Author: Joseph Thibault

Quote – Carl Sagan

An extraterrestrial being, newly arrived on Earth–scrutinizing what we mainly present to our children in television, radio, movies, newspapers, magazines, the comics, and many books–might easily conclude that we are intent on teaching them murder, rape, cruelty, superstition, credulity, and consumerism.  We keep at it, and through constant repetition many of them finally get it.  What kind of society could we create if, instead, we drummed into them science and a sense of hope?

Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (page 39)

New Year’s Resolution

1/3 of my New Year’s Resolution is to read more.  I did pretty good in 2009 (after I spent a few days reflecting what books I actually read), here’s at least 90% of the actual books I read:

  • Hitchhiker’s Series (Douglas Adams): funny, zany, totally unbelievable, sometimes laugh out loud funny, but mostly just fun.  The 1st book is not out done by any of the subsequent stories and is my favorite by far.  But “So Long…” was a close 2nd.
  • Lord of the Flies – William Golding: kid on kid violence, but it’s a classic I never read in HS.  I recommend it.
  • Paranoia (free on DailyLit) – Joseph Finder: pulp entrepreneurship fiction.
  • Pizza Tiger – Thomas Monaghan (I think my copy is signed): it’s about Domino’s Pizza and how Tom made billions of dollars.  It was actually quite a good read.  Much better than The first billion is the hardest by T. Boone Pickens (where the writing was crap and the subject jumped all over from sentence to sentence).
  • Generation Kill – Evan Wright: the book and the HBO series were both great.
  • The Next 100 Years – George Friedman: in the next 100 years Japan is going to hurdle rocks, from the moon, towards our world-watching networks of satellites and we’re going to send marines in exoskeleton suits against them and Poland and kick their asses.  Mexico is our friend, China falls apart and Russia goes to the poor house.  Yes, it was interesting.
  • Blackwater – Jeremy Scahill: want to feel bad about what we’re doing in Iraq?  This book will get you there.  It will also piss you off about the recent dismissal of the case against some Blackwater operatives.  Someone should be held accountable.
  • The Associate – John Grisham: I found this at the airport (and after I finished it 2 legs of my journey later, I left it at the airport).  Shitty ending.
  • Call of the Wild (free on DailyLit) – Jack London: I can’t believe I hadn’t read this.  Excellent.  Buck is like my new man’s best friend.
  • Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (free on DailyLit) – duh: sometimes these old farts are hard to read.  Ben probably had a little bit of a selective memory, but his life was pretty awesome (considering he retired in his late 20s and then everyone kept giving him money and cool projects which he slam dunked).  A few lessons learned: be a vegetarian, don’t drink ’til you’re 40s (after you’re retired), make friends with just about every important person in history and start one of the 1st modern universities (if possible).
  • Post American World – Fareed Zakaria: I blame John Stewart and Stephen Colbert for adding this to my book list.  Overall, I thought it was a little bit to hard on the good ol’ USA (I think our future’s a lot brighter).
  • Ender’s Game – Orson Scott Card: bored at the airport, this $6.99 book was good and entertaining throughout.  There’s a whole series (the Ender Quartet?) of them about a genius kid (who you meet at age 7) and how he defeats space invaders.  No joke.
  • I am Legend – Richard Matheson: way different than the movie popularized by Will Smith.  A really interesting take on the zombie/vampire genre in my humble opinion.  Not very long and worth the trip to the library.
  • UPDATED 1/5/10: Money Ball – Michael Lewis: very cool book, even if you don’t like baseball like me.  Premise: there is more to baseball than athleticism, and Bill Beane (GM for the A’s) figured out the equation, literally.  Awesome look at how statistics trump whatever “gut” feeling a scout/coach/GM might have about players.
  • The Outliers – Malcolm Gladwell: I like his writing style and his ideas.  Do I think he’s always right?  No, but the best point of the outliers is that it takes time and effort (and sometimes luck) to become an expert in anything.
  • Reefer Madness (Sex, Drugs and Labor in the American Black Market) – Eric Schlosser: did you know Marijuana grows in the wild in TN and KY?  neither did I.  The book was an in depth look at three of the US’s dirty little secrets and how they’ve thrived despite efforts to crack down on them.
  • UPDATED 1/20/10: Midnight Club – James Patterson: paraplegic cop takes down baddies (I didn’t buy this book).
  • Fareinheit 451 – Ray Bradbury: this actually kicked off me reading a bunch of classic fiction…great book if you’ve never read it.

