Men with Codes

This started with a recommended blog post on Obama's Code written by Geore Lakoff.
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/02/george-lakoff-on-obama-code.html
I live in a world of men with codes. Whether you agree with someone's codes or not, it certainly makes relationships much clearer. Figure out the guiding code and it's the difference between wandering around lost and being given a guidebook. My father-in-law, my husband, my sons all have codes of conduct that they just don't break ever under any circumstance.
I, on the other hand, would go to the depths of hell to save any of my children. That pretty much explains why I didn't get Sarah Palin. She lives by a code. I'd have bent my code and bought my child contraceptives.

A New Kind of Science

Basically I'm saving this text so I can find it again. It appeared on my facebook page and I'm intending to read it later.

Stephen Wolfram: A New Kind of Science | Online - Table of Contents
http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/toc.html
Source: www.wolframscience.com
Complete online version of Stephen Wolfram's 'A New Kind of Science' book

Care of Your PLN

I've set some rules for myself:
1. I'm going to do the reading. If the people on pln post to facebook, I'm going to follow their links. I'm also going to check in on their blogs.
2. I'm going to give back even if it's just posting comments.
3. If I see potential for collaboration between various facebook friends, I'll introduce them to each other.

So how am I going to do this without it overwhelming my life? I've decided to use the nursing model of checking everyone at the beginning and end of the shift. It's not perfect but it also doesn't let anyone fall through the cracks and it frees up the bulk of the day for my life in the real world.

My Personal Learning Network

I've been working on creating a personal learning network. So far I have about 200 people but as in anything else there will be some who never post anything. At the moment, they are heavily into education and educational technology which makes a lot of sense considering the purpose of a pln. I'm trying to branch out to include more people from the arts (writers, poets, artists, etc) and more from the health science. It's not like I've ignored those areas - I have a couple of writers, a couple of poets and a screenwriter as well as people in nursing education. I'm also trying to achieve a demographic balance - various ages, various locations, various career paths, etc. A kindergarten teacher and a university professor have different bodies of expertise even though they are both educators. Someone with a lot of experience has a different perspective than someone entering a field. It's very exciting - especially for someone who has mainly lived in very small communities.