Jim's Blog

WordPress has snuck this in … unless I pay $99 per site — you will be subjected to ads I do not control.  And we thought FB was bad for abusing folks.

#Wordpress #FAIL

One of my first tasks in state government was to review the plans and progress for Y2K upgrades — some $320 million spread across 2 dozen agencies.  The State CIO developed a simple system of measuring momentum and progress — red, green, yellow signals.  If you made no progress in a month, or backed up, you got a red light.  If you had made progress, but not complete all tasks on schedule, you got yellow.  Green meant everything was going according to plan

This NYT story reminds me how effective such an implementation tool can be:

Getting Stuff Done: It’s a Goal, and a Rating System

Everybody should know what everybody’s goals and controls are, and everybody should understand their individual ones relative to their department, and their department’s goals relative to the company’s.  To achieve that, we publish company wide goals and controls. We have six major goals this year, and there might be three or four metrics for each. We publish that every month for the company. It’s transparent. Then we talk every month with the company about whether we’re at green, yellow or red on any of those six things, and we are very transparent about that. We don’t hide the bad news.

Good read

http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2013/Teachers-and-technology

From David Warlick’s blog on teaching and learning — a thought-provoking essay (wait, I am redundant), an essay discussing the utilities of a textbook.  Lots of ideas that may provoke many more essays, hopefully to learn why we use texts, how texts may transform, what we should do about texts whose cost exceed both present and future value….  But, nonetheless, lots of ideas…  like:

The job of the teacher would be to locate (or cause to be located) and attach content (both open-source and/or commercial), in any appropriate format, to that arrangement of scope and sequence-forming tags and constantly filter and refine that content based on changing conditions and newly available content?

What might this process look like as an integral part of teacher education?  Might the act of starting their own flexible digital textbooks be a part of learning to teach.  (Is “Flexbook” trademarked?  How about “flexibook?”)

Seems like yesterday, I lifted Caiti up to place the star on the family Christmas tree.  Now she enters the blogosphere, and writes about her fear of heights and why she writes.

Dave Winer discusses the power of writing as it is an exercise in thinking.  Dave Winer is one of the creators of the blogosphere.  I started blogging 12 years ago using one of his first blog products, Radio UserLand.

Which reminds me of other good readings about why we (should) write:

• On Writing – Stephen King
• Learning a Trade – Reynolds Price
• Thinking on Paper – V.A. Howard and J.H. Barton

Writing is purpose-driven thinking.  Writing is hard work.  Writing can be exegesis for the curious and an occlusion of reality for the escapist.

Here’s to good thoughts, good writing, and a mastery of the outputs of her amygdala!