Comments on: Slow Blogging on the Fast Train

By: simplekaywa - Slow Blogging

simplekaywa - Slow Blogging — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 20:59:24 +0000

[...] Slow Blogging on the Fast Train – ein Reisebericht und eine Reflexion übers Schreiben und Reisen. [...]

By: cloudscome

cloudscome — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 12:43:02 +0000

I came here from edubloggercon and I am really enjoying your blog. Nice thoughts of slowing down and I’m glad to hear about your Asian trip.

By: I Am a Slow Blog : Ruminate

I Am a Slow Blog : Ruminate — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 16:37:00 +0000

[...] Slow Blogging is in the air. And even slower blogging. I don’t know all the details of the Slow Blogging movement, nor have I had the pleasure of meeting Barbara Ganley (who has been championing the concept) to talk about it. But I’m quite aware of the slow blogging idea… not just from Barbara’s blog entries, but from serendipitously stumbling across other people who had independently developed similar ideas. I’ve had similar– though less fully explored– thoughts about blogs and blogging for some time, particularly after coming under the influence of a book I’ve since recommended to many people, Carl Honore’s In Praise of Slow . [...]

By: Janet HasBrouck

Janet HasBrouck — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 19:21:15 +0000

It is amazing to read about your experiences in Japan and China. In the 70s my husband and I traveled in several countries in Asia, later spent 3 months in Japan, and then in the late 80s spent the summer in Cebu, Philippines. Things haven’t changed much, it seems, except to get even more crowded.

Now I am the teacher librarian at a high achieving high school in southern California where 67% of our students are Asian, mostly Chinese from Taiwan and mainland China. Experiences similar to yours certainly help me to understand my students and the extreme pressure their parents and peers put on them the succeed and get into a major US university.

It has also been our experience that some students we met while in Japan have come to a US college to study and they don’t succeed. There is no one pressuring them to get their work done or even attend class, after all of the structure they had back home in Japan in high school.

I too was thrilled to get home to the “wide open spaces” of my small ranch house with a lawn in a suburb of LA. Ah travel!

By: Steve Collis

Steve Collis — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 02:35:15 +0000

Travelling = so healthy for one’s perspective. So stimulating, so humbling, so clarifying!

By: Rob Wall

Rob Wall — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 16:20:02 +0000

Wow, Alan – what a tremendous stream of consciousness flow of your experience there. It sounds like that is the only way to describe your trip – a collage of vignettes of different places and people.

18 years ago (wow – how time flies. I remember it like it was last week) I spent 4 months in Great Britain, traveling around from one end of the island to the other. Even that relatively minor change of culture made me aware that there are other ways of understanding the world and one’s place in it. That helped me to know a bit more about myself and how I am shaped by my culture. And I understand what you mean about appreciating where you come from. Flat, wide open prairie never looked so good as when I made it back to Canada.

They don’t serve chicken feet in Britain, as far as I know. For this I am grateful.

By: Barbara

Barbara — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 16:10:48 +0000

Ah, Alan, you have stepped into the complex delights of slow-blogging. Fabulous!

I love this post, and feel for a moment that I have left my hotel room in Vancouver and instead am there with you on that train, seeing the passing landscape as a filmstrip, and then the cities you have visited, and your still forming, so fresh responses. You create a kaleidescope of experience for us, and in doing so, invite us into some of the whirl of the wild sensory ride. We get to know you better through this journey, too, and how you see things and what you feel. But you do more than that, even–you remind us to pull out of our own small, myopic viewpoints, our own petty singular concerns and look around at the wondrous world, and to think about our times and our place and our path. To dare do something.

Thank you for such a beautiful post–I think I like your words as much as I like your photos. And having them together? Wow.

By: Leslie M-B

Leslie M-B — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 15:43:05 +0000

Thanks for sharing your impressions, Alan. This summer I had a tiny glimpse of higher ed in Japan because some faculty from Kyushu University came to UC Davis to learn about active learning. We’re going to be helping folks at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology as well. These faculty were excited about including more interactivity in their classes, and they absorbed Western ideas about pedagogy very quickly and were hungry for more. They hope to become ambassadors at their universities for more interactive ways of learning, but they also talked about the great resistance they may face.

Part of the reason faculty at both institutions are interested in incorporating more active learning is because they are expecting an influx of students from elsewhere in Asia. That means not only teaching more classes in English, but also adapting their teaching to students who aren’t Japanese and who may expect more than old-school lectures.

By: Janice Jennings

Janice Jennings — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 15:06:15 +0000

I am going to live vicariously through your slow churned blogs. They are delicious. I can’t wait to learn about Iceland.
Janice

By: Edward Vielmetti

Edward Vielmetti — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 15:00:41 +0000

nice travel summary, much appreciated.

(i really need to find some reason to be in a train for a long time with no internet, as a writing environment; I miss those extended periods of travel and non-connectivity as a way to connect with some part of yourself that’s not the net.)