Blogging challenges for 2017

This New Year’s thrust list is definitely including some blogging challenges. I'm calling this list a thrust list, in contrast to the common expression "New year's resolutions", I´ll use the word "thrust" because its meaning is more suitable for what I have in mind. A thrust is a propulsive force caused by a jet or rocket engine and that is exactly what I have in mind. I included in the list a number of things I already do, things that somehow need a renewed motivation. Blogging is one of them.

I began the year looking for blogging challenges to reignite an old blog that I have. There were two motivating incidents. Firstly, browsing my Twitter feed I found a Tweet inviting to join the #edublogsclub challenge, Secondly, I was asked to promote strategies for documenting school activities among teachers. These two motivating incidents seemed to be made one for another, I was presented with the chance to unite two objectives into a more comprehensive one. It was a straight forward decision to design a PD to help teachers begin and sustain documentation activities by regularly blogging. This idea is by far not something new in the education world, but it seemed promising given some personal and professional circumstances.

The first motivation thrust mentioned above has already produced some forward motion. I enrolled to take part in the one-year long challenge of blogging every week about a specific prompt. Prompts are out every Tuesday and participants are supposed to compose a post, publish it and share it with the blogging community. Once the post is published, the permalink to access it should be posted as a comment in each respective Ronnie’s (from Edublogs) original post. I’ll take the sharing of the link a couple of steps further, I intend to share the link in my Twitter account using related hashtags and as an update in my Facebook account. I expect to reignite this two SM accounts too.

The second motivation thrust mentioned above, to create a PD opportunity at the school where I work, needs a little more planning time. I expect to get it going by mid-February. For starters, I´m planning a 10 post challenge for beginners. This will be only to help beginners to learn how to use the blogging platform (still in the process of selecting one). After the 10 posts challenge for beginners is finished, participants will have to choose what to their opinion significant milestones are in the learning process of their students and document those milestones. This overall goal is intended as a bias to stimulate teaching practices reflections, as a mean to improve quality standards in the classroom.

The next challenge is to begin planning how to put these ideas ahead.

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Photography is my serious hobby

It is Tuesday again and the #edublogsclub challenge prompt is out. This fourth prompt has a very special meaning for me, because photography is a very serious hobby for me. I spend many hours taking pictures, studying the work of great photographers and seeing tutorials in a number of recognized youtube channels. This is something I already integrated to my daily life that in fact I lately chose my smartphone based on the quality of its main camera, regardless of other features.

I started taking digital pictures many years ago with a 3 MP point-and-shoot camera, which I still use, mainly because I was curious about digital image production. Back in that time, DSLR cameras were way out of my league, I did not have any clue about shutter speed, f numbers or ISO values. Depth of field and Speedlight guide number were mysterious concepts to me. The point-and-shoot was in automatic mode, always. For the record, there is nothing wrong in using a camera, professional or hobbyist, in auto mode. Some recognized professional photographers use it, for instance to take a scratch picture of a scenery to be perfected latter. The deal is to progressively switch to semi-automatic modes and finally to full manual, there is a clear gain in control over picture quality and creativity possibilities.

 

Now, after this short intro to my post I’d like to come back to the topic of the prompt: including an image. For the remaining of this post, I’ll try to make a point how still images make a meaning.

As educators, we are supposed –among a thousand other things- to be professional communicators. At least to the extent of our subject’s field of knowledge. We spend a great deal of time developing printed/digital documents of various formats, even video and sound formats are expected. In my case, most of those documents include still images (photographs, clipart, diagrams, charts, etc.) I tend to use images for two reasons, one reason is “decorating” a rather boring document, the second one is presenting information otherwise difficult to express with text.

It is interesting to analyze the text to image ratio over a period of time, not so much surprisingly images have taken more space over time. In my opinion this is not always a disadvantage, as long as the imagery contributes to display concrete representations of the ideas being communicated. Text and images go together and the reader creates a compound understanding of the set. Readers do not rely only on the text they are reading, they capitalize on all the visuals, including the text that was treated as an image. Sometimes text and images are highly coupled, and it is impossible to take one away (text or image) without profoundly altering the original message.

Let me get back to one idea expressed above. Text can also be processed, in the sense of word processing, as a constitutive part of visual design. Consider for instance the following image.

