Things have been a bit quiet at work on usual activities. There have been other things on the agenda.
The VC has announced serious planned changes. UCTL to be broken into several chunks, splitting Teaching and learning policy from operational (ie academic development), moving Institutional research into another section away from Academic development, putting the learning Skills centre somewhere else (maybe back where it was 22 months ago). About a month for submissions.
Christchurch > Auckland > Vancouver (13 hour flight)
No camera (left it charging by the piano). I felt so naked. On thinking about this, I realise there is just that little niggle of guilt at being away, at feeling so free and unencumbered, with everyone else back home still in routine. I realise though that I’d not be here if it weren’t for Phillipa and Bill. When I firstly take the wrong suitcase at the airport, then later get the right bus in the wrong direction I do realise I am probably not cut out for travel alone. I need people also. The reason I like cameras is I can take snaps of the quirky things to share back home. Nine buses to get from airport to E 1st avenue, and the flat (where I am staying with 5 20-something temporary flatmates)
I had to check the definition of twenty something. I was curious if this was a specific demographic (ie a particular group or general ie any 20 something)
Tne definition was this I found: www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=twenty-somethings
A specific demographic group, those aged 20-29. Often Obama supporters (regardless of the country they live in), heavy drinkers, users of urbandictionary.com (and the souce of all the worthwhile-to-read definitions, as opposed to the adolescents that write the unfunny definitions that either profess their love for a gf/bf or proclaim their hatred of a schoolmate), students, servers, bartenders, clubgoers, in massive debt yet still optimistic, and believe that they can change the world if they just work together (until they reach the threshold age of 30, when 98% people realize the futility of their causes).
The author of this UD definition belongs to twenty-somethings demographic.
The courageous protesters at Tiananmen Square were mostly twenty-somethings.
The flat is cool. Takes me back 30 years. Very very well organised, has various customs, welcoming, functional, and it’s only been going a short time. I guess I put it down to Joel, who seems to have set it up. Shows the power of democratic leadership. Broadband. Mainly vegetarian. (I certainly will not cook meat here).
And the location. I have a choice of at least 60 places. Tea is at an Italian place on Commercial Drive (Road?), with real italian spoken as 12 people congregate at the next table. It dawns on me this is a very special part of town. Music, cafes, organic shops, beggers. To sleep.
I’m back on the blogging wagon. For now. I’ve been playing a bit over on Facebook. Keeping up with Jeffery Keefer (Who has been working on research proposals and buying a portable bike), Sean Callaghan (writing a fascinating article on story telling, I just wish the powers that be would get this) – plus a bit of fun (VOCA people), although only posts and pictures and comment (Not really interested in tossing sheep, cats or womans weekly like quizzes) (sofar, anyway).
I’ve just been too fragmented again I think. Usual story.
Moodle has taken more of an effort than I thought. Just working on a third draft of my workshop reference manual. Comments welcome. Edition III coming out sometime soon.
Then there is the professional development/reflective practice sessions with the Bangladeshi group. What is a good model for Professional Development for teachers? What works here, will it work there? Does it work here? What is “work”?
Read this (actually on management) and ask What is a good teacher?
There’s a misbegotten conceptual blunder in all this. We think we can reduce the complexity of business acumen and leadership (read teaching) to something that is actually at a much deeper level of both personal and organizational understanding. It’s not that we shouldn’t try to articulate how to improve, but to confuse that with a promise, particularly a scientifically verifiable promise, is simply naive. This is not, to my mind, terribly different than the employee, not doing his/her job, who complains: “just tell me what to do!” And if you can’t tell me, then you are a hoax. So we do the best we can to offer the expertise, and voila, we are found out. We took the bait of hubris.
We skimmed over the section that said there are no absolute answers. We skimmed over the section that said we don’t know. The answer to this MAYBE is a community. One where we talk about the real stuff that’s going on in our firms (Schools) and in ourselves. Seems like, from time to time, that might create a breakthrough. (Actually from Bob Sutton)
And: John Hattie’s book: Blog post from PPTA | The Ethical Teacher |Invisible learning A ‘sympathetic critique” (More on this later maybe)
“Evidence does not supply us with rules for action but only with hypotheses for intelligent problem solving, and for making inquiries about our ends in education.”(John Dewey).
