The TWAIN blog

In 2005, author Erwin Raphael McManus released a book titled “The Barbarian Way: Unleash the Untamed Faith Within“. This book is small and powerful. I believe it was less than 200 pages and it basically rouses christians to disregard the current Christianity movement to move back toward the original barbaric and revolutionary early Christianity.
“Somewhere along the way the movement of Jesus Christ became civilized as Christianity,” McManus writes. “We created a religion using the name of Jesus Christ and convinced ourselves that God’s optimal desire for our lives was to insulate us in a spiritual bubble where we risk nothing, sacrifice nothing, lose nothing, worry about nothing. I wonder how many of us have lost our barbarian way and have become embittered with God, confused in our faith because God doesn’t come through the way we think He should.”

The call to be the barbarian way is truly about being fearless. The early church was about revolution and change. The people in that church held to a belief system that literally meant death or danger in the political shift of the time.

He goes on to say, “When we fear God and God only, we are no longer bound by all of the other fears that would hold us captive. The fear of death, the fear of failure, the fear of rejection, the fear of insignificance — all of the fears that we know by name and haunt us in the dark of the night become powerless when we know the fear of the Lord. And if this is not enough, we discover that perfect love casts out all fear. Not even God will hold us or control us by fear. When we fear Him, we in essence begin to live a life where we are fearless.”

I think of this tied to the changes we want to make in education. I didn’t get into education because it was an insurance policy for my future. I know I didn’t get into this for the pay or the holidays. I signed up to be in education so I could make change happen.

I believe I see others in my field who want to make change happen but there is fear. Fear of change. Fear of sacrificing too much. Alterning the first quote: “we are in a bubble where we risk nothing, sacrifice nothing, lose nothing, worry about nothing. I wonder how many of us have lost our barbarian way and have become embittered with [school systems], confused in our faith because [teachers or students] don’t come through the way we think [they] should.”

Have we lost our Barbarian way? How do we get it back?

I used to teach classes of technology subjects to students. I wanted them to see how technology applied to changing simple, everyday items into new areas of comfort. Example, I would talk about the television and how someone got tired of getting up and turning the knob to change channels. So, they invented a remote but the remote was tethered. So they made a wireless remote but that remote didn’t work too far. So they made a different remote so the person could lie on the couch and change the channel…and so on.

We would do this with several items ranging from mechanical toothbrushes to even cell phones.

The next step was to diagram a current technology and list the “problems” that it had at THIS CURRENT MOMENT. We would then discuss our own $Million Dollar$ ideas for improving those products.

Great classroom discussions!

I say all this as an intro to learning about a new site today called Posterous - http://posterous.com which allows us all to post a blog without making a blog or blog account. Posterous lets you just email your text and/or attachments to one email address that then timelines it out in a micro-blog setting.

Back to my classroom discussion:

We have blogging. What’s a negative about blogging?
You have to setup a blog account. You have to log in to the blog. You have to then post your blog item.

Now:
No need to setup an account. You email your blog to the address. You can even send attachments and Mp3s to Posterous.com

Lesson for everyone: Take a concept in existence now. List the negatives of that concept. What’s your $Million Dollar$ idea?

Run with it.

Better yet, gather a group of kids and diagram a timeline of the development of a technology and how it developed. Get to the stop point of current. Have them decide the next level of development for the product. There’s the Million Dollar Idea.

Collaboration. Open Discussion. Creation. Evaluation. Planning. Strategy.

As for me, I am still waiting for a former student to develop the implantable cell phone to be located somewhere near our nasal cavities. The device would project sound internally so no need to hold a phone to our ears anymore. And by talking, the device would translate the movement of air internally into digital (and clear) voice for the others on the phone.

We did have a problem figuring out what a sneeze or a cough would do…..

In my new role, I have been given the task of rewriting two items near and dear to my heart:

1) The district technology plan

and

2) The district acceptable use policy for staff and students. I have decided to write these as separate documents (I think they were already but just want to be sure.)

The district technology plan must follow a strict format to be submitted to TEA but I want to include statements about Web 2.0 and 21st century skills. If you were given the opportunity to rewrite the plan for your district’s technology, what would you want to add or subtract?