Would you consider the content as text or image, or both? It is important to leave apart one technical aspect, the above is in fact an image (it was created and inserted as one image), that can be read as text. Do we understand sufficiently how text and images affect the process of delivering a certain message? I think the answer to this question is better provided by a semiologist.

PS: I regularly post my photographs in my Instagram account.

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Leadership in educational contexts

We live  making decisions, constantly. We like to think that humans make decisions rather rationally than emotionally, because it is tough that way, that humans are rational beings. Our culture has championed rational endeavors, more than emotional ones for a very long period in time. In fact, after the late modern period, entire history time periods are mainly ranged on science and technological progress or breakthroughs. It is not until post-modern time periods, rationalism and emotional factors together have being recognized as drivers of the vast majority of social systems. Social factors have became more prominent to the extent of supporting the idea of a technology development trend tightly coupled to social movements. Core philosophical concepts or ideas, such as "truth" or "real" -see Baudrillart and Kellner- transformed because of the symbiotic relation between technology and social changes.

Technology and social factors bending the truth. 
Here's a short example about how information age technologies affect social change.

I believe that that all social and technological game changer are driven by a number of different leaders -not a unique one- And every effecting change is always produced by a number of different leaders. According to an article found in Leadership-Central, leadership theorists agree on a detailed time line that begins with a "Great man theory" and then progress to some other "one man" leadership theories, only to finish with a more "distributed" concept of leadership and effecting change. In fact, post modern social theorists insist on the idea that social movements are affected by a number of concurrent factors, resulting in a fuzzy logic dynamics.

I support this affirmations  based on the concept of dynamic and chaotic systems. With the purpose of clarification, let me go into a very summarized intro to system dynamics. Chaotic systems are those highly sensitive to initial conditions. A very small variation on the initial conditions will create greatly divergent variants in system behavior, making impossible to cast long-term predictions. Take for instance voting predictions, as the voting process being a social and chaotic system in nature (a small variance in the initial variables, such as a small mathematical defect in the sample for vote intention polls, might affect the end result or prediction of the elected) Inside this kind of systems are what mathematicians call "strange attractors". Those attractors are subsets that seem to -literately- attract a number of similar results despite divergent initial states. Take a look at the following image:

The lines represent the general behavior of the chaotic system and the pattern you see in the image is caused by attractors. Different initial states will produce a different path each time, but all paths are shaped around the attractors, creating the pattern. This means that it is highly improbable to predict the exact path of a specific run, but it is highly probably correct to say that a specific run will show a given pattern.

Finally, this is what I think is leadership about in educational context. Leaders are attractors. Each of the lines or runs for the chaotic system can be a number of social entities: teachers, students, parents. This social entities will exhibit a specific behavior very difficult to predict, but within a given pattern produced by the leaders.

School leaders are not to create a deterministic context for edu actions to take place, but set the context for a multiverse set of actions withing an acceptance threshold, that is creating the conditions where different paths might converge to a desired pattern. Know that pattern will have fuzzy limits and it would look something like the above image, you´ll recognize the pattern appropriate for a school. Within the pattern a multitude of ways of thinking, a broad sense of reality and even some eccentric behavior paths should be accepted, in the name of cultural diversity. Jet again, you´ll recognize the pattern of a good school, when you see it.

For more detailed information:

• Chaos theory.
• Leadership theories.

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This is my workplace

The new prompt of  #EDUBLOGSCLUB has made me reflect on the following: at the school where I work, we ask repeatedly our students to introduce the school to other parties, such as students in other countries. Sadfully, teachers do not do that very often. Once in a while, as we attend to conferences or workshops we find ourselves sharing basic information about our schools. Where do you work at? How many students attend to your school? What subject do you teach? or some other simpler questions are a commonplace.

At first it seems a simple task. A short text accompanied with a photograph and the job is done. Why should I invest time and effort on doing that, if someone has already done it for me? The straight forward solution would be to share the school website link: Colegio Goethe Buenos Aires.  Now, my purpose here is to share with you what my feelings about my workplace are. 

