Archive for June, 2009
I was originally going to wait for all my travel plans to finalize, but there’s no reason why I shouldn’t holler out right now that I’ll be at NECC this year. If you are also coming, let me know!
NECC is the National Educational Computing Conference, and it is – from what I’ve heard – the stuff of legend and the place to be for people interested in teaching and technology. I say this based on two things: (1) 100% of the people I know who’ve been to NECC have emailed/called/found me immediately afterwards and bellowed “YOU HAVE TO GO TO NECC!” and (2) when asked to describe what NECC was like, their first reponse is to drop their jaw into a massive grin and flail their arms around in wordless happiness before they’re able to start describing it in English.
So when I found out I was going down to DC, I quietly and calmly finished up some time-sensitive morning tasks and then RAN AROUND THE OFFICE BUILDING IN EXCITEMENT! Until it started to rain – at which point I went inside and sped another half-mile on a treadmill before I had expended enough adrenaline to sit down and be productive again. (Otherwise all my coworkers would be wondering why someone was whooping and hollering through the hallways.)
Needless to say, I’m looking forward to this. I’m looking through the program and starting to loosely map out my time there. It’s a given that I’ll want to check out “open source in education” stuff, but I also want to examine the basis of my kool-aid drinking on it, since to most of the world, this is not obvious. In fact, I’ve heard brilliant people whom I admire and respect tell me that open source and education is a terrible idea. They have good reasons. I don’t know what those reasons are yet.
I want to understand where that comes from – not to argue or fight back against it, but because there’s certainly a lot that we can learn from it and use to make our own work better. The realities and presures of working in a classroom, in a lab with creaky old equipment, with a massive district to oversee, within the government, with an overloaded IT staff, with tests and rules and regulations, with a host of kids with challenging needs, with things I can’t even imagine… and the solutions and mistakes and triumphs and opportunities that other people are already finding – what is this world? I have a lot to listen to and learn.
I’ll post more plans here when I have them, but in the meantime… who should I meet? What should I go to? Are there questions I should ask, topics I should seek out, things I should watch for? General conference-attending tips I should heed?
I plan on documenting everything I can, primarily through abusing my typing speed for live transcriptions (if you’d like me to transcribe your talk, or any particular talk, please let me know) and collecting short one-question interviews, for which I need a good question to ask. Maybe “What is your biggest learning goal for the upcoming school year, and what would help you get there?” – but that’s awkwardly phrased. Any ideas for a better one?
Sunday, June 21st, 2009 | fedora, olin, olpc, sugar, teaching open source | 5 Comments »
…leads to early bedtime. Not actually sleepy, just courting unconsciousness to make it stop (and to incidentally reset my wake-ups to a more reasonable time).
Saturday, June 20th, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
Oh geez, I’ve got a backlog. Gotta be smarter about this, since I can’t actually type more than I already am. Reassessing over OPERATION: WEEKEND!!! – I gotta make sure I can prioritize well before next week when the travel starts to hit.
I am reminded of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FK4nh5I0jpE, and that I need to learn how to do http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRkZN27Hp_k instead.
I’m well aware that the perceived lessened ass-kicking is actually the temporary dip that comes right before you break out of a plateau, so once that spontaneous rewiring happens, things will rock.
Piano results today: I can play over half the major scales now, fluently, at a moderate tempo, with good even fingerings!
Saturday, June 20th, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
Inspired by reading about laptops abandoned in Malawi. (Follow that to the original blogpost; it’s long, but worth reading.)
I’ve been struggling with this thought for years, and it’s no longer hypothetical.
I simultaneously realize that people are trying and get frustrated that the trying isn’t good enough to make a difference in a broken system. Or maybe I’m impatient; maybe the difference is a long, slow one that I’m not smart enough to see. And then… what am I doing? Why do I learn to make these things which should be useful but are in many cases just doomed to fail? Are the tiny successes really, really worth it, or just stuff we say to make ourselves feel better, or to pump more marketing through to get more funding to perpetuate ourselves not really making a difference?
Don’t get me wrong; I believe in self-directed education, I believe in open source, I believe in appropriate technology, I believe people can do this, and that a tiny difference is a difference, and that it is worth it, and that I’m doing what I’m meant to be doing (which may not change the world in Grand Sweeping Ways, but I’m here to help, not to be recognized for helping) and that I’ve done what I should do; I don’t regret working on anything I’ve worked on.
And yet.
One way to phrase this disequilibrium (and it’s a good one – it’s an eustress that keeps me going) is that it’s the weird difference between faith and knowing. I know that I’m where I should be – but I don’t know. I feel the knowing sticking inside me, without words. That’s supposed to make you at peace, or so I’ve heard. But my cerebral half won’t shut up. It’s not doubting, it’s just… saying. It’s pointing out, very calmly and with no hint of judgement, that I can’t phrase this in words, I can’t logically explain or prove the things I feel, I can only drift awkward poetry across it and italicize it and know. And this is odd, and slightly uncomfortable in a very detached way, because the world of concrete, provable rationality is the one I think I live in. I trust my intuition, and even when it works out, the scientist goes “but WHY did it work?” and tries to back-figure out the theory where maybe there isn’t a theory at all.
