Self-Awareness of DNA

 

One of the things I’m learning as a designer is how important it is to make things. Make anything that comes into your head.  Make it if you think it’s going to be bad.  Make it, because even the failures — especially the failures — will teach you important things.

This is just a silly meme.  It’s serious and funny and insightful all at the same time. And yeah, it’s dumb.

But I made it.  It’s here.  You can think it’s dumb or you can think it’s powerful, or you can groan at how mediocre it is.

But I’m farther up the learning curve of design because I made it, than someone who didn’t.  And that’s a powerful insight all its own.

NECC ’09: Blogging Best Practices

Just met Scot McLeod of Dangerously Irrelevant in the Bloggers Café.  Hi, Scott.  That’s definitely a blog worth reading regularly.

About to attend a session with John G. Hendron of Goochland County Public Schools, titled Blogging Best Practices for Educators. John’s been blogging since 19919, he’s an instructional technologies, a musician and the author of RSS for Educators. In 2005, he ran the Teacher Blogging Initiative which required each teacher to maintain a weblog on the school division’s server from principals down.  In 2003 they had 10 teachers blogging, 18 in 2004, 205 in 2005, and WordPress multiuser they’ve gone to 230 bloggers in the district, along with podcast support, and comment and trackback performance.  Shout out to Akismet for WordPress, mentioning that it needs a purchased license from the company.

At my parents’ house

I’ve spent the last few days at my parents’ house for the holiday. I came down on Tuesday, and we went to see A Man for All Seasons in New York on Wednesday. We had lunch together at the Oyster Bar (their clam stew is delicious), and then took a cab over to the theater.

The performance was excellent, but it made me sad to think that we haven’t really moved past the idea of thoughtcrime in 500 years. Thomas More maintained a very careful silence after his resignation as Chancellor of England about his opinions of Henry VIII’s divorce of Catherine of Aragon and marriage to Anne Boleyn. Yet it didn’t help him at all: King Henry’s ministers and secretaries gradually wove a net of difficulties around him, confiscating his properties and ultimately using perjured witnesses against him. A sad and lonely idealist at the end. Mom said that she thought More’s wife and daughter deserved to be sainted for putting up with him.

We had a lovely Thanksgiving with my parents’ friends and their children. After supper we had a lengthy conversation about the nature of school vs. learning, and I felt refreshed and justified in discovering that even among the adults, all of us in the room liked learning, but that only 50% of us liked school. That suggests there’s a real disconnect between learning and school, and it will be important to fix that now in the United States.

Visiting Worcester, MA

There’s a pretty good chance that I’ll be in Worcester, MA this afternoon from about 2:00-2:30 until about 5:00-6:00. Anyone interested in hanging out, writing poetry, conversing, sparking ideas, sketching, browsing book or comic book stores, etc. during that time?

Off to get caffeinated. Going to try to set up ‘s tent afterward.