Stephen Francoeur, one of Baruch’s many awesome librarians, turned me on to Posterous yesterday.  This is a service that allows you to publish to the web via a simple email to post@posterous.com; your posts will compile in your own space on posterous.com or can be configured to push out to your blog, Facebook or Twitter feeds, Flickr account, etc.  The process elegantly handles image files, mp3s, and videos, and allows for tagging via “tag:” enclosed in double parentheses.  Posterous also offers support for group blogs and custom domains, and it’s easy to see this is a good tool for publishing while mobile or even for enabling those who are reticent to go through the trauma of learning the administrative interface of WordPress to publish easily from their Hotmail or AOL email accounts.

(By the way, I published this through an email to Posterous).

((tag: online-publishing, webtools))

Posted via email from Luke’s posterous

LW add from inside Cacophony: I had to come into the Cacophony post to clean up the links and image… seems as though keeping the html formatting and attachments elegant through the push might take some work.  Further, it looks as though the tags didn’t talk to the Cacophony tag function.  So, the push is janky… but the potential is still there.

Paula’s now at the stage on her pregnancy calendar where it’s advising us about buying car seats and picking out outfits in which to bring the baby home.  Meaning, the baby is just fattening up at this point.  She’ll be full term in a week and a half.

Excuse me, I have to go put the crib together.  In the meantime, 1 year old Kaya just about sums it up:

Last night we attended a mixer for new families at the elementary school where Kaya will begin her march from kindergarten to the Supreme Court this September (though it still remains to be seen whether she’ll be there on the bench or as the subject of some sort of appeal).

She’s now at an age that I vividly remember, and attending her dance recital last month made clear to me that watching Kaya proceed through her childhood will be accompanied by memories of my own.  I’ve thought much about that dance recital over the past few weeks.  It provoked in me an odd mixture of emotions with which I’ve yet to adequately come to grips– I was so proud that she was performing something she worked hard on for months, and impressed by the level of support the community was showing for these girls who strutted their stuff confidently across the stage.  At the same time, I was horrified by the sexualization of pre-pubescent girls evident in many of the performances, and bothered by what I saw as an emphasis on showiness and performance rather than on craft and enjoyment.  While the event was pleasant on the whole, there was simply no need for the expensive, ornate costumes sported by each group.  I know, I know… they’re just kids, let them have their fun.  But that’s my point.  I feel that the dance would have been much more meaningful and perhaps even more fun with a dozen girls in black leotards stripped of the myriad cultural references that signified to the audience so much adorable cuteness.  The kids are naturally adorably cute without all that stuff… shed it and let them show what they’ve learned, for crying out loud!  Of course… I couldn’t have been prouder of Kaya, and tears streamed down my cheeks throughout her entire performance.

Another component of the recital that bothered me was that such a high percentage of the kids were white.  This is nothing against you, my potential white reader, and certainly nothing against white kids, but rather a byproduct of my strong preference for diverse communal experiences.  The mixer last night was majority minority, which was surprising because the state statistics show that the school is 80%+ white.  P and I remembered that there had also been a mixer in the morning, and thought maybe most of the white families had attended that rather than the evening event?   Who knows.  Maybe white people are less likely to let their kids stay up that late.

The school serves close to 600 students from pre-K to 2nd grade, and was impressive… art and music rooms support vibrant programs, a new playground was just completed for the pre-k and kindergartners, and the library even had a half dozen iMacs.  My elementary school had none of these things (well, we did have a great new playground, which Mrs. Waltzer helped put together, even if she wouldn’t allow me to go on the monkey bars), but I loved it then and remember it fondly now because of the kinds of people I was exposed to as a Verlinden Little Red (school pictured at left).  I had some good teachers and developed academic skills; but more importantly, I was exposed to a variety of types of kids and families and ways of looking at the world, which shaped me just as much as learning how to read or add and subtract.

Kaya’s about to become a Bulldog (the mascot of her elementary school), and I hope, hope, hope that when she looks back upon her own elementary school experience as an adult she feels its lasting impact as deeply and fondly as I feel mine.  She did turn to me after we toured the school last night and said “this looks like it’s a fun school, dad!”

That’s a good start.

photo credit: tantek

I was excited to get the Call For Papers for the CUNY IT Conference, scheduled for December 4.  This year’s theme will be “Information Technology/Instructional Technology in CUNY: Managing Complexity,” and the presentations will ask:

1. What works? How has technology not just changed but improved our instructional and administrative practices? What tests have been met? What value added? What innovations deserve to be extended and duplicated?
2. What works together? What mixtures of modes or services are available? Are we moving to the use of “mash-ups” in teaching and administration, combinations of applications that work together? How do we manage and sustain such combinations?
3. What helps us work together? What innovations allow us to be mutually supportive? What are we doing in the way of training and mentoring? How are we spreading the word to colleagues, introducing them to new methods and technologies?
4. What points to a shared direction? What changes on our horizon are most promising, most scalable and sustainable? What developments call for collaborative and strategic thinking? What changes are especially important to a multi-campus university?

Themes the past four years (there doesn’t seem to have been a theme in 2006) have included: “Instructional/Information Technology in CUNY: The Catalyst for Transformational Change,” “Instructional/Information Technology in CUNY: Future Present,” and “Instructional/Information Technology in CUNY: How Is Change for the Better?”

The notion of “Managing Complexity,” when combined with the questions italicized above, contains more of an argument than did themes from previous years.  Yesterday George Otte, CUNY’s Director of Academic Technology and a former Director of the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute, wrote a post that details much of the thinking behind “Managing Complexity,” and that also effectively shoots dead the notion that any single service can meet the edtech needs of our campuses.  This is a very important administrative recognition of the argument that’s been at the core of our experimentation with personal publishing platforms for the past few years at the Schwartz Institute.

The 2009 CUNY IT Conference promises to be yet another in the series of events that has sustained and further distributed throughout CUNY the energetic consideration of the role of technology in the university of the future.  I hope to see more panels that explore the relationships between information technology and instructional technology, that challenge and complicate the client-services model of technology that prevails throughout much of the university, and that highlight and celebrate the innovative teaching, learning, and research projects sprouting up at the campuses.

One additional note: David Pogue, who keynoted the most recent IT Conference, will come back for a return engagement.  While he was certainly an entertaining presenter, it might have been nice if we had someone who could draw into sharper focus for the community just what’s at stake in the reimagination of the role of technology at the university.

Over the past two years Kaya has gotten ahold of our digital camera on several occasions.  The photos below offer a glimpse into the world as seen by a precocious four year-old. 

At times her perspective is blurry, but she sure does get smiles…

Thought we’d kick off “dushtumay.sahawaltzer.org 2.0″ with some photos from our trip to Philly this past weekend.

Hope you all like the new site… We promise, it’ll be a lot more active in the coming months… bear with us as we work out some kinks.