millenniumWAVE technologies

Think in the Morning
Act in the Noon
Eat in the Evening
Sleep in the Night

Try to stay awake in the Morning
Try to eat in the Noon
Try to snooze in the Evening
Surf in the Night

A HUMAN BEING should be able to: change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.

....and teach others.

Most of us wouldn't be doing what we're doing if it wasn't for some teacher....no teacher's life is ever wasted.
-Patrick Sheane Duncan

Michael (Bard II) Scott, 96.05.05
The author wishes to apologize to his fellow surfers for such a lame quote...but the winter has taken its toll.

Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock. James Baldwin (1977)

There is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse; as I have found in travelling in a stage-coach, that it is often a comfort to shift one's position and be bruised in a new place. Washington Irving, Tales of a Traveler (1824).

A single day is enough to make us a little larger or, another time, a little smaller. Paul Klee (1908)

In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists. Eric Hoffer (1973)

Change is a whole lot easier to swallow when you're the change artist. Michael Scott (1996)

The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.

- Warren Bennis, U of SoCal

Of course my moods vary, but there is an average of serenity. I have a sure faith in art, a sure confidence that is a powerful stream, which bears a man to harbour, though he himself must do his bit too, and at all events I think it such a great blessing, when a man has found his work, that I cannot count myself among the unfortunate, I mean, I may be in certain relatively great difficulties, and there may be gloomy days in my life, but I shouldn't want to be counted among the unfortunate nor would it be correct.

May the winds of change always be at your back.

I am not a teacher; only a fellow traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead - ahead of myself as well as of you.

Let's rock. See you on the other side....

Education, to be effective, must be JUST IN TIME, not JUST IN CASE like it has been. In this age of information acceleration, we must teach people what they need to know now, not what they may or may not need sometime in the future. Anyone remember their high school calculus?

The Net is all pervasive. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.

1. I will finish the book "Learn C++ in 21 days" in a record 267.
2. I will spend a lot of time learning Java just in time for Active X to take over or vice versa.
3. I will see woodgrain on my desks sometime in the year 1999.
4. I will get a new set of wheels just after I get my new high paying cushy academic job just after becoming famous for my book just before someone wakes me up from this dream.
5. I will succumb to the belief that I am actually teaching kids something.
6. All my friends and relatives will have email or else they will never hear from me again.
7. I will get a life. This will occur between 1:52 a.m. and 1:58 a.m. on July 18.
8. On November 9, 1997 I will have exactly $1.42 left over from my paycheck that I can use as fun money.
9. I may or may not find out what I want to be when I grow up.
10. On January 1, 1998 I will once again resolve to improve my time management skills and to clean up my desks.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Some say the Internet is just a passing fad. I agree...just as it was for radio, TV, the printed word, telephones, sliced bread........

The whole world's a web site.

The Digital Nation is skank, pop, kewl, kultured, wired, real-TV, beat, virtual, interplanetary, end-of-the-millennium. The truth is out there. Where is education? It's not about having the hardware or having the software, it's about having the mindset. Time for teachers and professors to get their passports.

A few students studying Design and Technology will follow careers directly related to the field. However, all students will become consumers of products resulting from work by designers and technologists. If we can help students become better consumers, the rest should follow.

There is only one design process. You have an idea....you play with it, see if it works. If it doesn't, you try something else. It's part magic, part past experiences. Students design in a vacuum, they need stimulus and they need nudging..the rest is up to magic. The design classroom should be a big play room with lots of toys.

For my graduating students, may you show the world where its at! Keep in mind...

• Leaders create a shared vision
• Leaders enable others to act
• Leaders model the way
• Leaders encourage the heart

This past year, we have lost two great teachers of the Frontier, one of the sky above and one of the ocean below. On behalf of all teachers everywhere, I salute you, Carl Sagan and Jacques Cousteau. The two of you have done so much to make so many wonder, dream, understand. You were both inspirations to us all...leaving a legacy for all time. For the graduating class of 1997, I leave the following quote:

Some have taught you formulas, others teach you to solve problems.
Some have taught you the names, others have taught you to question and learn.
Some have taught you to paint, others have taught you to see.
Some have taught you the scale, others have taught you music.
After all that, you must remember one thing...

GO BEYOND THE ORDINARY

Make the world a better place.

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions...
Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you too, can become great...

