Teaser!

This is a visual taste of an audio treat. Coming soon to an iTunes and a CDBaby and a music store near you! Watch colinmerrickdotcom for announcements and one draft track! (#prouddad)

Bathwater, No Baby

I've spent portions of this week working to update our school's website at http://vlearn.mnps.org to reflect the realities surrounding the start up of Spring 2013's semester. I'm most proud of the faculty page at http://www.vlearn.mnps.org/Page83425.aspx, which displays the smiling faces of the 25 adjunct teachers who will facilitate the progress of our (nearly 100 now) full-time online students and our part-timers in the 23 MNPS high schools we serve, along with the handful of beta program middle schools where we have Middle Schoolers taking high school courses for advanced high school credit. These dedicated human beings are mostly full-time MNPS teachers, with a few retired ones and a few out of county teachers. Without exception, they believe in the future of online learning enough to take on more work in their work day in order to pioneer it.

This past week, it came to my attention that there is a small group of legislators who are mounting an initiative to (once again) ban virtual schools in our fair State. This seems to be a backlash from the documented failures of commercial providers' efforts in Tennessee, as noted in the following Google search results for "Tennessee Virtual School:"

1. For-profit virtual school drawing ire of TN lawmakers - WSMV ...

   www.wsmv.com/.../for-profit-virtual-school-drawing-ire-of-tn...Share

   Sep 3, 2012 – Virtual schools are a relatively new, but a growing option, for education across Tennessee. Metro Schools started a public virtual school in 2010 ...
2. PolitiFact Tennessee | Chattanooga senator slaps virtual school ...

   www.politifact.com/tennessee/.../chattanooga-senator-slaps-virt...

   Oct 7, 2012 – More recently, Berke has led the charge against the state law allowing for "virtual schools" to set up shop in Tennessee counties. As the ...
3. TN virtual school draws criticism | wbir.com

   www.wbir.com/news/article/.../TN-virtual-school-draws-criticis...

   TN virtual school draws criticism. 10:26 AM, Sep 10, 2012 | comments. Tennessee Virtual Academy student Jalea Slater, 8, left, takes a spelling test from her ...
4. 
   

   
   

   Tennessee senator calls for inquiry of virtual school citing low test ...

   www.commercialappeal.com/.../tennessee-senator-calls-for-inq...

   Aug 31, 2012 – A Chattanooga senator is pressing for an inquiry into the for-profit Tennessee Virtual Academy after seeing test scores he describes as 'dismal..."

   While these news and blog posts seem to point to a failure of online learning in our state, I want to go on record to suggest that Senator Berke and others would be doing a total disservice to the future of education in Tennessee to revert to the past prior to 2010, when it was against the law to educate students online. At MNPS Virtual School, the first official virtual Public School in our State, we have been tirelessly working since 2009 to craft sets of policies, processes, and courses that not only work for students, but that provide in many cases more rigorous, more challenging, and more academically engaging educational experiences for students than those available in bricks and mortar classrooms, be they public or private or in homeschool situations. 
   

   Our Principal, Dr. James Witty, comes to us from an accomplished career dedicated to Alternative Education.  As stated on our school's "Administration and Staff" page, Dr. Witty ",,,brings a wealth of experience and expertise in nontraditional educational methods. He most recently managed more than 60 educational reform initiatives for Metro Schools as the Race to the Top Grant Manager for MNPS. Previously, he served as the Director of the Center for Dropout Prevention, creating and launching a resource center for the Tennessee Department of Education. Dr. Witty also has expertise in out-of-school learning, previously serving as a Director for Extended Learning for the Murfreesboro City School District."

   At ISTE 2009 in Denver, Colorado, Dr. Kecia Ray, MNPS Executive Director for Instructional Technology and now incoming ISTE President, approached my dear wife Lee Ann on the veranda of her sister's historic Denver home during a party, looked her in the eye and told her "I'm going to steal your husband." She clarified that she intended to "steal" me away from my 14 year career at University School of Nashville to help her make her vision for online learning work for our school district's 80,000+ students. Along with Coordinator Barbara Thoeming, I began this labor of love within the month. We nurtured options along as a program with a small dedicated team until laws changed, we became a School, and Barbara moved along elsewhere in her career, making room for Dr. Witty to come on board, similarly walking away from his own successful and contributive career to help turn vision into reality.

