Ezekiel 2:1 He said to me, "Son of man, stand up on your feet and I will speak to you."

Ezekiel 2:1 He said to me, "Son of man, stand up on your feet and I will speak to you.": “Son of man, stand on your feet, and I will speak with you.”

My thought for the season. 

House restoration and ready for winter

Hey Gang!

Quickie update here - I'm in Lumberton working on the house.  My mom is in town for the month and she has fired up the house work.  In the last two weeks, we have:

Cleaned out the barn and backyard
stripped out the linoleum from the hallway, bathroom, and kitchen - The Kitchen had three layers of the stuff.
took out the hotwater heater from the kitchen
took out the heater from the hallway
removed all the window hardware
cleaned the windows - I wish I had done this on day one.
got the fireplace working - we didn't do anything to it, just started a fire.  It didn't draw well for a bit, but now it's working fine

I want to give kudos to the trash pickup in Lumberton.  EVERYTHING that's put on the curb is picked up.  First a group of scavengers descend and pick through everything looking for stuff to sell.  Metal is gone within 24 hours.  Perhaps we should sell this stuff ourselves.

The fires are great.  It's so nice to wake up to a fire or watch the sunset to a fire.  I really want to create a firepit outside. 

In other news:
I've got an idea to cruise out West for an extended trip - to visit my brother and family in Lake County, CA.  I went out to CO with Joey Boats and it really opened my eyes to the West again.  It's been 12 years since I left Alaska and it's time to get back West.

Web app vocab test in the real world

Forget Chef or Puppet – Automate with Sprinkle: Miso has a relatively standard server architecture for a medium-level traffic Rails application. We use Linode to host our application and we provision a number of VPS instances that make up our infrastructure. We have a load balancer equipped with Nginx and Varnish, we have an application server that runs our Rails application to serve dynamic requests, we have a master-slave database setup, and a cache server that has memcached and redis.

How cool is that!  I understand this (somewhat)... I should say, "This isn't complete gibbish because I took the CS253 Web Application Engineering course from Udacity.com"

load balancer, Rails application, database setup, cache server and memcache - All this stuff we just went over in week 5 and 6 of the course.

Go me! And thanks Udacity.

Never learn alone! Groups can rescue the impersonal MOOC experience

Udacity - Free Classes. Awesome Instructors. Inspiring Community.

Udacity is a MOOC - Massively Open Online Course



I love this courses. I started with PLENK and then lurked DS106 (for LIFE!) and now I'm really loving Udacity Computer Science courses.

I could list out the things I love about them. Boring! Here is something that I don't like...

They don't offer student support enough. Sure there are discussion boards - which are helpful. The videos are great and clearly explain and I can watch them over and over... But what I really want is direct contact with an instructor.

Well, actually, I really just want my questions answered or something explained in a different way. Discussion boards are good for this, but there is something missing. They are too big and impersonal.

I want to learn with my friends and colleagues. I want to get into my my learning comfort zone, the sweet spot of learning or the zone of proximal development.

The ZPD is the space between what I can do on my own - that's how I interact with MOOCs now - and what I can do with help from an instructor or more capable peer.

Here's my point - I'm not going to do another MOOC unless I have a group of people committed to doing it with me BEFORE I join up.

These MOOC's aren't really anything new - it's just eLearning- perhaps polished and nicer features - free and HUGE. But, I'm realizing the BEST part of eLearning was the side chat, the backchannel that goes on.

I'm missing that in my MOOC experience.

So now what: I tried to start a group on P2PU.org for CS 253, but I didn't really get any takers. I was already falling behind in the course, so I wasn't updating and working on stuff (now I'm just scanning the videos and now working the problems)

Perhaps another group. I'm looking at this Human Computer Interface course starting in a few weeks. Maybe you would like to join a group of folks to power thru the course together. To increase the Zone of Proximal Development. Never learn alone!

Tall Ship HMS Bounty To Visit Wilmington's Historic River District

Tall Ship HMS Bounty To Visit Wilmington's Historic River District | Wilmington, NC

May 14, 2012 - Wilmington, NC - The Tall Ship HMS Bounty will arrive in Wilmington on May 17th and will be open to the public for tours from Friday, May 18th through Sunday, May 20th. Tours will start at 11:00 am and end at 6:00 pm daily. Souvenirs will be available for purchase.

The cost of the tours is: Adults - $10.00; Children over 7 - $5.00; Children 7 and under – Free.
The ship will be docked at Riverfront Park downtown near the corner of North Water Street and Princess Street.