On the Princess of the People, the Queen of Hearts:

You have risen above both the pompous priviliged aristocracy and the tabloid swilling masses and became a teacher for our times. You have taught us in life, and in death, about being more human. Good for you. May the world be a little more democratic and a little more humane.

That's some catch, that Catch-22!

Teaching is the profession of the future. Our product is the next generation: the artists, the engineers, the leaders, the workers who will ride the next crest of change and bring society into the 21st century. It is dismaying to work for a government who has no understanding of the work of it's teachers, no vision of the future or foresight to the needs of society. Slash and burn has a propensity to backfire on the ones with the torch. It is time to look beyond the next election.
On a personal note: I am not a 'union person' by any means, but I dedicate my political protest to my uncle, Larry Hryniw, a teacher for 30 years who died October 18 while beginning his well deserved retirement. He was disheartened by the actions of this government, and was glad to get out of it before they dismantled all he had worked for. This is for you, Uncle Larry.

I am proud this day to say: I am teacher.

Being non-wired at the beginning of the 21st century is equivilant to being illiterate at the end of the 20th. Teachers, time to get plugged in.

Nothing teaches like teaching.

Education is like tape, it'll only stick if you apply it.

Procrastinator's Creed

1. I believe that if anything is worth doing, it would have been done already.

2. I shall never move quickly, except to avoid more work or find excuses.

3. I will never rush into a job without a lifetime of consideration.

4. I shall meet all of my deadlines directly in proportion to the amount of bodily injury I could expect to receive from missing them.

5. I firmly believe that tomorrow holds the possibility for new technologies, astounding discoveries, and a reprieve from my obligations.

6. I truly believe that all deadlines are unreasonable regardless of the amount of time given.

7. I shall never forget that the probability of a miracle, though infinitesimally small, is not exactly zero.

8. If at first I don't succeed, there is always next year.

9. I shall always decide not to decide, unless of course I decide to change my mind.

10. I shall always begin, start, initiate, take the first step, and/or write the first word, when I get around to it.

11. I obey the law of inverse excuses which demands that the greater the task to be done, the more insignificant the work that must be done prior to beginning the greater task.

12. I know that the work cycle is not plan-start-finish, but is wait-plan-plan.

13. I will never put off until tomorrow, what I can forget about forever.

14. I will become a member of the ancient Order of Two-Headed Turtles (the Procrastinator's Society) if they ever get it organized.

The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.

Ahhh....spring! When a teacher's thoughts turn to...marking and parent-teacher interviews and open houses and finishing projects and doing the budget and stupid on-calls and jeez...taxes are due! and fixing busted equipment and where did that form go and how many trees were destroyed just for my mailbox and marking and has it been getting warmer yet and I love that Windoze crash-and-pray and ahhh...spring!

God wisely designed the human body so that we can neither pat our own backs nor kick ourselves too easily.

To the graduates of 1998 and particularly the first alumni of the CS4 project...

A vision without action is only a dream
Action without vision just passes the time
Vision with action can change the world.

When life hands you scraps...make a quilt

If we are alone, that would be an awful lot of wasted space.

You have to drill through mud and water to get oil,
you have to sift through sand and silt to get gold,
you have to chop and hack through stone to get diamonds-
so why do so many people feel that the treasures of ideas should come to them with little or no effort?

You cannot achieve the impossible without attempting the absurd.

A lesson for students from industry: there are 3 levels of project achievement: Needs Improvement, Achieve, Exceed. Get three "Needs Improvement" in a row: look for another job. Get three "Exceeds" in a row, promotion to next level. Get three "Achieves" in a row, may or may not keep job when layoffs come.

The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be lighted.

Creativity is thinking up new things, innovation is doing new things.

We are continually faced with great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insolvable problems.

A few pearls of wisdom from the mind of Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert. Kind of puts things in perspective for the new year.

• I can please only one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow's not looking good either.
• I love deadlines. I especially love the swooshing sound they make as they go flying by.
• Tell me what you need, and I'll tell you how to get along without it.
• Accept that some days you're the pigeon, and some days you're the statue.
• I don't have an attitude problem. You have a perception problem.
• Never argue with an idiot. They drag you down to their level then beat you with experience.

Invention is a flower, innovation is a weed.

I'm an impatient perfectionist...everything has to be perfect but I don't have the time to do it.

I'm a peripheral visionary. I can see into the future, but just way off to the side.

- Steven Wright

The illiterate of the year 2000 will not be the individual who cannot read and write, but the one who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.

If you're non-wired your not hired.

