Shifting Semiosis

Seeking Signs - About Reading

2007-10-28T21:16:00.000-04:00

An Excerpt from my M.Ed. Paper, Seeking Signs of How to Live: A Woman's Web of Reading
http://www.box.net/shared/8c4nbp22ck

Mood and Time

2007-09-29T13:54:00.000-04:00

Midweek, I was fighting a feeling of uselessness and exhaustion. A day of "self-indulgence" and my energy and happiness rose. Doing was temporarily replaced by being, and it gave health!

Summer Idylls

2007-08-16T20:20:00.000-04:00

There have been emotional bumps and fears, but every time I walk in this wonderful summer, I'm in a timeless moment; it is idyllic, and I feel joy.

Cucumbers for Nutrition

2007-08-06T08:45:00.000-04:00

Who knew?

Waiting

2007-06-25T09:00:00.000-04:00

Sometimes I pin my dreams to a possible response that I'm waiting for.

I hang between hope and the butterfly's move,
counting out my days
in apple cores and coffee grounds.

The Treatment of Women in Canada

2007-06-21T09:26:00.000-04:00

I really enjoy reading Antonia Zerbisias's witty, pungent articles. Here, once again, she uses humour to remind us of how women are disadvantaged, even though many find it an old story that they'd rather not hear again.
http://www.thestar.com/living/article/227563
Just because we're used to it doesn't mean it's just!

Art With Art

2007-06-13T08:47:00.000-04:00

500 Years of Female Portraits in Western Art

Rumi Said ...

2007-03-01T11:35:00.000-05:00

Do you think I know what I'm doing?
That for one breath or one half-breath I belong to myself?
As much as a pen knows what it's writing,
or the ball can guess where it's going next.

Rumi - translated by Coleman Barks with John Moyne

"Time past and time future..."

2007-02-26T01:31:00.000-05:00

Eliot again, The Four Quartets.

"To be conscious is not to be in time" but I want to remember "the moment in the rose-garden." To think and to feel - are these opposites? mutually exclusive?

I believe that the wisdom which can come with age is simply and wonderfully, only the integration of thinking and feeling.

Sometimes I am fully in the moment and yet realize I have a choice:
I can collapse into blind raging,

or

I can try loving clarity, the calm voice and the heart seeking peace.

Image - "Open Clip Art Library/Clip Art." Open Clip Art Library. 24 Feb. 2007.

What is Life?

2007-02-25T08:25:00.000-05:00

"For what is life but reaching for an answer?
And what is death but a refusal to grow?"

Mary Oliver asks.

Oliver, Mary. New and Selected Poems. Boston: Beacon P, 1992.

Aging

2007-02-24T14:32:00.000-05:00

"I grow old, I grow old.
I shall wear my trousers rolled" - T.S.Eliot
I read it when I was young and it haunted me. I didn't know what rolling trousers meant, but I knew it was a

descent,
a diminishment,
a loss,
a lessening.

Was it also a letting go?

Winter in Ontario

2007-02-15T08:14:00.000-05:00

Beautiful, but my parents are thankful for snow-blowers and neighbours, and so am I.

Snow Day! Yea!

2007-02-14T19:25:00.000-05:00

So today was a Snow Day, with schools closed and people snowed in so they had to work-at-home. My friend, who has a share of a neighbourhood-owned snow blower, got her driveway cleared, but the school where she teaches was closed. She meant to work, but claims that her experiences of Snow Days when she was young conditioned her to stay in bed and read. Sounds like she had a delightful day!

I spent the morning catching up on a report I wrote, then lost when my computer crashed. I think today's version was actually better. I just structured it with the info in a most-important to least-important pattern, and added the recommendations immediately after the reported problem, instead of in a bunch at the end, the conventional method. A point - suggestion, point - approach that I think will be easier to read and take in.

In the afternoon, I discovered a possible job, and then read. Lovely day!

Music to Rouse You!

2007-01-28T05:04:00.000-05:00

We saw two groups in concert yesterday, and both were wonderful.

The Blind Boys of Alabama

http://www.blindboys.com/main.html They are amazing! Their story is amazing! Their name gives you some indication of their age and the era and circumstances they were born into. They have won 4 Grammys in the last few years. They are showmen who use who they are to woo their audience and get us up on our feeting clapping and cheering several times. (Staid, middle-aged and middle class Canadians yelling and cheering! Almost Unbelievable!)

When they came in, guided in a chain with their hands on their shoulders, and obviously quite old, a kind of patronizing preparation sets in; I was ready to make allowances. None needed! Their voices are truly powerful and so is their stage presence. If you get a chance, go see them. If you can't go see them, get one of their CDs.

The House of Doc

http://www.houseofdoc.com/home.html Much younger and Canadian; their musicianship is impressively tight. The range of instruments and the intense harmony, plus the stage commentary of their leader all got the audience (same usually staid folks!) on their feet, clapping and cheering. CDs and show - highly recommend.

technorati tags:Blind_Boys, House_of_Doc, music

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After Epiphany

2007-01-22T09:04:00.000-05:00

Christmas is over; the Christmas tree waits on the curb for the municipal truck to grind it into compost and haul it away. Snow covers the land outside of my study, at last! This year with the violent and/or strange weather, even the most blinded and reluctant are beginning to admit that Global Warming is truly happening! An epiphany long awaited and leading, I hope, to more individual and government action.

What can be done?

Christmas

2007-01-01T11:47:00.000-05:00

Inherited from my husband's family - a Christmas Tradition

Our 2006/2007 Amaryllis

Happy New Year!

technorati tags:nativity, amyrillus

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My Town - A Wet Fall

2006-12-22T16:43:00.000-05:00

O for Oakville

Along the Avenue

Gold Beneath Our Feet

Three Trees Are One

The Stripped Tree

Leaves and Berries

A Fall Garden

In the Dark of Winter - An Advent Poem

2006-12-03T15:27:00.000-05:00

Advent Meditation
by Joan Vinall-Cox

Listen Here - http://www.box.net/public/7vgtbqolda

This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet,
“Out of Egypt I have called my son.” - Matthew 2:15

It was a dark time -
Mary had wanted to be glad
Joseph had chosen her
but that strange dream ...

and old Elizabeth, swollen with child,
calling her blessed, saying a
Child was growing in her
too, yet she’d never...
except in that strange dream;

and she had swollen
and Joseph,
angry and sad and puzzled,
had planned to hide
her disgrace, but he dreamed
too,

and married her but slept
apart
and would not look at her.
It was a dark time.

It was a dark time -
the rulers had decided
to count them all where
their ancestors had lived
so Joseph and Mary must walk

for days, weeks, and her so
large and tired, and both so
puzzled and hopeful and fearful.
Could the Holy One really have chosen
them?

Still they must walk,
as the rulers
demanded, in the cold,
in the darkening time, they must
walk into Bethlehem, this ancient
town, filled with others obeying
the rulers who wanted to count them and did not care

about walking, or a room for a
young woman with her time
pressing on her,
with the Holy One’s Gift demanding
His time on earth,
and no room for this family

It was a dark time.

There was light at His birth -
light in Mary’s eyes and
light in Joseph’s smile and
light flowing out, pulsing out
around the wondrous Child

light that brought the amazed
shepherds,
and star light that
brought the Wise Ones from
afar to worship
Him

and light that the eyes in
the dark could see, whispering to
a man with too much power
that he was nothing
beside such Light,

and the Holy One sent another
dream to guard the Light, to
hide it in a foreign land

and Mary and Joseph fled
into Egypt, carrying the Light
away from the darkness of
Herod’s massacre of babies.

It was a dark time.

It was a dark time -
waiting in a foreign land,
watching Him grow, and learning
patience and trust, waiting
for a new dream, yearning for
home
and then

out of the dark time,
the dream came.

December 18, 1996

Temporarily Away

2006-09-12T09:02:00.000-04:00

The view from my study.

I won't be posting in this blog until after Christmas, due to a heavy workload. I will, however, continue posting here - http://elgg.net/vinall/weblog - on, among other things, my experiences as I use wikis and blogs in place of a commercial Learning Management System. Hope you can link to me there.

Fall's Coming

2006-09-06T10:57:00.000-04:00

It's cloudy, raining, and cool today.

from http://www.ontarioweather.com/specials/stormchasing/storms.asp?Chasing=June292000

Amazing how dull weather helps you look forward to school and the Fall.

technorati tags:clouds, school

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A response to a Post by Judy O'Connell

2006-08-30T14:01:00.000-04:00

A response to a post by Judy O'Connell - via Stephen Downes https://heyjude.wordpress.com/2006/08/24/teacher-as-learner-in-web-20/

This is to let you know that dropping out can come before or after the degree.

I was lucky when I went back for my Ph.D. because I was able to do (pause for a big breath before I roll out the phrase) an Autoethnographic Arts-Based Narrative Inquiry, with phenomenological and ethnographic approaches (inhale!) to study my own learning as I moved onto the computer, the Web, and Web 2.0 - under Dr. Pat Diamond (originally from Australia.)

My thesis was on learning to teach communications skills with this wonderful new technology. I had travelled from technophobia to technophilia and OISE/University of Toronto allowed me to write my thesis studying how that happened and its learning impact on me and in my classrooms.

The irony is I was not allowed to use my Ph.D. in the Ontario Community College where I worked because it was in education, which has been ruled "not a discipline". (A further irony, degrees in education are "counted" for administrative positions.) I also found it very difficult to get teaching assignments that used my computer and Web knowledge. I took early retirement, and I now teach part time at UTM in a program that values my degree and my knowledge, and have set up my own consulting & training business, JNthWEB.

I worry that the educational institutions are missing the Web 2.0 boat, and that our students are being poorly served. I still believe the university experience can be a broadening and depthening (I think I've just invented a new word) one and that legacy knowledge is very, very important. I don't think that most areas in most institutions are courageous and fair enough to return the courtesy.

42 Years After Grade 13!

2006-08-23T09:22:00.000-04:00

I had an amazing (2-part) experience last week. I met up with three women I'd gone through grades 5 to 13 with, after not seeing one of them for 40 years, and the other two for 42 years!

My best friend in high school (hereafter known as BF) visited my parents, still in the same home, a couple of months ago and called and we had a brief chat. After exchanging phone numbers, emails, and a phone conversation we met halfway between our homes at a restaurant. We immediately recognized each other, and talked with the same ease as in high school. It was fascinating to hear about a couple of painful points we each had back then that the other hadn't known about. It was even more fascinating hearing the paths our lives had taken: husbands, children, professions. When BF mentioned a Sunday get-together with some other high school classmates, I decided to go to.

I have a couple of male classmates that I've connected with a few times. One lives in my town and the other has a holiday party every year that I've gone to a couple of times. But, and here my feminist self shakes her head at me, it's not the same. Being with the girls/women I went to school with is qualitatively different. We talk about different things. We have noticed and so can comment on different aspects of live. It is a gender difference I can't deny. (So I must cede the same recognition to men!)

The Sunday of the get-together, I had already committed to volunteering, with my husband who is a Rotary member, for Dragon Boat Races, a Rotary fund raiser. So i got to the park at about 7:30 and explained (no problem) and left at 12:30. I drove to the closer of the two other classmates, who doesn't like her name on the Web and so will be known as Closer Classmate, or CC. One minute into talking to her and I knew how to weave into conversation with her and watched how our mannerisms meshed. You don't spend 7 or 8 years of your growing up time in the same room for most of the day without creating powerful patterns.

CC guided me to the home of the daughter of Another Classmate - AC - where she was visiting with her husband while her daughter and her spouse traveled. AC was immediately recognizable too and it was a pleasure seeing her again. Three other women arrived whom I met for the first time. They were all about my age and very interesting conversation ensued.