This 180-foot-long replica of the famous 18th century ship was built in the early 1960s as a floating movie set for the 1962 Marlon Brando motion picture "Mutiny on the Bounty." It has also been in many other films including "Pirates of the Caribbean – Dead Man's Chest."

In 2010, Bounty sailed through all five Great Lakes as part of the ASTA Tall Ships Challenge. In 2011, she visited Europe. This year, the ship is making stops at various ports on the U.S. East Coast.

HMS Bounty is owned and operated by the HMS Bounty Organization based in East Setauket, NY.

For information about the ship, visit www.tallshipbounty.org.

Gandhi's Swadeshi - The Economics of Permanence

Gandhi's Swadeshi - The Economics of Permanence: Principals of Swadeshi

Gandhi's vision of a free India was not a nation-state but a confederation of self-governing, self-reliant, self-employed people living in village communities, deriving their right livelihood from the products of their homesteads. Maximum economic and political power - including the power to decide what could be imported into or exported from the village - would remain in the hands of the village assemblies.

RIGHT ON, Gandhi!

Challenged by P2PU.org

P2PU
... is a favorite.  It's a community based learning portal.  Basically, you can find all sort of cool things to learn there.  It's free and open and awesome.

Here are two CHALLENGES I'm doing.  A challenge is different than a course, because it's task oriented.  That means it's a matter of what you can do, know what you read or 'know'.  It's a simple way to take 'epistomology' or you unique 'way of knowing' out of the learning equation.  Good on ya P2PU!

• #2 Writing HTML by Hand
• Programming with the Twitter API

I need a place to post my learnings and I'm thinking of doing it here or over on my Lumberton Web Design project.  That's where I'm trying to bootstrape a little web development community around here in Robeson County, NC.

 

 

CSS :hover Selector

CSS :hover Selector: a.ex1:hover,a.ex1:active {color:red;}

Go figure!

Hey Gang - I'm posting today because I can. And, it only takes a min.

This little :hover selector got up all in my business. And, then I was all like - boom, I just googled you and hit up Wc3 to figure you out.

Level up!

I've been working lately. Check it out at http://abetteruserexperience.com and http://wellnesseLearning.com and http:www.capefearnaturalist.com (which is where I used this :hover thing)

A good times on thelumberriver.com

And, that's not to mention my Codecademy.com stuff and CodeYear meetup stuff.

Spring time is coming. The dark, cold and wind will surely not last.

squeakland : home of squeak etoys

squeakland : home of squeak etoys: Etoys is . . .

• an educational tool for teaching children powerful ideas in compelling ways
• a media-rich authoring environment and visual programming system
• a free software program that works on almost all personal computers

Alan Kay gets it.  He, I believe, is the driving force behind Squeak and these Etoys. 

Check out the first bullet point.  teaching children powerful ideas in compelling ways.  It's to learn this language, or tool or skill - powerful ideas in compelling ways.

Love it, seriously love it.  Children know what to do with powerful ideas.  I trust them with powerful ideas more than adults.  The kids are the ones who need the powerful ideas ... and can use them.  Let's balance the powerful ideas scale ... and share with the young ones.

Vitamix comes to town!

Natural Green Smoothie | | Eat Better to Live BetterEat Better to Live Better

We make this smoothie morning - looking for the natural buzz the Vitamix affords.

cheers!

Random thought : Badges and assesment

Lots can go wrong in baseball...

Lots can go right. A game within a game - subtle interplay between players, teams, leagues, sponsors, fans, the field, the stadium, on and on... I love it. It's the rich variety of life. Only people uninterested or uncreative (dull, deadened,...) only look at the score and think that's all that happened.

As I re-connect with sport, I integrated it with my past experience. My experience with youth sports was not extensive, but ... let's call it "small but mighty". I was on winning teams and( mostly) losing teams. Perhaps because of this, I was told - and mostly remember - the sage statement, "It's not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game".

I took this to heart. And, looking at the way things are today, I don't think many others did. See, my point is that I don't play for the score in games. I don't learn for grades in life.

Why? because the score was so flat. The score doesn't really tell you what happened. It does serve a purpose - I'm not a fucking hippie! (hehe - eat it hippies) God bless the score and the horse it rode in on... but there is so much more.

Baseball is a good example here. The stats in baseball are extensive. A line score, a box score, and then, I guess, there is the stat book that looks at every stinking play - and converts it to numbers.

