Technology

My Own Personal FailBlog

/ jwsepke / 3 Comments

I’m a fan of failblog and the rest of the cheezburger network.  Sometimes funny pictures of cats really can make your day better.  However, I’m not referring to this failblog, but to this post as being my confession of failing at my blog.

If you read the previous post, you may notice that I last posted on 6/10/10, just four days short of a FULL YEAR AGO.   Really?   I haven’t had anything to say for a FULL YEAR?   For any of you who know me, you know that this is not remotely possible.   Not at all.

What happened a year ago?  I went on a few trips and I got a promotion that added a new department to my area of responsibility.  And I fell off the blog wagon.  About three months after that, I fell off the balance wagon.  I stopped working out consistently.  I stopped being careful about what I ate.  I stopped cooking.  I stopped spreading housework through the week and ended up doing it on weekends.  I stopped stopping at a reasonable time at night, checking email and working into the evening and night.  I stopped staying connected to my personal learning network on Twitter.   You can’t write a “tech life balance” blog if you’re really lacking in tech life balance, now can you? (Note: this post came from a previous blog entitled “tech life balance.)

So, here’s my failblog confession.   I failed to blog and I failed at the purpose of the blog.  I forgive me.

In the words of Thomas Edison,  “I haven’t failed, I’ve found 10,000 ways that don’t work.”   Maybe I haven’t found 10,000 ways that don’t work, but I have found a number of things that don’t make me feel like I’m as happy and balanced as I want to be.

Now, I’ve come back to this blog and to taking time to consider the questions that I designed this blog.

I just hope I can stay on the wagon this time.

Hang up and…

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Once, in college, I was given a tiara.  I was given the title “Queen of Multitasking.”  It was a very small ceremony and the tiara was made of carbon atoms from my Organic Chem molecule building kit.  So, know before you read the rest of this that I have been known to multitask.  Often.  I once gave a full AP Computer Science tutorial while working out at the school gym on an elliptical machine.  I kid you not.

That said, I really want people to hang up.  You do not need to be using a cell phone at all times.

I saw a guy biking down a fairly busy street the other day.  He was texting.  With both hands.  He clearly has better balance than I do, but this just seems unwise.

A few weeks ago, I waited several minutes to get cheddar slices at Target.  Why? Because the woman standing in front of the cheese was on the phone oblivious to the polite attempts of others to reach the cheese. This trend continued in the cleaning products and in produce.  If you want to shop with a friend, bring her with you.  Or better yet, go have coffee and leave the grocery store to those of us who can fill our carts and be out in less than 20 minutes.

Other places that your shouldn’t be on the phone:

Fitting Rooms:  Being trapped in a cubicle with fluorescent lighting and then having to listen to you talk about your hernia is adding insult to injury.

The bathroom: Seriously.  No one wants to talk to you while you do your business.  No one.

In Line:  Any line at all.  I do not want to listen to the details of your argument with your friend, husband, wife, neighbor, co-worker, boss, cat, dog or potted plant.

Stores:  While shopping, phone calls should be limited to one of the three following calls:

  1. “Honey, was I supposed to get apple juice and oranges or orange juice and apples?”  “Okay. Thanks. Bye”
  2. “Can I call you back in 15 minutes?”  “Okay. Thanks. Bye.”
  3. “You have a wrong number.” “Okay. Thanks. Bye.”

Restaurants: Just eat.  You talk with your mouth full when you’re on the phone.  You think you don’t, but you do.

Bonus rudeness points to anyone talking on a speaker phone in public.

And to quote my husband, “If I have to think, ‘hang up and walk,’ you’re doing something wrong.”

So, what does my rant have to do with tech/life balance?  Tech isn’t life.  Needing to be connected all the time isn’t balance.  Simple daily tasks can just happen.  Save your multitasking for when you’re not disturbing others.

Hang up and…

Note: This post was originally part of my previous blog entitle “Tech Life Balance.”

Virtual education – the time and place for simulations and animations

/ jwsepke / 2 Comments

At NCAIS Innovate this year NCAIS unveiled their Virtual School.  The backchannel chat on twitter raised a lot of questions and one that I found most interesting was what is the role of the virtual, mainly simulations and animations, in education.

For those who might be new to this blog, my first love was science.  I majored in biology and minored in chemistry at WFU.  While in high school at NCSSM, I completed two independent research projects during my senior year.  The lab was a big part of my life for many years.  I love the smell. I love the tools (cryostat, centrifuge, pipets, electrophoresis just to name a few favorites).  I love the way that the lab makes science real.  You can see things and prove things to yourself.  You can connect to the universe and its secrets.

In becoming a chemistry teacher, I’ve found labs can be a simultaneous blessing and curse.  Labs are essential to teach science.  Students need to get their hands dirty and see the science work.  They need to learn how to collect and analyze data.  Unfortunately, labs are time consuming.  Sometimes they fail and confuse students rather than clarify concepts.  It is difficult to get students to understand that results are results, not right or wrong.  They might be expected or unexpected and their might be a source of error that has skewed them, but they are what they are.

In a world of virtual education one can’t necessarily do labs.  Students working at home don’t necessarily have the resources to dissect a frog, perform an acid-base titration, or measure the frequencies of sounds.  So, where is the happy medium for the virtual in science?

I think that it is in supplements and in visualizations.   Below are a two examples that I feel represent the best of the use of the virtual in science education.

