Figured I’d post this warning in case folks were trying to find me: my flight from the Philippines back to the US has gotten shuffled around, so after two hours of going back and forth between various airlines, I’ll be embarking on a lovely 48-hour trip back home which features such delightful things as 9-hour layovers and did I mention only one of my flights has food included? (Actually, the flight-shuffling and the Travel Schedule of Doom isn’t so bad; the family fussing over such drove me to the point where I declared myself non-interruptible, went into a bedroom, closed the door, Dealt With Stuff, and then rejoined humanity).
Consequently, my functionality between now and reaching Chicago will be somewhat questionable. I’ll start being reachable again for sure during US Thursday daylight hours. Will start being reachable and functional/coherent during US Friday normal work-hours (…such as I have them). The next time I go to a POSSE, it will not be during the last throes of a Fedora release. I’m actually grinning as I write this – I’m not pissed or anything. Just… tired, and storing up my reserves because I know the travel’s going to wear me out even more. (I have no idea how “tired” on the Mel scale maps to anyone else’s scale, mind you. It seems to mean that I’m walking around like a normal human being instead of running around like a maniac, and sleeping 6 hours a night. Weird.)
Plenty of stuff I should write about when I get back – had a wonderful time with the Filipino Ambassadors last night (thank you, Herson, Engels, and Magie!), got some fast food with a couple really cool nuns on the way to Tanay, was thoroughly stuffed with way too much food, saw Willison get married, heard some family stories I hadn’t heard before, caught up on several thousand (almost there!) emails, and generally reflected on the inadequacy of my current keeping-up-whilst-travelling strategies, which will be revised next weekend with the help of my little brother, who tends to be a good sport for these sorts of conversations. We’re also going to do a Finish Those Grad School Applications!!! marathon (me for Engineering Education, him for an MBA*) together and I’m taking him out for his first beer flight (he turns 21 this coming weekend).
*my brother is a good boy.
Anyway. Any online-ness or productivity from me between now and Thursday is a bonus, though I’ll try.
(For those who don’t know Tagalog: “Balikbayan” means “someone who is returning home.”)
My arrival to the Philippines started with a text message from my mom telling me to stay put, watch my luggage, and that they’d be there in less than 30 minutes. They arrived nearly two hours of crawling traffic later and started feeding me dried mangoes; on the way to the market (in order to get more food) we were stopped by some policemen looking for bribes (which we didn’t give) and then accosted by beggars tapping on the car windows (also didn’t give; even the cute little kids often belong to begging/crime syndicates).
Yep. I’m home. (Well… sort of home. One of my kinds of homes. More my family’s home than mine – but still kind of a home for me.)
Got to the market, where two of my mom’s sisters (#1 and #7) and some of my cousins (Barby and Bea, the two daughters of Mom’s Sister #1) helped us tuck into a feast of boneless bangus (a fish with lots of bones that consequently usually gets manually deboned before it’s cooked, in order to preserve the sanity of the eater), sizzling sisig (finely chopped pig head, pan-fried), banana blossoms, buko (young coconut – chop off the top, drink the juice, scoop out the meat and eat it), and more…
Things have changed in the two years since I last came. My grandmother’s house has wifi, and it is of sufficient speed to watch videos online. This rocks my world – I’ve always had to struggle to find connectivity here before. My cousins are in college, and they’re geeks! Organic chemistry, mechanical engineering, product design… we’re all sort of artsy nerds now in some sense and it is AWESOME to be able to geek out with them. After a quick stop at my aunt’s factory (you can hardly tell Typhoon Ondoy came through, except for water/oil marks up by the ceiling where the floodwaters reached) Barby and I went to a construction expo (she’s the design student – this was a homework assignment) and gawked at trucks and roofing materials and had frozen yogurt and asked each other what we were up to.
She told me about all our cousins (on my mom’s side) in the Philippines and how they’ve grown up and I told her about our cousins in the US and what they were like (the last time Barby saw Audrey, she wasn’t talking yet; now she’s in 1st grade; the last time I saw Agnes she was in high school, now she’s in the middle of her engineering studies and likes robotics!!!) and we really need to get on a mailing list so we can actually talk about things and not have 2-year lags between our conversations. Barby filled me in on her design studies, I explained what I’m doing now, which necessitated an explanation of open source (and now I have to teach her Inkscape and she wants to check out the Fedora Design team so hopefully we’ll get a chance to sit down and do that before I leave) and then I got back to the house and there was MORE FOOD! and… happy. (Oh, and Barby drives now – so I might actually be able to leave the house! I must admit my family’s paranoia is well-founded in this country… taking a taxi is a bad idea here if you don’t like getting kidnapped.)