It has to be okay for science not to work on everything. It has to be okay to make decisions based on that.
No matter how philosophical I sometimes get, there’s still the real world, and the real world has laptops sitting in a closet in Malawi. Textbooks sitting in warehouses in the Philippines, undelivered and years out of date. Well-meaning projects creating dependencies and then abandoning the people they were trying to help. How do you react to that? How do you not react to that – how do you perceive it, accept it, let it be what it is? How do you understand that? How do you make peace with not understanding that? How do you ask – perhaps without asking – not what to do, but what to be?
I wonder if the Mystics felt a little bit like this when they wrote about God.
Friday, June 19th, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 1 Comment »
…which was given to me randomly at LinuxFestNorthwest over a year ago now. I needed to keep my electronics drawers closed in storage so they wouldn’t spew little surface-mount resistors across my aunt’s basement. The 4th Amendment came to the rescue.
It’s also been used to seal and label all the boxes that my stuff is packed in. I am, once again, living out of two suitcases (at pika). And I sort of like it this way.
Settling down can wait.
Thursday, June 18th, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
I’m on a jazz-and-waffle high right now.
Just got back from funk night at Wally’s. First time I’ve heard a synthesizer played; it was a big red box with half the surface covered in knobs, and totally threw me off in the beginning because I couldn’t find the timbre of a piano to listen to. Keyboardist was crazy good – flat-fingered and hammering into notes, sharp comps on the right and percussive accents on the left, then simultaneous double-octave runs with wrists fluttering madly too fast to see, a hummingbird on Hanon. Bass player throws some Beatles quotes in; crowd packed into the dim little bar cheers, swaying and clapping as the singer wails and bends and folds into a swinging angular pile of limbs pointing towards the drummer who is blurring sticks and cymbals with his eyes closed, guitar player leading the crowd in a backbeat clap.
Bike back in. Alex making waffles. Matt has already eaten 5. Break out the mascarpone and fig-cocoa jam and spread it on one that’s just popped off the griddle; others follow suit, waffle-fig-cocoa-cheese combo a hit. Maybe mod projector to use fan with magnetic bearings so it’s not so loud, says Jon. I pull a knot out of my left palm, type a little, pull a few more knots out of my fingers, stretch. A bit of work, and now I’m on a work and jazz and waffle high.
I love working at a place that has more textual information streams than I can process. No matter how fast I push my reading abilities, I can’t keep up with everything; there’s too much useful, interesting, well-written text. I love this. I’m learning how to prioritize my information intake now, and how to speed it up, and when not to, and when it actually matters to meticulously follow a conversation trail (this happens very, very rarely) and basically how and when to go Pareto on this kind of thing. It’s a quick study for me, since I can transfer a lot of my strategies for auditory input triage to text, and my lack-of-bandwidth coping strategies for audio conversations are very honed and well-evolved indeed.
Jon’s bass guitar is sitting next to me and I’m picking out the bridge to “Sir Duke” during RSI breaks.
The night is good.
Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
In some ways, today started as a MEL FAIL day. I managed to somehow bump everything in my calendar an hour late (or put everything on my calendar an hour late today, or… something equally stupid and probably preventable) and realized this when I got a text from Greg asking if I was going to be in a call. Which I raced to just about in time to miss. Luckily, things ended up being okay. And the day monotonically increased from there.
Observe:
- Mafe – a Filipino teacher-turned-IT-project-manager who, as it turns out, used to teach professors in the Philippines how to contribute to open source projects. Which sounds a bit familiar. And she wants to share her course materials. The world is small and wonderful.
- Orange-cranberry scones and mango-laced green tea for breakfast, a spicy Italian sausage from the jovial fellow at the Harvard T stop for lunch (I love that guy) and homemade tacos for dinner set aside for me by Lisa and Matt.
- Harvard yard is always a nice place to walk and think. I stopped by to pick up a book from the Coop about RSI and ended up looping most of the campus trying to unclutter my head.
- Getting past a total unproductivity block. See above. Matt Ritter gave me cool Timesvr ideas. He is fast asleep as I type this at 2:15am. I love my roommate.
- Semifunctional voice recognition on my desktop. Hands may be happier soon!
- Cinnamon-raisin bagel toasted with fig-cocoa mascarpone cheese for snackin’
- Left arm no longer feels like massive rock embedded in elbow. How did I go so long without massage therapy? (“It’s, um, not supposed to be hard and making a clicky-clanky noise, huh.” “Nope.”) My arms are actually… warm now. Because blood is in them. Because the muscles aren’t all choked. This is really weird. (Also, it hurt somewhat to coax the muscles into releasing, and residual soreness is definitely present, but it is a worthwhile tradeoff for not being cripped by RSI again.)
