Out of somewhere came a childhood memory of a standardized test they gave us in elementary school, 1970s era. I did well on the test but I recall some analysis which said my skills would be best for some kind of bookkeeping or doing typing in my career. I was not thrilled by that given childhood dreams of something more adventurous.
As it turns out I have a school years book my mom had organized for all of her children, with little pockets of report cards, certificates, immunizations for each grade. I poked around and in the third grade pocket I found my results on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (I never knew as a kid why we got tests from Iowa, but we had no Wikipedia where I can find it now).
Here is standardized testing in 1970s ditto format (and my scored hand written in an charted):
To find your weight, you step on a scale. To check your height, you use a yardstick. To find out how well you are doing in school, you take a test. The skills taught in school cannot be measured as accurately, however as your weight and height. These tests indicate how well you have mastered the basic skills and how your skills compare with these of thousands of other pupils in Baltimore County who have taken the same tests.
I was highest in Language and Work-Study skills? I thought I was great at math! And I cannot find anything indicating what kind of future job I might land in, nothing suggesting a career spent at a computer keyboard– wait a minute! my career IS typing. Way to go Iowa.
I digress, and maybe that nostalgia trip is not connected to the big question in the title.
My career in edtech has seemed like a fortunate series of things that almost seem like I have fallen into, and it always seemed like almost unexpectedly the next thing would come along almost by surprise.
Yet lately, I stare out the window or look far to the Saskatchewan horizon, and wonder, “when is the next thing going to appear?”
For another post, I am not finding much in the two letter acronym many others are hepped up about.
And then I had another one of those memories (which like the standardized test, was incorrect) of long time ago, D’Arcy Norman had done some kind of sketch thing in his Moleskin notebook of phases of his career.
Thus, I took out a blank piece of paper and one of those pen things. I did all of this in about 15 minutes. Across the top I put time frames from my career (in boxes), knowing where the breaks were. Below I put where I was working (underlined).
Then I started adding in the technologies I was using or engaged with at the time. Next came bigger trends or broader interests (in circles). And finally added other significant points.
It was just a one off, and I am sure I missed stuff. It was a curious process. Oh, here’s the scribbles.
I am noticing now that there is the biggest clump of “stuff” in the middle, like late 1990s to maybe 2020.
The key thing is the big question mark under 2024.
Now.
All along and still today, I very much like making connections, and having spontaneous interchanges with people on the net. It’s like everything that flowed the early days in email listservs, then on the web through blog networks, then social media, and now, well pretty much “entropified” out to too many spaces.
I quite very much enjoy doing the OEGlobal Voices podcasts and running live streamed events (we have been doing them with Streamyard, published directly to YouTube) all of which are rarely scripted and very loosely structured. I have yet another new idea, I want to organize some live sessions got OEGlobal that are opportunities for demos- not just of technology, but it could be to show an online course, an OER, a technique. But in Demo Wednesday sessions there are no slides, everything is a live demo.
For me, so much academic discourse feels formal –presentations and slide talk webinars– where are the places for open conversations? I so relish a conversational format, the unexpected that arrises. For a recent example, I was fortunate to record an episode with the Tony Bates. One of my standard questions is asking guests what they thought of school as a kid, what kind of student they were. Tony mentions that at his primary school in London were two other lads named Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.
This is what algorithms and vector representations of internet content can’t do, they hover at the median, not the interesting outliers of human experience.
Plus, going back to the days of going live on DS106 Radio (there is a reason this is on my mind, but that’s another post) that freeform going live on the air or the video stream, even if there are no listeners. It makes for a sense of excitement, what in the early planning day stages of the open DS106, Jim Groom described as a “sense of eventness” — something is happening over there, I want to be part of it.
Heck, it goes father back that I think of it, in my mid 1990s days at Maricopa, I was doing a presentation at maybe a League for Innovation Conference with a fantastic dynamic faculty Donna Rebadow. She had a way of getting the audience riled up, I believe at the very start she mentioned the long day of sitting, and she got them stand up and give each other back rubs. We joked much as we did talks like a later one on Technology and Learning as Magic or Reality. But at the one I remember, we had so much laughter and loud audience energy, that people started filtering in from neighboring rooms to see what was going on on our session. Some of them were from a Douglas College in Vancouver, and it led to my invited trip to another institution.
It was just tricks and games, we had substance too. But it never needed to be drilled as reading bullet points from slides.
So now I have really gone off tangent, and slid down into the past. But hey, past as prologue, right? I am finding though what I seem to be liking doing are gathering for open, less structured activities. My colleagues and people I rope into these things seem to think I am good at this. I have a different idea of a realistic dialogue being talking with people, not yakking at an LLM on my phone.
So the arc of my career is to catapult me into being some web talk show host?
Nah, that’s not it. But at least it’s exciting to be doing.
And while I may miss out on The Big Thing That Will Consume Us All, I’m willing to miss full jumping on the AI boat. Not that I am totally against it, as it seems like you either get cast into being an all out champion or labeled as critic who just hates the stuff. Donald Clark blogged that “An interesting paper just published showed that much of the scepticism on GenAI comes from those who have not tried it. Lesson – for any real critical thinking or analysis, some use is necessary.” Note the lack of any real reference for said paper, much less that discounts skepticism based on experience.
And this is not even my post about my AI skepticism. And despite pundits claims, I have done more than trying it.
So the what’s next remains an open question. That’s always how the other things on my sketch came to be, they just seemed to organically emerge out of the experience of exploring and doing “other stuff.”
We’ll see what gets tossed on the paper next.
And now the most ironic thing is that the whole reason for doing my sketch thinking that D’Arcy had done one about his career timeline was wrong. I posted my photo to Mastodon, and deft as D’Arcy is, he found his original image. It was actually a timeline history of his blog!
And as often I ended up Doing What D’Arcy Did, and sketched by own History of Blog (as of 2007)
So my remembering something incorrectly led me to do something that turned out to be an interesting exercise. This is serendipity. This is not what you can from doing everything through a great Averaging Grey Slop Producing machine.
I crave the unexpected, the outliers. Have fun with everyone else in the crowd at the middle of the bell shaped curve.
Featured Image: My own photo. Yes, I could have generated some fantasy type graphic image, but why is this needed when I have my own photo representing looking into an unknown?
@topdog That's a 2 blog posts published in one day feat. Do I get micro-credential for that? (the achievement is for forgetting to publish one 5 days ago)