Although I have women friends my age, when we meet, we usually talk business, with a little family stuff thrown in. With my closest friend, and now with these women, the conversation just flows, moving from family to health to mates to retirement dreams with only little time for business-talk. I felt like I was in one of those groups you see in movies like Steel Magnolias, where women who have known each other forever, and don't expect each other to be anyone but who they authentically are, meet, eat and drink, and give each other hearing, ease, and support. It was a lovely afternoon and evening.

As I listened and began to grasp the shape of their life paths, my own began to take clearer form in my mind and heart. Knowing what had happened and been done by women I grew up with was/is a mirror that allows me to understand my own life more in two ways. One, some information I hadn't known about when it was happening back then was filled in now, because it no longer needed to be heart-secrets, now that we were old enough to look at it. And two, the threads of their lives provided contrast to my thread, as we all came from the same cloth.

I admire all of them. They have built themselves lives, lived them, and are building and living as we begin to move towards this new portion of our lives, retirement and beyond.

An amazing experience! If you have the chance of going to a school reunion, go! There are rich insights to be had.

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Twelfth Night at Stratford

2006-08-18T09:29:00.000-04:00

We went with friends for a day at Stratford, driving for an hour and a half, walking, having lunch, going to a matinee, shopping, supper, and driving home. It was a lovely day. Stratford is a beautiful town, with old houses and beautifully kept lawns and gardens. The walk from the Festival Theatre to downtown was an aesthetic treat, and a gardener's delight. Really worth the visit. Lunch was excellent, and so was supper at Bentley's. The central event, Twelfth Night, was even better.

The plot, as often happens with Shakespeare's comedies, was contrived, but the words! The actors, with one exception, delivered them beautifully. I hadn't realized the saying "Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them" comes from Twelfth Night. Nor had I realized that this almost cliche of praise, was originally said by a fool who was being deceived. It will give a nice ironic fillip to whenever I hear the saying used again!

It was also noticable that certain lines brought scattered and staggered sounds of laughter. Jim speculated it was because there was a high proportion of English teachers in the audience. I suspect he's right. Summertime vacation and large numbers of retired English teachers who have taught Twelfth Night, maybe many, many times, catching the line's humour almost before they are delivered.

The setting was 19th century India, with Indian and British costumes. They were simple and beautiful, I thought, and sometimes quite gorgeous with the intense colours of Indian silks, and the soft beiges of the twins who are mistaken for each other. I loved the Bollywood dance near the end. It fit the plot and was beautiful to watch. I really like the way it melded our traditional culture (Shakespeare) with our emerging multicultural culture. I stood early for the standing ovation!

I can't finish without mentioning Brian Bedford. He is, and this is no contradiction, an excellent ham! He overplays perfectly, and can really 'play' the audience like an instrument. Most of the other actors were quite good, and I liked Festus, and Olivia, but Bedford as Malvolio was a wonderful treat.

I recommend the play and the town. Visit and enjoy!

technorati tags:Twelfth_Night, Stratford

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Elgg Interviewed!

2006-08-12T12:52:00.000-04:00

Elgg - social network software for education:
An interview of the founders of Elgg

I heartily recommend the Elgg Learning Landscape to any teacher and/or professor who wants to use blogs with their students. To learn more, you can click the link at the top to read an interview with Elgg's founders. Elgg itself is both free and very user-friendly. I recommend giving yourself some time to explore it. I also suggest that, if you decide to use it, you ask your students to explore it and see if any can find aspects that you've missed. I've learned a lot that way.

What makes Elgg particularly recommendable - (Is that a word? Oh, well, you know what I mean.) - is that the individual user can set their own level of privacy for each of their own postings. Students can set their post as "Private" and no one, not even the Community Owner/teacher will be able to see it. They can also set it for just the community, or just the logged-in users of Elgg, or make it completely "Public" - at their own discretion. I like that (except when some students don't understand "Private" and can be upset to get '0' on their post) and the students like it. I sometimes am shy when I think about certain people reading what I'm saying. Although many of the student generation are very (too?) casual about who might be their audience, there are some that appreciate the "walled garden" approach to posting their thoughts on the Web.

Last term I used an Elgg Community blog with a class, and it gave me a view of how the class was working that I'd never had before. I gave a combination of guidance on what to post on and the language etiquitte required, and the freedom of their own casual 'voices' plus the freedom to go beyond the topic guidelines. What I got to see was their thinking, including problems, and, delightfully, how they were helping each other both think and accomplish assignments. I believe the Community blog encouraged more of a community experience for the class members. They were also required to use a wiki (on Wikispaces) and post their assignments there, which gave them a larger (and consequently more 'real') audience than just the teacher!

I also use Elgg for a blog of my own where I explore the pedagogical implications of this new communication medium, Web 2.0.

I am part of a more loosely-joined community. Elgg is designed so that I can designate other Elgg members as "Friends". How I use that function is by clicking on "Friends Blogs" (see the menu bar in the image above under the forest and railway image) and I get to read an aggregated collection of the posts of the people I have designated as friends. Here's what part of my Network page looks like:

You can see, above, some of the people whose blogs I follow. It was through Dave Tosh's blog that I found the reference to the interview link that I started this post with.

And yesterday, I noticed the menu bar's "Friends of" link and discovered who was connecting to my Elgg blog! When I checked out their profiles, I could see that we had interests in common, and added many of them to my Friends list. Thus I'm gaining a loose community of people interested in ideas, and possibilities that we can share.

As you begin to think about the fall and your teaching, I recommend you check out the possibilites of Elgg for your class and for yourself.

technorati tags:Elgg, blogs, Class_Blogs

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Stephen Downes & The Shifting Semiosis

2006-08-10T07:43:00.000-04:00

We are seeing people create more (and better) multimedia. It is easier to create a short audio or video message than it is to type a message, and once storage and delivery cease to be problems (as we are seeing today) there is less of an incentive to create text. True, there will always be a need for text, especially among academics, but much (if not most) popular communication will be audio and video.

The challenge will be to effect a transition between the textual world and the multimedia, to communicate complex ideas in a manner accessible to people using audio and video. Neither medium favours the abstract (and neither do their consumers today) and each medium imposes channel limitations (you can't skim an audio or video file).

It will be necessary, in my view, to evolve a form of language that combines audio, video and text, to in other words combine the subtlety and expressiveness of text with the emotion and immediacy of audio and video.

Half an Hour: mLearning Tools

Yes! Once again Stephen Downes has articulated a vision that I share. Yes, multimedia is getting easier. Anyone who can use a phone can dial into AudioBlogger and post a message on a blog. At a slightly more sophisticated level, you can use the freeware Audacity and/or Apple's GarageBand to create an MP3 and link it to a blog and/or create a podcast.

And webcams and digital video cameras come in all levels of sophistication, with some very cheap and easy. YouTube and OurMedia make sharing video easy. You can even see an example of audio and video and text combined with certain presentation software, for example take half an hour to look at Nigel Paine talking about Podcasting, wikis and blogs at the BBC using datapresenter software. (Ignore the overlong silly Ninja bit, and just get to the content.)

For sure, the rapid development of photosharing sites such as Flickr show how important visuals are to the general population. But I take some issue with Stephen when he says "there will always be a need for text, especially among academics, but much (if not most) popular communication will be audio and video." According to the Pew research, at least 12% of the (North?) American population blogs, and about 39% of us read blogs. If you add in reading books, etc. it's obvious that text is profoundly important. I also believe the act of writing has a different learning and psychological insight impact that results from speaking and then viewing and/or hearing recordings of it. I think writing helps you move forward in your thinking and understanding in a way that recorded speech and visuals don't.

Maybe what I'm saying is that language is my path. If I stop to think of people I know who aren't as text-oriented as I am, and who are more aurally or visually oriented, then maybe then can learn, think, and understand in a more multimedia environment. Heck, maybe I'm part of the last print generation and the transition. So maybe I don't have an issue with what Stephen says, especially when I re-read the second paragraph in the quotation where he mentions the abstract. As Roseanne Rosanna Danna used to say: "Never Mind ;->"

Once again, Stephen has sparked my thinking through a concept, not simply accepting what is written, and I think that's one of the wonders of what text allows and invites.

technorati tags:Downes, multimedia, text

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A summer Idyll

2006-08-06T20:47:00.000-04:00

Walking in the summer ...

Or staying in my air-conditioned study ...

Could life be sweeter?

Elgg vs the LMS

2006-08-02T11:53:00.000-04:00

Web 2.0 vs the LMS

Web 2.0 is increasingly making the use of Learning Management Systems anachronistic. Blackboard, which has taken over WebCT has been granted a patent for a whole whack of LMS functions, as Harold Jarche lists in his post quoted from and linked below.

From Harold Jarche's Blog -

I think that it’s important to consider that these kinds of functions can be found not just in LMS but also LCMS and even some non-traditional online learning systems. Is there an online learning system, proprietary or open source, that does not include ANY of these functions?

Update: On reviewing these 44 items, I would say that Elgg Learning Landscape does not use any of these. So, I guess that makes your decision easy. Choose Elgg if you want a lawsuit-free learning system ;-)

Harold Jarche » Blackboard Sues D2L over LMS Patent

Who Needs LMSs?

I believe that this is the corporate system about to topple from its own weight. I teach using an Elgg Community blog and a course wiki. I used to use WebCT. I prefer the blog and wiki as teaching tools; they're simpler to use, much, much cheaper, and students learn how to use software they might encounter again in their futures. The only thing I miss from a LMS is being able to post the students' marks securely, and I assume something that will be developed sometime soon. Till then, I can make do with some old-style approaches.

I challenge the LMS researchers to find out how many of the possibilities available in their systems are actually used by how many teachers. I suspect many courses are shells, easily replaceable by community blogs (even on Blogger) and wikis, which can be made private. So only the student mark tracking is missing, and why pay thousands for that?

Elgg Plus

Take a look at the OpenAcademic site, as described by Elgg's Dave Tosh to see a completely different social and economic ethos, where time and effort goes into improving the learning and teacher experience, not into lawsuits.

technorati tags:Elgg, Jarche, LMS

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Education and Creativity

2006-08-01T15:59:00.000-04:00

Some excellent advice on making presentations from Kathy Sierra of Creating Passionate Users, one of my favorite bloggers.

However, what I really loved from this post was her link to the TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson.

What he says about the problem with our current educational systems is very important, but the man could have a career as a stand-up comic, if he weren't in education. For an educational and amusing 20 minutes (approximately) - watch & listen here. It's really worth your time!

technorati tags:KenRobinson, KSierra, presenting, education

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The U.S. DOPA Legislation

2006-07-31T10:40:00.000-04:00

Damming the Ocean!

US House Resolution 5319, the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA), was passed by a 410 to 15 vote tonight. If the Resolution becomes law social networking sites and chat rooms must be blocked by schools and libraries or those institutions will lose their federal internet subsidies.

Techcrunch » Blog Archive » US House: Schools must block MySpace, many other sites

This American move could have a huge impact on Canada, and the world, and the Web, but I think they are simply trying to dam the ocean. It's too late. And it's totally ironic.

It's Too Late

Pandora's Box has been opened, the genie is out of the bottle, this new semiosis will not be stopped, as long as there's electricity, computers, and networks. If/When those are destroyed, we'll have more to worry about than MySpace!

It's Totally Ironic

Guess who created the ancestor of the Web? The American military during the Cold War, wanted a way to make sure they could keep controlling their fighting forces even if all major cities were wiped out, so they created ARPANET, and from ARAPANET came the Internet, followed by Tim Berners-Lee's development of a visual interface, and, thus, the World Wide Web, and, currently Web 2.0, the Read/Write or Social Web, where the fearful MySpace is located.

