Learning Sciences should be about more than learning science!
My research group (Stephanie Teasley, Eric Cook, and Jude Yew) and I are proposing a workshop for the International Conference for the Learning Sciences (ICLS 2008). We're hoping to get a group of people together to discuss learning as it occurs outside classrooms and other formal and semi-formal instruction environments. I've been frustrated with learning sciences events and publications in the past because they seem to focus too narrowly on classroom learning - especially middle school science and math classrooms. Thinking of learning, rather than instruction, seems an important distinction, and the learning sciences community ought to stake a broader claim. Not only are we studying learning outside the laboratory, we're studying it outside contexts explicitly established for learning.
For example, I consider myself a learning scientist; I elect this moniker because I'm interested in how adults learn in their professional environments.
- How do civil engineers learn to design with a new building technology?
- How to doctoral students learn the lay of the land in their new schools?
- How do communities capture and represent the knowledge that resides in them?
- What does the way organizations use wikis tell us about what knowledge they value?
These questions and more ought to be part of the Learning Sciences even though I didn't mention minors, teachers, curriculum, or standards once. Hopefully our workshop will get accepted, and it will become a welcome respite and energized conversation for others frustrated by the science classroom focus of today's learning sciences.
A confession
I confess. I have spent about $80 at Wal-Mart in the last week. I honestly cannot remember the last time I spent money at Wal-Mart; I'm not even sure when the last time I walked in to a Walmart was. But, I'm in northwest Iowa, and Walmart has run the other stores (Kmart, Shopko, White Drug) out of town. On my first trip, I was accompanying a friend who needed (yes, needed) the audiobook of the new Harry Potter. The local bookstore was sold out of everything Harry Potter, so Walmart was the only local option. I bought sunscreen and deodorant. I should've gone to HyVee instead, but I was lazy. I'm ashamed.
Then, yesterday, I was in Wal-Mart because my brother insisted that we go there to buy a socket set because he knew they'd have it, and we desperately needed to fix the SeaDoo. While waiting in line to buy said socket set, I noticed the Walmart optical center and wandered over; I found they had the contacts I'd just paid through the roof to have overnighted to me from VisionDirect. I returned to the lake house to poll my friends about whether or not I could justify canceling my internet order and buying my contacts at Wal-Mart. Meggie, an alternative medicine student, checked, and sure enough, I was experiencing pretty nasty eye strain. Those of us at the house then decided it was ok for me to return to Wal-Mart and buy my contacts if I offset my indiscretion by donating to a worthy cause.
So, now I'm looking for somewhere to send my $70. That's how much I saved by shopping at Wal-Mart, and since I was shopping there to get my contacts 2 days earlier, we decided I should donate the price difference. So, where should my $70 go? I suggested maybe the Michigan Democratic Party, but Meggie pointed out that charitable organizations are having some trouble this year because so many people are sending their charity dollars to campaign-related pots. The Dems will have to wait until fiscal 2008 to get any of my money, I guess. Where would my $70 be most useful and most likely to offset some of the damage I did by shopping at Wal-Mart? Here are some ideas, and I'm interested in your suggestions:
- First Book - a nonprofit organization with a single mission: to give children from low-income families the opportunity to read and own their first new books
- Food Gatherers - exists to alleviate hunger and address its causes in our community by: reducing food waste through the rescue and distribution of perishable and non perishable food; coordinating with other hunger relief providers; educating the public about hunger; and developing new food resources.
Here's an article from Money magazine that talks about the evil-not evil debate that's in my head.
My not-so-digital life
It turns out the physical world still very much affects me. I don't mean that I still have to walk around or that I still bump into things and bruise myself. I mean that things like DVDs, papers, and Cubs tickets still muck up my plans.
I'm on vacation in Okoboji, Iowa, and I thought I'd packed well. I thought wrong. I forgot to return some DVDs to Blockbuster on my way out of town, and I'm pretty sure I'm now the proud owner of The Long Kiss Goodnight and the not-at-all-proud owner of How to Lose Your Lover. Yes, I could just send them back to the store from here, but that would require effort I'm not sure I have the energy to muster.
I also forgot that my syllabus for "Getting Started: GSIs Teaching Graduate Students," a Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT) orientation I'm teaching in late August, is due next week. Luckily, my very helpful officemate, Jun Zhang, was kind enough to send me all the papers I've gathered in preparation for writing that syllabus. UPS delivers to this remote area where DHL and FedEx fear to tread, and my papers arrived today. I guess that means I'll write a syllabus in the next few days. It seems strange to call a workshop plan a "syllabus," but that's what the guy at CRLT called it.
