Month: August 2012

Mourning Our Specialness

We’re not alone…

BBC Nature – Birds hold ‘funerals’ for dead: “Giraffes and elephants, for example, have been recorded loitering around the body of a recently deceased close relative, raising the idea that animals have a mental concept of death, and may even mourn those that have passed.”

One day we’ll realize that humans aren’t the center of our planet, just as Copernicus et al helped us realize we’re not the center of the universe.

What Am I Listening To?

I’m always shocked that people want to know what I’m listening to, but I’m pretty open about what comes across my iTunes and Spotify accounts via the @SamsHouseMusic.

Thanks to Last.FM’s Scrobbler, iTunes, Spotify and Twitterfeed, I’m able to stream whatever is playing in my house at any given time.

Even when I’m out of the house, I keep the music going. It’s always fun for me to check in the middle of the day to see what Schaefer is listening to at any given time.

He’s a big Phish fan these days, evidently.

Here We Go

I’m excited that Andy, Kevin and I will all be starting the year with the same challenge in our 7th and 8th Grade Science classes…

Beginnings | andylammers: “This year I am rolling out the Marshmallow Challenge (MMC), a design activity that Autodesk‘s Tom Wujec uses in his innovation workshops. The MMC seems to have what I am looking for: active participation, collaboration, problem solving, risk-taking, trial and error (prototypes), safe failure, and fun.”

I’m wondering if our 7th graders will show up some of the 8th graders?? 🙂

RFID in Schools

Here we go…

Papers, Please! » Blog Archive » San Antonio public schools plan to make students wear radio tracking beacons: “Unless the school board changes its mind, public school students at Jay High School and Jones Middle School in San Antonio, Texas, will be required to wear ID badges containing RFID chips (radio tracking beacons broadcasting unique ID numbers) when they come back to school next week.”

Clearly, folks need to read more.

700 Decisions in 3 Days

That’s about 10 decisions per hour if the jury worked 24 hours straight.

Given that it was probably 8 hours a day, that’s about 29 decisions per hour.

Or 1 decision ever 2 mins:

Live: Apple vs. Samsung: jury decision – The Verge: “Given the complexity of the task, a verdict back this soon is shocking. Some 700 individual decisions needed to be made for the jury to finish its job.”

Boom.

Split Open and Melt

crescit cum commercio civitas?

Arctic ice cap set for record-breaking summer melt session | Ars Technica: “While predictions of a total melt during the summer months and its potentially devastating effects on the planet have many worried (Serreze says the rapid melting may have contributed to severe storms in the US in recent years), commercial enterprises are busily jumping at the opportunity to open shop in the Northern Passage. China sent its first vessel along the Arctic route in August, trimming its usual route length by 40 percent, while Germany and Russia are already established players.”

What I Did This Summer

What did you do this summer?

It’s the question we ask of all our returning students we haven’t seen since June.

It’s been a bit of a crazy summer for me.

Well, more than a bit, really.

Our Middle School technically let out June 14. That following Monday, I boarded a plane with our new (and awesome) Communications Director, Kelly Andrews bound for Connecticut and FinalSiteU.

Finalsite is the company that has been hosting our website for the last few years and we were attending to learn more about the platform and what we could do in the way of customizations, mobile implementations, social media connections etc.

We spent the next three days outside of Hartford learning more about FinalSite’s platform, specifically what it could do for us and what it couldn’t do for us. Being a programmer (amateur, of course, but I still have a few chops) and someone who doesn’t do well being told that the trade off of flexibility is worth a lock-in, I was chaffed.

It didn’t take us long at the conference to hatch a pipe-dream plan to (completely re-)build the Carolina Day website ourselves before school started back (which it did this week for faculty) over the course of 2 months. We literally started this project with a cocktail napkin drawing and more idealism than time.

Tom Trigg, our Head Master, gave us a skeptical but supportive greenlight to see what we could do (if only more teachers in our country believed in their students the way he believes in his faculty, we could change the world overnight).

However, here we are… we’ve done it.

