I’m writing this while I’m still on vacation. This week we drove to my hometown, rented a condo on the beautiful Gulf of Mexico, and I didn’t do a thing I didn’t want to do.
I swam. I took naps. I went to a parade and caught tons of beads and candy. I ate food I’m not supposed to eat. I stayed out too late and probably had one too many martinis.
And I read. A lot.
I read A Wolf at the Table – which was written by Augusten Burroughs. He also wrote Running with Scissors, and is the brother of John Elder Robison, who wrote Look Me in the Eye (he also made all the cool guitars for Kiss & has Asperger’s). A Wolf at the Table is a very, very dark book about the author’s experience growing up, mostly about the relationship between himself and his father. Some of the story is hauntingly familiar…I’m still left wondering if I have done enough for my aspie as well as my “nuero-typical” child.
I’m also reading Here Comes Everybody for my summer semester class. This book is amazing – it explains how what we are currently referring to as “social media” may actually be an indicator of a huge societal shift. I will probably be blogging about this more over the next couple of months, but here’s a quote that really stuck with me. He’s talking about why Linux was able to gain a foothold in the server market even though it is an open source project. He said:
Some threshold of transaction cost for group coordination was crossed, and on the far side, a new way of working went from inconceivable to ridiculously easy. All that remains when costs fall is for someone to recognize what has become recently possible.
What if we substituted learning for working in that quote? Has something changed so profoundly in the way we are able to deliver instruction that something that would have been previously impossible is now very simple?
And is anyone recognizing this? I know I missed another amazing lrnchat tonight, but educational professionals are gathering there (and the there is actually on Twitter!!) talking about this. Some of us are starting to figure out how to do something about what we see happening.
Lots more to come from that book, lots that will be hard for me personally to write about.
But I do have a clear head, and my perspective is a bit more balanced right now. Let’s see how long I’m able to keep that balance! 
