A Day in the Life of the Internet

Created by Online Education

Summer 2009

I can’t believe that it’s all come to an end. I got to North America about 6 weeks ago with stops in New York, New Jersey and Anaheim before heading to Ottawa. PSU and Disneyland in Anaheim seem like a long time ago.

I head to Nagoya tomorrow. I haven’t done a 13 hours flight since I went to India the first time. I have lots of reading material, Gravol and my ipod!

Thunk … back to Earth

So I haven’t even finished processing my pilgrimage but I’ve been snagged back to earth at the Tel Aviv airport, at entry security (not gate security). I had every item examined. At one point, I was worried that my back up hard drive would be confiscated and/or my laptop power cord. I’m happy to report that my concern was unwarranted and all items were returned to me. It only took 1.5 hours for the process and the security lady escorted me to passport control so I didn’t have to go through security a second time. All the security people that I encountered were very nice and friendly. Security is taken very seriously here.

Short Trip to London

I can’t believe that it’s been over a month since my visit to London. I finally downloaded my pictures to my hard drive today. Since my hard drive crashed, it’s taken me a while to get things back in order. I’m much better at backing up now that I have a 1 TB back up hard drive. Hopefully that avoids the catastrophe that I encountered when I killed my hard drive at the end of January.

Pictures of visit to London

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

12►

Paris Tours continue…

I can’t believe that my time here is up already. Yesterday, I went to the Louvre, the Eiffel tower, Saint Chappelle, l’Arc de Triomphe, Champs Elysées. I started off at the Louvre. It is immense but I only spent a couple of hours. I figured out some time ago that my limit in any one museum is about 3 hours. From the Louvre, I walked along the Seine to Pont Neuf and had lunch on the left bank. Then I went to St. Chapelle. It was not sunny so I missed the light show but the architecture and stained glass windows are beautiful. I took the metro to Notre Dame and spent some time walking around the cathedral, studying the portals. I meant to go to Place Concorde next but I got on the wrong train and went to the Eiffel tower instead. It’s an imposing structure up close. I thought of taking the elevator up but I don’t like heights so I stayed on solid ground and enjoyed the view around the Eiffel tower. I never imagined what the area around it looks like. It’s a green space with little ponds, ducks, flowers, trees. I stopped to watch some ducks and to admire the flowers blooming in winter. For some reason, I get extra pleasure from seeing flowers blooming outdoors in the winter.

The next stop was Arc de Triomphe. I started walking but gave up at I’Aena metro stop and took the metro to FDR. I watched the Arc de Triomphe from across the street.  My feet hurt and I didn’t feel the need to see the grave of the unknown soldier so I returned to the metro and went to my hotel.

It gets dark here in the winter. I got to the hotel at 6 p.m. and it was already dark outside. I spent some time responding to emails, watched tv, and went to bed. I planned to wake up early today to go to Versailles but …

I didn’t wake up til almost 9 this morning. I first went shopping on Rue Haussmann. Wow! The window displays at Galleries Laffayette and Printemps are extraordinary. Many of them depicting scenes created from puppets on strings. I’ve never seen such elaborate window displays in my life. I stopped to look at each of them. They’re like little masterpiece creations.

From Haussmann, I went to Montmartre and walked up to Sacre Coeur. The climp up definitely woke me up. I had a crepe for lunch afterward and headed to Rue de Rivoli. I was on line 12 of the metro which went to Place Concorde so I decided to stop there and walk down Rue de Rivoli. I’m happy that I made the visit. Place Concorde is grand, in true Parisien style. There are two fountains, a ferris wheel, and several statues. I think that it’s magnificient.

I bought a few items on Rue de Rivoli before heading to Luxembourg to meet a friend. I hadn’t seen this friend in 3.5 years, since I left India. She’s visiting Geneva and Paris from Mongolia. We walked along St. Michel and had dinner together. While having dinner, I saw a man with a Macbook and asked him where the Mac store is because I’d been having trouble finding it. He showed me the location on the map. My friend and I rode to Chatelet les Halles together. She continued on her way while I walked to rue Bernard. I got to the store in time to see it being closed. Aaargh.

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

123►

Another busy and pleasant day in  Paris.

