Miguel guhlin's Bookmarks

Reflection is a great process…a proven process of learning. We’ve been asking students to reflect for years in education so one simple question:

Do you give yourself permission to reflect during the work day?

and another question:

Do your administrators give you permission to reflect during the work day?

• “Learn to work for yourself and not for anyone else. If you don’t, you’ll drive yourself crazy.” -Emily Seawell, online producer/copy editor


• “You need to read more Hemingway; you need to learn to say things without saying them. You’re writing too much and trying too hard.” -Copy editor from the CND (this was the best writing advice I’ve gotten in about a year).


• “Get used to bad editors. For every 10 editors you have, you’ll be lucky to get one good one.” -Metro desk reporter


• “Don’t expect nurturing or praise when you’re in the real world. Do your job well because you should.” -Another metro reporter


• Learn to keep your head up when newsroom morale is low. You’ll forget why you love journalism otherwise. -I got this from a few people


• Limit the amount of time you talk and read about layoffs and the scariness of the industry. You won’t be able to keep going every day if you don’t. -I picked this up from Mary Shedden, health reporter

• For teaching factual information, use this template: Present the
  information in suitable chunks, emphasize logical links, provide
  mnemonics to facilitate recall, require trainees to process the
  information, provide suitable feedback, review the information, repeat
  the information in different configurations, and summarize the
  information.


• For teaching concepts, use this template: Present clear-cut examples,
  present matched nonexamples to emphasize critical features of the
  concept, present divergent examples to emphasize variable features,
  require the trainee to discriminate among new examples and nonexamples,
  provide feedback, and test for the ability to generalize and to
  discriminate.


• For teaching procedures, use this template: Provide an overview of
  the entire procedure, demonstrate each step and identify its critical
  elements, coach the trainees as they practice each step, require the
  trainee to demonstrate the mastery of each step, integrate all steps,
  provide systematic practice toward fluent application.

At it's core, story is about  a "...fundamental conflict between subjective expectation and cruel reality," says McKee. Story is about an imbalance and opposing forces (a problem that must be worked out, etc.). A good storyteller describes what it's like to deal with these opposing forces "...calling on the protagonist to dig deeper, work with scarce resources, make difficult decisions...and ultimately discover the truth." Can not a presentation on a technical or scientific topic be a story — with plenty of data and information along the way — about a long journey of discovery, of trial and error, and so on?

How can executives/leaders learn to tell stories?
We tend to forget lists and bullet points, McKee says, but stories come naturally to us; it's how we've always attempted to understand and remember the bits and pieces of experience. McKee's point is that you should not fight your natural inclination to frame experiences into a story but should instead embrace this and tell "the story" of your experience/topic to your audience.

"You have to think like an artist. If you know you’re in over your head, and that doesn't intimidate you, you might just make it. The hard part is getting in the chair and writing. It takes tremendous will power and discipline and the only way to defeat the fear is to gain the self-confidence that comes from knowing you've mastered the art form."

"My job," he said, "is to give writers an understanding of the art form so they'll have the courage to write something and put it out in front of the world. If they understand the art form, then they can learn from criticism and move forward. "The solution," he said, "begins with mastery of the art."

First extract the theme zip file to a folder. Then put this folder into your Moodle's 'theme' folder (if your using a internal web server for test just copy/paste, but if you have your hosting, use a FTP Client {FileZilla} to upload the folder). Next login to your Moodle site as admin. Locate the 'Site Administration' panel on the left. Locate and click 'Appearance' in this panel. Two more options will appear - 'Theme Settings' and "Theme Selector'. Click 'Theme Selector' and then locate the theme you want and click the 'Choose' button. Finally, in the next page giving the theme details, click the 'Continue' button.

Note: When you extract any theme zip file to a folder using WinZip the actual theme folder may be inside that folder! For instance when you extract blueseek18.zip to a folder a folder named blueseek18 is created. Inside this you would see another similarly named folder. This is the folder that contains the theme files, and has to be put into your Moodle's theme folder.