Link to my Blog: http://betch.edublogs.org
Thank you David for setting all this up for us to use. A wonderful use of Wikis.
I'm only about halfway through the keynote address... trying to get a solid block of time to watch the whole thing has been tricky - sounds like a good excuse to get myself a video iPod ;-)
Just a bit about me... I'm an Australian teacher who is living in Canada during 2006 as part of a teaching exchange program. I am teaching communications technology and general computing stuff here in Canada, although back home on Australia I teach Multimedia and also manage the school's IT resources. I've really enjoyed getting back into the classroom a bit more this year, and have used the opportunity to do some blogging and podcasting with the kids. I've also started a few podcasting projects of my own too, just to really get to grips with the whole podcasting idea.
I'm really resonating with the stuff I've heard David say so far, especially the pizza story from the IRC experience. I've been involved in a few international collaborative web projects and it certainly does expand the way you view the world.
One things that does jump out at me is that we need to be rethinking a lot of what we mean by the word "school". Schools tend to have some very entrenched cultures at times, and we need to get a lot of these ideas about breaking down the walls of the classroom, opening up our classrooms to the outside world, and being able to bring our students into contact with a wider range of ideas and experiences. This virtual world can help do that.
Looking forward to expanding on this wiki over the coming weeks.
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I like the way David verbalised the notion of "I am here and I am now" and "You are there and you are then". The whole notion of timeshifting is an interesting one, and I like hearing it expressed like that. As someone observed (perhaps it was David - it all becomes a blur as you read more and more stuff), but someone observed that the first person to sign up for the wiki was from China. QED. :-)
I also enjoyed hearing your story about the "olden days" of your Radio Shack 3s.... that bought back some memories. Here's another story...
In 1976, when I was a school student in Grade 8, we had a wonderful science teacher that had a part-time job at night running the mainframes at a nearby university. He managed to obtain an old Fortran punchcard machine that he taught us to program with and he would take our punched cards to the university with him and run our simulations late at night (Remember how much money computer time used to cost back then?)
As a project, our whole class walked up the nearest busy traffic light near the school and we counted cars as they went through all the various possible turn options at the intersection. We took all this raw data baqck to school, punched it onto the Fortran cards to adjust the timing of the lights to make them more efficient. Each day our teacher would come back to class with reams and reams of computer printouts showing graphs of the traffic flow numbers. We would get our groups' printout, analyse it, work out ways to improve it, and then go back to the punchcard machine to revise our timings and create a new batch of cards. This process was repeated lots of times until we had a perfectly adjusted timing light sequence.
Was this part of the standard science curriculum for Grade 8 in 1976? I doubt it. But as you can see, I remember it like it was yesterday and it was one of the best experiences of my school days. The Rails vs the Side Trip again. I'll take the side trip thanks.