Dr. C.’s Learning Web

Inspired (nudged, prompted) by a recent e-mail from Janet, I’m trying to catch up with that builder and curator of a cabinet of wonders who calls himself Michael Wesch. Watching him and his work is like watching a time-lapse photograph of the Empire State Building going up. Every morning a new story appears. Amazing.
So this morning I got onto his blog entry about “Context Collapse,” actually an excerpt from a paper he’s submitted to a journal, and by the time I realized what was going on I’d composed a rather longish comment. I then wrestled with whether I should leave the comment there, or just post my thoughts here and link to the post. Tired of wrestling, I decided to do both.
This isn’t the blog post I’d planned to write–I need to do a follow-on to the one on blogging, where the comments have been truly mind-blowing and have added [...]

Original post by Gardo

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

Not quite the day-after report I’d hoped to make, but as we’ve discussed recently in the Milton seminar, time is a difficult dimension that consistently weighs on Milton’s mind and ours. So later and briefer than I’d like, here are my thoughts.
The evening was magical as ever. This surprised me a bit, truth to tell, as I had lowered my expectations given the compressed summer schedule, the size of the class (there are six students enrolled–what a luxury for real school!), and the scarcity of folks around campus during the summer term. I figured that nevertheless the occasion would involve “fit audience, though few,”and would have its own special character.
It did have its own special character–how could it not?–but in scope and intensity it was right up there with all the other readathons. I blogged about the upcoming reading, and I sent out an event invitation on Facebook, and that [...]

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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addthis_title = \’Following+the+CogDog+with+a+Wordle+of+my+own\’;
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Original post by Gardo

In the mid- and late 1960’s, Charles Marowitz directed an interesting remix of Hamlet called “Collage Hamlet.” The technique, according to Marowitz, borrowed from Burrough’s cut-ups. It’s also eerily prescient of contemporary remix/mashup culture. I saw excerpts from his production in the A&E Biography episode on Hamlet. I wish I could see the whole thing.  (Digression: I’ve got a personally taped and now digitized copy of that A&E episode, but it seems otherwise unavailable. A&E appears to have bought the show’s content from the BBC–Melvyn Bragg narrates much of the material–and simply provided a Peter Graves “wrapper” consisting mostly of obvious remarks and bad puns. Perhaps A&E didn’t buy the retail video rights, thus accounting for the absence of this episode from their other offerings. A pity! I find it very useful in my intro. to lit. studies classes.) In any event, I was googling ’round today for information on [...]

Original post by Gardo

Promising new functionality from ITConversations: one can build a URL that will excerpt a portion of the recorded audio. I’m testing it here:
[audio clip]
The only hitch in the get-along is the requirement to specify a start time “after the intro.” As a former ITConversations post-production audio editor, I reckon this means after the show theme, sponsor mention, etc., ending with “and now, here’s blank from blank.” But I also reckon “after the intro” will be ambiguous to most users (heck, I may have it wrong too), and in any case, there’s no easy way to calculate this time. I’m guessing the intro lasts about 2 minutes, and doing the math from the readout on my iPod, where I heard the bit I want to quote. It would probably be a little easier to do this on the website, but one would still have to slide the slider back and forth [...]

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

We finished the McLuhan video in New Media Studies today, and the students learned that MM had children (six, in fact) with a very charming and intelligent wife who both marveled at her husband and waxed rueful about his idiosyncracies. We learned that his son could not convince MM that in fact Brasilia was now the capital of Brazil. This TV special, hosted by Tom Wolfe, is quite the ride. Highly recommended for anyone with any interest in McLuhan. At this point, I’m going out on a limb and suggesting that nearly everyone should have some interest in McLuhan. I can’t believe that it’s been less than a year since I read him for the first time. So many gaps, so little time. Yet desire still cries, give me some more to read. (Secret handshake there for “Astrophel and Stella” lovers.)
Rock/Soul/Prog was a mixed bag today. Some folks are not [...]

Original post by Gardo