Margaret F's Page

Who remembers that in our techstitute in July, perhaps ever so fleetingly, a conversation meandered toward the question "If one were to have a social networking site page, do professional adults use MySpace or Facebook?" In Virginia Heffernan's "The Medium: Coldpage," she comments, "... the university crowd may have quit the boisterous MySpace for the wittier and more austere Facebook" (The New York Times Magazine 13 July 2008 and here's the link to this article: http://www.nytimes… Continue

Thinking about the connectivity angle and the EdTalk conversation Wednesday night, I'm wondering about the issue of e-conversation or e-feedback. In our July tech institute, we barely had time to "finish" our projects and also comment on each others', though that was our dedicated tech-time and we did, and I certainly enjoyed reading others' responses to everyone's creations and to mine though some responses were more thoughtful than others. We even had voices outside our institute group, such a… Continue

Continuing to learn about technology, this week at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, a week-long "Storycentric" workshop for K-12 teachers about film and story, my skepticism survives. The first three days, we were watching and learning about how filmmakers create meaning, and it was a great pleasure and time well spent to watch and discuss Psycho, In the Mood for Love, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest with experts and fellow educators. Today, we made "films"… Continue

...okay, honestly, it was no problem filling the hours from 9-2 last week, what with my favorite 2 1/2-year-old in our cabin (trucks! fire engines! sound-enabled fire-engine puzzles! yesss!!), but I've already been wondering how these new communications tools (hypertextopia, VoiceThread, tumblr) or others not yet introduced might replace the widely-criticized PowerPoint, yawnnn, presentations, ... and I'm in the thick of a free-lance project in which this is a question. So if anyone who is still… Continue

On my tumblr page titled Take Your Time--a title I've used before, long before Olafur Eliasson got to town--I focused my tumblr project on the question how can I more effectively help my academic writing students find and articulate a research question that is individual and meaningful. The project has seven parts, corresponding to the dashboard options of text, link, photo, etcetera, and its overall address is below.

As listed with links below, the first part you'll see, working… Continue