A clarification

I received a comment asking what laptop wouldn't run Ubuntu. I have to say that I ran Ubuntu on that laptop for almost a year. It was fine. It was only after an upgrade to Gutsy that things started not working. It is an Acer Aspire 5100. And, as another comment indicated, I think it has to do with the 64-bit thing.

As for PCLinux, so far I am happy. Except I had a Skype conference call this morning that didn't go well; I couldn't hear them at all. Was it PCLinux? Probably not. But it is curious that it happened now. I was very happy to see that Flash works perfectly, though. I didn't have to log in to Windows to check the latest updates to the course materials.

We'll see what I think in a week or two or a month or two. I still have Ubuntu Gutsy on my other machine, so I don't feel totally disloyal!

A switch

My husband has been at it for some time now, but it wasn't until Miguel talked about it that I was ready to give it a try. PCLinuxOS 2007, that is. I finally switched from Ubuntu to PCLinux on one of my laptops.

Ever since I upgraded to Gutsy Gibbon, I have had trouble getting it to read my flash drives, and Flash wouldn't work right. It was a major pain because of the course development I am doing that is produced in Flash. I had to log into my Windows partition to edit it. (That is all I ever use Windows for anymore!).

So today I backed up everything on my Linux partition and tried live CDs of Linux Mint and PCLinux 2007. I really wanted Mint to work, but it wouldn't find my wireless card. PCLinux found it right out of the box. So I got everything running the way I wanted with the Live CD and then installed it. It was so easy. Everything was exactly the way I wanted it as soon as the installation was finished.

I am sorry to leave Ubuntu, but I need for things to work. For me on this machine, PCLinux is it. I am still running Ubuntu on my other laptop. Everything works much better there. So for now, I am content to leave it that way. But if I have trouble in the future, you can be sure I will try PCLinux on it, too.

Some things to think about

Thanks to Vicky at Cool Cat, I discovered Teen Literacy Tips. The site is great, full of things that I could have used in my old job, things that I am still vitally interested in. As I was looking around today, I found a post called Education Quotes to Peruse and Ponder. One of them seems to speak to what all of us edubloggers believe:

“Who dares to teach must never cease to learn.” — John Cotton Dana

Nothing terrible new there, of course, but it reminded me of how important my blogging and reading of blogs is to me as an educator. It is how I learn. Would I learn if I didn't blog? Probably. I hope so, at least. But what I learned would be different. It would be textbook based. It would be theory more than practice. And that wouldn't be bad. But it would definitely be different.

And another quote:

“An educational system isn’t worth a great deal if it teaches young people how to make a living but doesn’t teach them how to make a life.” — Source Unknown

This goes back to something I wrote about a few days ago, something that Doug brought to my attention, something that Gerald Bracey wrote about: whether or not schools should be in the business of preparing young people for jobs. Maybe this is the approach I should have taken in my post: It is OK for schools to prepare students for jobs, but they should first prepare them for life.

There are other great thougts in the post. Which ones speak to you?

Reality or fantasy

Richard MacManus' post reporting on the faberNovell Consulting research paper on social networks was quite interesting. I am not into Facebook or MySpace, but I know people on both networks. I had never thought of them in the terms that faberNovell did. What struck me was MacManus' statement that:

Facebook is viewed as "real identity", whereas MySpace is "fanntasized identity"!

As I said, I am not overly familiar with either network, but these characterizations don't seem too far off.

What I found interesting was my reaction to the idea of a fantasized identity. Granted, I am quite old (57 at last count!) and stodgy, but I can't imagine going on MySpace and creating a fantasized identity. I don't know how I would even go about it. And if I wanted a fantasized identity, why not do it on one of the many online games that are out there, where you are expected to take on an identity within the game?

I think about my desire for transparency in my blogging and in my life in general. I guess am not a good candidate for MySpace. But then, I am not sure I am a good candidate for Facebook, either.

There is a slideshow of the faberNovell paper in MacManus' post. Check it out.

A circuitous route

I am amazed by the things I can learn online every day. But I am even more fascinated by the path to that knowledge. Take, for example, this post on Read/Write Web by Richard MacManus. I got to it from this post on Column Two, which I got to from a post on elearningpost. I got to elearning post when I added the flake to my Pageflakes page. I was looking at Pageflakes today because of all the recent hype about the Teacher Edition. Although I had seen posts about it before, today I saw it in Ewan McIntosh's del.icio.us links, which appear in my Bloglines account along with his blog posts. I decided to check it out, to see what the difference was between the Teacher's Edition and the "regular" edition. And so started a chain of links that brought me to an interesting post about Facebook and MySpace, which I will talk about in a minute.

Today's post... just barely!

I have been sitting here for half an hour trying to decide if it is better to have a lame post than no post at all today. I finally decided that lame was better than nothing. And actually, I want to talk about something that isn't lame at all: TESOL's Electronic Village Online 2008.

Every year about this time I plug it, and this year is no exception. Check out the call for participation. It gives you a basic idea of the sessions that are being offered this year.

