Dan Gross

I want to write this while its still fresh in my mind… before I lose the details.

The end of the year meeting for SWING was this afternoon, reporting out from all of the committees, and deciding to fund, or reduce funding, for the program was on the agenda after the long range planning and reports. I was printing colored copies of documents and briefing Mary when we heard a strange scream, groan, and thump in the hallway. I looked at Mary, got up, and walked over to investigate.

I found an older man in the hallway outside of the Workforce Development office lying face down in a considerable pool of blood. I stood and watched as he continued to vomit and bleed from his nose as I tried to wrap my mind around what was happening. He was struggling to breathe and was blowing bubbles in the blood on the floor. I yelled to Mary to call 911, and began to try to roll this man on to his side so that he could breathe. I got him on his left side, when someone else told me to roll him to his back. I refused, knowing that he had to breathe.

His glasses were somewhat mangled, so as I held his chest with one hand I moved them out of the way with the other. I got behind him as he gagged and convulsed again. He was rubbing his hand in the puddle of blood seeking to try and push himself up. Another person in the building began to call 911, and I told Mary to call the EMS instructors knowing they were probably next door and could respond quickly.

He was struggling again, and Sandy came out with some newspaper, so I lifted his head and we put the paper under his head to keep it out of the blood. He was bleeding quite rapidly it seemed from both his mouth and nose. (And maybe more?) I tried to gently keep his head up off the floor with one hand, and hold him from struggling too much with the other. We kept placing more clean newspaper under his head.

Nurses from the other building showed up, and asked for gloves. I hadn’t even thought of that. I asked Mary to open the paramedic training room and help get gloves and anything else they needed if it was available. Unfortunately, the nurses came back and said that much of what was in there wasn’t usable as they were training kits. The man had turned blue, and while still struggling, could fight less. He could not speak (at some point someone tried to ask him what happened and I just responded that he should relax and not even try to answer.)

In the minutes leading up to this, I honestly thought this man was going to die in my arms. All I could do was to hold his head up slightly, rub his chest as I held him on his side, and kept asking him to hang in there and to stay with us.

In a few more minutes, the police arrived. I moved out of the way and they took over. We still didn’t know what had happened, but now someone had looked through his folder, found his name, and he had begun fighting again. A few more minutes and the EMTs from the Fire Department began to show up.  Everyone was asking a lot of questions, and all I could think of was to try and get the footage off of the surveillance cameras to see if he tripped, fell, or what. But I had absolutely no way to get it. We called building services to get a custodian over and ask about securing the area and how to get the footage.

I began updating Twitter as it started to sink in what was going on. I checked the call log on Mary’s phone to see when she first tried to call 911 - 11:55, about 15-18 minutes or so had passed so far. My board members had begun to arrive while I was still holding this man, so I cleaned up in the bathroom, and Mary and I moved to the meeting room to reduce some of the congestion in the hallway. I went in the bathroom to try to clean up somewhat. I didn’t get a lot of blood on my clothes - a little on my shoes and pants, but I had it on my hands, arms, face.

And then I set it aside in my mind and held my end of the year board meeting.

By the end, I wasn’t sure if I was going to vomit, collapse, or both. Workforce Development closed their doors and went home during the meeting. I got to leave a little after 3PM when the last of everyone else left the building and Mary and I could lock up. (Did I mention she called in sick today with a 100+ degree fever? But felt sorry for me and showed up to help anyway?)

David asked me to look some information up for him tomorrow for a program on Wednesday. I think instead I’m going to take the day off.

Because of HIPA, I probably won’t know what happened today unless he stops in or something. I am sure he doesn’t read this or any of my other blogs. (Heck, who does?) But I sincerely hope and pray that he is OK. I know he’s in a lot more pain than I am right now. God bless you sir.

I can tell you that I passed my review - my contract was extended (thank you).

Finally, I know one of the officers, Steve, responded when I accidentally severed both arteries in my arm a few years back. I know there are people who see this kind of thing and respond heroically every day, and think nothing of it. I don’t know if they remember their “first time” or if this would even register on their scale. I know I’m a wuss. But I am thankful I was able to have the strength to hold it together in this case. (I get very woozy at the sight of blood.) I hope I helped in some way, at the least gave him comfort, at best kept him from meeting his ultimate fate today.