Net Neutrality and the American Internet Regulator

The video, with sound, will start to play after you click - almost 5 minutes - on YouTube and Jon Stewart - It's funny, but it's terrifying because the people making the rules appear to know so little.

Net neutrality, BTW, is a different issue than DOPA - it's the attempt of commercial interests to make the Web less democratic, to set up a two-tiered, or multi-tiered system where some sites would be less available than others depending on your service providers whims, or business deals. And this could affect Canada directly too, as Michael Geist has pointed out:

Websites, e-commerce companies, and other innovators have also relied on network neutrality, secure in the knowledge that the network treats all companies, whether big or small, equally. That approach enables those with the best products and services, not the deepest pockets, to emerge as the market winners. Internet users have similarly benefited from the network neutrality principle. They enjoy access to greater choice in goods, services, and content regardless of which ISP they use. While ISPs may compete based on price, service, or speed, they have not significantly differentiated their services based on availability of Internet content or applications, which remains the same for all. In short, network neutrality has enabled ISPs to invest heavily in new infrastructure, fostered greater competition and innovation, and provided all Canadians with equal access to a dizzying array of content.

Michael Geist - The Search for Net Neutrality

But I digress.

To Learn More About DOPA, go here -

and find this section and read the links

I’m not the best person to analyze this though. Here’s who I recommend:

Declan McCullagh at ZDNet has posted a very thorough background article on DOPA.

Andy Carvin writes Learning Now, a blog about education and technology for PBS, and has set up a page called DOPAWatch to aggregate blog posts on the topic.

danah boyd is probably the web’s leading expert in analyzing the politics of MySpace and youth social networking.

Will Richardson’s Weblogg-Ed is a great source for all things Learning 2.0

Vicki A. Davis is a Christian school teacher in Georgia who uses blogs, wikis, podcasting and more in her classrooms. Vicki has written a number of powerful posts on DOPA

Techcrunch » Blog Archive » US House: Schools must block MySpace, many other sites

The most important communication development since the printing press, maybe even since the creation of writing, is being threatened! The most significant education tool is being blocked because some people misuse it. Why not ban cell-phones instead, because way more people misuse them!

What Is Needed

People of all ages need to learn how to use the Web safely and intelligently, because it isn't going to go away. The older and/or less Web-aware need to learn more about how it works and what it can do for them. The younger and supposedly Web-adept (but often strangely Web-naive) need to learn about b.s. detection (academically known as critical thinking) and privacy-protection. IMHO.

technorati tags:DOPA, Net_Neutrality, Geist, MySpace, TechCrunch

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YouTube Shifts Our Semiosis

2006-07-29T10:37:00.000-04:00

"Now with the advent of the internet we have the first medium that is oral and written, private and public, individual and collective at the same time." Derek de Kerckhove - from The Skin of Culture, 1995.

And, as Tom Scocca describes in The YouTube Devolution from The New York Observer, we have a medium that preserves and shares moving visuals, clips from TV, movies, and home videos that are searchable and replayable in a way we humans have never seen before. For a world-wide audience too, as I described here. YouTube allows us to find and watch as many times as we want videos - in a manner similar to how we can find text(s) in libraries or through Web search engines.

Scocca says:

Memory has always been a shaky witness. But writing was checkable, to one degree or another. There could be differences of taste or opinion, but there was the text lurking, waiting to settle the question. If you told someone else a piece of writing was good (or gorgeous, or moving, or persuasive), that claim would have to survive the other person’s reading of it.

NYO - Off the Record

And ...

The Internet left writers more exposed than ever. If you were published from the mid-90’s onward, you ended up in a text-based panopticon: At any time, someone, somewhere, could conceivably be reading something you had written.

NYO - Off the Record

(I love the word "panopticon" - it is so brutal, and so descriptive of what the Web is.)

Writing text led to the development of indices and, consequently, to libraries, and the Web is not the enemy of libraries but part of their natural evolution.

These opportunities represent, in part, a surprise victory for library science. As we plunged into the digital age, one of the great fears was of format obsolescence: People would throw out old-fashioned paper in favor of electronic archives, only to suddenly find that they had all the works of human knowledge stored on five-and-a-quarter-inch floppies and nobody was making floppy drives anymore. But with Web video, people are raiding their personal, inaccessible stashes of VHS tapes, winding through them till they find the important bits, and transferring them from a near-obsolete medium to a current one.

NYO - Off the Record

YouTube is a bold new step into the culture we humans are creating with our media -

YouTube stands as the opposite of old television because, above all, it’s easy. It doesn’t demand that you install a player; it doesn’t crash your browser. It embeds in blogs and plays there, freely.

NYO - Off the Record

YouTube and similar sites are taking us into a new semiosis, away from text which demands analysis and a distancing objectivity, the stalwart standards of our academic culture, into the sensational media that provides the experience without demanding the analysis.

I recommend Scocca's article - The YouTube Devolution.

technorati tags:Scocca, YouTube, semiosis

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Grey's Anatomy - My TV Fav

2006-07-28T15:01:00.000-04:00

ABC.com: Grey's Anatomy

I watched two back-to-back episodes yesterday evening. I'd seen both before, but I still totally enjoyed them. Why? Because they show people behaving badly but trying to do their best. And they might be simplified psychologically, but they aren't widely inaccurate, as many TV shows are.

Take Meredith, the central figure. She has a difficult but brilliant mother with Alzheimer's, and Meredith has to struggle to be responsible. she's no plaster saint, but she's understandable, and she tries!

The same thing with her love interest and his wife. The situation's is acknowledged, but all three try to behave with as much grace and ethics as they can, and their struggles are heroic, IMHO.

Then there's Sandra Oh as Christina. I absolutely love her. She's beyond difficult, and she knows she is, but she accepts herself, and still works at becoming more human. The way she connects with her friends and Preston Burke enthralls me. She's my favorite character/actor in the cast.

Dr Bailey is my second favorite. I guess I like testy women who take no prisoners. She (the character) is blunt and firm, yet ethically-based, rather than power-hungry or ego-biased. She is a really positive female role model.

I like the men too, especially George as he surprises himself as he develops into maturity. In some ways he's the most overtly immature, but all the characters in this show are facing their developmental challenges and trying their best in human (as well as surgical) terms.

Watching the episodes for the second time through the summer re-runs, I see that this was a fully thought out set of episodes, with character consistency clearly evident. As you can tell, I like it a lot!

Design and Ugly MySpace

2006-07-27T11:35:00.000-04:00

the show with zefrank - 07-14-06

The video linked to the page linked above (did you get that?) Anyway, the video with the image shown below is amusing and insightful. zefrank, as this blogger calls himself, gives the big picture of what is currently happening with design, and tells us why. It the accessibility of the tools! When design tools were rare, expensive, and demanded a high level of skill, a small group could define what good design was. With the democratising of the tools, the small group no longer rules. A new definition of good design is emerging as more and more people play with the new tools.

Or that's what I thought he was saying/showing.

Link to his blog post and see what you think!

technorati tags:zefrank, MySpace, design

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An Artist Reports From Beirut

2006-07-23T20:52:00.000-04:00

Mazen Kerbaj sends out words, images, and music from Beirut at http://mazenkerblog.blogspot.com/

This appears not to be a political site, but rather stories and descriptions of being in the middle of a war the blogger doesn't want to be part of.

To avoid the spin of more political blogs, and to see how it feels to be in Beirut now, check out this blog.

tags
Beirut
Blog_art

For Your Entertainment!

2006-07-21T14:27:00.000-04:00

Play films - Focus on Animation - ONF

Canada's National Film Board has produced some amazing animated films. Here, for your personal enjoyment, you can watch some of them. I like to search by title - on the left, and check out the description, on the right, before I play them.

The Big Snit is especially topical right now!

technorati tags:Canada, Animation, National_Film_Board, NFB

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Generosity

2006-07-20T08:57:00.000-04:00

Steve Rubel says in his blog Micro Persuasion: Only Generous Bloggers Influence and I agree.

The generosity dynamic that exists in the blogosphere is really important.

Micro Persuasion: Only Generous Bloggers Influence

Being generous is an act of creativity. In an interesting way, blog generosity is, in my opinion, a good metaphor for how generosity works in life-off-the-Web.

There's no way around it. You have to lavishly dish out links, advice, news, ideas, commentary, freebies, you name it. It's up to you.

Micro Persuasion: Only Generous Bloggers Influence

When you help people connect with others or ideas relevant to what they want to/need to do, you help them create by linking them. That can happen on the Web, and, as I said before, in life-off-the-Web. This is also the pattern that makes a good teacher or learning community member. I think it is more innate or socially patterned in some people than others; I also think it can be learned.

A major difference between generosity on and off the Web is that in life-off-the-Web generous people can be burned. I remember, in my late twenties, feeling really ripped off by a few people whom I had been friendly and generous to, but who just didn't bother to help a mutual friend when it would have been easy to. I started feeling like I had been designated "the server of others" by them. I decided to try to limit my generosity to those who I had received generosity from, or whom I had seen being generous to others.

Maybe I'm making an artificial distinction between life on and off the Web. Rubel also notes about selfish bloggers and reacts much like I did -

They focus solely on themselves and not an iota on others. I have unsubscribed from all of these blogs. They're just not worth my time.

Micro Persuasion: Only Generous Bloggers Influence

Targetting my generosity is the choice I make. I don't want to throw my energy into the service of the greedy and neglectful. I try to be conscious of receiving generosity, and only welcome those who also share.

technorati tags:generosity, Rubel

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Out of Left Field

2006-07-14T23:51:00.000-04:00

The dream comes again, but this time

there's a space for me, and the powerman

listens.

I hide my nakedness and offer

the one I fear for

as champion.

I am afraid

I am required.

technorati tags:poem, dream

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Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

2006-07-12T12:09:00.000-04:00

If you like

the bar scene in the original Star Wars,
the tragic musical monster of Phantom of the Opera,
Jedidiah, the Gyro Captain in Road Warior,
Johnny Depp channelling Keith Richards,
Orlando Bloom's cheekbones,
Keira Knightley's feistiness,
a fantastical plot,
lots of explosions, and
nasty villians,

and you don't require

characters with depth, and
a meaningful plot,

then this movie is for you.

technorati tags:Pirates, Dead_Man's_Chest

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The New Social-izing

2006-07-11T05:56:00.000-04:00

The online culture is socially-driven, but it's a different kind of socializing. In some ways it's a million Speaker's Corners, where some have megaphones of varying amplifications, and some speak (write, record&play) in a soundless chamber.

The aggregate is beginning to have power, even though many individuals may not. Chris Anderson, in the large megaphone he is editor in chief of, Wired, writes about People Power and says -

Now we have armies of amateurs, happy to work for free. Call it the Age of Peer Production. From Amazon.com to MySpace to craigslist, the most successful Web companies are building business models based on user-generated content. This is perhaps the most dramatic manifestation of the second-generation Web. The tools of production, from blogging to video-sharing, are fully democratized, and the engine for growth is the spare cycles, talent, and capacity of regular folks, who are, in aggregate, creating a distributed labor force of unprecedented scale.

Wired 14.07: People Power

Yup. This is how we people amuse ourselves, writing into the void for the pleasure of writing to find out what we think. Is it work? School and business have taught us that writing is work, and there are certainly skills and mind-work required (I believe) but is writing about what we want to write about really work? Or is it the equivalent of the social chatting for pleasure rather than the formalized, constricted, purposeful 'social' interaction of meetings or political interactions?

Previous industrial ages were built on the backs of individuals, too, but in those days labor was just that: labor. Workers were paid for their time, whether on a factory floor or in a cubicle. Today’s peer-production machine runs in a mostly nonmonetary economy.

Wired 14.07: People Power

We like to express ourselves in writing as well as in speaking.

