Shooting email zombies DFI Day 3 Friday 9th August

 Filtering and organising email - I decided to do a session on this at the GBHS staff PL; partly because at a staff meeting earlier this year, a senior staff member whinged about how many emails he got and that he wasn’t going to bother reading them. This seemed to be a popular sentiment. Emails are a never ending to-do list and you have to slog through them. In fact, the popularity of Zombie movies are (in my opinion) are a result of this. Consider, most horror genres-and this is critical film theory- are thought to be a personification of some human fear -a metaphorical representation, if you will. So Godzilla, as a fear of the atomic age. werewolves, an instinctual fear of predation and human detachment from nature, Frankenstein as a fear of science overreaching and vampires and zombies as our anxiety over disease: Zombies had a parallel with rabies, vampires with AIDS. In 1968 George Romero made the first Zombie hit movie ‘Night Of the Living Dead’ and admits ripping off the plot of a book called ‘I am Legend’ which was actually about vampires. It has since been made into a zombie movie starring Will Smith. Since then there have been a shit ton of zombie movies and television programmes.

In fact we’re probably past ‘peak’ zombie which was 2014 or 2015 depending on your opinion of season five and season six of ‘The Walking Dead’. Interestingly, in the U.S. 5.3 million people watched the premiere of the Walking Dead but only 2.9 million watched the season 4 premiere of critically acclaimed show Mad Men. So 2.4 million people would rather watch January Jones, Christina Hendricks and Jon Hamm if they were shambling, decomposing corpses. Even Game of Thrones fits (uneasily) in the zombie genre. Which zombie movie is my favourite? I’m glad you asked - it’s a tie between Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland. Anyway, a better question is probably: What on earth have the popularity of Zombies got to do with my email account? First: zombies. There are two types: fast zombies and slow zombies. They can’t talk, don’t think and want to consume your flesh. And that’s it. The solution is also simple: blast zombie in brain from point blank range -preferably with a shotgun-until you either run out of zombies or run out of ammo. Here’s the point: what if people are less interested in seeing a metaphorical representation of their unconscious fears (zombies as a proxy for our fear of rabies) but are more attracted to an analogy of how their day to day life feels? My inbox is a constant, unholy shitstorm of tasks, reminders, notifications, announcements and requests sent impersonally by colleagues, students, senior managers and complete strangers. I didn’t ask for them and now I have to deal with them even if it is just to read them or delete them. And like the zombies, they keep coming. 

Tuesday’s PL session with staff went pretty well, some staff had no idea that docs does the voice typing - in fact some of them now think I'm some sort of digital Dumbledore (how do you like that reference to my first blog). I had a short spiel about filtering emails into folders and bypassing the inbox. There were a couple of ‘in’ jokes about filtering specific serial email spammers. Staff then had a crack at google grouping and I found myself added to several groups with interesting names like GBHS Blokes. I had mentioned that if you invite people they will ignore the invite. No doubt we’ll soon be exchanging our opinions on the latest Marie Kondo episode.

