It’s the age-old tale. First, I stopped being abl to think of things to write. Then, I had an identity crisis, and in the middle of the identity crisis, a lot of things happened.

But this might turn out to be a good thing, because I’ve given a lot of thought to what I want this site to be and who I am, and I think this place is ready for the long overdue overhaul it’s (hopefully) about to go through.

As part of trying to resolve the identity crisis, I started a secret blog to experiment with sharing more of the content I felt I should be sharing. I don’t know that I truly found my voice (or my posting consistency), but I thought I would move those posts over here and see what you guys think (those of you who may or may not still be around).

If these posts become your introduction to Rebecca Thomas Designs, then welcome! Leave comments. Email me. Say hi.

Anyway, things you’ve never seen before are going to start appearing. Don’t freak out. This is part of the flux this site will be undergoing for a while. Advice and behind-the-scenes help is appreciated!

One of the things that’s always frustrated me is that if I add a song to a playlist, my computer perceives that as two different songs and uses up the appropriate memory. If I add it to two or three lists, it’s like having two or three copies of the song lying around.

In playing with tagging and manipulating my content, I got to thinking about building playlists through tagging instead. I know last.fm allows this. Please let me know if any players allow for this. The way I see this working (or at least have seen it work on last.fm) is that you can add as many tags as you feel necessary (album, artist, genre, mood, etc), and then you select the tag into player’s interface to hear just the songs with that particular tag. You could also conceivably select multiple tags to build a playlist appropriate to the moment.

I’m also trying to move back to the original Rebecca Thomas Designs website.

The original site was structured to meet the needs of the person I was when I started blogging. Each of my interests had their own blog, blocked off by Multiply. The design was clean, simple, able to be appropriate, regardless of which blog you were looking at.

The problem came when my focus changed, and the multiple blogs no longer reflected the person I realized was hiding in here. The person I am is a blend of teacher, content creator, and leader/coach; and now I want my blog to reflect that.

It would seem like some of the old blogs could just be re-purposed to fit this new me…but I want something more complicated. I want all of my blog entries to show up in the main blog, but leave people the option to see only the topics they want within these three major spheres of my life (preferably without the pain that comes with managing a blog broken apart by Multiply).

A couple of weeks ago, I started playing with FriendFeed and Yahoo Pipes to create a pair of all-in-one stops for Dead Bunny. Using tags and categories in his blog, Delicious, goodreads, Twitter and YouTube, I’ve pulled together an easy-to-use lifestream. It was fairly simple to put together, and running Yahoo Pipes through Feedburner has already allowed people to take advantage of subscribing to Dead Bunny’s content and getting it emailed to them. My next step is to figure out how to pull it into my original blog, and then to create a specific corner for him on the original website.

I’m already looking at creating a Yahoo Pipe for my design content. It’s really forcing me to think about how I use websites and tags to present and organize my work.

Even more importantly, I’m also starting to look at this as a means to pull together some sort of portfolio. I may have to build a few to reflect my work in different contexts, but I’m definitely looking forward to it.

In short, tags and categories can be used through FriendFeed and Yahoo Pipes (or other lifestreaming/mash-up tools) to create focused streams of your content. You can also use Yahoo Pipes to pull together information on topics that you’re researching.

Naturally, one of the early questions popping up is the difference between connectivism and constructivism. I’m taking this class because my periodic research on connectivism has often left me wondering the same thing. I’ve seen connectivism as connecting prior learning to what I’m now learning. Sort of a “How does this fit with what I already know” approach. Going through this week’s readings, I’m finding that my interpretation may really be too shallow.

Of course, I’m learning I may also be incorrect in my interpretation of constructivism. Constructivism was one of the educational theories presented to us my first semester in my teacher prep program. We were all encouraged to figure out which theory (or blend of theories) best fit how we learned and how we taught. Amazingly, I felt drawn to constructivism. It just seemed to fit with my emerging career in museum education and how I worked with students and developing programs.

Even this morning, as I sit here working on the next set of Dead Bunny videos, I’m really looking to build on what a student already knows to help them understand that video’s skill.

ack to the point, connectivism isn’t about making connections within the student to help them learn. It’s about creating connections outside the student, to create feedback loops that help cement the idea for the student. I wonder, though, if that really does create the right atmosphere for skill and concept mastery. It will be interesting to read and watch.

This morning, I plugged the drive back into my computer, and discovered my computer can’t even see the drive. It gave me an error message telling me how to mount it to my computer, but that didn’t work. So, I”m sitting here with a drive full of data I can’t access. I’m still working on fixing it, but it’s led to a small problem. Today, I was planning on cleaning up my resumes and sending one out. But guess where my resumes are?

Really, I should feel very frustrated right now. I’m having to take what’s on my LinkedIn profile and reshape it into a pair of resumes that define my career. But I’m not frustrated at all. This is a chance to “start fresh” to an extent. It’s a chance to think about what’s been really important in my career, what’s really stuck with me, and then revise my resume to reflect that.

This is a blessing when you really think about it. How often are you forced into thinking about what’s really mattered to you during your career?