Figures someone would shorten 'Year 2000' to 'Y2K'. Isn't that what got us into trouble in the first place?

Koyunun olmadigi yerde keciye "Abdurrahman Celebi" derler.

As I venture into a new frontier, and leave St. Peter High School after seven years of lots of learning and a little teaching, I leave my fellow teachers and the graduating class of 99 with a few thoughts. To my staff, I watched as the visions became reality. Congratulations on making St. Peter the place to be for design and technology education. Keep up the good work. All the best to everyone, it was prime time!

 

A teacher is somebody's enthusiastic motivator, or else the teacher is a teacher of nobody.

Students come to us (School of Industrial Design), "knowing" how to design a car. They leave us after four years with the goal of knowing how to design a car door handle.

In the new economy, all work is project work. You are your projects.

To the teachers taking courses at Queen's this summer:

Every profession is great that is greatly pursued.

To my Texas friends...a little humour to say "thank you all"!
THE EVOLUTION OF MATHEMATICS

1960 OLD MATH
A logger sells a truckload of timber for $100. His cost of production is 4/5 of this price. What is his profit?

1970 NEW MATH
A logger exchanges a set L of lumber for set M of money. The cardinality of set M is 100 and each element is worth one dollar. Make a square array of 100 dots to represent the elements of M. Represent C as a subset of set M. What is the cardinality of the set of profits?

1980 WHOLE NUMBER MATH
A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is $80 and his profit is $20. Underline the number 20.

1990 DESTREAMED MATH
By cutting down beautiful forest trees, an environmentally ignorant logger makes a profit of $20. What do you think of this way of making a living? In your group, use role playing to determine how birds and squirrels in the forest feel.

The word for the 00's is WIRELESS. Put your best people on it.

For those who know me....

Why Dogs are Better Than Woman

A dog's time in the bathroom is confined to a quick drink.
The later you come home, the more excited your dog is to see you.
Your dog doesn't mind if you play with other dogs.
Dogs don't shop.
Dogs never need to "examine the relationship".
Dogs don't hate their bodies.
Dogs never criticize.
Dogs are never concerned about dog hair.
Dogs don't find work for you around the house and yard.
Dogs think you are a culinary genius.
No dog ever bought a Celine Dion or a Michael Bolton album.
No dog ever wanted to go to the opera.
When you dance with a dog, it lets you lead.
Middle age dogs don't feel the need to abandon you for a new owner.
Your dog's love for you never fades.

The Zone: the nexus of your interests, knowledge and skills and what you get to do for a living.

Whatever is weird, is already there.

Reward excellent failures, punish mediocre success.

For teachers of the 21st:
Now is the time for the revolution in education:
Out of the box, Out of the Classroom
Just in Time learning vs Just in Case
Go Beyond the Ordinary
Innovate, not Recite
Make it Real

To the ghosts of the 20th century....you have lived and died in your time, carrying the spirit of life that stretches back thousands of suns. At this time, it is wonderous to ponder your life, the grainy black and white images of biplanes transforming into tiny figures bouncing on the lunar landscape, the sounds of scratchy phonographs transforming into heart pounding big bass surround sound. Ahhh, technology! Greetings to you from those of us marking the passage of your age, it has been an exhilarating journey, with the promise of more amazement to come.

Life is too short to dance with ugly people.

An expert is someone who lives more than 50 miles away.

The web is the message.

The teacher's job is not to train students, but to prepare students.

The Mester

A poem by a student on my great grandfather, Robert McAlister, of Balleyclaire, (Belfast), Northern Ireland, (late 1800's, author and publication unknown)

If students are not trained to learn, then we are creating performing seals in a circus that's about to be demolished.

Obstacles are the frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goals.

Latest Summer Fun Office Vocabulary

1. Blamestorming
Sitting around in a group discussing why a deadline was missed, or a project failed, and who was responsible.

2. Seagull Manager
A manager who flies in, makes a lot of noise, poops over everything and then leaves.

3. Salmon Day
The experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream only to get screwed and die in the end.

4. Chainsaw Consultant
An outside expert brought in to reduce the employee head count, leaving the brass with clean hands.

5. CLM
Career Limiting Move - Used among microserfs to describe ill-advised activity. Trashing your boss while he or she is within earshot is a serious CLM (Also known as CLB - Career Limiting Behaviour)

6. Adminisphere
The rarefied organisational layers beginning just above the rank and file. Decisions that fall from the adminisphere are often profound and inappropriate or irrelevant to the problems they were designed to solve.

