This is harder to do than you might think. I’ve spent a good part of my teacher prep time for the last ten years or so trying to devise materials and methods that will allow me to me less<\/i> cognitively active. “If I put these materials on PowerPoint slides, I’ll be better organized (i.e. put less future thought into creating my lessons).” Or, “if I assemble a great test bank of questions now, I won’t have to work as hard when I need to write a unit test on this material next year.”<\/p>\n
There’s nothing wrong with this, of course. I’m just about the biggest fan of “Work Smarter, Not Harder” there is. But being more efficient isn’t necessarily doing my cognition any favors.<\/p>\n
Our brains, it turns out, like to be puzzled. Which brings us to vi<\/b>, now vim<\/a>.<\/p>\n That’s not the Roman numeral “6,” that’s actually the two letters “v-i”, pronounced “vee-eye,” and referring to a text editor that was originally written back in 1976 by Bill Joy. vi has since gone on to become the<\/i> power text editor of choice, beating out by a healthy margin gedit, emacs, and all the others in a recent survey<\/a>.<\/p>\n If you don’t know about “text editors” yet, you don’t know what you’re missing. Text editors allow you to write simple, unformatted, text-based documents without, say, having to wait 5 minutes for Microsoft Word to launch. Another advantage includes the fact that “text is text”—you don’t have to worry about whether you have the right version of a proprietary software package to open a file (Microsoft’s 2004 software won’t open its 2008 .docx files, for example.) The disadvantage to text files is that they don’t support even the simplest formatting: bold text, italicized text, underlined text are not available. You get text, and that’s it.<\/p>\n I use text files for lots of different things, from to-do lists to lesson plans, from journal entries to coding programs and websites. So I’m kind of a fan. On the Mac, I started out using BareBones Software’s free TextWrangler<\/a> for awhile before deciding to pony up the big bucks for their professional-level BBEdit<\/a>. I played around with emacs<\/a> for a bit, and recently have enjoyed working in TextMate<\/a>.<\/p>\n All of these are perfectly awesome text editors, and well worth your time, money, and attention.<\/p>\n You may have noticed that vi is not on that list.<\/p>\n vi, for me, has been super difficult to learn. It’s what people call a “modal” editor, meaning that you have to switch between 2-3 modes while working with your text—inserting text is different from editing text—and that process of switching back and forth between the two modes is difficult for me, cognitively.<\/p>\n So that’s why I’m learning vi this summer. It’s the most popular text editor for geeks by a large margin, it’s amazingly powerful, AND I get to try to learn something new that my brain has to struggle with?<\/p>\n Sign me up!<\/p>\n That’s what I’m<\/i> trying to do this summer that’s difficult for me. What are you doing to keep your brain plastic? Something creative? Something challenging? Something you don’t already know how to do?<\/p>\n NOTE: If you’d like to try vi<\/b> for yourself, it comes pre-installed on Apple OS X and any Linux distro—launch a Terminal and type vi<\/b> to try it out. Fair warning, though: you’ll want to Google “vi tutorial” or something similar for advice on getting started.<\/p>\n Windows will have to install vim by following the instructions here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Good luck!\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Keeping the Brain Flexible by Richard White 2011-07-02 They say that keeping your brain active is an important part of trying to stave off the natural effects of aging on brain function. This may be good advice on a neurological basis, but I think it’s even more important for teachers to stay cognitively active. This … Continue reading Keeping the Brain Flexible<\/span> ![\"\"](\"http:\/\/hybridclassroom.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/07\/vi.jpg\" "\\"vi\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\nWhat’s vi?<\/h3>\n
Wait… what’s a text editor<\/i>?<\/h3>\n
Doing the difficult thing<\/h3>\n