Saturday, July 28, 2012 at 6:44 AM
Good morning. It is about 6:45 AM now, and we have been up for
two hours. So far, we've just been doing our normal startup exercises on the
Internet. We will have to remember taking our medicine in about 15 minutes and
Rich is now up. We will have to adjust that he's able to listen to everything we
are saying because he doesn't have the TV on to distract him. He says this is
okay so now it has to be okay with us too.
After going through all the tweets from individual columns and
then going back to the timeline feed, I am disappointed to say that I haven't
found anything that I was more interested in this morning. It seems that there
are not too many serious things going on early Saturdays. There's a lot of
conversation about what is happening in the Olympics. They had its opening
ceremonies last night. We're getting a lot of complaints online about either
the coverage from NBC or the actual opening ceremony. I myself have to say that
it was very confusing to us and long. I found more interested in watching the
parade of nations than the performance. I loved seeing the different scope of
clothing and faces. I wasn't so sure about the outfits of people carrying the
country's name, and I didn't like the costumes worn by the younger persons carrying
what looked to be a replica of the flame. I didn't see its purpose.
We signed on this morning to follow the Olympics just
through Michelle Obama on Twitter. We figure that if anybody was going to have some good
behind-the-stage pictures it would be her. Another surprising find this morning
was that Connie Sue, my sister, seems to be following twitter for the last two
days. We will probably remind her about TweetDeck today and offer to share
lists with her.
As to last night, we have to reboot that information – let me
think. I remember watching the Olympics.
We’re ok here on that. For dinner
we had leftover Chinese because Rich was still out grocery shopping at that
time, and we knew he’d be eating something different. It seemed to take us the
majority of time yesterday in writing and editing. We had two entries that were
important to us.
Rich is going to be out today between ... Okay, will come
back to that because he's not sure because his information is conflicting.
We will be doing the normal things today nothing unusual. I
don't think we got a chance to talk to Linda today so will make sure that she
is on our scope. I don't know if TPony will be doing anything over the
weekend, but I know Linda has some sewing projects for customers this weekend
so she might be busy.
Maury called yesterday and he's asked that we babysit on the
11th so that gives us two weeks’ notice. Apparently somebody has given him very
good Cubs seats, so he and Nikki are going. It sounds like the Garvey girls are going
to be over at his ex’ place, and Jade might be with friends, but he doesn't
have anyone to watch Jasmine. So we figured that it would be nice and maybe it
would allow her to get some sewing needs met.
We did remind Maury that it's a school day for us and he can’t really stay
out after the game because we will need those hours. We repeated that our
assignments are due at midnight on Saturday, and so even those few hours after
seven or eight o'clock are important to us. He seems to understand and stated
they wouldn’t be out drinking or anything. I'm really surprised that he asked
because they've gotten along so far without asking,so that is a changeup. It
should be fun. We did ask him to give us closer to the date some idea on the
kind of food Jasmine eats. Maury says everything. But we don't want to shock her
system or ours.
Okay 15 minutes is up. I'll be right back - time to take medicine.
Okay that's all done. We stopped in the washroom and got
ourselves a cup of coffee too, so I figure we'll be well for a while.
We went through a little frustration with the new group this
morning. We're talking about the dissociative talk group. We had noticed in our
mail that somebody had written to us and they had used Upper case LETTERS, and
so I'm not sure if they were all upset with me or that is just the way they
write. When we went to the group to sign-in, we couldn't figure out the sign-in
information. We are not used to using Yahoo and we tried signing in through our
Google e-mail, but they assumed we were a new person and didn't have rights to
the group. Then when we signed up for the group again then it said that we had
to update our Yahoo profile, so it was like quicksand. We were going nowhere
fast. We sent a mail to get our screen name, or password through the AOL
account, but all we got was a blank white screen, and at that point, we were so
frustrated that it was like no we’ll come back to this later. We did write an email note to the group from the last post. I think that they will understand why we aren't responding
to the comment made. We haven't been following the account close enough through
our e-mails to know if anybody else has written to us. I had thought from the
one line messages that we were getting that nobody had talked to us directly, so
we’d set it aside. We'll just have to check this out when we get back into the
room. We don’t want to be rude.
I was just looking at our Diigo account. And it seems that
we’re going need deciding whether we are doing something with the room
earlier or whether we should wait till later, but usually Saturday is the day
that we do the Roundup. I say that tongue-in-cheek because usually means that
this is a week old task.*Silly grin*. It looks like we've got about 17 links
that we collected throughout the week. Maybe it'll be a good Saturday morning
thing to do to finish the old week so we can start the new week. I'm pretty sure that
nobody wants to read the post on a Saturday night. So might as well put it now
and see if anybody's interested. I have to take heart. My new favorite person Paul Dell seemed to
have a very good blog feed, but there's not a lot of current traffic and we’re thinking
he gave it up under other time priorities.
We’ve been through this before and know it's not about who reads it's
more about writing for purpose that is personal - just the door is open. It is your Internet real estate and you need
to keep mowing the grass.