7. Dilberted
To be exploited and oppressed by your boss. Derived from the experiences of Dilbert, the geek-in-hell comic strip character. "I've been dilberted again. The old man revised the specs for the fourth time this week."

8. Flight Risk
Used to describe employees who are suspected of planning to leave the company or department soon.

9. 404
Someone who's clueless. From the World Wide Web error message "404 Not Found", meaning that the requested document could not be located. "Don't bother asking him . . . he's 404, man."

10. Ohnosecond
That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that you've just made a BIG mistake.

11. Percussive Maintenance
The fine art of whacking the crap out of an electronic device to get it to work again.

12. Prairie Dogging
When someone yells or drops something loudly in a "cube farm" (an office full of cubicles) and everyone's heads pop up over the walls to see what's going on.

13. Assmosis
The process by which some people seem to absorb success and advancement by kissing up to the boss.

There are no secrets in circles.

On the death of Pierre Elliot Trudeau
I have a personal memory of Trudeau, a small one, but one that affected me greatly. I was young impressionable high school student in the 70s, just getting interested in politics, and social revolution. I had come to see Trudeau on the campaign trail, at Maisonville Mall in Windsor Ontario. I had to coax my friends to drive out there to see him, after all, how often does someone famous come to backwater bordertown Windsor? I was about three or four deep when Trudeau walked about shaking hands after his brief speech. I was content to see him up close and in real life. But as he walked by, he stopped, backed up, looked me right in the eye, smiled and reached way over to shake hands with me! I swear he had winked at me. It was a personal moment, a moment in the presence of greatness.

The Trudeau era was a time of change. It was a time of wage crises and October crises and cultural identity crises. It was a time when we were defining our identity as a country, and for a long hair teenager, living on the border in the shadow of the elephant, Trudeau gave me and many like me, hope that we could make a difference…that we could play a role in defining Canada to the world.

In those days we Canadians debated endlessly about our cultural identity and who we really were. Maybe we didn't appreciate it at the time, but because of one man, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, we had that identity. We were not Americans, we were bilingual, we had our own constitution and we could say fuddle-duddle. This country has had great leaders, but one did more than anyone to make us who we are today. Mr. Trudeau, because of you, we can say...I AM CANADIAN. On behalf of a generation, thank you so much; it was a pleasure watching you define our history.

Design is what you do when you don't know the answer, or have the question.

That's why I think there are two types of people in this world- people who can start things, and people who can finish things. And while I place great value on the finishers, its the starters who are rare because they can envision what isn't there.

To this generation of students, the computer is about as exciting as the indoor flush toilet, both technologies were there when they were born.

We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.

- Marshall McLuhan

Education's role is to replace an empty mind with an open one

My goal in life is to be the sort of person my dog thinks I am.

April 2001 Quote

No one is ever as shocked and suprized as when the inevitable occurs.

May 2001 Quote

For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert.

June 2001 Quote

Men on frontiers, whether of time or space, abandon their previous identities.

July 2001 Quote

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

August 2001 Quote

THE SHRINKING EARTH...food for thought

If we could shrink the earth's population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all the existing human ratios remaining the same, it would look something like the following. There would be:

57 Asians
21 Europeans
14 from the Western Hemisphere, both north and south
8 Africans
52 would be female
48 would be male
70 would be non-white
30 would be white
70 would be non-Christian
30 would be Christian
89 would be heterosexual
11 would be homosexual
6 people would possess 59% of the entire world's wealth and all 6 would be from the United States
80 would live in substandard housing
70 would be unable to read
50 would suffer from malnutrition
1 would be near death
1 would be near birth
1 (yes, only 1) would have a college education
1 would own a computer

-author unknown

Silent September Quote- September 11 2001

I feel a great disturbance in the force. As if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.
-ObiWan Kenobi (Star Wars 1977) - sign on the fence of the US Embassy in Ottawa, Canada, after the September 11th tragedy

No one can ever forget the image of doom as the planes slammed into the World Trade Center, the smoke pouring from the top of those huge towers, full of people no doubt wondering what hit them, before it all collapsed, a powerful symbol of human beings suddenly silenced...on a bright summer day turned surreal. My heart is heavy when I think about how these people went to work on a typical day, to end in such a horrible way, never to see the daylight again. Just not right.

