The sacrifices I make for my professional organizations

I'm missing it to attend today's ISTE Board meeting: the Eugene Celebration Parade.

Why does this feel like a sacrifice? Because the Society for the Legitimization of the Ubiquitous Gastropods - or SLUGs - are marching in the parade. Excuse me - participating, not marching, since slugs being monopods can't march.

It may have been my one and only chance to see this group in action. Rats. My kind of people.

Glorious Gastropause (aka Leigh Anne Jasheway-Bryant) snorts at the notion of order: "The celebration is about being out of step." Thomas Boyd The Register-Guard ""Slugs do not march," said Slug Queen Inspira Gastropodium. "Slugs have one foot; it's physically impossible. They slither, they slime, and they crawl on their bellies, but they do not march."

Room on your shelves for Wikipedia?

If the English version of Wikipedia were printed out (as of August 2007) from Nikola Smolenski (via Stephen's Lighthouse blog).

Using volumes 25cm high and 5cm thick (some 400 pages), each page having two columns, each columns having 80 rows, and each row having 50 characters, ≈ 6MB per volume. As English Wikipedia has around 7.5GB of text (August 2007, length of wikitext counted by myself) ≈ 1250 volumes. Note that this is a conservative estimate, as it doesn't include images, tables etc. which take up more surface than the text which describes them. 

Yikes! 

Department of Education Prevention

Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, if he gets angry, he'll be a mile away--and barefoot. --  Sarah Jackson

Inca Trail, 2006

A classroom teacher shares her frustration on her blog entry "The Start of the School Year" with the overly restrictive policies set at her district. (Thanks to Scott McLeod for the pointer to this one.)

Good technology policy-making is probably the most neglected area of technology planning and integration. I've explored it before at  A good policy for policies, Librarians Are From Venus; Technologists Are From Mars and informally in the Blue Skunk at When Techies Don't Get It. I've even done a session at NECC about the issue - complete with handouts!

And do people listen? Noooooooo!

To be truthful, developing good policies is an ongoing issue in our district as it is in all. Just this week our tech staff discussed whether to use our firewall to block iTunes Radio - a bandwidth-sucking resource of dubious educational value that requires us to open ports in our firewall. No good or easy answers here - but the decision will be eventually made by our district tech committee with information and insight provided by our IT folks. Sigh...

I did pass on "The Start of the School Year" to all of our techs and our district tech committee. Daniel Pink in A Whole New Mind lists as a conceptual age skill:

4.    Not just logic, but also EMPATHY. “What will distinguish those who thrive will be their ability to understand what makes their fellow woman or man tick, to forge relationships, and to care for others.

Developing mutual empathy between techs and teachers may just be a career-long task. I could use more empathic abilities myself. 

How do you build empathy and good policies in your district? 

______________________________

Greetings from beautiful Eugene, Oregon where I am attending my pentultimate board meeting for ISTE. Up at 4AM (6AM Minnesota time). I'll get to watch the sun rise over the Willamette River. Question is: Will I still be awake at sunset?