Shelly Blake Plock Live!!!!!

An interesting interview....let me know what you think!!!!!!!!

Keep this Train a rolling.....

It has been a bit difficult for me the last few days and I found myself beginning to wallow in some self pity. I have no job, I an officially unemployed, and I have been afraid of the idea that this bump in Obama's road may just not go away very quickly. I am over that.....and to celebrate that for now here is a song by Lisa Lim and Over the Limit..... Just Keep this Train A rollin

It is class warfare---check the details

http://www.onlineschools.org/blog/rags-to-rags/

A tribute to Paddy...

My partner Paddy is answering the Call of the Wild in a few days. He has not contributed to the Blog for some time now and I miss him here. I just wanted him to know that he is remembered and will be missed this summer. And to hope he finds a way to send us a post or two....

A song from Flogging Molly's new album in his honor...



The WOP

Flogging Molly - Revolution

Lisa Lim a blues player of note....

Lisa Lim and her band, Over the Limit play some really good music. I am trying some new embed techniques. Enjoy!

A Cross Post with 6AM Thoughts

This is the opening paragraph of an article, The Instructional Power of Digital Games, Social Networking, Simulations and How Teachers Can Leverage Them, I discovered from a Tweet this morning. I have been an advocate of simulation gaming for 30 years and am particularly happy to see work like this being done. I hope you will take the time to read the entire article which I have included the link for. The article was written by Eric Klopfer, Scot Osterweil, Jennifer Groff, and Jason Haas from MIT.

What is good learning? That may be a subjective question. But it’s likely that many educators would give answers that fall in the same ballpark…
…students collaborating and discussing ideas, possible solutions…
…project-based learning, designed around real world contexts…
…connecting with other students around the world, on topics of study…
…immersing students in a learning experience that allows them to grapple with a problem,
gaining higher-order thinking skills from pursuing the solution…

To many educators, these notions are music to their ears. Would it seem terribly strange then to hear that students indeed are doing these things regularly outside of their classrooms? While Timmy or Susie may not be running home from school saying, “What fun, deeply-engaging learning experience can we do today?”, they are engagingwith new technologies that provide them with the same opportunities. Every day, many students are spending countless hours immersed in popular technologies—such as Facebook or MySpace, World of Warcraft,or Sim City—which at first glance may seem like a waste of time, and brain cells. But these genres of technologies—Social Networking, Digital Gaming, and Simulations—deserve a second, deeper, look at what’s actually going on.

~~
The Instructional Power of Digital Games, Social Networking, Simulations and How Teachers Can Leverage Them

Do Not Tilt Your Head.......

Cross posted from 6AM Thoughts.

I regularly read a blog called TeachPaperless. Yesterday, there was a post in Teachpaperless entitled "I Don't Want More Professional Development. It began:

We don't need more "professional" development. We need social development. Or at least we need to recognize it and recognize that the ultimate outcomes we often desire from the best of professional development are actually an outcome of social development. We need a development of human capacity, not an adherence to the rules of our established profession. We need to build our relationships for the purpose of furthering our humanity, not furthering our careers

Reading that entry caused me to write a comment on Teachpaperless which I have revised into the blog entry below. Enjoy.

I am not sure how many of the readers here have ever been on Second Life. If you have, you may have noticed what your avatar does when you log off...the avatars body goes limp and their head dips to the right and their chin rests on their shoulder.

Well so many teachers seem to be in a Teacher Second Life while reading this blog. When we leave here and go to school our personas do exactly what a second life avatar does---we go limp and turn our heads away from the reality around us.

And the reason we do it, we are afraid of losing our jobs. And it is a founded fear. If you do not go to sleep and say the same things in faculty meetings, professional development or training sessions, in the faculty room, in meetings with principal, or out on the playground or in the lunch room, that you espouse here, you very well may get fired. School is about control. This blog is about liberation! We all talk liberation but are we willing to walk liberation?

Every revolution has it casualties. If you really want a revolution it may be you. It has been me.

An Open Educator Manifesto

This is a reprint from David Truss's Connected Principals Blog.

[Version I: Just the Manifesto]

My Open Educator Manifesto
‘We’ educate future citizens of the world
Teaching is my professional practice
I Share by default
I am Open, Transparent, Collaborative, and Social
My students own their own: (Learning)
• learning process
• learning environment
• learning products
• learning assessment
My students belong to learning networks
Every student deserves customized learning
• Student voice
• Student choice
Every educator deserves customized learning
I have high expectations
I Care, Share, and Dare
I am a role model
I am the change I want to see in Education!

a test for a student................

How do I affect this........

The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late. -Joseph Stiglitz Vanity Fair

If only life was this calcuable........

Games-Can they be good for us?