   
   

   As of yesterday, we are serving right at 700 individual class "seats" to our students with a staff of 5 full-time professionals and 25 Adjunct Teachers. We offer a new paradigm of accountability with our "Performance = Attendance" policies. We have in place a communication system of "Performance Concern" which supports students in a timely and effective manner through communication with parents, school counselors, and students. We underscore every module in every online course with a "Discussion Based Assessment" graded in accordance with a rubric made available to students even before they sign in to their course for the first time. This DBA is simply a structured (telephone or Skype call) conversation between instructor and student about the learning they have just mastered. We offer 24/7 online tutoring to many of our students via Grade Results. Our teachers deliver regular tutoring opportunities in our Thomas W. Hatfield Student Success Center up until 5 pm after school on a regular basis. We provide in-person orientations for teachers, students, and parents, supported by separate 50+ page handbooks for Full-Time and Part-Time students. We are continually evolving in the spirit of student support and accountability. We rock.
   

   

   Thomas W. Hatfield Student Success Center at MNPS Virtu@l School

   Come see us, Senator Berke: We are open for the business of learning and teaching. Please don't throw out our baby with your bathwater.

ISTE CONNECTED EDUCATOR--ONGOING!

Crossposted from Oh! Virtual Learning! 

 I'm so proud of this. ISTE SIGVE has continued producing "nearly monthly" "Connected Educator" Google Hangouts to share resources and new developments in virtual worlds ever since the US Department of Education's Connected Educator Month back in August 2012. I am proud to say that I have, really, nothing to do with this.

Why in the world(s) do I say that?

Because back in 2009, when we founded ISTE's "Special Interest Group (SIG) for Virtual Environments," I worked pretty hard on it. I gathered consensus, formed a plan for proposal, wrote a proposal, and jumped through necessary hoops to get the largest and most diverse international organization for technology in education to recognize our tribe as an official SIG. Once we were official, the real work began: We built on an annual "Playground" at the international conference into an event of importance. We took on monthly Second Life "speaker sessions" in the tradition developed by our esteemed pioneeer Kevin Jarret (KJ Hax in Second Life), monthly sessions that continue to this day and show no signs of cessation. We salvaged ISTE's bailout (not in the Obama General Motors sense, but in the "jump ship" sense) from investment in virtual environments by an orderly (though sometimes painful) process of committee, a process which resulted in the founding of ISTE SIGVE in Second Life, a robust and actually growing community that continues to evidence new talent and innovation.

That's why. The community is thriving in ways I have nothing to do with. It's oh so much bigger than I, bigger than any individual. Sure, there are primary movers, most notably like Karen Novak, aka Kae, aks Qae, aka so many other aka's. Like Andy, aka Spiff. Like Blubarker, aka Blubarker. Like Knowclue, and Maggie, and Gridjumper, and Lucas, and Rosie, and Bob, and Gordon, and on and on and on. My apologies if I left your name off this post, you know who you are, and so do I, and so does our tribe.

My gift to all of you is this: One day you'll see some really great stuff develop out of ISTE SIGVE that you have, really, nothing to do with. That will make you proud. We are so much bigger than any individual, yet so dependent on individual initiatives and innovations. Now, if you haven't, watch the latest ISTE SIGVE Connected Educator installment, this one featuring our best asset, our children and their parents. Listen and learn...

Help Re-envision the Virtual Environments Playground!

Help yourself to this, and help ISTE SIGVE radically rethink its Virtual Environments Playground for ISTE 2013 in San Antonio, Texas. Pretty please?

Created with Wallwisher

Help! Now! Voting Ends Sunday!

I was in a meeting today with my dear friend (and ISTE President) Dr. Kecia Ray, and she introduced me as an internationally recognized expert in the field of 3D virtual learning. That felt good, even though I tend to run from the room anytime anyone invokes the "e" word. Help us kinda sorta prove that. Daily, from each device you have with a unique IP addie, visit http://edublogawards.com/vote-here/, and vote (at least) in the Social Network category for ISTE-SIGVE. Help make this happen. It'll be huge, at least in a small way. 11:59 Sunday night, from I think Eastern time zone, it's over. You know what you need (and want) to do. Sincerely, with hugs from Nashville, Tennesee, Scott

Friday, writing and working out, sort of

I can't believe it's Friday again and I'm once again at Level P9 and tomorrow? December. It's 6:30 a.m. Colin's been out the door for 20 minutes, the pup has been up and is back in his crate upstairs, and I'm pumping my way to nowhere again, synced into the 9th of 10 different pre-programmed configurations (levels) of my magnetic-recumbent bike, typing on my Dell XPS which is resting into a custom-built rack spanning across said bike's handlebars.

