Oh! Virtual Learning! The Book!

Hello, and may this day find you well and safe, two iffy constructs in these dark days for American government and public safety. But that's neither here nor there (although it may feel like everywhere).

I stumbled across this in my Dropbox whilst looking for an ancient song I had written in the mid 1970s. It is from Sharebook, a feature that appears no longer to be available at blogspot.com for bloggers to archive their work, and it begins with a post from May 7, 2007 and ends with one at February 21, 2012. The blog went on for a few posts, and featured a revival announcement in August, 2023. That last is, though, the last. The revival never was followed up upon, and will not likely be.

Still, this little online book, spreading across some 277 pages of .pdf file, is fun to explore, at least for me. Many of its links got lost in the process of publication and a cursory click-thru demonstrates that many of the links that survived take one to a polite "page not found" message.

During Oh! Second Life!'s publication online, I was teaching young kids about technologyin independent then public schools whilst helping my wife to raise our own two kids, and Second Life for education was my primary creative side hustle. My involvement with virtual worlds for learning spread and grew over decades, until upon my May, 2022 retirement I audibly brushed together my hands and for reasons I can understand better than I can explain, I turned my back on the teaching world. I will herein say that I was so done with the reshaping of schools into businesses, and the data-driven administration of them (just how accurate was that data, beginning with standardized testing results?),  that I was, like, outta there, and for good--for my own, if for no one else's.

https://bit.ly/scottsecondlife will get you there.

So. There you are. Pretty much the sum total of my educational experience over 5 years of the nearly two decades of what people called Leadership in that field. I made friends, and many of those were from other geolocations--Australia, Germany, Great Britain, Canada, Japan. Once we loosely organized, we were always just on the "about to be" side of the Bell Curve of Adoption. It may be that those still involved will always be, and will pass, in turn, their own fascination and dedication to its newbies, who will one day do the same. It may be that the experiences within virtual worlds are simply so unfathomable to the unitiated that they will never be of real use to the powers that shape "the education system." Who knows?

What I know is that these engaging fascinations, with their promising and unfulfilled possibilities, are archived palpably in the blog, which is still available on Google's blogger.com platform (possibly useful if one wants to pursue a lost link) and shared here for as long as my Dropbox footprint evades the inevitable and eradicating winds of time. 

Stay well. Stay safe. 

Be Good and Have Fun.

Summer, here, and we prep for travel

 Well, well, well (again), here we are once more. Me and my imaginary readers. 

Wait. I know you're real and I know how grateful I am for you. Let me pop over to my online Gratefulness Journal to say that.

Back.

My boy Colin is in town from his hometown of choice, Missoula Montana. I am so happy to be in the same room, car, or Nashville venue with this centered, talented, and kind human being. I miss him every day when I am not, but I am happy with his decision to live in that beautiful place. I remember when I lived in Anchorage lo those many years ago I hardly spoke and never saw either of my parents for over 5 years. Thank god that's not the case with either of my magic children. Here's me and Colin at table in our Nations Nashville home:

scott and colin at Chez Merrique, courtesy of Tim Buell

And a pic of both our children, smooching on their beautiful mom, on our paradisial back porch:

Colin, and Miranda Lee smooching mom on Mothers Day

Why do I blog, still, after so long? It should be obvious: blogging provides a consistent wandering ripple throughout my years and helps me clear my head and honor my thoughts and those of others. Look back on some posts, from 2005 on, and see for yourself. Take a look at a short story, my novel (available on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback), my novella, or a post about the future of education, my bailiwick for nearly 30 years, an original song, or jump around for a poem or two. It's all there. As my dear sis-in-law Amy explains to my cherished wife, "It's his book."

That's a simplification, of course, as the blog contains most of my books, but I like it. Many of my links have gone dead, as platforms used for photo sharing, news sites, and other blogs have crapped out and been nullified; but I likely won't take up the goal of revising anything from 18 years ago to present. I prefer to be here now. It's my thing. But a perusal of past posts will reveal some trends and share some good past, and may be of historical use to the alien researchers who follow us. 

