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

Week #2 Reflection: Making Learning Connected

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

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


voodoo_doll
It 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

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.