Okay, so it seems we start the new list from here … The last
entry had been on the 86 productivity tips. We have not reviewed that or any of
the other posts that were made last week. The first article saved this week was 20helpful things my therapist said by Caroline Spring. Now looking at that story
I'm thinking it looks like it was said to younger multiple’s parts. Apparently,
Caroline writes from PODS, which is positive outcomes for dissociative
survivors in Cambridgeshire, must be the UK. Yes, that has now been confirmed.
I think that Caroline Spring is one of the authors in the dissociative book. I'm
not sure, it just seems that way, and maybe it was another Caroline. I'm thinking now there was a Carol Steele and I'm getting the two confused. Her first
thing item on her list of 20 was that she likes pineapple. Let me read that for
a second, it does seem silly, but we saved it. It seems to be that the 20
things comes from a client with dissociative identity disorder and she's
reflecting on psychotherapy. I'm thinking Caroline Spring is not dissociative, so it's not her talking, but maybe her talking about something a
multiple said in her office setting? I'm not sure here. It seems confusing.
Anyway the reference to pineapple was that somebody liked
pineapple and blueberries for breakfast, but it was the different parts that had been out, apparently there was a lot of avoidant-fearful apprehensive
problems in trusting the psychologist. So, with the mention of fruit, it gave her a chance to believe
that she might be trusted because this was coming from younger part and they were now on equal ground. It didn't say that directly, but it might've
been a good switch-over for her. We might need to do a couple more of this list of 20 things to get this. The second helpful thing the list covers was
that someone thought sex was yuck. Apparently, that was said by a part that had
been repulsed, perhaps an adolescent.
The adolescent seemed to be making generalizations about everything to
do with yucky sex. It then seemed that
that part had gotten validation that it was okay that she thought it was bad,
that she had hated it, and had a right
to hate it, but also that it was something that could be clean, wholesome,
lovely, etc.
This is a little bit confusing if it's not better by this
next third one – we are going to disconnect from this saved link. I think maybe
we have saved this one because we did want to read all of it because it
might be interesting. The third one is called, “it's not happening now,” and
apparently here the client had been irritated by those words because it made
her feel stupid because she wasn't comprehending whatever would have been going
on that somebody else was interested in, but it might've been a lead-in to
flashbacks as if opening the door to another part who said okay. Let me rethink this more clearly. It also
might've been some kind of a reorientation for her that she could disengage
from the trigger stuff because it wasn't actually in today's time at that very
moment she was sitting in the office or wherever she was. It sounds a little
bit like grounding. I remember grounding with Dr. Cooper was ages ago. We’re
thinking about the years 1984 through 1987, He had a way of putting his
thumb in the middle of our forehead, and he would back us up against the wall
so we could feel the hardness of the wall and then make us concentrate on
feeling the wall and being in the room with him at that very moment. It sounds like
this might be what was happening in the therapists room of this writer – she
was being called into the present.
It's very hard to go through this entire list one at a time,
because it doesn’t make easy sense and there are just too many to get through
in this confused state. It would be
frustrating to continue. I guess we'll keep it on our saved list and hope that
we get back to it later with better results.
The next article was also written on the 22nd which would've
been Sunday last week. It was on “understandingdisassociation,” by Paul Dell. Dell had written his blog on disassociation and
he called it “stalking the wild dissociation.” I'm not sure what that meant yet,
but he had elephants charging across his opening banner. I wanted to go back
into that at a later time to see if I could understand the articles that he had
left, and to check for sure to see if he really had discontinued or not written
in it for quite a while, or if that's is the interpretation we gave going
through the blog too quickly.
It seems our initial thoughts have been confirmed that he
had written only sporadically. He had started the blog in September, 2010 and
had continued it for five months. And. then he skipped to January of 2011, and
then he skipped to January 2012. So that makes me believe that he would like to
do something like this in a blog, but he runs out of time. Because of his January entries, we'd like to think the writing was still a goal or New Year's resolution. I think at the time
since his book was published in 2009 that he might think it would be a good
appendix, but most likely he got too busy for it. I think writing would have
put him in better touch with the community.
He had 34,853 hits from that time till now so obviously people have looked at his work. I'm noticing also that he had a couple things on this
blog roll and one on Sidran Institute, which was formally a
foundation. We had been familiar with Sidran before because they write a lot of
books on dissociative, trauma, and PSTD. I just stopped to look if Sidran had a twitter account. Shoot, they don't seem to have anything.
This would be something I would like to follow but it doesn't list either Facebook
or twitter. There's no way then to remember that all - wait a minute we could
just bookmark it on Diigo - that'll help. Okay, that is done. I guess at this point it is there, so we will move on.