Also, the acceptable use agreement is of major contention with employees and students. I know I want to make a better use of the form online - perhaps embedding some videos on it to provide more information about why this document is important. A real teachable document for the 21st century.

What are some ideas for the AUG?

This is a chance to re-invent how things are done starting with documentation. I am really excited about the possibilities.

I am watching the final keynote address from NECC08 from my office at home in Kerrville. I have a front row seat. I am watching the video. I am in Second Life.

Here are some shots in my Flickr account to give you an idea of this tool used in real time.

You can find them at my Flickr - http://www.flickr.com/photos/techxas. Posting as we go now.

I am at the NECC conference in San Antonio. It is amazing to see so many faces of people I connect with through Twitter and our social networks.

This year, I am laptop-less. In fact, I am only posting this using my room-mates’ laptop while he is partying somewhere downtown about now. I have spent the past few days at the nation’s largest technology educator conference without access to a portable computer. It has been frustrating on a few levels but really positive on many others.

I have been regulated to taking notes with PEN and PAPER!! Not only does this help me focus more on the speaker but it also gives me a greater chance to really PEOPLE WATCH. And people are amazing to watch in these large groups.

The most amazing thing to me is the use of the technology by our technology education peers that makes it appear to something similar to paparazzi stalking a star. The “heavy hitter” celebrities of the blog world are following each other and sitting in the front few rows. They then Twitter, Ustream, and even blog about what is happening while it is happening.

Now to the audience participating globally in the conference, I can see how helpful this is. Its opening the conference and discussion to others in the world wide classroom.

But to be in the room and watching - its really distracting! People aren’t just discussing the topics. They are discussing their plans for dinner. They are discussing their inside jokes. They are posting commentary about the commentary. Some try to be more witty than the previous post and the conversations jump off the topics into their own little satires.

In our keynote this morning, I had a woman sitting next to me who was posting her blog. She was in Twitter. She was also adding to a discussion in Ustream. Meanwhile, those of us around her were distracted by the screen of her laptop seeing as the lights were dimmed for the video playing of the keynote. I watched her post about her experiences, watched as she answered emails, watched as she twittered to her friends about what they were doing in other areas of the state.

I didn’t see much conversation about the keynote. I didn’t see her really noticing that her tick-tack clicking of her nails during the presentation was disrupting the crowd around her. I don’t think she cared. She was in the Web 2.0.

I left the keynote today with the idea to watch the audiences more than the presentations. And while many conversations were on task and on point, there was still this strange race to be the first to post the information. People are taking pictures, filming, streaming, and blogging it seems to be the first to post the content. They want to be the source for the information first. It reminds me of a favorite media-news site I check daily called Ain’t It Cool news. Media news is posted with a commentary section for each item. The first few posts are the people visiting the items to post “FIRST” so they can get the recognition of being noted as first-posters. Paparrazzi? Nope. Webucators! First to Tweet. First to UStream. First to Flickr!

My questions:

What happens when we allow the social networking on the computer overpower the social gathering?

When do we give up meeting and sharing ideas locally when we get together locally only to be sharing those ideas with people in other rooms, states, or countries?

What is are the new rules or etiquette guidelines for social networking in social gatherings? or Are there any?

Does the social network become the new society?

I close with this. I attended a “Twitter dinner” last night. This was a nice dinner joining people from the Twitter-verse together. The dinner was great and we got to talk to one another. We hugged and shared that common feeling of knowing that we are on the front-line. Its interesting to meet the people you don’t see everyday but are in the same boat as you and to greet them with a hug. First meeting in person and hugging each other because we are in the trenches as comrades.

The party was swelling and then circled about as a group. People began taking out cell phones and Twittering while we were in the group. Then they began talking about the Twitter conversations. The social gathering was now guided by the conversations taking place from people not in the room. The party was over for many of us at that point. It was like watching people talking about a party I wasn’t a part of in the party that I was a part of. I was in the room with these people but they were in a party taking place in their cell phones.

That’s just one issue with Twitter. I guess the other is that it is constantly down…..

Find me there - mradkins

Technorati Tags: necc08 necc necc2008