Should schools do these? There is the final grade. There is the weekly quiz score and project / exam / paper scores. These are experiences translated into numbers for the purpose of fitting a machine readable format - the sorting function of grades.

But how do you translate getting hit in the face with the baseball into a score - 'Hit by pitch' doesn't do it justice. Do you really think you can sum up the trauma of dropping the last out as an 'error' or bottom of the ninth strike out to lose the championship as "strikeout".

Same is true of schooling. My '89' on my math test, because I forgot to 'carry the one' which caused me to miss the A by one percentage point. That number doesn't begin to describe or communicate that experience to others.

But, Badges can.

Badges are not grades. They can be used right along side grades. The guy in the picture could get the "Hit by Pitch - EPIC" badge, along with the stat in the book. Possibly there is a modifier ribbon to go along with the badge "broken bone", "bleeding on the field", "crapping your pants", "crying on the field"...

Badges allow for creativity to rush back into the classroom. All of a sudden, you can nurture the dry phrase "it's not whether you win or lose...". A badge describes, qualitatively perhaps, HOW you play the game. And, when students create and give badges, it shifts the balance of power back to the student.

One last thought - What does it say about the worldview of someone you creates the system of grades? How clincial, sterile the world must be for that person? 4 months of work in a college classroom and the only 'real' result is two exam grades and a final score.They see the world as industry and factory.  I see the world as wilderness and a workshop.

Grades are a currency and we have confused the currency for the thing we want.  You don't want money - You want a house or a car or knowledge or skill. Perhaps this is the monster of materialism stomping around every aspect of modern life. 

...

And, this is what I think about. I've decided that I should share these thoughts. I'm no longer a young adult. I've arrived at 'Grown ass man" status. These thoughts are my own - however they arrived in my brain, I can't really say, but I feel it's important to share them with you, dear reader.

playr.co.uk - Zilch

playr.co.uk - Zilch

I know I've written about this before.

Zilch is a game that UNDERSTANDS badges and achievements in the game format.

A badge / adward can't be too broad. A thru F in school is the DEFINITION of too board achievement. As a measuring device, maybe. It works for the school, somehow, I'm sure. But it doesn't work for the student.

...rant starting...
How much stuff goes on during a school class? A $hit ton! And, you want to sum it up in a single Letter. And you can go screw yourself with a A- or a B+. Thanks, but no thanks!
...rant ending...

What this tells me is that the A-F group has no idea what is going on -ACTUALLY - going on in the classroom. The way your reward and motivate directly relates to how you see the subjects / users / students. Your perspective of learning and the internal life of the students.

Are they having a rich, multi-faceted, emotional, whole being experience? Or, are they holding there breath and not rocking the boat focused on the grade?

One last story. I play(ed) golf. Golf is a game and there is a score. And, as a beginner golfer - I got pissed alot, because I couldn't score like Freddie Couples (the Dominating player at the time - They call him BoomBoom because he hits it a mile and never loses his cool).

One day I got super pissed and (in front of some friends and a stranger partner) lost my shit. I yelled, threw my bag, I threw my club - and nearly destroyed it when it hit the cart path 20 yards out.

Here's the thing: I want a badge for that. I want the "Total meltdown - missed a drive"... There's a series of "Total Meltdowns" ... missed putt, lost a match, go in the trap, go in the water, out of bounds...

Here's the thing:
The game IS NOT the score. The game is the game, and you can see it from MANY perspectives.

On the positive side, you can chose to not count the strokes the same way. I started to play better when I only recorded the putts, or the GIR (Greens in Regulation).

So, Zilch has 100 different achievements. Great, much better than school which has basically a handful per class (assignment grades and a final grade - not the same, but similar).

But, would it be cool if we - the non-designers, non-teachers - created our own badges our own achievements? I bet we could do it...

One last thing before I publish. There is alot of talk about badges and I feel I need to put down my thoughts about it. Speciffically, what I like about the movement - Peer created, Peer adwarded, variable scope, easily transfered/displayed/ researched. And, what I see as pitfalls - just recreating the same system, which will happen if you only get simply re-name a certificate / diploma / degree with the term Badge or Patch.

Listen up Instructors and Course Designers!

Let's Have a Serious Discussion About the New Masteries - Page 8 - League of Legends Community

Let's Have a Serious Discussion About the New Masteries - Page 8 - League of Legends Community

I've been playing League of Legends to keep my gamer cred up. It's important if you want to work with dude's like Lucas Gillispie and the gang at Cognitive Dissonance Guild. Point being, games have something to teach us about motivation and learning- and - in order to learn from them you have to play them... okay, i'm rationalizing a bit here.