I am a gamer. Playing games is an intregal part of who I am. Playing games is a good thing. I can remember sitting on Paul Filbert's front porch in the summer time and playing Avalon Hill war games or Rummy Royale. I can remember playing chess in Hankie Pauley's kitchen on Friday nights with the glorius wooden chess he brought back from his trip to Mexico. I can remember the giant Risk tournaments we played over entire weekends. Joey Chachulski usually won them. I can remember designing lionel railroad empires in Jeffery Pyzinski's basement or creating rockets out empty CO2 cartridges and launching them filled with matchheads for solid fuel and soldered on sheet metal wings for guidance. Kermit Avenue had the best young Diplomacy players in Buffalo, New York I am sure! Our imaginations raced with new ideas and expanding horizons all of the time. We were not stressed, we did not feel depressed at all. We empowered ourselves.

Games are good for us. They empower us. A recent book by Dr. Jane McGonagal, Reality is Broken , has opened my mind to all types of new ideas, particularly the new science of happiness and the concepts of flow and fiero. Games produce flow and fiero. It makes for great reading and spurs ideas.

Couple Reality is Broken with Johann Huzinga's brilliant Homo Ludens and you will gain new insight into human nature.

Video games also may help us to cope with the crazy world that speeds up every day and infuses us with great anxiety and depression. A research study from the East Carolina University cited the following statistics about human beings in this world we live in from the National Institute of Mental Health:

According to the National Institute of Mental Health in the United States an estimated 20.9 million American adults (9.5% of the U.S. population age 18 or older) suffers from a mood disorder, and more than two thirds of those (14.8 million U.S. adults) are cases of major depression. Depression is the leading cause of disability in the U.S. for people aged 15 to 44. Depressive disorders often co-occur with anxiety disorders, and approximately 40 million American adults (about 18 percent of all U.S. adults) have an anxiety disorder.

The study then when on to explore what effect playing video games has on subjects such as those refereneced above. Playing games like Bejeweled, Bookworm, and Peegle from Popcap games significantly reduced depression, stress and anxiety levels in the study groups. All of these games are free by the way and blocked by most school web

filters. I play all of these games and am particularly drawn to them after particularly stressful days at work or when I am feeling overwhelmed by my task and to-do lists. The results of the study are quite startling and deserve to be studied and applied in our schools.Video Games Can Reduce Depression And Anxiety - Study
should be read by every teacher in America.

O Say Can You Drink

I always knew that the tune of the Star Spangled Banner was a remix from an old english tavern song but I have never heard it before until a friend sent me this...

Back to My Roots

Just harking back to the Lake and summer days spent at "Nick and Gert's".

American Uprising-A Review

Following is a review of Dan Rasmussen's American Uprising The review was written by Dr. Robert Shurmer and appeared in Googreads. Rasmussen is a former student of mine, and Dr. Shurmer is a former colleague.

Acclaimed historian of colonial America, Jack P. Green, has called the South “a negative example of what America had to overcome before it could finally realize its true self.” For two centuries, the struggle to 'integrate' the South into a more 'progressive' and 'mainstream' American narrative has flummoxed scholars, politicians, and cultural theorists of all shades. The South still tends to confound those who are not a part of it. Dan Rasmussen’s new book American Uprising perhaps adds another strut to Greene’s argument by providing a glimpse into the complex, and problematic, relationships among slaves, landholders, merchants, politicians, soldiers, privateers, and rogues of every shade and political allegiance in the steamy swamplands of Louisiana during the early years of the American Republic. The story Dan tells is ostensibly about a little-known, but substantial slave revolt in 1811 that occurred on the Andry Plantation located on Louisiana's German Coast forty miles north of New Orleans. The insurrection that marched on New Orleans that year may have included up to five hundred slaves (actual numbers are disputed), but broke up fifteen miles from the city when it came up against a smaller, but better armed, force of planter militia. While the enduring impact of this particular uprising remains debatable, Rasmussen’s narrative provides the fodder for a much deeper story about the ‘Americanization’ of the Deep South.

Rasmussen possesses a knack for conjuring up the sights, sounds, colors, and flavors of early 19th-century New Orleans and placing his readers at the side of his protagonists, both planter and slave. The slave experience takes center stage here as Rasmussen attempts to piece together the world inhabited by the West Africans Kook and Quamana, the primary organizers of the uprising. From their arrival in the port of New Orleans in 1806 with some 1500 other slaves to their executions following the failed uprising, Kook and Quamana are contextualized into the history of the region. Dan displays real skill and art in making sense of a complex story. While the actions of Kook and Quamana and the slave perspective generally remain central to the story -- the rich broth that is essential to any good gumbo to use an apt analogy -- Rasmussen transcends the narrative event of 1811 by analyzing the big picture as much as the actions of a few men.