In praise of Knoppix Live CDs

At 7:15 am today I was frantically downloading Knoppix to create a live CD. After I got it, I stuck the disk in my son-in-law's dead computer. It booted right up in Knoppix. After mounting the hard drive, I was able to access his files. We put the ones he needs right now on a thumb drive and transferred them to another computer. Over the weekend I hope to get all his files off the machine. He was good to go when I went to work at 8:45.

If you don't have Knoppix Live CD, get one! It can save you. And it gives you a chance to try Linux, too. You just might find that you like it.

A friendly reminder

My son-in-law has one final paper to finish before he gets his MA on December 14. He had just finished the next to the last project and was turning his attention to the paper when his computer crashed. With many of the articles he still needs to read for the paper on it. We are at the moment trying to get back into the computer and, hopefully, will be successful. If not, we will all start trying to duplicate his search and find the articles again.

But to the reminder -- to myself as much as to anyone else -- please back up your stuff! You never know when things will come crashing down around you!

I know I start out with good intentions and then get busy and forget. I know that's what happened with my son-in-law. Don't let it happen to you!

Mounds and mounds of paperwork

In my new job I find I am suffering from too much paperwork. I know that I am fairly lucky not to have had to deal with all kinds of paperwork before, but that doesn't make me feel much better about having to deal with it now. Right now I feel like my teaching isn't as important as all the paperwork -- at least not to anyone but my students and me.

There is no way to avoid doing it, and I understand the value of it as a way to satisfy funders if nothing else. But I feel like I am shortchanging my students because I am taking time from instruction to test and then test again, and then I have to document all that testing. Then I have to fill out a ton of other forms on top of that and on top of all the other forms we have to fill out throughout the term. Or at least that's how it feels.

Since this is my first time doing all this, I am sure my reaction is a little extreme. In time I should be more used to it and take it in stride. But for now, I am really feeling frustrated and harried.

There must be a better way to do some of this, but I haven't been here long enough to have an idea what it would be. Believe me when I tell you I intend to find out!

Professional development

Miguel's posts usually make me think, and this one on professional development was no exception. I was struck, though, by his parting comment:

In the meantime, I'm glad that I embarked on the blogging adventure 2.5 years ago. I'm much further along than if I'd limited my conversations to traditional venues and people who I hope will embrace a different way of learning.

This ties, again, to what I have been thinking. Reflecting is good. Connecting is good. But blogging is better. What I have learned, the people I have "met" and interacted with since January, 2005, truly amaze me. There is no other way that I could possible have learned as much as I have through blogging and reading blogs.

I have taken three grad classes since I started blogging. None of them made me think as much as blogging has. None exposed me to the variety of thought and opinion as blogging has. Blogging nourishes me as a professional in a way that nothing else seems to. It inspires and challenges me on a daily basis.

My goal for the rest of this year

I know; it's almost over. But in looking at the sidebar on this blog, I saw that this has not been a great year from blogging. At least not for me. So I am determined to finish this year up the way I started blogging almost 3 years ago -- with a post a day. If I can do that and throw in a couple extra posts when time permits, I won't ahve the msot dismal blogging year ever. It still won't be great, but it will be better than last eyar. So I am going to give it a shot and hope that it carries over into 2008, too.

The need for creativity

Coming after my last post, I was interested to read Barbara Ganley's post in which she says:

...I am dismayed that our institutions of higher learning place such little value on creativity-centered courses except for majors in the arts. If a student has 36 courses to take over the four years of college, how many of them are creative-intensive? And yet, what could be more important than building their ability to think and act creatively?

I don't think it is just colleges that are ignoring creativity. I see children doing senseless, mindless worksheets that don't mean anything to them. I see my own students not encouraged to be creative or really interact with what they are learning more often than I would like to admit.

I know that I as a human being am only happy when I am creative. I used to sew and bake. Now I blog and develop courses. And I am happy.

Barbara goes on to say:

In slowing down by moving more deeply into reflection, connection and creativity , my students have gotten in touch with parts of themselves that they haven't seen in years while coming out of themselves to examine the world around them...

Reflection is, in itself, a creative process, I think. So is connection, really. The "product" may not be tangible, but it is very real.

She says more that I need to think about and comment on. But that is for tomorrow, I hope. My thanks to Barbara for helping me think about this.

Preparing young people for jobs

Doug over at Borderland raises an interesting question. Actually, he only relays the question from Gerald Bracey:

Is job preparation what schools should be about?

Despite all the movements to the contrary, I really believe that schools -- K-12, at least -- are not about preparation of people for jobs. They are about the preparation of people for life. Or at least they should be. Work is only a small part of who we are as people. And young people need the opportunity to discover who they are. If schools are focused on preparing students for 21st century jobs, when do young people get to even think about who they are and what interests them?

On the other hand, we do need to make sure that young people have an ability to think and reason and that they can read and write. I think that they need to be encouraged to develop their creativity. And to me, those are job skills.

One of my favorite stories

I was reading my Bloglines feeds when I ran across this story, which made it into my email box several years ago. It is about retiring in Mexico. My husband and I had received it and then, apparently, deleted it but finally found it again about 6 months ago. And today I found it here in a post at Common Craft.

