Thursday, April 23, 2009

Stranded at sea

OK, It was more of a manmade tide-pool, and we were only in 6 inches of water, but technically we were "aground" or "stranded" and the water was seawater (or at least brakish). Back 10 to 15 years ago when I first came to Taiwan I used to come down to the fishing port and hang out. Before it was reclaimed and gentrified it resembled more of a wharf you might find in a Batman comic - where the Batman goes to find trouble - more than the touristy resort like atmosphere we have today.


I'd seen the bottom of the bay back then before it was dredged and gated - and I'd seen some nasty stuff stuck in the mud. Back then you couldn't walk the beach for more than 50 yards w/out finding a hypodermic washed up on the shore.


It's much cleaner now - but those memories, and my wife, kept me from taking off my shoes and pushing us back in deeper water.

Besides, it seemed so absurdly funny, and the weather was nice.

Monday, April 20, 2009

Twitter and Fortune Cookies

You know the old joke made famous in an episode of “sex in the city” about the true way to read a fortune cookie by adding 2 words to the end. I'm thinking that's funny now for a couple reasons.

  1. fortune cookies are as American as apple pie. Invented in San Francisco they are largely unheard of in Taiwan and China, so fortune cookie jokes fall flat. When the IMF – some international banking thing – admitted China, US senators who supported it celebrated with a Fortune cookie photo-op. The Chinese thought it an odd American cultural thing and smiled. The Americans thought they honored a Chinese cultural tradition and grinned. Misconceptions were maintained bilaterally.
  2. Twitter forces me to use only 140 characters – including spaces and punctuations. Messages get reduced to what you could fit in a Fortune Cookie.
  3. You gotta add “with a 2 yr old” to a tweet from me – then it's funnier and more accurate.

If I were more clever I could reduce this to something more witty and pithy.

I'm liking Twitter at the moment. It works well for my needs traveling. I can keep multiple people updated, I can pull myself away from the more time-consuming blog, and access has been easier than email.

Soon I'm going to try tweeting a haiku.

Only in Taiwan: emergency room for a mosquito bite

At the Master Teacher Retreat, we recalled that the great teachers we'd had went beyond the expected, beyond the traditional boundaries of the classroom and beyond the strictly professional to establish connections: between what we knew and what we wanted to learn, and between ourselves and others. They forged relationships by making us feel we mattered. They shared their passion and made it interesting. They thereby shared something personal through transparency and an openness.

That got me thinking. Most bloggers start personal and have a quandary when their audience grows; do you continue writing for personal fulfillment or do you write specifically for your audience? I started writing for teachers and I've put some useful practical pedagogical content in every post: very professional. As a result of the retreat, and since I'm on vacation in Taiwan – I'm going to change my tone. Push the center of gravity toward the audience. I tweeted last night about taking my son to the emergency room for a mosquito bite. Some people have demanded details.

While the bandage accentuates the size - it doesn't add to it. This picture doesn't really do justice to the size either - it looked HUGE last night.


I'm on about the tropical line here – much of the island is subtropical. The island supports wildlife different from what we find in Kansas, tho anything that can be eaten or used for or currency has likely been hunted to extinction, but bugs and the snakes are not to be trifled with. I have stories, having lived in the mountains, but this post belongs to the boy.

People here go to the doctor for things that would annoy a doctor in the states. Like when they get a cold. It’s dramatically cheaper to see the doctor – appointments aren't needed and I've never had to wait over 10 or 15 minutes. Also scratches that heal by themselves in dryer cooler climates get infected quick. This is the part of the world that through crowding and climate produces 75% or more of all the new virus strains. This different attitude toward the health profession causes cultural misunderstandings and friction – but in defense of my hosts, Taiwan and China have lower infant mortality rates than the U.S.

Translations cause problems. For example, the Chinese have 1 word for either a mouse or a rat. The distinction here seems academic; after all they are vermin. Mosquito gets translated as "wen-dz” but I'm not sure there aren't several small blood sucking varieties – and if not those here give tremendous welts - large red swellings with a hard center that produces multiple blisters. Scratch and they break and spread.

