Tag Archive for internet

Remembering the 90s Online

17/06/2011 Joh Business, gratitude, reading

I am still borrowing Darin’s laptop and keeping up with important things with my phone and ipod. I think this year is the most separated I’ve been from technology and the Internet since the mid 90s before I was on the Internet! Interestingly though even without my own personal laptop I can do more, faster than I could then. The internet was time consuming then. It was much slower and there was a wait for a page to load. Most of the particpants were on the other side of the world so posting to a bulletin board still meant a long wait for a response. There was nothing there, compared to now. I couldn’t do my banking, bill paying, apply for jobs, ask questions about products, shop, file tax returns or any other mountains of other ‘in person’ things I used to have to do. There was probably only one person I knew in real life that had an email address I could email to. In comparison, I can post an update on ‘The Butchers Dog’s facebook page and have instant responses and even customers within an hour. Now I only know a handful of people who don’t have a facebook page and I have to remember to call them and invite them to things or update them on important facts about me that I assume everyone knows.

I read this article recommended on the ‘Atlas Shrugged’ facebook page: Forbes: When it Comes to Wealth Creation There is No Pie. I was struck with the reality of how much richer my life is even in the last 10 years.

Anyway the update is that it was actually me who damaged my computer! It was liquid damage. This post in March ‘Sticky Keys’, preceeded all my laptop troubles. I don’t know why I didn’t connect the dots sooner! I have been given a quote which is almost half the price of a new laptop. I am going with it because why create more landfill? I have been watching the passing traffic of people going to the Cobbler in our arcade where our shop is. I really like his business, it’s very eco-friendly, yet old fashioned too. I like seeing people get things fixed instead of throwing them away. My laptop will be back with replacement parts early next week… woo hoo!

Popularity: 1% [?]

No comments , , , , , ,

Online and Blogging latest thoughts

01/02/2010 Joh blogging, holidays

I am trying out this gadget called Zemanta. As you write your blog it comes up with images, links (wikipedia, amazon) and articles relevant to what you are writing. It’s a great concept but I’m still not sure about it. It seems to generate a heap of drafts that I can’t delete. I probably should do some more research into it…. but I want it to save time, not create another task!

During the holidays I reduced my feed reader from over 900 saved posts to 6! Quite an achievement for me. I used stumbleupon and delicious to store some of the information I thought was worth sharing or saving for future reference. I never want to get to that point again. I deleted some of the blogs that are just too wordy for me, or not interesting. There are some feeds that haven’t posted for a long time also that will probably be next to go.

This year I have had a huge increase in people searching for ‘What to wear to Big Day Out‘. I wrote that post a couple of years ago. I find it interesting and amusing the posts that get a lot of views, rarely the ones you think.

I intended changing the appearance of my blog over the summer holidays but really didn’t find the time. It was a busy holiday this year and my life seems much fuller lately. I have less solitude. I’m not complaining.

Related articles by Zemanta
Enhanced by Zemanta

Popularity: 9% [?]

No comments , , , , ,

These Days…

13/10/2009 Joh health, home

We have laptops in many classes now. There is so much to teach about using the Internet. This week we had a learning experience about Twitter. Some students were using it as though it were a private chat room. I guess because all their usual chat channels are blocked by the schools ‘protection systems’ it was too much to expect that given a way to communicate with one another, they would be able to resist! Never mind they are sitting in the same room… high tech note passing, yet pretty silly when they realised they had potentially shared their notes with anyone online who’s interested. The more I use technology in the classroom, the more I believe that the fear of computers replacing teachers is not in the near future. Young people may not fear technology, yet there is so much they need to learn about socialising, reputation, logic, the list goes on and on…..

I had a tense meeting after work. Before I went, I said to Rhonda “I’m going to shut up. I’m not going to say anything, I’ll let others have a go this time.” Famous last words. I find it so frustrating when people are full of remarks about things until given the opportunity to speak to the person in charge. So I can’t resist saying what’s on my mind, when others seem unable to remember what they think.

After school was a lot more pleasant on a lot of levels. I got to spend some time with the Wii Fit. It was the first time for a little while that I made progress towards my goals, so that felt good. I’ve been conscious lately of letting some healthy habits slip.

