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.