bleahh

As a practicing academic technologist, I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I acquired my first mobile device in December of 2011. This excludes the mobile phones I have had, as I barely used them for anything but voice calls, and the iPads I borrowed from my uni library in the first 2/3 of 2011. Frankly, the issue in my personal life is frugality. I never saw the benefits of shelling out a lot of money for connectivity that didn’t promise much that I wasn’t already getting. I’ve never had trouble making friends or keeping in touch with old ones through existing technology like the postal service, so I didn’t need something to keep me connected to a social network. I resented and continue to resent the drip-drip-drip of fees imposed on information access by the telcos, especially since others in the world have demonstrated that things don’t have to be the way they are in the US.

But in any case, as part of my new job, I requested an iPod Touch as my first networked mobile device of my own. Perhaps it was the affordances I enjoyed while using the iPad last year, perhaps it was that I finally had access to a budget with room for getting me such a device, perhaps I just wanted a new toy. (For what it’s worth, I’m on the record as thinking that toys in education and among those of us who support structured learning are good.) In any case, I’ve taken the last three weeks or so and learned some things.

1. There are many fewer open wireless networks than were once available or at least than were once reportedly available. I’m glad that security is improving, but it makes having a device without cellular capability more difficult.
2. Because I can only use the device on open wireless networks, I end up either a) contorting my schedule looking for access or b) using my device much less than I might due to lack of access
3. iPod Touches and their iPhone kin (and I presume Android devices) have very small screens. Do people really read anything carefully and extensively on these? I’m over 40 and don’t need glasses, and it’s neither easy nor pleasant to read much of substance. I have yet to achieve a reading Flow with the device.
4. The best parts about it so far are the basics: email, photos and videos that can be shared easily, time management applications, note-taking applications (within reason), weather applications
5. I have to compartmentalize. Because the basics are so nice, it’s easy to drift away from my toddler son when I should be savoring time with him, ditto my wife. Some time this morning I realized the key for me is to conceptualize the device as a little satellite office. When I’m on it, I’m doing work, so I should put it in an inaccessible location when I would not otherwise be doing work. Because I enjoy my job and because the people I work with (academics and academics-in-training) don’t work usual schedules, I’m not put off by doing some work outside of usual business hours. But there have to be limits. Conversely, just as there are benefits to my family to be derived from my employment outside of what a mobile device offers, I’m not going to avoid using the iPod Touch for family purposes where it’s truly useful.

What did I learn today?

Today I saw the value of a something I always preach to instructors: Noticing and keeping in balance persistence and seeking help. I’m wrestling with Drupal on a project and not sure that I haven’t gotten myself into the wrong weight class. There are so many good things about Drupal, and one day I’m sure I’ll be smooth like butter with it all, but for now I’m very frustrated with the system’s steep learning curve. It has never made sense to me that enterprise-class systems tend not to have simple points of entry. WordPress has the opposite problem, of course, but I’m pretty convinced that the majority of projects are simpler, in an IA sense, than their PIs would like to think they are.

In any case, I was able to make headway by making a foray into the wilds of the Drupal instance for the project, hacking down a few vines, and then returning to a clearing for rest and to look for others who had had the same problem I was encountering. (This is another frustration with Drupal: Their internal terminology is basic enough that searching for a crux returns project pages, long-outdated-version support board threads, and only a smattering of useful information. More foraying and vine-chopping in its own way.) Along the way, of course, I learned some things I wasn’t looking for but that will probably be useful to me down the road. Doing this also helps me articulate questions for the PI and team so they can make intelligent decisions about important implementation details.

In a meta way, I probably can never learn this lesson often enough.

(Trying once again to be disciplined about blogging.)

What did I learn today?

The terminology for the people I work with (or for, depending on your POV) is clearly going to be tricky. Conversations at my last position showed that the rampant use of “client” by academic admin units thinking that they are becoming appropriately businesslike is extraordinarily wrong-headed. This is intuitive for me, as well. Faculty are not clients when the staff they work with are not freelancers. They’re not merely “participants”, either, but “partner” can be an aggressive word for staff to use. My preference when speaking generally about the varied spectrum of people we academic technologists work with is for the political metaphor of “constituents”, but that itself gets problematic when speaking about any particular person or persons on any particular project. “Team member(s)” works for me generally, but I’m more comfortable with the sports metaphor world than many in academia; it also may have the built-in tinge of presumption from the perspective of people who want to put us in a strictly service relationship, just like “partner”.

More often than not, I’ll probably end up using “person” or its appropriate pluralizations, but I like specificity so I’d prefer to find something that acknowledges the relationships among people (see?) working on a project, the wholeness of each individual, but also the appropriate boundaries on each person’s reach in the project process. Part of my agenda poking out of that last clause is that I want to, in my own small way, raise the status of academic technologists at my institution. We are, it should be needless to say, more than strictly service people. I’ve been in strictly service jobs (legal assistant, café staffer, barista) and while giving good service is very difficult, requiring healthy doses of skills, it’s not the same as being a respected colleague on a project. The service person gets a dollar tip, but the colleague gets mentioned in the final project credits, gets to present on the project, and puts it on a CV.

(Aside: Apparently my conceit isn’t working out that well. Imagine that. I’ll try again soon, because I need to work on my writing discipline, in multiple ways.)