This isn’t amateurs versus professionals; it’s each benefiting the other. Companies aren’t just exploiting free labor; they’re also creating the tools that give voice to millions. And that rowdy rabble isn’t replacing the firm; it’s providing the energy that drives a new sort of company, one that understands that talent exists outside Hollywood, that credentials matter less than passion, and that each of us has knowledge that’s valuable to someone, somewhere.

Wired 14.07: People Power

Yup, even if we don't write/talk strongly enough to be heard individually, we can make enough noise together to talk back to the powers-that-be in a way they can choose to hear. And that's something, I guess.

technorati tags:peer_production, Wired, Chris_Anderson

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Popular Culture: Crazy & The Devil Wears Prada

2006-07-07T13:40:00.000-04:00

Here's my current favorite song/video - "Crazy" by Gnarls Barkley - the link is to YouTube and begins playing immediately.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgKUnhCANTY

I enjoy the visuals & the lyrics as well as the music itself.

_______________________________________________________

The Devil Wears Prada - no spoilers

Anne Hathaway is good at doe-eyed naif-ness
The boyfriend is mostly one note.
Stanley Tucci is believable and likeable
The romance plot is standard, as is the business plot
The clothes are fairly restrained (for the fashion business setting) and beautiful

BUT

Meryle Streep is beyond amazing!

I totally enjoyed the experience of watching it.

technorati tags:Crazy, Gnarls_Barkley, Meryl_Streep, Devil_Wears_Prada

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Long time, No Write

2006-03-03T09:36:00.000-05:00

My life is distributed in blogs. I have two main blogs, one that is a space to be kind of a PD person, making suggestions about how to operate on the web and informing people about what I have gleaned from my Bloglines collection. Another overlapping one is more academic in nature, aimed at teachers who are interested both in scholarship and in educational technology. Plus I belong to a couple of communities that have blogs, and there's a course blog. Then there's this long=neglected one.

Since last I wrote here, I have retired from college and started teaching occasional courses at university. And today, I just pulled myself out of a contract that I am just not suited for. I feel badly, but I hope I've learned that if my intuition says I won't like something, I should listen. 'Cause my intuition knew, but I used my willpower against my intuition, and that was dumb. As I've now proven to myself, and probably to others.

So here I am, feeling better, slightly poorer, but still in a wonderful place in the universe! Which blog do I use to proclain my psychic news? I think it might become this one.

Plagiarism - in the web world

2005-07-01T15:35:00.000-04:00

Found someone plagiarising text for a school-assigned website. When I googled, the student's text was found on at least five other sites. The student used someone else's text word-for-word, but so had others outside the school environment!

We know about peer-to-peer with music and movies, we wink at image re-use, and cut-and-paste is leading to more and more plagiarism. Is intelligent, meaningful, and well-designed content, irrelevant of its sources, the way of the future?

In this new communicative space with its ease of reproduction, what rules are appropriate? And what is the relevance of a source when cropping and altering have been applied?

Keeping Up and Choices

2005-06-26T23:59:00.000-04:00

Spent the day reviewing Stephen Downes emails, catching up.

There is so much, and developments are exploding possibilities.

I can't try everything; I have to chose what to play with. Stay with a limited JotSpot, or shift to Drupal? Be serious about using Backpack to plan, or let it drift away? I have chosen to commit to Furl, and it's working for me. FLickr, to a limited degree too. I should start looking at the urls posted by others who have matching urls to what I've chosen - using the social web.

I need to learn more about trackback, and use the Creative Commons.

Never enough time!

No Change

2005-06-24T20:07:00.000-04:00

Nothing has changed;
everything has not changed.

Did I not get what I wanted, or
did I not get what I wouldn't have wanted?

Is that rationalization,
the self comforting herself?

And if so, is it self-deception, or
merely constructing a different ending?

Cassandra: Blind and Mourning from http://homepage.mac.com/cparada/GML/Cassandra.html

An MIT Survey on Blogging!

2005-06-24T12:26:00.000-04:00

Doesn't take long.

Credo

2005-06-22T13:54:00.000-04:00

My Class Wiki

2005-06-21T17:06:00.000-04:00

See the new banner one of the students made

Stress - Good or Just Stressed

2005-05-09T19:23:00.000-04:00

Why do I find it so hard to plan? I suspect that trying to plan a multi-threaded experience with all the threads in place from the beginning could be the problem.

I'm planning a course with many learning filaments woven into a complex cord that I hope leads students out of a labyrinth into an open space where they can see their own path.

Poetry may be possible again, after so many years.

Solo Images

2005-03-28T12:33:00.000-05:00

Solo Images, originally uploaded by Semiotic Explorer.

Or to show you a larger size, as I set up another small tutorial ...

In the Halls of Academe

2005-03-28T12:06:00.000-05:00

What are we selling our young? Who are we selling our young to? Is this subliminal seduction with multiple repetions of an act (a suggested act?) at the edges of consciousness - what we almost ignore?

Language and the Web

2005-03-16T14:34:00.000-05:00

So I'm noticing this difference in the way my students freewrite. Freewriting is an exercise developed by Peter Elbow where you write without pausing for a timed period, not stopping to think or correct, just steadily writing. It's an exercise aimed at getting in touch with our internal flow of words, (with reference to Vygotsky).

My students not only don't have to be nagged to keep going; they have told me they like it!!!!! Very different from my experience using free writing with students 3 years ago. Plus I have noticed that none of them handed in papers that were shorter than the required 15 pages, and many, if not most, were longer! Another surprise.

After thinking and discussing it with my students, I have come to the conclusion that this is the generation that has been using web writing for social purposes, like they do for talking. They are already in touch with their inner flow of language!!!! Their connection with written language is vitally different in a significant way.

And now this Wired article with someone in Wales noticing a variation of the same thing!

This shift isn't the end of teaching writing. No more than talking precludes learning how to present. There is still much for students to learn if they want to write academic papers or business reports.

When is a Sick Day Not a Sick Day?

2005-03-01T19:23:00.000-05:00

So - two days at home, one afternoon nap, two after dinner work sessions, as well as all day, both days. What is a sick day currently?

And why the wool? A metaphor for learning GoLive. How does one learn a complex tool? Where does one start? What thread do I pull out the allows me to follow it into the creativity I seek?

All day, and almost nothing accomplished! Ahrggg!

Gladwell's blink

2005-02-28T17:38:00.000-05:00

Only someone who loves reading could have drawn this

I just finished reading Gladwell's blink today. What he says makes total sense to me. It's the scientific, academic information that backs up something I've been (sort of) aware of since I figured out how to write multiple choice tests in high school. I can't remember how I figured it out, but I do remember knowing that I should go with my first (instinctive?) choice, rather than thinking about it. If I thought about my answers, I got lower marks than if I just "guessed," so I "guessed." I remember feeling guilty because my friend Barb, who studied harder, I thought, and often helped me review, sometimes got lower marks. She tried too hard.

I remember reading somewhere, years ago, that if runners ran full out, and at 3/4s effort, that they often ran faster at 3/4s. Same thing, I guess.

And I really like how Gladwell writes, with information embedded in narratives, and descriptions of the people involved as researchers or as examples. He humanizes knowledge.

I was a bit disappointed that he didn't mention Michael Polyani, because I think some of the research, especially the stuff about "implicit" knowledge, was rooted in Polyani's thought.

And it is relevant to teaching. The rules about how to make an improv work were interesting, and I often think that teaching is a lot like performing an improv, and "mindreading" the student's faces to see how it's going over (or rather "in"). The part about Rip and the red and blue team, reminded me of how the rules can be used by people not in the classroom to actually diminish a teacher's skills and abilities. Some people prefer power to understanding and success.

William Stafford's "The Way It Is"

2005-02-26T21:53:00.000-05:00

Using Picasa

2005-02-23T09:23:00.000-05:00

The frustration of learning relieved by beauty

This picture by Mondrian was uploaded using Picasa2 and Hello.

PRACTICE

2005-02-16T15:35:00.000-05:00

Here is a photo I took and, using Flickr, posted here!

Do the Tool and the Times Make a Difference?

2005-02-06T22:36:00.000-05:00

I believe that the act of writing is changing. We have a radically new tool, no make that plural, we have radically new tools, and we think through them differently. Does anyone think we would write the same way with a quill pen as with a ballpoint pen? Does writing with a pencil change the way we write from how we would write with a fountain pen? And the big question, does writing with a word processer in an online environment change how we write?

The second question is, do we humans write the same way at different points in history? Do I write like Aphra Behn? or George Elliott? or Emily Bronte? or Virginia Woolf? or Margaret Lawrence? or Margaret Atwood? Or even in a similar style? Of course not. And are patterns in writing changing? I've read that articles in scholarly journals written in the 1930s were much denser and more formal than modern articles. And magazines are very different too. Do we even think about writing the same way as writers did then?

Now that we can write and "publish" for the world to read with no publishing "gatekeepers, now that we can write knowing our spelling mistakes will be automatically pointed out to us, and a correct possible replacement offered to us, now that we can write, and change what we've written immediately with no traces of the previous wording left, now that we live in a world with informal writing, email and messaging, for example, as well as formal business reports, do we all need to know formal stylized rhetoric of the 1960s?

The First Time Ever I Heard My Voice ....

2005-02-01T22:03:00.000-05:00

Academic Writing Made Easier by the Computer

2005-01-18T14:35:00.000-05:00

Format bibliographys

Compose Academic Papers

Information Literacy Tutorials

These three web sites are almost a course in themselves!

Thoughts

2004-12-27T15:33:00.000-05:00

The twentieth century was a time of great expansion of representational modes. The development of photography, sound recording, moving images, movies, radio, and television has led to our culture being increasingly dominated by human-made semiotics. However, during most of the past century, the need for elaborate skills and equipment meant that cost limited authorship in these new representational modes, as it did for the more established mode of print. Despite, or perhaps because of, these gatekeepers, audiences were educated in these new representational modes simply by passive immersion. These new modes were not widely or systematically studied in how they represented (rather than simply as crafts to be learned for a limited few producers/authors) until the last quarter of the past century.

In the twenty-first century we (and our students) are in Ong’s “secondary orality” as more and more of us take in information holistically from the semiotic sea that surrounds us, rather than analytically and reflectively from printed text. At the same time, the representational gatekeepers of expensive complex equipment and skills have been largely removed. The ubiquitous computer and Web have created tools that are increasingly “affordable” and “user-friendly” which allow us (and our students) to individually create in the new representational modes developed in the twentieth century - photography, sound recording, moving images, movies, radio, and television, - as well as in the traditional alphanumeric print. And we can publish our work online to a worldwide (potential) audience.

How do we teach (and test) in this rapidly evolving semiosis? How do we shape curriculum for digital natives while we are still immigrating into the digital world ourselves? Are our students thinking and/or learning differently than we do or did? And if so, how? Is a photographic essay “equal” to a word-processed essay for teaching and/or for showing a student’s knowledge? And what about a sound and/or video documentary? Will our students learn more or more deeply from such representational modes than from text? Even if we focus exclusively on written text, as I will, what are the changes in writing brought by word-processing and the Web?

The computer is not a typewriter and the Web is not a collection of books. Teaching academic writing and business communication currently demands teaching the tool as well as the process, and teaching the visual as well as the verbal impact of structuring language. I believe we teachers of writing (and teachers using writing) must step off the dock of past practices into our digital boats and launch ourselves into this shifting semiosis.

