Schoolblogs | Skating
Friday, February 15, 2002
Peter Ford reflects back on a year of weblogging, their place in the classroom, and the value of reliable technology. It's really valuable that Peter regularly and continuously writes about what he and his students do, have done, and hope to do.
As far as I know Lloyd and Peter are the among the first, if not the first, to use weblogs with students in a K-12 setting. I think of them as pioneers. It's always exciting to hear what they have to say about the further K-12 applications for weblogs, and it's exciting to see others joining in this work.
Will Richardson's weblogg-Ed has become an excellent place not just for news, but for the "real time" ideas and reflections of a classroom teacher applying the use of weblogs to student learning and work. It always interesting to see the different and many applications for edublogs that Patrick Delaney comes up with for classrooms, the library, and teacher professional development. These are just two examples.
It's also valuable the Schoolblogs has become a key hub of the edublogging world, providing both a place for others to try out and use this technology, and a kind of central information source. Some other are doing this, too. I'll mention two who come immediately to mind because I'd just been catching up with their weblogs. David Carter-Tod's steady, mostly M-F, edutech news blog Serious Instructional Technology comes to mind. The Center for Educational Technology at Middlebury College is also hosting weblogs, and Sarah Lohnes there is also a good source of edutech and weblog news, info, and thoughts.
Just taking the time to write those previous three pararaphs makes more tangible the kind of good work that is going on. Having written this, and read it over, I'm even more appreciative of what people are doing, interested in where they are going, and excited about the possibilities.
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I do want to add one thing in response to what Peter has to say. He talks about Radio and it's potential for easing the burden on centralized servers. Obviously the desktop is important; it carries a heavy load, and is a primary workspace. And the ease of publishing between the desktop and a weblog is very important.
However, I think the beauty of something like Manila is that in it's simplest form it is a portable place to write. This is important because the student is a mobile person. Currently, in many, probably most cases, he or she does not necessarily use the same computer at school everyday. So using a weblog the student can write from any machine anywhere as long as it is networked and has a browser.
Schools can't move as fast as the industry. I'm worried that schools, who don't have a machine for every person, and for whom a weblog as a portable writing space is ideal, will be left behind. Again. Because not every student, or even every teacher, yet, has their own desktop.
Now, in the coming days when every student has their own desktop in the form of a cheap wireless PDA with a small keyboard, maybe the definition of mobility in education will be closer to the definition of mobility in the industry.
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While watching men's figure skating last night I recognized something I felt the need to record about two skaters whose careers span the last ten or twelve years or more- Todd Eldridge and Elvis Stojko. I've seen both of them many times on TV over the years. They are both around thirty and at the ends of their Olypmics careers.
Both skated boldly and comfortably. I can't say that they both skated with absolute confidence, only because they both know that even at age thirty they don't have the strength or speed to be completely competitive within the current field. Also, I can't say that their programs were complete successes in terms of what is measurable in skating. For example, both bobbled a couple of landings. But I want to emphasize that they both skated boldy and comfortably, adding that they skate knowledgeably, with experience, and, above all, expressively.
Figure skating competition highlights jumps. Younger skaters have the strength to jump high and then very smoothly glide out of their landings. Older or less strong skaters jump without a lot of height, land and plant quickly, losing their speed and momentum, and then try to spin out of this in the hopes of doing it fast and smoothly enough to appear to be graceful and strong, flowing in a continuous movement.
But I think that there is something more happening in the performances of the older skaters that the Olympic judging can't take into account. While in both Eldridge's and Stojko's performances there is a kind of longed-for but missing youthful strength and power in those few decisive jumping moments, there is instead clearly in their movement a rehearsed deep memory of the kind of complete and continuous movement of a younger body.
What these skaters have, instead of power, in between all the jumps, is more of an emotive, expressive, and mature movement. In their movements the observer becomes aware of the long hours of practice, the solitude and sacrifice, an acknowledgement of their experience of time, desire, beauty, and devotion.
Devotion. I think that's it. You watch their skating and you witness in their slower, graceful, ingrained movement a devotion to both craft and art, sacrifice and joy, difficulty and triumph, love and compassion, care and desire for precision. They live in the moment, alive and vital still, but their purpose is different. It's not really to win. It's to participate.
And this is what I mean by comfort. They know their place, their strengths and weaknesses. These are individuals who love what they do, and appreciate that their bodies can move and express.
Perhaps that the real meaning in this is a contrast between the here and now, past and present, and the flow of time. This is mortality. And to see that continuum by watching a skater past his prime but still moving beautifully carries a lot of meaning.
It is beautiful and a bit sad, at once timeless and almost too quick to hold on to. The human body bending to find meaning in the moment of its own movement, expressing it as it can now, is art. It's not about competition, and it's more than sport itself.
It's difficult to measure, but it is something we can observe and pay attention to. Seeing this humanizes this rarified world of faster, higher, and longer. Knowing this, we experience something from which we can learn and in which we can participate. We can transfer this learning and experience to other areas of life, to how we look at other endeavours and the people who do them.
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Raymond: I created a PPT out of a few pieces of the Yoshiko Uchida scrapbook, published it as a LRN, zipped it, and made it available.
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