These past couple weeks I've been working on an abstract that I am as of yesterday calling finished. Why do so many of these efforts result in color studies and shapes that are full of motion and energy? I don't know, really, but I'm calling this one "terminal ascension," and it may be whatever it may be to you. I see things and suggestions of events and natural phenomena in this piece. My mentor, Charles Brindley, hasn't seen this, as I completed it at home. There is a lot underneath it, and a concentration on tensions of both texture and color, and I had fun with the palette knives and the brushes. I have promised myself to seek some softness and peace in my next abstract, but here is 

"terminal ascension", photo of 16x20 acrylic painting by scott merrick

On the more realistic side, a study of dusk at Cheatham Lake, my preferred local camping waterside, is underway. Charles has helped with this one with cutting insights on contrast and underpainting, along with color mixing suggestions. It's not finished but it is sneaking up on it, a process that is undercut every time I see something new in the iPhoto I took that delicious evening. I want to express calm here. Maybe that's the thing aforementioned: I work for expressing peace in my landscapes and my left-behind work, like "on the inside" and "rocky's ridge from rocky's ridge." Anyway, definitely a WIP, here is 

"dusk @ cheatham lake", photo of a work in progress, acrylics on 16x20 canvas by scott merrick

I'll end with a little humorousity (sic). My dear love-of-my-life was messing around in my studio closet, rearranging things as she will, and this painting on up-cycled scrap treated lumber (a medium I may well revisit) was maybe precariously propped up on the door trip above the closet door. I'm not sure how, but it decided to drop from its perch right on her noggin, falling to the floor. I'm not sure if it broke on her head or on the floor, but break it did. This one doesn't have a name, as is sometimes my wont, but, anyway, I propped it up on the floor and in between the two halves I placed a curio I purchased in a thrift store years ago, an incense burner just tacky enough to have caught my eye. I sort of like the staging and may do some media work to make it a permanent piece. What should I call it?

"untitled", acrylics on treated scrap lumber, by scott merrick

We are journeying overseas in a couple of weeks, for a couple of weeks. We'll be in Spain excepting for one brief outing into France near San Sebastian, staying in only 4 overnight hotels over a period of 17 days, and hopping from one to the other via train and plain. The trip was planned through consultations with the (highly recommended) RH Travel Design here in Nashville, and we are soooooo looking forward to it. It's all upscale accommodations and travel, and we both are expecting, literally, the trip of a lifetime. There are LOTS of food, wine, cultural, and art experiences built in along the way, along with ample down time to explore or just relax together. I'll be documenting, most likely, but don't hold me to that, and don't expect anything while it's underway. I plan to be here now, there, in my most present ways. Think good thoughts about safe travel for us--we are all in. 

For all the slum bag lurker thieves out there, our good friends Matt and Anitra will be staying here with our killer dog Watson, and the NCA alarm system will be in use. Don't even think about it.

To everyone else, regardless of your politics or any other enlightened or misguided beliefs, I hope your days will be good and that you will remain safe and well and alive as we roll around the center of the planet and circle around the good ol' sun.

Kathy Shrock's Guide for Educators

I've been doing some snooping around for resources lately, and I revisited tonight a link at the Discovery Education site to friend Kathy Schrock's resource page. If you knew about it or think you did and haven't visited it for a while, or if you don't know about it, visit now. Her Upcoming Presentations page indicates her current focus is in the area of "Information Overload," something all of us could stand to pay attention to. Her Slide Shows for Teaching page contains dozens of her presentations for your own review and inspiration.

Kathy is truly a maven in her field, having led many of us into it to begin with. Enjoy what she has to share and enjoy it often.

On to the second full week of school!

ClustrMaps User of the Month!

Yay! scottmerrick.net has been chosen as one of April 2009's "Users of the Month!" I'm lovin' it and I want to thank the fine folks at ClustrMaps.com for the honor and for the free upgrade! Yippee!!! See the whole announcement at their website!

