Time, Precious Free Time

It is high summer here in Mamaroneck. The neighborhood is quiet because many are away on vacation. Our local pool, where Laurie and I swim laps almost every morning, often has only a few other people in it while we are swimming.

In the mornings I spend two or three hours following up on leads from my PLN (mostly via twitter) and posting my daily set of tweets. If I'm lucky one of those tweets will spark a conversation which will get me engaged and fired up for the rest of the morning. Most days the tweets just disappear off into the great tweet stream, rushing to join the vast ocean of tweets stored somewhere off in the cloud.

Yesterday I put together the video below (reload the page if it doesn't show) for my online computer science class. The whole thing was made on an iPad 2, which turns out to be a nice platform for producing short instructional videos.

I'm starting to think quite a bit about my coming time at Yestermorrow. It should be a great experience as in a way I've been preparing for it since I was in high school. This is a direction that under different circumstances I might very well have developed into a career. One of the goals of the adult gap year I'm taking is to see if perhaps this might be a second career opportunity.

My other major gap year goal is to do all I can to develop a strong expertise in online education. I've been making good progress in that area, largely through leads discovered as a result of my participation in eduMooc. I haven't made any progress with OPuS but I suspect that is a much longer term project.

Through the middle of August I'm going to try and make the most enjoyable possible use of every day, with lots of swimming, kayaking, reading and gardening. It is definitely a time of year to slow down and enjoy family, friends and flowers.

I hope your summer is going well.