Where Have You Been, Composter?
If you read this blog occassionally, you may have noticed that I have been “away.” That may partly be because my RSS feed was not working but I think that is fixed now (thanks to Tom and his amazingly helpful videos!) . The other reason is that I am blogging with my Core class right now at another blog: CoreCownexions. More on blogging and grading in my next post, but for now I just want to note a funny juxtaposition.
Last Sunday, the Parade Magazine that comes with my Richmond Times Dispatch featured Drew Cary on the front, all wired up. I think of Parade as the Sunday Mag of Middle America. And if it is, then I do believe we have reached a “tipping point.” Look at the article about meeting people on the internet, and it is not about creepy predators. Instead it is an optimistic look at the positive things that many of us know can come from these electronic communities. It even quotes on of my favorite resources, the
Pew Project for the Internet and American Life found that the Internet builds rather than decreases friendships by broadening users’ geographic networks, giving people more contacts to communicate with about health issues, hobbies or other interests.
The day after I read this, I went to a class at Godwin High School, where kids have had laptops in a one to one initiative since they were in middle school. I wanted to show them things about digital storytelling, but all the sites I wanted to show were blocked! Everytime I get involved at our schools I get mad. I get aggravated that many teachers don’t utilize the computers we fought so hard to keep available to our students and then I find out just how tightly their hands are tied. This is ridiculous! Our kids should be out front, creating multimedia projects among other cool kinds of projects where they can be creative and self motivated and really engaged… Let’s face it–those kids should have been teaching ME about digital storytelling. Instead, they had never heard of it.
My message to Henrico County Schools is: come on now! Even Parade Magazine is dropping the “fear factor” ! When will we untie the hands of our teachers and students to use these fabulous tools as more than a word processor??
visual aids
One of the things I see really changing because of the internet is our ability to think visually. Today I tried out Vizuwords. I think this may be on of the first Web 3.0 applications that I have used. I am definitely a word person, but I also find that I use visuals a lot to understand complex ideas. Vizuwords is a dictionary that uses a moving visual interface to show not jsut the word, but other words closely related to it and the nature of those relationships. I could spend lots of time there… I am thinking of ways to use it with my students. This article from Edutopia first pointed me to it, and there are other sites mentioned there that I am looking forward to playing with.
It occurs to me that it matters a lot HOW we explain things. It is more than just moving thoughts from inside the head to outside; it is interpreting and making sense of things in a particular way. I noticed that many people are put off by the kinds of “drive-by” display of new technologies that we tech enthusiasts tend to want to produce. I think we really have to start to care about getting our message out to people who are afraid of learning new technology. Thanks again to Jeff who introduced me to one of my new favorite reources: the CommonCraft Show. These guys do explanations that are very visually savvy and also audience savvy–they couldn’t be less intimidating! I was going to link to one of the ones I’ll use with my faculty, like the one on wikis or the one on social bookmarking, but first you should check out this one that contains potentially life-saving information?
Knowledge Networking
I had the joy of presenting with Jeff Nugent at the POD Conference this year, on a topic near to my heart. How can the magic of Web 2.0 tools better support teachers (and the people who support them)? We were proposing some scenarios for POD to pool reources and foster collaboration. What I originally thought would be a hinderance (lack of internet connectivity in the hotel meeting rooms!) turned into a plus. Jeff and I really had to think through what we wanted to present and then use screen captures to simulate live internet. We had over 50 people join us for this session, and people seemed very excited by the idea of something like “PODapedia” and PODpodcasts. Jeff and I still like the notion of working on social bookmarking tags…
Today I noticed this post by others who are thinking about the same topic over at the Teaching and Learning Commons and it made me think that there are all these pools of resources, pointed toward slightly different audiences who have overlapping members and overlapping interests. I wonder where this is all going… It makes me think of my favorite spoken word poet, Rives and his poem about the internet–how we all wish it was “more organized” but at the same time, to say that is to misunderstand the very beauty and nature of the internet. It is like trying to mash 10 dimensions down into 1.
Still, POD needs to get in there and be a part of this collecting and collaborating. Faculty Development people are great networkers and great collaborators.
a little meme play
Libby and Tricia have tagged me, long ago, with this one. I have been not getting to my writing and that has made me a cranky person : ( So here is my attempt to make it up to myself: 5 things I like about my writing, with thanks to Libby and Tricia for their consistent support and inspiration:
5 things I like about myself as a writer:
1. I don’t separate writing from life. My life feeds my writing and my writing feeds my life. It is “both/and.” Yeats said one has to choose. He was wrong (but only about that one thing…)
2. I like my quirky sense of reality which comes out in my writing. The impossible often happens there.
3. I like that humor is almost always present in my writing, or at most a page away. I believe in humor. I am sad when really fast processing power is wasted on a person with no sense of humor.
