The First Cut is the Deepest

I grew up generally interested in sports, although I never played on an organized team. My brother played baseball for several years, and a major portion of my inlaws' lives as they grew up revolved around organized sports (some of them still do). I collected baseball cards, played a little baseball in the backyard with my brother, played basketball fairly regularly at Scouts (but never enjoyed it that much), and went to a few Yankees games, even though I was a Mets fan. The Yankees fan in the family was a lot more vocal than I was. I still remember the day I became a Mets fan. It was pretty anticlimactic. Sitting in Mrs. Sullivan's fourth grade class, probably working on our latch hook pillows, Ralph Aiello asked me who my favorite team was. I told him the Mets and the Yankees, since living in North Jersey, those were the teams you heard most about. He told me I couldn't like both of them. So I picked the Mets. That was it.

Over the next few years, I didn't think much about playing organized sports until shop class at Eisenhower Middle School. We would be working on our pointless projects (no, really, even more pointless than most junior high shop classes; my brother at least got to make a grappling hook) and the guys would be talking about their football and baseball teams they played on. It kind of hit me. I thought, hey, I'd like to play something. I realized, though, by that point, I knew little enough about most of the sports that I'd probably make a fool of myself if I actually tried out for anything, since I hadn't been playing since I was 5 like they all had.

When I was 15, I worked a summer at the baseball fields. I was ahead of my time and unwittingly broke a gender barrier; apparently boys are supposed to work as umpires, and girls work in the snack bar. I got a job at the snack bar...with 11 girls. I'd figured out something all the umpires hadn't: girls, shade, and candy were better than angry parents, hot sun, and no candy.

In high school, my friends and I started playing volleyball regularly, slowly figuring out the rules and techniques (which was a lot harder in the pre-internet days). We played a lot, and once or twice we even challenged random people at the big volleyball pits in West Bountiful, but still nothing organized. My sisters got me into racquetball when I started college, and in my time at USU, I took classes in racquetball, volleyball, billiards, and golf. Over the next decade or so, I played each of those sports sporadically. I had a pretty regular volleyball schedule going a couple years ago, but it fizzled out. I've also been picking up the Triathlon bug as well, but that's another post.

So about a year and a half ago, I taught a couple guys that worked for me to play racquetball. We started playing a couple days a week when we needed to get away from the office for a little bit. In a completely unrelated move, I had joined Facebook a few months before, and was kind of figuring it out, not sure how much I liked it or not. (I'm still not sure.) Like a good Seinfeld episode, but less funny, the two stories came together when Tom Caswell, a fellow PhD student, posted something on Facebook about how the best part of his PhD program was playing racquetball. I followed up, started playing with him and a group of other guys, and over a year later, generally playing 2 or 3 mornings a week, here I am pretty decent at racquetball.

So a couple nights ago, the racquetball team, officially a campus club, held tryouts. I was pretty sure I didn't have the time to actually join the team, but curiosity got the best of me. Could I compete? Could I make the team?

I showed up 5 minutes early, and it was a pretty packed house. I was by far the oldest person there. I figured I'd get toasted and head home, coming away with a good story about how woefully inadequate I am, while maybe learning a move or two to show the guys the next morning.

We started late, and there were way too many guys there for the number of courts they had available, especially since for some reason the team president thought it was important to play singles, not doubles or cutthroat, which left a handful of us standing around talking about how nice it would be to get to play. Someone finally convinced el presidente to let us play cutthroat and/or doubles and we were all in. They watched from up above, occasionally asking questions like our names and how many years of school we had left. I did pretty well, serving quite a few aces and some very wicked kill shots from all the way in the back court. I was on fire and started thinking, hey, maybe I can do this. After about half an hour of playing (and half an hour of not playing), they called us all together to make the first cut. I didn't make it.

They called around 8 to 10 names and asked those guys to come outside to talk about what was next, since they would be having another round of cuts at some point. I biked home, shrugging off what might have been, knowing I probably wasn't going to have even joined the team had I made it.

Just as I got home, I got a phone call from the team president. Apparently he'd written my name down but accidentally called someone else's name instead of mine. He wanted me to come back. So I drove back to the gym to find out the details on when they would be having us come back for the final round of cuts.

Oh. They were doing it right then. I hadn't brought my stuff back, since I didn't think we were playing anymore that night. I didn't have my glove, racquet, goggles, or headband. I borrowed a racquet that I wasn't used to playing with, sweat running unimpeded down my face, and afraid of getting hit in the eye. Still, I played well. I destroyed a couple guys when I know they were watching from above. I also was destroyed by one guy that was pretty awesome. It was humbling to be in the same court as one so great. I was pretty evenly matched with a couple other guys. So you do the math: if they're going to take 5 or 6 guys, and there was only one guy who could really slaughter me, I had to be in. Maybe I will be on the team. Maybe I will get to go to all these cool tournaments. Maybe I'll go to nationals.

And I was cut. For the first time in my life I didn't make the team (except the other time about an hour before, when I was accidentally cut but then reinstated).

And just like that, I'm back in dissertation land.

Addicted or just that busy?

How busy or addicted to your mobile device do you have to be that you can't set your phone down for five minutes while you take pictures for your business card?


Here's more info if you're extra excited about having someone this busy as your realtor. And yes, there is a picture of him talking on a different phone.

What is Instructional Design?

I'm working on a project designing an M.Ed. program. There is one course in Instructional Design. It's kind of interesting having taken many courses and done quite a bit of research on this topic, it's hard to nail things down to what you'd cover in just one class.

If you're looking for core principles for this field, it seems to me that there are three general levels of abstraction. At least, this is what I came up with.