After many years of teaching using the chalkboard and overhead, I was pushed into teaching academic writing and business communications using the computer and Web. For 10 years now I have been teaching Ontario post-secondary students, both college and university, how to communicate using the online computer – and learning from them. Since the late Nineties, I have been teaching using a Course Management System where I develop materials and then my students access them online, and in this process teach me how to teach online. In the last three years, I have seen radical changes in how the young, even the computer-reluctant young, combine writing and the computer. I have been learning about this new curricular space and how to shape it using the knowledge of the digital natives I encounter and helping those around me, whether labeled “teacher” or “student” to navigate in and through this shifting semiosis.

Not Enough Time

2004-11-08T09:46:00.000-05:00

Now, as I wait for a student who is overdue, I am grabbing some time to blog. Using Paint on the IBM the school provides for those using computers in their teaching, I give you my current descriptive image. I should be marking, but ... this is my break!

Bush, for four more years :-(

Caught between resenting the bad name being given by fundamentalists of all stripes to religion, and fear that their passion will destroy much that I value, I spend my time marking papers, fearing that my suggestions will go unheeded.

It's November. On dark days, I wilt; on sunny days, I can try to keep going.

An old poem:

November in School

In November, everything crashes -
files are lost,
cars slide into each other,
suiciding squirrels shut down generators

and I
am late for school.

In November, people weep -
assignments fail,
teachers and students snarl,
work done is less than hoped,

and more,
much more, is required.

In November, we fear -
even if Christmas ever comes,
even if spring only hides behind
the winter we have to endure,

we have lost
whatever we came here to find.

Time Flies

2004-10-19T23:36:00.000-04:00

Time flies when I have taken on a lot of work. On the one hand I love teaching. On the other, marking is a part of teaching.

I had a wonderful rant yesterday. I was lecturing on how literacy has changed our very way of being in the world, the way our psychology is shaped. I was charged up with my understanding of Ong and Havelock and a rich sense of what they meant and I flowered into the moment and engaged the students.

I've felt this before; it is the sweet moment of teaching/learning. I can reach them, hold them, and then release us from a kind of electric exchange. It is what I felt when I "saw" the golden chords reaching from my fingers and touching the students when I taught English as a Second Language in the top floor of a converted warehouse. It is what I experienced in some of my poetry classes. It has been rare for me lately as I struggled mired in enmeshing change. I love it, but I can only prepare for it; i can't command it.

It is something to do with oral rhetoric. It is a moment of wholeness and fullness. It is a psychic embrace. I am grateful for the moment and the experience. I hope they are too.

Windows xp Ate My Files

2004-09-21T18:09:00.000-04:00

Good thing I kept my backup CD and it wasn't too out-of-date. Today, in class, as I tried to show my class that you have to be careful where you save your files, I was surprised to discover that my largest, most important folder had simply disappeared from 'My Documents" and all the other folders were shortcuts. "Search" didn't find my lost folder for me.

When I went to the technicians, they muttered that xp hade done this to others too!!!!! They found some of my missing folders, but not all of my files. My backup CD helped, but this leaves me scared. Obviously I can't save anything important and back it up on my IBM; it simply can't be trusted.

Back in the Classroom, Again

2004-09-17T09:33:00.000-04:00

I have been reassured and delighted to discover that my joy in the classroom still exists. After only one (very soul-destroying) term of teaching over two years of study and other projects, I am back in the classroom again. What I am enjoying so much is feeling like I belong, and can connect with my students. I hadn't realized how much I'd been afraid that I had lost my classroom "presence." It feels like home; I feel alive in my art. I love to teach, to really get my students grasping the content and skill I am teaching. It's a joy to activate their understandings and performances.

I suppose this is the honeymoon phase of my return. I only have limited marking so far, and the students aren't stressed yet with some possibly acting out. We'll see what the future brings, but right now, I am satisfied!

Very Bad, Very Bad

2004-09-07T20:24:00.000-04:00

Today was my first day back at school as a teacher since last December, and it was very messy. But I must have some positive feelings about being back because when I played around in Illustrator and created this image, I liked it even though it seemed kind of not-negative.

I cancelled my first class, because my laptop wouldn't start, (for the second time since Window xp has been installed.) The students didn't have access to their computer lab accounts without their user names and passwords, and the new registration software isn't working very well, and they hadn't received the letters telling them what they are. I could have looked up their information one by one, but my laptop wouldn't start - have I mentioned that?

The printer doesn't have the new software installed so xp won't print to it, and I like to print out things like class lists and topical outlines. Even after I got a new hard drive and re-installed all my info, I couldn't print. No matter, I couldn't get at my class lists because the new software, changed my name (I use my second; it used my first) and so wouldn't let me read my data.

Then I went to another campus for another course, but the program is moving and was neither at their old spot, nor their new one in a quite unfinished building. It took me an hour to find that out!

I did not have a good day.

My Thinking Tool

2004-09-03T09:16:00.000-04:00

I'm more dependant than I'd thought. I start teaching on Tuesday, and so I have to prepare. I am using WebCT for 5 of my courses, even though I'm only required to for 2. The other 3 I have chosen to use WebCT as a Learning Management System (LMS) because I like the orderly way it contains all my course materials and makes information available to my students. I felt in control.

The school WebCT technician has been doing the changeover from the summer courses and upgrading our version, and for serious personal reasons had to be away unexpectedly while WebCT was unavailable. So I had other work to do, right? Yes but I couldn't think! Yesterday my courses were available, and I worked intensively all day, accomplished a lot, and felt in tune and coherent. I love feeling that way. I love looking at my course sites and tweaking them. I love creating them. It makes me feel creative and powerful! (Go figure! Some people just have weird needs ;-> or that's what I used to think.)

During the evening as I continued enjoying this energy surge, I made a few connections. While I was blocked from setting up my coursees in WebCT, I couldn't think and plan. Separate files to work on weren't enough. I couldn't think about classes, I couldn't plan my classes without my thinking tool for teaching - my computer and WebCT. And the other course I have at another institution, there's no WebCT there. So what have I started doing, even though I'm pressed for time? I'm creating a web site, of course, to support the class, and my thinking!

avatar

2004-08-26T22:53:00.000-04:00

avatar,
originally uploaded by Semiotic Explorer.

So this is how I imagine myself as a cyber-explorer, learning .... or fiddling around ;->

I hate summer colds!

2004-08-26T20:17:00.000-04:00

I hate summer colds! I can't think through my thick sinuses and scratchy throat. I've sent out messages requesting what I need to know to plan my fall courses, and had no replies. Just as well, because I can't think anyhow, and I have no energy.

All too soon, I will be very busy. Ah! A teacher's life ;->

Images, RSS feeds, & News Readers

2004-08-12T10:34:00.000-04:00

Well yesterday I either worked very hard or did nothing at all; I can't decide which.

When I saw the picture icon on the Blogger Posting window, I just had to try it out. The least complex method seemed to be to use Google, find a suitable image, and use the code offered and the url of the image. It worked. As web stuff gets more user friendly, I move towards it by learning a few more "technical" moves. Picture a woman running, arms outstretched, towards an open laptop rushing through the air towards her. They embrace.

Spurred on by this success, I looked up definitions for RSS, worked on setting up the RSS feed for this, my blog. To find out if I had been successful, I clicked on the icon, took the link, and created a new channel in my Mac News Aggregator. It worked!!!! So now I'm going to start collecting educational blog channels. ZOWIE! I'm not sure what I'm doing but I'm doing it.

Phil's Film Workshop 10th Anniversary - Camping Resolutions!

2004-08-11T09:43:00.000-04:00

I resolve never again to -

use a tent with the floor space of 2 air mattresses
sleep in a tent I can't stand up in
stay in a tent more than 2 fields away from the porta-potty
sleep on air mattresses over 20 years old and unchecked for air leaks

However, the people were a pleasure, the food was great, the films were interesting, and seeing dawn and hearing a distant farmer call out "co-boss, co-boss, co-boss" to his cows reminding me of my grandparents farm - priceless!

Print: From Tyranny to Democracy

2004-07-20T12:07:00.000-04:00

From Walter Ong's writings, I learned the term"chirographic" - that's handwriting, - and its impact is different from print's. Writing raises consciousness, Ong says, and I believe that's true both culturally and individually.

I remember friends who were studying for their PH.D.s in Education saying that getting their degrees had a profound impact on them, that it changed them deeply. I nodded, of course, and thought maybe they were exagerating. Now, I'm beginning to understand what they said. Part of it is simply the reaction from people around who honour and value this achievement, but reading Walter Ong has convinced me that it is also the impact of the prolonged meditation that writing a thesis is. People are changed, - I am feeling the change of attitudes towards me, and a complex of awareness that my writing has created within me.

The most important seed of my writing was my learning to write using a computer and word processing software. My handwriting blocked my writing because I regarded it as visually inadequate, signalling low status thinking and it was physically difficult too. Also, my years of intense reading and the academic culture had caused me to think that the only "real" writing was that which was printed. Books were "real writing" and handwritten notes were just rough notes, no matter how much I had tried to do a good job of writing.

Because of the material structure of publishing, few people got to be published. It was expensive and complex to do and so there were many gate-keepers. Thus, the tyranny of print, more visible now as the stranglehold of published is being loosened and lessened. Word processing, desktop publishing, web sites, and blogs are creating a new democracy of print, where individuals with access to comparatively inexpensive equipment and communication links can present their ideas, thought, words, to a much broader audience with few, if any, gatekeepers.

This is creating a new understanding of communication using print. Using keyboarding and software knowledge (and online computers) is different from using chirograhpically produced text and the publishing industry. We are learning this new thinking/communication tool, and beginning to understand that it affects us profoundly.

Walter Ong - My Hero!

2004-07-12T14:22:00.000-04:00

I'm reading Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy and it feels like writing my thesis was preparation for reading his work. This was published in 1982, but it is even more relevant today, IMHO.

I read Patricia Sullivan's article Practicing Safe Visual Rhetoric on the WWW (available at http://austen.sla.purdue.edu/handa.html) and found an interesting reference to Ong. I think Olson's The World on Paper also references Ong. In any case, I bought Orality and Literacy and I am captivated, wowed, hooked.

More later.

More Authors than Audience?

2004-05-21T10:41:00.000-04:00

Are the young blog writers spending more time creating/composing their work, both text and visual, than they are in reading the work of others? In the environment we now live within, it's entirely possible that overall more time is spent authoring than audiencing. This is a kind of reversal to what has happened in sound.

I remember my parents, when I was a child, singing in the basement below my bedroom. My Mom played the piano and Dad plus their two closest friends, my "aunt" and "uncle" sang hymns in harmony. All of them were in the choir except my Dad. They didn't listen to records or radio all that much. They were more performers than audience.

So, too, in the Sixties, I had some musician friends who liked to "jam" anytime they could find someone else to sing or play with them. They, however, were more audience than performers because they also spent hours listening to records and other musicians.

Since Gutenberg, despite private letters and business documents with small and private readership, the "publishing" of written work has been highly circumscribed with both economics and elite judges limiting which work could move into the public spere (like music recordings now.) Now with the ease of access to the web, people can "publish" their writing with little to no interference. Blogs are only one way of published. Theses and novels and commentary are all to be found on the web. The personal writer rules.

In music something quite different is happening. Relatively little personal music making is to be found on the web, especially as compared to the huge trade in copies of professionally made popular music. It is almost the opposite of books. There are books up on the web, but in very small proportion compared to blogs and personal journals.

On the web, with the written word, there are more authors than audiences; with music there are more audiences than performers. Why? And how is Karaoke different? Is it audience, performer, or hybrid?

Restricting the Semiotic Palette

2004-05-01T20:48:00.000-04:00

I've been thinking about what would have to happen for me to produce an article for a scholarly journal. I can't just take an excerpt of my thesis and send it along because journals restrict the semiotic palette. I'm limited to the font of their choice, and only one font. There are no pictures or colours. That means everything has to be done through words, and only words.