I fear for the future, for the first time in my life. What must it have been like...the noise, the terror, the roar...then the silence. Not a soul left to be found...just not right. The following Friday, I stood on Parliment Hill with 100,000 people...and heard nothing but silence. Not a bird, a plane, a car horn, or even a whisper. People are a lot quieter now. I fear for when it gets noisy again.

October 2001 Presidential Quotes

The only things worth learning are the things you learn after you know it all.

- Harry S. Truman

The C students run the world.

- Harry S. Truman

The best thing about the future is that it only comes one day at a time.

-Abraham Lincoln

God must love the common man, he made so many of them.

-Abraham Lincoln

November 2001 Quote (Scotty's WAVE 6th year anniversary!)

For those who think provincial wide testing is a good idea:

You can't nourish a starving child by constantly weighing it.

- unknown

December 2001 Quote

In a completely rational society, the best of us would aspire to be teachers and the rest would have to settle for something less, because passing civilization along from one generation to the next ought to be the highest honour and the highest responsibility anyone could have.

- Lee Iacocca

January 2002 Quote
Happy New Year!!!

Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.

- Mark Twain (as seen on Harry Truman's desk)

February 2002 Quote

Dream the Impossible. Do the Incredible.

- Dick Rutan and Jeanna Yeager, pilots of the Voyager aircraft, first non-stop, non-refuel flight around the world (on autographed picture).

March 2002 Quote

From Peter Gzowski's CBC Morningside Radio show contest, where listeners were asked to complete the phrase: "As Canadian as...", the winner was:

As Canadian as possible under the circumstances

April 2002 Quote

To those of you who have received honours and awards of distinction, I say well done; and to the C students, I say you too can become President of the United States.

- George W. Bush, address at the Yale commencement ceremony

May 2002 Quote

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.

- Henry Adams, 1900, "Praying to the Dynamo", in Richard Rhodes' Visions of Technology

June 2002 Quote

History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's dam is the history we make today.

- Henry Ford 1916, "Making History", in Richard Rhodes' Visions of Technology.
M. Scott's opening speech at the OCTE conference, London Ontario, May 31, 2002

July 2002 Quote
To the teachers of Summer 2002 at Queen's University:

Can we fix it? Yes we can!

- Bob the Builder

It's kind of fun doing the impossible.

- Walt Disney

August 2002 Quote

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

- Alan Kay

September 2002 Quote

Great discoveries and improvements invariably involve the cooperation of many minds.

- Alexander Graham Bell (quote seen on the Engineers in Residence website)

October 2002 Quote
On the death of my friend, Dick Hopkins Oct. 6 2002

Dick Hopkins was a master teacher, a friend and my hero. Of all my teachers, he was the one who inspired me the most to go beyond the box, to do great things. He was a dedicated and excellent technology educator who worked so hard to promote the community based project. Dick will be incredibly missed, but his influence will live on.

The shops feel all quiet and empty right now.
I don't know what is important anymore.

-Michael Scott

November 2002 Quote (7th Anniversary of this site!)

It is in fact nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry.

-Albert Einstein

December 2002 Quote

Not learning is boredom

-Michael Scott

January 2003 Quote
Happy New Year, 2003!!

DD is FOM
(Dramatic Difference is a Frame of Mind)

-Tom Peters (forward to Doug Hall's Jump Start your Business Brain)

February 2003 Quote
Dedicated to the NASA families, astronauts, engineers, technicians, technologists of the Columbia mission

Whatever you want to do in life, you are training for it now.

- Payload Commander Michael Anderson, to Grade 2 students (as quoted in Time, February 10, 2003)

The planet below you is our campsite, and you know of no other campground.

- Mission Specialist Kalpana Chawla, (as quoted in Time, February 10, 2003)

March 2003 Quote

To the world you are one person but to one person you can be the world.

-from Diane Stuemer, local heroine who with her family dropped everything and travelled the world, written up in weekly dispatches in the Ottawa Citizen, (see www.northernmagic.com/), and in the book, Voyage of the Northern Magic. An inspiration and teacher to many, overtaken by cancer, March 15, 2003. Thank you, Diane, for the inspiration and the lesson to have the courage to live life.

"I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious."

-Albert Einstein

We live in a technological world, and every citizen needs to be technologically literate in order to survive and thrive in today's and tomorrow's world. It can no longer be an optional subject area. Welcome to the 21st century.

-Michael Scott, for the OCTE Technology Literacy Campaign

Through the years....

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