Dr. C.'s Learning Web

What I learned at Mary Washington

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 13:56:12 +0000

First, a travel update as the westward trek continues.
This is the last night on the road for me and daughter Jenny. (Alice and Ian are coming later, after house stuff in Fredericksburg is complete or as complete as we can get it.) The trip has been interesting, enjoyable, and only occasionally fraught. We’ve connected with friends and loved ones along the way. We’ve eaten at Lefty’s BBQ near Crossville, a gift from our GPS’s “nearby food” listings at lunchtime on Monday. We reasoned that a place named “Lefty’s” was worth a look. Our reasoning was sound and the food was delicious. We’ve driven about 200 miles on the Natchez Trace Parkway between Nashville and Tupelo, Mississippi. On the parkway we visited Meriwether Lewis’s grave site, saw one of the more impressive bridges we’ve ever seen, and cruised through countryside so brilliantly sun-drenched that the green turned to gold on the [...]

Original post by Gardo

The Bluehost Experiment in 3:34

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 13:37:04 +0000

Just about the length of a good pop song.
At the wonderful NITLE Summit back in April, Steve Greenlaw and I did a poster session on what since 2005 the dream team at UMW has been calling “The Bluehost Experiment.” More than anything else that happened on my watch as Asst. VP for Teaching and Learning Technologies, this experiment (a perpetual pilot, and darn proud of it too) proved transformative. Not only that, it has been a constant source of inspiration and a wonderful opportunity for learning throughout the entire community: students, staff, faculty. I think it’s an example of positive deviance, though I’m hardly an unbiased observer.
There’s plenty of stuff floating around the ‘net about our adventures in the sandbox. Here, in the grand tradition of “Minute Shakespeare,” is the abridged version, presented for the “Three Minutes of Fame” poster-session advertisement at the NITLE conference. The most ingenious part of [...]

Original post by Gardo

Better

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 14:41:36 +0000

As I prepare for my new job at Baylor University, I’m even more alert than usual to the many analogies, metaphors, and parables out there that help me think about education. My reading this summer has been unusually rich in that regard. Over the last few days I’ve been deep into Atul Gawande’s Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance. I don’t think I can recommend this little book too highly. Parts of it are expanded versions of essays that originally appeared in The New Yorker. Parts of it are new to me. All of it is insightful, inspiring, thoughtfully cautionary.
Two parts I’ve blogged about before, in their New Yorker incarnation: the story of Virginia Apgar and her scoring system for assessing newborns’ health, and the story of Warren Warwick and his zealous devotion to the best possible outcomes in treating cystic fibrosis. Both of these stories strongly influenced my work [...]

Original post by Gardo

Context collapse, face-work, Michael Wesch

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 13:37:32 +0000

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

The Reverend asked me a question

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 15:38:49 +0000

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

Reflections on the twelfth UMW Paradise Lost Readathon

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 09:55:58 +0000

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

SUNY-CIT 2008

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 14:33:54 +0000

A little over a month ago I was privileged to attend and speak at the 2008 SUNY Conference on Instructional Technologies, splendidly hosted this year by SUNY-Genesee Community College. (You’ll need to use IE to get to the program pdfs; at least, I did.) The theme was “Are We There Yet? Teachers and Learners in a Digital World.”
I met some extraordinary people there and once again was encouraged by the way imaginative faculty and staff have persisted in their visionary efforts to make sense and good use of computers in teaching and learning. As I listened to folks’ stories and learned something of the history of the conference and of FACT (Faculty Access to Computer Technology, the primary sponsoring group over the years) I was struck by the commonalities with my own experience, as well as with the stories I’ve heard from similar groups: early adopters, early resistance, the slow [...]

Original post by Gardo

Twelfth and final Paradise Lost All-Night Readathon

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 00:50:34 +0000

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

My beloved English professor, Elizabeth Phillips

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 18:51:00 +0000

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

Following the CogDog with a Wordle of my own

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 20:17:28 +0000

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