Connections

I took this photo of a spider web covered in frost on my way to work in October. It seemed an apropos connection to various classes and events of the week. I finally understand the networking stuff from our Configuring Network Learning Environments class. While I’m not sure how this information will relate to using Moodle in a Linux environment, I’m up for that challenge too. In the meantime this information has allowed me to understand the web of cables, routers, and devices strewn along the walls of the small non-profit I work for. Because we had a bit of down time in the Web II class this week I got into researching the history of computers and the Internet. In my links section see the really cool blog called An Incomplete History of Personal Computing.

Every once in a while I do a ‘catch up’ week of making connections with the people in my life: old friends, family, and business networking that I’d been putting off. The net result is I have a date on valentine’s day with a dear friend and her four month old baby, reconnected with an old colleague who is teaching in inner NYC, found out my sister’s job went kaput after 23 years, and my parents were thankfully just outside the area where the tornadoes hit Florida this week. John Perry Barlow, a Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation is quoted as saying: The central purpose of technology is to connect ... to make contact. To wake up, shocked by the voltage of increased interaction between the properties of humanity in my heart and those in yours … I had a business communication over this week that taught a great lesson about email. I was working on a project with one group, and forgot that I had not covered all my bases with another group over said project. I was in a hurry and wrote and sent off an email that I did not re-read…big mistake! I found out later that my email, which in my view was just an objective stating of facts, could in fact be read from a whole different perspective…and was. I said something like a second planned meeting was cancelled last minute…forgetting to mention that the other party was at home with the flu. Overall I apologized, but I wasn’t really sure whether to say sorry I blew it or thank you for letting me learn that mistake from you...

In Ped II we began reading Integrating Differentiated Instruction and Understanding by Design. It seems to be a combination of sound instructional design connected with a desire to make the curriculum accessible to multiple needs. What hit me the most while reading was the quote: Even the best curriculum delivered in a take-it-or-leave-it fashion will be taken by a few and left by too many (18). These authors clearly state that this is not really a methodology, but a way of thinking (10). At CCV, this has been known as Universal Instructional Design. UID principles include: getting concrete (goals, syllabus, assignments, feedback), varying teaching methods (to meet learning styles), allowing for options (makes output accessible and real), and using technology. I don’t really like the term UNIVERSAL though. I still think it connotes a one-size fits all approach. Looking at the Latin roots of universal it literally means like one turn: UNI (one, single) VERS (bend, turn) AL (pertaining to, like, of the kind, belonging to). We should change the terminology to MULTIVERSAL – belonging to many turns….