I continue to have an amazing amount of respect for all of these folks who can do this on a regular basis, and return to these scenes again and again. I know I can’t. (This has pretty much wiped me out, even though there wasn’t much of me left.)

This weekend I’ve had an incredible opportunity. Dan Theobald from i2i, a consulting firm in California, invited me to speak to a group of leaders in California at a three day event hosted by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. There is a lot I could say about LACMA and what a huge, and awe inspiring facility it is, but my focus here is really more on the meeting and the amazing work that is happening at it.

California is a big state, and there are a couple of folks here who keep reminding us of that. As one person next to me said, there are more students in the city of Los Angeles than there are in the entire state of Wisconsin. Having worked with some large districts, and knowing what its like to work with the 800lb gorilla in the room, I can’t begin to imagine what has to happen each day to keep that size of a district up and running. Likewise, as plentiful as resources are here, there is fierce competition for them that creates a feast or famine model. Teachers often don’t have much control over their access to those resources, and whole systems have been created to try and deal with these equity issues.

Yet other districts, towns, and rural areas are struggling. They can’t get the funding to feed the infrastructure needed to bring services to their districts. Few children are moving through the schools. Declining enrollments and non-performance reprimands further hasten the demise of these schools, which leads to the demise of the community. As one participant described to me, she drove through “ghost towns” to come to this conference.

That’s still resonating with me right now. Connectivity has become SO important to education that when it doesn’t exist, schools die, communities die. That has to then have a further impact on those counties, and ultimately the state as a whole. Yet the culture we live in is one of inequity ~

Wish I had enough cycles in my fingers to get down all of the stuff going around in my head. Feast or famine…

For those that know me in real life, you know I’ve long been fascinated with museums and other “non-formal” educational institutions. You know, the places that many home-school families buy memberships to and use as hands on labs throughout the year, but that the kinds of places we work in kind of sort of discourage us from using too much because its probably not on the test.

Last fall, I challenged some of the participants in my Lead Teachers program to think differently about what they do. Use technology to communicate in some new way. Open a new door for students.

A museum educator and great friend for many years, Gaye-Lynn Clyde, happened to be in my class, and offered a program that had been done in person at the museum for the past 5 years. Students would collaborate on a project throughout the semester, working with various departments at the museum, to develop an exhibit. Nothing too groundbreaking there, I know. Classrooms have been creating mini-museums for years. But in this case, these kids would actually get to create an exhibit at the Milwaukee Public Museum that would really go on display! And in the process, the exhibit would have to pass all of the same standards that any other exhibit designer had to go through to get his or her exhibit on display.

Peggy Fleck, a teacher at Wileman Elementary in Delevan, took us up on our challenge. Located an hour away, her students got to visit the museum once in person in February to talk about what their exhibit might look like. There were several great ideas, but Delevan has a rich heritage as the home of the Barnum and Bailey Circus, and winter home to more than two dozen circuses in the 19th century. We decided to bring back the rich tradition of the Great Circus Parade to the Streets of Old Milwaukee!

Each week these kids put in considerable personal time developing artwork for rack cards, circus posters, costumes, floats, and more. The Nickelodeon was the stage for the circus, and the parade ended up there. A barker in the hall drove museum patrons in to see the show! Every other week, students in Peggy’s 4th grade class, an hour away from the city, video conferenced from their classroom with curators, image specialists, educators, and many more people at the museum as they consulted on how they would bring the circus back to town.

I hope that videoconferencing wasn’t the focus of this project. At the same time, I know that without these great communications technologies, this project would never have been possible. Years from now I hope these kids are still all fired up about what they have done, even if they don’t remember the role that our technology played in making it happen for them. THAT is great technology integration!

Have you ever been part of something truly life changing?

Yesterday my friend Stuart posted a fine note about Twitter: http://manintheblackcoat.blogspot.com/2008/04/5-essential-twitter-truths.html

I started using Twitter a few weeks after Stu did. So, you could say that he’s a bit more experienced than I ~ but I think when the sum of our experience still totals less than a year, maybe we’re both still attracted by the pretty packaging. But I think his post shows a certain maturation of social networking and our understanding of how to use it to make our lives better.