Professional Relationships

I read many professional blogs, particular in the field of edtech. I participate in several listservs as well. I am often awed by the achievements of my colleagues. I tend to think that what I do is just routine. It must have to do with my general just do it attitude. I had a meeting today that had me thinking.

I had a meeting with a colleague today that reminded me of something that I often tell my students. I tell my students that each of them has something to contribute. I tell them that they should not take their skills and abilities for granted, and should use them to help others. I seem to have forgotten that lesson myself however.

I know that I do many things well. I know that not everyone thinks like me. I know that I am resourceful. Yet I put all these pieces together and get less than the sum of the individual parts. I need to change that. Action plan 1: Take a more active role in participating in listservs. Action plan 2: spend some time organizing resources and thoughts to be better able to share them with colleagues.

About Me

Name: Damianne Rowena President

Profession: Technology Coordinator

Current Location: Nagoya, Japan

First weeks of school

School started on August 12. It’s been a couple of weeks of school now. My classes are developing nicely. We’re all involved in getting ready for our accreditation visit.

Last night was back to school night, where parents came to visit their children’s teachers and classes. Yesterday was a long day and I’m happy that it’s the weekend.

Martin Minsky

I’m still trying to wrap my head around a meeting that we had with Martin Minsky during the Constructing Modern Knowledge Conference. We met him at the offices of the One Lapton per Child initiative. Since there was just a small group of us meeting with him, the discussion was fairly informal and was structured as a question and answer with conference participants questioning Martin Minsky about his beliefs and experiences.

I had never heard of Martin Minsky but got carried along with the enthusiasm of the the rest of the participants. The discussion was interesting and got me thinking; it helped me affirm my views of education. I won’t write what I personally thought of Martin Minsky from that one meeting but will highlight some of his comments below.

Martin Minsky’s Comments:

• “Teach children science, and let the learn history”
• Pleasure is over-rated. What should motivate us is the quest for understanding/knowledge for the ability to invent/create.
• Religion is blind faith and Roman Catholicism stunted the growth of science for many years.
• Instead of creating horizontally, we should create vertically. This lead to a discussion of his disgust for athletes as there is nothing that we can learn from them about how the brain works, and about the process of creation/invention.
• Painters and other artists don’t have a vision but rather sees how many principles they can incorporate into their creation for some end result.
• Engineering and science are most praiseworthy because of the process that results in a product or invention.
• Children have individual abilities and potentials. It may be possible for all children to learn Math etc.
• Running cars on water, or from corn, is impractical, inefficient
• Fugues are the only music worth playing because there is more creativity and innovation than repetition.
• Pop music and jazz are a waste of time as they incorporate too much repetition.
• The current state of research in North America is despicable. t is difficult for people to get long term research money. People used to spend 20 or more years doing a Phd to actually invent/discover something; now they do one in much less time, of much less depth.

Notes from Scratch@MIT08

Applications in Scratch

• Car race games that uses random numbers to move the cars, and calculates the speed of the car
• Virtual genie to learn about random nature of flipping a coin.
• Drawing tesselations/fractals, using the integration of rich media such as images and music
• Create you own adventure stories
• create a scratch club
• Get students to create games/activities that can be used to teach content in lower grades, e.g. geography games for teaching elementary students about the states
• Get students to create working scratch cards in Scratch that highlight one idea and add the scratch cards to a gallery, using tags to aid in searching
• Get students to plan/storyboard before creating a scratch project

Points of discussion

• Show the resources available online, scratch cards and help/examples in Scratch to students so that they can make use of the resources.
• Can integrate to other applications for example, students can create sound in Audacity or Garageband.
• Get students in technology classes to create content based projects and show teachers the presentations created so that they can get ideas of how to integrate the technology, i.e. Scratch, into their curriculum.

Points brought up for discussion/consideration

• How can we teach Scratch?
• How can we use Scratch to teach something?
• How can we learn something using Scratch?
• How can we engage students in Scratch so that they will use it in to build understanding and in the process of learning.

To check out

• http://www.glsconference.org/2008/index.html
• http://www.gameslearningsociety.org/
• http://www.brainygamer.com/the_brainy_gamer/2008/07/gls—beyond-ga.html
• http://www.academiccolab.org/home