I’ve applied for funding to go to The OpenED conference and the FLNW ’09 event.
And I’ve reconnected with SCoPE. They have done something to their e-mail there, and whoa!! suddenly I’m getting e-mails again.
We have been really busy with the Moodle trial. I have compiled my wish list of features here.
I have so many things on the go . . . Enough for 10 or more posts.
Moodle trial is coming along. People ask “Is it going OK?” and I’m often unsure how to answer. What is ‘OK?’
There is a feeling, often expressed among the participant lecturers “I’m not really doing much, just using the basics”. I came in today for the first time this term to find NO e-mails about things to do with Moodle. Except the Moodle trial meeting.
We have a show and tell this week: Lecturer to lecturer.
One little incident has interested me. Not to do with trial courses, but in two courses that did start up on the site, both using a wiki and a forum with a task.
We used the minimalist approach both times.
Wiki Minimalism. In wikis you need to understand the three wiki steps:
and “Here is where your wiki is, here are some pre-defined pages – Go for it”in other words, no big deal about pages, history, rollbacks, notify, camel case . . .
I took for granted they would use the forum for forum stuff. They didn’t. Everything went into the wiki, including Hi, how are you? Where is everybody, Hey this is cool . . .
Leigh’s Online Facilitation course on WikiEducator has started. Need to get into this as well. In another post.
I posted a little about Dan Sullivan recently. I have just been browsing his website, wondering if it had anything on it about his ‘three day’ philosophy. There must be something there somewhere, but at the moment I cannot find it. However there is this link: on a Free Day.
Imagine the following scenario. It’s Wednesday afternoon. You and your spouse are having lunch at your favorite restaurant, “catching up.” After lunch you’ll consider a movie, or just go home and read. It doesn’t matter which. Your cell phone is off, work is the farthest thing from your mind, and you’re committed to nothing more than simply relaxing. You return to the office the next morning, guilt-free and feeling rather energetic.
Most people think of Free Days as a reward for hard work. I don’t. Free Days are a necessary precondition for achieving success and optimum productivity.
This is a Free Day, a 24-hour period completely free from work-related problem-solving, communication, and action.
And this:
Free Days are a necessary precondition for achieving success and optimum productivity. On any given day, most entrepreneurs would consider themselves extraordinarily lucky (or seriously pressured) to be able to squeeze in a bit of free time, let alone a whole day. It happens only IF they can first get “a few things” done, IF there are no unexpected crises, and IF they can just clean up a few “little messes” around the office. Not surprisingly, this seldom, if ever, happens.
But if you want to improve the quality of both your work and personal life, I think it should. And often.
He has a market niche in mind for his services (Entrepreneurs) but I think his ideas apply to the rest of us as well.
Unfortunately, The Blogging challenge came one month too early for me. I had set September as my time to re-emerge into the world of blogging, internet accounts and social software after clearing my mind of this major project – the Online Workshop Toolkit (Hoped to have it sorted by the 31st August) – and then pay attention to my online life a little. But I got sick and fatigued, had a trip to ACODE in Brisbane and both were delayed a little.
The latest SCoPE discussion has been timely. Silvia Currie has done a marvelous job (like shepherding cats) of looking after a full schedule of workshops for some months now, and this little interlude has been to ask ‘Where Now?’ I’ve not really taken part, but I have been reflecting on some basics, and enjoying eavesdropping.
Some e-housekeeping:
Part of this was generated by the workshop work. What is needed to REALLY assist folk to engage with a constructivist, community oriented view of learning? What did I need to be doing? How can I also have a life?
Then I read a bit from Neil Postman’s book “Amusing Ourselves to Death”. What information did I really want to take in each day? I stopped our newspaper subscription four weeks ago. (A story I have told a bit here on the SCoPE forum) Can I survive on RSS and Stuff.co.nz? Is my network good enough to get me what I want, what I need? (The answer I think is YES, but I’ve neglected this a bit – too many blogs with more than 6 posts unread in Bloglines, and not enough time given to it . . . )
And there is more to come:
What is stuff? All those things that are left unfinished, half through through, embarked on then dropped;
Things that need fixing, replacing, maintaining, tidying, finding . . .
