The Treatment of Women in Canada

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

500 Years of Female Portraits in Western Art

Rumi Said ...

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..."

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?

"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

"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

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

Snow Day! Yea!

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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!

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

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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