We’ve completely rebuilt the Carolina Day website on top of an open source and extensively flexible (and more authentic) WordPress.org hosted site, thrown in some of my SEO know-how and we now have a site that reflects the true daring, inventiveness and awesomeness of our school.

On top of that, we’ve created “Centrals” for each division and our Athletics programs on top of Google Sites (we’re a Google Apps school that treasures the collaborative features of the platform and the “Share” metaphor extends into our sinews and across the traditional divisional boundaries).

We’re really proud of these Centrals. They’re magical.

You can see them at the awesome urls of:

http://lowerschoolcentral.com
http://middleschoolcentral.com
http://upperschoolcentral.com
http://keyschoolcentral.com

These Centrals will transfrom how we communicate with parents and our community, how we do work in (and outside of) our classes with students and how we as a school continue to grow, adapt and ultimately become better because of the evolving nature of the web.

Not only that, but the Centrals bring together our school in ways not possible before. Even though we’ve seperated them out from a main site, we’ve created unique and dynamic communications and expectations of engagements across the board. So even though each division has it’s own Central, each division is participating in something awe-inspiring and ultimately jaw-dropping when you consider the scope of our learning community.

It’s been an amazing summer of growth, frustration, patience, elation, disappointment and tears (good and bad) for me. I expect nothing less from my 7th grade students, so I feel as if I’ve come out of this experience a better teacher and a better learner and a better communicator.

These are exciting times for Carolina Day.

These are exciting times for me.

Vertical Rhythm

Beautiful and helpful post…

24 ways: Compose to a Vertical Rhythm: “On the Web, vertical rhythm – the spacing and arrangement of text as the reader descends the page – is contributed to by three factors: font size, line height and margin or padding. All of these factors must calculated with care in order that the rhythm is maintained.”

via jfornear which I discovered via Dave Winer on Twitter

Breaking Down Monoliths 1990’s Style

As a dorky/geeky middle schooler in the early 90’s, I remember the frustration of not being able to have my messages flow from Prodigy to users on other services such as CompuServe. We were locked in to virtual message board monoliths…

Prodigy (online service) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: “Two of Prodigy’s most popular services turned out to be its message boards and email. Because Prodigy’s business model depended on rapidly growing advertising and online shopping revenue, email was developed primarily to aid shopping, not for general communication between users, which in practice is what it became. The message boards resulted in users being connected to the service far longer than projected. This resulted in higher than expected expenses, adversely affecting the service’s cash flow and profitability.”

Eventually, the AOL monolith was hatched in the mid-90’s and that caused a great exodus to their platform. Prodigy, CompuServe, etc limped along for a few years but ultimately faded away into the nether.

Ultimately, AOL would be replaced by Friendster then MySpace and now a tripartite conglomeration of mostly Facebook, a little Twitter and Tumblr for the niche folks. Sure, there are Google+, the new App.net, Foursquare, Yelp, as well. However, we’re back to where we were in 1993 with user lock in of messaging and communication.

I was elated when Twitter came into prominence and more mainstream adoption in 2007. I remember having coffee with Tris Hussey at an Affiliate Summit that year and discussing how Twitter would rapidly become a protocol similar to POP or IMAP or even TCP/IP that would serve as the social messaging backbone of the internet. It would allow for the delivery of content and messages between services and become something of an open messaging standard that was so lacking then and definitely is now.

We were wrong then and certainly wrong now about Twitter.

Maybe the new darling App.net will solve this issue or fill this need. I hope so. Dalton certainly has high aspirations.

Head over to TWiT and listen to the last This Week in Google featuring Dalton Caldwell in which Leo and Kevin Marks really ask some great questions about App.net’s future and long-term strategy. It’s the best podcast I’ve heard Leo do in a long while.

So back to 1992 and 2012, Dave’s post here is a pipe dream in the age of advertising being the backbone of our social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Google at least) but one I’ll happily add my support to:

We could make history — I.M.H.O. — Medium: “We need to break out of the model where all these systems are monolithic and standalone. There’s art in each individual system, but there’s a much greater art in the union of all the systems we create.”

Imagine a web where advertising supports, rather than impedes, network and social spaces working together.