The first layer is what I'll call the Process layer. This is ADDIE, the Dick & Carey Model, or Rapid Prototyping, meaning the overall process of determining stakeholder needs, implementing something to meet those needs, and evaluating how well needs were met. These models are generally ongoing cycles.

The second layer is what I'll call the Architectural layer. This is Merrill's First Principles of Instruction or Gagné's 9 Events of Instruction. In order to get to this layer, you have to be (or should be) going through a design process, and you decide the types of problems students will have to solve and the ways in which students will be motivated to learn. This is the core of designing how the course will function, how and when learning materials will be accessed by students, and making sure on a macro level that the course will be effective.

The third layer is what I'll call the Turbidity layer. This is Sweller's Cognitive Load Theory or Clark & Mayer's Multimedia Principles. Once the first two layers are set and the overall framework has been laid out, the outline is filled in with details. These specifics can either add to or detract from the planning in the first two phases. Maybe you've got awesome videos with no pause buttons. Maybe course materials are scattered around on half a dozen websites, each with their own username and password to access. Given two great textbooks, which do you choose? Every choice you make, no matter how small, can make your instruction more or less clear. On a micro level, ensure your course materials are effective.

How many of these layers can you integrate into one instructional design course and in what order?

Energy Independency

We are an unstoppable oil dependency breaking machine. Unfortunately the machine runs on oil.



Thank you Jon Stewart.

Blogging Class

This week I'm teaching a fun blogging class to students from the Summer Citizens program at Utah State. It should be a lot of fun helping them learn this technology.

786,432 points of light

A great video from a couple years ago that points out some of the disconnect between teachers and students:



See further discussion of the video by the professor involved in its creation.

I wonder how some of these statistics have changed since the original video was made. The point is just as valid.

Twitter: Lame or Misunderstood?

Last month, I mentioned an idea to use Twitter to let students communicate with the teacher and others live in a classroom. It turns out there is a professor in Texas doing this in her history class. Students tweet during class as well as when they're not in the classroom. Students can text in their tweets, use their laptops, or write a note and hand it to the TA to tweet for them. Interesting.

The question, though, is whether this will really connect to younger students. According to a few studies I've seen, younger students aren't interested in Twitter. They do text a lot, and they use Facebook. You'd think that anyone who liked texting would like Twitter, but apparently that's not the case. You could use Facebook to facilitate this same in-class communication just as well as Twitter. In the end, the tool itself probably doesn't matter that much, so long as you find something to open up the lines of communication with your students.

It would be nice if people would learn the various tools, the etiquette to using each, and the strengths and weaknesses of each, before making a judgment as to how lame or like totally awesome a given technology is.

We recently had an earthquake a few hundred miles away from our town, and one guy I talked to said the first place he thought to look was Facebook, to figure out what happened. The first place I thought to look was Twitter. On Twitter, I was instantly connected to hundreds of other people who I don't know discussing the earthquake. On Facebook, there were less than half a dozen people that I know who mentioned something about it. I really didn't gain any information from Facebook.

There are problems with Twitter. There are problems with Facebook. Both have benefits. Choose to participate or not in either or both. However you do or don't participate, there are conversations happening. Will you be part of those conversations? Will you start a conversation?

Cell Phones in the Classroom

I spent a little time yesterday reading about using cell phones in the classroom. I'll do a more thorough write-up of this later, but I think one of the most interesting potential applications is using cell phones as an iClicker replacement. Sure there is an extra layer of complexity there in getting SMS responses in quickly especially if you're in the basement of a building with low signal strength and the question of how to deal with the less than 1% of students who don't have cell phones, but at the same time, you have a pervasive technology that students already use on a daily basis.

To loosen it up from the more formal polling of just certain questions, what about live tweeting in a classroom? You can use twitter from your cell phone or from a laptop. There are many conferences that provide a hash tag for that conference so everyone can follow what everyone else at the conference is tweeting about. So how about the professor set up a hash tag for their class and run a live feed either just to their monitor to see what students are or aren't understanding, or if they're feeling really adventurous, run the feed to the projector so the whole class can see. You could minimize purposefully distracting tweets by having students register their twitter account beforehand, so if someone puts something dumb up on the screen, you'd know who it was.

Of course, the type of professor who would kick someone out of class for participating in a discussion would retire before allowing something like this in their classroom, but they're not really the market for something like this anyway. It needs to be professors who actually want feedback from their students.

Internet Explorer has stopped working

Yes, thank you, Windows Vista, for that great error message. I think I already know what made it stop working, though. It probably has something to do with the fact that I clicked the red X thingy in the corner to close it.

Food Revolution

Awhile back, I mentioned a McDonald's commercial where a team loses the soccer championship, and we find out it's because they eat Happy Meals after their games. Here's the video that hadn't been posted at the time:



With the Olympics going on currently, we're inundated with more McDonald's commercials telling us how much the athletes eat it all the time. I suppose it is possible that it's not all a big lie and that these commercials are not outright fraud. Yes, these athletes work hard to fine tune their bodies to do amazing things, and it seems that fast food wouldn't fit in there. However, it is plausible that McDonald's is an integral part of these athletes' diets. Considering that Michael Phelps eats 12,000 calories a day to keep up with his training demands, it is possible he loads up on a few Mighty Kids Meals at 800 calories and 1400 mg of sodium per meal as an efficient way of piling on the raw energy his body needs. That doesn't mean it's good for the rest of us. Exercise like Phelps and you can eat whatever you want.

So do we add a sin tax to bad food or threaten kids with cancer or diabetes to fix the problem?

Jamie Oliver may have it right with his goal to educate people about food so they have the tools to make good choices for themselves. He says:

I wish for everyone to help create a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food, inspire families to cook again and empower people everywhere to fight obesity.

Hopefully his Food Revolution works. Is there anything else that can?