I read a lot already online (I probably read about 50 pages of online text a day through blogs I follow), but my night time reading has fallen to occasionally.  In ’09 I read a pretty good list of books (above) but I definitely want to improve on how many real (as in tactile, bound, published books).  So my goal is to read a total of:

52 books (a book every week!).

…and go.

1/20/10 update: note that I originally said I was going to read 26 books, but after compiling the list of books I read in 2009, I realized that I had read about 26 books.  So, I’m taking the full on challenge: 1 book per week.

Stuck on OER (and somehow quotable)

One of the things on my bucket list is to be referred to (some day) as an expert.  You know, like those quacks on FoxNews in the split screen with the green screened cityscapes behind them.  For some reason that seems glamorous to me.

Getting quoted by a reputable blogger/educator only helps me take the first baby steps toward that goal.  Enter Miguel Guhlin, a really skilled and experienced Director of Instructional Technology in TX who quoted me on his blog (woot!).  The quote, well, it was from my comment left on this really interesting post at http://connectivism.ca that discussed the future of education technology and the differences (shortcomings?) of Learning Management Systems (LMS, which include Blackboard and Moodle) and Social Networking Sites (SNS, Facebook, Ning, etc.).

Here’s my comment in full, the bold is what Miguel picked out:

Great article, I really liked the fact that Martin chimed in about Moodle’s use and its design. I’ve been using it for several years and over that time have worked my best to educate teachers about the social features that can be used (as simply as the discussion forums). But training apparently isn’t enough, as course designs/construction almost always defaults to a content centric approach. It’s no fault of any Moodle administrators or trainers, it’s just that the Moodle tools provide a very easy way to organize content (and it’s often the very first thing taught to new Moodlers).

I’m eager to see the new features in Moodle 2.0, however I’m not sold that they will accomplish the necessary change alluded to in this blog post.

On another note, perhaps my biggest gripe is that we’ve provided teachers this AWESOME tool to structure courses and content that could easily be used by other teachers, but the software locks it down (or at least, it provides tools that are easily configured to “close” the content to the outside). Sure there are Moodle course exchanges, but far and wide content is closed to outsiders, difficult to procure (even if a backup is available) and not available as OER. Imagine if all the content created in Moodle were open? THAT would be a great asset to the educational community and would be ripe to transition past the “build today use for 3 years model” to more of a social approach (where the best content floats to the top of social interactions because it’s freely available).

I’ve got a soft spot for Open Educational Resources (OER — and I mean really, truly open resources, e.g. no passwords, fees, indexed by Google).  Part of it is driven by the fact that I think we (the human race) should have access to every subject matter that we want to learn (for free).  The idea of paying for access to certain content just seems less and less acceptable as I get older (at least some of that stems from how spoiled I am by my personal learning network and the internet, which never fails to edutain me).

The other part is driven by the fact that OER makes education easier.  It’s faster to use content that’s already been created and in many cases, that content has a high probability of being higher quality and vetted (not to mention thoroughly checked and re-checked by those that have come across it before and used it likewise).

So…how might I become an expert?  Well, I think the first part is to continue contributing to the discussion about OER and how it should be organized, categorized, classified, etc.  The other way to turn out any and all of my content as OER (but I really haven’t found an effective way to do that either).  Truly open resources are hard to come by (but they are out there: http://www.oercommons.org/), I hope to make it my job to advance and grow OER.  (After all, that’s 50% of the mission of http://Coursefeeds.com)

Quote – Jonathan Rosenberg of Google

There are two components to our definition of open: open technology and open information. Open technology includes open source, meaning we release and actively support code that helps grow the Internet, and open standards, meaning we adhere to accepted standards and, if none exist, work to create standards that improve the entire Internet (and not just benefit Google). Open information means that when we have information about users we use it to provide something that is valuable to them, we are transparent about what information we have about them, and we give them ultimate control over their information. These are the things we should be doing. In many cases we aren’t there, but I hope that with this note we can start working to close the gap between reality and aspiration.

Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President, Product Management, Google – “The meaning of open“