Maybe that’s App.net or maybe it’s a slow realization that RSS and hyperlinks are really the best way to have a decentralized social network backbone. It’s the reason I encourage my students all to have their own blog, their own space on the web… not just a Facebook or Twitter profile (and adults too).

I’m certainly betting on that as I have re-thought of this place less as my “blog” and more of my own self-hosted social presence on the web.

Sure, things will pipe out of here to Facebook and Twitter, sending signals to folks locked into those walled-gardens that I’ve updated something or shared something. However, I’ll be posting less and less direct stuff there and instead focusing on this being my coral reef.

It will happen to us all. Eventually.

Retention, Not Acquisition

The mantra (I know, I hate using that term out of context as well) I use with my clients is “Retention, Not Acquisition.”

That means businesses should put 75% of their efforts into retaining customers or users or community or whatever the relationship-model is with their constituents and 25% of their efforts into acquiring new ones.

Twitter should hire me…

Twitter: The Tail That Wags the Dog – David Smith: “However, Twitter seems to have forgotten its roots. The long tail of Innovators and Early Adopters at the head of the adoption curve does not become irrelevant to your audience once you begin to welcome the Majorities. The same people who pioneered the adoption of your platform would also be the people leading an exodus. That exodus may have just begun.”

A Day of Outages or Why I’m Sticking with RSS

I’m becoming more and more convinced that the best way for the web to work is for us all to have our islands of identity that are linked via coral reefs and communication channels.

Today has been a heck of a day for the web.

First Twitter.

Now Charter.

Mediums that we normally associate with stability and user interest continue to disappoint and disgust.

I’ve often talked about how I want to “Bring it All Back Home,” but I’m really close to pulling that trigger and relying on tried-and-trusted RSS as the vehicle to deliver that information rather than a walled island that I have to (or will have to) log in to such as Twitter or Facebook.

RSS – Wikipedia

I don’t trust my identity and my content to 3rd party islands anymore. This is me and for me and hosted by my dollars.

So here’s to a free, open and federated web.

If you want me, I’m here. Grab the RSS.

When @Charter Goes Down, Listen to @_tatuaje_

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Sigh but still, it works…

Using Google Public DNS – Public DNS — Google Developers: “The Google Public DNS IP addresses (IPv4) are as follows:

8.8.8.8
8.8.4.4”

Twitter APIocalypse

And here we go…

Changes coming in Version 1.1 of the Twitter API | Twitter Developers: “At the end of June, I wrote about how we’re working to deliver a consistent Twitter experience, and how we would soon introduce stricter guidelines about how the Twitter API is used. I’d like to give you more information about coming changes to the API and the migration plan while offering insights into today’s Twitter ecosystem and why we’re making these changes.”

Sad to see awesome apps get called out:

That upper-right quadrant also includes, of course, “traditional” Twitter clients like Tweetbot and Echofon. Nearly eighteen months ago, we gave developers guidance that they should not build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience.” And to reiterate what I wrote in my last post, that guidance continues to apply today.

This is not your parent’s twitter.

“People are crazy and times are strange, I’m locked in tight, I’m out of range, I used to care but things have changed.”

Hope this is true…

Wow, what a day.

Sublime Kicking and Screaming

I didn’t think I could ever use another text editor besides TextMate, but I’m learning to like Sublime Text 2 and its tabbed goodness:

Sublime Text: The text editor you’ll fall in love with: “Sublime Text is a sophisticated text editor for code, markup and prose.
You’ll love the slick user interface, extraordinary features and amazing performance.”

I do everything in a text editor that I save up to a sync’d Dropbox file.

This is a big big transition for me. Time to do it, though.

Kicking and screaming.

Spotting Pyramids from NC with Google Earth

Fascinating story for the history and archaeological aspects, but also interesting to note that Maiden, NC is where Apple’s iCloud lives.

Lost Egyptian Pyramids Found? : Discovery News: “Two possible pyramid complexes might have been found in Egypt, according to a Google Earth satellite imagery survey.

Located about 90 miles apart, the sites contain unusual grouping of mounds with intriguing features and orientations, said satellite archaeology researcher Angela Micol of Maiden, N.C.”

More here.