Or, maybe moving back – we still haven't read anything from
Dell's work let me try that again. We decided to check under de-realization since
we have been feeling our educational world especially is very unreal. The link
brought us back to his first post listed on September 6, 2010. Here it seems
that he's going to associate dissociation to trauma and he stated right away
that he was looking forward to comments which is an excellent start. He was
really looking for an audience of researchers on trauma and dissociation and
graduate students. Perhaps adding “insiders” was an after-thought, although
very much appreciated. He references a movie called, “the kids are alright”
because he thought it portrayed disassociation. We might have to look that up
later with Rich, but it stars Annette Benning and Julianne Moore. I've heard of
these actresses, but I wouldn't be able to pick them from a crowd. It
doesn't seem like his first entry is very long or in-depth. He does ask the question when is
dissociation not dissociation? He notes a Chinese curse that says "may
you live in interesting times!" His refers to Ellert Nijenhuis, Onno van
der Hart, and Kathy Steele. These are
people listed in his book. He then says that the derealization from the movie
isn't really dissociation because it was not a manifestation of a dissociative
part of the personality. It isn't caused by structural disassociation, so it
can't be disassociation at all. He also notes that this is something that was
controversial.
Okay, not a lot of good information there, but I assume that
he gets better. Let's move on. I know his content is too strong not to come
back to later, but I want to get to the Diigo list still this morning. By
the way, it is now about 7:45 AM. Missy is
starting to do her meowing. It's still quiet at this point but were going to
start with the water right away and see if we can nip it in the bud before she
gets worse; it seems to be her normal thing to do about 8 AM. I'm a little
disappointed on reading the first article by Dell, but it seems that he was
just trying to keep it casual. And, I can't fault him for that. He hadn’t figured out yet how to address the
audience - he was just testing the water.
The next article comes from an e-learning site, and I'm
seeing here that the first story is on constructivism and online learning. I'm
not sure why we collected this particular article. It seems very short and just
a basic list with some basics such as andragogy – six principles by Knowles and
Jerome Bruner stating technology is a powerful tool for instruction and that
technologies are cognitive tools that help learners elaborate on what they're
thinking and to engage in meaningful learning. This is helpful because it is
not - wait a second there it is - he's got full text. Apparently, the real
article is written by Nancy Rubin. I think that she is one that we connected to
through twitter. The article was written on July 21, 2012. I think that we were excited about this because it emphasized
things that we'd already been learning about, especially the first course we
had taken from JIU. Now looking at it - it seems that she's got a few of her
key topics and she summarizes what they mean, or why it's important and she's got seven issues of constructivism for online educators. The first issue
is "the issues of humanity and learners’ isolation,” since individual
learning at a distance is a basic design for online learning. Because online
learning constrains us by allowing communication through computer technology,
not a real person, it loses some humanity leading to social isolation."
Wow! That's pretty negative. But, it states some of the more obvious things with
online learning for adults which might be good if we were looking at doing a
paper on andragogy, but for the time being it is not really essential because
we know the basics of these terms.
The next article is called bittersweet Gestalt: creeping onthe creeper. I think we've gone into this one in a previous post but it is
basically by a multiple who relates to an experience she had talking to
somebody on the Internet who was asking her about the multiplicity. She had
become upset because she had figured he was basically a letch who was keying in on
one of her younger personalities. It was strange to see how quickly she had
come to this conclusion, where it had not been as obvious to us. From there her reactions were abrupt and discontinuing. We enjoyed the
blog entry because it was very clear at describing her disgust with her subject
matter which was a real emotion, and we applaud all efforts of multiple
speaking out in their own behalf. I don't think there's any general link to
that particular blog entry and what we’re looking for now, but it was a good
marker point. We would like to say at this point that the article was written
by Marisa and she tweets from the account of “I am the crew.” She doesn't tweet often, but it appears that
her posts are meaningful. This particular post was written on Thursday, July
12, 2012. Her previous post was June 19, so again not real often writer. She appears
to have had seven comments from this post and we had left one also, but there
was no response after that. Our note related to not being able to catch the
creeping part as quickly as their system had, and that we had thought it was an
excellent communication.
The next article was on Adobe Captivate 6: the Essentialsskills and drills workbook. There was a note left to ourselves that it was a
step-by-step book but it had cost $39 which was too expensive for something we
had figured that we could do ourselves, but that if we really get in trouble it would be available. This is the hottest program we have to learn - or at least near the top. We also left a note here because they had this book
offered as a beginning tool, but they were coming out within a couple months
with a more advanced info-book which seemed more interesting to us. This had
been put out by Iconlogic and not Adobe which was another reason to suspect the
price, but it was noteworthy. Again, we can't say enough that we dislike cost
on the Internet. They also offer courses but they were way too expensive. This
particular class on Captivate 6 cost $600 per person and it was a two-day class
and apparently the class runs about once a month. It seems that the course
outline is the same as the chapters in the book. Obviously, the book is much
cheaper than the class.