Titration Simulation – http://www.chem.iastate.edu/group/Greenbowe/sections/projectfolder/flashfiles/stoichiometry/acid_base.html

I used this simulation as a follow up to the hands-on titration lab my students did.  Titration is tricky, because it is so easy to overshoot the equivalence point and miss your chance to record the correct data.  Several groups struggled with this aspect of the experiment.  On the next day, we needed to demonstrate how to complete the calculations that go along with titration.  Using this simulation let us review how the experiment works and then complete the calculations.  For homework students used it again to try an experiment on their own and turned in their assignment by sending me a screenshot of their completed “experiment” and correct answer.   One of the best things about this simulation is that it provides a lot of choices to the students with regard to which acids, bases, and indicators they use.  It also lets them complete the calculations and check their answer.  The only thing that this simulation lacks is a review of how to do the calculations themselves if your initial answer is wrong.

Buffer Animation – http://www.mhhe.com/physsci/chemistry/essentialchemistry/flash/buffer12.swf

One of the challenges of teaching chemistry is that students need to visualize things that are happening on the atomic level.  This particular animation was very helpful in helping my students understand how buffers function.  You can explain and draw the chemicals and their atoms on the board all day, but seeing the motion of this animation made a huge difference for my students.

As the NCAIS Virtual School and others like it develop, I’m sure much more will be learned about how students can use the virtual to understand scientific concepts.  In the meantime, I’ll be looking for more examples like these that can be used for preview, reinforcement and practice.

Goodbye, August. Hello, October.

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I’m not sure where September went this year.  I just know it went quickly and the balance train ran me over.  But, in the last few days, I feel that things are returning to “normal.”  In other words, August is over and it is actually October now.  As you read in my last post, August is a hectic time for school folks. August doesn’t end with the calendar saying September 1.  August ends when the rush of back to school changes to the steady pace of the school year.

So, what have I learned from this year’s extended August?  Two new email techniques have been added to my arsenal: categories and deferring.

Outlook 2007 has categories that can be used for calendar items or emails. I’ve never really used them for anything other than contacts and then it was just for tagging people to whom I send holiday cards.  Next, I started using them to tag tasks.  A red square (Category WF for “waiting for…” ) beside a task means that I can’t move forward on this particular task until someone gets me something that I’ve asked for.  The waiting for list is another of the techniques from David Allen’s Getting Things Done.  Yes, I’m sure you’re spotting a theme in this blog.  It’s all about the GTD.  Anyway, there are several main topics of email that arrive on most days right now.  One is questions from staff members about the new databases we implemented this summer.  Another is items to be added to our new website or questions about its ongoing development.  A third is questions from parents or students about accessing the web or the database.  After those, there’s everything else.  As the amount of incoming email became more than I could clear in a day, I started using categories: “Parent/Student Question,” “Database” and “Web” joined the “WF” category.  By coding messages, I was able to deal with them in batches, ignoring the category that I wasn’t working with at the time and not re-touching the message over and over.  This has proven to be an incredibly helpful technique and has kept important questions and requests from slipping off my radar in the sea of incoming items.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always had that little stack of messages at the bottom of my email inbox that I just wasn’t ready to answer yet.  Not because they were in the “WF” category, but because I needed to think about them or decide what my weekend plan was.  Each time I scanned through my inbox, these messages sat at the bottom, mocking me for my inability to clear that box.  Then I discovered the “Defer” button on the ClearContext toolbar.  Click the bottom, set a time, and the message disappears until that time.  Know that you can’t reply to that dinner invitation until after you see next week’s schedule?  Defer.  Not ready to decide whether you want to take advantage of the most recent offer from a vendor? Defer.  Simple. Elegant. Useful.

Now, Fall Break has arrived and I’m breathing a sigh of relief.  My inbox isn’t empty, but it only has a 10 items in it and I can relax for a few days.  Things have been crazy and busy, and at times a little overwhelming, but I have two new techniques to manage the flow of information.  This can only make it easier to find a little tech/life balance.  Happy Fall Break!

Inbox Zero

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It has taken a few hours, but as of this moment, I am at Inbox Zero!

I am a strong advocate of keeping my Inbox small, but this week, in the insanity of the pre-back-to-school frenzy, things had gotten a little out of hand.  This morning, I have answered about 60 messages and added about 25 to-do items to my Tasks in Outlook.   Needless to say, I have a busy few days ahead of me, but at least now I have a consolidated list of what needs to happen.

If you are interested in some of how I make GTD work electronically, please read my previous post on that topic.

What does reaching Inbox Zero mean for me?  Basically, it means that I have mostly climbed out of a hole in which about 80 different things were crowding my mind.  I need to buy a birthday gift for my husband.  My boss needs a document prepped.  The agenda for the meeting needs to be online.  Can we do dinner on Thursday?  Each of these individual items is small, but the overall effect is a maelstrom of mental energy being sucked into an endless loop of gotta’s.  Gotta send that message.  Gotta return that call.  Gotta order that book.  This kind of thing can really knock your tech life balance out of whack (Note: This post is part of a previous blog entitled “Tech Life Balance.”).  Inbox Zero mean that I’ve started the approach back to centered.

The next week is full of excitement and constant motion.  We launch the new web page.  We train the faculty on the new system.  We discuss books, policies, and teaching ideas.  I’ll have a lot to do and even with GTD, a mind like water, and a great support network, I’ll feel like I need to bend the laws of physics to get it done.  I’ll be challenged to keep the tech life balance this week.  Soon I’ll dive in to tackling those to do’s.  But right now, I gotta stop for lunch.