Troy Patterson

Educator, Thinker, Consultant

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The tail of a humpback whale in the ocean.

Weekly Review 202504

August 6, 2025 / / 1 Comment

Anniversary

Today is the day that I officially wed my wonderful, fun, loving, smart, intelligent, beautiful wife. Turns out that the priest didn’t actually file some paperwork, so we got to do it again with our kids as witnesses. So many great years together.

AI

This year is going to continue to be about AI in schools. There are lots of concerns (e.g., water usage, power consumption, copyright, moral, etc), but the reality is that AI will be part of our (and our students) lives. I’m planning on lots of training and information for our staff.

Technology and Respect

I had an interesting chat with a fellow Tech Director the other day. We were doing the general chat thing when the other Tech Director noted that Technology Directors are the “Rodney Dangerfields” of education. (*To those of you unfamiliar with Mr. Dangerfield, he was well known for the line “I get no respect”). The Tech Director noted how difficult it was to get training time with teachers. Teachers have so very little professional development time. There are so many things that teachers could grow and develop with opportunity.

The other Tech Director went on with another example. “I was at XXX, and noticed that there were reserved parking spaces for the Superintendent, Director of Business, Director of Curriculum, and Director of Food Services”. Notice which Director is missing? It’s not about the parking space, but the mind space.

Things I Learned This Week

Take hearing aids out if using an electric beard trimmer

Yeah, not my most shining moment. On one hand, I’m so used to wearing hearing aids that I don’t really think about it. On the other hand, I thought that I wasn’t getting close enough to be an issue (wrong on that one). Those little wire tubes do split nicely, though.

Facebook in Maine

In Maine, businesses may not update their website (check Facebook, they may update that). The kids invited us to go skating. They checked the website, and the skating rink was open from 7:30 – 10:00 p.m. The kids picked us up and we headed off to skate. However, when we arrived, they were pretty obviously closed. A little more searching, AN there is a Facebook post stating that they take July off and are closed. I don’t use Facebook.

Flowers

My wife has done an absolutely fantastic job of planting, cultivating, and growing flowers around the house. The yard looks absolutely fantastic.

A Little Taste of Michigan

It turns out that you can order an Olga’s Snackers Kit directly from Olga’s. I can confirm that they are wonderful. I would lower the air fryer temperature just a bit though.

52Frames

I broke my string of a year and half of posting in 52Frames. The killer is that I had a picture ready to go, but decided to wait until Sunday. See, I was taking a hike with my youngest, and knew that I was taking my camera. So, week 30, Unusual Crop has no entry from me. My submission would’ve been a whale seen from a boat.
The tail of a humpback whale in the ocean.

Garage Organization

I’m finally making progress on organizing my garage. I still have a ways to go, but the tool organization means that I can actually find tools now. I’ve also made efforts on small parts.

Jesse Terry

We went on Monday night to see Jesse Terry. Jesse Terry is an independent artist who has created some wonderful music. We had to go to Castine in order to see the show. This is a two-hour drive. Gee, if only we had a concert venue* near us.

On the way, we stopped in Bucksport for dinner at Chalee Thai-Sushi. The food was terrific. The place is small, with three dine-in chairs, but obviously owned and operated by a passionate couple. We chose to “take out” and walked down the stairs to a picnic table.

It was a good show. He played straight through for a little over two hours. It is absolutely wonderful to hear the story behind the songs. This just deepens and enriches the song.

(* We have a terrific concert venue, which is wholly underutilized. A local restaurant has more events at Johnson Hall than Johnson Hall does. However, most of those are posted on Facebook, so I can’t see those.)

Bad Presentation Habits

June 22, 2025 / / 0 Comments

I’m currently taking a class for certification renewal. One of the assignments is to create a Digital Learning A-Z guide.

“Your goal is to create a digital guide of course learning of
Federal and Maine School Law. This would be an A-Z guide that demonstrates your thorough understanding of what you have learned in this class with reading, handouts, discussion, etc.”

“As you develop your ideas and pull this project together,
imagine you would be presenting this A-Z guide to peers for a professional workshop in a power point fashion for a
training.”
Specifics to include:

  • Icebreaker activity at the beginning.
  • In the middle, an interactive component, with a brief game or role play experience.
  • Embed one video
  • Incorporate font size that is conductive to an audience.

This just screams bad presentation skills. Creating a PowerPoint presentation is going to end up with tons of words on each slide. I regularly watch presentations that are really speaker notes. I see presentations with literally paragraphs of text.

This is not how I give presentations. I generally use an image to help ground what I’m talking about. In some instances, I use a limited number of words (usually three unless names are involved).

I want to pass the class. I also kind of want to just put all the information into the Speaker Notes section, add a relevant image, and explain that this is how I present information.

"Choose Your Own Adventure" is written over a stone path.

Twine & Markdown

June 6, 2025 / / 0 Comments

I’m working on my Fall ACTEM presentation. The presentation is on “Choose Your Own Adventure: Create An Adventure for Your Students”. Specifically, how you can create these for students. Or, better yet, how students can create these.

While working in Twine (I wrote about Twine previously), I wrote some things in Markdown. Since Twine doesn’t have a “viewer” window, pure text is what you see. I didn’t really expect Twine to display the markdown correctly, I was just entering it as a to way to remind myself to go back and format the text.

However, I clicked the “Test From Here” button, essentially a “preview” button, and lo and behold, Twine does display markdown as proper HTML.

Now, I know that I can use Twine while writing in Markdown. Yea!

tide going out with the water forming ridges

52 Frames – Week 20

May 16, 2025 / / 0 Comments

Living close to the Atlantic, water was going to be an easy assignment. I headed out and took some shots of boats, a lighthouse, and more. While I was shooting, I captured the tide coming in and out. I was surprised at the clarity of the ridges (terraces) formed by the tide.

Water Terraces

tide going out with the water forming ridges

I love the serendipity of finding this structure in the tide.

I also considered a couple of other images as my submission.

New Dawn on the Atlantic

(the potential title was worth considering for submission)

A lobster style boar named "New Dawn",with buoys hanging from it

I also liked the feeling and the seaweed on the rock of this one.
Tide on a Rock, the tide comes in over a rock, leaving bits of seaweed on the rock

Neon sign that says "psychic" imposed over slice of the moon.

AI as a Mentalist

May 5, 2025 / / 0 Comments

Baldur Bjarnason has a fascinating write-up entitled “The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con“.

Essentially, Baldur Bjarnason makes the observation that LLM’s frequently end up following the same path those that do “cold reading”. He notes that many people are becoming convinced that language models are intelligent. There is no reason to believe this, but he offers two possibilities:

  1. The tech industry has accidentally invented the initial stages a completely new kind of mind, based on completely unknown principles, using completely unknown processes that have no parallel in the biological world.
  2. The intelligence illusion is in the mind of the user and not in the LLM itself.

He falls squarely in the second camp. I love the way that he clearly lays out the reasoning. He describes, quite clearly, how cold reading works. Then he mirrors those same steps in how an LLM works. He not only lists the areas, but goes on to provide examples and further clarification.

For example, in a cold read situation, the first issue is that the “Audience Selects Itself”.

Most people aren’t interested in psychics or the like, so the initial audience pool is already generally more open-minded and less critical than the population in general.

The first issue in LLM’s as a Mentalist? The Audience Selects Itself.

People sceptical about “AI” chatbots are less likely to use them. Those who actively don’t disbelieve the possibility of chatbot “intelligence” won’t get pulled in by the bot. The most active audience will be early adopters, tech enthusiasts, and genuine believers in AGI who will all generally be less critical and more open-minded.

This is a fantastic read and well worth your time.

Thoughts on BlueSky

May 4, 2025 / / 0 Comments

BlueSky seems to have picked up a good bit of traction. There are lots of differing opinions on BlueSky where it fits, it’s future, and whether to support it or not.

I’m going to look at BlueSky mostly from an educator’s perspective.

Lots of people left Twitter, er X (no link intentionally). Twitter was at one point a very useful platform. Originally, it was terrific to be at a conference and follow a hashtag to know what was going on. Twitter also allowed teachers to share links, ideas, successes, and concerns. It was a place to make connections.

However, once Elon Musk purchased Twitter, a quick decline occurred. Twitter had been suffering from trying to figure out how to navigate external pressures (how do you handle it when a powerful person tells blatant lies?) and revenue issues. Twitter had tried a variety ways to fund their operations (external apps allowed?, not allowed?)

With Twitter becoming a toxic site, people started looking for alternatives. BlueSky had been funded prior to Musk purchasing Twitter. BlueSky was designed to be an open-source component of Twitter.

BlueSky was one option, Mastodon another. Mastodon is truly federated. There is no single owner (currently the originator of Mastodon has a lot of influence, but it is not the same thing as an owner; plus Mastodon is working toward being a fully non-profit, independent organization). Being federated means that there are many different sites that can operate independently while being voluntarily connected. If there are branches that promote things you don’t like, you can block them and never see them. There is real power in federation. There isn’t really a monetary model for Mastodon, it relies on voluntary payments or passion projects.

I tried to move to Mastodon in 2018. I loved the open-source nature of the platform. However, Mastodon in 2018 was a bit confusing. There was a bit of a learning curve. Most importantly, there were no teachers, no educators there (at least that I could find).

BlueSky skyrocketed following Musk’s purchase of Twitter. Although they claim that they will be federated, instead of utilizing an already existing protocol, they are creating a new one. The new protocol is still being developed, thus BlueSky is not currently federated.

BlueSky has been adopted by a good number of teachers. BlueSky has done some smart things. There are starter packs, which makes it easy to follow a group of accounts. I even saw a newscaster use their BlueSky account in their chevron the other day.

So, I’m trying to read the tea leaves for the future. BlueSky is the closest experience to the old Twitter. It is still very much centralized. That centralization creates an easier, smoother experience for users.

