Godin Video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ot1Ahvjo8vI

This video is about Seth Godin talking about taking risks in the 21st century. Risks are not as risky as they once were. He mentions that if a person blogs about something but does not get the response he/she wants, the can try again tomorrow. Same with tweeting, if no one re-tweets their stuff, they can try again in an hour

He underlines the point of taking "appropriate risks. Take risks where "you are still in the game if you fail." I like this idea because having the connotations as a risk taker (and maybe even a failure) who hasn't achieved their goal yet is better than a someone who is happy with where the are at and does not try at all.

This relates to a quote of his where he mentions that defending mediocrity must be exhausting. Where in that holding yourself back takes much more of a toll than constantly putting yourself out there.

Seth Godin Tribes Quotes

Storify: http://storify.com/gfontana8/godin-quotes

My Passion

I would have never described myself as a passionate person before I decided to enter the teaching profession. I like to joke around for the most part, unless I am competing in something, anything. It was others who brought it to my attention that these are passionate qualities; I just thought I was a little immature because I didn't like to lose.

I still have those qualities when it comes to athletics and training. These passions have helped me as I transition my life in a new direction, an education/teaching direction. Instead of motivating a client to ignore their mental limitations to truly find their physical capabilities, I can use those skills to help students past their mental limitations so they can see their cognitive potential.

As of now I am content with honing and transferring these skills. Once I feel confident in my capabilities is when I can truly find  a narrow focus in my future research

Visitors and Residents

I would fall in the visitor category of visitor in Dr. White's analysis of the internet's residents and visitors. I never used the internet on a daily basis until a couple of years ago. I only stopped paying my bills by mail not long after I learned how to attach a file to an e-mail.  I am confident in my abilities now that I can admit in early as 2010, I did not know how to attach a file to an e-mail. That being said, once I realized that it was useful and made my life easier, I had no trouble learning the ways of the super highway.

This is probably most evident in that I have been playing fantasy basketball on Yahoo since 2005. I learned ways to maximize my roster so I had the most amount of players every week, yet I knew little else. It was useful and fun because 10-15 of my friends would be in these leagues. I even learned how to trash talk on the rumor mill (blogs for teams).

Now that I have emerged from my cave I am finding it very easy to adapt and learn to new internet tools. For my PACT I never touched a scanner to upload student assessments and lesson plan materials. I downloaded a PDF converter on my phone, learned how to use it in 5 minutes and saved time while making my work look organized and aesthetically pleasing.

I like being a visitor. It gives me the freedom to come and go as I please. I do not feel like I am missing out on anything if I am unable to get on the internet for a day or two. However, now that I have e-mail on my phone I am upset on how dependent I am on it.

Communities of Practice

·         Shared experience over time

·         Shared understanding

For the EDUC 578 course our community of practice would be the  1-year MCC Cohort. Our domain would be our commitment to the year program. We were not friends before this program started, yet we became friends because of our goals and struggles. Few students outside the cohort may not value or recognize our growing expertise, but we do have a collective competence and indeed learn from each other.

Our community is both academic and social. For various events our presence in “mandatory.” We share what we learned and compare notes. Socially, we sometimes get together for drinks to unwind and release stress.

We definitely have a practice of practitioners. On almost a daily basis we meet after our student-teaching for night class and it is here where we share experiences, resources, tools and ways of addressing problems we have faced in our placement.

Our PLNs are another example of a community of practice. Those who we connect with (and those who connect with us) via twitter are presumably on the site to further their own understanding and knowledge to whichever subject, in our case, teaching. A plethora of ideas have already been exchanged through similar PLNs. Classroom management techniques, ideas for a unit, or maybe even an educational way to utilize a free 10 minutes are ever present on Twitter (after some thought, twitter sounds like a community of interest, not community).

http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/19/02/67/PDF/Henri-France-2003.pdf

The above link is an article that describes communities of interest. A community of interest functions much like a community of practice. The people within it have a passion and are committed to deepening that passion with added study or learning techniques. The main difference is that, for the sake of highlighting the difference, the members of a community of interest do not really care about the other people in their “community.” This is ever present with the inclusion of the internet as learning tool. The impersonal method of obtaining information needed is a solitary one. There is no face to face contact. It is these encounters that bonds of understanding occur. When these encounters are absent, so are the human connections that are needed for a community of practice.

A New Way Of Thinking

1.      L- directed thinking is an attitude to life that is characteristic of the left hemisphere of the brain—sequential, literal, textual etc…

R- directed thinking is an attitude to life that is characteristic to the right hemisphere of the brain—simultaneous, metaphorical, aesthetic, contextual etc…

My subject (History) requires both these ways of thinking to fully grasp the meaning and lesson of the subject. If forced to choose I would say R-directed thinking is more valuable, but L-directed thinking is needed to put events in sequential order to fully comprehend the spatial significance an event might have.

I can try and reach this balance by constantly intertwining R and L directed thinking in the lessons. Do not expect students to remember every single date of an event, but on which ones came after which and why. When this is learned, filling in dates will be easier to remember by the events already being grounded in their knowledge base.

2.      AAA (Abundance, Asia, Automation) greatly diminishes L-directed thinking in business and schools. True, in the United States’ past it was important to be able to produce a mass of goods at a quick pace. These two factors almost always guaranteed success. Presently, things are not as simple. With the flood of products and the competition of cheap labor across U.S. borders, new aspects are necessary to become successful in business. Abundance has caused a greater attention to the aesthetics of products. As machines once replaced the workforce in the early 20^th century, such is the case with computers and human knowledge, turning it into a kind of automated knowledge. In short, AAA is no longer just effecting the blue collar workforce, but the white collar as well. White collar workers are now faced with the decision to become masters in their field (with the help of R-directed thinking) or become outsourced. Schools find themselves thrown in the predicament because they are supposed to cultivate the next generation of workers and contributors. If the work force is changing, so must the curricula taught in schools.

3.      High Concept- Capacity to detect patterns and opportunities to create artistic and emotional beauty, to craft a satisfying narrative, and to combine seemingly unrelated ideas into something new.

High Touch- The ability to empathize with others, to understand the subtleties of human interaction, to find joy in one’s self and to elicit it in other, and to stretch beyond the seemingly mundane in pursuit of purpose and meaning.

Both these are extremely important in my teaching. It is a combination of being able to make sense of a subject to students in an interesting and genuine way. It is possible to teach with only having one or the other, but the combination of these two principles will not only make the learning experience memorable, but also enjoyable.

4.      The flaws in an education system that only values IQ are the same flaws in a business that only values L-directed thinking, they both create uncreative students or workers. The role of EQ in education is to teach students to be productive, motivated and valuable members of whichever community they are a part of (home, school, athletics).