Was so cool to see a hot air balloon sailing by while we squeezed in one more evening dinner on the screen porch. Summer is winding down but the cool fall air is refreeshingly welcome.

Trying Again

Cool fall temps have returned and once again I embark on my try at running. I generally do not like running but once I get in teh groove its OK. I like to run in the fall and I usually follow the Couch to 5K podcasts to guide my fall running.

I like to run on the state forest roads around my home. I like to run with my wife (a veteran runner who tolerates my slow pace) and our dog. Saturday morning runs with the dog are for us 50 year olds  what some folks call "date nights".

This morning out deep in the forest there was a truck pulled off on the side. Not that unusual this time of year for a hunter to be out checking things out for the up coming hunting seasons. A little early, but not unusual. One of great things about running in teh woods is that when nature calls you can answer. At the end of my run I stepped over to the side of the road and was about to take care of business when I looked up to see the driver of the truck. Not a hunter but a guy with a metal detector working his way along the base of a stone wall that once marked the edge of these overgrown farmer's fields. I recovered quickly enough so that it was only a partial not a Full Monty.

In a few weeks the road I was running on will look like this:




More pictures here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/18556071@N00/sets/72157608001566131/

Cycling The Erie Canal – July 2009

A Summer of Ennui?

Where did the summer go? The late end to the school year in June and Labor Day falling late into the calendar has left me with a disjointed feeling as the school year starts. Summer always goes fast and you almost always get the feeling that it went way too fast but this last one just felt out of sync. It was a summer of change with the youngest going off to college and the "empty nest" being filled by her Grandmother who needs the extra help of a supportive family around her these days. There was lots to to do to get one chickadee off to school and to welcome the new chickadee into the house.

Even with the household change taken into account it was just a different feel. The summer weather clearly was a factor, rainy and cool most of late June and July, then a brutal hot spell  just when I was heading back to work in August. It did not make for a summer of consistent outdoor exercise, and while I put miles on the bike it was mostly in one big trip rather than the everyday and every week riding that is better for me. I did not get down to a Third Thursday Streetfest, or out to the Brooklyn or Woodstock Fair and only made a handful of club rides on Saturdays.

We had a wonderful family gathering on Labor Day Sunday with 25 people from both sides of my family and while a wonderful time, the sentiment was all about how rare it is that we all get together in such a big family group these days and even rarer that we do it at my house. Usually between birthdays and holidays and summer vacations everybody is gathering in smaller family groups here, there and everywhere almost every other weekend. We really had not had a family picnic since July 4th and that is an odd occurrence. There was lots of catching up to do at the party.

I am really not sure what to make of it all except to note it was different and to wonder what the fall will bring.

Now That Was a Class...

As teachers kids come at us in groups. You remember them as sets, and individuals in sets. Every once in a while you get to interact with a set that stays with you. Today I got to say goodbye to one of those extraordinary, no, the most extraordinary group of young people I have gotten to know.

I am not their teacher, I am just a father of one of the kids in this Class of 2009. We live in a little town in northeastern Connecticut. It is a one school town where from grades K-8 there are about 185 kids. This was one of the largest classes of kids to ever come through the school with a total of 28 kids who graduated eighth grade 4 years ago. We send our kids to the next town over for high school and today they became a part of the Woodstock Academy Class of 2009.

Academically and athletically gifted, this crew from our little town kicked butt and took the lion's share of honors and awards bestowed in the graduation ceremonies. So many white National Honor Society stoles, so many honor society chords, so many of our town's kids called to the podium multiple times. And yet, beyond that, there is something extra in their collective character and moral fiber that made them stand out.

You know when you meet a person of integrity sometimes it just jumps out at you. It strikes a chord in you, you pause, you reflect, you take note to keep an eye on this one because something is happening here especially when it is a young person. This group is filled with such kids.

It is hard to put into words, but perhaps two stories from my own experience will help. I got to coach these kids in different sports at different ages. At age 8, the best male player on my team at the end of the fall season made a point to hang around at the end of the last huddle of the last game and stuck out his hand and said, "Mr. Sokoloski, thank you for coaching me." At that point in his career he was head and shoulders above 90% of the kids on the field and my "coaching" consisted of making sure he he got as many minutes as possible on the front line. But it was a lesson that I took to heart. At the end of every season, no matter what the sport, no matter what the level or record of the team, I make sure I hang around the last huddle and thank the coach for coaching my kid and I learned it from an 8 year old.

A second story. At one point when the kids had grown old enough to a play on single sex teams we fielded a town team of 9 girls in a league that played 7 vs 7. It was clear, there was not enough girls in a league where a typical team was about 13 girls and usually you had one or two out for various reasons. We should just break the team up and scatter the players to other teams in the league. We put it to the girls and they unanimously shot the idea down. We tried again. You know you will be running your tails off? You know nobody can miss a game? You know we are going to have to rotate through all positions just to get enough rest, you know everybody is going to be in goal? There was no choice for them. They were going to stay together and they did. And they ran their tails off, and they all played goal, and they all showed up except for two games where we played with 7 the whole game, rotating into goal for breaks (and they would have played with 6 if they had to).