Two more things - Cubs tickets and more DVDs. I forgot to turn on my vacation status thing on Half.com, and someone bought my West Wing DVDs. Thanks, Chris, for getting into my apartment and sending those off for me! My eBay reputation stays unblemished this year; we can almost forget about that phone snafu from a while back Thanks to Nicki, I don't have to worry about the Cubs tickets I also forgot in my apartment. She got them off via USPS to my cousin's waiting family. I wouldn't be able to forgive myself had I ruined a 3 year old's chance to see a Cubs game. Unforgivable!
So what have I learned during the last few days?
- My friends are wonderful people (well, not learned, but reminded).
- My need to send and receive postal mail increases as my distance from my apartment increases.
- I do need more than my laptop to get work done.
I think I've sent and received more postal mail in the last 5 days than in the 5 months before that. Well, wait, I was the lucky recipient of a number of fantastic post cards. Maybe I deal with mail more often than I notice. It just seems odd to me that I've had to arrange for the delivery of so many items in the last few days. Of course, I haven't even mentioned Harry Potter. I had the last book sent to my parents' lake house, and it took until very late Saturday afternoon for the darn thing to arrive. 749 pages is too many. My eyes are tired, but my curiosity is sated.
Now that I've managed to blather on about mail for an entire blog post, I invite you to check out my Okoboji vacation pictures. You'll be jealous!
libbyh.com on the move
Libbyh.com is on the move. I've opened a new account for the site with Dreamhost, and over the next week or so I'll be moving everything to their servers. Dot5Hosting sucks. That's all there is to it. They have horrible support, bad service, unacceptable down times, and are just all around irritating. So, I'm leaving Dot5Hosting and moving to Dreamhost. I apologize in advance for any complications the move presents for anyone reading. May I suggest some other blogs to read in the meantime? See the "recommended blogs" sidebar for your procrastinating pleasure.
The Treo 755p and how it makes me angry
I let a manager at Wireless Toyz talk me into trying a Palm Treo 755p with Sprint. What a stupid mistake. I was perfectly happy with T-Mobile; I just needed a new phone. I should've gone back to the Blackberry Pearl that I had at the beginning of the month and been happy. Instead, I decided to give a full-figured PDA a try, and I've been angry about it every since. Here are some of the reasons the 755p is not for me:
- Sprint doesn't work with SpinVox, and SpinVox may be my favorite thing of 2007
- Treos and Macs do not get along easy (total time to set up syncing: 3.5 hours)
- the 755p is a brick; it's so heavy my pants sag when it's in my pocket
- It takes 2 hands to accomplish most tasks with the 755p
- Sprint is insanely expensive - $105/month for voice, data, text messaging
- You can't download pictures from the Treo to your desktop; you have to go through Sprint Picture Mail
- The default ring tones are all bad.
- Chat help from Palm is not available for Mac users
And those are just the 8 I could think of right away. Argh! Do not buy a 755p if you are a Mac user or value your time. I can't speak to the Windows side, but getting iSync to work took 3.5 hours and a hard reboot of the 755p. I'm exhausted and irritated and still can't tell if my contacts made it over to the device. Boo!
Newsflash: Girl beats Word at its own game
Word tries to make my life complicated. I've tried LaTeX, OpenOffice, TextWrangler, and a variety of other Word workarounds, but the network effects dominate, and I always end up back in Word. Today, I won a very small victory.
When one copies text from some other application and then pastes it into Word, by default, the text pastes as it appears. This drives me crazy. You might wonder why. Well, I'm a rigorous "style" user, and I would much prefer that text be pasted to look like the rest of the text rather than to stand out. For example, when I want to put a URL in my notes, Word inevitably pastes it in giant serif font. That looks ridiculous in my small, sans serif notes. I can solve this problem by choosing "Paste Special" from the "Edit" menu, but I don't like to use a touchpad if I don't have to. There's no keyboard shortcut for "Paste Special." Until now!
My small victory was to make a macro that makes "Paste Special" the default rather than the exception. Simply recording a macro didn't work. I had to hack it. It's a 2 line hack, but a hack nonetheless. Here is the code you need to get Word (at least on a Mac) to Paste Special by default:
Sub EditPasteSpecial()
'
' EditPasteSpecial Macro
' Macro recorded 5/19/07 by Libby Hemphill
'
Selection.PasteSpecial Link:=False, DataType:=wdPasteTextEnd Sub
Thanks, Herb Tyson, for the solution.
