I read this one on somebody’s weblog today, but I can’t remember where.
How many kids with ADD does it take to change a light bulb?
I don’t know, how many?
Let’s ride bikes!
I think it’s probably more funny when I tell it in person. At least Paige thought it was funny when I told it to her. But, I guess she’s obligated to laugh since we’re married…
Last Thursday night I attended a meeting of the Lamar County Coalition of Education, Business, and Industry. My role there was to present a web application I’ve been developing. Also in attendance were representatives from each school district in Lamar County, three students from each district, and a few business people from the area. I think there were about 25 people there total.
The Coalition’s goal is to develop a website to bridge the gap between high school students and business people in order to help students prepare for jobs. With this in mind, I thought a wiki would be the perfect tool to facilitate this collaboration. Also, I’ve been working on a wiki of my own for a while now (more on that later), and I thought this might be just the thing to push me into finally completing it.
Over the last few weeks I finished up all of the essential features of the wiki and added some content provided by a guy from a local business. My hope was that this site could be expanded by students and business people into something really useful — similar to how Wikipedia is maintained by visitors to the site, only on a smaller scale.
I was in for some big surprises that night…
Before I showed the website to the students, I asked if anyone in the room knew what a “wiki” was. Out of the 20 students in the room, three raised their hands. All three were students in my class at Paris High. Next, I asked if anyone had ever heard of Wikipedia. A few more hands went up, maybe five or six students had at least heard of it. So I gave a quick overview of wikis and Wikipedia in particular.
A wiki is a type of website that allows anyone visiting the site to add, to remove, or otherwise to edit all content, very quickly and easily, sometimes without the need for registration. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for collaborative writing.
With this out of the way, I proceeded to take them through the site. There were only four pages to look at, so it didn’t take long. I mentioned how students could post comments on each page, and showed how easy it was to add and edit pages. I was quite proud of myself at this point, but it was obvious that the students were unimpressed by the limited content on the site.
One student had already mentioned how she went about researching her chosen career of Marine Biology. She spent several days searching the web for information about the job including colleges offering Marine Biology as a major, required courses, job opportunities, and basically everything else you would need to know to become a Marine Biologist. Seeing as she was now an expert on this topic, I asked if she would contribute to the site.
Her answer was simple – No. I asked the rest of the students if they would contribute to the site, and they answered in a similar fashion. If the content they wanted was available on the site, they would use it, but if they had to do research to find what they were looking for, they would not return to the site and share the information. So much for sharing.
Keep in mind these weren’t just average students attending this meeting. The three from Paris High were National Honor Society members. This really made me wonder about all of the “user generated content” on the web. I wonder how many people use Wikipedia compared to how many actually edit articles. Who generates the content in the first place? Obviously someone out there is working on it, but it’s no one that I know.
I tried to use my house key to unlock the door at the high school today. I was about to be late for my class so I was probably rushing just a bit.
Luckily, a student came running out the door just as I was trying to go in. After I dodged him and his giant backpack I caught the door and went in.
Just in case anyone’s wondering – the days when students would open the door for a teacher are long gone…
Maybe it’s just because it’s late at night and I’m tired, but this quote seems to really speak to me right now:
Obstacles are what you see when you turn your eyes away from the goal.
– Joseph Cossmann
What do you think?
I just made the big switch from MovableType to WordPress. So far it seems to be going pretty smoothly. I’m sure I’ll regret saying that later…
Work has been crazy this week. Things are sometimes calm after spring break, but no such luck this year. Anyway, here’s a little more information about what I did during South-by-Southwest…
The first thing I saw was the Jason Fried / Jim Coudal opening keynote. For me, that one talk was probably worth the price of admission. I’ve read all of 37signals‘ ideas about building web applications, but somehow actually hearing and seeing Jason Fried say the words made it a lot more meaningful. Jim Coudal was also a great speaker. I would probably say he was the better speaker of the two, but almost everyone in the audience seemed to be a Jason Fried fanboy.
There were so many other sessions I sometimes had a hard time deciding where to go. DOM Scripting with Jeremy Keith and Aaron Gustafson was a great introduction to JavaScript and the Document Object Model. Sink or Swim with , Evan Williams, Josua Schachter and a couple of other guys had some good advice for business owners. The Sunday keynote with Jason Kottke and Heather Armstrong was a lot of fun. The Microformats talk really opened my eyes to what all the fuss was about. I feel like microformats are going to be very important soon.
I got several books signed while I was there – Designing With Web Standards, DOM Scripting, and CSS Mastery. All of the authors were extremly nice. Geeky guys don’t take to being treated like stars very well. Some people got their picture taken with Zeldman and I could tell he thought that was a little weird. Yes, I did take his picture, but I didn’t stand next to him and hug him. I guess that makes me just half weird.
Overall I had a great time and I was very impressed with the convention. It was great to be able to watch people speak at a session and then be able to bump into them in the halls or sit next to them at another session. It didn’t seem like some exclusive event where the speakers were wisked away in limos. Everyone seemed really easy going and eager to share their ideas.
There was only one session that I left early and that was mainly because it was the end of the day and the lighting in the room was turned down low. For me it was either leave or fall asleep.