Tonight we registered to play touch football socially. I am not sure if it’s such a good idea now. I’m feeling particularly unfit. I will give it a try though. It looks fun. Maybe it’s what I need to get fit!

Kate my little sister called last night from Berlin. She is having a ball and has been through Bruges and Amsterdam. I had to cut my chat with Wilma tonight short because a delicious meal from Darin had arrived on the table and I wasn’t going to let it wait.

My daughter has just sent me something she has written tonight that is one of the most precious things I have read for a long time. Her expression never ceases to delight me.

Popularity: 8% [?]

2 comments , , , , , , , , , , ,

Friday at Last

28/08/2009 Joh learn

I’ve been back at work for three weeks and already I’m celebrating Friday. This week has been hectic and intense for me. It’s been windy, stormy and so very busy. I injured myself on Wednesday night. I turned the light off in the kitchen and on my way to bed walked into the door frame. My eyebrow has a split in it and I am developing a shiner. Yesterday I rushed off to school late only to realise when I got there that I couldn’t teach, I had a bad headache. Darin sent me flowers to brighten my day and when I phoned him to say I was at home, he had to redirect them. They are beautiful.

Today I feel a lot better, but there is still a slight headache and a bit of vagueness. I was fine to go to school. The thing about injuries on your face is that you have to explain them. I think I described what happened over 20 times today. I would go into a class and individual students would ask, what did you do, so I would announce it to the whole class to save time.

We’ve started the Media topic in Year 9 English this week which is one of my favourites. I’ve been reading heaps this week about the rising influence of social networking. Watch this youtube clip I found on Karl Fisch’s great site:

Popularity: 7% [?]

7 comments , , , , , , , , ,

Moving House over Easter

17/04/2009 Joh home, relationships

I don’t recommend moving house when there is a long weekend or worse still at Easter. It took extra long to get the internet connected. Dial up is simply frustrating and although it is embarrassing to admit it, I think I suffered from some kind of ‘fast internet access withdrawal’. I don’t think I even fully realised it until I had it back and felt a lot less stressed out about things.

The shopping was not pleasant either. It was too busy or closed. I am never a big fan of shopping. I found all those little things I’d forgotten, harder to get than I normally would. I realised I need to pay more attention to such things as open and closed times and days.

Where I have moved is much quieter than Traralgon. I can’t just stroll down the street in the evening and find some fast food for dinner. Things close early. It’s all very different. I have checked out the library though, and that is good. Not that I was short of books, it’s just comforting for me to know if I need a book, I will have access to one.

I love my new place. It’s smaller and cosier and since there is usually only half the people living in it to my previous home, it makes sense. Most of all the trees and the filtered light make it a serene space. There are lots of birds around and a paddock of cows (who are my favourite animals) close enough to hear mooing.  We have an outdoor space that gets the afternoon sun and I’ve spent literally hours sitting out there soaking up the autumn sun and enjoying long chats with Darin.

Popularity: 5% [?]

No comments , , ,

Back into the thick of things….

08/10/2008 Joh family, work

Is it only Wednesday? My phoneline went down this week. I came home after a very busy first day back at work, with a pile of stuff to do online for prep, and couldn’t connect to the Internet. I picked up the phone to call the helpline and that was dead too! Lucky I have a mobile phone – that worked! It was only back on tonight. Mercury retrograde?

This term is quite busy for me. I am attending two camps at Tamboritha and have a number of transition activities to oversee. Our school is a junior campus, so we are prepararing for our year 9s to finish up and getting them organised to cross to the senior campus. I am one of the year 9 co-ordinators so there are a few extra tasks associated with these events for me. I have certainly hit the ground running.

I farewelled my baby sister this afternoon. She is flying to the UK tomorrow and I it was a teary farewell. I think she is both nervous and excited and her boyfriend will be taking her to the airport tomorrow, so I hope they will be ok. We had dinner last night and my daughter came home from Melbourne so it was great. One of my four brothers, who lives in the same town, but I rarely see was there too. I enjoyed their company.  

Popularity: 5% [?]

One comment , , , , ,

How Unspectacular of me….

24/08/2008 Joh blogging

Widget has tagged me in this meme to give unspectacular facts about myself. I apologise to all my friends like Widget who have given me awards and tagged me for memes. I can’t do them. I don’t especially like them. I don’t mean to offend. I could come up with an endless supply of unspectacular facts about myself, but I just can’t tag other people and give them another to do. I do like getting tagged though. It’s always nice to be thought of.