The next article was on the site on Creative people clustering– neighborhoods – the Atlantic cities. The article was written by Richard
Florida on June 19, 2012 and apparently has 28 comments and it was published by
the Atlantic Cities - Place Matters. The article discusses creative people in
literature by job type and referenced another study indicating five major
personality types across states. He then talked about people who were open-to-experience, which seems like a liberal Democrat though noting that San
Francisco was still the nation's largest concentration of these "types" of
people. It is interesting to note that the opposite lowest end of the spectrum
included Minneapolis. But, we won't go into our
history with that city right now. Okay, yes, we were born there. *Sigh* The author comments specifically on Rentfrow
who was somebody he and his team had done research with. Rentfrow is apparently a psychologist who
states that personality involves the capacity to accurately perform certain
tasks competently and effectively, and that personality predisposes people to
acquire certain skills. He notes people that are in roles that are highly
skilled empower regional economic growth, but as well they pursue their personal interest which is a positive attribute to the community. He writes, "the jobs at
the center of innovation were design, engineering, science, painting, music,
software development, writing and acting, and appeal to individuals who are
curious, creative, intellectual, imaginative, inventive, and resourceful. Yay writers AND designers!
"These
professions are primarily concerned with exploring, developing and
communicating new ideas, methods, and products." He goes on further to
state that people who are open, are also adventuresome and generate new
perspectives on old issues. They are comfortable with and adaptable to change.
He also states that these kinds of people are more likely to pursue interests
and follow their dreams and that they don't do this by design, but the process
occurs gradually in an ad hoc way over time. They seek out other personalities
that are similar to them and hence cluster in particular communities. He states
that these communities take on a certain level of openness which draws even
more open people and enhances the openness to new people and ideas and the
ability to harness creativity and generate innovations. Openness comes to be
imprinted on their psychological and cultural DNA.
Some of that was quoted, but I missed a few direct quotes. Think if its a list it probably should have been quoted. If we use this information somewhere else, we’ll clean it
up. Sorry just got sloppy. But, in general this information comes from a book
from Richard Florida called, "the rise of the creative class – revisited:
10th anniversary edition – revised and expanded." The book is $17.26 and
the second edition came out June 26, 2012.
Florida's book description states, "10 years ago,
Richard Florida published the past breaking book about the forces that were
reshaping our economy, our geography, our work, and our whole way of life.
Weaving story telling with reams of original research, he traced a fundamental
theme through a host of seemingly unrelated changes in American society: the
growing role of creativity. In the decade since, we have endured a series of
world shattering events – from the collapse of the tech bubble to 9/11 to the
economy economic meltdown of 2008 – any one of which might have been sufficient
to derail the forces he described. Instead, the drive toward creativity has
only intensified both in the US and across the globe.
"In late 2011, the social media site LinkedIn reported that
the word most often used by its members was to be creative. In this
newly revised and expanded edition of his now classic book, Florida has brought
all of his statistics up to date (and provided a host new ones); further
refined his occupational, demographic, psychological, and economic profile of
the creative class; Incorporated a decade's worth of his own and his colleagues
quantitative and qualitative research; and addressed his major critics. Five
completely new chapters cover the global effects of the creative class and
explore the integral features and factors that shape "quality of
place" in our rapidly changing cities and suburbs. Florida delves into the
roles played by technology, race, and poverty in perpetuating an exasperating
income inequality and the pervasive influence of class throughout every aspect
of society. Throwing down the gauntlet, he proposes a dramatic new social
compact – one that can turn our emerging creative economy into an enduring
creative society."
It is interesting as a good source for creative information
that is current, and it also ties in some of the context work that we had done
on cultural identity back when we were in Norway some 30 years ago. Right now ,
it's just an interesting reference, but we don't plan to go anywhere with this
soon. We are interested in things that are creative just a small sub-topic at this moment.
The next article is from Educause Review online. It is
written by Ellen Wagner and Phil Ice, and is called "data changes everything:delivering on the promise of learning analytics in higher education." In
this article the authors talk about the digital breadcrumbs that learners leave
behind and that researchers study what learners have viewed, read, engaged in,
and assess their behaviors about their interests, and about their preferences
providing a ton of information about personal learning experiences. The authors
then talk about the new methods and technology tools that are assisting them in
understanding this work. They discuss consumerism tracking for marketing and
mining data to assist another decision-making They then consider lessons from
Major League baseball and learning from the PAR framework. PAR framework is
predictive analytic reporting. Its first usage goes to marketing universities
and now they are aggregating data. The center of this conversation was on the
ability to make decisions and shift patterns of behavior in desirable ways
which seem to lot like behaviorism. They do touch for second on using the
analytics techniques for teaching and learning processes, but they don't go
into this in depth except to say that in the future, researchers will have greater responsibilities. They conclude by stating that in the future
decision-making will continue to alarm, provoke, seduce, and intrigue, but that
it will also enable learning experiences that are more personal, more
convenient, more engaging, and have a direct impact on student retention.
We took a little bit of a break. It is now 9:18 AM and Rich
has left for a good portion of the day. He is expected to be back about 4 to 5
PM. He is going to pick up his boat first, and then haul it to his moms and there
it will get recharged, and then he has a game. He had three games, but two of
them got canceled so he'll be home earlier than he had initially expected
today. He had 20 minutes to talk before he left and we took full advantage of
that. After he left, we got a Herbalife shake and that reminds us that were going to have
to reorder the Herbalife. I don't know if they saved her bank card. We better
take a break right now to look at that before we run out ... it seems we were scraping bottom this morning.