4. One of my strengths is my deep understanding that revision is magical,
5. Another strength is that I know how to use semicolons properly; few people possess this understanding, though many think they do!
Only Connect
I was on the phone with the help desk, waiting for the technician to see my tablet through its network connection, so that we could straighten out some sort of problem with my new tablet pc’s wireless connection. And I had just begun a blog entry titled “Only Connect” to be based on this EM Forster quote:
“Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the gray, sober against the fire.” (from Howard’s End)
And then I saw a connection between two very different blogs I was reading, both of which mentioned “capuchins” in different ways: Andrew’s vacation
when he was at Luray’s Rescue Zoo, and in my new favorite blog, Bibliodyssey
in a post about Surinam. The monkey is the connection between these two far-apart spots on the planet, and the internet connects me to the places, the animals, the blog writers and new knowledge–and as I make the connections, I create new knowledge and connections in my own brain. I am left with ideas and questions I want to explore about monkey habitats, trading of exotic creatures, and then the connections to the human “trade” that Bibliodyssey looks at in its arresting images.
I am obsessed right now with odd connections and coincidences, and how the internet seems to embody the possibilites in a new way. And this is the perfect example: I wasn’t looking for monkeys, but I found, in a few minutes reading, this odd coincidence, and a million thought sparks that fly off from the collision of the two blog worlds.
I will be asking my Core students to work on individual blogs this year, to make connections to the texts we will be reading. I have this theory that everything is connected, and that somehow seeing the connections is what makes us care. That is: it is a legit question for those students to say “Why should I care about Neitsche”–but what they don’t know is that THEY are the only ones who know the answer to that question.
And, as EM Forster so beautifully conveys, the connections we make are the essence of our humanity, connecting our inner beast to our inner monk, our passions to our ideas, and making us whole.
I remember Claudia Emerson speaking at UMW’s Student Academy and explaining how her independent study student made what seemed to her to be “random” “non-scholarly” connections in her blog about Sylvia Plath, and that these posts that seemed insignificant turned out to be the seeds of the most amazing work she did. This is my inspiration for using the blogs in the way we will use them. But it is a kind of leap of faith. I am not preplanning hidden connections; I am stepping out of the realm of scholarly writing and discourse, and asking the students to let whimsy, synchronicity and coincidence lead them to deeper understandings of our classic texts. I am excited for the adventure of it all. I hope it will help them find the “rainbow bridge” Forster describes.
now, when did that happen?
I saw a link to this great tool today: xtimeline. (See Kevin, I do read the minutes sometimes : ) )
And for your time-travelling pleasure, here is a particularly useful timeline for this week:
I am having trouble getting their embedding code to play nice with my current WP theme. You can see it better at this link
http://www.xtimeline.com/culture/Timeline-of-Harry-Potter-Series
A Little Summertime Game of Tag
Libby tagged me with a meme! Who am I to stand in the way of propogation?
First, the rules:
1. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
2. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
3. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
4. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
5. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.
So, here goes my 8:
1. I grew up with 3 younger brothers and now I have 3 sons.
2. I survived 11.5 years of Catholic school. “Survived” is a relative term.
3. I was suspended from school once (St. John the Evangelist) because I wouldn’t rat out a friend who had started a “slam book” (Debbie Licameli–you still owe me!) Come to think of it, this meme is pretty similar to a slam book and I am already feeling nervous I am going to get in trouble for this somehow…
4. I sprained my back the day before my wedding, waterskiing. The wedding went on, as those things must…
5. I overuse elipses…
6. I never had a class in World History and Geography and am constantly embarrassed by not knowing where countries are and what happened there!
7. My first trip out of the US was the summer I turned 40. We went on an incredible Vagabond tour in Ireland. I plan to travel as much as I can, in an attempt to remedy #6.
8. I have a thing for big, old bathtubs.
I’m tagging the following folks, and then I’m off to catch fireflies…
Lee
Anything you can think of, and more!
That’s what you can find on the internet. Just a few choice, wacky things I have learned today:
there are wild parrots in North America, and you can go on a safari to see them:
http://www.brooklynparrots.com/2007/01/special-double-header-wild-brooklyn.htmlÂ
next safari: July 14. Since these are parrots who somehow escaped cage living,wouldn’t that be a cool thing to do on Bastille Day?
http://www.metaphorm.org/pages/portfolio/defenestration/defen.htmlÂ
“defenestration” is one of my favorite words. I wasn’t sure why until now.