LOL is fun to play!

Anyway, they just re-did the masteries or there Talent Tree (in World of Warcraft terms). It's causing a ruckus because now you have to pick out new skills. I would figure most people are like me and pick talents based on what more advanced players have worked out and published. Some dudes are WAY into this - serious calculator nerddom going on there.

Here is the tree that I used with my Champion (toon or Avatar) Ashe:
http://www.solomid.net/guides.php?g=4134

But the new masteries are totally different. For instance, there is no Perseverance (which increases Mana and Health regeneration) in the new Utility tree.

Here's what I picked for Ashe:
1/1 Summoner's Wrath
3/4 mental force (+3 ability power- Ashe's is Focus, increased critical strike chance after 3 seconds)
4/4 alacrity (+6% attack speed)
2/4 deadliness (+2% critical strike)
1/1 weapon expertise (+10% armor penetration)

I'm going for Crits and attack speed here.

and for my other Champion, Kayle

1/1 Summoner's Wrath
4/4 mental force (+3 ability power- Kayle's is Holy Fervor, target loses 3% armor and magic resist for 5 sec)
3/4 alacrity (+6% attack speed)
2/4 deadliness (+2% critical strike)
1/1 weapon expertise (+10% armor penetration)

Bump that ability power and attack speed.

Okay, now I'm ready to play. I may or may not talk about this in more posts but I wanted to comment on the goings on.

cheers!

university as open platform - Google Search

university as open platform - Google Search

Facebook wins because it is a 'platform'. By that I mean, it's a ... central point, hub, portal. A place that ... A service that others services connect. You can' get away from it, it wins and will continue to win.

Facebook is open because it allows anyone to create services that connect to it.

now to uni

Universities won (past tense) because they were a platform. A central point where learning and research and innovation happened. Not so much, now.

Universities are not open because ... they don't understand they are a platform. Hiding under a rock. Are concerned about security. Perhaps.

conclusion

If I were a University I would try to become a platform like facebook(private) or RSS(open).

Post influenced by: P2PU, seth Godin, Fleetly, RSS, and Facebook Platform. And, of course, Uncle Dave Winer, What is RSS and I deleted my Facebook account.

How do I rename multiple files in Windows Explorer with numbers I - Microsoft Answers

How do I rename multiple files in Windows Explorer with numbers I - Microsoft Answers


Oh yeah! and it works. I'll use this all the time to rename multiple files.

Badges!

First off, Let me say that when ever I hear Cathy Davidson speak - I get smarter.

This year's Digital media and learning competition is titled"badges for lifelong learning". the good folks at Mozilla are cosponsors of the competition. Here's some info:

Digital Media and Learning Competition: This Competition focuses on building digital badges for lifelong learning. The Competition is designed to encourage individuals and organizations to create digital tools that support, identify, recognize, measure, and account for new skills, competencies, knowledge, and achievements for 21st century learners wherever and whenever learning takes place.

Today I listened to the webinar - 'Badges 101' Hosted by Cathy Davidson (Duke U and HASTAC), Sheryl Grant (HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation),
Erin Knight, (Mozilla and P2PU); Carla Casilli, (Open Badges, Mozilla)

The webinar was worthwhile and it was great to get the condensed background and context for the badges project. They didn't talk too much about the competition and that will be handled in subsequent webinars.

Here are a few of my ideas and thoughts from the talk.

Many people know Davidson because of her work on crowd sourcing grading. It's nice to hear a respected professor come out and say, plainly, grades suck. She eloquently made the point using a history lesson. Grades haven't been around that long-since 1890. 'ABCD' grades were adopted and subsequently rejected by the Packers as being too restrictive. Educators adopted it with gusto, particularly after standardized, multiple-choice testing became accepted ( roughly after World War I)

I got this image in my mind during the webinar. The red card serves as a badge - given by the ref, accepted by the player, seen by everyone. The question was asked about negative badges - do people use them?  referees do.  In military school, I remember my demerits more than my merits.

Another thought I had for my past was that of the badges I collected while traveling around Europe as a first grader. My family and I lived in Bielefeld West Germany in 1979. I had a blue jean jacket that I wore proudly as an American. Each new town that we went to I would pick out a patch that my mom would so on to the jacket.I wish I had a picture of that jacket, but I still remember the badges that I collected. How it focused my attention during those travels.

