Edlightenment » General

Authoring for any System

Mister V — Mon, 07 May 2012 18:08:07 +0000

The Set Up

My district frequently purchases digital content for online classes. The content is good – chunked information, videos (albeit usually in flash – hello future headache), and useful interactive games. The content is built for the web – essentially the content provider gives us an extremely vast website that (sorta) works like an [...]

Noam Chomsky on Researching Human Nature

Mister V — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 16:28:56 +0000

File for future thoughts (especially where you’d fit theology in this) – from Slate:

In your new book, you suggest that many components of human nature are just too complicated to be really researchable.

That’s a pretty normal phenomenon. Take, say, physics, which restricts itself to extremely simple questions. If a molecule becomes too [...]

Rumblings on Future Ideas for the District Portal

Mister V — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 15:37:05 +0000

Context: The Issue

An unexpected problem with BYOD (really!) is access to software tools. It’s all great if you have students bringing their own devices to the class, but you now need them to do something with those devices. You get a mishmash of tools spitting out different products (or, sometimes, no product because there are no [...]

Responsive Web Design

Mister V — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 15:05:52 +0000

The Context & The Problem

We’re a “bring your own device” district. What this means is that we’ve the wild west of screen sizes. Smartphones, at their best, are 800 by 600 pixels (ignore Samsung’s odd experiment). Netbooks (which we have at the middle schools) are 1024 in width with some goofy height. [...]

Which you is you to the certain who?

Mister V — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 14:07:25 +0000

Generally speaking, my online presence (that presence that produces, not necessarily consumes) falls into three categories.

Professional/Academic

These are posts, retweets, reflections that center around education and technology. In short, the realm of misterv.net.

Family

My wife and I maintain an active family blog. The blog started as a way to document our journey as [...]

A Profile on the World Changing

Mister V — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:06:12 +0000

The NYTimes is running a great piece called “How the US lost out on iPhone jobs.” It’s essentially a piece on capitalism, globalization and comparative advantage (sort of…that actually might be the most debatable part of the article…as comparative advantage usually is).

A section that stood out:

At the same time, [...]

Some quick thoughts on SOPA/PIPA

Mister V — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 01:49:47 +0000

As both a technology guy and a (former) social studies teacher, watching the SOPA/PIPA debate and struggle is fascinates me. These are bad bills. And they deserve to die – for obvious reasons.

Yet it’s the way in which Wikipedia, Google and the like are fighting this bill that intrigues me. I once [...]

Four Stages of Introducing New Technology

Mister V — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 01:38:23 +0000

Slate is running a great future-tense piece on how society reacts to new technology. Briefly, Brian Johnson qualifies this reaction into four steps:

It will kill us all! It will steal my daughter! I’ll never use it! What are you going on about?

I’m usually on step 4…although I am very suspicious that my [...]

Virtual Office

Mister V — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 18:27:41 +0000

I do work anywhere in the district. It can get busy sometimes. Here’s my virtual world (screenshot) while having 2 teachers visit at the same time.

I love it.

Student Potential

Mister V — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 13:47:48 +0000

The quote under the RSS feed reads:

The bunch of disadvantaged kids I was tutoring became too good at writing, and their essays were forcing me to confront painful existential questions, so I started trying to turn them on to crime instead.