User of the month
Every month we will feature a new ClustrMaps User Of The Month, and reward that user with a free ClustrMaps+ upgrade for 2 years.

April
2009
AUP Radio - Paris
Portrait Sculpture by Blake Ketchum
Stitch and Book
scottmerrick.net: teaching, learning, working and playing in the 21st century

Clustrmap reset and how to exercise while working!

It's happening again: My little lonely clustrmap (see sidebar) will be reset to zero in a few days, an annual event I'm guessing the folks at clustrmap hold in order to keep the most popular maps (like David Warlick's) from becoming solid red dots.

Awwwwwwww.

Well, it's been an interesting year, and I want to thank the thousands of readers who have visited scottmerrick.net in an effort to learn anything I have to share in my meanderings through this lifetime.

I also want to thank the folks at Clustrmaps for developing such an inspiring tool, one that is easy to use and that tells me that from April 1 of 2008 until this very moment in which I'm blogging about it, my little effort has been visited by 5,145 human beings from every continent (excepting Antarctica--hey, where are you, explorers!). That's encouraging to me, and it gives me hope for the future of the globe, a world where people are engaged in active learning about one another and interested in others outside of their own local, national, or regional geographic areas. Life(s) is good.

Speaking of which, I am into an exercise routine that makes my family laugh at me but which, in combination of it and healthier food and beverage choices, has lost me around 10 pounds in the last 6 weeks or so. Here's an 00V00 video that shows it in action. Just another geeky moment that I shared out this morning at PBS's new Frontline Digital Nation project.

Here's a link to the video.

Cheerio!

Call to Share from Julie Lindsay in Qatar!

A friend of mine said last week that she's underimpressed with folks blogging other people's work. I present this in order to beg to differ. I'm absolutely impressed with sharing out valuable efforts to bring others into the Great Conversation that is Web 2.0. "Find your story and tell it. If you put two individual teachers together, they're always better than two individual teachers." I rest my case.

This is a MUST-SEE from Julie Lindsay.

Educators internationally gathered together at Qatar Academy on February 20 to
discuss 21st Century Learning. As a result they decided to take action and share
their experiences in the hope that others will be inspired to embrace change in
education using new tools, new skills and a new mindset. See http://elearning.qataracademy.wikispaces.net/21C_Learners for
more information.

PLEASE vote!

Hey, all,

My other blog, the one about Virtual Environments in the service of education, has just garnered a nomination for Best Use of Virtual Worlds in the Edubloggers Awards 2008 race. I'd greatly appreciate it if you'd click on over to the site and vote for "Oh! Virtual Learning" so I might take home the "Eddie" in that category this year. Voting goes through December but I'm all for pulling out ahead early and staying there. Not that I'm competitive, heheheee. Here's the link:

THANKS!!!

Brave New World Wide Web for Teachers!

This is soooooo worth a look. David Truss, a new favorite blogger at David Truss::Pair-a-dimes for Your Thoughts, mounted a video at blip.tv from a powerpoint pressie he had recently done. Up there ^ it is :)

I'll reference this one for a good long time, and I hope you find it valuable. I discovered it, btw, in a posting at my Diigo, which I really don't access as often as I should. It's all about the balance and the time, isn't it? But as Truss exemplifies, if you don't

The "Embedded Practicioner," -- Words of Blogging Wisdom from an 8th Grade English Teacher

I didn't mean to do it. After all, I had already spent over an hour in Second Life earlier in the day at a fantastic panel discussion on "Virtual Identity," the discussion facilitated by the dana centre in England. That panel featured Howard Rheingold, coiner of the term "smartmob" and widely acknowledged creater of the concept of "virtual community," and Will Gardner, founder of the non-profit "Childnet International," an internet safety organization created to "help make the Internet a great and safe place for children." I did some recording there but haven't had a chance to do anything with it. (I hope I can, since it was really wonderful.)

So when I logged in on my laptop at my boy's bedside while he went to sleep last night (he doesn't really need that anymore--it's just a tradition with us, one that I'm sure I'll be losing soon as he breaks into teenagedness) I never intended to get caught up in another online presentation. I made the crucial (propitious) mistake of checking out the happenings at the Auditorium on ISTE Island.

