For the first six years of my career, I taught a middle school computer applications class. Nobody really cared what I taught. They didn’t say that, of course. But the administration knew that kids needed to learn about computers, and they didn’t really know exactly what that should look like, so they carved out some space and just let me do my thing. I never … Continue reading Information Illiterate
I’m pretty old. I was thinking about my first job interview. It was 1993. I was asked what I thought about Microsoft Windows. I told them it wasn’t a real operating system. It was just a shell that sat on top of MS-DOS. It was a resource hog, and it was unreliable. It made computers harder to use rather than easier, and it wasn’t worth … Continue reading Nostalgic Optimism
I started this blog experiment 15 years ago. I was looking for a way for my teachers to quickly and easily share information with students. They wanted web sites. We didn’t have a good way of doing web sites. WordPress seemed to fit the bill. It was easy to set up quickly without a big learning curve. The blogs looked nice, and worked on any … Continue reading Reflecting on Reflecting
When my kids were learning to talk, they would often make up words to overcome shortcomings in their vocabularies. They knew, for example, that baby dogs were called “puppies.” But since they didn’t yet know “foal,” a baby horse was called a “horse puppy.” Similarly, when my wife needed an oil change, she would go to the “car doctor.” It didn’t bother them that no … Continue reading What Do You Know?
Daryl Davis is a piano player. In 1983, he was playing country and western music in a bar in Virginia. A patron came up to him and remarked that it was the first time he had ever heard a black man play piano as well as Jerry Lee Lewis. Davis explained that Lewis had learned to play from black boogie woogie and blues piano players. … Continue reading Civil Conversations
It’s a funny thing about social media. Sometimes, it can be kind of social. That’s fantastic. It’s great for democracy. It’s a monumental shift in how information is managed. It changes the structure of power. Everyone has the means to widely disseminate ideas. Everyone has the ability to engage in the conversation. Everyone can reach a global audience. The gatekeepers are gone. No one is … Continue reading Listen: We Need a Community
On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. In 1993, Peter Steiner captured the sentiment that I was trying to convey to my students. The Internet was the great equalizer. Middle school students can be pretty judgmental. If you don’t have the right clothes, or the right hairstyle, or like the right kind of music, or have the right body type, or reject the right … Continue reading My Word
Taste of Tech 