I even plea-bargained my way into wearing pants for Willison’s wedding today. If I were to wear a dress, I pointed out, we’d either need to buy or borrow one. Buying one is sayang (there’s no direct translation to English, but one might say “such a waste”) because I will never wear that dress again. Borrowing one is nigh impossible because I’m very tall (the average woman in the Philippines is less than 5 feet tall; I’m 5’8″) and broad-shouldered (which, in American clothing sizes, means I’m more of a Women’s Medium than a Small) – by American metrics I’m not big, but by Filipino standards I’m a friggin’ giant. However, we’ve conveniently brought pants and a shirt from the States, so… wouldn’t it be easier for everybody if…?
Deal: I wear pants, but I also wear jewelry and allow them to put on some makeup. (Which is coming off ASAP, believe me. Ergh.) I also do the first reading at the wedding mass today. I can live with this. It’s better than the puffy frilly yellow dress I had to wear for my uncle’s wedding. My parents get it worse because they’re one of the ninang/ninong (godmother/godfather) pairs for the wedding (there are 6 pairs, which is a lot) so they have to do the Official Wedding Wear thing and walk in the procession and all that. They can pull it off a lot better than I’d be able to, though.
Breakfast today: persimmons, misua (noodles), taho (soft beancurd with syrup and tapioca) – I stopped short of the rolls filled with shredded vegetables, though I may go back for second breakfast in a bit. My free time ends shortly because the hairdresser is about to come. The remainder of the weekend will be filled with family and feasting. And then when everyone else goes to bed (because I don’t sleep anyway) I’ll pop online and work on Fedora and catch up with Sugar Labs; I’ve got quite a backlog after POSSE in Singapore last week.
I just sent this to the POSSE APAC attendees (weeklong bootcamp for university lecturers who are going to teach their students open source participation – this week’s POSSE focused on the Fedora Project) and thought others might be interested in reading logs – I ended up being too hosed this week to make as many live updates as I’d have liked, but most of this weekend/Monday/Tuesday will be gathering those materials and starting to do some follow-up. Stay tuned.
As a side note to those reading logs – I’d read the fedora-websites one, followed by the logs from Thursday and Friday, and then look at the Monday or Tuesday logs for comparison to see the difference in the conversation.
Dear everyone,
I will write up more notes and emails once I reach the Philippines later today (I have to take the taxi to my plane now), but I wanted to say a big *THANK YOU* to all of you for taking the time to spend the week with us at POSSE. I’ve learned a tremendous amount from you on how to teach open source.
It was inspiring to see how willing you were to try new things (even an unfamiliar way of learning) and how quickly you picked up on it. I have no doubt that you will all be amazing ambassadors for open source when you go back to your schools and students and classrooms. If there is every anything that we can do to help us, let us know.
Now that I’m done flinching from the use of the term “education 2.0″ and fighting the temptation to launch into a long spiel on what I know about the history of education and how it’s led to our current systems’s designs… (I need to learn more about that history – there’s so much of it and it is fascinating!)
For me, the biggest difference is not that the string quartet becomes faster or more efficient (there is a limit to how fast people can learn, though it’s super high and most folks never come close to hitting it). We’ve had rich, immersive, satisfying learning experiences for years – I’ll call those string quartets and recognize that they’re ideals that we usually don’t 100% reach.
The big difference for me is that now you can choose, at any given time, which of many string quartets is best for you to listen to – instead of maybe not having quartets available at all, or being forced to choose between a quartet that’s not right for you and a wider range of crappy tin-whistle recordings.
</awkwardly explained analogy!> <other notes I took!>
Wiley’s quote sums most of it up. “The challenge is not to bring technology into the classroom, he points out. The millennials, with their Facebook and their cell phones, have done that. The challenge is to capture the potential of technology to lower costs and improve learning for all.”
