Welcome to piece of content #4000 posted to this blog. In the words of the inimitable Shelton Brown, I guy who I used to clean boilers with at a local Western Electric plant about 25 years ago when I was home from college in the summer, all I can say is “sleepin’ jesus.” I have no idea what that means, but it seems profound and meaningful enough to apply to this marker I’m passing on the blog highway, and it’s adequately abstract to capture my restlessness with blogging of late. I mean, I guess after 3,999 pieces of content (not all created by me, certainly) I have the right to feel some blog crispiness from time to time, right? RIGHT?
Sorry.
Thing is it’s been a while since I’ve felt blog drudgery, though I must say taking three days offline and not feeling bad about it helped, as has reading some really good stuff in my aggregator this morning that I want to write about, and having gotten through our jam-packed, tablet roadshow In-Service on Friday (after which 94% of the faculty surveyed said they wanted one, by the way) and getting the final revisions to my book out the door has all helped. There’s a little air in my calendar, and that’s what all of this always comes down to, isn’t it? Time to read and write and play and connect without feeling like it’s happening at the expense of the rest of my life. Which makes me still ponder how long it will take before most teachers have played and thought enough about what all this means for it to start making a real difference in the classroom. As Stephen Downes writes when considering what that’s going to require:
“…there is a certain sense in which you have to experience this full immersion in order to be able to understand it. The teacher who turns on the computer a couple of hours a week? No chance.”
No question.
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