or: Not Volunteering For Anything Ever Again

Things picked up for about an hour. I spoke with Bill Fitzgerald from OpenAcademic who narrated a tour of his DrupalEd, which came closest to the wish list I posted a few days ago. The user roles are well-defined from admin through teacher on to student. Anyone can register, though the new user role doesn’t receive any privileges until the admin validates, which effectively realizes this idea of a “walled garden” which I coined, defined, and copyrighted last post. The tools for teachers range from podcasts, wikis, blogs, social bookmarks.

Things took a sorry turn after 10h00 that release day, though, after Bill stopped holding my hand and I had to coast on my own limited enthusiasm and knowledge. And I swear, the blogosphere just exacerbated things. My mind is wide open on this one. I have been ready to be dazzled for several months now. I have been reading posts on all this for several months now and I have yet to get It.
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I’m lost. I’m pretty sure I can get un-lost in time to present, but a proper sales pitch requires a certain degree of expertise that exceeds the parameters of this assignment.

I find myself craving 37Signal‘s mantra of Do Less Better. Check the beautiful minimalism of their front page and then check the clutter on Moodle‘s. Then again, 37Signals isn’t open source or built for outside development, so: apples and oranges. Still, I kinda prefer apples.

Anyway, at 08h00 I set into Elgg, Moodle, Joomla, and Drupal.

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I’ve become shy in my use of the word “irony,” nowadays, what with the Grammarati so trigger happy in pointing out its misuse. So let’s just say that, as the word is commonly understood, my current situation is the very definition of ironic:

In less than a month, I’ll be making a case to the math department, then the leadership committee, and then the faculty for integrating 21st-century educational technology into our high school.

Ironic?

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I’ve been pushing some mean work days recently. 20 hours yesterday; 18 the day before. It isn’t the teaching, it’s video editing, my sideline hobby which recently turned into paid work.

So there I am, staring at Adobe AfterEffects and its attendant, x-, y-, and z-axes, linear motion palettes, bezier curves, inflection points, derivatives up on your derivatives, and I don’t care if all the interpolation is handled inside my computer’s noggin.

I couldn’t help thinking right then that, man, I’m glad someone bothered to teach me some math back when.