Friend Kevin Jarret (KJ Hax inworld) manages a wonderful Tuesday night speaker series over there, and his blog, "The Story of My Second Life," was one of the first ones that motivated me to begin blogging my Second Life experiences. Last night, KJ offered Torontan 8th grade English teacher Konrad Glogowski (SL: Konrad March) on the topic, "The Embedded Practicioner," sharing information about his journey from attachment to his "teacherly voice" to the development of his "readerly voice," which a teacher attempting to nurture literacy skills with blogs must, in Konrad's view, adopt.

Take 20 minutes and listen up to the segment of the talk I choose to share. If you are interested in educational blogging with students, I feel it's a "must listen!" Then head on over to Konrad's blog, "blog of proximal development," for more. I'll add the pics I took here soon, but here's one for starters, the one referenced early in Konrad's presentation, when he's talking about what most of us traditionally, and habitually, call "teaching":



Cheers,
Scott

Pics from Friday's TAIS Technology Institute in Memphis, Tennessee!

Friend Julene Reed, techwiz extraordinaire and Director of Technology at St. George's Independent School in Memphis, Tennessee, sent me pics from the event I blogged about earlier and I want to share them! Here's a picasaweb slideshow. You can click on the show to visit the slideshow for larger pics. This event was a great one for me, and I'll continue to share what I learned there often and loudly! Thanks, Julene!

Personal Learning Network Offer

Hey, ya'll,

From my favorite administrator's blog: PHSPrincipal Blog, this post where he muses about a comment from his own PLN (Personal Learning Network). Are you a colleague of mine? I don't care where you live or work, if you need help getting started with the kind of ongoing learning and collaboration Dave's talking about in his blog post, when he says "I have found that I spend more time now reading about educational issues than I did when I was working on my Masters degree or my Specialist in Ed. degree. One particular item that i read this past weekend has me thinking about our particular place in history..." you just let me know. I'll help.

Cheers,
Scott

Why Let Our Students Blog?

Forgive me if this is old news to you but it's new news to me. Connecting the dots from twitter to email to internet this morning (not an unusual pathway for me) I came across a video I'd like to share. It's from New Zealand teacher Rachel Boyd and I find it rather eloquent. Enjoy:

It's Not Too Early to Think About Summer!

Cold and damp as it is in Nashville this mornin', I'm hoping that some portion of my 5 readers (just kidding--see the Clustrmap in the sidebar!) may be thinking about summer :)

I am offering four one-week workshops this summer, all of which are detailed in the "Web 2.0 for Us" wiki and three of which are still available for booking at your school. At the wiki, I describe the workshops pretty completely, so I won't repeat myself here. Isn't that refreshing?

Cheers!

Scott

David Jakes' Tech Learning Blogpost--Frustration!

For a really nice example of how blogs can spur discussion, I discovered a recent David Jakes post at the Technology and Learning blogsite. Returning there to look for it today for shareshare, I couldn't find it. I googled me man David (whom its been my pleasure to meet on a couple occasions at conferences) and found his new blog, "The Strength of Weak Ties," with the post I was looking for: "Under Construction."

In it, Jakes, a prolific proponent for Web 2.0, says, "The idea that teachers should build Web pages doesn’t work, and it’s a classic and representative example of why technology has not delivered on its potential in schools. Here are my top five reasons for this failure, and the failure of technology to alter the learning landscape…" He goes on to list and explain those five reasons, which include:

* Reason 1: Using technology to create and support learning opportunities in most
schools is not considered mission-critical.
* Reason 2: Most administrators have failed to understand technology and how it
applies to the learning process on the most fundamental level.
* Reason 3: Schools have not provided teachers with the proper tool(s),
infrastructure, or support to get the job done.
* Reason 4: Teachers are too comfortable.
* Reason 5: Teachers have not seen the benefit.