What do I mean? Watch the common mistakes of folks new to the media - they follow hundreds, perhaps thousands of people. There are people talking about “Twitter Etiquette” which includes following those who follow you. A recent “experiment” called Osen recently found that 17% of people who know nothing about you will follow-you-back.

There already is a public timeline, and I’m not sure if somehow there is some sense of self worth that people are finding by following thousands of others while replicating that timeline. Of course the advantage is that you can then spam a short message out to those foolish enough to follow you. It’s a PR wet dream of sorts.

I read a piece the other day calling it “permission based stalking.” Too funny!

But maturation of the users of the technology includes redefining a new social etiquette around its use. One popular education web2.0 star recently got in some trouble for this:
http://dossthoughts.blogspot.com/2008/04/special-twitter-message.html

I don’t want to get to the gravel of casting stones with any of the people involved, but it does certainly raise an interesting point: yesterday @WillRich45 raised this point in a uStream session by asking if your network exists solely to agree with you, or to provide thoughtful discourse to your thoughts and ideas.

There are people who will never follow me. Never read a thing I blog or write. And I’m not sure if I should care. Yeah, maybe it bothers me a little bit when I know there is someone who “has the answer” but won’t talk to me, but it doesn’t bother me that much ~ because the shoe has been on the other foot before. Today, I follow a nice mix of people that I feel I can trust, that interest me, and are usually pretty willing to respond back to me. I make liberal use of the BLOCK button to keep spam bots from following me, although I let some of the more innocuous mega-followers join in the fun.

Ego takes a back seat so that I can take the time I need to during each waking day to get a good sense of 70% or so of what has been said through my personal learning network. Eventually, that may result in a tenfold number of followers to those I follow. (But its certainly not that way now.) By adding just a few new and creative people every few days, my network is growing with my skill level, helping me to be more effective, have more fun, and stimulating my mind.

Would I want to throw that all away for flash in the pan status by having lots of followers I’m not personal with?

I know I sound like a broken record sometimes. That’s OK. Based on the responses I’ve gotten, I know at least a few folks have been paying attention. I am not knocking our current network here; but I am advocating for a completely different level of service as we move toward the next procurement. These documents are meant to support that view.

I just finished up a meeting with several district administrators and administrators from our local supporting technical college and a private university. In it I heard very clearly that all parties are ready to reinvent ourselves and our levels of communication and working together. How will we do this? Via technology and networking.

At one point in our meeting, the President of our technical college district asked me for my vision of what an ideal relationship should be. I described a vision in which students and communities were empowered to earn dual credit and leverage the power of the educational partnerships, while greater levels of access were provided to programming that enriches the communities that we all serve. To borrow from a recent “Speak Up National Net Day 2007″ summary, “as one high school student in a recent focus group [stated,] his vision for the ultimate school is a school where the teachers and the principal actively seek and regularly include the ideas of students in discussions and planning for all aspects of education, not just about technology.”
http://www.tomorrow.org/docs/National%20Findings%20Speak%20Up%202007.pdf

Approaching this from the other side, students are probably less concerned with the networks that make this possible, and want to be more involved with the actual learning process happening over those networks. There is good data in the report talking about how students see themselves as content creators and network socialites, yet teachers still believe that technology best supports education through homework and testing ~ very low level use of classroom technology.

It is no secret that there is a digital divide in residential areas.

My home Internet connection is 15m/1m, up from 5m/384K just a couple of years ago. For most of Wisconsin, those speeds are incredible. A Twitter buddy of mine recently remarked on his connection through his cable company which was now pushing 24m/10m in a Western state. For those that follow NPR’s Andy Carvin (formerly the Director of EDS’s Digital Divide Network), he sent out a message today excited that in his new home in DC he would be connected to Verizon’s FIOS network - anticipated 50mb download speeds. Even our best connected neighborhoods are still quite a ways away from FIOS capabilities around here! (Another friend in Northern VA wrote to tell me he still has a 56K dial-up connection at home because no broadband exists where he lives. I know colleagues in Wisconsin who can relate.)

At some point, kids exhaust the RIAA’s objection to broadband by having downloaded every MP3 they care about, and yet they still need bandwidth. As the pipe gets larger, we go from being media consumers to becoming media producers. The evils of unsupervised media creation are the subject of plenty of other discussions so I won’t go into that here - but suffice to say - there is much we could do to help our students actively participate in all aspects of their own education when they are connected. So how do we connect them?