It's possible; I've done it before. And I suspect that money is part of the issue, although I also suspect that the innate conservatism of scholary journals dictates that no effort is made to innovate semiotically.

I feel caught between how I want to and can communicate information and concepts and knowing that I must work in an limited medium. I used to think that scholarship was all about exploring the the novel, about seeing possibilities and connections. I know there are some pockets where this happens, but it's like I have to wear a girdle and gloves and a navy-blue uniform instead of the comfortable but professional clothes that allow me to focus on my work without energy draining into a useless, limiting formality.

Watching TV Ads

2004-04-21T08:39:00.000-04:00

I see a lot of car ads during the news and the 10:00 dramas I tend to watch, and I'm noticing the way text is integrated as part of the visual. In one, the text moves from the back of the centre to occupying centre screen, and the text itself is slightly off kilter. It's almost at an angle showing perspective, and not quite. The end result is, the irregularity draws the eye.

In another, the words drop in and move, centre screen, part of the movement that holds the viewer's eye. This is text as a visual "character," as a visual element more than as words carrying information. This is the new multisemiotic of our age.

Spring Colds

2004-04-16T14:18:00.000-04:00

Spring colds are the pits. Sinuses blocked equals a sluggish mind. Runny eyes and nose are uncomfortable and unattractive; (my mate got it first and gave it to me!)

Others - Learning to Write

2004-04-12T10:01:00.000-04:00

So I was talking to a friend yesterday and mentioned my thesis being about how to write, and referred to how I learned to write - joined printing and having to get "good enough" to get a straight pen and ink, and what a struggle that was. She related and began talking about how discouraging her messy-looking handwriting was when she was struggling to learn. Then, without a word from me, she said "What did they expect? All the written work we saw was in books and looked neat and finished." Exactly. My point. As children learning to write, we were immediately diminished and discouraged by our inability to achieve what we thought was the standard, something that looked like the books we were asked to read.

I was not the only one feeling this way! In fact, my wanting to have my writing look like a book may have been the norm!Think about it, when you are taught to cook, you are supervised, do it slowly and simply, but end up with food, something edible. The same thing when you learn to knit or sew, or build or repair. What you end up doing as you learn is create something that, while perhaps not up to a high standard, is never-the-less recognizable as close to a product in daily use.

My friend and I shifted into talking about our late-teen, early-twenties daughters, both of whom have their own blogs and spend hours online. The text they practice and the text they see have a unity and connection that ours never did. They read books too, but I suspect they don't hold them in the reverence that we did/do. They use and see text as part of a communicative system that they are tightly tied into, and that gives them a real discourse community, a far better learning situation than the required writing that always seemed inadequate both because of its appearance (not a book) and because it was observed as a performance where style and correctness mattered more than meaning.

I wonder how the increased amounts of time in casual "texting" will affect how they write in more formal situations?

Reading Has Always Been Postmodern

2004-04-05T12:02:00.000-04:00

Historically, as soon as many people were reading the same text, exactly the same text as replicated mechanically, they began to disagree on what that text meant. (And perhaps even before, the source of so-called heresies lay in disagreements about what texts "meant.") But with increasing numbers of people reading the same texts, their different "readings" became obvious. And it's easy to understand why. Text, as the postmoderns have vigorously pointed out, is not absolute. The words stay the same but the reader(s) change.

If you read a story, you read it from your point-of-view and that affects how you "understand" it. If you read a newspaper, your point-of-view on what has happened is shaped by who you are and what you have experienced. The same person at different ages "sees" the meaning differently. Age, gender, race, class, nationality, profession, - all these shape how textual (and visual) stories are "taken."

Both the law and science have implicitly known this since their inceptions. Language is slippery; that's the basis of rhetoric. The law tries to be absolutely clear, and lawyers and judges make their livings interpreting it. The rigidities and formulas of scientific writing are simply attempts to avoid multiple interpretations.

I remember teaching my classes that a business letter that had more than one possible interpretation was poorly written, and that a poem or story that had only one interpretation possible was poorly written. Different writing for different purposes, and in certain situations being open to interpretation is a strength not a weakness.

So readers have always and will always interpret text, and thus have always and will always have different readings. It's inevitable. The questions the postmoderns ask us to reflect on, as I understand them, are "Do I understand myself to be an interpreter and not the sole correct authority?" and "How do we decide who, and on what basis, can be an authority whose interpretation can be trusted/allowed/accepted?"

In this age of doubt, litigation, individualism, those are confounding questions.

Representation and Replication

2004-04-02T08:13:00.000-05:00

Sometime in the 1600s, the printing press was invented by Gutenberg, and mass replication of text became possible. Suddenly humanity was on a new path. Previously hand-copied books were of necessity rare, and those who could read were also rare. Caxton moved the printed page from posters into books, and reading objects became more complex. In western culture, the Bible and a few other books had been preserved and studied, but that kind of studying was, in many ways, more like meditation, like lectio divina, rather than what we would call reading today.

The association of reading with the Bible and the development of Protestantism led to a immense campaign for universal literacy - everyone should be able to read so they could read the Bible. At the same time, science was developing, as the spread of reading and books led to the spread of knowledge and/or ideas about what constituted knowledge. Reading became increasingly prevalent and important because of the exact and widespread replication of textual objects, that is, books.

This incremental growth in reading and readers had an interesting impact on readers. They disagreed with each other about what the text "meant." And therein lies my next snippit.

I'm an Owner!

2004-03-29T19:10:00.000-05:00

Long time, no whatever, write and read, I guess. I been existing (and I do mean "existing") without a computer of my own. Used my husband's till he got home from his trip. Then used the old IBM clunker in his study, and the open access one in the part-time teacher's lounge. Looking up my mail in two different webmails was awkward and inefficient, so I didn't look as often. Writing without access to all my files was a pain. Printing up my thesis on Jim's computer kept him from using it to edit, so I felt pressured and guilty. All-in-all, I felt limited and even lonely without my computer prosthesis.

Now I have my very own iBook G4, and it's almost fully set up to my desire. I still have a couple of things to sort out, but I can write emails, and get emails without fussing with webmails. I can write up documents. I have PowerPoint problems, but I'm sure I can get that worked out. I like the keyboard, and I love the interface. At the moment, I am a happy camper, especially because I can now get back to writing here!

Needing Help!!!

2004-03-13T23:52:00.000-05:00

So I decided to ignore my other responsibilities and focus on editing my thesis so I could get it done before I have to return this computer. I was working my way diligently through my edits when I noticed that a page reference was missing. I knew what the page was from my edited copy to I just added it in. Then I noticed another page reference was missing so I tried to get into "Edit Citations" to see if I had added it, but, although there was a space before the period, the computer said there wasn't a citation there to edit. When I clicked on a citation that included the author's name and the publishing date, but not the page, there, in the editing field, was the page reference.

I checked several others. Consistently the page references weren't showing in the document but had been added in the editing field. What-to-do? What-to-do? After much exploring and manual reading, it seemed to me that it must be something to do with Output Styles. So repeatedly I tried to open APA 5. The little icon that signals that something is opening appears then a quick flash of a field which immediately disappears. So I can't change anything to get the pages to show. Which means I have a problem because I have to have the pages references there when I print up the next version for my final committee meeting.

I use Google to get to EndNote, find "Technical Support" and describe the problem. The page says that they guarantee a response within 3 working days. That should be just about when I have to turn this computer back to its owner.

I'm tired of fighting with software!!!!!

Working at Work Avoidance

2004-03-13T01:07:00.000-05:00

The first time I heard about EndNote I was fascinated. A software that does all the finicky detail work of citing and building a bibliography! I was immediately sold. As soon as I was back at school, despite the cost, I picked up a student version. Anything to free myself from bibliographic hell.

For a long time I was enthralled by filling out the reference cards, citing while I wrote, and then checking my References which kept magically growing. And EndNote took care of the nasty APA details. I did have a few problems. I'm a tad manual-adverse and figuring out some of the steps I had to take took some time. By-and-large, though, I was happy with the way EndNote worked.

Then the first of my computer migrations happened, and I had to migrate across platforms. To keep using EndNote I had to purchase a Mac upgrade for my Windows version. What a messy experience! I emailed and ordered it from a pleasant memail help-person. First he sent me a Windows upgrade, then a Mac 5 for OS 9, and finally, finally EndNote 6 for OS X. Lots of emailing there and the guy was apologetic about the confusion and I got to keep the various CDs and manuals.

I'm a bit detail adverse too, and I avoided learning about APA, figuring the software would take care of all that for me. Luckily my thesis supervisor is kind and supportive. As he told me things like, no author's name here, and page number there, I worked with the manual enough to figure it out a little bit here and a little bit there. Worked for me.

It took me a while to figure out how important the library is, and that an alias is not a library. I did lose one version of my thesis library, but a backup existed and I was able to get it and add in the references I'd lost. It wasn't too bad, except for the anxiety attach I had until I got the backup installed. So, ... I learned a lot.

Then I had to move to another Mac, an iBook, and now I'm back to a second G4. The good news is my institution issues me computers; the bad news is there's a lot of change. As a result, the good news is, I am forced to learn a lot. Now I am squatting temporarily on my mate's G4 while he's travelling. While I was trying to edit my thesis, EndNote would either not open, or "unexpectedly quit" over and over and over. I tried all kinds of variations; nothing worked. But all the elements showed up in Word undertools and in the icon bar. They just wouldn't open.

I began feeling a bit anxious. I pulled out the manual. Didn't find it helpful. I uninstalled and reinstalled the program. Still kept quitting. Went to the EndNote site, and found the FAQ. After stumbling through the list of questions for a while, I found one that seemed to fit. It told me to get a free download to update EndNote 6 for OS X. I did, and in one of the most common of the current cliches, the rest is history. More or less.

On the computer previous to this one, the iBook, EndNote developed the twitch of whenever I put in a citation, the rainbow ball would spin and spin, then suddenly the last page of the references would be on the screen. I scroll back up to the page I was on and edit the citation, whereupon the same thing would happen. The bad news is this happens for every single citation. The good news is I'm mostly finished and don't have to add too many more citations. And the other good news is that I've learned how to use the scroll bar to find the heading and page number with it. Learning by accident.

So, is that work avoidance, or simply a different kind of work? Don't know, don't care, would rather play with the computer than work out where commas go and where periods go and type it all up manually.

I can cite while I write again and I know more about how to use EndNote. I'm sure I must be avoiding some work.

The Digital Disconnect

2004-03-10T21:53:00.000-05:00

One of the things I've learned through putting up a few sites is that it is actually quick and easy to fix or update a single page, and then upload it to its site. You don't have to take months. I've also noticed that it's more interesting to create a new site than update an old one. Which may be why there's a lot of out-of-date stuff up there on the web. So what?

So an institution should figure out how to keep its web site up-to-date, especially when it comes to a page referring to someone who has died. I don't know why it has to be a secret who is in charge of getting the web changed when something has changed. The presisdent of the institution must have better things to do with his time than redirecting concerns about seriously out-of-date material to the one in charge of the technitions who will actually make the changes. Why don't institutional web sites encourage their employees to help them by having, in a prominent spot, an address where problems could be directed?

Why not use the interest of people in their part of the institution by encouraging their participation rather than discouraging them! I suspect that many people including managers have no idea how simple small changes are. It's part of the great digital disconnect where people who don't understand make decisions, or don't make decisions because they don't know how things work!

Okay, So Maybe It's Font Heck!

2004-03-05T07:48:00.000-05:00

It's weird. My thesis prints up okay, and the larger size fonts look okay, but any font I try in the smaller sizes looks ugly and messy. It's a bit like a reversion to an earlier computer screen that doesn't look like the page it preludes. But it looks okay when printed, so that's what counts right now for me.