P9 is not my favorite. It's straight-graduated light to hard, then over again. There are 10 one-minute sections in each level's configuration. sometimes alternating light and heavy, easy and hard if you will, as if one is biking up a hill and down a hill, up a hill and down a hill. Once the 10 minutes are up the pattern repeats. P9 is like starting out on the level and climbing the roads up to Kerry Park Overlook in Seattle, gradually increasing straight on up. Sometimes I do 30 minutes or so, just enough to log some burnt calories, and on weekends I've been known to do as much as 75 minutes. However long I "workout," I log particulars in a Google form I keep online for motivation. I've got its results set up in the spreadsheet, and as of the next moment, when I will check it (mind you I'm adding to this as we write), 6569:11:00 minutes, 1607.18 miles, and burned 59097.26 calories.

According to my approximating math, that's just short of 109 hours, or a little over four 24 hour days on the bike.

 Let's have some fun with this. 4 days of my life on a bike since March? I guess that's fair, since at my last physical I had lost 9 pounds since the physical the previous year. Of course that revelation caused me to celebrate by taking it easier on myself and I put a few of those back on, but I'm snapping out of that lately. I hope by next full physical, come May or so of 2013, to have improved a little on that number. Where could I have biked in that amount of time, achieving that number of miles? Go go gadget Google...

Eureka, www.mapsofworld.com has a neat little tool whereby one can calculate distances to other cities from a location. In this case, let's make it Nashville, Tennessee. Well, I couldn't have made it to Boise, or Las Vegas, or LA, apparently, but just look at all the places I could have made my destination in that 4 days of non-stop biking:

 

Yes, I do suspect those are air miles, but let's not quibble here. We're fantasizing. 

What about the calories? http://www.cookingnook.com/calorie-calculator.html wasn't really any help, though it's a fun way to project weight loss goals in hard and fast calorie counts. According to my results there, if I want to lose 13 more pounds over 90 days (my first entry of 30 days resulted in an "unsafe" warning), I need to maintain my moderate exercise routine and lower my caloric intake by around 500 calories per day (or burn those in addition to my moderate exercise).

At http://caloriecount.com, I received the following information, interestingly parsed out to what? About 90 days again:

You should consume about 1,746 calories a day to reach your goal weight . This is at a reasonable weight loss average of 1 lbs per week, which should be reached by March 01, 2013.

Experts recommend weight loss at the rate of 0.5-2 lbs/week. Remember that this estimate is based on your body weight, height, age, gender, and activity level. It may vary slightly depending on other factors.

Generally, women should not consume any less than 1,200 calories per day, and men should not consume less than 1,500 

calories per day. 

So anyway, I'm sweating pretty swell now and leaning into my 44th minute this Friday morning. I can't believe it's Friday but I do know I'll feel better about it all day because of this time spent in low-impact exercise. I think I'll take in Johnny's Monday morning "Wake up Yoga" class at The Yoga Room again next week, largely to work on the "critically tight" hamstrings he noted last week, obviously further tightened by my what will be 50 minutes on the bike today. You have a good weekend. That's a wrap, at 51:47, 6.5 mi., and 493 calories. Cool.

Teacher's Apple--Infographic

This gorgeous piece of work has been much reposted and repinned, but I'm not shy. I sometimes put stuff in my blog just 'cause I want to remember it. With so many other options for that function available (see http://about.me/scottmerrick), it's not a consistent strategy., but that's mine of choice this fine crisp Sunday winter morning.

Before I do, let me opine that this graphical/text object is interesting because it reads like an article without actually being an article. And that I'm not sure I buy into the prediction of Apple's dominance, though I will further share my opinion that their intentional, focused work in the education sector mirrors the way that they have focused their sales on one particular device, and that the profligacy of android devices noted in the infographic goes well noted in that respect. Personally, I'm suspecting that the Google Chromebook may the the ticket, at least in education (see friend Kathy Schrock's "first impressions" of the Chromebook).

All that said, enjoy:

An Infographic by Open Colleges

Saturday morning in MNPS Virtual School Worlds

Happy Saturday morning. Got 20 minutes or so to view a little tour of the virtual world(s) I'm building out for my school? If so...



 And pardon all the throat clearing...I'm working out a little upper respiratory thang. If you are a member of the general public, you may visit our Public world at http://www.kitely.com/virtualworld/Scott-Merrick/MNPS-Virtual-School-II-Public. If you are one of our teachers or students, visit that Public world to get your avatar and download the client software to your computer, then send me your Kitely username and I'll whitelist you into our private world. Seriously. Teachers? Incentive credits for exploration and fearlessness! Students? I would wager I can get you a little extra credit in your course if you've managed to work your way into our virtual world--again, credit for pioneering. It's time.