Last week I was fortunate enough to again attend another Internet2 Spring Member Meeting in Washington DC. I think an interesting note to make about this meeting is that several of us have been working together the past few years as media creators to produce a Wiki where we embed videos, slide presentations, links and more within a page that captures the “essence” of the learning that has happened during the conference. How I wish we could share that process with our students who could capture their own learning and interactions with one another in a similar way!

Needless to say, there were many excellent presentations. Some programs were recorded and are available for archived playback, if you will: http://events.internet2.edu/2008/spring-mm/netcast.cfm

I would call to your attention especially the Wednesday general session:

http://events.internet2.edu/2008/spring-mm/sessionDetails.cfm?session=3811&event=280

Download the slides at:

http://www.internet2.edu/presentations/spring08/20080423-blueprint-windhausen.pdf

and then forward into the program to approximately when Mr. Windhausen begins speaking: [Approximately 38 minutes into the video he is being introduced.]

http://winmedia.internet2.edu/smm08-vod/smm08-6.wmv

Today is already my fourth day in DC, and its almost time to go home. Dawn to dark of doing some of the coolest EdTech stuff on earth for three full days, and I haven’t sat down to blog about it at all. Well, actually, that isn’t true - I’ve started many times, but the posts haven’t made it public.

This meeting, more than anything else so far, seems to have been about strategic planning. I2 is now in its 11th year, and I’ve been following it for half of its life. Like with any other adolescent project moving in to its teen years, I2 has grown in directions that its fathers perhaps never were able to conceptualize. Predicting the future is easy; getting it right is the hard part.

http://www.internet2.edu/strategicplanning/

With the strategic plan such a big thing, everyone of course is talking about it. There are lots of opinions, and many folks are wanting to make sure their interests are represented. But I think one big thing is missing from the premise of this document. It’s not that K20 isn’t mentioned, or Teaching and Learning is finally at least getting a nod in the goals even if we didn’t make the strategy level…

I think it is that Internet2 doesn’t yet fully understand and value its own community. They value the network. They value the research. They may even value the contributions of individuals and the amazing contributions that have been made - but they don’t yet realize the gold mine of value that community is.

I had some very colorful ways of explaining this relationship - including the community of bacteria that forms around mussel poop. OK - I’m not really trying to make a statement about K20 education in a negative way, but I will say that there is a direct relationship (I’m told) in that one feeds the other.

The strategy was written to allude that I2 will be everything to everyone. But everyone doesn’t need everything. 98% of the value of Internet2 to the K20 community today is the Internet2 community at large. And that doesn’t always require every possible technology at every possible endpoint.

But it does take a realization that the relationship is important. It does take the effort to cull the wonderful things happening on the physical network, and figure out how to distill that information **AND** excitement out to our Teaching and Learning community.

THAT will fill the pipeline. THAT will feed the relationship. THAT will keep us healthy.

It’s Sunday and I’m sitting at Chicago’s O’Hare airport waiting for my plane to board. According to the nice plasma display hanging over my head, we should be boarding in about 10 minutes or so for a flight that leaves in a little over 30. It’s not atypical to find that the plane you’re supposed to board in a little while has yet to arrive, and true to form the attendants have little more than a half-hour to get the plane we’re about to board cleaned up, and all of us on it so we can take to the skies.

I like to travel for the most part. Its the travelling part I don’t like. But I very much enjoy getting to visit new places and old friends. Like others who travel at least fairly regularly, you try to minimize your stay in the airports and on the airplanes paying a few dollars more for direct non-stops whenever possible, and trying to carry everything on. I guess its why I fly out of O’Hare a little more than an hour from home instead of the smaller and more comfortable Milwaukee Mitchell ~ a greater choice of non-stops.

Airports are a place to wait. And wait. Movies that generally take place in airports deal with waiting of some sort. Or huge disasters ~ but we won’t go there. And as a place to wait, its a great place to observe other people who are just waiting. OK, I know that isn’t a new thought.