I highly recommend the read, especially for readers who are technology coordinators or curriculum experts. Most importantly, read the comments. It's an excellent example (is that redundant?) of how a blog can spur thinking and conversation amongst parties interested in the topic.

Cheerio!

This looks like a most interesting day of networking with other podcasters here in Nashville, Tennessee. I'm planning to to see what I make of it. Anybody else interested in attanding? Click the image to check the "unconference" out!

Online Photo Sharing in Plain English

This is no scoop--it's been blogged about several times already since its release yesterday, but I want to include it here partly as a reference for myself and partly as a reminder to add it to my reservoir of resources for a summer teacher workshop I'm offering for the upcoming summer. More about that later, but if you want to see where my mind (and my summer) is headed, visit the Scottweb2.0 wiki at http://scottweb20.wikispaces.com.

The folks at Commoncraft, already to be thanked for video releases on topics like social networking, wikis, blogs, and rss feeds, have done it again; they've made a tidy little animated video about a Web 2.0 tool and released it several places so that it can provide learning in a very viral way. I'm about to infect you :) From TeacherTube:

Happy New Year--It's Gonna Be a Good One!

Been spending little time online this week, much time painting a sorely needful room in our house, the extra one over the garage we call "the wii room" for what I hope are obvious reasons. Much time hanging out with my wife and daughter and missing my son, who's in Colorado learning how to snowboard with his cousin and his "other family;" a bit of time fleshing out and publishing an all-indie-music Snacks4theBrain!; and a tad bit just relaxing and reading and movie viewing.

Reading: WIRED Magazine, "David Byrne and Thom Yorke on the Real Value of Music" and All the Pretty Horses, the first of Cormac McCarthy's "Border Trilogy."

Byrne and Yorke summarize nicely the changes which the bizness of music has seen and break down a musician's options for earning a living into a tidy set of five options. Certainly worth a read for anyone participating in the field in any way.

McCarthy's this year's Pulitzer Prize winner for Fiction, and there's a reason why. My wife and I went to see the movie "No Country for Old Men," (wheeeeeeeeew) and I just had to experience more of this author's perspectives on the American West. I feel our children are missing out on the rich narrative experience this topic has to offer, btw, much because of the media's general confusion over the historical nightmare that was our Eurocentric ancestors' genocidal treatment of Native Americans--sigh. I really enjoy a good Western, whether it's movie, fiction, or history. Another great writer in the field, just as a li'l bonus for ye, is Elmore Leonard, whose sort of "greatest hits" short story collection came out in 2004 and which I discovered after viewing the fab movie "3:10 to Yuma" last year.

Cinema: We took on "I am Legend" yesterday, and I'm glad we did so on the big screen. I really enjoyed Will Smith's tour de force, though I'm not sure all the Oscar talk is on target (and not sure why I'm not sure). On the small screen we watched "Waitress" last night and that's more up my alley, quirky love story that it is, with a nicely optimistic ending that isn't schmaltzily predictable (maybe that's part of my issue with Legend). And we watched "Rescue Dawn" earlier in the week, a movie that was absolutely great until the throwaway "war-movie-turned-sports-movie" ending. We've also started the DVD collection of "Dexter," the not-for-the-faint-of-heart Showtime series about a serial killer who only kills people who need killing (now there's an ethical-dilemma-filled theme for you). Michael C. Hall did such wonderful work in "Six Feet Under" and seeing him in a very different role in Dexter is a treat.

I also spent a little time to put up a brief video tour of the Blogger's Hut at ISTE Island in Second Life. You can see that at my SL blog.

Well there it is, my version of the annual family letter.

I guess all this leads me to say that I've realllllllllly enjoyed my week of down time over the Winter Holidays, at times actually thinking how nice it would be to be this uncommitted to work schedule all the time, as in "retirement." Since that's not an option, mainly for financial reasons, I'll be back at school Monday (at Vanderbilt, where I'm helping friend Cathy Walker with her workshop session at an Arkansas teacher conference, popping into Second Life for a brief tour of ISTE Island--then trying to firm up plans for three weeks of teacher-teaching Web 2.0 in the summer). Then on Tuesday I'll re-greet my 3rd graders bright and early with a fresh set of plans for the remainder of the winter and spring. Life(s) is good, ya'll.