Vivyan's Jacket with badegs... expression of his self identity.  self chosen for display.

When I think of lifelong learning I think of travel. And I wonder if the travel industry is a good place for a badge system. Go to a town-get a badge.  Do some activity - get a batch.  Collect enough badges - get a bonus, bad-ass badge.  I imagined an eager group of school kids (or Elderhostel types) test during an Alaskan whale watching Capt. to give them access to the QR code that would unlock a badge and display it for their friends back home.  Perhaps they could record the moment with a picture, video/audio or writing.

I wonder what it would take to organize something like that.  Is that what foursquare does? what are the overlaps between travel and lifelong learning?  are there specific travel learning organizations?

Thanks for listening and seeing next time.

Models: Emporium

The local Community College is working with an innovative approach to solve the problem of flagging Math proficiency - The Emporium Model from the National Center for Academic Transformation. It seems to be a 'Flipping the Classroom' type model.  It reminds me of Khan Academy which I didn't really get until I saw this TED Talk:

Models: Emporium: The Emporium Model

• Eliminates all lectures and replaces them with a learning resource center model featuring interactive software and on-demand personalized assistance.
• Depends heavily on instructional software, including interactive tutorials, practice exercises, solutions to frequently asked questions, and online quizzes and tests.
• Allows students to choose what types of learning materials to use depending on their needs, and how quickly to work through the materials.
• Uses a staffing model that combines faculty, GTAs, peer tutors and others who respond directly to students’ specific needs and direct them to resources from which they can learn.
• May require a significant commitment of space and equipment.
• More than one course can be taught in an emporium, thus leveraging the initial investment.

TED Talk on Khan Academy

InfoQ: QCon Keynote: Innovation at Google

InfoQ: QCon Keynote: Innovation at Google:

Patrick Copeland presents the first three principles of the eXtreme innovation approach based on the Pretotyping Manifesto: Innovators Beat Ideas, Pretotypes Beat Productypes, and Data Beats Opinion.

Fail fast and often. It comes natural to the those in virtual worlds, like games and blogs.

These guys at pretotyping.org get it. The idea is to put it out. Always be shipping. Godin asks "What did you ship today?"

Ideas aren't as important as things. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Put it out there and see what happens.

My rebut or hesitation of this is that I'm afraid of the "yard full of $hit" syndrome. Also called the 'Camero on blocks'. it's like the idea and half done projects of the past. It's hard to look at each day as you bring yet another project into the yard...

I guess the trick Copeland is talking about is, get alot of junk in the yard(ideas you are starting) - but don't make them huge, don't make them WebVan.com. Make them like Palm's paper prototype.

Less formally, pretotyping is a way to test a product idea quickly and inexpensively by creating extremely simplified versions of that product to help validate the premise that "If we build it, they will use it."

yep, I like this. If you are a creative person, don't be embarrassed to create. But, don't be foolish in putting all your efforts to create something people may not want. The speaker says you SHOULD be embarrassed by your first iteration of your new thing - if you aren't, perhaps you spent too much time building it.

hmmm, food for thought here.

Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue? - NYTimes.com

Seriously. This makes alot of sense to me. Our whole society seems to be shifting to more and more choice - and it's getting freakin' exhausting.

Have we gone to far? I wish I could go back in time - for all kinds of reasons - but one would be to go to a 1960s supermarket. Why? because this is where the choice generation began. Food makers are kings of baffling by choice. now there are 15 types of EVERYTHING - ... could you imagine when you had only to pick between Regular and Decaff... perhaps there where two Brands. (And all that...)

All these little choices and we no longer have the energy to make BIGGER - MORE IMPORTANT - choices.

Oh well, I'm choosing Regular coffee.

More links:
Podcast where I got the tip on Decision Fatigue -
http://blogs.howstuffworks.com

NYT article that the podcast is based -
Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue? - NYTimes.com

'Decision Fatigue' on Google Scholar - 117 articles (today)
http://scholar.google.com

National Football League: NFL Audio Pass Listen to every NFL game online. Live!

National Football League: NFL Audio Pass Listen to every NFL game online. Live!

I love the AudioPass. I hate Ads.

Imagine my surprise when I hear Ads (which I hate) on the NFL AudioPass (which I love).

NFL gets a "C'mon man!" on the this.

Why do I have to pay to listen to ads? I understand ads on broadcast TV. But, when I pay for a service, I expect to be ad free.

I love the AudioPass alittle less. Hate Ads even more.