Rain and disappearing snow - the dirty end of winter.

There is such a wide range of computer knowledge around nowadays. Many of the people I'm supposed to work with just don't do computers, and what's available for them in the institution is old and unsupported. Yesterday, as I am (I hope temporarily) without computer at my institution, I went into a teacher "lounge" to use one of the computers. OS X was on the system, but everytime I tried to send a message in webmail on the school portal, both Internet Explorer and Safari would simply close. So I tried the other computer, and someone had shut it down and I have no idea what the user name and password are and who to ask. So I gave up and came home to my borrowed but wonderful machine.

At the same time, I know that a former supervisor (not mine) had very limited computer skills and at least two totally high end computers for his exclusive use. Status indicators rather than tools. Tant pis!

The whole question of learning and computers is both fascinating and central to our culture. How do we learn, and how do we learn to use computers to do what we want to and need to? How do we get techies to learn design and communication, and those who who have skills and knowledge to communicate to learn how to use the computer? No complete and perfect answer is posible, and the learner and the environment are as central as computer availability.

Stuck in Font Hell

2004-02-29T20:25:00.000-05:00

How come a font that is supposed to be part of OS X is there in name only! How come my beautiful thesis looks stupid and ugly now! What do I have to do to get the font I want! I can't find it anywhere to download.

Got to go and keep on trying, until the call from the Oscars becomes impossible to ignore.

The Monstrous Aspect of Technology!

2004-02-28T01:22:00.000-05:00

If I didn't love the computer so much I'd hate it. I crashed a Mac iBook! Didn't mean to, but apparently I drained the battery printing my 282 page document several times without always being plugged in. Then I put it to sleep before the battery had re-charged enough. Pop! and it went into a coma. Luckily the technician was smart and kind and rescued my my data onto 2CDs before performing hard-drive to hard-drive resusitation so I could hand it back into IT central. Now I'm writing on a borrowed computer, but hey, it's a PowerBook G4 and I love the feel of the keyboard.

What I really care about is a place to keep making adjustments on my thesis. So I borrowed this computer, after checking to see if it had Lucida Grande, the font I use most. I didn't think to check for Lucida Handwriting which I also use. I saw the words "Lucida Grande" in the list of fonts and assumed I was home free. Tonight when I finally got my EndNote properly installed (don't ask) and opened my thesis document, it looked funny. I looked at the font closely. It says "Lucida Grande" but it isn't. Not even close. And "Lucida Handwriting" isn't there at all.

There must be some way around this, but I keep remembering when I moved my thesis over from the IBM laptop to the first PowerBook and found that the Lucida fonts I'd been using weren't on the Mac. I had to reformat all my "voices." It took AGES! I liked the name Lucida, and the looks of Ludica Grande so I adapted to and adopted that BUT I really don't want to do that again.

I used the Minotaur at the centre of the technological labyrinth as a metaphor about learning to use the computer. The Minotaur was created out of a deep desire through the use of "technology:" the "blind" Daedalus built so Pasiphae could have her "way" with the white bull her husband had seized from Posidon. Now imprisoned by more Daedalus-built technology, the labyrinth, I was set to prove the Minotaur was wonderful and not a Monster. Now I'm not so sure.

Technology is wonderful until you have to deal with its montrous side, its difficulties.

Whoops!

2004-02-26T16:55:00.000-05:00

Oh, well. some experiments do not totally work, as you can see below.

I will try again another day, another place.

An Experiment in Cutting & Pasting HTML

2004-02-26T16:52:00.000-05:00

cellpadding="2">

style="font-weight: bold; font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif;"
size="+1">Playing with
WYSIWYG Web Authoring and cut&paste of HTML

style="vertical-align: top; background-color: rgb(255, 204, 153);">

I went to a presentation
today on using the Discussions
feature of WebCT. It was fascinating. But what I really loved and what
I was really fascinated by was the possibility of cutting and pasting
HTML code created in a WYSIWYG course authoring program, in this case
Mozillas Composer. I realized that I could use the same feature in my
blog, as Im displaying here.

I am on a different computer which for some reason does not show an
apostrophe for the apostrophe key, but an e with an accent, so I have
to write this with no apostrophes or quotation marks until I figure out
how to fix it.

I had a problem with the
computer I was using and a wonderful (I hope) technician says he has
saved all my data. I will find out for sure tomorrow. For now, I am
playing with this other computer, which belongs to the person I live
with who is currently on the other side of the world, in India,
innoculating children against polio as part of the Rotory campaign to
eradicate polio worldwide.

So here is my experiment;
let us see how it works!

The Details, the Details!

2004-02-24T20:54:00.000-05:00

I'm having trouble stopping making adjustments to my thesis, and the printing process is driving me crazy. After deciding to ignore the rule about using small roman numerals for the first section and printing up one copy, I set to work and figured out how to do that, so I'm keeping that first copy for myself, and will just write in the correct pagination. Since then, with the colour cartridge running out and then the black cartridge running out twice, I've had to deal with delays and irritations!

As well, I had to print up a bunch of separate pages to replace the ones that were messed up colour-wise during the last bit of the colour cartridge. After I put those into that copy, I realized that there were extra blank pages and I had better check through page-by-page. I hate that kind of detail! But I did it.

Then I realized that the next copy was significantly thinner than the others. Page-by-page checking showed that somehow the missing pages that I had printed up had been left out of this printing!!! So, more individual pages printed up.

Then I got the three copies I had cerloxed and took two into my supervisor's office, one for him, and one for another committee member; the one for the external, I'll take in on Thursday when I have a class, and I'll courier the fourth to my other committee member.

This part of the thesis journey is like being at the airport on the way home. After planning, travelling, holidaying and then packing for the return, I am waiting to have my baggage checked and be called to board the plane - the slowest and most boring/irritating part of the process. But there's no escaping it, so I better find a way to make meaning from it.

Just Abandon It!

2004-02-22T23:36:00.000-05:00

A piece of writing is never finished; it is merely abandoned. I can't remember who said that but it is definitely true. I keep fiddling with it. I just change that phrase. Then I remember something my supervisor said and change something else. I get bugged by the numbering and spend a few hours figuring out how to start with small roman numerals then switch to Arabic. I finally got it figured out and printed up the next two copies. That felt good. It took about a day each at the speed my printer goes, and partway through the third copy, the colour started changing and I had to get a new colour cartridge.

So here I am printing up my supposedly finished thesis, fiddling with it, and then getting the numbers done right. Then, in checking for what pages I'll have to reprint to get the colour right, I discover an almost blank page where the picture has shifted right in the middle of the document. I don't want to reprint all the second halves. I think. Finally I decide to add a little bit more text and another picture so I will have the right page number when the next chapter starts.

At this point I'm getting tired and irritated with the thesis and printing it up, and I know what I should have done; I should have printed up a (cheap) non-colour copy (commercially and quickly) and checked and edited it carefully before I printed up the colour ones. Next time. That's one reason I really like web pages; they're so easy to correct and upload. Paper has to be replaced after any corrections.

Today I printed up the fourth copy, and I think it's okay. I don't have the energy to check at this point, but I will print myself up a copy before the oral and go over it very carefully. Tomorrow I will get all four copies cerloxed and take three of the copies in and give to my supervisor so he can distribute them. I'll courier the fourth to my other committee member myself.

I haven't heard back from anybody about the dates for the oral. I hope I do soon, but I am impatient.

I heard Dr. Jonathan Butler speak on suffering today. Interesting.

How Important is the Numbering?

2004-02-18T19:03:00.000-05:00

I finished my thesis today. Wrote out the Abstract. Generated the Table of Figures. Wrote out the Acknowledgements and the Dedication. All finished!!!! And I start printing the whole thing out - making 4 copies - as soon as I finish this blog. On a home printer that takes a while per page. I expect to take hours and perhaps days getting this all done.

I didn't follow the instructions concerning the numbering. I've had trouble adding and or changing the numbering before, and don't want to risk a catastrophic collapse of my file. Is that silly paranoia? I have a copy attached to a message, safe in cyberspace, and a copy burned on a disk. Maybe I should give it a try?

I dreamed about returning to work last night. I was in a new office with a bed in it. What does that mean? It was rather barren and people from another department that I "knew" - in the dream but not in life - kept coming in because this was their office too. There was one guy, and he was really upset because it was going to be a noisy place and could only work where it was quiet. I offered to get the bed moved out and give him whatever space he wanted in the area I had been in. Is that my "male energy" and is he a whiner who gets women to give him what he want? Or does dream interpretation not work that way? I don't know. I am just worried about what will happen when I go back I guess.

My mate/significant other/life partner/ whatever leave for foreign climes tomorrow for a month. I'm curious about how I will react and feel; guess I'll be finding out soon.

Do Introverts Read More?

2004-02-15T17:33:00.000-05:00

I've been wondering if being an introvert is part of why I read so much. It would be a logical assumption. If you enjoy people only in small doses, and you like being by yourself (and have a limited interest in TV) reading would be the perfect way of spending time. I've been able to figure this out because only some of my reading is "status" reading. I have a taste for pulp fiction. No, I have a need for non-challenging, low-brow reading.

When I am overstimulated by people or fraught events, I calm down by losing myself in a book with a strong and familiar plot. Going over the same ground plot-wise, with different details and costumes, takes all the chaotic feelings and thoughts and smoothes them into a meditative peacefulness, and then I can sleep.

I read interesting, challenging informative books during the day, and pulp in the evening and sometimes late into the night. I don't read just to learn more; I read to affect my affect. (Sorry, couldn't resist play with the verb and the noun which look alike but are pronounced differently!) I read because it's an enjoyable way to spend time, not to benefit or boast. (I often, as here, don't reveal exactly what kind of pulp fiction I indulge in. Lots of judgmental attitudes here, eh?) Knowing that I read for reasons that don't get me "points' in the status game is what caused me to wonder if reading is a function of my being an introvert. Guess I'll never know unless someone sends me some stories about why they read or some research data.

Polishing the Jewel

2004-02-13T11:09:00.000-05:00

I've been writing a thesis for a year and a half, and incubating it for at least 20 years. Now I have been given the final edits to deal with, and they will make it stronger and clearer. Part of what I am doing is creating an exploration of the semiotic possibilities of writing text using a word processor. We are years beyond the typewriter, but still trapped in that semiotic space. I want to move beyond barren black text on white pages with font choices treated as irrelevant.

I want to bring the semiotic choices of writing with a word processor more clearly into view; I think this is another dimension of reading text. There are words strung together, then there is the appearance of the text and what that adds to the meaning. There is a dimension beyond this, and that is when text and meaning move onto the computer screen and hyperlinking, audio, and moving images are added in. This is not the third dimension, but something that offers infinitely more choices and possibilities to the authors and readers. This blog is a tiny step in that direction, learning enough of how to manipulate HTML to choose the colours I want and adding the occasional hyperlink.

But before I move into that larger and more complex semiotic space, I must complete my artfully shaped study of how I got to where I am now, my thesis.

Hearts and Chocolate

2004-02-11T23:10:00.000-05:00

Red everywhere and hearts. St. Valentine's Day must be approaching and the information is semiotically omnipresent. Why? Because it's a commercial holiday, a glorification of romantic love. Red for passion and hearts to signify love. And women's underwear to suggest sexuality, which is now read as central to Valentine's Day.

I have read that originally St. Valentine had nothing to do with sexuality and passion, that the love being referred to was compassion, that he gave his coat to a poor homeless person and froze to death himself. How come the semiotic meaning of St. Valentine has shifted so radically?