Hold close to what you love, and may it love you back.

My RSS Feeds on Education are Achieving Consensus!

Interesting, or at least it is to me...

I use Netvibes to aggregate my RSS feeds. It's a cool tool that I would love to share with you, so here it goes on my list of "to be created" instructional videos. More on that later.

Meanwhile, I have been struck this week with how posts from so many of the education-related bloggers I follow (or "arse"=RSS, according to one particular German-British friend of mine) via my Netvibes interface are reflecting rather dramatically on how they are personally striving to re-examine the relevance of their own teaching practices, toward incorporating social networking, Web 2.0, and as-yet-unimagined new technology tools rekindle the relevance of education.

Vicki Davis, "coolcatteacher" blogger, starts with a poem, and cross-posts at the TechLearning bloggers' outlet. She argues that blogging is not the "death of writing," as many old garde have argued, but its evolution, and continues, warning about changes to come, that "...as we move forward to a society that can send and receive education any place any time from anyone, the best teachers will become SuperTeachers and the worst schools, districts, and teachers may find themselves completely without a job."

Sandy Wagner, "Ed Tech Administrator" blogger and head of a 5000 student school district in western NY, describes a student panel whose work resulted in his realization that "our students had anywhere from 60 to 600 contacts on their 'friends' lists. They are spending upwards of two hours a day communicating using these tools. More importantly, students said they would like to be able to contact teachers using these tools."

Jeff Whipple, prolific commentator at his "Whip Blog, musings about technology and education," points out challenges by writing, "Certainly the ability to build a global learning / work network will be a valuable tool in the next few years. My concern lies in the methods students used to generate traffic. Global citizenship will require not just connectedness, but value to that connectedness. Students soon found that more traffic can be generated by questionable content that content of redeeming social value. What do they learn from this? Where do we start the discussions of digital citizenship when the biggest library is but a click away from the world’s largest arcade, the world’s largest “TV/movie/music” store and the world’s largest porn shop?" I discovered Whipple's post, which you can read here (and should, since it talks about one educator's use of social networking to measure their grade by traffic on their websites) via David Warlick's commentary on it at David's 2Cents Worth blog.

It's all interconnected, ya'll. It's all common sense. It's not just some "kool-aid" radical trend. It's the way things are going. As Vicki opines, we are the teachers, we are in the best positions to help our students cope with what Ian Jukes calls "information overload." Let's all go out of the locker room, onto the playing field, and make a difference--one infused with kindness and love of learning...

Happy Holidays to you all, and to all a good day...

Twitter and What's Going On?

Logged into my iGoogle this morning, after sitting down with the espresso I set up last night. Yesterday I'd added two Twitter widgets to my iGoogle, one to read and one to post, hoping to twit a little more productively by reducing the number of clicks it takes to perform those two tasks. Top of the read window? David Warlick, and I'll quote here: dwarlick: Just read Will's post (http://tinyurl.com/2xflq5). I'm not sure we are even capable of answering his rhetorical questions! .

So I did "just read," and I suggest you do too.

That took me to another browser start page tab, my Netvibes, to its own "Education" tab (my netvibes tabs are, in order, left-to-right, "General, Education, Second Life, Music, News, and Technology"), where I clicked on David's most recent rss-fed entry, "Sometimes Size Doesn't Matter,", where he posts a few interesting rhetorical questions of his own.

Just thought I'd start out your day or evening with some impossible though thought-provoking questions. My apologies in advance. :)

NYSACTE Video from Brian C. Smith

Here's a video from Darren Draper, a colleague of Brian C. Smith, who posted it at the NYSACTE ning.com site. The piece compiles a whole lot of current thought about education into an enjoyable, thought provoking set of comments and questions. It's resident on Brian's NYSACTE (New York State Association for Computers and Technologies in Education) conference ning. See what I mean: