It was a beautiful day outside – the first sight of sunshine in days – so we spent most of it outside cleaning up the yard and prepping it for the upcoming snowfall. Spent a few hours helping the neighbour with his parking area and fence and got an invite to his daughter’s upcoming baby shower. Overall it was a quiet, calm day. Something I haven’t really had in months.

Mom is coming out to visit for Christmas.

I’m a movie fanatic. When the hubby or I are away from each other we have family rules regarding viewing new movies. It’s it’s something we both wanted to see, we won’t go see the movie in theatres, we’ll wait until we’re together and rent it.

Over the weekend we finally got to see Thank you for smoking. It’s got an excellent cast (includes Aaron Eckhart, Sam Elliott, William H. Macy, Robert Duvall and Maria Bello) and smart dialogue. The script pokes fun at the current PC (politically correct) world we live in and – despite the title of the movie – not a single cigarette is smoked on screen. Instead of glorifying smoking, the movie focuses on the voice behind the tobacco lobby and how he moves through both his work and his attempts to instill values and critical thinking in his son. If you haven’t seen it yet and get a chance to, I highly recommend that you take the time to view this movie.

During his sojurn to the video store the hubby also picked up Click. I’m not the biggest fan of Adam Sandler, but I do adore Christopher Walken. It’s definitely not a candidate for the Academy Awards, but as far as jello for the mind goes, it’s not bad and goes down easy. I did have some trouble with a few of the plot elements. The deaths of two “father” characters in the movie hit me extremely hard. I’d like to say that I’m not much of a crier when it comes to watching movies; there are too many people who read this blog that can easily dredge up a number of examples where I bawled like a baby during a movie to get away with it. The scene where Michael (Adam Sandler) sees his father (Henry Winkler) for the last time started the waterworks flowing. I’m sure it was a case of transference, but I couldn’t help worry that maybe I too spent too much time concentrating on work and stupid daily items as dad was dying and not enough time talking and spending time with him.

Technorati Tags: movies, Thank you for smoking, Aaron Eckhart, Click, Adam Sandler, Christopher Walken, dad, guilt

I love my truck. I love the Stewie, Tac Hel Choppers, and support our troops decals on the back windows. I love that we can purchase big items and not have to wait for delivery. I love that we can haul things around behind it. I love that we can buy lumber and other construction supplies for D-I-Y fix-ups around the house and don’t need help getting it all home. I love how it can continually surprise me – it’s amazingly fuel efficient on highways and a pretty shade of beige as well. How girly is that?

I love that only a few people can sit in it (legally) so I don’t have to play car pool maven. Driving with others in the vehicle makes me nervous. I think it ties back to the car accident I was in (as passenger) over a decade ago. I worry about being responsible for their lives and become a crazy super cautious driver. Oddly enough, I don’t behave like this when I’m driving something other than my beloved truck.

I digress, I was babbling about how much I love my truck, not my driving neurosis’.

I do not like being woken early on a Saturday morning from a phone call asking to borrow my truck. If you’re going to beg someone for the use of their truck, or ask for their hubby to do manual labour, you should wait and call at a reasonable time. Just because you have kids that woke you up crazy early in the morning to the sound of your kids watching cartoons does not mean you have the right to wake up the rest of the world.

No one should be forced awake before the crack of noon on a weekend! Especially not if they’ve only just gotten to sleep at 4am. *grrrrrrr*

Technorati Tags: pick-up, truck, phone call, sleep, favours, pet peeve

Google Dale’s Cone of Experience and you’ll find a wealth of sites containing references not only to Edgar Dale’s original research, but to a series of percentages said to be associated with Dale’s Cone. For example, the .pdf file located at www.mc.uky.edu/pharmacy/edinnovation/pdf/Step%20Dales%20Cone.pdf contains a list of percentages associated with the elements in the Cone. This perpetuates a fallicy (or shoddy research practices) that is becoming more well known in recent years. Dale never assigned percentages re: effectiveness of learning activities in his work.

Will Thalheimer at Work-Learning Research delved into Dale’s Cone and discovered that:

1. While Edgar Dale indeed did indeed create a model of the concreteness of various audio-visual material back in 1946, the model contained no numbers and no research was conducted to create the model. Dale’s Cone was just a hunch, albeit an educated hunch, one that Dale warned shouldn’t be taken too literally.*
2. The percentages — ‘people generally remember 10% of what they read’ and so on — were most likely added to Dale’s Cone by an employee of the Mobil Oil company in the late 1960s. These percentages have since been discredited.**

Thalheimer’s complete report is available online at http://www.willatworklearning.com/myths_and_worse/index.html.

* and ** is from the Dales Cone Drum Corps article in the Internet TOURBUS 07/27/06 edition.

Michael Molenda of the Indiana University has witten a paper refuting the inclusion of percentages as part of Dale’s Cone of Experience. Mr. Molenda also authored a Reader Comment on an article published by Deepak Prem Subramony titled Dale’s Cone Revisited: Critically Examining the Misapplication of a Nebulous Theory to Guide Practice? in the July-August (2003) issue of Educational Technology.

Richard Crowest also wrote a dissertation titled “Making Sense. Multisensory Interpretation and the Visitor Experience“. Elements of his research focus on Dale’s original source material and indicates the lack of percentages in his work.

A number of adult educators and ID’s have written articles or blogged about this topic, some of the most relevant posts can be found at

• Visual Being: Forget What You’ve Heard About Remembering
• Infomacy: Hornswaggled: a Study in Active Learning
• Infomacy: Hornswaggled: These Data do NOT Exist
• e-Learning Acupuncture: Incorrect information in the field!
• Bogus Research Uncovered
• I Speak of Dreams: Oh my, Dale’s Cone is not a Cone but a Crock!
• Online Learning Research: Fact or Fiction

Ok, I admit it. I’m addicted to researching the phenomena of how one man’s theory becomes co-opted by others 😉 If I won the lottery I’d be spending way too much time and effort researching this.

Technorati Tags: Edgar Dale, Cone of Experience, learning retention, internet TOURBUS

Yesterday was my first foray into the world of meme and Thursday Thirteen. I’ve been reading T13’s on other’s pages for a while now and finally jumped on the bandwagon. It’s an interesting project and I really enjoy reading other’s postings. I’d say it’s definitely working as designed – help building a social group through sharing of information – and the flexibility of being able to create any themed list the poster chooses makes it more appealing than completing other meme options. I also like the fact that if I continue with the T13 project, I’ll never be at a loss for something to post on a Thursday ever again. The only real constraint is having to post something each Thursday, which may be an issue down the road. For now, I’m gathering ideas on what to post next week.

Technorati Tags: Thursday Thirteen, T13, meme