The TWAIN blog

I just checked my blog and noticed that I never posted my job change information.

As of July 1, I will be the new Chief Technology Officer for the Kerrville ISD. I am currently in the process of packing my home up for a move to my new place. I have posted pics on my Flickr stream that should be showing up soon on this site.

I am really excited about the new job and role I will be taking on in Kerrville. I have always been routed to one campus in my previous roles. This new job is district-wide and I plan to be mobile for the most part of my job. “Have laptop, will travel!” I told my administrative team that I would prefer to be housed at the campuses rather than at the administration building.

This is also a new position for the district. They have had a tremendous technology support team for years! I met them and I agree. But in the past year, the technology planning committee challenged the administration to find a person to come in and help them learn to use the technology in the classroom. The teachers requested that this job be created so that they could take the learning to the level of application in their classes.

I am going in just the way I like it: without a plan and without a pre-conceived notion of what should be done. I want the teachers there to help me devise the best method for helping them learn and apply technology tools. How can we all learn together? We are all in this Web 2.0 world together and the tools will always be changing. I will be learning along with them and sharing as we work together.

I am really excited about the possibilities and for living in Kerrville. Its a population of about 20,000 which is different than all the other places I have lived. I think this difference is going to be the best thing for me!

This is my away message. I am away from the web, the Internet, and the core of what holds a digital native to the world. I have posted away messages on all of my social networks to inform people that I will not have access to a home computer for the next few weeks while I move jobs and homes.

I am hoping to hold out for the new iPhone because I have to return my laptop and iPod to the old job tomorrow….but I probably won’t be able to wait that long! I will have email access for my gmail account through my phone so I am not completely out of touch.

I will be accessing the world’s events in a style I have not used in a long time: newspapers and television.

I will be mobilizing my movers with the use of the phone book (which I recycled ages ago!). No more music to work out to.

No podcasts for a while. Also, I lose my instant connection to Twitter through TwitterFox. I will have to learn to live non-digitally again and then re-master my digital lifestyle. The end result is that I hope to learn to manage my time better as well. Perhaps I can merge some of my social networking tools into a better place for time management through this journey.

Gosh! I hope nothing happens in my social network for the next three weeks!

I received this post from Slashdot this morning about a new bill making its way through the senate for HR 4279. The foundation of this bill is for the protection of intellectual property. The interesting thing about this bill is it helps the government establish a new division within the Attorney General’s office for Intellectual Property Enforcement.

An interesting advancement of this new division will be their ability to seize computers and/or other devices (phones, PSPs, etc.) that may contain as little as 1 file that has intellectual property rights of someone else.

Yes, we are in a financial, energy, and national energy crisis. Yes, we are still at war. But are we watching the bills being passed around our government that give them rights to seize our hardware with minimal cause? I am all for protecting intellectual property rights but I also know that removing the hardware tools of the people (and for the people) will have a ripple effect beyond just protecting creative rights. How does this work in such an open source environment when creative rights are not well established already?

I sigh an agreement with a comment posted by someone on Slashdot’s site: “Now we know what the next war will be about…”