Projects you may or may not do. Books and papers. . . . (you get the idea)
Adapted from the 43 Folders blog:
So how does GTD work?
- identify all the stuff in your life that isn’t in the right place (close all open loops)
- get rid of the stuff that isn’t yours or you don’t need right now
- create a right place that you trust and that supports your working style and values
- put your stuff in the right place, consistently
- do your stuff in a way that honors your time, your energy, and the context of any given moment
- review projects mercilessly:
periodically re-examine your now-organized stuff from various levels of granularity to make sure your vertical focus (individual projects and their tasks) is working in concert with your horizontal focus (side to side scanning of all incoming channels for new stuff)So, basically, you make your stuff into real, actionable items or things you can just get rid of. Everything you keep has a clear reason for being in your life at any given moment—both now and well into the future. This gives you an amazing kind of confidence that a) nothing gets lost and b) you always understand what’s on or off your plate.
Several jargon terms:
Creating the ‘right place’ is one challenge. The blogs are full of comment son the system. Web based? Paper/electronic? Hipster PDA? Electronic PDA? Memory stick based?
This is much later than I intended for a Part Two. There is much more of a psychic challenge than I ever thought possible. Dave Allen has talked about this in one of the podcasts done with Merlin Mann. Someday Maybe. This basically says “Give yourself plenty of time to come to grips with this and you may need to go round a few times to really ‘get it’ “. It’s the same old question of creating radical change: there is NO easy option, whether you are loosing weight, exercising or trying to get organised.
MY INITIAL THOUGHTS: After some thought – I want a paper based system that links into electronic/online. I think I’m not really suited to a PDA. Probably web based.
It needs to be a system I can pick up when I lapse. My motto in the homework/study workshops I take is “If you lapse, don’t collapse”.
MY FINAL THOUGHTS (six weeks on) the same but not web based.
From my surfing:
I have actually made huge progress in six weeks. But more on this another time.
In case you don’t know what GTD means, it’s the term from Dave Allen’s book and stands for Getting Things Done.
There are a bunch of web sites around to support this, in fact it’s become a cottage industry. 
New job, new roles and all that, I think I need a little help at the moment.
At random . . A summary of GTD. There are scores of these.
Here are a few links I’ve visited in the last week:
Comparison with “Seven Habits” – (Rosa Say, www.sayleadershipcoaching.com/ )
www.sayleadershipcoaching.com/talkingstory/2005/06/why_gtd_reminds.html
and: successbeginstoday.org/wordpress/2005/06/the-7-habits-and-gtd/
I have benefited from the Seven Habits over the years, but have faltered a bit with GTD, and it has not taken root in my practices or thinking. What has changed has been a Dave Allen podcast with Merlin of 43folders.com.
43folders is one of the premier GTD sites (it is a little Mac oriented)
This podcast detailed two observations:
Getting Things Done: The Procrastinator’s Version Contains a great summary diagram. blogs.salon.com/0002007/2005/12/13.html
Rosa Say’s Blog has some of her personal story A really interesting read.
So to from Will Simpson: www.willsimpson.org/taxonomy/gtd/
ASIDES: HISTORY
An interesting article on Stephen Covey with comments on the Franklin Covey merger (USA Today, 2004) www.usatoday.com/money/2004-11-08-covey-usat_x.htm
ASIDES. GTD TOOLS:
A diagnostic tool for those interested in GTD. Dave Seah has an interesting approach, a little analysis tool to look at time on task, with a neat flash app to support it. Read about it:
davidseah.com/archives/2006/04/18/the-printable-ceo-iii-emergent-task-timing/
The Flash app: davidseah.com/tools/ett/alpha/
Paper Grid #1: www.lifehack.org/free-online-graph-grid-templates-pdf/
Paper implementation discussion: www.davidco.com/forum/showthread.php?t=2100