This is not news since I just stumbled on this, and it turns out that this has been going on this whole year: the Flickr Commons. It’s a way to obtain references or use of images that have no copyright restrictions or at least been put into the public domain. This is an example of one from the WWII era (a period I’m really starting to enjoy learning about).

In the meantime, I’ve upgraded the look and feel of the site with a free theme from http://www.freewpthemes.net/ because I don’t have any time to design a new one on my own.

Enjoy.

Well it’s final. I have my degree (in spirit and ASU’s computer system). I’ll have to wait for the paper version in a few months. I’m sure I’ll get lots of people mailing me to ask for my money in making it laminated and wall-mountable.

I fully intend to live up to the responsibility to what I earned. Just because a person has a degree doesn’t mean they deserve laud and honor. Hopefully their behavior and willingness to give back to the people that supported them in their effort to earn it come into play as well.

The first of these is to complete one’s thinking into an organized fashion. (Although you could get that with just writing) The other is to communicate to others what you are working on or what’s going on in your life. I’ve not really been spending as much as some other people do on their blogs because I’ve been involved with things that not many other people necessarily care about, and much of my energy for writing is going towards schoolwork.  After my sabbatical leave is over I’ll be scaling this website to become more of a software engineering perspective (because I will likely be writing more code then).
I like to be verbose in my writing which makes it hard to spit out really short posts sometimes.

As far as what I’ve been doing lately, I just completed my application for graduation in December. It’s hard to believe it is coming that soon. I was talking to my sister today and she had remarked about the fact that it had seemed like I just started. This indeed is true. My first class was Fall 2005, and I was thinking I would be able to get done sometime before the 6 year time limit of my program. I’m rather proud of the fact that I was able to do it in much less than that (provided I don’t mess up my comprehensive final exam required to graduate from the ASU Ed Tech program), and that I’ve been able to pay for it with money from my own pocket.

At any rate, I’m going to be going back and inserting some relevant posts about things I’ve learned. I know that is not what a blog is for, but as far as keeping a journal for others to read it makes sense to go back and put these items in.

When I get back to work in December/January I will be reporting to the MCCD sabbatical committee on what I learned. I will be referring back to this website as an electronic portfolio of my experience, so some of those things should be in there anyway.

• Write a new piece of music
• Release an application for AIR (which is currently in beta)
• Make an inspirational video
• Make a lifelong friend (or at least a new one)…
• Exercise at least three times per week

I’ll keep everyone updated on each of these accomplishments by the time I get finished this semester

Sunset

Originally uploaded by midiman

I’ve been a flickr.com participant for over a year and a half now. As far as a great way to store pictures, they’ve also been one of the premiere second generation Internet social networking apps. One of the reasons they’ve been successful is the creative commons licensure model. Where everyone on the web has the ability to scoop up and use content with the understanding that it will be attributed to or given credit to the individual or entity that put it out for consumption in the first place.

I’ve had several of my pictures ‘scooped’ up this way. Some of the websites and entities that have taken advantage of this are:

http://answers.yahoo.com
http://www.thefriend.org
http://www.downtownatlantis.com/ (Adam Zeisler – a professional juggler. I took a picture of him at an event he was performing in)

…among others.

One of the really cool ways these pictures get used is in other applications. Schmap.com does it in a way that allows them to make online traveler guides, and then make little smaplets that display little local things to do around where the pictures were taken:

I have to admit that I couldn’t pick out a favorite right away, so I went the other direction and mentioned some teachers that I have had with whome I did NOT particularly have a good experience being in their class. Here were my classifiers:

• Felt like the professor was there to pad their own ego
• Research was their primary function, therefore teaching a classroom full of college kids to them was a way they could continue their research and came secondary to their students’ learning

What my teacher did was turn this around and point out these two qualities boiled down to these respectively:

• Pride
• Disinterest in student outcome or performance

Over time, it has been pointed out to me that instruction at its root psychologically is a spiritual thing. Growth and change occurs in an individual as they are lead through effective teaching. Of course the student must be motivated, but we can teach our students to become motivated in our subject material. Paraphrasing a great religious leader, “Effective teaching is the very essence of leadership. [Growth/Achievement] will come only as men and women are taught with such effectiveness that they change and discipline their lives. They cannot be coerced,…They must be lead and that means teaching.

Granted, at this early stage of the semester it is difficult to pin down what I think of my teachers, but so far I don’t think I have anything to worry about. There are two parts to learning, learner motivation and instruction, that I think for me have been influential in my development as a person. Everybody is different, of course, so I’m being objective but as an educator I want to become a better motivator and an instructor. If nothing else, hopefully I will be able to accomplish this.

As I am looking for things to put together for this website, I’m trying to decide how often to post and what is of most worth to put on here. Part of my sabbatical proposal is that I would keep a blog or journal of what I would be doing and experiencing. Plus, keeping a journal is cool. Years down the road I will be reading this or others that care could read about this and know what it was like. With this in mind, I’m going to refrain from posting pretty much anything that is trivial or superfluous. — Of course I got up in the morning to check my email messages and went to class, worked on my project(s) late at night sometime during my leave. We’ll leave that part of my leave alone.

But that won’t stop me from putting things on here that I think about from time to time. After visiting some web resources I thought about putting a post that reflected some of my feelings about education in general from some great thinkers:

These are all from or attributed to Albert Einstein:

“The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.”
“Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death”
“It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.”

This one is by Henry L. Doherty:

“Get over the idea that only children should spend their time in study.  Be a student so long as you still have something to learn, and this will mean all your life. “

I actually like that one because in a class once I had to introduce myself as having been a college student for most of my adult life. Some might think that being in school is a waste of time, (and it can be if you don’t learn to apply what you are taught in school) but I am a self-proclaimed life-long learner. That doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll be in school forever, but I do hope that I can remain teachable well into my later years.

My intent with this first post is to find a way to kick off a time in my life where for the first time since moving out of my parents’ house, I won’t have to worry about working at the same time as being a student. With my parents’ gracious help in starting my post-secondary education as a student at Mesa Community College way back in the day, I’ve since been able to pay for my entire college education in cash with money from my own pocket.

My undergraduate work was in the engineering program at ASU, more specifically in computer science. Through a series of challenges and the hoop jumping that we all have to do as students in order to get our education I made a stark discovery: I actually like learning. I may be overstating that fact, but I guess what I’m really trying to say is that through my prescription of how to view life there is a great value to learning all that you possibly can. Subsequently there is an even greater value to sharing what you learn with others (teaching).

I ‘m currently awaiting the start of a sabbatical award from Maricopa Community College District to begin on August 20, 2007. I will be completing the requirements for a masters degree in Educational Technology, and then returning to work in December 2007 in preparation for the spring semester.

At any rate, I’m going to use this website to share my experiences and also begin what I hope is a noble effort to share with other educational software developers what someone with a degree in software engineering and an interest in computing can do with a degree in education and an interest in psychology. I’ll also be disseminating what I will deem to be my ‘soapbox‘; in that there is always a better way or method to teach…specifically the subject of computing and software development. I’ll do this by revealing some of my findings with side projects that I work on of my own accord, and research work that I will be doing under the direction of the Ed Tech faculty at ASU. I’ll leave the tried, true, and tested methods of teaching engineering to professionals with doctoral degrees in engineering, but at the same time, I hope and pray that there are also people in that field who have developed an epistemology of how to share their great and vast knowledge with those that truly want to learn.

I’ll let everyone who reads decide how to best use this information.

Oh, and I’ll also be occasionally cross-posting at my current job website blog, the CTL Blogcast.

Enjoy.