Dorothy’s spiel - presentation. Emphasis on creativity as a ‘hook’ for student engagement. Maslow’s hierarchy, solo taxonomy both rank the whole creative thing as fairly important. Sight, sound and motion are an important part of creativity - she finished with some quotes from Kevin Roberts who is well-known for leaving Saatchi and Saatchi in a storm of controversy after making some rough calls about gender diversity in the advertising industry. I should also mention that Kevin retracted his comments when people gave him stick and apologised. But...
Multi modal sites Engagement (hook) As a guy that loves fishing - I even watch fishing shows- the hook is a compelling metaphor. The best hooks are super sharp and have a wicked barb so the fish (fighting for its life) can’t spit it out. Circle hooks are my favourite type: they have a design feature that makes them slide to the corner of the mouth and don’t cause a huge amount of damage if you did want to chuck the fish back. Of course, with the hook metaphor, you have to consider bait. What interestingly flavoured shiny thing is impaled on the hook that hides the vicious barb? Even Maui had to bait his hook; he used his own blood. The hook is a fairly aggressive metaphor. But unlike something similarly aggressive - the spear, the dagger, the bullet - the hook has a degree of subtlety and deception. It’s also a fairly common metaphor: the hook in a song is the catchy part, riff, phrase(even catchy is metaphorical). Also, if we started talking at length about ‘spearing’ our learners someone is going to get flamed. Much like any other aggressive hunter-gatherer images there is a fairly brutal process inferred with ‘hooking’ something. The catch is dragged ashore (or onboard) and bludgeoned to death, filleted, skinned and put on ice. At least, that’s the ideal process. Sites: I enjoyed Maria’s detailed explanation of setting up a site. I have to do a similar presentation on Tuesday morning to a staff group that has swelled to 18. Some of the stuff Maria went through was instructive - such as having navigation across the top instead of the side because it frees up space for content. Some of these things I’ve just blundered through intuitively or I’ve just gone with presets. I asked about fonts, wanting to customise these but there are few choices. Luckily none of them are comic-sans. Explaining the simple stuff and not taking a whole lot of prior knowledge for granted is vital. The multi-modal suggestion is also worthwhile: if I reflect on my sites, I have initially gone crazy with loom videos. My media site is probably a better example as my staff site has been heavily weighted toward loom videos. Anyway, I am hoping to use this content that Lenva Shearing developed for making new sites. Also useful: the DFI slide presentation which I moved to my drive. I was trying to make a copy (that I could adapt) but that function has been turned off.

I should also probably mention that I’ve just been on a trip to see Hornby High School and Tamaki College as orientation for the Manaiakalani programme. I went with Jason Scott who is our techie and our principal. As our techie, Jason is probably the most indispensable guy at the school. Last year, I broke my achilles tendon and had quite an extended sick leave. There was someone in my class doing my job straight away. If Jason fell over, the school would fall apart. Anyway, Hornby’s principal, Robin Sutton gave us the grand tour of the vast property Hornby sits on. Everything looked new. And the classes were tiny - we're talking 12-13 students. Robin admitted that Manaiakalani was still not embedded after five years on the programme. Interesting. Also intriguing was an extended discussion about exponential decline in the popularity of rugby. I found this fascinating as I think that there’s a real digital crossover. Not to mention the elephant in the room (which no one did) which is concussion. I think I should expand on this in a further blog post as it’s got me thinking. Hornby, small classes, modern learning environments, digital devices, probably has more in common with Campion College than Boys' High. Tamaki College, however had more in common with Boy’s High. I should probably expand further on this trip but am still considering how my school compares. The short version is that I don’t think we are far from where we should be and that it won’t take much to get there.

Last week, one of the things that was new to me was the 'soft skills' thing which is about responsibility, teamwork, leadership, decisiveness - that sort of stuff. This is the popular stuff!  It made me reflect on the perception of intelligence which was pretty much connected to having a good memory; especially relating to current events and history.  If you’re still reading (and good for you) you may have noticed I used the past tense. That was deliberate - the perception of intelligence may have just changed. Back to the original perception of intelligence before the internet became ubiquitous - this was partly to do with how we absorbed information -  most of which came from books with the occasional documentary. You had to retain whatever you learnt so a smart person had a general but imperfect sense of history and current events. But then the internet started to collect and index pretty much everything including facts, opinions, and reviews generated by pretty much anyone who wanted to have a say on anything. This is not a good thing. An overwhelming amount of information becomes a morass. Now, I think a perception of intelligence won’t depend on these skills - some of which are innate - but instead, an ability to sieve through an overwhelming amount of information. I have a reasonable memory - but as I said, memory is now not really a necessary thing - it’s like being able to multiply two five digit numbers in your head instantly. Sure, it’s impressive but I have a phone in my pocket and it can do the same thing.