That was a good thing. They remembered our card. Still had
to enter the CVS number, but I didn't have to go downstairs to get the card from
the car. The expense wasn't as much this time although we ordered one new
product; because they gave us a 25% discount. We took a general break and
decided that we should try the tea that had come in the last order, but we
hadn't used it all. Tastes pretty good hot, I hope it stays good as the water
cools off. I'm a slow drinker and I'm a little nervous about the tea because it's supposed to be an
Energizer. And, I really don't know if I need that much of an energy boost in
the morning. But I did want to give it a try so...
One more note is that we did watch the Olympics last night.
I think that was stated at the beginning of this entry, but we're realizing now that before Rich left he must have turned on the Olympics for us so we could at least listen to it in the
background; just hearing there is a bike race. I didn't tune-in to see who had won, I
don't even know which countries were involved or which country was winning. And, now it seems that we have
switched over to swimming, but again, I like the sounds in the background. I
really don't want to pay attention to it directly. I don't mean to seem
unpatriotic, but I just get too much to do to start preoccupying myself with TV
in the middle of the morning.
Okay back to work. We are only about a third way through the
links that we had created throughout the week. Maybe we can expedite this a
little faster. Some of the work I've commented on earlier in the week, but we
do want to pull from its collective point at the end of the week. The next one
says that if you aren't social, you'll shrink: 10 steps to becoming a socialbusiness and this is by Vala Afshar for Forbes.
This article discussed the blueprint for transforming our business into
a social enterprise. It described social enterprise as being "a vibrant
high communication, high collaboration enterprise that uses social tools
(chatter, twitter, Facebook etc.) to accelerate business via connection and
collaboration and he also states that social enterprises should have a marketing
budget, expand customer relationships beyond sales, sustain exceptional
customer service, credit culture of internal advocacy, ensure full utilization
of resources, shift from defense to offense, bring headquarters closer to
customers, and promote lateral sharing of best practices.
He gives us 10 steps.
We’ll go through a few. The first one is to define a meaningful purpose.
He quotes Peter Drucker is saying "management by objectives work if you
first think through your objectives. 90% of the time you haven't." He then
states that it utilizes social collaboration and execution and continues saying
that a strong culture has transparency, accountability, execution velocity, and
mass collaboration. The second step is to ensure simplicity and that the key is
user experience. Here he quotes Steve jobs as saying "simple can be harder
than complex: you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it
simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move
mountains." Okay now looking at it generically it seems like the pattern
is to leave a quote from a famous person and then just a couple words about
what that meant. I can see why I marked it but, I'm not really interested in it
right now. We will take a pass and go onto the next section.
The next section is an easy way to build brand scenarios for
e-learning: the rapid e-learning blog. I think I remember that this one is
about storytelling; at least we have related it to storytelling. It is written
by somebody named Tom. This article discusses building interactive scenarios to
move projects from linear thinking to meaningful interactivity which includes
utilizing real-world environments to make of real-world impact. Right now this
seems like an interesting article to read so let me skim through it. This first
subsection is called simple structure for scenarios and he considers this to be
a 3C model. He uses the three terms challenge, choices, and consequences. The
challenge is to engage the learner and challenge her understanding. It is also
to present a situation, get some general information, reflect, and then let her
make a decision. Choices are – that once the learner is challenged, she needs
to make a decision or series of decisions. Providing choices means utilizing viable
and realistic options. And then for consequences, he writes each challenge produces
a consequence. Sometimes you get immediate feedback, but sometimes you just get
additional challenges that compound the situation. He then explains how to use
the 3C’s to develop complex type branching.
This next section he titles for complex decision-making
interactions. He considers like Wiggins (2005) that the business of education is to
improve performance. He states that there are two performance-based courses. On
one side you have procedures that are like steps from one to gazillion, and
then the other side is to teach principles that guide decisions. He considers
teaching principles to be soft skills training. He then lists pros and cons of
complex branching. Most decisions are nuanced and the solution for one
situation, may work, but not in another – it just depends. He does state that the branch interactions are
great for getting to the heart of the principle you are teaching and this might
correspond to Wiggins "big ideas." He notes that challenges are to provide
situations and decisions that force us to demonstrate understanding or the need
to gain by learning more about the situation. That's a really good point, and
then the second part choices assist us in collecting information to know what's
right, or we may just make a decision and work through the consequences. He
then explains that complex branch scenarios is like telling a story, and that a
few tips to doing this would be to keep this scenario simple, review what makes
a good story, take a creative writing course, and read some books on storytelling
and scenario-building.