“The simple, unpretentious beauty and humanity of these downtrodden objects is reawakened through the action of the piece. The act of “throwing out” becomes an uplifting gesture of release, inviting reflection on the spirit of the people we live with, the objects we encounter, and the places in which we live.”
I don’t know, maybe it is because of Independence Day and Bastille Day that I am fixated on escape. Maybe also because the writing I am working on is also about escape. And summer time is such an escape for me–I am fixated on Nimrod Hall and the Cowpasture River, screens in open windows, fans pulling in the cool night air… the countdown has begun for the writer weeks!
Answer People and Networks
Who are the Answer People? Following a link from Kevin’s post on Social Networks, I came to this post with visual aids (always helpful) about communication patterns, and then to this discussion on slashdot where people try to visualize the “Answer People.” The beauty of the discussion is that the discuss-ers are actual Answer People. One pokes fun at the stereotype (” imagine a guy in his late 20s sitting in his parents basement sucking down Mountain Dew and inhaling cheetos…..
Oh wait, thats not what you meant by “visualizing” them, is it?”) while others represent pretty much the range of people I have experienced on the internet–from incredibly generous to incredibly condescending. (Think: Saturday Night Live skit with the Computer Guy). The NYT Sunday Magaizine this week had an interesting piece on Wikipedians, and I am wondering about the connection: I wonder if there is a connection? My guess is that there may be some overlap between the two groups (Answer People and Wikipedians) but not a lot. Answer People seem to be technical experts, programmers and others who enjoy playing with the machinery and code, while the Wikipedians were news junkies and word people who are devoted to the idea of the free information commons. What they have in common is that they do their work (answering or editing) because they love it, and aren’t paid for it!
As a writer, I identify : )
When working with faculty, we have to be so careful to not be like “The Computer Guy.” How do we create, instead, a community like the best of these internet communities, where people respect and draw on each others’ expertise? It seems, in the best situations, everyone is the Answer Person in the area of their own expertise or passion, and everyone shares and everyone listens. It is a lot like the way a really successful classroom looks.
The World to Come
I have just returned from 6 glorious days at the beach with six absolutely wonderful teenagers, all of whom happen to be related to me : )
When I was growing up we went to the beach every summer to a practically primitive place. It had no television or phone. We complained about that a little, but the sand, sun, pool, ocean, card games, etc. more than made up for it. Beach days are easily the happiest memories of my youth.
I used to think that getting away to a simpler place was what made it magical. Was it? On our vacation this year we had several laptops with us, and the house had wi-fi as well as several tv’s and dvd players. J. had a digital camera, pretty much everyone had their own cell phone, and many of us had ipods. And I think that applied to most of the houses at the beach, given the other wireless networks that offered themselves to my computer when I logged on and the folks I saw gabbing, texting and jamming on the beach.
Yeah, it was different. But it also wasn’t different. Everyone moved seemlessly from technology to non-technology. J. read about 10 paperbacks, while C2 IM’d with a buddy who was vacationing in Belgium. N. had her earphones on when running or sunbathing, but took them off often to chat, and handed them to me to listen to her favorite songs when she wanted me to hear them. Uncle P. heard via Blackberry from one of his employees who had a family emergency and needed permission for a few weeks off while she went home to China. All of the kids showed each other their favorite videos on YouTube. J. and C3 even made their own video, a rif on a “cupcake” video that is popular right now, by using J.’s camera (that also does video). We all wanted to learn more about Barber Shop singing since C1 had missed the first beach day for training at Harmony College –he is the school’s new Bass–so C2 found us some Barber Shop music videos at YouTube. We wanted to learn more about the ghostcrabs we saw on the beach, so Bman looked it up on Wikipedia, then went back to playing his guitar.
But one of their favorite activities, when the waves were too flat, was playing with my Mac photobooth:
We all got all the sun that pale, freckled folks like us can stand, and we enjoyed some improv games after dinner one night, and we had a luau complete with tiki torches…and we did this other fun stuff too. Actually, if the new technology took the place of anything, it was boring old bad tv. As we were packing up to go, “Good Times” came on the tv, and the boys were watching. “Well, this is kind of lame,” they said. We explained: “well, back in the olden days, there were only 3 tv stations, and we were pretty limited…” What if I had been able to rif on “Good Times” with my own video camera then?
It was a fabulous vacation. It wasn’t primitive, but it was away, different, and a special time with family we rarely get to see. And I feel I know my nieces better for knowing their favorite songs and videos and seeing them at play–on the beach, and on the internet.