Because of my position, I have been the one mediating the changes for both the incoming leadership and for the teachers who are just trying to understand what each of these changes means for them. Admittedly, I walk into work every day wondering what’s been changed overnight, and how am I going to be expected to handle that change. The job was already one that required a lot of flexibility because small things were constantly changing, but now it’s a persistent state of change. In a way, you could say that change has become a lifestyle for me.

I’ve had some very long days and weeks just trying to keep on top of everything going on, and as a result my blogging (my writing in general), and my new photography and drawing hobbies have fallen by the wayside. I’m not so invested in either the photography or the drawing yet, so I almost haven’t missed them except when I see my camera or my sketchbook.

Losing the writing, on the other hand, has created a sense of, “Something’s missing here.” That’s probably because writing is a lifestyle for me as well. I’ve written as long as anyone can remember. I’ve journaled. I’ve written short stories, novels, and fan fiction. I’ve blogged. Not writing has actually contributed to my inability to relax because it’s like my arm’s been cut off.

Not writing, or taking pictures, or drawing has actually led to other frustrations for me because creativity is another of my lifestyles. When I can focus on Dead Bunny’s material or solve problems at work, my inner need for creativity is met, but I would flourish with more opportunities to be creative.

The one part of my lifestyle that I haven’t had to find opportunities for is teaching. I train at work. I teach at work. I come home, analyze cartoons for learning moments, and then work on learning moments myself. There was a time, though, when the closest I got to teaching was training volunteers every three months. I have friends who still remind me of how much I was a pill during that time.

A lifestyle is something that makes you who you are. For me, that involves teaching, writing, and being creative. That’s my recipe, what keeps me going.

What’s you lifestyle?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xKG0E-QwhI]

The main problem with this particular skill is that students catch on to the rules for quickly, and then try to apply them to adding and subtracting positive and negative integers. Unfortunately, this gets them in a lot of trouble because the two are governed by their own rules.

On the production side, this one seems plagued by two problems. The audio track has a tinny sound to it that I’m not sure where it came from. When I was recording and editing it in Audacity, it sounded fine. In fact, I spent far more time cleaning up the audio tracks for this presentation just trying to remove the background sounds. The second seems to come from the compression both Windows Movie Maker and YouTube put it through. This time, it seems to be affecting both the video and the audio instead of just the video. I’ll need to figure out what’s causing that and try to avoid it.

I may take a break after the next video is finished because my computer is finally home from the shop, and I’ll be transferring back to it and then learning how to produce my videos on Ubuntu. (Advice is welcome. Leave a comment, or email me at rebecca[at]rebeccathomasdesigns[dot]com.)

This doesn’t mean I act like a fraud or deliberately mislead people into believing I’m something I’m not. It means that with a little confidence and a little common sense, I can generally muddle through a situation until I’ve actually picked enough skills to do it on my own.

It may sound weird, but it really works. When you’re “faking it”, you’re really taking an opportunity to learn what you need to know in a hands-on situation, arguably the best way to learn anything. Even better, you’re immediately applying what you’re learning, further cementing your own understanding. You can then apply that to the next time the same question or situation arises, and you’re reinforcing your learning. Once you’ve completely learned that answer or process, there’s no longer a need to fake anything, and you’re honestly standing on your own two feet.

It requires far less energy than trying to be someone else, and these days, everyone is looking to conserve a little energy, right? It’s also far more satisfying to do what you truly love rather than what someone else loves. And third, being yourself might be the only chance to give yourself to be really brave, because let’s face it, it takes a good deal of bravery to be a child-free adult who loves her Saturday morning cartoons. What? No…of course, I don’t do that…except in months with 28 days in them.

Need more convincing? Check out Scott Ginsberg’s post on how people react to those smart enough to be themselves, and see if that doesn’t motivate you.

In fact, the only lecture I remember was the day the professor was trying to start a role-playing scenario about the Old West. I can’t tell you what point she was trying to make, because she was derailed fairly early in the scenario. Somehow, we got on the topic of being an individual versus conforming. She asked us to raise her hands if we thought we didn’t conform. I was one of the few who raised her hand.

The teacher asked each of us in turn why we thought we were a nonconformist, and then pointed out that we all follow some basic rules. For example, none of us was running around campus naked, and we were all students with perfect attendance. According to her, that took away our nonconformity. That bothered us. None of us could see why adhering to rules that benefited us would eat into our otherwise nonconformist lifestyles.

I’m still not what anyone would call “normal”, and I teach teenagers. Theoretically, teenagers are supposed to be rebellious as they try to figure out who they’re going to be when they emerge from the teenage cocoon. According to several of my students over the past couple of years, being a teenager automatically makes them nonconformists.

But the teen years are often when we’re most motivated to be accepted, so my rebellious teenagers express their individuality, their nonconformity, by falling in with the subculture that appeals to them, and then conforming with that group. I actually tried to ask one of my students once how that made them a nonconformist, but he couldn’t really answer me because it was like, you know…and…I don’t know. You know?

I think even as adults, we have the same problem. We want to stand out, but still be accepted by the crowd. Being “weird” haunts us. But maybe it’s not the worst label to bear.