We all sit and look at the other folks around us trying to avert our gaze when they look back at us. After all we don’t know them. We wonder what is playing over the little white earbuds crammed in their ears - they stare at me with my great big foam cups over my ears of my active noise cancelling headphones. A few open laptops, many read books, some play games on their cellular phones and will later wish they had saved their batteries before they reach their final destinations. Occasionally you still see someone reading the newspaper.

I’m a jumble of wires and technology - my laptop open, my phone connected to give me broadband and charging off the laptop battery, my headphones plugged into my phone. A compact tripod next to me and my clothes for the week taking up any additional space in the two very small bags that are my laptop case and carry on.

I wonder if I stand out? I kind of hope that I don’t. It’s fun to people watch, and spooky to be watched. Yeah, I would be wireless if this wasn’t an airport and an airplane and nobody would know since all of these devices would pretty much stay in my pocket. I suppose its a catch 22 - but does it indeed make me geekier than thou?

I’ve been fortunate in my life that I haven’t yet been the victim of a full blown identity theft. [Knock on wood.] At least not so far.

But I have had several brushes with attempts both major and minor.

Previously the most serious was probably when my eBay account had been compromised. Through brute force, or some other means, someone had gained control of my identity on eBay and posted jewelry for sale. Although I am not a big eBay’r, I happened to be checking my account fairly frequently around that time and noticed that notifications had been turned off, that I had posted something for sale (a Tiffany necklace), and that PayPal was set up to dump to a gmail account.

What amazed me was how difficult it was to take care of such a simple thing. Have you ever tried to get help from eBay? Sending email messages so that you have documentation doesn’t work. The people who are supposed to help you apparently get paid by the number of emails they respond to - and not who they help. Each time you get a cut and paste letter back that has little or nothing to do with what you send them. You’re left to their “live chat” feature - which did eventually work - but kept disconnecting me and I would have to start over from agent to agent. Took 2 hours.

Then, weeks later, I had to deal with the same thing when eBay decided to bill me for listing fees! Again, a month or more later I started getting told my account was on hold because now they wanted $5 for helping me and verifying that I was me. (We won’t let you buy anything on our service because we have verified who you are after our faulty security let you down.)

Can’t say I feel better about the experience, but I’m fortunate that it was a relatively minor case of identity theft.

But this morning I’m reeling from a little different kind of identity pain. For work, I find myself frequently sending messages out to various listserves - for distance learning, ed tech and Internet2. I just reposted tagging guidelines for bloggers to four Internet2 lists for our upcoming Spring Member Meeting next week.

Somewhere, on one of those lists (and I suspect I know which one) some machine harvested my email address and began informing folks all over the world about products and services designed to make someone else rich, on my behalf.

OK, we’ve all been the victim of someone we know having an infected computer and it sends out a few hundred emails with our address on them. Its annoying having to answer people and tell them that “I didn’t send that to you!” Sometimes its the people who receive the messages who scold you telling you they don’t need that kind of medication, or prefer to use properly licensed software. Other times it comes from very helpful meaning servers letting you know that your message has been blocked because it met the criteria for bulk mail, and how you can contact them in case your message wasn’t.

But I’ve never been the victim of it on this scale. At one point yesterday non-delivery messages poured in one every other second or so! My inbox was FLOODED from servers all around the world as evidenced by the Chinese, Japanese, Russian, French, and other languages represented. Servers in the US, the UK and all over told me that I had been placed on their black lists.

Black lists? But wait - what if some day I really *DO* need to reach someone at your organization? <sigh>

I set up a rule to automatically delete NDN messages so that my inbox would not overflow. Now I won’t see the messages from folks that I really do need to get in touch with. But at least I can keep my inbox working. I would estimate based on what I deleted, and what was in my postini pre-filter, somewhere on the order of over 1000 non delivery messages have been received in the last 24h.

If only 1:20 servers sent a message, that would be 20,000 people whom my alter-ego emailed. If its 1:50, well - I guess I was very busy while I slept last night. And I have to ask myself how many other people had their identity stolen last night?

The last time this happened to me it wasn’t this bad, and I had to change my email address. That was a few thousand messages off of an address harvested from my website. I don’t post it like that anymore - but apparently I didn’t need to.