It is important to live life as we go along, not waiting for some magical future. That's a decision my husband and I made 36 years ago, and we have tried to live by it. Our lives have not been comfortable in a traditional sense, but we wouldn't change it for anything.

Reflecting on practice

Reading Adult Education and Technology, I came across a list that the author had gotten from Vicki Davis at Cool Cat Teacher. There were 20 questions in the list, mostly relating to the use of technology by teachers and students. There was one question that I found especially interesting:

19. Have you changed anything significant about ALL of the courses you are teaching THIS YEAR?

I have always wondered how a teacher could just do the same thing over and over again every year. I had teachers like that in high school back in the dark ages, and I have seen teachers like that recently. But I don't get it. Even if you teach the same classes over and over again (Especially if you teach the same classes over and over again!), your students and your classes are never exactly the same from one year to the next. They have different needs and different interests. Why would a teacher not want to tap into those differences each year?

Another interesting question was this one:

14. Is more than 50% of your content relevant "to life?"

As an adult educator, I would like to think that everything that goes on in my class will help students get through life. I wonder, though, if that is true. It probably is true in some long-term existential way, but I am not so sure my students would agree if I were to ask them.

Teaching is not an easy job. If we are to do it well, we must consider the needs of our students, their interests and abilities, and their reasons for studying. We must reflect on our own practice and continue to learn ourselves so we can improve what it is we do and how we do it. The Internet offers teachers a chance to learn and to reflect. All we have to do is make a little effort.

So what's the problem?

I was excited a couple weeks ago to read Konrad Glogowski's post on How to Grow a Blog. I loved the graphic he used with his students to get them thinking about their blogs. I wanted to use it to come up with a new plan for this blog. But somehow or other, it hasn't happened. I can't seem to come up with a plan.

I think this has something to do with the fact that I am still making the transition from Intensive English program instructor to adult educator. I am, in some ways I think, still fighting the transition a little. I can't quite see myself in this new role -- even though it is one I have taken on before.

I want this blog to speak to who I am and what I am doing now. I want to use it to learn more about teaching my adult students. I want to use it to reflect on my practice. But I can't quite figure out yet how to do that.

I have been looking for blogs by adult educators because I want to read about their practice. I know that my blog reading has always inspired and shaped my posts here, so this seems like a necessary step. But I have not had much luck finding Adult Ed blogs. Any suggestions?

Growing my blog

Konrad Glogowski's blog of proximal development always makes me think. His post How to Grow a Blog is certainly no exception. I think his visual outlining the idea is a great one.

As I do not have studets blogging at the moment, I read the post more as a blogger than as a teacher. And I learned a lot. I have been struggling to find my blogging voice again after a number of months away. I think that I will use Konrad's visual to help me think through my own blog. What do I want to accomplish here? How can I make that happen? I have to think it through before I write about it, but look for some "thinking out loud" here. As always, I will welcome whatever ideas you might have.

Language Learning Online

I may not have told you before, but I love Mashable. What has prompted me to announce this to the world is a recent post there listing 70 online language communities for learning and practicing languages. It includes a wide variety of possibilities, including LiveMocha and friendsabroad.com.

I have a student who asked me about websites for learning English. I had heard of LiveMocha before, but the Mashable post was good impetus for looking at it more closely. It looks good. Does anyone have any experience with it?

Sharing uncertainty

Miguel says it all: Share More!

He says:

Our gurus should be those who are unafraid to share their most vulnerable moments, those moments when they are learning that show they do not know what they are doing but are trying to learn.

While Miguel is primarily speaking to educators, his advice is good for everyone. When we have to pretend to be perfect, when we are afraid to show that we don't have all the answers, we do a disservice to ourselves and to everyone around us.

It's hard, though.

I find it easier, for instance, to talk about my uncertainties here on my blog than I do with my coworkers. But when we do it, the results are usually amazing. I had a situation just last week where I was looking for a way to approach a topic in class. What I had done hadn't worked, and I needed help. I was looking in the resource room for something to use when a fellow teacher asked me what I was looking for. I told her. She didn't have any great ideas, but another teacher in the room told me to look in a particular book, that it addressed the topic very effectively. I took his advice, and the lesson was very successful.

Why are we so afraid? Why do we feel this need to be perfect?

I constantly tell my students that if they wait until they can do it perfectly, they will never learn to speak English. And yet I find myself not wanting to share my vulnerabilities with my colleagues.

I think I am getting better about this. Blogging has helped me a lot. Reading blogs has helped me a lot. I hope I can make more progress as I go along.

Playing Catch-up

Since starting this new job, I have been constantly playing catch-up. After 2 and a half weeks, I am starting to get caught up. It feels good. But my Bloglines account has been severely ignored. I have done a little reading over the last two weeks, but tonight I had over 1200 posts to read. There is no way I can really read that many posts!

So it is time to clean out my account, weed out those feeds I often skim over at best. This will require that I think seriously about what my needs are right now and what my interests are. I think they have changed a bit over the last few months.

All of this is, I hope, preparatory to my return to blogging on a regular basis. I miss it!