Tag: connecting

Networked Scholars Course: Week 3 Reflection

Notes from Networked Scholars course this week. My thoughts at the end…

Zeynep Tufekci‘s article, Social Media is a Conversation, Not a Press Release: How @nytkeller and @emmagkeller flunk understanding @adamslisa:

  • How should it have been written? In one word: When trying to understand social media presence, dear journalists, don’t “peruse.” Engage. Because that’s how the medium works.
  • To understand these basic points Lisa Adams made, repeatedly, over the years, you’d have to be engaging her feed, and not just reading snippets of it and projecting it onto one’s own anxieties or issues.
  • If anything, social media has helped move us to a world in which people are no longer passive, silent subjects of journalists (or academics or other gatekeepers of public discourse). We can no longer speak of people at them, without them talking back of their own experience, and articulating their own narrative in their own terms. And how to deal with that reality, not whether cancer patients should tweet that much, is the real ethical question before us.

Sherry Turkle‘s TED talk about Alone Together:

  • We want to be in spaces together, but we only want to pay attention to the bits that interest us. I definitely see this is graduate school classes. In texting, we get to edit, delete, and retouch our voice, but real relationships are awkward and messy. A little later, “I share there for I am.” The more we connect the more isolated we are because we do not cultivate solitude. We need to teach our children to be alone.

“People who make the most of their lives on the screen, come to it in a spirit of self-reflection.”

  • Develop a self-aware relationship with our devices and others: make room for solitude.

Audrey Watters‘ keynote for C-Alt conference, Ed-Tech, Frankenstein’s Monsters, and Teacher Machines: Continue reading “Networked Scholars Course: Week 3 Reflection” →

Middle School Technology Handbook

I think a lot about how 1:1 programs share information. When I first became technology coordinator, I was desperately searching for resources in how to organized and articulate the program norms and policies to parents. Thankfully, the program itself had thoughtful foundations already in place from my predecessors and colleagues, Angela Hancock and Brad Baugher, and I was able to build one what they had already written. I also got a lot from Kim Cofino and Jeff Utecht. I eventually wrote it all down in the form of the MS Tech Program Handbook, that I shared with everyone from our technology website. (I realize there is a bit of irony in calling it a “hand” book.)

This also goes along with our Responsible Use Agreement, which we show as a short, Common Craft style video that I made at the beginning of the year and then students fill out a check out form. I also sometimes review this with each grade during the year.

All of these resources have all been publicly accessible at some point, but I thought I would put them together here in case it is helpful for other 1:1 programs and coordinators. (Please reuse, remix, & attribute through twitter @pdxkali – Thanks!)