They have hung together. Oh, sure they have friends from the other towns that feed into WA. But many are united in a teen church group, and well beyond the time when going out on Wednesday night for church and clubs is cool, they have endured, hardening the steely bonds they forged in grade school. Many of them don't attend the same church on Sunday as they worship with their families in their own denominations but they enjoy each other, they enjoy the Christian commnity, they respect each other and on Wednesday nights they celebrate the Bible and each other.

This is the time where speakers tell graduates to forge ahead, take the world by storm, imagine the possiblities, dream great dreams, shoot high and end up over the rainbow. I do not want this for them. I want to be selfish. I don't want them to wander. I want or maybe I need them to come back. Somehow, some way we produced this clutch of extrodinary chicks, and I want to turn my torch over to them.

In 5 or 10 years I want Rachel to be exhibiting her art in her local gallery with her work on one side and her grandfathers pen and ink, and water colors on the other. I want to Joe to be practicing medicine in partnership with his Dad. I want Keri to be sitting on the school board with the same clear thinking and moral certitude as her mother and grandmother. I want Ethan to be growing apples, strawberries, blueberries and pumpkins and his family's farm to go on forever. I want Robert to be designing and building the most energy efficient structures and still playing taps on Memorial Day. I want Ryan, and Kirby, and April, and Will, and Shawn, and Chris, and Chelsea and Luke, and all the rest to understand what a special time they have given us and how we yearn for them to pick up our torches and stay close by to keep this special place, special, for our grandchildren.

And most of all for my darling Katie, I want her back in a few years in a classroom, in a gym and on a field. And mostly in a third base coaches box, where she will bunt on the first pitch, her runners will explode off the bases, her catchers will call their own game, and her players will play their hearts out for her. Congrats, Katie

Plain Speaking by Peggy Noonan

On Meet the Press today Peggy Noonan, former Reagan speechwriter, suggested that a way forwad for the Republican party was to contrast itself with the present administration by "speaking English, something that Republicans have not done good ..."

Feed Me Twitter, Feed Me!

Robert Scoble wrote a quick post about the new upcoming Friendfeed beta and discussed ideas for Twitter in 2012. One of the ideas was an automated tweetback for info like wait times. He referenced Washington State's border crossing wait times as a current example.  Let me add the following idea.

I live about 30 miles from a large suburban mall-plex. You know, one big mall w/ a couple of smaller strip malls and specialty shopping clusters. Not my favorite place to go, or hang out. Traffice designs there are bad, weekend traffic makes it a nightmare. I stay away unless I have no choice.

There are in that location at least a dozen chain type sit down restaurants (Chili's, Ruby Tuesday, Johnny Rockets, Pizza Uno, Olive Garden and so on and so on). If you are shopping and need a bite to eat, you better hit the restaurants before 5PM or the lines and wait times build quickly ro 45, 60, or 90 minutes.

What if there was an automated Twitter based reply system based on zip code? You DM or Tweet Applebees06299 w/ your phone and you get a DM back: @stevesoko: Current Applebees wait time 30 mins. Call 860-555-1234 to get on wait list. For the privilege of using the service, every so often Applebee's sends you a tweet - @stevesoko Remember Wednesday 4PM-8PM is all you can eat pasta at Applebees or @stevesoko For April only two entrees for $20 @Applebees.

Would I follow a restaurant just so I could figure out a reasonable place to eat? After an Saturday afternoon of shopping w/ a car full of cranky kids to find a 15 min or zero wait time? You bet! They all cost about the same, and after a hard day of shopping I don't care if it is Tex-Mex, American Burger, or Italian. Kids are going to get the chicken fingers anyway.

Maybe one tweet to bind them all! @BucklandRestaurants and you get a series of tweets w/ wait times, phones and special deals, and short URL to their menu & website. Could work with a text message back as well. Could work with local downtown areas, or vacation hotspots (@willimaticrestaurants or @newburyportrestaurats). Could linkup to GPS on a phone to get you directions there.

Now all I need is a couple of out of work API developers, a downsized sales rep or two, and a VC angel to fund it. Any takers?

The Great Ski

I have written before of the perils of being cross country skier in southern New England, land of the sloppy snow. You wait, you hope, the Nor'easter moves up the coast and 50 miles one way or the other in the storm track means 3 inches of wet concrete or 12 inches of fluff. For some reason over the last week and especially over the weekend the snow gods have been smiling. Ten days ago we got several inches on top of an established solid packed base of 3-4 inches, and then Saturday night we got dumped on w/ 6 inches, and kind of by surprise a late band of snow dumped another 5-6 inches Sunday night - all of it light and fluffy. Twelve inches of pow-dah on top of a solid base, on a three day weekend!

I had some things that needed to get done on Monday AM but a plan began forming in my head for an afternoon ski. I knew that for some reason the snow machines and ATV's had not been out in force in the woods on previous storms and the unexpected snow should continue the trend. A quick check of key locations on the way home from morning chores confirmed it, and the plan was hatched.