 I still remember very vividly the first impressions I had as I walked in for the first time. It was for the last interview of the admission process, but the first one on site. I drove my car to the address I was given, considering the recommendation to arrive ten minutes earlier to the meeting time. Security staff checked my ID and let me use a visitor parking slot. That was the outer perimeter. After a three or four minutes walk, I arrived to the front desk in a large hall. Behind that front desk, I was able to see a large campus, big buildings and large open spaces, lots of students wearing neat uniforms and staff people walking around. That picture did not match with the memories of the school I attended as a student, a modest paroquial  school.  Please, don't get me wrong, it was not intimidating, but I couldn't help thinking about school's infrastructure and educational outcomes. 

Finding my way to the principal's office for the  planned interview was easy, staff members were so helpful to accompany me all the way to my destination. A staff member was actually waiting for me at the front desk, she started a friendly chat that helped me to calm down. Sometime latter, I realized the job interview had already started at that point as I learned she was a human resources consultant. The friendly chat  lasted for about ten minutes and then she showed me to the principal's office. The atmosphere was very welcoming. I was offered the position and invited for a tour around the facilities.   

Why am I telling you this, that happened 18 years ago? Because I keep this in mind every day I go to work: it looks like a small corporation's facilities and infrastructure, but the people inhabiting this buildings create the most enjoyable learning and teaching atmosphere I've ever experienced. 

As an IT professional and a digital learning evangelist, I learned to pack my fix-location-office in  and moved it to the cloud. It was a tough decision that many did not understand nor support,  specially top management representatives. They argued that not having a fixed location to be easily reachable (the were thinking about not having an extension number to dial whenever they needed to communicate with me) would make me regret my decision not long after.  This was back in 2004. Technology was on my side,  educational and management trends  were also on my side and this idea of a cloud based office finally took off like one of the most powerful airliners ever ! (actually I feel like I`m selling tickets to this airliner now) So, I can take my job to whatever location inside the school I prefer to and I use this advantage in many ways. Do we need to catch up with project indicators? then, lets book a small meeting room. Do we need to exchange some ideas before a PTA? then, lets have a coffee at the students cafeteria. Do we need to have an educational chat with a student about FB or TW appropriate usage before it is too late? then, lets meet at the front desk and have a walk in the school park.

It sounds great, isn't it? There are two things that concur. The most important one, the school I work for has a very strong culture of student centered learning / teaching / management methodology. Although in my country (.ar) the school system in general has a very archaic shape, international schools like the one I work for, enjoy of a certain degree of flexibility. The second one, IT resources are not an issue. Students and staff members have access to a variety of devices to carry around during school time and an incipient BYOD initiative is also in place. Don´t think it is like the IT Disneyland, but we are certainly beyond the defining event in IT.    

Basically, I work paperless, but I do not "hate" paper... I just do not need it for the most part of my personal or professional life. There are a few exceptions, like certain printed information that I'm legally obligated to keep. There are also a few drawbacks: doing backups regularly is a mayor concern, I struggle to  achieve connectivity or power supply redundancy and device or software upgrades are a must.

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This is my blog story

Scrolling up and down my Twitter feeds I found one entry that immediately caught my attention,

The Edublogger's Blogging Club of 2017 starts TOMORROW! Get weekly blogging prompts, free! https://t.co/UcX6yR9PQI

— edublogs (@edublogs) 2 de enero de 2017

At the moment I first read about the #EdublogsClub initiative, some basic questions arouse: Is this intended for beginners / amateurs or "professional" bloggers?  Is this my chance to develop a habit for blogging? I am currently on holidays, Will I have the time to sit down and think about the prompts?

That was like four days ago. I had the time to give it a thought. So, here I am, prompt 1: my blog story. I feel I have nothing more than a commonplace to write about prompt 1, so I decided not to bore you (if I happen to have a reader) Instead, I will make a confession: I´m here to learn from the community and to try (one more time) to develop a habit into blogging.

I am currently facing a crisis. Some time ago I found this quote by Umberto Eco:

I am an admirer of his work, he was one of the greatest thinkers of our era, and his words came down on me like a ton of bricks right on my head, until I learned about the impostor syndrome while reading Ronnie´s post "Should I blog or should I blog". Why wouldn´t I give it a try? Whether my posts are popular or not, my success indicator should be suitable to my learning process than to others expectations.  So, my challenge  would be to exceed my own current limitations and make a great effort to exit the comfort zone.

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