Indeed, Dan is at his best when his focus widens and he places the events surrounding the Andry Plantation in the wider context of American-Caribbean history. He writes convincingly of a new nation flexing its muscle for the first time, eschewing established channels of European diplomacy, and successfully flaunting international law, using God’s law instead to justify its self-serving actions in Florida and Louisiana. One example is Fulwar Skipwith’s cunning and illegal seizure of Baton Rouge and the killing of the Spanish garrison, an action that cleared the path for the United States to assume control, by presidential proclamation, of West Florida. Rasmussen is supremely aware of the multiplicity of historical ingredients in his narrative of the 1811 uprising. He writes of French, Spanish, Haitian, Creek, Miccosukee, Akan, and Asante -- all bound in complex economic interdependency, all rubbing shoulders with the newly dubbed Americans in the cosmopolitan port of New Orleans, all providing meaty chunks to the spicy broth carefully laid down with the stories of Kook, Quamana, and Andry.






Rasmussen ultimately raises the thorny question of what is ‘authentic history’ when he attempts to make something of the fact that no one has made much of the slave revolt on the Andy Plantation. "Why," asks Rasmussen, "has no one ever bothered to tell the story of the enslaved men who lost their lives fighting for their own freedom?" A pertinent question, though not entirely accurate (Howard Zinn is notably absent in Rasmussen's bibliography). In his discussion of the limited historiography on the 1811 uprising, Rasmussen uses some emotionally-packed words to malign (rightly so) not only prior scholarship, but to cast aspersions upon the 'uglier' side of the American story, that problematic part of our narrative that, pace Green, we had to overcome in order to realize our true self: Communist, Marxist, academia, White, Jewish, Nazi, racist, rebel and Confederate are all dredged up here. Such words, however, serve various masters in the broader narrative of America and form a political minefield that often inhibits serious historical dialogue.

"The South proxies for a variety of national pathologies," insists Thomas Schaller, professor of political science and author of Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South (Simon Schuster, 2008), and Southern history and modern politics rarely disengage easily. Dan Rasmussen deftly weaves a tale of something that is not so much the historical ‘winning’ of the Deep South as it is the absorption of it into the debate about who we are as a nation. "This is a story about American expansion and the foundations of American authority," states Rasmussen, as he rightly challenges us to "reckon with the politics of the enslaved." However, it appears uncertain at best that, as Rasmussen asserts, a cover up of the Andry uprising has been perpetuated for two centuries by bigoted, white, Southern elites for political ends, or that racist historians "conflated the idea of law with the idea of white supremacy." It is perhaps convenient to use the event to help exorcise those uncomfortable demons in the American psyche, but we would do well to avoid mixing contemporary polemics with history (if such a thing is possible). There persists an enduring perception in this country that the South is defined more by culture than geography, that Alabama or Louisiana (both voted for McCain in 2008), for example, are somehow more southern than Virginia (voted for O'Bama), that what is southern will forever be tied to its lard and greens cookery, to an attachment to evangelical religion, to an anti-scientific outlook, to militant and xenophobic patriotism, and ultimately to the 'peculiar institution' of slavery. As a nation, we are still trying to come to terms collectively with the issues of slavery, race, and immigration and what it ultimately means to be an American. Rasmussen gets it right: The events surrounding Andry Plantation in 1811 constitute something more than merely a Southern story, they make up rather an American one.

In the end, Dan tells a darn good story and is especially deft at showing the complex interplay of ethnicity, economics and politics in the Deep South in the early 19th century. Rasmussen succeeds in making his reader think twice about received traditions and historical identity, the mark of a good book and good historian indeed. Jacob Levenson of Columbia University has observed that for many Americans outside the region, the South will remain forever frozen in time as scenes from Birmingham and Selma are constantly re-hashed on PBS. Northerners, Levenson believes, seem "to treasure those black-and-white memories because they serve as symbols for what we'd like to think we're not." Rasmussen's new book adds to the debate about what we are. By bringing men such as Kook and Quamana to the forefront of his narrative, Dan ultimately reinforces the motto E pulribus unum!

McGonigal on Gaming Again

An hour talk that is worth listening to

Jane McGonigal - On Productivity from The School of Life on Vimeo.

Which Side On You On

I have become very disturbed by the general assault that is being mounted against unions in the United States in the name of good government and sound financial management. Unions are being blamed for everything that is wrong with our schools, our muncipalities, and the country in general. Being a United Steel Worker while I went to college and for a few years after I returned from the U.S. Navy and went to graduate school made me believe in labor unions and the power of organization that makes the American Dream possible. To that idea I offer you this song by Pete Seeger

Post from Norman

I can do it:)

Call Me Barney Google

Another Catholic guy, who should be sitting on a bar stool next to Paddy and me, recently nick named me "Barney Google" because of my unwavering advocacy of Google Apps and Docs and the change it requires in our email routines as we become a Google Education School. It is with a chuckle that I give you my "theme song" for 2011.