My first impulse is to blame big business and commercial interests, but I think the semiotic shift pre-dates that. Maybe I'm confusing it with another holiday, but didn't Shakespeare have a Valentine's Day song in one of his plays? I remember my shock when I realized what the lyrics, "Let in a maid that out a maid never departed more," meant, a sad or cynical lament for lost virginity. Not really romantic. No hearts, flowers, or chocolate, and just the scarlet of a "scarlet woman", or maybe the brownish red of virgin blood. The red roses of passion replacing the bloodless white roses of purity - symbolism is such a rich aspect of how we think and understand.

When I was younger I thought to be pure and objective in my thinking I had to excise corrupted and corrupting symbols from my heart-mind. Now I know that I can't do that. I can only look at them and see what they say to me and the others who surround me. Then, perhaps, I can define them slightly differently and shift their meaning somewhat.

It's just a day. It's just a commercial shill. It's just a story from church history. It's just a marker Shakespeare used to delineate the paradox of passion which often, sadly, lacks the "com" prefix. It's just an appeal covering a multitude of hungers, for the love that sees us, for the comfort and pleasure of the body that moves with and through the heart, for the sign that shows others that we are loved and lovable, for the sign that tells us that we are indeed lovable. How silly to make it important. How intensely inevitable its importance is.

Offer compassion to others.

Symbols and Meaning

2004-02-10T23:24:00.000-05:00

We are a species who live through meaning. We use symbols to tie things, ideas, concepts, feelings etc. together. This means that; that means something else.There is a sound that matches a bunch of squiggles (called "letters") that "points to" something else. A sound symbol = a visual symbol = a "real" thing or feeling or concept, which may "stand for" something else which some of us may associate with something different again. This is how we communicate?!?

On CBC News tonight, a story about teaching infants who aren't deaf to sign because they can communicate through signing at 8 or 9 months, much before they can use their tongue and lips to enunciate words. Human children can use language before they can talk; they can sign at a very young age. Think of those months of frustration before we could get our parents and others to understand what we wanted, even though we had language tools.

There is some speculation that this early "languaging" can affect the brain and make kids smarter. The researcher warns that parents who take the trouble to learn and teach signing to their kids are also providing a rich environment otherwise. So the kids who were signed with at an early age having higher I.Q.s than the non-signing kids may simply be the result of having a richer environment and more parental attention.

What I find truly fascinating is how early and intense our need to use symbols for communicating is. Humans are the species who connect. We link. We construct meaning. We try to share meanings and symbols. We connect sounds with things to connect what we "think" with other humans. We connect in order to connect. Meaning is what we live for and through.

And it is never a simple one-to-one connection. There are tones, nuances, hidden links, and surprising new readings - because we can't read each other's minds. If we are both "coming from the same place" we may be able to communicate very thoroughly with very few words and/or signs. Vygotsky, I think, points out that couples who have long been together can sometimes know what their partners are thinking with almost no overt communication, but that is knowledge of the person and the situation more than "mind-reading."

Post-modernism, as I understand it, is fascinated by how we create meaning, how we communicate. The first book that really helped me understand how people use language was Word Play by Peter Farb, and what I remember most clearly is his example of how an authority figure could use language to demean to hold power. When someone implicitly "defines the situation" they rule. The "other" is ruled by the assumptions established.

Two people, angry at each other - Who is the aggressor? The one who tells about how the other hurt her feelings, or the other who is surprised by the accusations which don't match her memory of what happened? Is it simply a misunderstanding or is the one presenting herself as the victim of the other making a rather nasty power play? Who is the aggressor, the one who labels the other as an aggressor or the accuser? One signals innocence, and the other is the screen on which she projects her malevolence.

"She doth protest too much."

Symbols and interpretation = meaning, which causes actions which create more use of symbols and continuing interpretations, which all adds up to stories and plots.

Shifting Semiosis

2004-02-08T22:21:00.000-05:00

Just in case you were wondering my title means and why I chose to use it - here's some info.

I've just spent a couple of years studying arts-based educational research, narrative inquiry, postmodern thought, and the pedagogical use of technology. Great fun, and fascinating. Part of what I discovered was that the visual aspect of text, and the visuals with text were increasingly a significant part of what readers desired, and what technology gives us the capacity to produce. With word-processing I can use all different styles and sizes of font, in all kinds of colours, plus I can easily find and/or adapt and/or create images to add. Great on paper, even more intense on the screen.

Over many years I had kept hearing/reading the word "semiotic" and wasn't sure what it meant. I did my usual research, and just tried to guess the meaning from the context. At one point I think I even looked it up. - http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=semiotic

It seemed to be important to all those academics who talk in code, but I got my first real grasp of the meaning when someone told me that reading a person's clothes and appearance was using semiotics to understand what they were saying about who they are.

In the late Sixties, early Seventies, long hair on young guys meant they were hippies and therefore girls could trust them. By the end of the Seventies, the semiotics had shifted, and long hair on guys usually meant they were greasers or bikers, and only foolish girls would risk trusting them. We don't wear uniforms, but we do wear costumes that identify us. Look at a teen's clothes and you can figure out their taste in music, usually.

Well it's the same with the appearance of text on the page and screen. Font style and size and colour say something to readers before they actually start reading the words. Readers have expectations and are starting to establish their interpretation of the meaning of the text before they decode even one word. Here's an example; just glance but don't read what follows. What is it?

she looks, listens, but doesn't see
and doesn't feel. She trusts whispers,
and ignores my eyes.

i can't change another's heart,
or open her eyes.

Did you say or think "poem?" You made that judgment simply from the layout of the words. You made a rhetorical recognition and oriented yourself to continue reading through that lens.

Back to "Shifting Semiosis." I believe that our world culture is undergoing a profound perceptual shift. Photography, film, and recorded sound have changed how we perceive. Sight and sound are no longer either "real" and "present" in a "natural" way. Now they can be shaped, altered deliberately, artistically, to have an impact on how we understand the world to be. Writing in a black font gave words a virtually invisible embodiment, and "objective" power, now shaped images and manipulated sound have that power. If we want to be able to "see" and "hear" as clearly as possible when standing in an embodied position, we have to learn how to see what we see and hear what we hear.

By using the capacities of the word processor (and printers), we can play with the appearance of text. This is good because it's a small way to help ourselves and our readers "read" with more awareness. Or so I believe.

In this era while our semiosis is shifting, playing with text and the appearance of text is a way to stay alive to the changes in how we use and read signs to play with meaning.

Sometimes What You See Isn't What Others Get!

2004-02-06T15:25:00.000-05:00

So yesterday I had some time to spare at the school where I study, as opposed to the school where I teach. So I decided to work on my blog in their computer lab. The only Macs they had were OS 9 or whatever you call the OS before OS X, but they were pretty colours. I sat down at one of the hot pink ones and opened Netscape, but it was a really old Netscape, one with a lighthouse and something curling around it as an icon. I ignored that and got myself to the "Create New Post" area and began writing.

I'm still getting used to writing knowing that although no one seems to be looking at my blog, people might, and what do I want to be public about. And yesterday I had a strange keyboard, and even though it's still QWERTY, my fingers aren't as intuitive. So I was making strange on about two levels, but I wrote and enjoyed it.

The screen didn't have the bold, italics, link, and spell check icons that exist on my up-to-date Netscape at home, but I figured I can manage without them by using my limited HTML and my own double-checking of my spelling. That was okay. And it was okay that I was writing in a field with a different font and different coloured-font than would appear on the screen. I've learned to be used to that. But what I didn't expect, especially as I had been extolling my design choices, was that the screen would look very different than what I saw on my home screen.

The title background was much smaller and an ugly tone of the colour. There was no side frame and the links were messily displayed below all my entries. The font was different, and the width of the text, something I want to be no wider than the text in a normal-sized hard-covered book, went all across the screen. It looked ugly and amateurish. I was so disappointed.

I am assuming that the old version of Netscape was the source of the problem. What I don't understand is why the school where I study hadn't updated their version. Afterall, it can be downloaded for free. I don't know enough technically to understand if they can't because of the old OS, which does cost money to update, or because no one ever sits down and does the downloading.

I guess I'm spoiled where I teach because our laptops are kept at least up to the next to the most recent versions of software, so I'm used to a fairly current workspace. And maybe I should count my blessings and be grateful. It is so much easier to learn in an up-to-date environment with support easily accessible.

Aesthetic Learning

2004-02-05T13:26:00.000-05:00

So I spent hours last night playing with my blog. I changed templates a couple of times, then when I settled on one that kept my text relatively narrow, within the glance range for reading, I changed all the colours. That was fun and I love the result. I used QuickColor - http://kohaistyle.com/scripts/quickcolor/ - to find and chose harmonizing colours. I'll probably do it again in a few days. Maybe move from purples to reds, and gain more control over altering the code in the template. It's all fun.

So colour is really important to me, and text-breaks, so that the screen looks readable, not like a massive brick wall to be loosened and decoded. And font, too. Is this font too big? Does it make what I'm writing look childish? I want to be readable and respected, taken seriously. I realize I'm already challenging that by writing in dark purple, but I love the colour and it's dark enough to be pass for "dark" rather than "purple." Many people "read" purple semiotically and subconsciously see i t as revealling something about the character of the writer.

Do you?

Have you figured out anything about who I am?

gender;
age;
economic status;
educational level;
nationality;
computer knowledge; and/or
character?

What do you base those assumptions on? Can you identify where you find the clues?

That's it for today, on a computer in the school lab, on an unfamiliar computer platform.

How Visual is Text, and Why?

2004-02-04T17:16:00.000-05:00

So I sucessfully changed my blog's colour. Does it say more? Is it more me? I think so.

I'm using this blog as a learning project and each day hope to both post and make new changes in the appearance and/or functionality of the blog. I have never liked orange and even the amber shades don't really appeal to me. I have always, and I mean always, going back to at least being four years old, loved many of the purple shades. The one I chose I find aesthetically satisfying. Plus there's the satisfaction of finally figuring out where in the template to add in the right numbers to get what I wanted.

I am not from the technical end of learning the computer; HTML is not a natural language for me. I am from the communication and aesthetic crowd, and I only learn what technical stuff I have to be able to do what I want. My one advantage is that I have a good ability at seeing possibilities. Then I'm stuck with figuring out the technical aspects that I have to deal with and/or learn in order to achieve what I want. It's phenomenologically difficult.

I find code truly ugly and difficult to read; possibly being slightly dyslexic has added to this. However, from time to time I have tried to learn a little when I really wanted to do something and knew that there is a way, using HTML. For example, when I saw a fellow teacher (or "professor" as we were designated in one round of contract bargaining in my system) when I saw this fellow teacher use bullets in her WebCT postings, I was driven to learn the HTML for bullets. (I love bullets; they force information into such neat clear packages.)

Any techies out there are probably laughing at such a minor piece of learning, but hey, I'm honest and it was another little piece of knowhow acquired.

Anyway, to change the colour of my blog,

I found out how to get to the code;
I found out the RGB code for the colour I wanted;
I tried out that code where I thought it belonged in the HTML, using cut and paste;
I checked the preview to see if the colour of the title had worked; and
I reversed the edit and then repeated that step until I got the title's colour changed.

A minor step (would the techies please stop laughing!) but it got me there, and made me feel happy, and, yes, smart.

Two-Handed Writing

2004-02-03T17:49:00.000-05:00

I used to be a handwriter, squeezing out poems and plans, wishing I could type or get printed, but knowing that would never happen. Then I was pushed into learning about linguistics and how people learn to write and think about writing. At the same time, I decided to use the Bank Street Writer word pro myself so I could get used to it, and know enough about it to use with writing-phobic students. I discovered my own prose voice; I discovered writing my way.

Now I look at screens and pages and think about the text interface, and how appearance communicates and how images are increasingly central in our culture. I wonder when audio will be recognized. I wonder how all this affects education and, more importantly, learning.