Several leaders who I follow have provided differing opinions on BlueSky.

  • Cory Doctorow – is not posting to or using BlueSky as this point. Although he respects many of the people involved and what they say that they are going to do, he is not investing in the promise of something. Rather, if he can’t move his information and presence from a site to another place, he will not support that site. Cory is on Mastodon. Moving information, exporting everything, is easy from Mastodon.
  • Ben Werd – has a neat write-up about if he ran BlueSky. He mentions quite a bit about what the promise of BlueSky is, but still seems to believe that there is a way forward for BlueSky to become federated and a successful, capitalistic company.
  • Manton Reece has a nice write-up about when BlueSky was unavailable.
  • Then there is the issue of BlueSky participated in Government censorship in Turkey. Due to BlueSky being built to eventually be open (?), third party apps did not have the same issue. (*Note that I’m not fully aware of the third party apps, I’ll need to investigate.)

So, who will be the winner? It’ll be interesting to see. I still don’t see educators moving to Mastodon. I don’t anticipate that they will be soon. Open-source still has too much “need to learn” and less than pretty involved. There are just too many speedbumps for educators to fully embrace Mastodon. BlueSky has the mind share right now. It is very centralized and very close to how Twitter used to work. The question is in part, will BlueSky truly federate? Will BlueSky end up being controlled by a small number (or one) of individuals? We won’t know the answers until we know the answers. At that point, it may be too late. We may have just exchanged one bad situation for exactly the same thing.

Twine

Twine

April 14, 2025 / / 0 Comments

So, I downloaded the desktop version of Twine.
Awesome.
It appears to be very easy to use (especially if you’ve ever done anything with a wiki). Essentially, Twine allows you to create “stories”.

Twine is an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories.

You don’t need to write any code to create a simple story with Twine, but you can extend your stories with variables, conditional logic, images, CSS, and JavaScript when you’re ready.

Then you can easily “Publish to File”.
Nice.
You can decide where to save the file. Double clicking the file opens the story in a web browser.
Cool.
Now I want to share it with a group.
Hm.
According to the documentation, I can email the file to others. That’s…interesting. But what I want to do is to embed the file in a web page. Ah, there’s a WordPress plugin.
Great.
However, the plugin is no longer available due to “security concerns”.
Think, Think, Think.
The resulting file is just an HTML file. I have a website. What if I post the HTML file on my website?
Let’s fire up the website and see what happens.
Ta-Da!
It works as expected. Now this is super basic as I spent about 30 seconds creating a couple of pages, but it does seem to work.

So, I could create a “Choose Your Own Adventure” presentation/PD experience.

Now I need to understand why I would use this instead H5P and with the Branching Scenario.

It is nice to have choices though.

Weekly Review 2025-02

March 30, 2025 / / 0 Comments

My “weekly” update is frequently not weekly. This time, it’s not really my fault. I spent nine days in the hospital as it appears that I have outlived myself (at least my gallbladder). The ordeal lasted a couple of weeks as the original diagnosis was not gallbladder removal. I learned that I apparently have a decent pain threshold.

Anyway, I’m on the road to recovery now. I’m still very tired and working on rebuilding my strength and stamina. Appreciate good health if you’ve got it.

Doug Belshaw

A special shout-out to Dr. Doug Belshaw. His blog, Doug Belshaw has been an inspiration for me. The whole concept of a “weekly update” was stolen directly from him. I like to think of him as a friend, even though we’ve only met in real life once (and I’m absolutely positive he wouldn’t remember that). But I’d like to think that we could tip a pint and discuss various topics were we closer in geographic proximity.

Doug has shared his journey through life, including health and employment. I’ve benefitted from his thoughts. My site is pretty much just for me, but I do appreciate Mr. Belshaw.

Back to Work

I’ve been cleared to return to work this week. We’ll see how it goes as I was also informed that I may need to take naps during the day. The week was productive at work. I ended up working three days in the office and two days from home. On Monday I worked from home to see how I would tolerate a regular time schedule. That went well, so Tuesday through Thursday was in the office. I found meetings of two hours a bit tiring, but manageable. On Friday, I had a Doctor follow-up and a couple of online meetings. It didn’t seem productive to go in, so working from home it was.

Podcast

Our Podcast, Middle School Matters was one of our shortest shows ever. My energy level was low. Since I’ve been laid up for a couple of weeks, I didn’t have lots of new stuff to contribute.

However, we are the number two middle school podcast on Podfeed.

The last show (March 29th), was a traditional show for us. I had much more energy and resources to contribute.

Prognosis

I’ll be taking it easy for a few more weeks. Occassional naps, rest built-in to the day, no lifting, and generally accepting that I can’t do everything that I want. Hopefully, this all ends up resulting in a full recovery and I can then start an exercise program to rebuild strength.

New Lens

I did purchase a new lens. I picked up a Sigma 150-600mm telephoto lens. I’ve only made it out once to take a few test shots. I like the lens a ton, but I’m going to need some practice to get the most out of it.

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