The answer now, as it has been for 4.5 years, as it will be in the future, is no.

No, I do not want to put your ad in my sidebar.

No, I will not embed a link to your service in my post.

No, I will not post a pre-written article extolling your product and publish it under my name.

No, I do not want you to write a guest post for my blog.  If I want one, I’ll email you unsolicited, not the other way around.

The good people at adfreeblog (whose logo is the only one, beside Creative Commons’, you’ll find on this blog) sum up pretty well my feelings on why you won’t find Google Adsense or viral marketing here.  One of the major reasons I left Edublogs back in 2008 was because they started auto-inserting advertising links into the posts of their free blogs.

To their succinct list, I’ll add that I feel very protective of this digital space.  I’ve written many times about the sense of ownership I feel over this blog.  What I write here represents me – for better or worse – as a citizen, a dad, an educator, and a student, plus whatever other roles I take on.  If I write about a service or product I enjoy, as I do from time to time, I want whoever reads this to know that they can take what I say at face value.  If I am critical of something, know that that criticism comes from the heart and what I believe is in the best interest of children, and not from my target’s competitor.  Whatever I say here is, if nothing else, always genuine.

I would appeal to the organizations who write to me to stop, but somehow I doubt there are real people behind the emails.  I’m probably just on a list that gets cycled through every so often.  But as long as they keep sending me requests, I will keep marking them as spam and going on about my day.

…I want to engage with other educators – not just teachers, but administrators, psychologists, LDTCs, and others in the education field – as to uses for much of the technology that is available to us.

[...]

I’ve titled my blog “Apace of Change” because it so precisely sums up my life situation: trying to keep abreast of ever-changing technology while also dealing with significant changes in my personal and professional lives.

[...]

I’m really doing this for the collaborative aspect – I need to talk about these issues with people, and where else other than Edublogs am I likely to find such folks?

So what’s changed?  I’m clearly no longer hosting with Edublogs, and I’ve since expanded the scope of my writing.  At first, I wrote a wanna-be ed-tech blog.  Now, I write a wanna-be blog about the broader landscape of education.  This shift has mirrored the changes in my professional life, from classroom teacher to school psychologist and professional development facilitator to aspiring administrator.  As my professional perspective and concerns have changed, so has the focus of my writing.

I’m also more comfortable in my own digital skin.  I think at the beginning I was modeling my writing very much on the other blogs I was reading, education and otherwise.  It took me a little while to find my own voice, but having done so – along with purchasing my own domain and hosting space – gives me an even greater sense of ownership over this digital space of mine.

Speaking of which, there’s also this statement from my portfolio website:

Since 2007, I have blogged at Apace of Change about the challenges, successes, and failures I experienced in attempting to infuse technology into my instruction and assessment as a high school English teacher.  From 2009 on, I shift focus to broader issues in education, with some focus on special education and school psychology related issues, including the use of read/write Web tools as assistive technology.

Blogging has great potential as a tool of reflection, and I have found that frequent and thorough reflection has helped me to become a better educator, psychologist, husband, and father.  Whereas some may prefer to write in a journal or simply reflect in thought, blogging allows for interaction with an audience.  In some cases, this interaction provides me with affirmation; in others, my thoughts are challenged.  Either way, as long as the discourse remains constructive, growth occurs.

There’s no two ways about it – I love getting comments on my blog, and do my best to respond to each one as best I can.  I’ve found, however, that as the years have passed, I’ve been more focused on the personal reflective aspect than the conversational aspect.  I don’t comment on other blogs as much as I used to, and I’ve noticed that comments on my blog have fallen off proportionately.  I’m OK with that, though, since a) as I write I’m reflecting and refining my thoughts as well as my words, and b) I get most of my discourse via Facebook and Twitter these days – another big change from the summer of 2007.

I know, I know – it’s 2012, and blogging is dead (or is it?), but as long as I still have ideas, problems, questions, or concerns about education, this blog is staying alive.

Listening with understanding and empathy: Understand others! Devoting mental energy to another person’s thoughts and ideas; holding in abeyance one’s own thoughts in order to perceive another’s point of view and emotions.

I’m taking this post a bit off-topic and writing not about how I am empathic at work, but rather, how a personal experience forced me into the proverbial mile in another’s shoes.