The books he lists are designed for how people learn,
scenario-based learning, performance consulting, designing successful
e-learning, made to stick, and learning by doing. We have gotten the made to
stick book and have an interest in the book on design for how people learn. It
seems very interesting. Made to stick was written by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
and they question why do some ideas thrive while others die, and ask how to
improve the chances of having worthy ideas that stick in your brain. In made to stick, the authors
reveal the anatomy of ideas that stick and explain ways to make ideas stickier,
such as applying the human scale principle, using the Velcro theory of memory,
and creating curiosity gaps. They further suggest that the book will transform
the way we communicate ideas through successful stories and winning ideas. I'm not
sure why we picked up this book, but most likely we felt we were forgetting
things that we were reading, learning, or hearing.
In looking at design for how people learn, we note that it
is a $24 book 272 pages and it states that it will help us discover how to "learn the key principles behind learning, memory, and attention to create
materials that enable our audience to both gain and retain the knowledge and
skills we are sharing. Using accessible visual metaphors and concrete methods
and examples, design for how people learn will teach you how to leverage the
fundamental concepts of instructional design, and improve your own learning and
gauge your audience." This book allows me to "look inside," but the book might get
written-off because it isn't giving enough information to make it interesting
although generically this book could be helpful. This book seems to have
beginning level information, but sometimes we can jump over this stuff because
we have enough generic talent to bypass it. They cover where do we start, who
are your learners, what's the goal, how do we remember, how do you get their
attention, design for knowledge, design for skills, design for motivation, and
design for environment. We only need these few notes at this time for the book.
There are examples and cartoons and other visual aids. Okay, moving on.
The last article we added on the 25th was an article saying,
" brick-and-mortar education going to be left in the dust by onlinelearning and flipped classrooms rapid e-learning Adobe captivate blog."
This one is from Partridge and had no he is my favorite superstar beside Dell at
this moment as to not only how to use Adobe processes but how to teach
e-learning with the tools and philosophy of education. Partridge is the one
that does so many of the videos for Adobe. This article was written on July 25,
2012 he starts by noting that e-learning is where online music is to be five
years ago with an emphasis on learning rather than teaching. He then touches on
the constructivist approach routing from John Dewey in the late 1800's He
promoted active learner-centered approach that led to Montessori schools with the
teachers as facilitators. He notes (1993) Allison King publishing an article
entitled, " from sage on the stage to guide on the side." This is a
quote that I've heard often even in the context we are reading for our present
course. The author stated that many of the constructivist ideas are being reintroduced by using educational technologies to free teachers from what they
considered as the chains that bound them to PowerPoint lectures, worksheets and
overheads.
He then introduces the term flipped-classrooms. This seems
to be an idea centering the classroom around the learner by creating a blended
environment. I believe he defined this by saying they were in moderation by application
of methodologies and common sense education. I think he might've been okay with
this but he wasn't really ready to give a big yay for compromise. He talked
about one of the problems to flipped classrooms is that future teachers are generally
highly focused and they are high-performing machines, but unfortunately, they
have limited ability to adapt and this was due to decades of positive
reinforcement, list following, note-taking, an info dump of only observing
behaviors that have left them as mostly masters of drill and kill didactic
instructional methods and other approaches that replicate failing classrooms.
On the positive side of flipped classrooms, Partridge states
that the didactic elements of the instruction have been moved to a better
medium. At this point, he plugs Adobe products. He states that the teacher has
opportunity to provide individual instruction as they are beginning to discover
key concepts. He recommends positioning these things in the form of nearly
impossible challenges asking critical questions of students as a means of
kicking off a particular topic which forces them to the discover new ideas and
build on their prior schema. He also recommends this approach be placed in
lectures made into short video snippets because often students tune out during
a long lecture. He thought that shorter snippets reduce the chances of that
happening and give the students and opportunity to replay anything that is
unclear even outside of class. This theory states that the teacher then has
opportunities to provide individual instructions at the moment the students are
learning key concepts. He thought in this manner, one could build powerful theoretical
architectures that students can rapidly apply and synthesize, evaluate and then invent
new concepts based on the key ideas.
Moving onto July 26, we have two articles. The first one is
by Marcia Wieder “five principles that will change your life.” We have already summarized
this one pretty well before, but will try to do it quicker. She had five
important practices designed to change your life and help achieve dreams. The
first one was intentions and here she was talking about things that we intended
to create or accomplish calling on resources, opportunities, and people. Our
lives with purpose assist us in learning, growing, loving, and being kind. She
advocated deeper and more meaningful intentions which allow us to live better
and contribute more by risk – taking.
The second practice was integrity and here she considered
the ability to keep your word and deliver on your promises. She thought this
amount of honesty and assessing your entire life would make it come alive and
be imaginable, and it would allow us to live in the present.
The third practice was sharing your dream and here she
talked about the freedom you get from intention and integrity which would make
your world rich like an oyster. She thought you could speak about your dream or
vision and that people would relate because you would be more visionary and
show clarity and passion that others could understand, and then they would ask
to participate with you in making an impact on the world.
