Monthly Archives: June 2013

Week #2 Reflection: Making Learning Connected

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It’s an accomplishment to get 498 people give or take a few (ok, I don’t know how many are just lurking but it’s cool to lurk) to achieve this level of comfort in an online community so fast…especially since most are teachers.  Everyone is pretty much playing like kids.  I have to credit the facilitators, who are playing very hard every day and sharing like mad, making us feel like we can share our little products instead of waiting for some kind of grand production.  I am learning so much about apps!  I think I downloaded 30 apps this week.  But more than that, I’m learning about this kind of online community of creators.  The meeting place is the showcase and the workshop, more or less, all in the same space (Googlegoogle_002+).

For those of you who follow or are a part of my ePortfolio community at Stony Brook, I’m getting a sense of how I would like our ePortfolio community to be (a little more like).  Our community is already doing great work.  However, there are still so many ePortfolios that just lie there, rather like a guppy out of the bowl, after the “class” in which they were made is over.  Some of those beautiful ePortfolios get so lonely and unattended!  Sometimes I don’t update mine for weeks at a time, and I’m one of the diehard returnees (of faculty, anyway).  It is still more of a showcase than a learning space, for me.  I like showcases.  But I really love the dynamic quality of this G+ community.  The Faculty Center has been brilliant about promoting our ePortfolio communities, but I think more of us need to be involved in this.

We have Google Apps for Education, but our school has NOT enabled G+.  I am unable to use my school email address for this project.  It got under my skin, and I wrote to the CIO, and he answered me quite promptly (he is a good guy) and said that once security issues have been addressed, it is likely that they will enable it.  (New York and FERPA concerns, always. Our students are 99% legal adults, so I am certain something can be worked out.)

This week, I made a lot of new wonderful contacts, including two Second Lifers (Zoe Foodiboo and Valibrarian Gregg, or Monika Talaroc and Valerie Hill in real life, both information scientists) who met with me at Zoe’s archival workspace/playspace on 1920’s Virtual Berlin. internationalliteraturesl_002 I invited them to our Second Life Seawolves group and hope that we can get some events or projects going on the SLN (SUNY Learning Network) island this summer.  (Everyone needs to see Virtual Berlin, but be forwarned, the avatars are very tiny!  Not tinies per se, just made to scale, unlike most of us.)  I broke open my Adobe Production Suite and learned how to animate text, then mashed it up with Terry Elliott’s and Shari Edwards’ adorable kitty Vine videos, and even made an animated GIF of one.  Probably because I don’t have kids around the house and teach young adults rather than children, I was a little baffled by the #toyhack exercise, but in a sleep-deprived state I got the urge to fill my Osho Tarot deck box with raw lima beans and made a kind of shrine out of it.9148632945_90f8c63629_b  That was my only #toyhack that wasn’t digital.  But I want to keep the Tarot idea on the table for later projects, maybe.  I might try to mark a Tarot card profile????  Oh, yes, there was Mozilla Webmaker and  the profile exercise that Chad Sansing set up for us by making an easy-to-use template so we could modify the code and learn a bit about coding without tears and hair-tearing.  And I was a little late to Kevin Hodgson’s foray into augmented reality and Aurasma and I made a couple of short augmented reality videos too, but I’m finding the app a little glitchy to share work and still figuring that out (whether it’s the app or just me).  So, we have been producing all sort of wonderful little projects and finding friends to teach us and offer support along the way.

Nothing is More Forward or Backward Than Homo Interneticus

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wherecatWith the statement above ^^ I’m not even attempting to be profound.  This is not the “real” blog post of the week.  It’s just a sorta transitional moment of one.  I feel the need to mark the week as maybe a kind of important one for me as I caught a glimpse of myself living in the future.  We are bathing in the future; it’s like the anecdote that David Foster Wallace told in his much admired and ballyhooed graduation speech at Kenyon College three years before his death about the two young fish who don’t know what water is because they swim in it incessantly.  They are so much in it that they have no awareness of it.