On December 20th, I had surgery to correct femoral acetabular impingement.  My prognosis is good – the surgeon predicted an eventual return to full athletic activity for me, but in the meantime I had a few physical limitations:

• No driving for two full weeks after surgery
• Walk assisted, to some degree, by crutches for at least the first four weeks after surgery
• Very limited mobility in my right leg for the first few weeks after surgery
• No bending at the hip past 90 degrees for six weeks after surgery

The weeks since the 20th have given me a refresher course in awareness of issues of mobility and physical access. Here are some of my experiences from the last month:

Week 1: While I was able to get around on two crutches, I felt weak, nauseous, and tired much of the time from the surgery and pain meds.  The first few days I spent mostly horizontal on the couch, alternately reading, watching TV, and napping.  I avoided getting up as much as possible not so much because of the walking on crutches, but because the physical act of getting up off the couch without bending my hip was so taxing.  I had to mentally prepare myself just to get off the couch – I was not used to that.  Learning to use the crutches properly took a little getting used to as well – put your weight on the handles, not the armpit pads.  I’ll spare you the details of how I managed in the bathroom, but suffice to say that I had to reinvent how I did all the many things one does in the bathroom in order to stay upright and not stress the hip joint.  If you want a small taste of what it was like, try taking a shower (and getting in and out) standing on one foot. Good luck with that.

Week 2: Significantly better than Week 1, but still on two crutches.  Getting in and out of the car (as a passenger) was laborious, as I not only had to lean backwards into the seat, but then lift my right leg into the car with two hands while not breaking the 90 degree bend at my hip.  That, plus the increased amount of time it took me to get from Point A to Point B on the crutches made being ambulatory feel kind of like more trouble than it was worth (and what a horrible thing to feel!).

Weeks 3-4: Back to work!  I returned from Winter Break on the two-week post-op date – I was allowed to drive, but the hour+ drive to work made for an uncomfortable ten hours each week.  I often felt in danger of breaking the 90 degree rule, so I rolled up a fleece blanket and sat on that while leaning the seat back as far as it would go – still not terribly comfortable, but thankfully I have long arms and have been able to live with this arrangement.  I also spent the first few days spectacularly underestimating how long it would take me to get to different locations around my building.

Now: As I write this, I am just shy of four weeks from my surgery, and things are going about as well as could be expected.  I’m walking mostly unassisted, but I’m not allowed to bend beyond 90 degrees at the hip until the end of January, and I still have to take it slow going up stairs.  I feel fortunate that my recovery has gone as well as it has.

It still amazes me how much of the last month I have spent thinking about my body – not in terms of vanity or exercise, but in a purely logical, mechanical sense:

• How can I group the tasks I need to get done so I can minimize the amount of time I spend on my feet?
• Should I bring a backpack to work so I can carry more than one thing at a time?
• What’s the quickest way to get to X or Y classroom in case I’m needed?
• When are the halls filled with students, so I can time my trips to classrooms/offices/bathroom accordingly?
• Now that I’m in the kitchen/bedroom/office, do I have everything I came in here for so I don’t have to make another trip in 10 minutes?
• Should I just stand at the counter and eat my food now or should I make multiple slow trips to get it all into the living room?
• Should I sit uncomfortably in my office chair and think constantly about breaking the 90 degree mark or should I just stand at my desk to work?*
• When do I need to get dressed in order to have someone around to put my right sock on for me?
• What clothes/shoes do I have to wear in order to make getting dressed less challenging?**
• Is my hip flexion breaking 90 degrees?  What about now?  How about now?  Now?

But here’s the thing – I won’t be living with these issues forever.  I have, for a very short period of time, experienced a hint of what lots of folks live with on a full-time basis: limited mobility, persistent discomfort, and fatigue.  The experience has been a valuable one, not only for the long-term physical health benefits, but also for the concrete reminder that we all live, work, and move within different physical realities, and to be mindful of that at all times in our professional practice.

As Ira Socol says – and I frequently parrot – disability is often transactional.  In the case of physical disability, being mindful of the myriad potential physical conditions people can bring with them to your office, your shop, or your classroom and accommodating for them can lessen or remove their impact (read Ira’s blog post linked above for good examples of how).  Even those of us who consider ourselves sensitive to these issues may not fully recognize barriers until we experience them for ourselves.  Demonstrating empathy in this regard is elemental to establishing a culture of respect and trust, especially when one works with children and their families.

*Shout-out to my colleague Ryan, who provided me a tall stool from his office – a low-cost assistive technology accommodation that has made working at my desk significantly more tolerable for this 6’2″ guy with restricted hip movement.

**My 3-year-old daughter can zip up my black Chelsea boots for me, so they’ve gotten a lot of wear this month.

References

Costa, A.L. & Kallick, B. (2010). It takes some getting used to: rethinking curriculum for the 21st century. In H. H. Jacobs (Ed.), Curriculum 21: essential education for a changing world (pp. 210-226). Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Until recently, one of my favorite features of Google Reader has been the ability to “share” (read: publish) interesting articles to my own personal RSS feed, which I cross-published to my Twitter account and on a sidebar feed on my portfolio website.  Additionally, Google Reader users could subscribe to each other’s Shared Items feeds right in Reader, which was a great way for me to read the posts my friends found insightful or useful without having to rely on Facebook or Twitter, where they would be too likely to be overlooked due to the high signal to noise ratio.