The next practice is taking action. She states that
everything that we have learned, we have to put into action, and that is the
steps we take that are more important than just having the thoughts. She
emphasizes the words learning and to progress and that power was found through
action not just dreaming.
And then, last, her practice was to build the dream Circle.
She stated once we know what we have to accomplish, we could experience the
ease and joy from sharing the dream with others like-minded people. They would
support you and your ideas. She said to start small and build one at a time
conspiring with passion and vision and showing seriousness every day. She also
noted that when you invite people, encourage them to dream their bigger dreams.
The author also encourages that we stand up for things that matter, speak up
and be heard, and that we will have an impact on not only our life but the
lives of others.
The next article is the elemental structure of social media. The overview includes an infographic. This article was written by Richard Darrell one month ago. Richard writes a lot of things but they're always short. I remember this one being in-depth because it explains social media so well, but we had already summarized it in another entry. It was a social media periodic table in a visual presentation. This article is very much attached to a company called SocialOomph, which wasn’t inspiring and it was far from a complete list. I did like the categories. The first were elements, and then the other one is element states. The elemental categories would be reviews, social deals, Facebook – related, nontraditional social networks, blogging tools; management feed generators, mobile devices, Google planet, content aggregators, article sites, twitter-related, visual tools, and photo sharing, and tools. The element states considered were website, tool, platform, hardware, social network, app, and social bookmarking. I do want to take a special note here. I'm seeing the word "platform" and need to see if I can understand the term. Okay, it looks like Darrel includes as his six platforms the familiar entities such as WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, Pastorous, Angie's list, and Vimeo. The term is still fuzzy because the platforms aren't distinguished from others that are like them but categorized differently.
This last article by Darrell is also a part of the bit
rebel’s social media blog. Darrell discusses the ethical system of social media
as being on a complex online infrastructure. He claims that it is built on
websites and entities coming from people's minds and he thought that the
Internet was this close to inspiration as one could possibly get, because it was so valuable as a place to develop ideas. I would like to add here, it is also a place to leave markers ... all human contributors reference their thoughts and collaboratively the knowledge is to infinity and back. He suggests that one could not only browse,
but exist on the Internet and that just a few websites are what we really consider
social media though allowing there are many startups. The world is basically
looking for powerful tools to increase their influence especially on the
Internet directly. He states that crest media Incorporated was the one that created the
periodic table. He thought positively that networking services would be offering more and
more provisions for stronger and more sustainable platforms that we will find
successful.
There are three more sites. The first one of two collected on
the 27th was anxiety and evasiveness: Aman asks, "is there a point," and the work is listed within her Anxiety-Schmanxiety blog. Before when we went into this blog, we went
into the author's secondary topic she offered an info booklet for signing up to
her newsletter that discussed being down and changing the down into an up. It
seemed to say that instead of getting fixated on the negatives, that we look
for the positive attributes that had gone into that situation and then follow
that more inspired experience. Aman’s work was to commercialize for our sake, but she said
some steadfast, logical statements. In looking at her article on anxiety and evasiveness,
we see that she is saying anxiety is a way of shooting down the point of
everything positive, and that we’re trying to do that because of anxiety being physically and mentally uncomfortable. She theorizes that sometimes activities left us feeling there's little point because we figure we probably
won't succeed anyway. She stated then that this became an excuse or a way of
rationalizing the things that we don't care to do because they make us
uncomfortable.
Aman states that evasiveness is a sign of anxiety, and that it
was easier to think about what we don't want to do, than accept the anxiety not
letting us do the task. She then asked
is this the truth? She asked if we would do something if it didn't have anxiety,
what our response then be different? She asked that we imagine ourselves being
afraid to travel on Expressway, but if our child was in the hospital on the
other side of that expressway would we get in and just drive. The answer is
probably yes we would. It seems to be almost a paradigm shift. This is especially true for us right now with school with
school, and that we’re feeling a lot of anxiety to not doing it. It's so much that it is
causing us to stagnate which is very dangerous. I am sure this is why we picked
up on the article. She concludes the article by saying that we needed to find a
point when we recognize anxiety and then produce a comfort response as our top priority. I think she meant find a comfort response being hidden directly by the negative feelings. She said everything else besides finding comfort will pale in comparison. She
then states that this is the most important thing ever, because if we think we
will be ready to overcome anxiety by running from being uncomfortable, then we will forever miss reaching our goals.
So far she's following a pretty straight path. though we might have to reread to assure ourselves, we have what she intended to say. Aman says that we
need to find a point to be doing what we need to do. We need to find something
more important than anxiety. Something to motivate us, take priority, but allow
us to do something that might feel uncomfortable. She then says when we do
something which might not be fully comfortable, we realize that we can do it,
and the next time it becomes easier.. She also states that there is a point to
doing things such as happiness and fun. I don't think this was such a
spectacular conclusion and I think this is why we skipped over the article the
first time but she also has a link to entitlement and work ethic: anxious kids
needing skills and doing hard things. I believe we read that one too, and it
had to do with teaching kids to face there un-comfortableness in doing work. This particular article deserves another look.