Every morning I start my day fairly early, but always feeling like I’m already running late. My morning commute is a short one - about 8 miles which take me about 15 or so minutes. I use that time to start laying out my day, thinking about how long each task will take and the handful of things I absolutely just can not fail to accomplish. One of those things I always swear that I am going to do is to better maintain this blog ~ I have the best ideas I want to share early in the morning while my head is still organized.

When I arrive at the office I have nearly a whole hour before the doors open, and my office to myself. I start the pot of coffee, and check out whatever fun presents have been left for us by the classes who have used the building the night before.

Then the phone rings. The other residents in the building stick their heads in to say hello. I end up with a half dozen half written emails on my desktop. I’m not sure exactly how it happens, but pretty soon I come up for air and make note of it being somewhere around 11AM, or Noon, or maybe even later. If I’m lucky, I might have a cup of Ramen Noodles for lunch, or maybe a baggie left over from whatever I had the night before. But most of the time I just work right through it.

I don’t know if Twitter has been good for me or not - I’ve certainly learned a lot. But Twitter has managed to fill those little 2-3 minute gaps that I used to have in my life when my computer was busy printing, or processing a report, or uploading photos - now I’m glued to my computer trying to catch up on what is happening in my extended world.

My plans to get out of the office a little early has passed. It’s somewhere after 4:30 and there is no way I’m going to get my hair cut or the oil changed again tonight. I probably haven’t gotten through all of the messages from the various technology lists sitting in folders waiting for me to click on them. I am probably running to take my son to dance, football, REP or Scouts - depending on what day of the week it is.

And now, at 10PM at night, I can not remember for the life of me what my great and uncontainable ideas from 14-16 hours ago were any more. My plans to change the world have given way to the late evening news, and wondering how many times tonight I will get up with the dog, the kids - or the occasional freak earthquake that seems to be rumbling through the Midwest these days.

I’m already contemplating my day tomorrow. I’m reading blogs, thinking of great ideas to work on with the kids, and meditating on helping my tired muscles and aching body try to relax. But I have to ask myself -

How do you find the time?

They say that great minds think alike.

Over the weekend I was thinking of a discussion I had with John Pederson and Annette Smith a few days ago. In short, we discussed how the network is more powerful than the nodes ~ referring to a great cartoon that John had posted in his blog last year:
http://www.ijohnpederson.com/2007/09/26/etc/

I took that a step further by replying with a picture of a Borg Cube ~ a reference to Star Trek that isn’t so obscure ~ but only as tongue-in-cheek. The Borg, a fully connected society where individuals had lost their meaning as little more than tools to the cluster, lacked free will.

Free will would be perhaps the greatest strength and Achilles heel of such a society. In a smaller community, it might perhaps be a weakness. It tends to spread the community thin, causes its members to lose focus, and can birth politics as competing interests collide. But in a larger society there are more resources; free will can provide the spark that helps great ideas become raging infernos.

In Star Trek, a lead character struggled with this individuality after being cut off from her community. From time to time, she would reconnect ~ the struggle between her being part of the community and having free will being a major theme of her character. After being introduced to Twitter, I can kind of understand the struggle she went through!

Within Twitter, you form a community by following people who you think are interesting. Perhaps they follow you back. In 140 characters or less, you can share your thoughts and actions with those who follow you. Things you’re reading that you find interesting, asking for help on a project ~ whatever.

Amazingly, people will answer you. Ideas travel at the speed of the Internet.

New Twitter friend Chad Lehman posted a similar thought on his blog last night:
http://imcguy.blogspot.com/2008/04/power-of-network-twitter-network.html

I have always heard that big wheels turn slowly. And of course education tends to be a very big wheel… But I really like the way that the lead has been taken in so many of these communication technologies specifically by educators. These changes are actually taking place FASTER in the EduSphere than they are across so many other places.

Granted, there are still schools banning cell phones, and we’re still teaching to the NCLB testing framework ~ but perhaps it is because communication provides a release for so many repressed teachers that blogging, Twitter, delicious and web 2.0 technologies are thriving in education.

We can communicate once again. And when we can communicate, we can teach and learn. As that network grows and grows, and ideas spread quickly and find purchase, we accelerate the speed at which we can teach and learn. It becomes a self feeding loop.

Is there a downside? My guess would be yes. But that is perhaps left for a different post ~

Just remember, resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.