Some bits from our vacation in Rome:

• Baby food in the supermarket: coniglio, salmone, trota, cavallo.
• Good wine in the supermarket for 5 euros. (NB: Where we live, you cannot buy wine at all in the supermarket. If you could, it would be antifreeze at 7 dollars.)
• First big meal included tasty giant shrimp (I don’t eat shrimp, so they must have been good), linguine alla vongole, and calamari con fiori di finocchio
• The garden of the family apartment we got to use had 2 lime trees. Except that they were orange trees with unripe fruit.
• I explained to a Korean tourist at Basilica di San Clemente al Laterano that bimbo was equivalent to bambino. Except that I think she took away that you could call an infant bambino bimbo
• A Sicilian pastry shop had the most wonderful little budini di riso — like a little rice pudding pot pie. They also had mammy cookie jars for sale.
• A nice nonna in an elevator at one supermarket asked my son if he wanted to go home with her. He seemed to decline.
• Waiting for a bus, a man made a special detour to see my son and touch his hand. Somehow in Rome it didn’t seem creepy.
• Flattering that people addressed me in Italian. Pleasing that I was able frequently to reply sufficiently in Italian and that I even got compliments. Nobody told me I had a French accent, which is what I expected.
• One day I was wearing my AS Roma tshirt and got heckled by a passing Lazio fan in a car. He used the greeting traditionally exchanged between the two sides.
• Our only pizza was at Baffetto’s, which has, I hear, seen better days. It was a Napoletana, and was undercooked.
• Gelatos eaten: caffe, fragole – cioccolatto, nocciola – mela e mentha – cioccolato a latte, and riso e miele – cubano. The nocciola –caffe was at Miami, the first at the disappointing Giolitti, and the other two at the truly remarkable Gelateria dei Gracchi. My suggestion to our friends that the town needs a gelateria with truly uncommon flavors (cedano, carciofi, lavanda) was met with good humor. Too bad I was serious.
• The closest macelleria to our apartment sold its wares in vacuum packs instead of from a counter. However, it did have the benefit of humorous translations of the products. Apparently, prosciutto di montagna is “tasty mountain ham”.

EDIT 01: Michelangelo’s comment jogged my memory that the gelato al fragole – cioccolato was at Giolitti, near the Pantheon.

There’s been quite a flutter about since Alec Couros tweeted his feelings about his child’s new school environment and then Will Richardson set down his thoughts on the same matter. As of this writing, there are almost 400 results on Google when searching for the title of Richardson’s post. (We’ll leave aside the cute use of “2.0″ in the post title. That just makes me grind my teeth.)

As I increase and improve my knowledge of second language acquisition, language pedagogy, and educational technology, I’m pretty sure I will have some of the same issues that Couros, Richardson, and the 100+ respondents to Richardson’s posts do. To boot, my SO was educated in both psychology (focusing on child development) and early childhood education (along with special education). Put us together and it’s a recipe for at best the hand-wringing or indignance seen in much of the discussion spinning off from Richardson’s post.

And yet, there are things generally missing from the discussion on Richardson’s page. First, though there’s decent balance between points of view, and, all in all, a remarkable tolerance for differing points of vie, there’s far too much supposition from commenters that each is the holder of the One True Wisdom about teaching. In the United States and Canada, there are 80–90 million people of school age and northwards of 7 million teachers.[1] The problem is insufficient change? The problem is too much change? The problem is that teachers have insufficient options? The solution is that “the whole educational system has to be blown up to make true change happen“? If we could define the problem (if we could agree that there is a problem or reduce issues to one problem) or the solution (if we could agree that the problem[s] has[have] a solution) so easily, we’d be in a different world. The USA has been diagnosing and solving education issues for quite some time now, and things still aren’t perfect. So let’s start off with acknowledging that we live in an imperfect world, and that an imperfect starting point leads to imperfect later stations.

Second, in the text and comments that I read, there’s no articulation of the desired alternate vision for the childrens’ futures. Not their educational life, but their life beyond education. If the teachers were to teach (or approach teaching, or try to teach) the way any single commenter wants, what then. We solve world hunger? We call our mothers on their birthdays? We all have good relationships with our mothers? A chicken in every pot and a car in every backyard? In all seriousness, while outcomes-based learning has a very real and very powerful dark side, we have to know what we want children to become or what options we want them to have before we can pontificate about whether those goals are being met. Additionally, it doesn’t seem tenable to me that we can declare that one bad school year, even early on, will doom a child. (How bad is bad? And again, doom him/her to what? Indigence? A life outside the law? Beauty school dropout?)

I’m going to resist drawing this into a nice tidy moral, but I know how I hope I will act when my son gets to school. I hope I will model and tell him how I think he ought to behave at and toward school, foster his curiosity and exploration and critical thinking, and build into him a love of learning that can happen anywhere, at any time, with anyone.

[1] Figure for schoolchildren incorporates the inconsistent numbers at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_the_United_States combined with a rough estimate for Canada. Since I couldn’t find a direct figure for the number of school-age children in Canada, I ballparked it by applying the same ratio between it and the USA figures as the general population ratio. Teacher figures incorporates the old numbers at http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/pdf/cb05-ffse02-2_labor_table597.pdf (as of 2003) and the same algorithm as for the schoolchildren. Further, these approximations seem valid enough for my point.

See the brief description of this blog’s new conceit and please comment.