I’m in Washington DC for a work meeting, and although I was primarily interacting with, learning with, and having fun with teachers from around our national network, I also had some brief jaunts out onto Capitol Hill. This will be repeats for you if you follow me on Instagram or Twitter, but here’s a handful of images that caught my fancy…
Today, for work, I had the pleasure of watching a webinar on Connectedlearning.tv (also embedded above) where a panel of people heavily involved in making/coding/connected learning discussed the +/- of the “learning to code movement.” On the panel were some Writing Project folks (and friends of the Writing Project)—Mia Zamora, Joe Dillon, Doug Belshaw, and Mitch Resnick—and they had some really smart things to say about why learning to code is important.
Tonight during dinner I got a call from a coworker. This never happens so I knew it must be an emergency. When I answered I was greeted by a very apologetic, very worried person who had basically pushed a button they shouldn’t have pushed. We’ve all done it, right? Pushed that one button that somehow erases hours (or God forbid, days) of work. Lucky for this person I’ve had enough “oh shit” moments of my own to push me to make copies of code, saving revisions as I go, just for instances like this. Within a few minutes I was able to restore what was lost. Just like that.
I love working from home. Yes, it has taken some time to figure out and define boundaries with the other occupants of my “office,” especially the three shorter ones, but I’ve gotten better at shutting doors and using my noise-canceling headphones without feeling cold or neglectful. And, of course, you can’t beat the dress code.
That being said, I’ve discovered that while I often feel more productive at home than in the “real” office, there are times I miss the face-to-face interactions that being in a traditional office affords. My work teams have been doing much more video conferencing via Google Hangouts, but it’s not quite the same.
At the National Writing Project I’m the manager of much of NWP’s presence on the interwebs, and I’ve recently had the privilege and opportunity to work with teachers from around the country who are helping to create, facilitate, and implement some of our summer initiatives. This is the Summer of Making and Connecting and besides getting to observe some pretty amazing work around the country, it’s been refreshing to take a new look at what I do professionally.
Acceptance is a word I’ve struggled with in the past because I often equated it to giving up. And because I looked at it in that light, I fought it hard and I fought it often. Until relatively recently—the past year or so—anything that wasn’t the way I wanted was unacceptable. Either there was something I could do to change it, someway I could look at a problem differently to fix it, or just flat-out work harder to make it the way I wanted. I even approached people and their behavior in this way. I always said I couldn’t change people, but I thought that I could make choices that would then “steer” people in the direction I wanted. I couldn’t just accept how others were and the choices they made.