I hope I get to go again next year and from now on. Who knows, maybe one of these years I’ll even get up on the stage and talk about something.
It’s hard to believe that I’m back at work.
Well, not really. I’m sitting at my desk, staring at my laptop, with the server humming over in the corner. It would be harder for me to believe I’m anywhere else. I guess it’s just hard to believe that spring break is already over.
South-by-Southwest was great. I’ll try to post a full update later today covering everything I saw. In the mean time, I did take a few pictures while I was there. You can see of few of my pictures at Flickr.com.
Also, they’ve posted audio from a few of the sessions. The Opening Remarks by Jason Fried and Jim Coudal are worth the download, as well as Jason Kottke and Heather Armstrong’s Keynote Conversation.
It’s seems like just about every weblog I’ve look at lately says the same thing:
I’m off to Austin for South by Southwest!
I don’t know what else to say other than: Me, too.
We’re leaving at around 5:00am in the morning and will hopefully be in Austin by 10:00am. We’ll be spending the evenings with Geoff and Tony and coming home Tuesday night.
It’s going to be great to get to listen to and meet some of my web designer / developer heroes like Joel Spolsky, Jeffrey Zeldman, Jason Fried and many others. I’m even going to bring a few books for signing.
I had a hard time deciding which sessions to attend. Almost all of them were interesting to me. I’ll be booked solid from 10:00am until 6:00pm every day. There are also parties every night until at least midnight, but I’m afraid I’ll be too wiped out afer a full day of sessions to attend any of these.
Hopefully this will be the inspiration and motivation that I need to finally finish a few of the programs that I’ve been working on for the last few years. I haven’t forgotten my new years resolutions yet. I still have to make at least $1000 this year from something other than my day job.
I’ll be taking lots of pictures on the trip and hopefully updating this site with notes about what I’m doing. Check back tomorrow evening to see if I survived the first day…
The last few weeks have been a little hectic, to say the least…
Way back on January 28 I attended BarCamp Dallas. First, it has nothing to do with bars, and very little to do with camping. It was mainly a bunch of geeks getting together to talk about geeky things. In other words, it was my kinda place.
You can see a bunch of pictures on Flickr. Yes, I’m in a few of those. This one’s a bit like Where’s Waldo. I’m not sure what I was thinking in this one.
I attended six sessions on a variety of things – ruby, linux, javascript, etc. I also gave a little presentation. You can grab the audio from my session over at Web Logs Work and see what you think. I guess I should post my Power Point file and source code eventually.
Long story short, BarCamp was great. The event was free, the food was free, and everyone seemed seemed to share and grow. It was really great to be able to hang out and talk with so many smart people.
About a week later I headed off to Austin for Texas Computer Education Association Conference. I stayed in Austin February 7th through the 10th.
I’m not sure what to say about TCEA. I felt a little out of place there. The conference was dominated by teachers who were a little geeky, whereas I am a geek who knows a little about teaching. So, the sessions were mostly not for me.
For example, I attended a session by a “futurist” who flew in from California to speak. During the session he talked about Google Earth, Wikis, Blogs, and Podcasts. Most of the people in the audience seemed fascinated by what he was saying. The whole time I was thinking – I started my blog in 1999, does that mean I’m from the future?
I also attended a session about Linux where the speaker didn’t know the difference between Gnome and KDE. But maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe only the super geeks like me should even care about the difference. If anyone wants to spread the message of free software to the masses, I certainly won’t stand in their way.
I did attend a few sessions about running a district IT department that were interesting. It’s nice to see the way other districts deal with the problems we all face. Some of the other districts had a lot more staff and money than we did, but I did hear one guy say that he was the IT department.
I’d like to post more details about some of the other sessions I attended, but the session list on their website is not very helpful. It doesn’t even give the time that a session ran. Not to mention that session handouts are still not available.
I hope it doesn’t sound like I’m being too harsh on the conference. I really did have a good time there, and I think I learned a few things. I’m sure I’ll go back next year. I’ll probably even try to present something.
I also had a chance to eat at some great restaurants in Austin, and I got to hang out with Geoff and Tony for a while which is always nice. Geoff even took me out to eat for my birthday.
I’ll be heading back to Austin for South by Southwest on March 10. The Interactive portion of the festival promises to be a truly great gathering of web geeks from all over the world.
I’m sure I’ll also post my thoughts on SXSW, hopefully before April…
Sometimes I worry about the future of America. Really, I do.
I’m around young people all day and I often get the sense that they just don’t care about what’s going on around them. Their willingness to blindly accept whatever they see on television or read on a website is frightening. I thought teenagers were supposed to reject the ideas of previous generations and blaze a new path.
Thankfully, I came across a story on Boing Boing that reaffirmed my faith in the youth of America, at least a few of them. It seems that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales gave a speech to law students at Georgetown University. During the speech, he attempted to justify President Bush’s domestic surveillance program.
During the speech, these future lawyers stood and turned their backs to the Attorney General in protest. Other students came in to the room wearing black cowls and carrying a sign with paraphrase of a quote by Benjamin Franklin:
Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither.
For all of the details, check out Future American Lawyers to be Proud Of or any major news site, like CNN. This picture sums it up pretty well:
I hope to see more like this in the future.