- Feeling comfortable biking! In a city! At night! (With lights and a helmet. Safety is boring, but being alive is exciting.)
- Henry!
- Jazz – at Wally’s, which left me singing on my bike all the way back to pika. Excellent sax players. And the singer was incredible at getting all the players flowing and swinging together, and even got the audience into it, too! I was singing songs I didn’t know, thanks to the lovely power of call-and-response.
Now it is sleepingtime, and then waking up, and then a bit more work, and then off to the office shuttlebus.
Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
Less talk, more action.
I’ll be quiet for a while. I needed that period of braindumped reflections, but it’s time to head back into the fray.
Monday, June 15th, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
…are AWESOME. I still can’t follow them (like Tatum, folks like Dizzy and Parker give this inexperienced listener mental whiplash) but jazz is starting to sound normal. I haven’t had an “ow! that’s so crazy cool and unfamilar I can’t listen to it any more, bring on the Bach!” moment in a couple weeks, which means my musical sense is totally rewiring.
The Hunt for Gollum: good film? Nope. Impressive nevertheless? Oh, yeah. It’s a fan film with enthusiastic volunteers and no budget, yet they managed to make something that looked like a studio-produced prequel (of roughly Star Wars ep. I quality) with suspiciously look-alike actors.
Elsa’s plane was delayed, so she crashed at pika last night (and I think I went to sleep about an hour before she got up). Also last night: pika party. (Yeah, it’s the third time I’ve written about it.) I believe I’ve mentioned before how the theme was Labyrinth – a somewhat scarring movie involving Muppets and David Bowie in weird pants – so decorations were everywhere, and impressive costumes, and I was… curled up with my laptop and books in the non-partying basement study room. Come to think of it, that’s kind of what I do for pretty much all parties. Try-new-things FAIL. Next time I’ll grab a much more extroverted friend and ask to shadow them for the evening. A lot of this goes against my habits and personality, but I will never know unless I try.
I spent most of the day (literally) running across Boston trying to find aunt and cousins – from pika up to Mass Ave and across the river past Berklee to the Orange line, which I took to the New England Medical center right before I raced completely around (and then across) the Commons until we finally found each other at Government Center. Every couple minutes I’d have a phone conversation like this:
Me (gasping): I am… at $newlocation… where are… you guys?
Them (loud parade music in background): WHAT
Me (breathing more normally): $NEWLOCATION WHERE ARE YOU
Them: BEAR STAR MOO?
Me: nonono, where are you. You. Where.
Them: Oh, we just marched to $otherplace.
Me: *RUN*
And then I was pretty exhausted. So of course we went and got some Chinese grocery ingredients for Melanie’s birthday noodles (tomorrow!) and I biked from Newton to pika and it took an hour because I was tired enough to have to walk up a few of the uphills. (I mapped it afterwards; I ran about 6 miles and biked twice that. I should do this kind of thing more so it won’t hurt quite so much.)
Lissa made Magical Tofu and some pretty ridiculously awesome squash for dinner. I relaxed and mostly stayed away from keyboards for the day (this evening for a few hours is an exception), the consequence being that I need to, er, hit the library again soon. (Information gets consumed when I am bored.)
Tomorrow: share triumphant packaging results (…I hope), pika trip to farm, meeting with Mafe, non-RH inbox zero, practice piano by actually touching it this time (I was trying to do ear training while roaming Boston today – dominant flat 9 scales are hard to hum!), rub out knots in my hands and arms and muscles as best I can, plan for the upcoming week. I actually momentarily feel like I might have something like half my act together – this is pretty awesome. Incrementally improving!
Somehow, from these scattered improvisations, a life emerges.
Saturday, June 13th, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
Mo and Chris have prevented this from being our only POSSE logo idea. Thank you, Mo and Chris!
(Side note: I should someday make my Inkscape skillz less rusty… and learn things like “composition” or what to do with this “color” thing – although the latter usually manifests as “Mel has the color sense of a dot matrix printer AH NO MY EYES!”)
Mo’s sketches:
Chris suggests the silhouette of something like this:
You can (and should) still add your own ideas on the wiki page (or here, or somewhere else I can find it). I’m going to tentatively give this until Thursday, June 18 since that’s when we’re having our next POSSE planning meeting. With any luck, I’ll be ordering “Did You Put This On The Wiki?” stickers to put on whiteboard markers next weekend.
Next POSSE post will actually contain curricular content, I promise. It may also contain awful puns. (Seriously, this acronym rocks. Nothing is imPOSSEble!)
Saturday, June 13th, 2009 | fedora, teaching open source | No Comments »