There is a combination of woods roads and rail trails that starts near my house and leads to the Goodwin State Forest. It is about a nine mile +/-trip. My darling wife was hooking up w/our buddy Beth to ski at Goodwin and could serve as a safety valve if I needed to bail. Indeed as I skied south, they would ski north helping break and pack trail for the last portion of my ski.

Thus the game was afoot. A ski I really have wanted to try for a while, magically coming together. It proved to be a long slog, pushing through soft unpacked trail for most of it. I am not in the shape I should be in to try such a long ski and my body is barking at me this morning. The north bound skiers proved to be my salvation as the last 3 miles was in their packed ski tracks just as the adventure was becoming a death march. It was hard, but so much fun. Miles of powder, unbroken except for deer tracks. Nobody around in the quiet stillness of the forest unmared except for the shoosh, shoosh, shoosh of the skis, my labored breathing, and the pounding of my heart in my chest.

Internet Free Speech Ruling Favors Burlington School Administrators -- Courant.com

The Hartford Courant is reporting this AM on the latest rulings in a CT "Internet Free Speech" case. Follow the links to the full story which does a good job in outlining the basics of the incident with the student and the school's administration (in contrast to other media reporting which was amazingly inconsistent and IMHO incorrect).

For me the key piece in article was the description of the judges ruling on the motions before him. His point that since a landmark case in 1979, "times have changed significantly" and that "off campus speech can become on campus speech" at "the click of a mouse" is the heart of the matter. The ultimate ruling was that the administration was right in apllying punishment.

If Web 2.0 tools have the power to make a fundamental changes in education as they have made fundamental changes in society, does it also point a dagger at the very political structure of schools? I don't mean to go overboard here but as I have comtemplated what Web 2.0 learning looks like in schools, it is clear that it can look very different than 30 seats and a desk at the front. That classroom structure is a subset of school structure. Much of  what teachers end up doing is crowd management and social engineering.

"Nice quiet line please, others are working"
"Line leader stop at the corner"
"You can get a drink at the fountain but lets make it 1,2,3 that's enough for me"
 "That's the bell, you should be out of the hallway and into your rooms"

Much of school structure is a traditional top dowm management with information and control flowing from administrators, to teachers to students. In so many ways the school is the agent of social norms and cultural transmission. We carry out an important mission of socialization and societal normalization.
I heard a phrase way back in my college days - the massage of culture. There is a lot of what schools do that is the massage of culture, the good and and the bad of it.

The recent election is just one of a series of examples of how to use the Internet and social tools to go "outside the system" to influence the hoi poli directly. Viral videos, twitter storms, and the explosive growth of Facebook for the bayboomer set all point to the growing use of social media to influence, change, exploit and cajole the multitudes to action.

What happens when those techniques are used by students to go outside the systems of their schools? In some ways student unrest and protest has always been possible but never so much as with the tools we have at our disposal today. At some level we cannot stop it, the revolution is all around us, it is here. As we take advantage of the power of the tools and transform our classrooms and champion the roles of social media,  to "disrupt" traditional classrooms and teaching, do we also not lay bare the path for true social disruption for our students?

Some of the administrators in the Burlington school district have moved on, some in part because of the fall out of this incident. Like it or not, for better or worse, Avery Doninger made school change happen with the click of a mouse and teh use of a Web 2.0 tool. The judge is saying that the administrators were within their rights to apply consequences to those actions.

It may be a moot point.

• Internet Free Speech Ruling Favors Burlington School Administrators -- Courant.com - Annotated

  tags: no_tag

  • But in a ruling on several motions for summary judgment Thursday, U.S. District Judge Mark R. Kravitz rejected Doninger's claims that administrators at Lewis S. Mills High School violated her rights to free speech and equal protection and intentionally inflicted emotional distress when they barred her from serving as class secretary because of an Internet post she wrote at home.
    
    Kravitz's ruling relied in part on the ambiguity over whether schools can regulate students' expression on the Internet. He noted that times have changed significantly since 1979, when a landmark student speech case set boundaries for schools regulating off-campus speech.
    
    

    Related links

    • Doninger Free Speech Case

    Now, he wrote, students can send e-mails to hundreds of classmates at a time or post livejournal.com entries that can be read instantly by students, teachers and administrators.
    
    "Off-campus speech can become on-campus speech with the click of a mouse," Kravitz wrote.
    
    Kravitz cited previous rulings and held that school administrators were entitled to qualified immunity, which shields public officials from lawsuits for damages unless they violate clearly established rights a reasonable official would have known.
    
    Kravitz reasoned that because the nature of student speech rights on the Internet is still evolving, the officials could not reasonably be expected "to predict where the line between on- and off-campus speech will be drawn in this new digital era.

    • This is the key piece in the article. - post by stevesoko

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

im_an_idiot.png (PNG Image, 654x387 pixels)

A  Twitter friend posted a link that made me think of Rick..(not the idiot part)...

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/im_an_idiot.png