Popularity: 4% [?]

3 comments ,

Technology and the Gap

19/08/2008 Joh learn

This morning I read about young people becoming sleep deprived (The Age:High-Tech link to teen sleep, health) the cause mentioned was technology. Many teenagers have computers and mobiles in their rooms now and spend a lot of their evening time social networking. I thought at the time, perhaps if there was more technology at school, they wouldn’t need to spend so much time using their toys when they should be sleeping.

I remember a couple of years ago I had a student who was up all night playing a game online. It took me a lot of time to work this out. He didn’t do very well at school, but at night, apparently he was enjoying some success and was a bit of a legend at the game. We discussed this with his mum who had no real idea what went on online. He was as disengaged with home as he was with school.

I’ve had many conversations with students about their online usage. I find it interesting. They are really competent and usually when I want to do something online and I don’t know how, I can find a student to teach me. They tell me how boring their classroom experiences are and how they are in a daze in class sometimes and wish they had more time on their computers. So they steal the time from sleep. This is really unhealthy.

We are starting to get more computers in our classrooms now. This is presenting challenges. Even the teachers who know how to use technology don’t always know how to effectively integrate it into their classrooms. I have personally become disengaged with trying to use technology in my classes because of the unreliability of the computers in the past and the limitations to access. A couple of years ago I was full of ideas and trying all kinds of things but it was just too frustrating. Now I have to revisit that but I’m finding it difficult to be honest.

There are many teachers at my school who are not using technology very much at all. They are limited in their understanding or interest in web 2.0 type learning. They feel technological if they use a powerpoint and read it out. I feel the gap is too wide. Today we had a staff day and I was feeling an amount of frustration at speaker after speaker using this technique. I was thinking if they don’t have better skills and put more effort into presentations for the whole staff meeting, it’s certainly not going to happen in the classroom.

When I got home my son was working on one of his blogs and he asked me for help. He was so fast in his chopping and changing through websites and picking up code and pasting it, I had to tell him to slow down if he wants me to help. It further dawned on me how wide the gap is.

Introducing technology in the classroom is a big new adventure. I feel I am about to learn a lot.

Popularity: 9% [?]

4 comments , , , , , , ,

My Home on Google Street View

05/08/2008 Joh home

When I read about Google Street View, I was almost late to work, due to having to check out my house. I didn’t expect that my street in my regional town would have been included in this mass photographing. It was! I was quite surprised. It must have been in summer because the lovely big tree out the front of my home had leaves. Fortunately my lawns were mowed and my home looked tidy!

You can get the link to your street view or have an embed, if you want to put it on your blog. I don’t- but hey, you might. I feel awkward putting photos of my kids on my blog to be honest. My son put’s plenty of himself on his myspace, but I am just not there yet! It may change one day. I was never going to put my own photo online, and I have, so perhaps I’m just slow to expose myself.

Privacy is an interesting concept now though itsn’t it? Snoskred’s post So You Think You’re Anonymous on the Internet hightlights how wrong you are to believe that using another name, or the blanket anonymous doesn’t hide you. In the video I watched on Saturday, Kevin Kelley said all searches were recorded. I wonder if people realise how much their activities are monitored. It’s kind of like all the surveillance videos and satellites though, who is watching, who could be bothered? It’s just that it’s possible I guess…

Popularity: 8% [?]

5 comments ,

General Mooching

03/08/2008 Joh home, learn

Today I watched a very thought provoking TED talk: Kevin Kelly Predicting the next 5000 days of the web. There was lots to think about after seeing this presentation. The final point he makes is about transparent behaviour online. The web is not a private space.

An earlier TED talk I watched by Jonathon Harris about stories, led me to his site: We Feel Fine. A site inspired by this one Twistori, shows our words on the web are already being mined and refined. I could spend too much time on these sites watching the words representing thoughts from everywhere float by.

It’s very exciting I think to imagine the power of problem solving that is ahead.

I’m having a mooching around weekend. It’s delightful! I have cleaned, read, caught up with some of the little things I’ve been neglecting. Work is about to go to a frenzied pace, so I’m taking full advantage of the lull of these couple of days.

Popularity: 7% [?]

One comment , , , ,
« Older Entries