I last saw the peer2peer uni folks… was it 2 years ago now? It was still a “we’re all sitting here talking about stuff” pie in the sky dream last time I saw them; if they’ve gotten it off the ground, I’m glad! I’ll have to check back in.
The way WGU designed its competency-based curriculum assessments – with employers as the spec providers – assumes that all students go to university so they can be employed by those employers. It’s great for the use case it was designed for. At the same time, I think we should also recognize other use cases, like students who want to go to grad school, or students who care more about learning something they’re interested in for however many years and aren’t actually worried quite yet about where they’ll go after that.
Same comment for Neeru Paharia’s quote, which is one (of many possible) cool deconstruction(s) of the features of a university: “It provides you a clear path from A to B, provides social infrastructure of teachers and other students, and accreditation so you actually get credit for what you do.”
Thanks for pointing out the article, John – I hadn’t seen it before, and it is indeed awesometastic. At 4:53am, I write disjointed paragraphs rather than coherent sentences with tons of context, but I wanted to get this out there so I could give myself permission to pause for a while and sleep on this (and many other things, like the last day of POSSE APAC).
Karsten Wade is leading our POSSE group in a “let’s learn how to be a contributor to Fedora Documentation!” exercise – in this case, writing release notes. I made a screencast at the request of some of the other participants (originally screenshots until I realized it was Just Easier to use Istanbul).
This way, if Karsten (or anyone else!) wants to teach the same material again, they can follow a 10.5 minute video instead of going through an hour-long explanation on IRC. Ah, the power of documentation!
It’s worth pointing out that we didn’t originally have Documentation on our “Stuff To Learn” schedule at all; this was a spontaneous happy moment, with Karsten around and offering to teach, and folks in the room deciding they wanted to learn, and me deciding to make a screencast. The unplanned-ness is probably a huge part of what made it such a good learning experience – I’m not sure how this would work as a Standard Part Of Someone’s Classroom Syllabus. But… you know, I could be wrong. Teachers, what do you think?
开源软件 means “open source software.” It’s pronounced “kai yuan ruan jian” with the following tones… uh… there isn’t really a good way to… do this… *image editing!*
There we go. Maybe we can take some time during lunch to get (on video?) a “common words in open source… in Mandarin!” (and other languages people speak) reference going.
We need to work out some FAS group membership stuff, but should be
getting them on Planet Fedora and Planet TOS sometime today. Also, be aware that for the most part, English is not their first
language – though that’s actually pretty cool, because we might start
seeing multilingual blogs pop up as they go back to their classrooms
and get their students involved.
If you have a moment, please check out their posts and leave a comment, especially if you can answer some of their questions or point them in the direction of an answer. I want to show them how blogging can help other people find out what they’re up to – and how it can also help them find out what their students are up to.
Writing progress notes on blogging, IRC, and wiki usage on the board – for people who are becoming open source contributors for the first time, these tools make for a strange new world indeed.
I think there may be the makings of several coherent essays in here, and maybe someday I shall write them, but right now I’m just going to braindump.
You can either be frustrated by these kinds of conversations, or you can be amused. I choose to be amused. They come up frequently enough that this makes my life a lot more fun.
“Where are you from?”
“Boston.”
“No, I mean where are you from?”
“I live in Boston.”
“I mean where’s your family from?”
“Illinois.”
“I mean what are you, like, Japanese or…”
“Mostly American. I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago.”
Ok, so maybe this is stubborn immaturity on my part, but after a couple decades you learn the folks who ask these questions usually don’t give you the time to explain that your genetic heritage does not necessarily represent your primary cultural identification and probably wouldn’t care if you did; they just want you to Be Chinese so you fit into a nice little mental checkbox. (That having been said, I’m also proud of being Chinese-Filipino; it’s just not my default mode.)
“Wait, so you can’t hear.”
“I can hear, just not so well.”
“So how do you understand me?”
“I lipread.”
(no voice) “Can you understand me?”
“That’s the first thing everyone asks, and yes.”
Whenever you don’t fit into a default category, you get the opportunity to make others (and yourself) aware of the assumptions people make. And sometimes – often, really – I love that. I love that I repeatedly get the chance to explain Olin (not all Boston-area engineering students went to MIT) and open source and education and all this stuff, I love that I repeatedly get to make people go “…wait, how does that work?” and maybe, just maybe, rewire the way they see the world a little. Also, if I didn’t love it, I’d probably go nuts.
