Year: 2012

Evernote Amoeba Takes in Skitch

I’ve been a long time user of Skitch (since the early beta days… ’07 or ’08?) and a user of Evernote for just about that long.

Both have become integral parts of what I do as a teacher and with my work at Harrelson Agency.

It’s very cool and promising to see something as core to my workflow as Skitch get its proper due in the rapidly expanding Evernote ecosystem.

Evernote is Bringing Sketching App Skitch into its Core Service: “Evernote is moving to integrate its annotation and sketching product Skitch into its core note-taking product,which it says will strengthen the service by bringing syncing, searching and sharing features to it.”

I wonder when they’ll do the same with Penultimate?

Into the Wild

As a teacher, there’s something humbling about being with about 150 middle schoolers at an overnight trip with two days full of (real) rock climbing and (real) canoeing and sleeping in cabins.

You’re stripped away of the front of your classroom and your remote control and your ability to write on the board and ring a bell and have assigned seats… all conventions that keep you in power and give you comfort of knowing the plan.

Instead, you’re thrown into a canoe with a couple of students and have to figure out how best to get unstuck from a rock or not hit a pylon with a roaring current and rapids. The stakes aren’t about arbitrary A’s and B’s but real physical impact and safety.

Learning takes on a whole new level when you realize that your guidance to/from students and your teamwork with a group of 12 or 13 year olds can literally change your life in a second for good or bad as you are suspended from a rope 50 feet above a cliff.

I sometimes wonder if Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Pythagorus, Epicurus, Lucretius, Pyrrho etc had it right with their model of education in small groups with no classroom walls or school buildings compared to our four walled system of “instruction.”

Not to live, but to live well…

Why Apple Really Ditched Google Maps in iOS 6

Google Earth is the single most important property for Google’s position as market and thought leader of search and discovery. That’s always been the case since they purchased Keyhole Tech in 2005.

Apple knows this as well and that’s why they are going on their own in iOS 6 with a mapping technology that’s in house.

Mapping (discovery) is the new search:

How Google and Apple’s digital mapping is mapping us | Technology | The Guardian: “There is a sense, in fact, in which mapping is the essence of what Google does. The company likes to talk about services such as Maps and Earth as if they were providing them for fun – a neat, free extra as a reward for using their primary offering, the search box. But a search engine, in some sense, is an attempt to map the world of information – and when you can combine that conceptual world with the geographical one, the commercial opportunities suddenly explode. Search results for restaurants or doctors or taxi firms mean far more, and present far juicier opportunities for advertisers, when they are geographically relevant. And then there’s the most important point – the really exciting or troubling one, depending on your perspective. In a world of GPS-enabled smartphones, you’re not just consulting Google or Apple data stores when you consult a map: you’re adding to them.”

Mapping/Discovery will be the verb akin to “searching” of the next five years.

We’ll have “Discovery Optimizers” just as we have search engine optimization and “But are we appearing at the top of people’s discoveries?” questions as we have “Are we on the front page of Google?” now.

Discovery motors will quietly, but quickly, replace search engines.

It’s about time (and place).

Connecting with Students

The post is for principals, but applies just as well to teachers:

6 Ways Principals Can Connect With Students: Be open to showing kids how much you care about them. Be their advocate. Care about them. Say kind and authentic things about them. Embody to them how you would like them to treat all of those in their lives.

Needless to say, I don’t agree with the whole “Don’t let them see you smile until December” garbage.

American Democracy and Athenian Democracy

From a 2007 paper by Josiah Ober at Stanford titled “What the Ancient Greeks Can Tell Us About Democracy” (PDF)…

She explains the Assembly’s annual decision of whether to hold an ostracism, and the occasional (only 15 recorded instances) of actual ostracisms, as a repeated ritual through which the mass of ordinary Athenian citizens reminded Athenian elites of the power of the people to intervene in inter-elite conflicts if and when those conflicts threatened the stability of the polis. Forsdyke argues that the Athenian revolution itself, and thus the origin of democracy, is best understood as a mass intervention in what was formerly a exclusively elite field of political competition – and that the signal success of Athenian democracy was in the regime stabilization that emerged with the credible threat of mass intervention.

Recalls and impeachments don’t do the job of intervening (like ostracisms) in what has become a very exclusive process of government in the USA.

Social Media’s Importance For Business

Forbes:​

The perception of social media marketing has shifted quickly—no longer viewed as a trendy or passing fad, having a flexible and well-managed presence in each of the “big three” (Facebook, Twitter, and Google+) has become a must for any business seeking to secure a place in both the traditional and digital marketplace.

We’ve quickly entered a brave new world where social media matters infinitely more than most businesses guessed it would a few years ago.​

Don’t get caught left behind.​

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?? 🙂

New Biz Cards

Awesome thick (like hard card stock with red in between) business cards from the always awesome Moo shop for The Harrelson Agency…

You have to love that Apple-like design aesthetic of their entire presentation.​

These cards are amazing. You should ask for one soon.​

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.