My friend Alan Levine posted on Yahoo Pipes and a clever little bit of code that gives you a map of your Twitter followers. The code requires plain text Twitter password entry, so neither Alan nor I posted the actual map, but here’s a screen shot of mine!

Created @ http://pipes.yahoo.com/mmmeeja/twitterfollowers

In Novemember at NCTE I headed into a session where PJ Haarsma, the author of The Softwire series, was presenting on Science Fiction and Gaming in the High School Classroom. I was hoping to have PJ sign his up and coming book The Softwire: Wormhole Pirates on Orbis 3. When I walked in, Jim Blasingame, ASU professor and presentation chair, welcomed me, shook my hand, and told me that he wanted me to join the panel. I was surprised, but eager. I joined PJ, Jim, Pete, and a teacher named Kristina on a panel to discuss how to use video games to get kids excited about reading science fiction.

PJ discussed what he and Jim calls the simulated literary experience (SLE), and that reminded me of how we now see more and more trailers for books, instead of just movies. PJ uses video games to hook readers, and he and Dr. Goggin suggest that we need to redefine “literacy”. Literacy is now whatever we want it to be as creator and consumer. We cannot define literacy as just the ability to read and write; literacy in the 21st century included images, audio and video, too (for example see Gee 2003).

The concept of multimodal composition isn’t a new one, but a colleague and I have been developing courses at Mesa Community College that move beyond the traditional formal papers and more into the 21st century multimodal realms.

In what quickly became my portion of the panel presentation, I discussed the use of wikis to generate collective intelligence lexicons based on Haarsma’s The Softwire Series; of (when) the students generate the lexicon, PJ hopes to publish it in the rear of the paperback in March 2009. I just need to better motivate the students to become excited about this entire endeavor. I am also excited that on another level, this may lead to other presentation and publications for us. The power of technology used to increase youth literacies is exciting.

A couple weeks after that presentation, my name popped up on the grid here. I didn’t know the video from the presentation was online. Here it is.

This week I am at the AP Institute in Bellevue, WA. Last year I came to this same institute alone, because I’d heard it’s the best around. I agree. Last year it rocked, and my presenter was the Chief Reader for AP Language. The beginning of the week began a bit quieter until my friends Ryan & Laura drove up; we spent week nights together after the conference and then the weekend before I flew home. This year I brought about 25 people with me. Ryan asked about coming up again, and I apologized that with so much work to do here this year I would be relatively MIA. I asked if that bothered him, and I didn’t hear back so I assume it was a problem. It’s cool. I just hope to see them again soon, and if they were in town, I’d keep worrying that I wasn’t seeing them enough.

So now here I am again, and Perry High sent Shirley Crabtree to this same conference. I didn’t realize how much I missed her until I saw her again, knowing in 3 weeks I wouldn’t see her every day. Sitting in my room. Copying with me. In-servicing with me. Talking with me. Teaching with me. I’ll miss that, and even talking with her about curriculum mapping, I realized we’d never plan together the same again. Sure, we’d share ideas. Sure, she’d give me her advice, but never would we be on the same page day in and day out, again.

As for the overall conference, I didn’t realize how much I like quiet traveling. This time I am mostly surrounded by my friends and peers. Out of class, we’re at dinner or walking somewhere. In class I am with my new friends, reading, working, thinking. Sylvia, my instructor, is amenable albeit a but flighty (but that’s her charm), and our group is smaller. Last year there were thirty of us, and I could zone out if I wanted. This year I can’t.

I need to work on our AP Calendar. I need to work on our English 11 scope & sequence. I need to revamp things, and I wish I weren’t level lead, but I am. I trudge away in the work that has become me.

In 1999 my wife and I began traveling with students. Our first trip was to England, Ireland, and Wales the summer we were married, and we’ve been doing it since. The longest trip was to London, Paris and Rome, and the coolest trip was to Central European Citites, and now that we have Claire we decided to go on these trips every other year, instead of every summer. This summer we’re not doing a student trip, so next summer we wanted to do Greece & Italy but discovered another teacher is doing that tour for spring break. We tried to get him to wait until June but he chose not too. Spring break trips just seem to quick to us. We decided to not conflict with them and we’re considering going somewhere else.

Our initial idea was Spain & Portugal but some people don’t like Portugal. Then the tour company suggested Costa Rica, but I for one never considered that. It sounds interesting, and our Spanish speakers would be able to communicate. A couple kids were disappointed we weren’t doing Italy & Greece anymore and mentioned they’d like to do Scotland. I know my wife has always wanted to go there, and she’d like to pair it with Stonehenge & Bath so I was open for the suggestion. I looked through the book today and found a cool Scottish tour that included Northern Ireland. I swore I would not go back to Ireland until Claire could come, but I’ve never been to Belfast. We were reviewing that and flipped through the Australia pages. I always said no to Australia because of price, so I was shocked when I saw we could do that trip for under $3,000.00 base price. So now we have a decision to make. Do we head to Scotland, which will be cheaper? Do we head to Spain, which may be cool? Or do we go Down Under? Worse case scenario, we go nowhere. Not my idea of cool.