After a week of virtual high school here’s the virdict - online document management is a hot mess. It’s a mishmash and URLs, PDFs, google docs, links to docs, attachments, and proprietary comment systems. Underpowered Chromebooks struggling to zoom, PDFs with no way to markup.
Watching my kids get a crash course in online document management. We are stuck at 80% as an industry and we have no standards other than nasty looking URLs, OAuth, and the clipboard. The kids are the integration point and everyone is struggling.
The teachers are just ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ “email me a photo of your PDF.” This is an area that needs open standards, not better google docs or O365 systems. Document templates -> document instances -> links or copies.
To be clear - this is an indictment of ME and MINE - the techies! Not the teachers who inherited this mess of URLs and document formats. This can be fixed. The teachers are champs for coping!
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
So my son lost his AirPods. He says they were stolen out of his bag at school. We look on Find my Devices and they are a few miles away. We see them move around, then return to the same house. Lots of teachable moments here for my son so let’s go. Call the cops? Bust in on them?
He’s got plans. He’s 14. I suggest maybe we just ask. But they stole them, he says. We don’t know that. Let’s just ask. So we drive over. I see a gent in his yard with his son. I say hi, quick question! My son dropped his AirPods walking by and I wonder if anyone found them?
Guy is very genuine immediately and it’s clear he’s fascinated by the tracking app. I say they are within 100 feet ish so if you see them let me know? He says hang on let me ask my kids. He runs in, I hear him ask some kids. He yells back they found them!
Pro tip: stop worrying about the algorithm, and just make things that make you happy, feed your spirit, and that you think other people will like. In that order.
No joke, I really try not to look at any analytics, I care more about comments than page views, I haven’t looked at the stats from my blog or my YouTube. Looking at analytics only gives me stress, making stuff does not stress me out, so I try to optimize for *not stress.*
The world is littered with 9 episode podcasts that gave up after a few months. No one listened to my podcast for 100 episodes. But I wasn’t doing it for the audience, I was doing it *for the conversations.* (Not sure if folks listen now, no Apple iTunes lists, no awards)