This past fall, however, Google saw fit to remove the sharing function (the generic nature of which allowed users to publish to just about any service) and replace it with a “Share to Google+” button (which forces users to use their social networking product to share stories).   This turned an incredibly powerful, relatively open publishing platform into yet another walled garden, a move I (sort of) understand from a business standpoint, but one that frustrated me immensely as a user.

Despite Google’s shortsightedness, I’ve still been able to rely on RSS to help me concoct another solution for when I want to share interesting articles from my Reader.  I have repurposed my Delicious account to be my surrogate Shared Items feed.  If you would like to read the articles I find interesting, you can now find them at Delicious.com/damian613 (or if you use RSS too, subscribe to the feed).

So what happened to the existing items in my Delicious account, the special education/school psychology related bookmarks (that I also published to my portfolio website)?  Simple – I moved them all over to Diigo (RSS feed), with tags intact.

If you’re interested in either my shared bookmarks in special ed/school psychology or the blogposts I share periodically in the areas of technology & education, please feel free to drop by my Delicious & Diigo accounts, or better yet, subscribe to the RSS feeds (while the format is still alive!).

TL;DR: Moved some of my public stuff around:

• Google Reader Shared items now here (RSS feed).
• Shared bookmarks in special ed/school psych now here (RSS feed).

As my doctoral program rolls right along, I am currently in the throes of the literature review section of my dissertation.  After some going back and forth between potential topics, I have decided to focus my dissertation on the theory of distributed leadership.

I’m still in the very early stages of the whole process; I have yet to develop a specific research question or methodologies by which to conduct research, but what I am doing presently is attempting to read everything about distributed leadership I can get my hands on.  With this in mind, I am turning to the folks in my online professional network (i.e., any educator with whom I connect via blogging and/or social networking) for some direction.

I know many of you either work in environments where leadership tasks are distributed across staff, or may even be in formal leadership positions in which you distribute these tasks.  In other words, you may have some personal and professional connection to or investment in this theory.  If you have favorite resources or authors on the topic toward whom you can point me, I would be very appreciative if you could leave a note in the comments or shoot an email to damian at apaceofchange dot com.  Of course, I am fully capable of using EBSCOhost and Google Scholar, but I’d like to see what articles, sources, books, or authors are favorites among my online colleagues, including critiques of the theory.

I thank you in advance for any suggestions you can send my way, and best wishes to all for a happy, healthy, productive, and educational 2012!

Assistive technology (AT) can be a daunting topic for some educators to wrap their collective heads around.  The word “technology” itself can strike fear into the hearts of some, and assistive technology* (as traditionally defined in the educational world, anyway) has a reputation for being prohibitively expensive.  What I like about Dr. Brian Friedlander‘s reference guide Assistive Technology: What Every Educator Needs to Know is that it provides a basic overview of assistive technology – what it is, how it helps – as well as solutions, organized by category, making it a very accessible entree into AT.

One component I think educators will appreciate is the section entitled, “Low-Tech Options”.  Dr. Friedlander reminds the reader that “technology” need not be shiny things that beep; “pencil grips, highlighting tape, and tape recorders” (Friedlander, 2010, p. 1) are just some examples of easily overlooked technology options that may help students.  My own observations and experience with tools such as whisperphones support this; “technology” is a very large umbrella under which many different tools fall.

Beyond that, Dr. Friedlander explains the federal definition of “assistive technology” and provides overviews of AT evaluations and the theory of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), as well as how that ties in to AT.  He goes on to provide several examples of technology solutions that may help students in the areas of accessibility (e.g., keyboard, mouse, dictation, text-to-speech, general OS accessibility settings), writing, math, reading, and organization.  Pricing information for these resources is not included in the guide, but some of the resources he mentions are already built in to Windows and Mac operating systems, and others I know run the gamut from free to… well, not-free, I suppose, but at least there are options.

The four-page laminated guide concludes with a list of online resources for further information/support with assistive technology, including free access to audiobooks, more information on UDL, and links to “evidence-based practices for integrating instructional technology to support the achievement of all students” (Friedlander, 2010, p. 4).

While I think every educator could benefit from this overview of assistive technology, I imagine it would be of particular interest to special education teachers, Child Study Team members, occupational therapists, speech therapists, and administrators who may want to implement AT solutions with their students, but aren’t quite sure where to start.  This is not an exhaustive tome on AT, nor is it meant to be – it gives the reader some jumping-off points for further exploration, which is sometimes all that is needed in order to move in the right direction.

Assistive Technology: What Every Educator Needs to Know is available from National Professional Resources, Inc., and starts at $12.95 apiece for the first 1-10 copies (discounts are available for bulk purchases).

*Really, don’t we all use assistive technology every day?  How did you get to work?  How did your meals get cooked?  How did you record your thoughts on paper or in digital form?  

