May is bike month in New York City. Though I commute every fair weather day with my trusty Brompton SL-2 with a serious assist from New Jersey Transit, I have been wanting to ride all the way from home to work since moving out here just over four years ago. With the help of John Feinberg's excellent cue sheet, my GPS-enabled smartphone and some tired legs, I made it from Glen Ridge to Cooper Square in about two hours and forty five minutes. (This sounds more like a marathon personal record dream time to me, than a bike ride, but I digress.)
The route primarily traverses residential, industrial areas and the occasional patch of nature. Highlights include the now-defunct New York and Greenwood Lake Short Rail, and the New Jersey Naval Museum, which is home to the USS Ling, a World War II Submarine. I was surprised to see a loon diving for food in Leonia, and to learn that the south side of the GWB is closed to pedestrian traffic. The north side is open, but involves what seemed like an interminable number of stairs after the 2 mile climb through Fort Lee. I don't think I was ever so happy to see the Hudson. I thought of hopping on the subway at 181 Street, but savored the decline all the way down the West Side, which was all dressed up for Fleet Week.
For those contemplating the trip from Glen Ridge, here's a link to the modified cue sheet.
Educon 2.2 is something of an un-conference. Instead of presentations, facilitators lead conversations. The conference is hosted at the Science Leadership Academy,
a public charter school in Philadelphia, led by Chris Lehmann. Over
500 educators from primary and secondary schools, a handful of school
administrators and higher education professionals attended. Largely,
this group self-selects. Many pay their own way, all give up a weekend
to be there. It's one of the best educational gatherings that I've had
a chance to participate in.
My head is still spinning, but
I'm going to highlight three areas: 1) the overall participatory
environment at SLA and the conference 2) Jeff Han on Multi-touch
interaction experiments and finally, 3) a conversation that I
facilitated about online teaching and learning.
1) Students
managed all of the logistics from tech support, to checking bags to
helping people find sessions. They also joined sessions and shared
their experiences. That students were central to the conference
permeated all of the sessions and made the experience authentic in a
way that few conferences are. Chris Lehmann spoke about how he and his
colleagues create this community on a session he facilitated about
leadership. I'm a bit in awe of Chris--it's great to hear about it AND
see it in action at SLA.
2) Jeff Han presented Pixel Perfect, a spin off of his "multi-touch interaction research."
More on Jeff and his work here: http://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/index.html
Jeff was eager to hear from us about how we could imagine the data
visualization tool used in education. It's worth looking at the videos
of Jeff showing how the touch screen works--but it feels like something
out of a movie, where instead of interacting through a keyboard we
manipulate data with our hands. At a glance, one might think, oh, it's
an interactive whiteboard--but it's much, much more than that. Many
people can be on the board at the same time, it's as sensitive as an
iPad's touch screen and it's wicked fast. Jeff argues that we have
plenty of processing power, but that we're not making enough advances
from the interface side. He also envisions a day when the technology
is as cheap and ubiquitous as wall paper. From an educational use
perspective, we imagined ideas for collaborative writing projects,
virtual dissections and geographic analysis, but somehow I wished that
we picked a few specific curricular contexts and started with
educational goals. Nevertheless, it was an amazing conversation.
I
would like to thank all of my peers at Educon for making it such a
wonderful event, to Chris Lehmann, and the teachers, students and
parents at SLA and of course, Kristen Sosulski and the NYU-SCPS for
giving me something to talk about.
Has anyone noticed that Facebook's suggestions are becoming more aggressive? Perhaps their new tagline could be "Facebook, your digital friend coach: We help you find friends, provide guidance on how to connect with them and never let you forget a birthday." Sometimes the reminders have a sad quality about them. Today, I was prompted to help a friend find more friends--is there something that triggers this prompt?
Then there are the paternal reminders, "you haven't spoken with Jack in a while, send him a message," Forget that Jack used to taunt me about my height in high school, "Hey Jack, what up bro?" And then there's the seamlessly unlimited supply of friend suggestions, and despite how inane they are, I can't resist clicking on them. I wrote earlier on the Five Phases of Facebook, and I'm still at acceptance. I am grateful for friends tagging good reads, sharing reactions to the season finale of Dexter, or encouraging folks to support health care reform, or same sex marriage, but I remain perplexed by the stream of quizzes, and Farmville updates. I'm also struck by the conversations that start here. My college consitutional law classmate debating with my Parisian neighbor out here in the 'burbs. Facebook, where worlds collide. How's your Facebook experience these days? Love it? Hate it? Can't imagine life without it?
I'm coming out of the rock and pop closet and declaring my love for classical music. Benjamin Zander, a conductor gave this talk on how classical music speaks to all of us at the Technology, Entertainment and Design Conference. He's managed to explain how classical music is magic in a way that I've never heard before. This talk is as much about leadership and our shared humanity as it is about music--very much worth watching and listening too--as are the other TED talks. They are indeed "ideas worth spreading."
Robert Strauss, a former Peace Corps Country Director recently opined in the New York Times that "For the Peace Corps, the number of volunteers has always trumped the quality of their work, perhaps because the agency fears that an objective assessment of its impact would reveal that while volunteers generate good will for the United States, they do little or nothing to actually aid development in poor countries. The agency has no comprehensive system for self-evaluation, but rather relies heavily on personal anecdote to demonstrate its worth." He argued that the Peace Corps sends too many recent college grads who lack the skills to do their jobs. I disagree with Strauss and wrote the following response. Other letters both agreed and disagreed with his assessment. Perhaps it's not fair to generalize from one's own experience--which goes for Strauss and me.
Bill Bryson: A Short History of Nearly Everything Why is the center of the earth so hot? How did the contenients form? How did we evolve? Meet the people who have begun to unravel the world in which we live and share in Bryson's wonder. Arguably the best science book I've ever read.
Philip Roth: The Plot Against America (Vintage International) Frightening imagined alternative history of life in America in the early 20th Century. Instead of FDR, we got Charles Lindbergh, who was cooperating with Nazi Germany. As told through the eponymous narrator, coming of age in Newark, NJ.
Audrey Niffenegger: The Time Traveler's Wife (Harvest Book) Great read--I love books about time--this one brought past, present and future together in a wonderful way. I thought Niffennegger came up with a splendid analogy for how we experience the world--timetravel. We are our present, past and future all in a single moment.
