Monthly Archives: May 2008

Learning on a stick Minnesota style

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At the most recent meeting of the Minnesota Education Media Organization Technology Special Interest Division (I couldn’t resist writing that out) I learned about a cool professional development opportunity called 23 Things On a Stick. Curious about the name? If you’ve visited the Minnesota State Fair you’d know how we in Minnesota love things on a stick.

The 23 Things… program is a largely self-paced set of tutorials intended for teachers and library folks in Minnesota who want to learn more about Web 2.0 tools. The “Things” include RSS, photosharing, collaboration, social media, online productivity, online gaming, podcasts, video, and social networking. Each participant is required to maintain a blog for the duration of the project to foster reflection and interaction with other participants.

I’d like to see someone turn the 23 Things program into a Moodle course that can be distributed to any school that is using Moodle for professional development. (“23 Things On a Stick” is made available under an Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike Creative Commons license.) Any takers?

Twitterator gets a tiny bit smarter

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Here’s a little tweak that should make Twitterator just a bit more useful. You can now pass the URL for the list of people to follow in the link to Twitterator itself. For example, let’s say you’ve collected a list of Twitter usernames in a text file at http://mytwitternames.com/lsdf28sdf. A link like this:

http://twitterator.org/?url=http://mytwitternames.com/lsdf28sdf

will take you to Twitterator and pre-populate the URL field. This should make it even easier to help a group of people get subscribed to a bunch of other Twitterers. Have fun with it.

Race report: Lake Minnetonka Half Marathon 2008

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The Lake Minnetonka Half Marathon was my first try at the 13.1-mile distance, and I was bound and determined not to repeat the rookie mistakes I’ve made in previous races. In last year’s Run For Oromia 10k and Twin Cities Marathon, I felt good at the beginning and started way too fast. With my Timex Bodylink GPS system I knew that I would be able to monitor my pace often, and I hoped that I could stick with my race plan and avoid flaming out.

Conditions were perfect today. It was just under 50°F at the start and almost 60°F by the end. It was just cold enough at the start that everyone kept their outer layers on until the last minute. Since the race goes point-to-point, I appreciated the fact that they transported our warmups to the finish for us. The course ran along Lake Minnetonka (go figure from the name of the race) and was hillier than I’d expected. Nothing too steep or long, but lots of them.

My plan was to do the first couple miles at 9:00 pace, 8:45 pace until 10k, 8:30 pace until 10 miles, and then empty the tank in the final 5k.

Lake Minnetonka Half Marathon 2008 Splits

From the looks of the graph, I’d say my game plan went quite well. The two slower miles at 6 and 11 were due to a combination of slowing for water stops and some hills. I’m definitely happy with the trend line. I’ve never been able to do negative splits before.

The official results haven’t been posted yet, but the time on my watch was 1:53:40. I would have been disappointed if I hadn’t broken two hours, and I was hoping to go under 1:55. According to the Running Times Race Time Equivalent calculator, that puts my projected marathon time at 4:01:34. I’d really like to break four hours at Grandma’s Marathon on June 21, so I guess I’m going to need to get my lazy butt out of bed a little earlier and log some more miles.

Update: The results are in. I finished officially in 1:53:42 placing 472 out of 1449 overall and 103/192 in my age group. (One nice thing about turning 40 later this year is that I get to start competing against guys who are older than I am.) My knees are a bit sore tonight, but it’s a good kind of sore.

New Job: Osseo here I come

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Big news in my world this week. Starting on July 1st I will be changing school districts to become the Chief Technology Officer in the Osseo Area Schools. It’s a really exciting opportunity to work in a large metro district (22,000 students in 31 schools) with a great leadership team and a history of innovation with technology. Check out the TICT Initiative for an example of a successful teacher coaching model. (I blogged about TICT at the 2006 TIES Conference.)

One of my first tasks will be merging the existing Technology Management and Instructional Media & Technology departments into a new Technology Division. It’s going to be a wild ride!