About noon on Sunday we noticed a reddening of his right ear. I guessed a mosquito bite.

5 hours later after his nap it seemed noticeably larger, and the multiple blisters presented. Iknow the pic is bad - but I was holding him in one arm, he was squirming, and I felt like I was being judged harshly for taking a picture at an inauspicous moment. I put up token resistance when Ah-gong (Grandpa in Taiwanese) offered to take him to the Doc. He normally drives more aggressively than the average local and that says something. In the late 90's Taiwan had the highest traffic mortality rate in the world. It's better now but I don't know if they've dropped in the rankings. The trip to the clinic put the fear in me a couple times.
The worst part was holding him down so the nurse could clean and dress the ear. If you've read the short story "the country doctor" by William Carlos Williams you can understand why I had to be the one to hold him and why I had to do it right.

For the first time I believed the expression parents use - it hurt me more than it did him. We were cool together afterwards, but the next morning he pointed at me and screamed "j'accuse" in a nasty resentful tone I havent seen before.

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Master Teacher Retreat

KCPDC sponsored a faculty retreat for faculty recongnized by their schools as being highly effective, "master," teachers. We have audio that breaks down our early objectives, plans and calls for nominations if you want to see how that process started. I experimented with a video blog addressing our expectations:



We organized the retreat in part on the KCPDC wiki. Once the action started, much of the plans were replaced by photos, links, and items that came out of the event. The extent to which some of our participants took initiative and helped craft the page, and create content and write new pages, surprised and inspired me. Co-facilitated by Dr. Rob Flaherty and I (Greg Dixon) - we pushed the center of gravity toward the participants, banking on the idea that great faculty would make ideal collaborators. That paid off.

I'm still processing what we learned and explored, so expect to see an addtional post or two reflecting on what I took away.

Monday, March 23, 2009

Tech TALK 3.25.09

The last half of this TechTALK will feature activities you can take directly back to the classroom. It will be hand's on and interactive and will use Team-Based Learning strategies to meet it's objectives. I plan on "teaching with my mouth shut" as much as possible - taking a nod from a book I've been hearing about lately.

The objectives: to support the pedagogy (andragogy) required to justify use of web-based network technologies in the classroom. As an object lesson, we will collaborate and create relevant content, and share it with each other using readily available tools/ applications available free online or through ANGEL.
Our Datatel representative recently said that 2/3 rds of the sucess of any technology initiative are cultural, and only 1/3 is the mechanics of using the technology. Scholars from the humanities who tend to write on the subject (Cummins and others) also say that sucess with any computer-mediated communication (CMC) or computer-aided learning comes from pedagogy rather than technology. So we're going to do activities that lend themselves to digital platforms and demonstrate or assess our outcomes -



I've done the activities and they're fun.

The images here come from a book, Using Wikis for Online Collaboration by J. West and M. West (2009). Also from the book we learn important steps in the conceptualization and planning of a wiki, uses of wikis (FAQ page, team collaboration spaces, critical thinking and collaborative writing assignments, and more). The book also contains
  1. sample rubrics for every step of the process,
  2. advice for managing the process,
  3. activities for knowledge construction (FAQ, an annotated bibliography, etc.)
  4. as well as basic how-to information.
Resources on wiki basics: What is it? Why? How? etc.

Faculty support wiki page to support this presentation available click here.

There willbe door prizes!

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Balzac ND Little Chinese Seamstress


Characters:
  1. Ma - our narrator most of the time. Dr.s kid. 18 ?
  2. Luo - Dentist's kid. 19
  3. The Little Seamstress (aka: ) age?
  4. Tailor
  5. Village chief - ex opium grower.
Setting
Phoenix mtn near ChengDu ? Year (?)

Books worth reading.

Pictures from my travel in the area


Monday, March 9, 2009

Celebrating Math Month

March is math month. In addition to Square Root day (3-3-9) there's Pi Day (3-14-9).

If you are looking for math applied to youth oriented pop culture - there's a moving math poem from a Harold and Kumar movie. Maybe it's more surprising than moving.

Let me know if anyone has ideas to use the following geometric brain teaser courtesy of Bruce Stewart via the Boing Boing blog.