A poem from my morning walk, as always, best read aloud

being alive

Scott Gardner Merrick

Hundreds of cackling grackles

emerge from one horizon,

wings beating and gliding,

sets of six beats, then one long glide,

flapping six times again,

then gliding,

each of them, flocking

across the crisp October sky,

This pattern of motion conspires

with this number of birds

to create overhead an

impressive illusion of order

in a fleeting, private event

of sight and sound.

I am astounded.

Soon they dance away between me

and the full bright silver moon,

his ancient blue-lined face

askance always--

I can almost hear the “Meh...”

A sunrise pink-tinged Learjet

eases across the crisp

cerulean sky after them

sounding one big steady wind,

its engines’ blowings fading,

followed by a light plane’s props,

chainsawing away,

steadfast and unseen.

Unseen also, at long last,

in the far distance behind

my green and golden ridges,

the Louisville and Nashville

morning train, itself

a song intensely complex,

sweetly deep and rich.

And ah, there’s the whistle blast.

One russet leaf spirals lazily

from its tree, down

across the road

and down

and down,

settling.

What is not to like

about being alive?

100,000+ Pageviews!

Granted, most of them are me, writing or revising, but somehow that 6 digit figure looks good to me. Maybe someone _is_ reading. Have a great Sunday!

Senior Moment--MobiLearnAsia

 Just working out some things here. I just blew a gig. It was so all my fault.

Well, not really a gig, but a commitment. I had committed to present at a conference in Singapore this week, invited to do so by Mr. Patrick Ho, CEO of "MobiLearnAsia," a conference held to bring together people who are interested in the burgeoning move to digitize, profitize, and maximize participation, learning, and community. From the website, MobiLearnAsia was "organised for education professionals who are interested in deploying and developing the latest technologies and best practices in mobile learning and elearning, and for corporate executives who are interested in leveraging mobile learning technologies for employee and compliance training, product and sales training, customer service and performance support, this event will feature over 30 international expert speakers and a host of sponsors and exhibitors"

I was to be one of those "experts." For months, since  ISTE 2012 in San Diego, California, where I was approached by Mr. Ho to present, I have been looking forward to it. I had tested the interface, at Vidyo, with the organizers and had responded last night to a request to test again. I did so, and when I heard my wife driving up into the driveway outside my basement garage office I said, "See you tomorrow!" and disconnected. I never had a clue they were expecting me to present momentarily.

I spent some time with my honey, made sure my 16 year-old genius songwriter boy was safely home and in bed, and retired. At 3:41 I was awakened by our kenneled puppy's whining for release. I took him out to relieve himself and pulled down the Murphy bed in the guest room. He climbed up next to me and we slept until time for everyone to get up. At work, I dove into work, and I honestly didn't get a chance until around lunchtime (the middle of the next night in Singapore) to check my personal email to discover the frantic "where are you" emails that ensued after I had disconnected.

So, okay, I apologized to all concerned via emails. Then I got to thinking.

This was such a learning experience for me, and I hope it was for Mr. Ho and his colleagues.

1. It was never a condition of commitment for me to be compensated in any way for presenting.I'm sure that if I'd been flown out to Singapore I'd have been on time. Just kidding.
2. Their schedule was clearly posted on their website. I made a conversion error. Wrong, and clearly my fault. I have always been somewhat dyscalendaric. Great word, just coined.
3. In my defense, never was my cell phone number asked for: All communication happened via email ("the way you communicate with old people," according to a student of mine years ago). If I'd just shared my phone number, they could have called me and I would've jumped back downstairs and presented on the fly. Shucks.
4. Language and culture differences can skew an interaction. Never was my presentation time confirmed verbally or even via that old communication technology, email, though there was an initial email correspondence with the correct time. There was a lot of assuming going on, on both sides. I assumed I entered my presentation time in my calendar coreectly. Those in Singapore assumed I knew what I was doing. Sadly, both of us assumed wrong
5. As I proceed past this "clustercuss," to quote The Incredible Mr. Fox, I will bank my learnings. As Professional Development Chair of ISTE SIGOL and creator and organizer of the "Priceless ProfDev in Less than an Hour" webinar series, I will make sure I have cell phone numbers as we approach event times. I will confirm times 3 days out with presenters. I will never assume.

That's about it, but you, dear reader, please learn from my mistakes. I share them for that reason. It's what I do. I only wish I'd set my calendar right and been able to deliver on my commitment to share with MobiLearnAsia's attendees.

Posted 11 hours ago by Scott Merrick

Labels: mobileearnasia scottmerrick oops