Here are the original posts, as I am going to delete them from grolsons.com:
March 23:
The Umpqua Post ran the March 4 headline, “Gross off on the road to Morocco.” Jack Carrerow did a nice story and my picture was “above the fold.” I don’t imagine I will be front page news in Casablanca. Compare a population of around 4,000 with one of over 3,000,000.
Certainly, while we have enjoyed all that small-town coastal living has to offer, we are looking forward to getting back overseas and adventure--professional and personal. And, while I will be leaving a fine group of colleagues, and while I know I will miss them, I am very encouraged and excited looking at the credentials of my colleagues-to-be at CAS.
I’m taking a self-indulgent break in packing (18x18x24, 50 lb. maximum) boxes for an April shipment, doing taxes, and catching up on professional reading by plunging headlong into Web 2.0. While I was somewhat of a pioneer, using a website in my teaching as early as 1995, the whole digital world moved ahead of me while I wasn’t looking. But with this, my first “blog” entry, I’m making a comeback.
When we first moved overseas as newlyweds, Arlee “published” a series of letters, “Pat and Arlee go to Hong Kong,” to a group of friends. My idea here is to echo that, but electronically. I plan to share my personal and professional musings (they tend to overlap--a sign that I’m in the right profession), and our family’s experiences as we make this next trip overseas.
So this concludes my first entry, mostly an experiment to see how well this technology works (uploading from iWeb to my own domain). If it’s easy, there will be regular updates. Maybe one day, something either entertaining or profound will appear. Then again, maybe not.
March 24: Web 2.0
I brought Ed-line to our district, and have been leading a “gentle” push toward full implementation. I am also the representative from our district who has attended each COSA law conference since 2005. Balancing the real need for students to participate in a collaborative media process--wisely, responsibly, and appropriately, while protecting the district from various sorts of liability associated with the digital, connected world, is and will remain a real challenge.
With a very competent staff, many of whom honed their skills in a pre-digital world, functioning nicely in an analog reality, with a financially strapped district working to update old technology, and with a student population largely without internet access at home, I have been floating in a little bit of digital backwater. Honestly, that is not all bad. A good tag-board poster presentation is a more valid educational experience than a bad powerpoint, any day.
But, we do live in the information age. It’s a fact. As educators, our charge is to teach, to teach what is relevant. Responsible use of cell phones. Prudent internet research, with the practiced ability to evaluate and “consider the source.” Literacy, and oracy, and the ability to exploit a variety of media to communicate.
All that is going to change, for Reedsport and for me. For different reasons. For Reedsport, the district is about to explode into the digital age. The foundation is laid. The bandwidth and the infrastructure are ready. The mandate, via a community study process led this fall by the superintendent, is established. And, via a charter school process, the means is within reach. Reedsport is going 2.0.
I’ll be sorry to miss it. On the other hand, I’m headed to an overseas international school, and my colleagues-to-be are already active in the digital world, published in print and virtually, blogging about implementing connected, digital classrooms. So, I am updating my own website. I have started a blog. I created a Facebook page, loaded up Skype onto my laptop, and am exploring the networking capacity of my Airport Extreme. I’m converting all by bills to online pay. Of course, it’s spring break. We’ll see how much time I have next week when I’m back at 14 hour days. Now, where is the off switch on this thing?
March 25: More on digital literacy
Out loud, that sound like “moron digital literacy.” Fitting, as I try to make sense of my website, posting this iWeb creation to your-site, my web host for over a decade, via Fetch (a shareware FTP utility). Here’s the problem: managing the links, and deleting old files, and dealing with the much larger files (and automatically created support files, and folders), with very rusty skills and not a lot of spare time.
I’ll give myself a little credit. Turns out I was a Web 2.0 pioneer, long before anyone coined that term. I was creating dynamic content with a real audience in mind, writing html code, and even a little cgi, with a little knowledge and a lot of enthusiasm. I learned what worked by trial and error. I used Adobe Page Mill on Mac OS (well must have been 6, or 7). It was a lot of work. It was a hobby, like restoring old cars, or fly fishing. The process was the purpose.
What I should do is remove all that old content and start fresh. It’s old news. Travel pictures (uploaded from a Sony miniDV via a video capture card, with digital stills captured, scaled to a reasonable size/resolution compromise and rather inane captions placed in the created table cell below. Now we have Facebook and Flickr. I don’t suppose anyone looks at my family’s 2001 trip to Jordan, and if they do I don’t suppose they are too impressed. The “excuse” for all that work was “keeping our extended family abreast of our travels, between visits home.” Our families have seen all the pictures.
So, why am I so reluctant to just delete everything? Maybe I’ll work up to it. In the meantime, broken links and digital blind alleys multiply every time I upload an update.
