A blavatar reflecting in the blogosmirror: midsummer dreaming of MOOClets

This week brought out a less appealing facet of my personality.  I did nothing in the #clmooc at all, except check in a few times.  This was the special week where everyone was making credos, a “this I believe” sort of aria of affirmation about connecting, teaching, making, writing….etc.  And I just didn’t feel up to a new declaration.  Not that I haven’t made plenty of these in the past.  For example:

On Writing

Yet much of what I did the last week and a half was related to the values I hold about connected learning, as some of my colleagues and I brainstorm plans for our own MOOC.  MOOClet.  MOOC Module (MOOM?)  We’re writing in the middle of night, holding conversations on Google docs,  interrupting each other in mid-sentence sometimes, stopping to feed babies or sleep or say goodbye before short roadtrips.  Occasionally, it gets a little freaky and I have to move chunks of the conversation around to a special “other” place so I can stay focused, whatever that means.

Frankly, I find the prospect of this MOOClet rather overwhelming (perhaps ever so slightly terrifying) after seeing how expansive the #clmooc can be.  Yet, it is so very exciting because so much of my life’s value exists online now, and so far, my teaching hasn’t been online.  That’s not entirely true, of course, as there is teaching discussion on Facebook and ePortfolios and LinkedIn groups, and Blackboard, always.  Websites.  But the courses have not been online courses per se.

Experience has taught me that teaching, like life, often happens while you are busy making other plans.  There is a good chance that the moment where one says “now I am ready to teach a MOOC” never arrives in life.  As for credos, they come on little cats’ feet, in the midsummer dreaming, perhaps.  If you value poetry, perhaps, you can appreciate a slanted credo ala Emily Dickinson’s truth.

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Of the Map That Changes

 

Writers and maps have always had a special relationship.  This week in the #clmooc, we made maps and talked about maps a lot.  It was rather difficult for me to get into the mapmaking frame of mind, and while others were mapping their streets and their minds and their futures (no dearth of creativity there), I resisted at first.  I fussed about privacy.  Did I really want to map my location?ofthemapthatchanges3  I’ve never been a big fan of Foursquare because I don’t like to advertise my location, although of course I do in various ways all the time, as I think most of us do unless we make a concerted effort to conceal our whereabouts.  I starting digging around a website my hometown keeps of historical maps, dating back to the 18th century.  (See the results in the post below this one, Drowned Meadow Revisited.)  But the influence of the week’s assignment was deeper than I had expected. ofthemapthatchanges2  I remembered that an entire study area of my doctoral comprehensive was focused on the poetry of place.  So many, many brilliant poems and so many of my favorite works are poems of place, really verbal maps, usually either narratives of real geographies in a state of just being perceived (Michael Anania’s Riversongs) or or virtual places being mapped out for the mind’s habitation (Dante’s Inferno, William Hunt’s corridors of Orpheus, Robert Duncan’s meadow of the mind, Sylvia Plath’s cave in “Nick and the Candlestick”).  The virtual realities of Second Life and Azeroth are navigable by map.  In World of Warcraft, these wonderful maps begin almost blank but begin to develop, expose terrain, gradually as the player encounters new regions. This is such a salient and profound metaphor for learning that it makes my jaw drop.  One cannot understand where one is without some form of map,ofthemapthatchanges1 although maps can take many forms.  One cannot do analysis without some form of map, and analysis is indeed a form of mapping, whether it be form written texts, for places in the world, for media of any sort, or for understanding current events or dreams.  And the best maps are the ones that we make ourselves, as the world makes itself known to us, and we chart it, for ourselves and for others who follow our lead.

“Of the Map That Changes” is a poem in a  collection of the same name by William Hunt. It was first published in Poetry in April, 1968, eleven years before I met him in Chicago.  The three photos above were screenshots taken today on my iPad in Google Earth and run through Instagram; the application flattened the terrain, in essence turning my street into Flatland.  Fascinating!

Drowned Meadow Revisited

2011-8-1471This is a reproduction of a map of my town from 1797 superimposed with a photo that I took of the harbor the day before Hurricane Sandy.  The shoreline changed after the hurricane;  this map shows how drastically the geography of the area changed during the centuries past, from a swamp to gradually become a port harbor.  The changes were reflected in the name Drowned Meadow, which later became Port Jefferson.  Another interesting thing I found from the historical map collection online was that Port Jefferson Station, the adjacent town, was called Echo.  (The town was very fortunate in that we didn’t suffer too much loss; this structure still stands.)    #mapmaking