Reference

Friedlander, B.  (2010).   Assistive Technology: What Every Educator Needs to Know.  Port Chester, NY: National Professional Resources, Inc.

Persisting: Stick to it!  Persevering in a task through to completion; remaining focused.

This really isn’t much of a challenge for me when the tasks come one at a time, but it gets a bit more difficult when they start flying at me from all directions.  My default mode is to start a task, notice that another one is undone and start working on that, notice a third that just needs one quick thing done to it, after which I see something else that needs… and so on, which ties in neatly with:

Impulsivity: Take your time!  Thinking before acting; remaining calm, thoughtful, and deliberative.

Impulsivity is really only ever an issue for me when it comes to task completion, in that my focus tends to flit to whatever issue comes up next, regardless of how complete (or incomplete) the previous one is.  As work has become predictably more hectic in the period between Thanksgiving and the New Year, I’ve been more conscientious about completing one task (or at least getting to a natural break) before starting the next.  Without taking this deliberate approach to my work, it would be very easy for jobs and responsibilities to get buried and lost under the taskalanche.  Happily, taking this deliberate approach has helped me to stay up to date on all my responsibilities, which was even more important to me than usual this year since my break started three days early due to my surgery.

I hope to get at least one more post up before 2012, but if I don’t, I wish you all a happy holiday season!

Reference

Costa, A.L. & Kallick, B.  (2010).   It takes some getting used to: rethinking curriculum for the 21st century.  In H. H. Jacobs (Ed.), Curriculum 21: essential education for a changing world (pp. 210-226).  Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

If memory serves, credit for this idea has to go to my cooperating teacher during my student teaching experience in the fall of 1998.  I started my folder toward the end of that semester, and have been contributing to it here and there for 13 years now.  In fact, given the broad scale shift to digital communication in that time, I even started a separate feelgood folder notebook in my Evernote.

It’s not something that has to be public like a blog or website (although there’s nothing wrong with a little shameless self-promotion from time to time), just someplace you can go to remind yourself of all the good you do for so many people every day.  People in professions such as education give so much of themselves to help and support others that they too often neglect themselves.  If you don’t have such a folder, consider starting one; if you’ve already got one, take some time to flip through it and enjoy some well-deserved recognition.  If nothing else, it’s good for the soul.

So anyway, here goes: in “The End of Isolation”, my co-authors (Eric Brunsell and Elizabeth Alderton, both of the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh) and I explore how K-12 classroom teachers use Twitter as a means of professional networking (the research behind the article was the basis of Eric’s and my conversation at Educon 2.3 this past January).  More from the abstract:

The researchers surveyed and analyzed the public Twitter feeds of classroom teachers to determine the specific purposes for which teachers use Twitter. Study participants also completed surveys dealing with social networking. The K-12 educators in this study engaged in true dialogue, where evidence of actual conversation occurred in Twitter over 61% of the time. Additionally, over 82% of the time, the educators in this study chose to follow other educators or content experts related to their field of teaching so they were able to create a personal learning network meaningful to their professional needs. Analysis of data shows that a majority of tweets were educationally focused and were primarily in the categories of practice/philosophy, questions, and sharing of resources. Additional studies looking at how other online learning communities may be used as professional development venues would be beneficial and add to the knowledge base of online learning, professional development, and learning networks.

The article appeared in this past September’s issue of MERLOT’s Journal of Online Learning and Teaching; the full text of the article is available here for your review.  Finally, a huge THANK YOU to the participants in our survey; we truly could not have done this without you.

Reference

Alderton, E., Brunsell, E., & Bariexca, D.  (2011).  The end of isolation.  MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, 7(3), 354-365.

The first course in my doctoral program, Experiential Learning, focused primarily on helping students to codify their beliefs about leadership and establish learning goals for the coming year.  In one of my papers, I established the following goal:

Goal #2: Reflect on my learning in a transparent manner.   I have long felt that honest reflection is one of the most vital components of learning, and I required my students to do it frequently, both verbally and in writing.  As a blogger of over four years, I have found great value in writing about my professional practice and considering feedback from my audience [...] I hope to gain similar benefits from writing online about my experiences in the doctoral program as I have from writing online about teaching and school psychology.

So what are my reflections upon finishing my first course?  They’re much less to do with leadership and more to do with biting off more than I can chew.  I figured it would be difficult, but doable, but I seriously underestimated how much all this newness in my life would take out of me.  I don’t feel that either my studies or my work suffered as a result of my decision, but my sleep patterns, stress levels, and general well-being certainly did.  I had the opportunity to defer starting my studies for a year, and in retrospect that wouldn’t have been the worst idea, but what’s done is done.  Moving forward, I need to be much more sensible about balancing my responsibilities.  Perhaps that’s not such a bad lesson for a future leader to learn now rather than later.