The next article is called, "heal now and forever okay."
This is the one that we just talked about. I cannot go into this again because
we had mentioned it so thoroughly the other day and we had left examples. I
leave one more marker here to show the seven steps. Her steps are to first note
and understand that we are feeling down, and then look at what it suggests to
us about what is up, then we are to name and understand what is up, and then we
are to trace the history of the up and link it to positive people and events from the past. We need to then connect with the people that
have been in our journey, and lastly, we have to promote this up in our future.
Again were not going to go through this now but it was really hot stuff!
Okay that leaves me with only one more article which was
collected this morning on PTSD and disassociation resources for survivors,
supporters and professionals. Sidran Press is a long-term organization that
supports dissociation and posttraumatic stress disorder. Most of the books are
professional. Unfortunately we remember this to be an expensive site. They seem to talk about current
events, training, resources, and they leave the store and help desk as well as
listing our current projects and other regular things. Whoops, we are going to
correct ourselves. Their news IS NOT
kept up to date. For example, there was
nothing listed between October 2009 and May 2012 and it only includes things
that are happening within the Sydran Press. On the resource page they list about30 articles put out by the they would like you to link to through them to Amazon, but again most of the articles about
posttraumatic stress disorder and PSTD. There was one article on dissociation
which was “what is a dissociative disorder?” They have other resources for
people dealing with the disorder, not directly for people with the disorder.
Their definition on dissociative disorder includes questions and answers.
Responses are generic and are overly-simplistic, like suggesting that when
children go through trauma that they may simply "go away" in his or
her head. Yuck. I'm thinking at this point we won't come back to the source
unless were looking for book on multiplicity. And they do have a few out there.
I look at this as somewhat of a sterile environment.
On the positive side they do have one section that deals
only with dissociative disorders and the books are tied in with Amazon. The
books they recommend are:
Disassociation and the dissociative disorders: DSM-V andbeyond by Paul Dell and John O'Neil, (2009).
Treating dissociative identity disorder: The power of thecollective heart by Sarah Krakauer, (2001).
Well that is it is – it is certainly not a complete list on
dissociation, but it is a list. This disappointing part is that there is only
five books listed after 2006. Hello people it is now 2012! That means the
majority of Sidran’s recommendations are over six years of age? It is hardly
current. I think Sidran Press is terribly
behind the times as to new books out on the market. Of course, were saying thisin part because our book is not listed. It wasn't meant to be a first-classbook with great psychiatric significance; it was an ancillary book on someone withmultiplicity which gives a clear narrative experience. But, I won't demean myself either. It does talk about multiplicity
in a nonemergency manner. And that is a positive difference from all the multiples’
books placed on the market that primarily sensationalizing the field and make the DID seem unreal. I'm really thinking
that my appraisal of this company's knowledge in the field has gone down
significantly. I still know that dissociation is a hot topic in psychiatry or
psychology now, in that the industry is centering on trauma and PSTD. But my
understanding of those things, are that they are anxiety disorders and not
dissociative disorders, though I can stand to be corrected. I'm territorial ... I want to hear about multiples and their adaptations and in learning from their human stand on what is both right and wrong with life ... The horror of sexual abuse by close members of their families is just insane. NOT the multiples!
Okay, we have to get to some point of summarizing here
because I know that with all this anxiety highlighted that we are still
avoiding our coursework and this could take us a while to edit before we
can place it in the blog for the day. I'm hoping for a school start soon after dinner. But, we do have to summarize somewhat all
the stuff that we had just written because we are not holding it within our
minds. I'm assuming that you are not holding it all either, but it has been an adventure of thought - If you happen to have made it this far. You would've
needed a lot of concentration and forward momentum.
I think we’re going to do some classifying. AHA!
The Diigo program does this for us.
This is a list of the site’s tags we placed on the material. Ok, been messing around with the system for a
few moments. I think we’re going to list
our top FIVE categories and the words/terms that are associated to each. My top five are education 6, e-learning 6,
Adobe 5, psychology 4, and socialmedia 4.
I believe it is going to work as a hot link so that if you’re interested
in the links to original articles, you can tap on it. WOW!
That really works for me. Ok,
we’re going to put a little more here in just coming to our written
conclusion. It is about 1 PM and we’re
about 20 pages or 10,000 words into this project. Some of it is spread out, but I’m thinking
for most readers this is still thick content.
Not to say it is great, or not great … just that there are a lot of things we’ve
thought about this morning. It really
helps having Dragon. PLUS, maybe we’ll
get over it, but we are still really liking what Diigo is doing for us and
thinking we have to continue our work on processing it. I think this is going to be our second entry
… we’ll first place in the blog the current references. I like having the round-up.
As you know, the last thing I want to do is stop writing,
but we really have to do school too, right?
That’s what all the best minds are saying. Let’s demand we get into it. It be nice to do a paper this evening and two would be great, BUT ONE today would at least make us smile :-) Happy Reading!!! Keep us posted with your thoughts!
Our best,
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