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
Added by Margaret F on August 3, 2008 at 12:30pm —
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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
Added by Margaret F on July 31, 2008 at 8:00pm —
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...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
Added by Margaret F on July 27, 2008 at 10:15pm —
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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
Added by Margaret F on July 17, 2008 at 9:00am —
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THE DAY LADY DIED
By FRANK O'HARA
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille Day, yes
it is 1959, and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in East Hampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don't know the people who will feed me
I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I onc… Continue
Added by Margaret F on July 16, 2008 at 11:53pm —
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...is the time-space conundrum. Ha. That sounds pretty impossible. But as many things as I'll be busy with next week (little 2 1/2-year-old Avery Wen-Er, arriving late Wednesday night ready to tuck into his new pistachio-ground polka dot sheet set from Garnet Hill) (oh, and his parents), I am not ready to "graduate." I love every minute of our techstitute and the multi-directional learning and conversation and experimentation, and I suspect I'd be content to return at least one day a week for th… Continue
"Sneaking away" just now to check email and then mapquest the location of the meeting I'll head toward after we finish our workshop today, my mapquesting reminds me: once upon a time, this was new technology, yet it's second nature now. So I hope that before too long, tumblr and RSS feeds and VoiceThread and hypertextopia will be that familiar, too. On my tumblr page, which isn't yet "designed" with colors or theme or anything, I do already have two RSS feeds, for The New Yorker and Th… Continue
The first two weeks of this techstitute have been thoughtfully paced, with not quite (never quite) enough but a regular amount of f2f discussion to hear everyone's connections and questions. A question raised this morning, "why use a technology option (why use hypertextopia for this, why use VoiceThread for this, etc.)?" is probably my central question.
Starting last Friday, July 11, I noticed dots and a floating line in my vision, especially my left eye. I noticed this swimming, and I thought… Continue
Well, chapeaux to me! It's "only" Wednesday, and from Monday to now, mit frustrations and lots of demands for HELP! from Paul and Julie, I've created a five-image VoiceThread including four photos with voiceovers and one text plus one movie with… Continue
Added by Margaret F on July 9, 2008 at 1:59pm —
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...a Buddhist expression I think. I more often than not feel confident teaching my Academic Writing class, but I would not wish to be remembered for last night's. Can't get it out of my mind, of course, a perversity of life. Why not loop continuously the scintillating classes, when everyone was delighting in each other's profound contributions to our lifelong learning? A nicer name for obsessing about last night, of course, is being a reflective practitioner. I have also always been suspicious,… Continue
Added by Margaret F on July 9, 2008 at 10:00am —
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This is getting more complicated by the minute...I can upload photos and even videos to voicethread, and even record, but not necessarily videos/photos I'm interested in sharing or talking about...I need a better system for bringing in videos/photos, for starters. I think with students, I'd teach more about how to bring in (jpeg, etc.) photos to upload first...I'm wasting time with my haphazard anything-that-works m.o. My hypertextopia story is almost done, just lacking two shards...one a photo,… Continue
Added by Margaret F on July 8, 2008 at 2:15pm —
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...that if we wait till we "master" hypertextopia or VoiceThread etcetera, a tsunami of new technology will be looming on the horizon. More importantly, Julie's idea about being transparent as ongoing learners, which I agree she and Paul are convincingly modeling, seems crucial. In my coursepack, I have a 1980 article from The New York Times, Guy Davenport's "Pergolesi's Dog," in which he claims "We are never so certain of our knowledge as when we're dead wrong. The assurance with which C… Continue
Added by Margaret F on July 8, 2008 at 10:00am —
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...a photo I shot of the Paris Opera in February 2006 appeared on my VoiceThread page...I guess from a nycwp tech workshop from a couple of years ago, but I couldn't make it enter my VoiceThread creation, so my creation is a static single-image production of a photo of me in the eyeglass store, describing my eyeglasses, a photo I had emailed to use as a replacement for my splashup avatar. Compared to Kathleen Schulten's VT creation, or almost anything--a scrap of litter, a French centime--it's r… Continue
Added by Margaret F on July 7, 2008 at 2:00pm —
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...to reduce the height, or even better, the number of stacks of paper in the home of a teacher. Or must I finally just admit I have a few packrat genes? How did I spend the past 72 hours? What do I have to show for it? One stack gone, recycled, filed. Woke up late this morning, though, to find that after he fell asleep watching the extra-innings Yankees game last night, my husband knocked onto the floor the next pile I was going to tackle--which, of course, I'd already re-sorted into an order s… Continue
Added by Margaret F on July 7, 2008 at 9:30am —
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...I feared, at the end of Monday's session using Hypertextopia that when we'd created our minimum eight fragments (not knowing at that point they were called that), I'd never be comfortable doing anything with these other than hitting the delete button. But Tuesday, with feedback from a colleague, Julie in my case, I felt slightly more hopeful I had a fragment with which I could at least try to build something. Today, I'm feeling even more upbeat that I was able to create a four-fragment snapsh… Continue
Hi,
If you must, go ahead, read my story, "Chapeaux," but have you heard that they're handing out nicely chilled Veuve Cliquot and winning Lotto tickets down on the corner? Only for the next 72 hours, though.
At the moment, two shards in the "Wedding" section promise you'll get to hear Hoagy Carmichael's 1927 original recording of "Star Dust" and Fred Astaire singing "I'm Putting All My Eggs in One Basket," but this will only happen if Pa… Continue
..., reading Chs 1-2 last night, and I connected to a few details, for example the mention of Peter Senge, whom I heard live at the spring 2006 PBS-UFT sponsored Teaching and Learning Conference on a pier on the Hudson (did anyone else attend? I think this spring was the third). Senge was mesmerizing. He spoke with no PowerPoint slides (yeaaaaa!!!), as if extemporizing, though he did use visual slides of maps and things occasionally (just not one after the other as so many, most, 99.99% PPt pres… Continue
Added by Margaret F on July 3, 2008 at 10:08am —
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Well, of course I know this, but yesterday's anomie is today's engagement with this new tool of hypertextopia (I wanted to tell my students about it last night and couldn't even remember its name...that's anomie not speaking for you). Yesterday, the fragments I wrote didn't capture my interest much--I created my requisite eight or more, but had they vaporized I wouldn't have missed them. Today, after conferencing with Julie (since Eduardo, my assigned partner, isn't here), I had a sense of a fra… Continue
...I carried along with me the issue of the first person pronoun--"can I say 'I' in a research paper?"--and shared with my students an article from the NWP archives, found by googling, about the inevitability of the writer's own viewpoint, curiosity, sense of wonder, whether s/he explicitly uses "I" or not. One student, Jose, said, after I read aloud just two paragraphs (contextualizing by explaining the writer was a WP teacher consultant, referring to the high school teachers with whom she cons… Continue
Added by Margaret F on July 2, 2008 at 9:52am —
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Well, chapeaux to me! It's "only" Wednesday, and from Monday to now, mit frustrations and lots of demands for HELP! from Paul and Julie, I've created a five-image VoiceThread including four photos with voiceovers and one text plus one movie with… 
