Dr. C.’s Learning Web

about blogging in my classes. What is my method? How do I communicate to students the reasons for blogging, and how do I get them to commit to the exploratory spirit of the endeavor in a school context that emphasizes frequent incremental assessments of items on a task-list?
As I talked to Jim, I realized that I do have a method, or methods, but in the spirit of those methods I’ve resisted writing much about them here. In my experience, the paradox of real school is that it’s extraordinarily powerful when it happens, and at the same time very fragile along the way.  (Robert Frost on poetry: “The figure is the same as for love.”) As I try to get to the magic and guard the fragility, I try not to talk about either too much or too analytically. That said, and at the risk of talking both too much and [...]

Original post by Gardo

Final at UMW under my supervision, that is. It may happen again at my next post, and for all I know the Miltonist who succeeds me at the University of Mary Washington may be just ambitious, idealistic, and nutty enough to want to keep the tradition going. Time will tell. (Yes, I will blog about my new job very soon.)
The readathon will be at Alvey House from Friday, July 11 to Saturday, July 12. We’ll begin between 7 and 7:30 p.m. and read until we’re done. If the past is a guide, the event will conclude about 6:30 or 7:00 a.m. on Saturday morning. If you’d like to attend, just come when you can and leave when you want. Bring a copy of Paradise Lost with you if you have one. If you don’t, we’ll have some extras on hand. Readers of all ages and abilities are welcome. I extend [...]

Original post by Gardo

Dr. Elizabeth Phillips in her office in Trible Hall at Wake Forest University. I’m not sure when the photograph was taken, but this is how I remember her from my first class with her in the fall of 1975. Whatever I say here will be too little or too much or not quite right. I persevere in the saying because of the light Elizabeth Phillips shared with me, and shares with me still.
Dr. Phillips died last Tuesday night at the age of 89. Here is her obituary. Here is a news story about her death. She was born the same year as my mother. As it happens, she died in the same hospital where my mother died almost nineteen years ago, Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Now I have lost two mothers, for Elizabeth Phillips was surely my intellectual and academic mother. To say that she inspired me to become [...]

Original post by Gardo

Inspired by Alan’s post–and amazed he’s not in a coma after the high-energy marathon of the NMC annual conference just concluded–I offer my own Wordle del.icio.us tag cloud. Jonathan Feinberg has built a compelling visualization tool that can generate a tag cloud from del.icio.us or a word cloud from any text. (I just saw an amazing Wordle made from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech.) Because the image is more interesting–elegant, pretty, intriguing–it’s actually more informative, at least in my view. The emotional design bespeaks a fellow netizen with a deep understanding of the beauty of mutual augmentation.
Thanks as always to the big dog for the link.

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Original post by Gardo

Given my love of metaphor, juxtaposibility, and “mappingness” (to say nothing of my love of oddball neologisms), I have to report on a particularly intriguing juxtaposition I found for my talk at the 2008 CHEMA meeting in Louisville last week. As I was finishing my prep for the talk, I’d pretty much settled on beginning with the Big Bang of Michael Wesch’s “The Machine is Us/ing Us.” Michael describes his creation as “Web 2.0 in Five Minutes,” and the five-million-plus views on YouTube testify to its power and clarity. What better way to start? Then it occurred to me that Robbie Dingo’s beautiful “Watch The World” would make a dramatic and poignant followup to Michael’s piece. If, as Michael suggests, the machine is us (and I agree with him totally, by the way), Robbie Dingo’s creation offers a stunning example of new modes of artistic expression and discursive reasoning available [...]

Original post by Gardo

I’m too tired tonight to do any justice at all to this story, but I would like to note it and perhaps return to it another time.
Today in the 11:00 section of my Introduction to Literary Studies class the discussion was particularly rich and intense. At one point I was asking one student a series of questions about some of her own cognitive states as she was grappling with the indirection of parts of the discussion.  As I was trying to weave her own answers into the responses other students were offering to related questions, suddenly yet another student, two rows back, made a quick joke about “author-function,” recalling our discussion of Foucault. In that instant, I could see that the student two rows back had made a huge cognitive leap. It was quite a thrill to witness. The joke was an aside, not a formal contribution to the argument, [...]

Original post by Gardo

Catching up on my back blog reading, when what to my wondering eyes should appear than this magnum opus from Alan Levine. What’s one level up from alpha dog? Whatever it is, he is it.
For anyone who wants a thorough and wonderfully graded approach to customizing WordPress, look no farther. Alan’s come up with some gems lately, but this one combines all his strengths: storytelling, experimentation, encouragement, and sheer smarts. I’m overdue for a WP upgrade–and I need to fix that silly footer-spam issue so I can get my flickr badge back–but I’m going to study Alan’s post long and hard for ideas and inspiration as I work on Gardner Writes.
Did I ever tell you about the first time I saw Alan at a conference? New Orleans, 2005, ELI Annual Meeting. A truly fateful meeting for me, as it was also the first time I saw Croquet, the first time [...]

Original post by Gardo

Interesting two days, in this respect anyway: I did a presentation on Brian Wilson for Elderstudy yesterday, then explored “I Get Around” all the way through “Caroline No” for my Rock/Soul/Progressive class today. From senior citizens (I really don’t like that term much) to 18-19 year-olds. Brian spoke to all of them. This of course reinforces my sense that yearning, vulnerability, and an awestruck sense of the divine origins of beauty are trans-generational in their appeal.
Don’t worry, baby. Everything will turn out all right.
Don’t worry, baby.
The woods echo, and their answer rings.
Happy St. Valentine’s Day, everyone.

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Original post by Gardo

Interesting two days, in this respect anyway: I did a presentation on Brian Wilson for Elderstudy yesterday, then explored “I Get Around” all the way through “Caroline No” for my Rock/Soul/Progressive class today. From senior citizens (I really don’t like that term much) to 18-19 year-olds. Brian spoke to all of them. This of course reinforces my sense that yearning, vulnerability, and an awestruck sense of the divine origins of beauty are trans-generational in their appeal.
Don’t worry, baby. Everything will turn out all right.
Don’t worry, baby.
The woods echo, and their answer rings.
Happy St. Valentine’s Day, everyone.

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Original post by Gardo

I’m in the midst of A. S. Byatt’s Possession in my Intro. to Literary Studies class, working up to assignment one, which asks students to work with symbolism in Byatt’s romance. The idea of symbolism is quite complex (the etymology alone is intricate and fascinating). Students are accustomed to talking about imagery, themes, character, even the writer’s biographical and cultural context. Symbolism, however, is something new for most of these freshmen and sophomores.
Over the years, I’ve tried various ways of explaining symbolism to students. The most satisfactory ways I’ve found to depend on close reading that enacts the drama of symbolic suggestion as a kind of unfolding awareness of connections, of patterns, of possibilities of meaning. That kind of going-through works well. Yet I’ve always felt the lack of some more communicable conceptual language, one that would convey the complexity of symbolism and its effects without reducing symbolism to something [...]

Original post by Gardo