did take the tour and wanted (or were required) to learn to drive themselves, so techies sat in the front seat and directed them, giving important information about safe driving, proper turns, speed and care of their automobiles.

Now more and more teachers at [our school] are asking for the keys to the car. Techies still have to worry about the condition of the car and insurance, and they'll also bite their nails because there will be fender benders and perhaps crashes, but the goal is for teachers to be able to drive independently, care for their automobiles and become a truly collaborative partner in the implementation of the ITL curriculum.

Some teachers may even be ready in a short time for big trucks and motorcycles.

Kathy's comparison sounds a lot like Miguel Guhlin's "strict parent" description of technologists and administrators.

I would say that so long as administrators DO hold just the tech staff responsible for "fender benders" and "crashes," and not the teachers themselves, we will keep a tight grip on the wheel. Will basic technology safety and security ever be considered a professional responsibility?

Handing over the keys to the car? Are we capable? I hope so - and soon.

A Digisexual?

I guess you could say I was thankful to see the girlie poster hanging in my son's bedroom when I visited him yesterday. A shy young man, Brady has not shown a great deal of interest in romantic partners of any gender - or at least kept any such interest well hidden from Dad, whose damn business it is none of anyway.

What does concern me is that the objects of Brady's sexist objectification are not, well, really human, but computer generated. Very nicely formed virtual persons, but virtual none the less. Does this mean my son is a digisexual? (Not that there is anything wrong with that.)

Oh, in my younger years, I too experimented with relationships involving alternative media - Burrough's La of ancient Opar in print,  Honey Ryder on the big screen in Dr. No, and TV's Barbara Eden in her little Jeannie costume were all fantasy creatures to be sure. Even the Eerie, ahem, "graphic novels" with their voluptuous, but always nipple-less, heroines were, I thought, pretty hot. But I will say this - I have always known my sexual orientation was analog, no matter how cheap and tawdry the paper constructs where these characters lived.

I can only hope when Brady finds a real girlfriend, she can measure up to Laura Croft and her Flashy ilk. Or at least he will discover that cells may have some advantages to pixels, no matter how well programmed.