David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College, 2005

I have spent the last couple of days gliding from the desktop to the laptop to the iPad and (more pointedly because I just got it) the new Samsung smartphone and back again. (My God, I love that phone.)  I have been:  raiding and collecting stones, oil, and meat on WoW for valor points, swearing at Second Life because the lag kept stealing my avatar’s hair and facelight (didn’t spent much time there as a result), making  mashups of people’s short cat videos and some animated text that I managed to make dance in Adobe After Effects (not the most intuitive program in the world) and posting them on YouTube, photographing my food in a Panera Bread factory and sharing in in a Google Plus community, tweeting about politics and connected learning, watching a few minutes here and there of the Max Headroom pilot on YouTube (thinking it was a 1990s show and being told it was 1985 and having an omg moment, because it really was ahead of its time), emailing and emailing and emailing about MOOCs as my colleagues and I try to wrap our 20th-century minds around new impending paradigm shifts in education.  And then…I have to exercise because my body wants movement so I jump on the bike while watching Star Trek: Insurrection.  Somehow, I missed decades of classic sci-fi movies, including most of the Star Wars series and all of Star Trek movies.  (Some of it I’m glad I didn’t pay for in the theater, after all.)

In short, I have become a caricature of Homo Interneticus in middle age.  I don’t really want it to change except that I want time to be structured differently.  That’s part of the syndrome….fantasies about changing the structure of how we experience time may end up being some new form of porn for Homo Interneticus.  Everyone covets (lusts after) their very own TARDIS.  Yesterday wasn’t long enough…let’s go back there and extend it.  What did we need to do?  Shave our legs?  Scrub the mold that’s starting to form around the shower drain?  Make homemade chutney?  Call someone and tell them we love them?  Sleep another hour?

I can’t believe it’s almost midnight AGAIN.  See you on the other side.

Alphabets of Desire and the CLMOOC

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voodoo_dollIt seems like a class such as this, so formless in a way, shouldn’t work. There are no restrictions on who can join, no particular kind of creativity that is privileged. Talent is admired, but not really required, to make something cool. The Internet is full of fun applications now that make notions into striking products, like a word picture (Wordfoto) or a Voodoo Doll Maker (yeah, I tried it, and ended up making something weird but sweet. So sue me.) I cannot draw or sing well, or code, and my cooking is pretty rudimentary. But I can express my spirit, and sometimes that seems sufficient. As Peter Elbow says, “Everybody can write.” But everybody writes something new, even when it’s been said before. I realized earlier this year that the matter on the Internet is becoming a sort of emotional alphabet for the current generations. One of my students is a very gifted kid: medical researcher at 20, concert violinist, straight A student. In his digital story (Ying Tang’s digital story) he did an interesting thing. He found pictures of babies on the Internet to express emotions, so they became a kind of abc of feeling. He’s a pretty taciturn guy, but he figured out that he needed something other than words to share. Other students, too, will scour Google (hopefully, Creative Commons but whateva) to find images that evoke feelings: memes or sunsets or children or animals. It has to feel right or they discard it.

This Amazing Tree

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hereI have a cupcake of a back porch, a thimble of a porch, a little slab of concrete that emerges from the kitchen door/window.  If I sit here, as I am now, I am facing some serious trees.  There is one to the left that is about sixty feet high, I’d wager, though I’m not good at guessing height like that.  The sun is just about to go down for the night.  The temperature is about perfect by my standards, although a little cool on the skin.  So far, southeastern NY has not gotten the heavy heat that has visited other parts of the country this month.

It’s also intriguing how relentless immersion into the Internet makes me reach outside, and as I can see from the #clmooc images and projects that others have posted today, I am not alone in this.  Food, cats, even the grave marker of a beloved pet, children, crafting, nothing of life seems to be untouched in the creations that are displayed there.  I find myself wishing to go back in the apartment and grab a camera but it’s getting dark and I hate flash…but it is worth a try.