Things will be quiet on the blogging front for the next week or so as the family and I will be enjoying a well deserved vacation. It is going to be odd not being tethered to my technology. I may have to use the digital camera and video camcorder as a placebo!
See you soon!
Seems like the big news today is the release of the Calendar app from Google. If you have a G-mail acccount, it is a simple matter of logging into calendar.google.com and accessing your account.
While this is a beta app, there are a few tweaks I’d like to see. For those of us tied to Microsoft products due to institutional arrangements, it would be great if there was a cleaner import app direct from a local calendaring agent. Here at Plymouth State we have a portal based calendar and synchronization is effected through the use of a Sun product formerly known as iPlanet and now simply called Sun ONE Synchronization. It would be great if Google provided a tie-in to support this type of linking app.
I tried using the Import feature but it only pulled in some of my events and Outlook does not support the export of recurring events, rather it converts them to one off events (painful to be sure as my recurring meetings often find themselves rescheduled due to the availability of our team members!). I believe this to be an issue with my Outlook app but it is disappointing nonetheless.
On another note, I like the ability to configure Google Calendar to email you a daily agenda and to even text message you when you have an upcoming appointment! Unfortunately, I have not yet figured out how to connect it to my Verizon provider since that is not one of their currently listed carriers. Given my chaotic lifestyle, another reminder cannot be a bad thing!
I was checking out my blog stats from Performancing when I noticed that one of the referral URLs to my site was from blogsearch.google.com. I hadn’t heard of that one before so I pulled it up. It’s an interesting way to search just blog content. In a search for “ECAR,” my blog post New 2005 ECAR Report on Students and Information Technology was the second return. It is my sincere hope that speaks highly of the search process. I’ll have to remember to share this with my Web Expressions class.
UPDATE: Ok, so it turns out that blogsearch has been around since September of last year. That’s a lifetime in computer years but I wonder why it didn’t generate much buzz. I did notice as I was poking around that it’s process for returning results seems to favor those blogs with the key words in the title versus the content. I don’t know if I like that. For example, I did a search for edublogs and the first page was fine, but page three and many of the following pages of results had the same blog listed, albeit with differing posts.
I guess I would prefer a feature that would return a blog hit but would then subcategorize or compress links to the same blog.
BTW, Will Richardson’s blog, weblogg-ed.com didn’t make the first page for edublog. What gives? At least James Farmer and Josie Fraser were well represented!
I was skimming my feeds this week and came across a post by Paul Baker at EducationPR. It was a quote from a book by Tom Kelley called The Ten Faces of Innovation. What caught my eye was this:
“We have too many people out there playing Devil’s Advocate…”
And the only thing I could think was AMEN!
“…when they should be in a learning role like the Anthropologist, when they should be invoking an organizing role like the Collaborator, when they should be adopting a building role like the Experience Architect.”
It was that simple quote that prompted me to find out more and to read Tom Kelley’s book, courtesy of the Inter-Library Loan system. It came in Friday afternoon and I dove right in.
“Having invoked the awesome protective power of that seemingly innocuous phrase, the speaker now feels entirely free to take potshots at your idea, and does so with complete impunity. Because they are not really your harshest critic… They’re removing themselves from the equation and sidestepping individual responsibility for the verbal attack.”
“Why is this persona so damning? Because the Devil’s Advocate encourages idea-wreckers to assume the most negative possible perspective, one that sees only the downside, the problems, the disasters-in-waiting.”
I never really understood why I have always hated those words “The Devil’s Advocate” until I read Kelley’s introduction. It occurred to me that the absolution that comes from playing the Devil’s Advocate is the defensive mechanism for the problem oriented. And whether you are in higher education or the corporate world, allowing problem oriented individuals free reign in this role will eventually kill your organization.
Perhaps the biggest lesson I took away from my time in the Outdoor Education program at the University of New Hampshire is that there are two primary approaches to working through challenge initiatives, whether they are icebreakers, low-ropes or high-ropes elements, problem-oriented or solution-oriented. Kelley takes solution orientation a step further, actually ten steps, in his identification of the ten faces of innovation. These are ten different approaches to solution orientation:
I’m reading The Anthropologist now and I have to say that I like what I’ve seen so far.
The first track of the HigherEd BlogCon, Teaching, kicks off on Monday. Of the dozen or so CONversations to run, I am particularly interested in these:
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EdVentures in Technology is authored by John Martin, communication and collaboration consultant with White Mountain Technology Services.
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