Feminism shouldn’t be dead
I've begun to pay more careful and meaningful attention to gender and gender politics lately. Those of you who know me know that this is not an earth-shattering change for me. What's different about this change is not that I'm thinking about gender politics but that I'm getting frustrated. I even emailed with my mom a couple weeks ago about a number of misogynistic encounters I'd had recently. I was asked illegal questions about my age and gender in a job interview. I heard my colleagues use "young" to describe a woman and "inexperienced" to describe a man - the two were nearly indistinguishable on paper. I watched Shut Up and Sing and was appalled to see that calling women "sluts" for exercising their civil rights was considered acceptable behavior. And tonight, I read an article on Forbes.com that made me cranky.
Here it is: In Pictures: How to network without saying a word
You'll notice that the first few tips are about how to use one's tie and jacket to make an impression as "strong." Argh! So many things happening there. I read the text version of the article too, just in case it was less gendered. While it helpfully provides "he or she" instead of just "he" when referring to what a person might do, it does not succeed in speaking to or for women. I'm not letting this get to me too much though because the whole premise of the article offends me. People should not be treated as means to ends, but this article encourages readers to "appear authentic." Why not just be authentic? Wouldn't that be better?
Where did the feminists go? Our work is not done.
For Girls, It's Be Yourself, and Be Perfect, Too (from the NY Times)
Male-female gap in income grows (from the Denver Post)
Shut Up and Sing
I just watched Shut Up and Sing, and I'm blogging to recommend it. The Dixie Chicks went through a lot after that fateful concert in the U.K., and the film chronicles much of that. After watching the film, I have a deeper appreciation for their latest album - Taking the Long Way. The songs on that album aren't just about struggle and hope but about the specific journey their band had to endure because they stood up for each and for their beliefs. I'm glad they didn't apologize to country radio, and I love that they were able to get a #1 album without radio.
Thank you for not shutting up, Dixie Chicks.
Libby on a leash
I gave in and picked up a BlackBerry Pearl yesterday. I was wandering around the Twelve Oaks Mall waiting for my friend to finish her cookie so we could go into the Apple store and pick up my ailing MacBook. Back to that in a sec, first the BlackBerry. So, this Pearl is HOT. H-O-T hot. I bought the white one. It looks like this:
Aren't you jealous? I think my inner geek may have outdone herself this time though. The BlackBerry might be too much for me. The QWERTY keyboard is a shocker after so many messages (over 400 last month) as a T9 user. My Samsung t809 is the maybe the best phone ever, and I can see myself going back to it before my 14-day trial is up on the NerdBerry (thanks for the nickname, Liz).
For those of you Gmail addicts thinking of getting a BlackBerry, I suggest using the Gmail mobile application instead of BlackBerry's Internet Email. The Internet Email option ensures that you'll get a buzz or ding or whatever alert every time any Tom, Dick, or Harry sends you an email. Yes, that includes the guy from some third-world country asking for a loan and the person who posts incessantly to your favorite listserv. If you get as much email as I do, your poor Pearl will wear itself out trying to get your attention. The Gmail mobile application lets you decide when to check your mail and shows the same content in your Inbox as gmail.com. That means no (or very little) SPAM, no messages you have skip your Inbox. It also means you won't be alerted to new email. I'd rather have to check it myself that not get a moment of peace though.
If the way I used my BlackBerry today is any indication of how I'll use it in the future, I'm officially on a leash. You can tug on it by sending me email or SMS. I'm pretty sure it works as a phone too, so you can even call me.
Now back to the MacBook. I'm usually a happy Mac user. I LOVED my PowerBook G4. It was the bomb. Then Apple started using Intel processors, and I could see the obsolescence of my little PowerBook. So, I jumped on the bandwagon and bought a MacBook. My MacBook has been ailing since the second day I owned it. I will spare you the saga. The latest news is that the guys at Apple had it for 5 days, replaced all kinds of stuff including the logic board, top case, and some switch, and my MacBook is still broken. It still has issues. It sill doesn't work the way an investment of this size should. I am sad.
Summary: I bought a BlackBerry and am now constantly available. My MacBook is still broken. I still haven't finished my to-do list.