“You’re not supposed to be able to do that.”
“But I am. This is normal for me.”
It’s why I’m grateful I can chose to pass; sometimes it’s tiring, and by choosing the universes that you want to move in, you can sometimes lift that label from yourself and move around more freely for a while, so you can go back into the Big World later. It also makes it all the more wonderful when you meet someone that already knows what you’re talking about.
Stereotypes aren’t bad, per se – they’re efficiency tools, but like all tools, you’ve got to know whether they’re on or off, and when and how to activate them. They’re potential extra data, not gospel. And when you’re repeatedly in the position of explainer, you learn which signals are triggers for what larger cascade of assumptions, and where in that mental structure lie the points you can go poke! to – it’s like bringing a guy twice your weight down with a wrist lock. (Which is also fun, but which I rather suck at doing. I need to go back and learn more.)
Leverage: it’s what lets you flip a lot of thinking with just a little bit of time. I do not grok this fully yet, but I understand it as something that I already do – and need to become more aware of – and then learn to use it more effectively, in any domain, at will.
The nice thing about living (or spending lots of time, anyway) on the internet: even when you travel, you’re still home. Sort of. Nothing can ever take the place of being there in person, but little casual touches here and there make all the difference and turn potential homesickness into a “oh hey, I can share this back with people now!” experience.
Nikki’s blogs make me miss Olin’s randomness and professors (who are also random), and it was refreshingly wonderful to be able to touch base with so many people on IRC late tonight. (Note: living on the internet is also great when you don’t sleep; it’s always daytime somewhere.)
I shall try unconsciousness again. 6:20 am isn’t out of range for a bedtime for me, and I can get up at 7, and timezones… I have my own way of coping with timezone shifts and remaining functional. It works. Thank you, extensive childhood travel to Asia.
Weird thought: If I weren’t an in-betweener, what would I be? If I wasn’t born into a place where I would have to bridge a lot of worlds, what would I do? If I never had the opportunity to translate anything – if no translation was ever needed (and yes, I know full well that all these statements are impossible, but it’s a thought experiment), what would I use my words to say, if I didn’t use so many of them to carry someone else’s words to someone else’s ears in a form they could understand?
Maybe that’s what I’m seeing when I write. Because I write for my future self, and my future self doesn’t need much translation at all. Huh. I’m not sure that’s the right answer – or the right question – but it does make something interesting to mull on.
Hypothesis: talent is compound interest on a lot of hard work and learning from constant FAIL.
Procedure: Pick something you demonstrably suck at but love anyway. Do it for 10 years. See what happens.
Note: I have not successfully accomplished this yet – or… have I? Maybe. Sort of. The notion of being a social being engaged in a community and collaborating with people would have been such a weird thing for me to even imagine as a shy little junior high nerd outcast. And now it’s pretty much my life. Going from “abysmal” to “more than adequate” is not bad, in my book – and I’ve worked at it, a lot – with informal miniprojects like “let’s try this type of backchannel” or “okay, I’m going to try to pay attention to this group conversation for 5 consecutive minutes.” (then 10. then 15, etc – you do get better at following lipreading bouncing across the room with deliberate practice.)
howto rewire a reaction
Hypothesis: you can.
Procedure:
Notice the reaction that you have.
Think about the one you’d like to have.
Practice that reaction. Yes, in isolation, for no apparent reason. Yes, it will look stupid. Do it anyway.
When your first reaction gets triggered, let it run, then immediately follow up with the reaction that you’d like to have. (You won’t catch it all the time at first. That’s fine. Try anyway. You will eventually.)
Great. Now try to interrupt your first reaction. Not with the one you’d like to have – with nothing. Ideally, you’ll get “….pause… correct-reaction.”
Now make the pause shorter and shorter.
Now take the pause away.
It helps to get friends to deliberately trigger you through steps 4-7; you learn faster that way. You do have to tell them to wait for the full progression. (“When I flinch, keep going until I relax.”)
Result: I can, more or less, do hugs now. Nikki, Andrew, feel free to test next time you see me; it’s been getting better for a while. Other experiments are still in the pipeline.
