A Flickr Epiphany - Notes on Week 3

I've had a digital camera for years, but until this week it hadn't really changed the way I used photography. Instead of sticking film in an envelope, I stood at the photo kiosk for a half hour every month or so.

I have been carefully filling photo albums for all of my adult life. Yet, it wasn't until last week that I asked myself: Why am I doing this?

I guess it was nostalgia for those childhood afternoons spent poring over the family albums on the coffee table shelf. Turning those pages, I looked into the faces of my younger selves and developed some sort of identity half constructed of memories. I wonder if my kids will get that same sense of transcendence using Flickr.

...

After Week 3's class, I plugged in my camera card, logged on and started to play. It was fun, but when I got to the tags the lightbulb really flickred (couldn't help myself) on. A photo of my son, Nick, holding up a blue gill is tagged with fishing, Nick, summer 2008. If I ever do a compilation of family fishing photos I'll type in fishing and it will pop up. For a slideshow of Nick, I'll type Nick and it will come up again. This sure beats hours spent digging through boxes and flipping through pages - not to mention the tedious task of putting all the loose photos back when the project is done.

I shared my photostream with a few contacts I'd lost touch with over the years and was excited to learn that my cousin, Kate, had stopped for a view. I'm going to take pictures at my family reunion this fall, collect e-mail addresses and invite everyone who is interested to take a look.

Don't get me wrong, I still plan to print out some pictures for my albums and my real blog - the front of my refrigerator - but otherwise it's Flickr from here on out.

Name That Blog!

When I worked as an ad writer, I was often assigned to name new products. This involved many tedious hours in a small cubicle compiling lists of possibilities for products such as lawnmower engines, rangehoods, forklifts and fuel additives.

So you'd think I'd be able to name a blog in one shot. This began as "bloggiest notion," which seemed like a clever play on words, but got old - fast.

Then, in an attempt to attract other future teachers, I tried "teacher-to-be" (taken), "futureteach" (taken), and "teacher-in-the-making" (" "), before settling on "off-to-teach."

The latter didn't last long because it simply doesn't make sense. ("Gotta go, guys, I'm off to teach!")

So here I am with, I hope, a final name for this series of rantings - "Runs with Sentences."

I hope you like it. More importantly, I hope you visit.

10-point trivia question: Who was the famous poet who was hired to come up with names for new automobiles?

A New World

I just hit the jackpot! I just found secondaryworlds.com - a site for English teachers by Robert Rozema. It's a blog with great stuff, relevant stuff about teaching kids English. It also includes literary scavenger hunts, postings of student work and podcasts of his students reading from great works of literature. The student reading of "Maus" actually made me cry.

This is all good, but I will never get my laundry done!

Research shows that "games" is the word most frequently plugged into school search engines. This posting makes an argument for developing video games to engage students. Kids Play Games Online

Classroom Culture

Just read Pamela Felcher's "It's culture, not just class size" in the LA Times opinion blog.

This reminds me of something professor Mary Flynn (she doesn't have a blog) told her future teachers the first night of class: "You will have very few problems with behavior management if you take the time to build your classroom culture."

How do you do that?

By taking the time to get to know each student as an individual, by letting each student get to know you, and by letting them get to know each other.

There are many web tools available that have the potential to make students feel part of the classroom community as well as the global community of learner. But these are only tools. It's all in how we present them, teach them and use them.

The human touch is the real link.

On Blogs

Blogs are changing the way I view the internet. (It's not just for online shopping. Who knew?)

I feel very motivated to explore, learn and express my ideas.

This is how I want my students to feel.


P.S. I found an article about using blogs. It's geared toward preservice English teachers (that's me!). There's so much out there!

If I Have But World Enough and Time...

I plan to use all the stuff I'm learning in Digital Media: collaborative word processors, RSS, wikis, blogs...

Here is one simple way: I plan to create a blog for reflecting on what I learn while in the process of earning my teaching license.

I'm trying to connect to other teachers-in-the-making (please send me links when you come across them) so we can share ideas and resources and support one another. So far I've crossed paths with a few good mentors willing to share their insights.

And so it begins.

Loss of Brain Power?

What's the internet doing to our brains?

I checked out the pagesturned blog on the recommendation of Lit Queen and found another dialog on the Atlantic Monthly article. Check it out if this topic is of interest.

This link will take you to a great article about the Proust/Squid (too lazy to check actual title) in the December 24 edition of the New Yorker. Good stuff.

P.S. The response someone wrote in a subsequent issue is also food for thought.

Forgetfulness by Billy Collins

Scooped by Weblogg-ed

I can't believe it.

I posted yesterday on "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" and today I ran across a whole conversation about the very same article on weblogg-ed. I feel like a country girl in the big city.

I was shaking a little and couldn't figure out how to create a link to my blog so new, worldly technology friends could come and read my post, so I committed what I'm sure is a blog faux-paus (there should be word for this - "glob"?) and left a big, digital-immigrant fingerprint by copying and pasting the contents of the post unto the thread.

I have a long way to go.

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

In the July/August issue of the "Atlantic Monthly," Nicholas Carr ponders this question.

I'll admit that the uber-connectedness of the internet has reprogrammed many of my thought patterns and daily routines. (Morning: "Must turn on computer. Must make coffee and check e-mail.") On a larger scale, it has, arguably, redefined what it means to be literate. Though Carr celebrates the convenience of the internet, he laments his own lost ability to "read deeply," sacrificed for the hyper-now-ness and superefficiency of the web.

The whole article is really a coming to terms with these trade-offs. To put it in perspective - or maybe just talk himself through it - Carr informs us that even Socrates himself bemoaned the development of writing. "He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would ... 'cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.'" And "they would be 'filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.'"

Hmm.

I admit, like Carr and Socrates, I am sometimes nostalgic for the past and a little frightened of the future. Sometimes I feel like the media artist Paul Chan who foregoes Internet access in his studio to protect himself from what he calls the "tyranny of connectedness."

Looking into the future, Socrates would have laughed at his worries - maybe even written about them on his blog. In the same way, Carr, myself and other late-comers to the Internet bandwagon will learn to trade our worries for a carefree ride to wherever this magic carpet of technology takes us.

And is it really necessary to make a value judgment? The Internet is here. If that gets to be too much, we can just click on the little red "X" and hide out with a good book for a while.

Getting My Feet Wet

This is my first blog, really my first time putting something "out there" for other people to respond to. I feel shy and excited at the same time.

I need to do this so that I can teach students effectively.

In an age of imagination and communication, my subject - English - is more relevant than ever. If I try to teach it to my students using only a pile of dusty textbooks and some worksheets, what message would I be sending them? Why would they bother to listen?

Literature teaches us to think deeply and critically, to tell our stories and connect them to the stories that have been told before, to write and edit with grace and clarity. And to find poetry in unexpected places. English teachers of the past had to work so hard to engage their students. I am an English teacher of the future. Everything is right there for me. Students are already and engaged and doing this. All I have to do is convince them that what they are doing in all those hours they spend online is "English."

There's an article on Louis' Tech-Lou-ology about finding ways to use students' cell phones in the classroom. The last line of the article speaks to the unstoppable power of technology: "Now that the genie is out of the bottle, don't expect it to be put back."

Why on earth would we want it to be?